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Comment by LAC-Tech | Hacker News Reader

Imagine a world in which the EU instead funded research & implementation of public protocols to undermine US big tech? IE, they mention chat clients in the text, why not create something in the spirit of XMPP (or even revive it if the technical merits remain relevant?) I can almost feel it in my bones that there's a protocol behind "feed" websites like twitter & linkedin. Break the walled garden with open standards.

I mean we know the real answer is. The EU hates innovating especially when it could be regulating. But it's a fun thought experiment.

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The irony of your statement is that many of the core tech, protocol and software systems underpinning these big tech companies were developed in the EU.

In the EU != by the EU. By EU I'm referring to the governing bodies, ie my reference to the EU regulating things.

If you re-read what I said with that in mind, does it make more sense to you?

The EU is not a tech company. Then yet, they are funding these kinds of things. Check for instance https://gaia-x.eu/

However, these projects don't really have good results and generally are better made in the private sector. Same in the US actually

Are you saying that the problem of monopolies should not be solved through regulation, but by tax-funded public service alternatives?

Regulation tries to restore a free market by reducing barriers and allowing other companies to participate, such as in the app store market. Especially where limitations are not warranted, i.e. iPhone being hardware, the coupling with Apple's App Store is arbitrary and self-serving.

XMPP never died. A more modern open standard is Matrix. The problem with open/alternative chat apps is the network effect — everyone is already on iMessage/WhatsApp/Messenger/etc and they aren't going to install Element and figure out the entire decentralised network thing to talk with one weirdo.

> Imagine a world in which the EU instead funded research & implementation of public protocols to undermine US big tech?

That was tried, decades ago. Machines Bull. Plan Calcul. Cyclades. Minitel. Didn't win.

WhatsApp is built on a hodge-podge of open standards (including XMPP) already. It's also closed off to everyone else. Good luck with your "open standard" XMPP client competing when everyone in your country uses WhatsApp.

Part of the DMA is that they must open this up for others so competition can actually happen in the first place (which in my reading they're not really doing in good faith by the way; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39635948)

Also WhatsApp isn't really "innovative" in the sense that it does something spectacularly new or brilliant. Most of the "innovation" comes from scaling it to the number of users they have, but that's a bit of a different thing. This is actually true for quite a bit of these Big Tech companies (especially the software-only companies).

It is always bizarre to see people advocating for boondoggles like flat out reinventing the wheel but fully government funded this time.

Yeah, but they're simultaneously missing the fact that some of the protocols that underpin things like WhatsApp etc. were developed in the EU, and probably with funding from the EU.

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