Closing a Door to Open a Window
Defaults and the Secret Fight for Your Messages
Recently, at F8 — Facebook’s developer conference — the social networking giant unveiled APIs for Facebook Messenger, their Over the Top (OTT) messaging application. This was huge news for the messaging world — OTT applications have remained notoriously closed off from third party and value added service providers, largely because of their business models (advertising based on network activity and/or subscription). Adding an API, the way that WeChat has, creates the potential for a wide range of actors to begin building on top of Facebook’s messaging application — a potentially large win for organizations that don’t want to build their own platform. At 600m users, Messenger is already Facebook’s fastest growing platform — amidst an explosively growing space. According to the Economist, OTT platforms have a combined user base of 3 billion (though many of these users are the same person with multiple applications).
The potential of OTT chat platforms has gotten a lot of attention as a growth market, but there’s a dark side to the way that chat platforms behave in the backend that has gotten far less coverage: defaults. Essentially, the operating systems of most phones create a default messaging channel on a phone which routes all of the native messaging functions that don’t come from a particular app — particularly Short Message Service (SMS)—through the default messenger to create simplicity for the user. Defaults arise from the assumption that a user will only want one application to manage particular functions on their phone. That assumption, however, seems decreasingly true as the application market grows generally, and specifically untrue in applications with social context. The use of messaging applications, probably more than any other, are dictated by the social context perceptions of their users.
SMS is a data channel, not a single application, meaning that it’s not just a messaging platform, it’s the world’s most-used data channel. For comparison, WhatsApp is the largest OTT platform with 700 million monthly users. SMS has 3.69 billion unique users and more than 7.2 billion total subscribers. Unquestionably, SMS is larger than OTT, but it’s an open standard which means that it’s not owned by any single company. For users, that’s a benefit and something that (I think) is integral to its success.
The commercial competition for user attention and traffic through the messaging space, though, means that the world’s largest technology companies — like Apple, Google and Facebook —are all trying to become user’s exclusive and only messaging platform. Each of these companies are using the default settings on their OTT platforms (iMessage, Hangouts, and Messenger, respectively) and operating systems (iOS and Android) to (intentionally) block smaller companies and applications from using SMS. In other words, the world’s largest companies are trying to shut other companies out of the messaging market, cutting users off from services, applications, and information — often in markets where these things are most limited. Even worse, it simply doesn’t have to be this way — every single one of these companies and applications could compete on their merits, but instead are jockeying for position deep in their users’ settings menus.
As an issue, this is just as big–if not bigger-than Net Neutrality. SMS is the world’s most-used data channel and it’s also the only major open messaging standard (with the rapid abandonment of XMPP). As a market, SMS is already more than twice as large as the entire smartphone application market — and SMS applications are expected to occupy at least half of that market by 2016. And just like the small websites that many are fighting so hard to protect on the Internet, millions more small businesses and developers need protection against the increasingly heavy-handed market exclusion posed by large social messaging companies.
Technologically, they’ve done this in a variety of ways, though ultimately they all just try and become the default application for all messaging on a phone. iMessage is the worst offender–it comes pre-installed with iOS and blocks all third party applications from using SMS without giving users the ability to allow third party access or uninstall the application. That means that if you own an iPhone, you will never get the full value of your SMS. Google, through Hangouts, also comes pre-installed on Android phones and is the default SMS application on many phones (though not all), blocking any third party applications from using the SMS function. By maintaining the separation between Android and Hangouts, Google at least gives users the option to opt-out, although it doesn’t allow (most) users to delete the application and may still block other applications. Facebook Messenger takes a different tact — because Facebook doesn’t produce a mobile phone operating system (yet), it only takes over the default position once it’s installed (actively blocks other applications). Instead, Facebook uses spyware in Messenger to capture an inordinate amount of data about users. The new Messenger API opens access to their default platform, but does so at the cost of owning all the user data that moves through it. This is shrewd, but it means that in order to get the kind of platform flexibility we should expect, we have to give Facebook (and their advertisers) access to yet another data channel.
These issues seem very simple in principle, but are very complicated in practice. At their core, though, they are about huge companies making selfish, anti-consumer decisions without their consent. Often, in conversations about issues like this, companies cite complexity as what prevents them from giving users more choice. To me, that seems like a pernicious line of argument, and one that’s increasingly misinforming users about how to protect their interests in digital markets (and how easy it would be to do so). Perhaps worst of all, they’re limiting what’s available to their users while promising greater openness and possibility.
Like many others, I’m excited by what becomes possible when OTT messaging opens itself up — whether through common (though diminishing) standards like XMPP or APIs. The backend jockeying that shuts down open access to the SMS channel on smartphones shuts down the world’s largest data market in favor of their own, limited messaging applications. Even Facebook’s move to open Messenger’s API makes them a messaging intermediary, using their market position to strangle smaller companies. Even though the companies involved are big, none are as big as SMS, which remains the only universal, major open messaging standard in the world.
If we in the technology community are truly trying to build open digital markets, we’re go not going to do it with these “new” attempts to monopolize users by hiding in their default menus. It’s senseless to seek openness by closing doors in order to open a much smaller windows.
