A new seminal antitrust legislation has been proposed in the EU, which will go up for a final vote in the EU Parliament. There’s a whole boatload of measures in here, many targeting big tech. The first major one:
During a close to 8-hour long trilogue (three-way talks between Parliament, Council and Commission), EU lawmakers agreed that the largest messaging services (such as Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger or iMessage) will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms, if they so request. Users of small or big platforms would then be able to exchange messages, send files or make video calls across messaging apps, thus giving them more choice. As regards interoperability obligation for social networks, co-legislators agreed that such interoperability provisions will be assessed in the future.
This is exactly what should’ve been done ages ago, and I’m glad they’re finally getting to it. Messaging services have become incredibly important and vital communication tools in our modern societies, and they should not be used for lock-in and other anti-competitive practices. This is great news.
This will be interesting to see how it plays out. One of the problems with messaging federation is discovery. With email, there’s a standardised email address scheme for recipients, but with this comes the problem of spam, and with messaging on private platforms, this is often dealt with by means of having the ‘friends request’; you ask permission before you can send a message. This requires discovery, you need to be able to query who is available for messaging.
iampivot,
Yes, that’s what I was thinking of as well. I think our federated protocols are decades behind where they should if our dominant companies hadn’t roped into proprietary networks. Assuming they’re forced to open back up through regulation, then maybe federated network innovation has a chance at picking up again, which I’d like.
There’s tons of great technology that we could use including end to end encryption. You’ve identified something that concerns everyone: spam. Public key cryptography offers extremely robust solutions to do away with spam by requiring every message to be cryptographically signed from the outset. No spammers would get through. The crypto could be handled automatically and transparently. Every time you contact someone for the first time you could exchange keys using bluetooth, NFC, QR codes, or one time codes. With good standards in place this would be quick and easy to do.
Herein lies the problem: how do you bootstrap it? People have existing contacts scattered throughout any number of social media accounts and they will want to contact each other over these new federated networks. Allowing unsolicited friend requests opens up the network to spamming. One solution could be to reach out to their existing contacts and manually exchanging keys with them (Yes, I know, that’s not going to happen). Another solution could be for the social media companies to take an active part in distributing keys between existing contacts on their networks. This could work very well and be easy for users, but it would require a level of cooperation from the social media companies that is unlikely to happen voluntarily.
Other ideas for spam prevention are for the sender to pay a monetary fee or solve a CPU intensive computer problem. I’m not a fan of these solutions under ordinary use, but it could offer a solution for first contact or in the event of an emergency to bypass the signature requirement and allow people to reach you without a cryptographic signature. So for example, a message or friend request could be accompanied by $1. Spammers could abuse it, but you’d get paid for it and sending a million spams would cost $1M instead of <$1.
Another benefit is that if ever your information does get leaked/stolen, you’d just revoke the signature and it wouldn’t be useful to spammers. Also you’d know who leaked your info.
Just a couple ideas I do believe the technology to build a robust global federated network is technically achievable today, but getting all the giants on board with open standards and networks has been all but impossible in the past. They don’t want an open federated network to succeed and might sabotage it to fail.
The EU could just have required public APIs for tech that targets the masses leading to application diversity.
But this new law will cater to the lowest common denominator if me and my hypothetical new chat protocol (that would suck) could make demands on not only the monoliths but also smaller actors, like Tox or Retroshare. Why the overreach?
APIs would be best.
Is your new chat protocol worse then XMPP?
Bribery? Handicapping non-European companies?
It should be mentioned, Maxtrix, headquartered in the UK, has bridges for many other chat protocols.
Most of this will be covered by pre-existing services like SMS. It’s nice in theory but the reality is the obligation is artificial and as such will be implemented as minimum work required by the companies. Expect to see “want to open this family video, download WhatsApp for free to see it”.
Open protocols already exist and were baked into major chat systems (eg xmpp) they got dropped because the consumers didn’t want/use them over the feature rich proprietary options.
I doubt this counts as interoperability, but even if it does, it could force Apple to make iMessage available to Android in some form or another (app or website). Currently, Android users have no access whatsoever to iMessage, so it’s still a big improvement.
BTW another way they can achieve minimal compliance is by not supporting any of the messaging platform’s advanced features in the API that will be made available to third parties. For example iMessage already has advanced features such as animoji and cardiograph transmission that aren’t part of the definition of features provided (“messages, send files or make video calls”). But still, basic messaging will work and that’s a plus.
Ha! Fat chance! Companies that own those messaging platforms want the ability to “update” the standard like Microsoft did for RTF and they are doing for OOXML so they are always one step ahead.
features provided = features mentioned
iMessage protocol support on Android was the first thing on my mind. I’ve heard various iPhone users think Android is limited/behind/awful because it lacks iMessage. They seem to miss the idea that there’s TONS of messaging platforms out there the rest of us are using w/o issue (e.g., Signal, Telegram).
