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Comment by emteycz | Hacker News Reader

But that's a complete lie. There is the web, which has worked more than well enough for all government-personal contact purposes way before Android and iOS even existed. It's only now that they stopped caring about web and do the latest whim instead.

And I just can't understand this logic?

1) Someone makes a platform, it's big and successful

2) State wants to overlord it, so they make apps only for said platform

3) State says platform is so dominant apps are only on said platform and there's no choice - must be regulated

Wtf?

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You have to remember that a government is not a single hive mind. 2 and 3 are probably being pushed by completely different groups of people with differing goals.

That's one of the big problems of states. Every power you give a state government, there's someone (not one - thousands, if not more) waiting to do bad things with it. And while they're busy with it, the other part will keep claiming how you're a bad person because you don't want to help poor people.

That's not quite the order it happened, though:

1) Someone makes a platform, it's big and successful.

2) Private companies (banks, taxi services, streaming providers, education platforms) decide to only make apps for said platform, because the potential market of customers using anything else is too small to justify any business investment.

3) State says platform is so dominant apps are only on said platform and there's no choice - must be regulated.

4) State follows the same practices as private companies when making its own apps, for the same reasons as the private companies.

That doesn't change anything about it being bullshit. Web is still there and better than ever, and works on every platform too (as it always did). For their purposes, it's feasible to render only the most basic HTML/CSS and process everything server-side; thus the choice to make only incompatible platform-specific apps is theirs and theirs only. The private sector - banks, taxis, etc - have absolutely nothing to do with it, and they're still doing webs today (more than ever, actually)!

> Web is still there and better than ever, and works on every platform too (as it always did).

We're talking about an MFA solution, no? There's really no way to do that with pure HTML/CSS, you need some sort of TOTP generator.

IMO, this is why 2FA should always be optional, but the rest of the world seems to disagree with me...

U2F has been around for a long time and has worked great for me for email (and is more of a real second factor than TOTP: you just plug it in and push the button and it does its crypto thing). There are similar newer standards like FIDO2. I think some of those standards work with smartphones too (haven't checked recently)?

Why is SMS auth (like my bank does, with plain HTML/CSS pages) not sufficient?

Anyways, my government is sending me SMS for auth anyways and won't stop anytime soon. No need to introduce yet another requirement on the citizens.

Because it's too easy to convince carriers to port someone else's phone number to a new SIM. I wish the carriers would address that, but that too would likely require some sort of government intervention.

Alas, if only the government could provide government intervention? Since they can't, we're left only with the option of government intervention to mandate use of android or iOS?

In fact, intervention wouldn't have to be to change SMS. They could instead mandate a standard like U2F or FIDO2. If they really don't like those for some reason, EU states could get together and make a new standard and mandate that.

I agree with this take! I was trying to defend the Digital Markets Act, and was responding to someone who (as far as I could tell) appeared to be fundamentally against any or at least most government regulation.

Yeah, especially if it's not absolutely necessary (e.g. the goal would be otherwise impossible).

I'd be okay if they regulated telco carriers a little bit more than they already do; much more okay than with anything resembling what they're trying to do now.

Government regulation doesn't only exist to thwart monopolies.

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