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.
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.
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.
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.
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.