Why do we have RFC standardized and decentralized email but never could make standard chat/call protocol?
XMPP and now Matrix made good progress in that direction but are mostly obscure to date.
XMPP and now Matrix made good progress in that direction but are mostly obscure to date.
2) NAT really screwed us all by breaking the end-to-end nature of the Internet.
Don't worry, we'll all be on IPV6 any day now.
The most easily accessible alternative is another company's closed system.
I suspect NAT wasn't involved in that developing as much as money was - IRC, email, Newsgroups were hard to profit from. Having a distinctive service which is different from your competitors so customers can be attracted, and which is closed so customers want to bring their friends and family in to talk to them and then can't leave without the whole group leaving, is bound to be more profitable for the winners than taking part in a federated system where only one user can join and talk to their contacts with relays to other servers.
And then you add a committee and the lowest common denominator doesn't change very fast.
You can do audio/video calls and IM with it (using SIMPLE). The problem is being able to call people beyond your SIP servers. Companies don't want to allow it, probably because they don't want to have their service become a commodity.