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There's only one regulation of Big Tech that has no downside for the rest of us: Break up these companies, and require interoperability, to create the conditions that make genuine competition (mastodon.social)
submitted 8 months ago by dangillmor@mastodon.social to c/random@fedia.io
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There's only one regulation of Big Tech that has no downside for the rest of us: Break up these companies, and require interoperability, to create the conditions that make genuine competition possible.

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[–] danielbingham@mastodon.social 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

@kbal @dangillmor And then on top of that, when you lock certain service types into certain protocols, you cut off evolution.

Imagine if we'd legislated email interoperability by declaring that all "services that implement messaging must implement email".

You've now seriously hampered the evolution of IRC, AIM Chat, MSN Messenger, the various social media messaging services, Slack, Discord, and even localized chats like Stackoverflow's chat.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Nobody was proposing that the interoperability standard for instant messaging should be email. At no point in history would that ever have seemed reasonable to anyone.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

But if a core standard for instant messaging had emerged twenty years ago, and everyone had stuck to it sufficiently that IRC, iMessage, Whatsapp, Matrix, Slack, and Discord users could all communicate with each other, we'd be much better off by now. It's unfinished work that needs doing.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 1 points 8 months ago

Instead we've gone in the opposite direction, with users increasingly confined to isolated walled gardens so that their owners can better control the right to extract data from them. This approach is just not working out well so far.

Identifying the biggest of the worst offenders and requiring them to all interoperate via xmpp gateways with full end-to-end encryption wouldn't instantly solve all our problems, but I for one would be happy to see it.