Europe prepares to rewrite the rules of the Internet
wired.com
wired.com
It's more inline with bringing back an open internet and transparency in how our data is used by the different platforms.
While also forcing them to collaborate, to let us be able to switch easily from one product of company A to the next product of company B.
This is great for consumers and will help reducing the power of the techbopoly we have today. If it works.
This is terrible for consumers if it means software can’t be improved.
Exactly!
because they are not interoperable.
If they were, it would be simple.
Do you not see the problem?
the only problem I see is the fictional one you are creating.
Interoperability is a layer, not a feature.
Just like rails, the fact that they are the same almost everywhere in the world, hasn't stopped trains from improving and changing independently.
Italian high speed trains are different from Japanese ones.
They use the same rails.
Software is the only industry where interoperability is seen as an obstacle, but it's at the same time the industry that prides itself of being the most innovative. so innovative that they can't solve interoperability?
A single person developed pipewire that replaces pulseaudio entirely without a glitch and billion dollar companies can't do the same?
I don't believe it.
Thanks for the advice.
I'll humbly begin studying again how software works.
My fault for thinking that companies that sell the promise of self driving cars and colonizing Mars could solve the problem of making it possible to interoperate with other software products.
I clearly underestimated the challenge and overestimated the abilities of their 10x employees and of their visionaries CEOs.
I wonder how is that even possible that HTTP or e-mail came to be. Must be some kind of alien technology.
HTTP and Email are extremely narrow, have had vast amounts of work put into them over time, and are still deeply flawed. They have also developed at a glacial pace.
Your examples show that money can’t magically solve hard problems, and ironically, that even the narrowest forms of interoperability are extremely hard.
HTTP is virtually running the World as it is.
I wouldn't call its scope narrow.
But probably I wasn't clear enough: we just need a way to access data and documentation.
You don't need to know what kind of web server is running when you send a request and the WEB server don't need to know what kind of client is sending the request to answer.
Interoperability is easy, if there is the will.
If there is no will, let's mandate it by law.
I don't see the problem.
Your argument is: the perfect solution is impossible so it's pointless to even try.
Which is provably false.
Even more so because software interoperability existed, before companies started to lock everything down, to push their proprietary tracking soft... ehm apps.
same reason they killed RSS
I could connect to Goggle or Facebook chat with any XMPP client back then.
WhatsApp protocol started as a a modified version of ejabberd (XMPP server).
etc.
Nobody asked for perfect.
Flawed is still better than no solution.
Human body is deeply flawed too, we don't renounce to live because we have to die anyway.
Exactly. It’s not an API - it’s a way to transfer arbitrary blocks of data. Applications that use http have to build an API on top.
That’s why it’s not even close to a valid comparison, and yet it has still become extremely complex over time.
> Flawed is still better than no solution.
This not the case. In many cases flawed solutions simply fail.
Uh?
API cannot transfer blocks of data?
Again: this is not new, it's tedious, it's bureaucratic, it can be hairy, but it's not difficult.
This seems like a deliberate and silly misunderstand on your part.
If you don’t realize that most API’s generally do more than simply transfer arbitrary blocks of data, then you have lied about your experience as a developer.
HTTP is just a transfer protocol. It’s in the name.
where did I say it?
> HTTP is just a transfer protocol
that's been hardly true since forever.
POST, PUT, DELETE, PATCH etc ever heard of these verbs before?
You want innovation to be automatically compatible with competitors ? That's what Open Source is for.
If they could capture your thoughts directly from your brain and leave you not even seeing the light of the day, they would.
I'm personally OK with requiring interoperability when the free market resorts to rent seeking when can't attract customers by offering compelling services.
Interoperability requirements can be easy as mandating documentation and legal permission for interaction with API and it can be up to the competitors to implement the easy switching experience.
This is a misunderstanding of the problem. Once there is an API it can’t be changed without breaking the clients.
Therefore independent progress is no longer possible. This destroys innovation.
Because that's not the case, it's just a fallacy. Close or open API, they all have legacy users and the solution to the legacy users is the same. Obviously, if the competitor fails to update it's software for the updated API they will fail to acquire new clients and that would be the competitors problem.
No. Why would you think that?
That’s what forced means.
Competitors and api consumers would be able to argue that any change they didn’t like was anticompetitive and request injunctive relief. It would be up to the courts to decide each time.
