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Comment by can16358p | Hacker News Reader

While I think big tech needs to be controlled, I think this is the wrong approach.

This will slow down development by being forced to implement interop where they shouldn't be forced to IMO, and will confuse less savvy users (e.g. "Why can't I send this $platform_native_content to Bob but can send perfectly to Alice in the same app?").

Controlling entities' presence within the public (the Internet) is one thing, forcing to do things within their own platform/domain is another.

Sadly, EU picked the latter.

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Well then they better get their shit together and implement the features on both ends.

They have lots of devs and project management experience. If they don't want to do interop it's just fair that customers are complaining.

Nothing a typical chat group on WhatsApp uses is particularly innovative or unique. Text, Voice, Images, Video, map links and attachments probably cover roughly 99% of the use case and everyone supports that.

They are free to compete on additional features.

They can, but why they should be forced? I mean its their own platform, they shouldn't be used to offer interop. They _could_, if they wanted to, but it's their platform after all, and forcing a private company to open their own pripriatery platform to 3rd parties is plain wrong and against the rights of the company. It's theirs after all.

The right thing here would be making a standard, modern way of communication that supersedes SMS/MMS with a push for global adoption that has all the necessary features of sending videos/images/links/locations etc. with E2EE that is part of GSM technology suite which is either super cheap or free, to offer a sensible alternative to free but closed down services offered by giant companies. That would be much more fair play for a free market.

I (and apparently the EU law makers) think they should be.

When elected officials decide that a Plattform/network is now part of the public space the owners loose out.

It happened to railways, telephone grids and all in all was an improvement.

If government thinks access to a commonground chat platform is a necessity for the public, then they should either provide it themselves or buy/outsource a state-operated private service instead of messing up with private companies' private platforms. What they are doing is equivalent of trespassing private property, such laws shouldn't exist in 2022.

> a state-operated private service

If they implement a public service, freemarketers not unlike yourself will accuse them of unfair competition and spend their lives sabotaging them, like Murdoch does with the BBC in the UK.

The reality is that your position is effectively that nothing should change, and everything in this space is as good as it can be. The public at large clearly disagrees, and this is a step in the direction of addressing some problems that are extremely hard to deny.

Besides, nationalisation would be nothing new. There are laws in your country, whichever it may be, for the state to confiscate your land for the public interest. That's not trespassing, that's the power of the collective trumping other rights. This is not it anyway - this is mandating standards, like the size of your electrical plugs.

Confiscating someone's land should also be illegal, but unfortunately government has too much power.

Mandating size of plugs is a good thing for anyone to build things that can operate with electricity, mandating some private entity with a perfectly functional ecosystem without any interest to open its system to provide a certain type of socket, is not.

If it were "perfectly functional", people wouldn't be campaigning for this sort of laws. The reality is that these conglomerates are anything but perfect.

They are perfectly functional, and no one has to use them.

You either pay for their hardware (Apple) or be okay with some data harvesting (others) and get a free chat service in return. It's a fair game. And no one forces you to use anything: all my friends, literally every single person here uses WhatsApp for primary communication, and I've deleted my WhatsApp account 2 years ago and still communicate with anyone without issues.

> They are perfectly functional

For the people building them, yes. For the people using them, they are basically a massive con. "We will help you communicate!" Yeah, because this will allow you to harvest my data and sell me more shit. "We have these great features!" Yeah, that other networks had 20 years ago and you killed to enable the beforementioned con and monopolistic practices.

> I've deleted my WhatsApp account 2 years ago and still communicate with anyone without issues.

Well, good for you. I have WA groups that provide information about my kids' whereabout, schoolbus info, all sorts. Can I leave them? Yeah, in the same way I could walk out of civilization to go live on Jakku.

> Confiscating someone's land should also be illegal

Genuine question, why?

Why should they do it themselves?

Food is necessary for the public, but there aren't a lot of governments running their own farms. Or construction companies, power generators, or really anything else. The best possible system is where people create goods and provide services to each other, and the government ensures a system where this exchange can be fair and thrive. This is exactly what they are doing with this law.

If food farms or construction companies do something wrong, people can die.

Power companies are being created while there are rules so they know what they're dealing with.

What's happening here is someone created a platform, spent years building things, and now EU is coming and saying oh you HAVE TO open it up. Not even mentioning the mess about having different rules at different places (e.g. I can't send many things to people in the EU in Instagram DM).

This is plain wrong.

They don't have to do business in the EU then.

Their government decided what is allowed in their country.

If the companies don't like it, then they should have won the election, or they should leave and go do business elsewhere

Full functionality with platform native users, limited functionality with third parties is still a lot better than no functionality for third parties.

The bigger issue is malicious compliance. I can see companies deliberately making the experience horrible.

I think it will just mess things up UX-wise. From what I've observed, people expect things to be simple and just work.

If there is an inconsistency introduced (e.g. I can send something to one user but can't to another) it will just confuse the users more.

About malicious compliance, yup, it will probably happen. If I were a company with my platform and someone comes to me and says that I have to open up my own private platform, I probably would implement the bare minimums to not get fined, and cripple that part in every conceivable way, while still "complying" with the law. I'm a private company and want people on my platform, simple as that.

I fail to see any relevant innovation happen in the current fragmentation of giant silos.

Well, it brought up to here what we have. Even though there are many people complaining, what we currently have, even if fragmented, is a great collection of apps that are free and allow us to send text/images/videos/rich links to anyone using the app on Earth in a split second.

Not saying that it couldn't happen in other setting, but innovation definitely did happen in the current fragmentation of silos.

We have had that for over a decade now

There's nothing that I'm aware of that is standard in all (acceptably decent) phones, built into the standard by, say, 3GPP, without need to install an external app, that can send a good quality (so no MMS here) images and videos to any group of people, with verifiable E2EE, with welcome features of things like realtime location sharing (with explicit permission of sender of course), read notifications, online/delivered status, reactions to messages, and starting video calls (3G video features never took off), other "fun" and convenient features like shareable stickers etc.

Almost all of WhatsApp, Telegram, Apple ecosystem, Discord, Slack etc. have almost all of it.

Which public standard that's available on phones do we have that provides these features worldwide?

We've been living with similar limitations for a very long time now. See: blue versus green SMS bubbles. As an Android user, iOS-sent SMS/MMS means lower quality photos, extremely low quality video, and I get "So and so loved this message" instead of a heart emoji. I believe people will adapt and recognize differences quickly.

> forced to implement interop

I didn't read this as the EU forcing the apps to actually implement interop. I read it as forcing them to publish the details of their protocols and not ban people for using 3rd party clients.

Now, will market forces force them to implement interop? Maybe, but based on my reading an app that doesn't talk to other apps is still legal.*

*Do not base your entire business strategy off of a single HN post from someone who is not a lawyer.

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