If we're going to legislate anything, I believe the right way is to force complete data export is made available via a reasonable API/process, which then allows people to independently evolve & progress, and competitors will then need to support (or not) what comes out on the other side. But customers then know they can always extract or simply backup their data themselves if needed.
every client provider can do whatever they want, that'd be the beauty of it. Someone could write a stripped down, privacy respecting Facebook client and charge users five bucks instead of running ads, if that's what users want. Someone could offer a chronological news-feed free of algorithmic meddling, or one that you can fine-tune however you like. That'd would simply be developer and user choice. Just think of RSS-readers or podcast apps or email clients. They're not all equal, but that's a feature, not something gone wrong.
Hmm. At least in the case that the OP was taking about -- third-party Facebook clients -- I don't think it would "destroy their walled garden" any more than third-party Twitter clients did back when those were meaningfully a thing. Standardized APIs aimed at enabling full-featured third-party social network clients wouldn't really contribute to a robust market in competing social networks; they'd just contribute to a robust market in, well, third-party social network clients.
What it seems to me you want is a couple steps beyond data portability, which honestly really isn't enough on its own. What I actually need is a way to import the user's social graph from Facebook or Twitter. That's arguably how Instagram bootstrapped its success initially: if you gave it your Twitter account, it would download all your followers/following info. (And, of course, that's why Twitter shut down that API after that.)
"But doesn't that violate GDPR?" someone is raising their hand to say, and: yes. GDPR as written does help protect privacy, but it's also an incredible boon to social network incumbents: it under it, your social graph can't be treated as your data, because by definition it contains personally identifiable information about all your contacts. For your regulation idea to be meaningful, GDPR and similar privacy regulation around the world would have to be overhauled -- if all the "open API" can do is import/export my personal data sans social graph, it becomes little more than a backup mechanism and a convenient way to fill out registration forms.
I feel like you're missing his point a bit, which is that sure they can do whatever they want, but it would be within a well-defined and highly regulated system, and would need to conform to an interface that would be difficult to change and evolve.
A bit like how IRC never really got updated with features people like to see in newer IM apps, like conversation history, read receipts, sending images and videos, threading, and so on. Or HTTP. Or email. Federation always leads to ossification.
Google Photos definitely supports Live Photos, I've successfully uploaded and shared lots of Live Photos via the Google Photos for iOS app.
Which then raises the question of why doesn't the tool support it?
Or Apple might just not be uploading the videos that accompany the photo for some reason.
[1]: https://developers.google.com/photos/library/guides/upload-m...
Hopefully yes. Most "progress" is towards worse services and more user data minining and ads.
But if needed, they can always innovate. But they'd still have to be able to export to the standard format (even if it can hold less than their full features).
You can't honestly believe this. Even if one agrees with making some things open protocols, potentialy by law (messenger, social networks), stating "it's trivial" to do such a thing is just the height of hyperbole.
Don't get me wrong, I've had to reverse engineer my share of proprietary protocols to get behavior I wanted (and would have loved to see them be open), but I don't think I can get onboard with the idea that requiring open protocols is trivial or noninvasive.
At what point do you become compelled to start transforming your web application into an open protocol?
If your argument is that companies should be compelled to publish good API documentation, and allow any client to connect to them, then aside from creating a completely unnecessary system of regulatory moats, and aside from using the wrong words to describe this idea, you're likely to run directly into a 1A violation.
Nothing in the parent comment says anything about requiring good documentation or 100% backwards compatibility.