EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants • Hacker News Board

Re: EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

#321

Post by paxys » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 10:19 PM UTC

merrywhether wrote: post #263

hrnnnnnn wrote: post #2

> Parliament also succeeded in convincing the Council of interoperability requirements for messaging services, meaning outfits such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or iMessage will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms. For group chats, this requirement will be rolled out over a period of four years. This would be great. I remember using pidgin back in the day and it was really convenient…

I wouldn’t be surprised if the response was a Chrome-esque “drown the competition in feature velocity” approach. iMessage could add new features (with totally necessary payload shape updates) fast enough to prevent any integrations from working well and competing effectively. Throw in some EME-style approval-requiring binary blobs to enable decryption and a dash of CSAM-style regulation compliance and open vs closed…

I'd say that's a feature not a bug. Let iMessage roll out exploding balloons and whatever else they want in every update. I want to use my own client which should just stay compatible with the core functionality – sending lines of text back and forth.

And if they are deliberately breaking existing third-party apps for no reason, well I'm sure EU courts would like to have a word.

Re: EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

#322

Post by pflanze » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 10:20 PM UTC

oxplot wrote: post #230

hda111 wrote: post #219

I‘m not sure if this is a good thing. Despite email being an open standard we have now the situation that most emails are processed by either Google or Microsoft. When the same happens to Matrix we will have a situation where it’s so hard to make your own home server that nobody wants to do it anymore.

> processed by either Google or Microsoft Let's first clear up why this is: spam control. Google along with the rest of the industry has essentially killed email spam through the many additions to classical email standards. From reputation based delivery, to spam databases, crypto signatures and more. This isn't just to reduce an eye sore in your inbox. Spam does real damage, financial and otherwise. Despite the comp…

> Let's first clear up why this is: spam control.

I'm running my own mail server. The problem with regards to spam is not that it's hard for me not to be inundated by spam: I'm just running spamassassin and qpsmtpd with mostly standard configuration and my account on my own server is rather better at catching spam and not ham than my Gmail account. The problem I've always been fighting with (it's better lately) is that Google (and to a lesser degree Yahoo and Microsoft) tends to put my mails into the recipients' spam folders.

It's understandable that a minimal level of centralisation is necessary with email so as to build up server reputation. I think that level is already satisfied with just a few dozen or maybe hundreds of emails sent per day. If there are many installations of that size, companies like Google are forced to accept mails from them, and there's no need for further centralisation.

> Google along with the rest of the industry has essentially killed email spam through the many additions to classical email standards. From reputation based delivery, to spam databases, crypto signatures and more.

I don't see Google having had an exceptional role in "killing" email spam that way. Spam databases (both server reputation as well as content fingerprints) existed before Gmail started, DomainKeys was designed by Yahoo[1], the DKIM (the current way to add cryptographic signatures) RFC[2] does not list anyone from Google as its authors, bayesian learning was published by PG[3] in 2002. Gmail launched 2004[4]. Giving reputation much weight was something easy for them to do and it does tend to come at the cost of small legit servers.

They had a solid implementation early on (both the spam filter and, for the time, a top notch HTML UI), had of course a good name, and were free, so they were a default choice for anyone who was with an email provider that didn't do well (like many (most?) ISPs). There are reasons for people to flock to a strong, large company, that's not different here, but I contest that spam necessitated this.

That said, any new protocol would do well to take the problem of handling spam seriously and learn from and improve upon the past.

TL,DR: my argument is that spam is (somewhat) easier to handle in a centralised way, just like most problems are, but handling spam doesn't inherently require centralisation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DomainKeys [2] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6376.txt [3] http://paulgraham.com/spam.html [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail

Re: EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

#323

Post by paxys » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 10:29 PM UTC

can16358p wrote: post #194

Vespasian wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

#324

Post by paxys » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 10:35 PM UTC

cryptica wrote: post #224

IMO, based on their current business models, big US tech companies would be better off financially by pulling out of the EU entirely than by allowing interoperability via public APIs. They will lose most of their users to small platforms if they provide too much interoperability - Not just in the EU but all over the world. Their monopoly over the bulk of the world's user accounts is their only real competitive advant…

If that's really the case then they'll pull out of the EU market rather than comply with this law. Let's see if that happens or not.

Re: EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

#325

Post by pabs3 » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 11:44 PM UTC

cf141q5325 wrote: post #235

pabs3 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pidgin is still there, still works and supports modern chat platforms too, via plugins: https://pidgin.im/plugins/ Of course, some platforms ban you for using alternate clients.

Also with offTheRecord Messaging for encryption. I am really loving this news, i was able to convince some of my old icq contacts back then to switch to jabber this way. And why wouldnt they if its all the same interface?

Please note that OTRv3 has laughably insecure encryption these days (1024-bit keys etc). There is OTRv4 in progress but it isn't ready for use yet.

https://bugs.otr.im/otrv4/otrv4

The interface for Pidgin is exactly the same as it was back then (it still uses GTK2), modern users have much different interface tastes in 2022, so you might find it difficult to convince people to use Pidgin.

