Yours truly, writing in January about Beeper, a cross-platform messaging app that aimed and failed to add iMessage to its arsenal of services:

Shortly after Apple revoked Beeper’s unauthorized access to the iMessage service, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts posted the following to the social media website X, quoting The Verge’s article reporting on the changes Apple made: “Green bubble texts are less secure. So why would Apple block a new app allowing Android users to chat with iPhone users on iMessage? Big Tech executives are protecting profits by squashing competitors. Chatting between different platforms should be easy and secure.”

A week later, Senators Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Mike Lee of Utah; and Representatives Jerry Nadler of New York and Ken Buck of Colorado wrote a bipartisan letter to Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter calling for the Justice Department to “investigate whether this potentially anticompetitive conduct by Apple violated antitrust laws.” “This” conduct refers to Apple’s immediate shutdown of Beeper Mini. The members of Congress collectively write: “We write regarding Apple’s potential anticompetitive treatment of the Beeper Mini messaging application. We have long-championed increased competition, innovation, and consumer choice in the digital marketplace. To protect free and open markets, it is critical for the Antitrust Division to be vigilant in enforcing our antitrust laws… We are therefore concerned that Apple’s recent actions to disable Beeper Mini harm competition, eliminate choices for consumers, and will discourage future innovation and investment in interoperable messaging services.”

In other words, the letter tells the Justice Department to investigate Apple for locking its doors to thieves. There are two main points to untangle here: that the members of Congress show apparent illiteracy in both antitrust law and technology, and that opening up messaging ecosystems is not a job of the government. It is quite obvious that these members of Congress have no clue what Beeper did to gain access to the iMessage service — nor have any interest in finding out — and that Beeper’s Migicovsky brainwashed the members into taking congressional action against Apple as retaliation for destroying Beeper’s flawed-from-the-start business model. Speaking of Migicovsky, he promoted the letter with his own commentary on X shortly after it was published. It does not require any knowledge of government lobbying to conclude that Migicovsky — and perhaps some of his cohorts — lobbied the members of Congress to get the letter published for publicity.

Thursday’s lawsuit is a direct consequence of Klobuchar, Lee, Nandler, and Buck’s letter hitting Kanter’s desk. Kanter, who leads the antitrust division of the Justice Department, filed the lawsuit yesterday — his name is listed on the suit. Due to Beeper’s aggressive government lobbying on Capitol Hill, the members of Congress wrote the letter to Kanter, who then was brainwashed by Beeper’s marketing speak and told his technology-illiterate aides to write a poorly researched, ill-informed complaint against the world’s largest technology firm.

Furthermore, the complaint includes this passage, as I wrote in my annotation Thursday:

Recently, Apple blocked a third-party developer from fixing the broken cross-platform messaging experience in Apple Messages and providing end-to-end encryption for messages between Apple Messages and Android users. By rejecting solutions that would allow for cross-platform encryption, Apple continues to make iPhone users’ less secure than they could otherwise be.

Not only is this passage entirely false, but it also reeks of Beeper and Eric Migicovsky, Beeper’s chief executive, directly influencing the lawsuit. Migicovsky himself found this uncanny, and on the social media website X, posted: “This DOJ v Apple lawsuit is basically Eric Migicovsky v Apple. I swear I did not do this on purpose,” referring to the Justice Department. Migicovsky wrote this in response to a passage from the lawsuit which essentially served as a call-out to Pebble, the now-defunct smartwatch company Migicovsky founded that brought him into the spotlight, in the “Smartwatches” section. Migicovsky also backs the Justice Department’s incorrect complaints about Beeper Mini up on X, saying he “couldn’t have said it better” himself.

Beeper did not “fix” broken cross-platform messaging — that is what Beeper wants you to believe, but it isn’t what happened. Beeper infiltrated Apple’s private iMessage service meant to serve as a selling point for Apple devices and sold access to it with a subscription. Beeper is not a “third-party developer,” Beeper is a thief. A third-party developer (keyword: “developer”) would refer to someone who gains authorized access to Apple services to create products on Apple’s platforms. Beeper is not a developer — it is a company with the sole intention of profiting from another corporation’s infrastructure. The Justice Department is supposed to serve as the just and correct arbiter of conflicts. Instead, it has chosen to pick favorites in one of the most important lawsuits it has filed in its entire existence because some scrappy start-up founded by a failed smartwatch manufacturer lobbied Congress.

Without even describing the full facts to the court in the lawsuit, the Justice Department aims to sell a one-sided story to the jury that is simply factually incorrect. I hope and assume Apple will fight this moot, incorrect point in court to the fullest extent possible. Lying government lobbyists’ words don’t belong in a court of law — they belong in a concessions stand outside the Capitol in Washington selling T-shirts. If TikTok did this, it’d be banned in the United States a week from now.