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> What if we had regulations to force service providers to provide APIs and interoperability in their services? What if messaging someone on Facebook from Google hangouts was as easy as sending an email?

Exactly, the kind of regulation that would promote real competition than silos of shitware built on network effects.

API Enforcement, Net neutrality, Transparency, Free software enforcement, Copy left and privacy regulation are pro-consumer, pro-user, pro-individual and anti-authoritarian. These are the regulations that would promote freedom instead of standing in the way or worse grab the notion of freedom completely.

Stallman has been preaching about it for ages. It is sad that people who fight for regulation don't have faith on the individual, or want to provide the tools for betterment of the individual (a centrally controlled internet with official version of the truth is never the answer).

One point I do lean in on the pro-regulatory side of things. The platforms showing automated feeds/suggestions have to share the same culpability as individual doing it. i.e. If a goverment deems an individual can't do X, or has to pay Y in damages, then a platform promoting the video actively (hosting it without a searchable link is fine) through automated feeds is culpable of sharing it.

I am not promoting govt regulation, but just saying companies should not be treated as exceptions.

> People complain all the time about how Google and Facebook and Netflix and Spotify own all my data and make it impossible to use it outside their platform, yet I never hear people discussing the most obvious solution: just regulate them to make the data interoperable and empower you like you wish all the decentralized technology would enable you to do, if only they had adoption!

That doesn't address the issue where your personal information is their business, ie. the ad-supported business as discussed in the article. The limits of what's allowable probably needs to be well-understood by all parties.

In the case of Facebook unless it becomes a subscription it does not indeed. In the case of Netflix, Spotify and G Suite it's baked into the subscription already, what the regulation would do is alleviate vendor lock-in.

> The balkanization of the web and walled gardens is to me the biggest issue that affects the most people for the worst, and while we constantly talk about the new technologies that could solve the issue if only there was a way to develop them, we ignore (I think often out of unconditioned reflex) that the issue could be fixed in a timely and reasonable manner by bringing the government in with a reasonable framework.

Balkanization is sadly inevitable — there will be multiple regulatory frameworks that address varying cultural norms around the world.