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Comment by FungalRaincloud | Hacker News Reader

I don't think XMPP is going away any time soon, but it certainly is not the most used thing out there.

However, I think that's part of why they've made this request. I think the problem is that it is late enough in the lifecycle of XMPP that no one large group (politically speaking - let's talk minimum of 100,000 people with similar political interests) really cares about it. That makes this not at all controversial, so it allows them to set a precedent.

I do not live in Germany, though, so I don't know if there's already precedent, or if the German people really even care about this. Hell, I don't even know if making XMPP service providers register is at all harmful or restrictive. All I can comment on is how it looks to me, and it looks like a power grab from over here.

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Registration per se is not harmful or restrictive - except that some (figuratively speaking) poor developer in Russia now has to deal with a four-page form in German which isn't even really suitable for software.

The problem is not the registration, the problem is that BNetzA considers software to be "telecommunication services" and thus subject to regulation. There are 152 paragraphs in the TKG (https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/tkg_2004/index.html), how much would it cost a software vendor to comply with everything? Or how much would it cost even to find out what a software vendor would have to comply with? There was a pretty good reason Google went to court over the question whether GMail is a "telecommunication service" or not (https://www.noerr.com/de/newsroom/News/gmail-ist-ein-telekom...). Google lost, by the way.

From the other hand, the list of "providers" includes a lot of organisations like "Antennengemeinschaft Schreiersgrün e.V" - roughly translated as "Antenna community of the village Schreiersgrün (registered society)".

It does seem pretty odd to consider software a telecommunication service, to me, absolutely. All the software is doing is wrapping up a message for someone else to send. It would sort of be like considering envelopes, paper and writing (when taken together) to be a mail service.

Taken another way, if we think of XMPP as a telecommunication service, and require providers to register, do we also consider HTTP to be a telecommunication service, and also require registration of every public access HTTP server? Both are protocols that, at their core, pass messages. Who's going to ratify all of those forms? This feels like it would be expensive to enforce, and if the law does not explicitly name XMPP (or explicitly define the difference between a telecommunication service that it covers and one that it does not in a way that excludes such widely used things as HTTP), it should not be selectively applied to XMPP. It should either be rewritten, or applied to technologies that existed or were expected when it was drafted.

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