*** Open protocols already exist and were baked into major chat systems (eg xmpp) they got dropped because the consumers didn’t want/use them over the feature rich proprietary options. ***
This is funny. Of course the proprietary options are more feature rich, as the tech behemoths put their money into that. A closed silo means a captive audience and more eyeballs on your own ad services. It’s lucrative to create walled gardens. They are like Hotel California, “You can check-out any time you like, but you can never leave!” Everyone you care about is inside that space and leaving means foregoing these people.
None of the major players wanted to keep the federated protocols or develop them further. They realised quickly that they then couldn’t inflict their self-serving shenanigans on their userbase without a large portion getting wise and leave for greener pastures without major consequences.
Why am I on WhatsApp? Not because I am a major Meta fan or that other Messaging Apps can’t take its place. It’s the people I care about who are on this platform. If I leave, I cut myself off from these people. Some of them live in different countries and some even different continents. It’s the network effect keeping us tethered there. We can’t go somewhere else en masse without losing contacts we don’t want to lose.
After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a third of my contacts tried to leave WhatsApp. They all chose different platforms and meanwhile I had to contend with 3 additional messaging platforms next to WhatsApp to be able to keep in contact. Not everybody is as willing as I am to keep in contact with hoops and inconveniences, so these contacts are now all back on WhatsApp. Meta can do whatever with their platform, because people can’t leave without cutting themselves off from the people they care about. In a federated world, this would largely be a non-issue and Meta would be very careful with their business practises, lest they lose eyeballs to the competition.
r_a_trip,
You are right. The social media and communications markets are controlled almost entirely by network effects. Being unable to reach one’s contacts is by far the biggest impediment for alternatives when the dominant corporations have completely blocked them. Being forced to choose between openness and talking to your friends and family is not a reasonable choice to be forced into, but that’s what the dominant companies have done.
I also agree with kurkosdr, the leading corporations will try to find ways to fight these policies somehow.. They always do.
It’s funny that you mention SMS, given this is the telecom company operated garbage that dumped us in this situation in the first place due plain greed.
Yes, greed. Telecom companies used to charge (at least outside USA) absurd fees PER MESSAGE to have a unreliable service that more often than not silent failed to deliver the message to the recipient, and it was not unusual that these money gluttons charged higher fees to send messages outside their own network, or put caps on the number of messages pretty much making impossible to engage in group chats.
Then came the attempt of these operator to “modernize” the service with MMS. What they did? They charged even higher fees to use it. And more often than not it didn’t even worked right due half ass client side implementations and network inadequacies.
Now we have the RCS/Joyn, and it is a total mess that kinda shows how clueless telecom companies are. Half charges more for the service, and the other half didn’t even bothered to implement the gateways to communicate with other operators… a born dead service.
What pushed people towards this mess of closed ecosystem that we have today, where you need 4 different application installed on your phone, is not that whatsapp or fb messenger where more feature rich.
Indeed these services used to be quite feature poor in their early days. It was because they provided a minimum viable alternative for SMS/MMS/RCS that actually worked reliably and free.
The most feature rich of all these services used to be desktop applications, like ICQ, Skype and MSN, and most failed to see the writing on the wall that the world where moving towards mobile.
XMPP kind of stagnated, and didn’t evolve as the world changed. The servers and clients are all over the place in XEP support. A baseline and feature sets really needed to be defined, and bumped occasionally, with a reference implementation and conformance tests.
Snikket is the project which is trying to fix this by doing what the proprietary systems did: build a client and server in lockstep which have features for the modern world.
The EU took 20 years to mandate that cars have catalytic converters and seatbelts for all seats (my dad’s first car, a 1988 Seat Ibiza, was delivered without a catalytic converter and without rear seatbelts).
Also, the problem of roaming charges making a mockery out of the supposed “single market” existed since the 90s, and it didn’t got resolved until about 20 years later.
So, a decade is blazing fast by EU standards (first release of iMessage, the first closed messaging platform, happened in 2011). What’s the complaint again?
(btw it always me amused me how the EU bureaucrats think of the EU as “advanced”, yet US cars had catalytic converters and seatbelts in all seats since 1973 and 1968 accordingly, while the EU got around to regulating those in the early 90s)
How could they, as the EU did not exist back then? The EU was formed in 1993. (Perhaps you think of the EEC, which had no such regulatory powers)
Perfect. XMPP and SIP (SIMPLE) are standing by. WhatsApp is a cheap XMPP ripoff anyway, and XMPP was in some distant past also supported by Facebook and Google. Throw in Slack and we’re good. (Although admittedly the Telegram protocol would also be interesting on the wire.)
evert,
It’s amusing to compare our predicaments today with where we were at twenty years ago.
https://www.infoworld.com/article/2678727/xmpp-vs-simple–the-race-for-messaging-standards.html
As we all know, messaging giants Novell and Sun Microsystem ended up winning. It was in the bag really. Haha.
Interesting history, thanks.