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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I am not clear why EFF is lobbying on behalf of the XMPP standards foundation here. The entire computing industry is cluttered with opportunities for interoperable standards, some of which haven't been tried, some of which worked out, and some of which were attempted but (often correctly) jettisoned in favor of progress.

Standardization is a good thing, but not the only good thing, and it always worries me when people make arguments that effectively demand that new offerings justify themselves (either with time or money) to existing standards groups.

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Why do you have a problem with EFF lobbying for a standard? They lobby whenever they feel like it's necessary and this isn't the first time they lobby for privacy or for open standards, after all, their motto is "defending your rights in the digital world" and I think that dropping support for federation or for disabling the archiving of chats is within their goals.

At this point, standardization for video chat is one of the most important steps forward. We already have proprietary video chat services. We already have the likes of Yahoo, Skype and Facebook.

Why do we need another proprietary protocol to throw in the mix? What could possibly be more important than an open standard at this point? And yeah, Hangouts has some cool stuff in it, but not enough to justify the breaking of a promise, but then again, it's not the first time where I feel like Google is disappointing.

Every time software progress threatens the status quo, partians of the standard argue that the new functionality proposed doesn't justify degrading standardization. Who are those partisans to say?

True, but at the very least they should keep the support for XMPP they had until now and make an effort to publish specs (not as standards, but as public documents), such that at the very least we can have third-party clients and not leave it up to third-parties to reverse-engineer the protocol badly, violating some TOS in the process.

Or at least commit to doing it in the future at some point. Nobody's rushing them into doing it right now, but changes such as these create anxiety. I mean, what next? Are they going to drop POP3/SMTP support from GMail or something?

If it costs $X dollars to retain XMPP support and $Y dollars to build their new offering out and their budget can't accomodate both $X and $Y, then the choice is indeed between progress and placating standards advocates.

I can't imagine a standards issue I would care less about (among standards I routinely use) than Google Mail dropping POP3 support, unlikely as that may be. Most mail users are better served by web interfaces. POP3 and IMAP are archaic. People that want those interfaces have plenty of options for maintaining them.

You have never had more freedom in how you can avail yourself of technology than you do in 2013, no matter how many restrictive app stores and giant email providers you choose to concern yourself with. (I don't mean that to sound snide.)

These standards, archaic as they may be, also allow you to export your emails should you want to. I pay for my wife's Yahoo email account, such that GMail can use POP3 to connect to it and retrieve the emails that she gets on that account. Not to mention that email clients work best if native. iOS users didn't have to wait for Google to release a half-baked client for them.

As an alternative, of course, we can do better than POP3 or IMAP. Sure, lets burn them, but name an alternative first and it has to be a standard supported by Google, no?

I can't believe that you think this. You're basically arguing for the sake of arguing.

Btw, you're mentioning "web interfaces". How would you have liked it if everybody had their own browser-like app, communicating through their own http-like protocol, speaking their own language for hyper-linked documents?

If you think I'm just arguing for the sake of arguing, let's you and I just stop arguing.

There's a difference between advocating for a particular standard because one has a vested interest in that particular standard (e.g. lamenting that JSON isn't XML) and advocating for openness in principle (in this case, lamenting that Google is promoting a proprietary, unfederated IM service in a world dominated by other such services). I think you're confusing the latter for the former.

IMO, any "progress" in the form of a proprietary service which erects boundaries for communication is not progress at all.

This isn't so much about XMPP. Dropping federation, without notice to cross-boundary contacts, is the bigger thing for me. I am personally disappointed about the whole affair, especially because there is still no clear picture on why that would be necessary.

As an XMPP Council member I can say that general consensus within the XMPP Standards Foundation is that we will just move forward, no longer constrained by things, like network security, Google never got around to implement.

Am I misunderstanding, or does your last paragraph rule out social pressure as a force for standardization? Are you proposing that we simply allow standards to evolve according to the local incentives of individual agents?

Sometimes. Standards bodies are not themselves entirely benign. They're extremely susceptible to capture, and the incentives of those people not in service of some commercial agenda are often not aligned with users either.

People sometimes lose sight of the real goal, which is interoperability. Interoperability is harmed not just by deliberately idiosyncratic implementations of old ideas, but by refusal to adapt to new ones.

Is SPDY and Microsoft's objections to it being implemented as HTTP 2.0 somehow serve as example to your expressed view?

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