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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

> If you defer to a politician, you simply centralize more power into a body of government constrained by only cultural norms and donor interests.

You're taking it as a premise that someone should have this power, i.e. that the centralization should actually exist.

Compare two alternatives.

One, each person has (is required to have) a single account across all services. You use the same account for the DMV, YouTube, your bank and the IRS.

Two, you have an independent account for each service. You have separate accounts with the IRS, Medicare, DMV, YouTube, etc. If one of them gets messed up or compromised it doesn't affect the others. If you have a dispute with any of them it limits the blast radius.

The first one is a dystopia regardless of who controls the single account. It's subject to abuse of power whether it's a politician or Mark Zuckerberg. So the solution is to demand the second one.

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Open standards, protocols, and interoperability are definitely part of my values.

But you're still relying on a law if I understand you correctly.

If the society lacks them as deeply ingrained values as opposed to somehow to getting lawmakers to force them, then they will be implemented cynically and not within the spirit of the values. The type of thing that happened with apple's implementation of the anti-gate-keeping laws 'enforced' by the eu.

What you describe requires a flexible values system - not a single semantic standard. I'd love to live in a world where if you were big enough to have people wanting to interoperate with your service on behalf of your users and you were actively preventing it, you'd be an outcast in the deepest sense. That no users would touch your service, and it would be politically unfeasible to deal with you.

We don't live in that world because people have not developed this sort of social norm.

This is one of those problems where there are different ways to solve it but all of them require you to put in the work.

We currently have an army defeatists who show up to tell you that if you think companies would get more customers by selling products that screw them less, nobody cares about that and people just want to live in a convenient cage with an unlimited supply of artificially sweetened penitentiary gruel. These people (to the extent that any can be found who are not robots) should obviously be burned alive in the town square to serve as an example to the others, but the most important thing if you intend to solve the problem in that way is to ignore them and build the product that screws customers less anyway. And then shame the services not doing that into irrelevance, once the alternative actually exists. Put it in your advertising so people know there is a difference.

Likewise, there are better ways to do anti-gatekeeping rules than what the EU is doing. For example, require two things. First, that source code be published as a requirement to receive copyright protection -- not that the customer can make unlimited copies, but that they can read it to know what it's doing or make changes to their own copy. And second, require that if the manufacturer/seller can modify any code running on the device, so can the customer. Now Apple can do malicious compliance all they like, but any vendor locks they put in will have someone distributing a patch to remove them the next day, and inhibiting that is the thing which is prohibited.

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