A legislative path to an interoperable internet

I highly recommend that everyone reads it - it is extremely short, well written, and probably the single most important piece of legislation to HN folks in the past decade.

As the bill is right now, it require communications platforms with 100M monthly active users in the US to make their services interoperable with other platforms. The bill presumes that platforms using open protocols already (like email) are fine. Facebook and it’s messenger platform is likely to be the only one meeting the threshold.

I'm not American, but if you are and you care, I would suggest you to call your representative and explain why you support (or not) this bill. Remember that as it goes through congress, it can, and most likely will, be heavily edited or gutted to fit the many competing interests whispering in their ears. If you think the bill is good as is, tell them that! Personally, I think the bill is perfect, except for the 100M user threshold to start demand compatibility, which I think should be lowered to 10M.

Data portability is easy to implement (and has been by some companies).

But back-end interoperability and delegability are tricky not just because of technical challenges (those can be solved), but mainly because of abuse and spam.

If, all of a sudden, any other service can like and comment on Facebook posts without having a Facebook account... I don't see how this doesn't become a spam/abuse-fest overnight.

My $0.02 is that there's a much simpler solution hiding in plain sight: just stop giving legal copyright/hacking/ToS protection to sites with third-party-generated content that the site didn't license.

In other words, if someone wants to build an app that downloads your Spotify playlist data by impersonating you... or scrape Craigslist listings... or copy Yelp reviews... then nothing is legally in the way. Not copyright, not anti-hacking laws, not ToS.

Services are free to rate-limit or ban you if they catch you... but if you can get around that then the information/interaction is yours.

This feels like a much more "free market" approach. It doesn't rely on trying to build laws that will be bad compromises and outdated by the time they're passed. Rather it involves undoing existing laws and protections that are producing harm.

(To be clear, copyright still applies to things that are paid for or licensed -- movies, songs, articles, etc.)

This looks like a barn door, not a loophole. What would stop major players from updating their proprietary protocol on a daily basis? The overhead of staying on top of a dozen big social media sites' protocols would be absurd.

I agree with the need for security, and I see that the industry has failed to update email; but I see that more as a consequence of the industry continually trying to "disrupt" email through the creation of walled gardens.

What about my bank? They have >100M users, and with an app/service portal, they'll be required to be "interoperable". I don't want my bank or my bank info to be interoperable. I also don't want my bank to have an interoperability interface; as an internet plumber, I fully realize the first thing you need to have a blockage is a pipe with something in it.

What about content delivery? Will I be able to play music/movies hosted by my subscription provider through a 3rd party? This calls into question some difficult problems around licensing that may be impossible to satisfy via existing, established contracts; don't paint a content provider into a corner of guaranteed noncompliance.

Where is the definition of "interoperability"?

This will be a field day for an endless bevy of corporate lawyers to say "Oh XYZ isn't a service with users. It's available to users of ABC service, which is fully compliant with the interoperability rules as required by blah blah."

I applaud the effort and think this is a priceless next step in helping define where we should go next, but I'm only hearing possibility and daydreams, not concrete implementation.

Progressive taxation of companies

I know this sounds outrageous, but hear me out. What if monopolies split themselves? Wouldn't that be great? Does the same company really have to make the phone and the charger? No, but there are 2 reasons apple does:

1. Collaboration between the phone department and the charger department is slightly easier.

2. They can abuse their monopoly on iphone chargers to force you to pay more for them.

Apple makes about 30 billion on iphones per quarter. Assuming all iphones were $600 (which they arent) and everyone uses 2 chargers per iphone (because the first one broke) priced at $20, apple would be making $2 billion from chargers.

Say, if they didn't abuse their monopoly position for chargers they would make only $1.8 billion from them.

This is $2.0 billion - $1.8 billion = $0.2 billion less revenue.

Now if you just tax apple progressively such that taxes for 32 billion in revenue are more than $0.2 billion higher than paying taxes for 30 billion in revenue, apple will split into iphoneapple and chargerapple by themselves!

Now in practice you might not want to tax revenue but for example the value of the company or something else.

Also you don't want the 'split' companies to still behave like they are one company, this means that you want the split-off company to have different shareholders from the main company, because otherwise they would just behave in mutual interest.

More in line with the topic, netflix might decide to split into a 'movie suggestions algorithm' service and a 'movie streaming' company.

Google would split into a gazillions of different companies.

But some interoperable internet legislature might be a little more realistic :)

I love the spirit here, but I think everyone here is aware that outside of mainstream networks like Twitter you have other networks which are just full of rampant hate speech.

If you tell Facebook they have to support allowing hateful users to contact their own, Facebook no longer has any ability to moderate anything. I would love social media which wasn't controlled by a single Mega company, but I'm just not sure how this could exist.

I have heard of projects, say a local group of college students set up zoom socializing, which does provide a much needed alternative. But I just don't think this can scale, once you have no obligation to the group to be a decent human being, it becomes extremely easy to be nasty and mean.

I'm lucky enough to be a part of one zoom ( for now, I met the owner in real life) community. He has to personally let everyone else in to the room, and he's already had to ban a few people for over the top racism.

Before you know it everyone is meaner on social media than they'd ever be in the real world . It's at the point where I don't want to feel my mind with that, therefore I just don't partake.