Re: EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

#326

Post by viccuad » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 11:53 PM UTC

8fingerlouie wrote: post #315

viccuad wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The way i read it, they're calling for open standards, which can be a good thing. > > Sadly, open standards also slow down the development of new features, No. They are asking for endpoints and public APIs. Nobody is forced to adopt a standard, that is a fallacy you have just built (and has powered a tangential thread of 20 messages and counting.. debating something that is not in the topic). Services will be force…

> They are asking for endpoints and public APIs How will they interface with the different APIs ? Or is it a single API defined by a standard ? The first one means that most clients will play “whack a mole” with 20 APIs, trying to keep up with features. The second will be the lowest common denominator, limiting what can be sent between different clients. It would be the new “green bubble”. Next, how do you identify p…

You are moving goalposts. This legislation is not the end all be all, and only applies to those with ~7 billion capitalisation (so, Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, and little more).

If you want to solve all those problems, you can use and push for Matrix for example.

Re: EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

#327

Post by nonrandomstring » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 12:44 AM UTC

merrywhether wrote: post #256

nonrandomstring wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that's naive. Please attack my arguments, don't make aspersions as to my disposition. > the problem is that we moved away as an industry Please don't try to define the narrative from a parochial viewpoint. No. we didn't. Some of us did. And those few have arguably done a great deal of damage to "the industry". > widely used standards take decades to change just slightly, or never (see SMS, email) It's arguable that…

I like the idealism of your arguments, but tech idealism doesn’t matter without users. And the majority of users have repeatedly chosen proprietary UX innovations over things like standards and interoperability. And many of these things are just an underlying standard with some changes/additions sprinkled on top, but those changes are differentiating to the product. Slack, Zoom, Gmail, etc. Some of their success is n…

I get the feeling there's a kind of bleak, hopeless circularity in your thinking, but I can't quite nail it. It feels like saying;

Universal suffrage is great idealism, but it doesn't matter unless women vote for it.

That's to say, the means by which change might occur are also the goal of that change. That's a hard place to get out of.

> idealism doesn’t matter without users.

It absolutely does, because "idealism" is precisely that force in the world that exists despite and in hope for better things than the status-quo. It's the engine of all progress, and is almost always a minority concern in the face of a herd mentality. I'm glad you like my idealism though, because some (fake pragmatists with narrow horizons and fear of losing the privilege) treat idealism as a fault, whereas we see it as a badge of honour.

> the majority of users have repeatedly chosen

For very small values of "chosen". People accept what they're given. Not even the "consumers" themselves believe in the myth of demand driven markets now. They mostly adopt stuff to fit in and be like their friends. If pressed, they'll rationalise. Today, digital literacy does not extend to social, economic and political awareness of why choice might even matter. Some of us are trying to fix that (see [1]), and I am happy that in Europe we are gaining greater strength.

Number of users matters for making money. I get that. And I can see why many people here fixate on that. Making money is nice. But one shouldn't let it distort ones better judgement. And one should know when enough is enough and when greed is working against our future capacity to make money.

> choose UX innovations over things like standards and interoperability.

That's a false dichotomy. Those things aren't even on the same axis. It is the sloth of companies wanting to lock-in users that gives motive to break interoperability standards. That doing so is necessary for innovation is a blatant falsehood peddled in so many of the comments I've read here today. You say yourself, that it's a thin veneer over standards. Not to recognise the value of foundations paid for with generations of public money and the role of government in maintaining the very conditions that allowed tech firms to prosper is ungrateful and parochial. I'm getting downvoted because that hurts to hear.

[1] https://www.humanetech.com/technologists

Re: EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

#328

Post by ClumsyPilot » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 1:55 AM UTC

Dracophoenix wrote: post #255

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you like that your code is protected by intellectual property so that you can make money off it and noone can just take it and use it whoit permission? But you dont like that your users data is protected by GDPR, so that you cant take it without permission? Thats unnessesary regulation holding back business? Does not sound like it has anything to do with regulation, it sounds like you want the fovernment to give y…

There's no contradiction. Intellectual property protection is opt-in. It requires the individual to enforce his rights before a court in the relevant jurisdiction. The government only facilitates registration and adjudication. Courts don't force individuals into global protection schemes against claimant's own will. Whatever the expected merits were, GDPR's existence as a policy has been of little more use than a pro…

So if governments didnt sue you for violations of GDPR, but your users did so personally then the situations would be exactly idebtical and you would be happy?

Re: EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

#329

Post by yossarian1408 » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 2:19 AM UTC

ckastner wrote: post #137

robertlagrant wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30% fees are not immoral. You may not like them, but that's very far from the same thing. A moral question would be "how much should governments control voluntary interactions between customers, platforms and products?" The immoral answer might well be "As much as it will help them gain short-term votes", not the moral one.

I didn't say 30% fees are immoral, I said 30% fee walled gardens are immoral. Especially when you make it all but impossible for third parties to operate outside of that walled garden.

Anybody is more than welcome to build their own garden, but if you own the garden you also get to decide if it has walls around it or not.

Re: EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants

#330

Post by Spivak » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 5:23 AM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #189

microtonal wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will lead to fragmentation where apps can only be bought in some app stores. Some will stay in the Apple app store, because people trust it. Others will flock to other stores to pay a lower commission fee. Regardless, I am in favor of this legislation. The iOS and Android ecosystems have become crucial infrastructure in modern life. So either Apple and Google act more like they are a utilities companies with low…

This is the world that android already lives in, and there is no meaningful fragmentation in app stores. I think your fears are overblown.

This doesn’t really apply because the Play Store doesn’t have half as strict rules. If you’re point is “Apple will have to give up all the annoying for publisher but good for user rules to keep apps from leaving” then we’ve really gained nothing.