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Ask HN: Is there any petition for messaging applications to be regulated?

4 points by pi-squared ↗ HN
I feel we are in a crazy world with chat/messaging applications and it has been going for a while. It's like if I have a mobile phone carrier I can only call numbers who are with that carrier but nobody else. Or email people only within gmail. The walled gardens of every single chat application (FB Messenger, Viber, Telegram, Signal, Skype, +probably thousands of others) makes users install several chat applications on their phones or computers in order to keep communicating.

My question is actually two-fold - do you think there should be a regulation from somewhere (EU,countries, app stores...?) that if you develop a chat application (I understand that's vague but law usually is) you need to be able to provide a way to chat with other chat applications (via xmpp or whatever).

And the second part is - is there already some initiative that I am not aware of that is attempting something similar.

4 comments

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chatmasta
When did so many people on HN become fans of regulation?!

This website used to be about startup news... startups, aka those hurt most my regulatory capture. Is this just not a consideration for people any more? Have we really reached the point that regulating the negative externalities of large corporations is worth sacrificing the ability for startups to compete with them?

pi-squared
My imagination might be failing to see it but any startup creating yet another chat application just makes the problem larger. Is it possible that a startup could force giants like Facebook or Google to comply with giving up their walled gardens of IM? I also don't mind the petition to be towards said tech giants for them to make a consortium or whatever that agree on only making and allowing chat applications in their stores that comply with implementing an open protocol.
vihren
How is enforcing a standard protocol for communication sacrificing the ability of startups to compete with large corporations? I believe it's the contrary - a standard protocol would mean that any new app (made by a startup for example) can enter the big sandbox with all other users and they all can communicate freely. E-mail is a good example for that. If you want you can build an e-mail client and sell it or distribute it to the people and if it's better than the alternatives - great! Imagine a world where the e-mail protocol was proprietary and locked down and Gmail has become the dominant player. How would we then have alternatives? How would an e-mail startup enter the market?

Your argument further supports regulation and an unified standard than it disproves it.

chatmasta
I agree that a single standards protocol for chat would be good for everyone. However, I’m extremely skeptical that governments regulating, and defining, that standard is a good idea. The first problem is that there are many different governments. Will each have their own standard, or will it be another extrajurisdictional legislation like GDPR? The second problem is that any government regulation is going to include clauses that benefit the government and law enforcement, e.g. backdoored encryption.

If, and it’s a big IF, the government could force a standard that was limited in scope to interopability, with no backdoors in encryption or increased cost of implementation, then I could maybe get behind this idea. But given the past behavior of governments regulating technologies, and feature creep of regulation, I am extremely wary of any new legislation to regulate technology standards.