If this ever was something Facebook had to do, within hours you'd be flooded with bots dming you nonsense. As is Facebook has major issues with Spam and abuse, what's the stop someone from creating a service which just sends bots in to hurl racist insults

In particular, back-end interoperability needs to be mandatory for Internet of Things stuff. The lifespan of a cloud service is short, maybe 5 years. That's a big problem for house components.

Delegability needs thought. There's bots. There's Snooping as a Service. Technically, back-end interoperabilty implies the ability to delegate. It's more of a contractual issue. Can a service forbid it? Intermediaries and aggregators have their own headaches.

I think a better version of this legislation would apply to any corporation that collects PII or collects browser activity outside of 1st party domains, in order to serve ads to users.

Opening up these services like this seems to be one of several prerequisites to preventing great harms, but doing so would be in conflict with a number of expedient political issues the parties have dug in on around platform censorship, data privacy, etc.

You need to give more credit than that. STARTTLS adoption is well over 90% now. Yes, it is unathenticated so that it only protects against passive listening, but that is still a huge improvement.

Authentication only would apply to the mail servers anyway. Further worthwhile improvement would require authentication of end users. Not sure how you can legislate that in a useful way.

Mandating data portability is one thing, but having the government decide that a company must provide an api seems absurd to me (so far: it's a new idea to me).

In the meantime, dear EFF: - Why hasn't the EFF created boilerplate privacy agreement clauses that companies could adopt to prove their ubiquitously claimed "utmost concern for user privacy"? - Why isn't there a vision of how companies could maintain the provenance under which each datum has been acquired (and therefore when they can/can't be shared/sold/etc.)? - What meaning does any privacy agreement have (no matter how consumer friendly) if it can be changed at any time? - Why do NO companies promise to protect user data in the event of an acquisition (in fact they promise the opposite).

These seem like action items right down EFF's lane and I keep waiting year after year for the basics to be covered. I criticize as a friend (and small donor).

Imagine a postgresql database where bunch of these scraping interfaces load data into per-service schemas, and you can then join/union across schemas, integrating data from several different online services in creative ways.

Too bad this bill is targeted at huge services only. Though those are mostly the ones that try to obfuscate and hinder access to data.

I can already use up one hand counting the webistes that just deleted all user contributed content or disappeared for other reasons where if I didn't do this, the content would be lost completely to me. Or services (like online banking) that just offer 2-3 year history, and you need to pay to access older data.

Just allow users to write their own clients.

We really need more open protocols to make this happen. A doable strategy could be too look at markets with a lot of existing solutions (e.g. chat, task management, note taking, scheduling, document management, file syncing) and force the players to formulate a protocol that everyone adheres to. Since that will take a long time it's probably only doable for the core services, but having something like this e.g. for chat services would be incredibly useful.

I generally don't donate to anyone but I am going to send the EFF a few dollars in case it helps them promote this bill.

Can someone describe a model for these services that doesn’t depend on advertising?

I just emailed my senators and representative urging them to support this bill. In those emails (the text of which is reproduced below), I address some of the reasons I think it's a good idea and make some suggestions for amendments to it.

What additional reasons do you have for supporting (or not) this bill, and what other amendments would you suggest?

Text of email to my House/Senate representatives:

I strongly urge you to support the ACCESS Act (S.2658 - Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching Act of 2019) introduced by Senator Warner and encourage your colleagues to do so as well.

The bill requires that large communications platforms such as Facebook and Twitter provide mechanisms for other platforms to interoperate with their platforms.

This is important for several reasons:

1. The sheer size of these platforms lock your constituents into them, creating huge barriers to entry for competitors and stifling competition in the Social netwotking market;

2. The ACCESS Act would create a mechanism for other platforms to interoperate with these huge platforms, some of which already exist and others which could provide users not only with superior capabilities, but also with the ability to exert more control over their personal data and information (cf. Diaspora, https://joindiaspora.org );

3. These huge platforms have enormous control, not only over the news and information that their users see, but also over the marketplaces created by their sheer size. Requiring them to freely interoperate provides an opportunity to create a true public commons divorced from any particular corporate entity;

4. As we've seen in the recent (and not so recent) past, these platforms exert an enormous amount of influence and have a huge economic impact on us. As such, there have been calls to break up these companies to limit that impact and influence. I posit that creating an environment which will significantly reduce barriers to entry into this space will encourage competition and limit the impact/influence of these corporations, while creat new opportunities, new jobs and a broader set of voices on the Internet.

I'd further urge you to introduce amendments to this bill to accomplish the following:

1. Reduce the size of impacted platforms from 100,000,000 users to 100,000. This would allow a rich ecosystem of communication and social networking platforms that can interact and give everyone an opportunity to connect with others in a decentralized, open way. It would also provide strong incentives for entrepreneurship in this space and encourage innovation and competition;

2. In addition to tasking the National Institute for Standards and Technology with creating the protocols and interfaces required to implement this bill, invite the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to participate as well. The IETF (https://ietf.org/about/ ) are the people who have, for more than 30 years, been developing, documenting and implementing the technical standards that have made the Internet the economic and cultural dynamo it is today.

Please make this a priority, because broad-based, open communication, discussion and the potential for enhanced personal privacy are critical to our democracy and cultural cohesion.