FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr said Monday that the agency should investigate Apple over the company’s decision to block the Beeper Mini service, which worked to bring iMessage to Android.
Founder of Pebble by Eric Migicovsky Beeper launched a new service called Beeper Mini in December that claimed to reverse engineer the iMessage stack to make it work on Android. The next few days were like a cat and mouse game where Apple repeatedly blocked the Beeper Mini and the latter tried to find a solution. Later in the month, Beeper abandoned its efforts to make iMessage work on Android through the Beeper Mini, calling the efforts “unsustainable”.
Carr talked about reviewing this story with FCC Part 14 Rules in mind. These rules describe that the “advanced communication service” must be “accessible and usable by persons with disabilities.”
“Apple’s broader set of blocking practices warrants review by antitrust and competition agencies, but the FCC should also examine this particular incident through the lens of Part 14’s accessibility, usability, and compatibility rules,” he said. .
Carr said the Beeper Mini advanced some of those principles like accessibility and usability for people with disabilities.
It called out Apple saying carriers “shall not install network features, functions or features that impede accessibility or usability.”
The FCC did not immediately comment on plans to investigate the matter.
Apple’s decision appears to have caught the eye of regulators. In December a bipartisan group of US lawmakers asked the US Justice Department to investigate Apple’s “potential anticompetitive treatment” of Beeper, saying that “interoperability and interconnections have long been key drivers of competition and consumer choice in communications services’. Separately, Senator Elizabeth Warren had also criticized Apple’s move at the time.