Of course there wonʼt be a mandate on exact API endpoints or data structures for every kind of service anyone could possibly create. That would be an impossible undertaking even for a bureaucracy like the EU.
Bring it on!
The EU is not Europe (although the EU often conflates the two).
No citizen ever voted for any of the commissioners that come up with these regulations.
I for one like my society not being a wild wild west run by big corps.
We vote for the EU parliament representatives and they recommend commissioners to the council and the council appoints. A bit like the UK, where they don't elect a prime minister but vote for parties which appoint the prime minister. Notice how UK went through a couple prime ministers without an election?
If you want to shoot for technicalities, in the USA people don't vote for the president but electoral college that happens to elect a specific person but they might choose not to.
How do we depose a bad EU commissioner?
Anyway if somehow the EU commissioner manages to be bad and needs to be removed ASAP the EU parliament, which is made of the directly elected officials, can remove the commissioner.
EU is undemocratic and the members can't do anything about EU is a myth like Brexit is removing the red tape myth.
EU is not a 3rd party institution, despite that politicians might talk as if it is. They might say something like "Ah we would love to do that but we can't because of the rules in Brussels" to deflect blame but Brussels is simply the location where people who you voted for and people appointed by the people you voted for gather to agree on these rules.
That's why EU often can't agree on something if even one of the countries(which is a placeholder for the people who they voted for or people who are appointed by the people they voted for) don't want. The most recent and well known examples are the policies against the war in Ukraine where Hungary didn't play ball.
That's also why UK won't be able to be a better place after Brexit: The EU rules are also British rules, made by British politicians with UK's best interest in mind. The most you can get is sewage on the beaches and border checks when exporting to EU. The border check part is about making sure that if you happen to remove regulations and start producing things like children toys with led paint, these toys won't end in Barcelona or Warsaw.
I’ll grant you that due to the generally low turn out for EU parliamentary elections, the commission’s mandate could be argued to be lacking.
Otherwise this is just a nonsense argument.
So what?
Nobody ever voted for any US president too, if that's your concern.
Besides, commission is formed by delegates one for each country and they are not bound to the political institutions of their country exactly to ensure independence from local politics.
They represent the interest of the EU.
Approval of legislation proposals presented by the commission is the duty of the EU Parliament, which is made by professional politicians elected in each EU country in proportion of the population.
Each approved legislation has to be then ratified by the single Parliaments of each country, in accordance with their laws.
There is absolutely no lack of representation in EU, believe me!
Don't be that person, learn how the institutions of EU work before writing a random populist good-for-nothing comment (which seems to be a very popular sport Europeans like to play here on HN when talking about EU, for reasons I don't fully comprehend).
And I watched the Copyright Directive vote in the EP - basically the Commission just repeatedly rammed the bad legislation through Parliament until they got the “yes” vote they were looking for. When massive (historically large) public petitions emerged against one of the articles of the legislation, the EU literally just changed its article number (to “rebrand” and dissociate the same legislation from the backlash) and then they pushed it back through Parliament again
meaning?
In what way what you observed is relevant to the discussion?
How can we be sure that you understood what you observed?
because you say so?
> And I watched the Copyright Directive vote in the EP - basically the Commission just repeatedly rammed the bad legislation through Parliament until they got the “yes”
Boris Johnson, is that you?
MEPs are elected by the people of EU (up until not long ago also by the Country that left, and they associated by political family, not by Country of provenance)
So now you don't like that either?
How did the commission obtained this "yes" if the elected representatives where not in favour of it?
please explain.
You are not making any sense.
> When massive (historically large) public petitions emerged against
please, provide evidence of these large massive (meaning hundreds of thousands of petitioners at least, there are 450 million people in EU) petitions (plural) against it.
> the EU literally just changed its article number (to “rebrand” and dissociate the same legislation from the backlash)
Are you saying that MEPs are all stupid and can't recognize the same article by just swapping its number?
An who rebranded it?
The EU at large?
the 28 countries? (I mean 29, UK was still in, but I guess they are not responsible of what EU has done while they were a member, am I right?)
the Parliament?
the commission?
who exactly?
An why?
Whose interests this gray entity was serving exactly?
I don’t think the US and EU have any bilateral trade deals, do they?
In the same way that the EU's food regulations are bad for companies that produce pink slime from beef paste.
We've seen time and time again, that if there are no regulations in place to advance consumer's interests, then corporations will take the most profitable path, which is often a user hostile one.
Is that what you are saying?