Funny that back in the day Apple reverse-engineered MS office formats to make Mac software that could open Microsoft documents [1]. Sounds like you and them want to prevent anyone from doing what they did when they were a smaller growing company. Kind of ironic, huh?

> your examples presumes falsely that iMessage provides a unique service

You know that anti-trust laws apply to all kinds of anti-competitve situations and not just monopolies on a unique good, right? Things like building walled gardens and buying up the competition can fall into this category.

> violation of the concept of ownership

There's nothing sacred about current ideas of ownership. They changes over time. It used to be that peasants and women and children were property and kings owned all the land. Intellectual property rights have changed. We compromise ownership rights with things like imminent domain, property taxes, zoning and libraries. Why do you assume that a messaging protocol should be owned the same way as other property?

> but you do this without justification

The root of this issue is that people are unsettled with the direction big tech has taken, concentrated in so few companies, they way they embrace and extend, weaponize the legal system, lobby politicians, profit off people's privacy, attention and well being, etc. Governments are taking action because this is what people want. That's how the world works.

Do you assume that people are supposed to adhere to your principals when they are unhappy with what big tech is doing? This is all new, why would you assume that the rules shouldn't be adjusted for new situations?

> You feel entitled to this product because it’s common

This isn't just me and this isn't just this product. It's much bigger than that. People are unhappy with the direction big tech is going. In general they are exploiting old rules with new technology. You're not providing any answers here.

> violation of the social contract

The social contract is not guaranteed to stay the same for you or anyone else. It evolves when there are significant changes. Things like the bubonic plague, the printing press, the new world, the industrial revolution, large scale farming and container ships and other things all drove significant societal changes, some good and some not so good. The amount and pace of change due to the internet and mobile computing is unprecedented. Stuff like this prompts changes to the social contract, in an attempt to fix problems. The social contract is always changing, every generation there are tweaks.

The people who wanted to keep slavery legal said the same thing you're saying - it's not fair to violate the social contract. Well sometimes that's the right thing to do.

> if normalized would utterly kill innovation

Wouldn't open protocols tend to encourage innovation, like what happened with the internet and open source software? Instead of these companies milking profits for years because of network effects and their ability to lock out the competition wouldn't it be better if switching costs were lowered? Wouldn't that create a lot of possibilities for alternatives, and lower prices, and a better balance between these big companies and the rest of society? That's what people want.

Innovation is not Apple reverse-engineering MS Office formats then later using the legal system to stop others from doing the same thing.

What is it that you are afraid of? Do you think these big companies can't compete if they had to open some of their protocols? Do you ever worry that a few big tech companies have carved up the world and will stifle anything or anyone that gets in the way of their profits?

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interopera...