Hacker News Reader

Comment by gochi | Hacker News Reader

If a protocol can be "effectively owned" that quickly by an outside corporation, it's not a very good protocol especially if one of its core tenets is decentralizing access to social content.

View on HN

If a corporation comes to control the majority of traffic over a protocol through a proprietary client they can switch that client off of being able to communicate over the shared protocol and starve out the network - especially if they do it in a predatory manner[1]. It's not necessarily that Meta will try and acquire all the open source clients - it's that it will use the network to grow a starting pool of users and then switch protocols as soon as they can convert the majority of users to a proprietary client.

The protocol can be exceptionally well designed - and corporations can still effectively break it.

1. One example would be still publishing posts over the shared protocol but blocking the visibility of replies from people using an open source client.

If a protocol can be broken in such shallow ways as starving out the network, it's badly designed.

If users refuse to leave after a company switches protocols so manipulatively, it's because they don't care about the protocol used.

Users don't care about the protocol used. Well, the majority at least - your average user is not well represented by the HN userbase, we're all power users of some kind or another.

Ain’t that the truth. I’ve had to convince friends to move off of propriety, anti-privacy insecure chat clients, and it’s a struggle. People fear change, even with promises as clear (to me) as better privacy and security.

To the average joe, who pays no mind to the man behind the curtain, getting them to understand and act on things as basic as the human right to privacy is a struggle.

This seems to be exactly what Google has done with chrome and it's working very well for them.

How would you design a protocol immune from all the politics? Whatever the implementation, it's just a part of a larger complex system. This is a very hard issue, and trusting Meta or the likes is naive and dangerous with destructive consequences.

https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-netwo...

A protocol is just a technical specification. There's nothing inherent in a protocol that can determine who does or doesn't have power over it. That's entirely a matter of the people involved.

Embrace extend extinguish; Or rather not extinguish, but control. Everything in this world is about money and control, especially for corporations. There is no mechanism that guarantees that a tool will not be abused.

E-mail IMAP, SMTP and POP3 are also protocols, but given that Google maintains dominance over it, you cannot effectively host your own server [1].

[1] http://www.igregious.com/2023/03/gmail-is-breaking-email.htm...

Open source will only work correctly with open source. Not with corporations. Corporations will abuse every protocol.

The word "effectively" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here and negates your entire point.

Protocols should encode legal terms for implementers, as I suggest here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36499183

Reply on news.ycombinator.com