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Comment by tpxl | Hacker News Reader

> If we start creating laws around these things, then it’ll only be even tougher for up-comers to challenge the existing big players

This is such an unimaginative take. Laws could easily demand easy export of _all your_ data and interoperability of chat systems.

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Unimaginative is the wrong word, imo. GP is calling out that over-regulation introduces market hurdles for smaller businesses. This is a known and non-controversial fact. Typically it gets addressed by instituting different requirements for various key metrics like company or user base size.

Article 30 of the GDPR states that companies with fewer than 250 employees do not need to keep processing records unless “the processing it carries out is likely to result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of data subjects, the processing is not occasional, or the processing includes special categories of data…or personal data relating to criminal convictions and offences.”

Your point about an authoritarian government siphoning user data from companies which siphoned that data is also possible and valid.

How do you foresee that working? Would the government publish a standard API for all chat systems? Would chat system makers have to build a bridge for every single messenger ever made, even if it only has 1k users? I just don’t see how the law can make apps interoperable without huge barriers of entry that would benefit the incumbents.

Laws shouldn’t name names but properties, such as: Fully documented and available APIs where first-party clients or front-ends can not rely on undisclosed endpoints.

For a chat app, that would just mean using en existing solution like XMPP or Matrix and provide API documentation for any added deltas.

The less you touch user data, the less you have to think about this.

You could design an API that is very confusing to use, changes randomly, and all the documentation is only written in a language no one speaks.

And roll the dice on whether you would be able to tell the court with a straight face whether you had a business reason for making all those changes and it isn't just an end run around the interoperability law, perhaps comparing your behavior to competitors who don't do that, and…

I don’t know... there would be a lot of bad apis you could point to in the world.

Expert witness on reasonable industry practices, perhaps? But the deck might be easy to stack. Hmm.

I suspect it's solvable if society has at least a slightly coherent idea of what's desired though.

If society knew what it wanted then there would be no point in trying something new. Even if it did know, there are wouldn't be "reasonable industry practices". The only experts in that domain are called lawyers.

Many businesses base their existence on breaking and building systems. After all, they're called start-ups for a reason. Proactive regulation (which seems like what you're proposing) just sounds like putting the cart before the horse and expecting the rest of the world to follow. To paraphrase Henry Ford, if he concerned himself with what people said they wanted, they would ask for faster horses.

I wouldn't call this “proactive” any more than trust busting in the 20th-century USA, nor for a more recent example the introduction of the GDPR. Abuses are occurring now, so society saying “actually we don't want that to happen” would be reactive regulation, in itself, even if the forward-looking side effects are debatable. To be clear, I'm not sure what I think about the possibility of dismantling network effects by legislation at the current tech level; it would depend a great deal on specifics, and I certainly think the idea in general has a lot of potential downsides—but not enough to make me immediately reject the whole thing, thus the speculation. I note especially that some of the aforementioned trust busting involved the abstractly similar case of the Bell System.

The bifurcation-chaos that intuitively seems to surround network effects makes for an interesting fork here, actually (assuming of course that my intuition is anywhere close to correct). Both sustained overreaction and sustained underreaction can get very bad. Looking at the earlier example, earlier communication grids' network effects were more dependent on physicality, and “everything is ephemeralized as software with effectively unstoppable automatic updates” is a huge lever in both speed and dimensionality of power. So maybe the meta problem of “legislation can't operate as a control system with enough bandwidth to keep up with technology businesses wiggling the cable to get what they want in the grapple for the ‘humanity's nervous system’ role” is more important here.

Or, perhaps, human societies decide that technology level exceeding value reach is so undesirable that the innovation explosion becomes a casualty of preserving humanity's nature, because the alternative of it eating into everything faster than it can respond (which I would say is what is happening now) is worse, and then we get Dune. Or perhaps we designate sub-areas of society as experimental zones, regulate the heck out of the stable zones, and get closer to dath ilan…

Why not just set an arbitrary threshold on how big you need to be before interoperability law applies to you? After all, people are only forced to interoperate with you when you're sufficiently big.

> I just don’t see how the law can make apps interoperable without huge barriers of entry that would benefit the incumbents.

I don't see how making such a huge dent in network effects will be anything but a detriment to the incumbents.

What's sufficiently big according to you? And what qualifies as interoperability? An API? Open sourcing the whole tech stack? What about in companies with hands in multiple markets? Does this apply de facto tech companies in other markets like Boeing or Toyota?

Sorry, I haven't really thought about the specifics. Are you insinuating that these questions are insurmountable?

Not that they're insurmountable at all. More that they are insurmountable to implement in a country where legal policy such as the one you're proposing violates freedom of speech and voluntary association. It seems a lot of what you're asking for come down to turning RFCs and standards organizations (i.e. W3C et al) into laws and legal bodies. Or giving the government a final say in what someone can or can't program. That's the only way I see forcing interoperability as a workable solution.

> How do you foresee that working?

The exact same way it works with open banking api's.

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