Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New EU law could require iMessage and WhatsApp to work with other platforms

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 145 posts

Re: New EU law could require iMessage and WhatsApp to work with other platforms

#61

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #5

This is almost too good to actually go through. Protocol transparency, that is to say forcing companies to open up their APIs would be one of the simplest and effective ways to break platform effects and walled gardens. It shouldn't just be limited to messaging. An internet where everyone can built a client against Facebook's API, or Youtube or what have you and users get actual choice and control about how they cons…

Yes, but if I remember correctly, one of the things FB internal document dump showed was that API for smaller and bigger players behaved differently. API access won't mean anything, if companies are allowed to pick and choose how it behaves against some IDs.

Re: New EU law could require iMessage and WhatsApp to work with other platforms

#62

Post by tinus_hn »

parkingrift wrote: post #42
grishka wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most social media companies' businesses models rely on having complete control over the presentation of content. Forcing them to allow third-party client apps would ruin that, and it's going to be beautiful.

Complete control of the presentation of content, editorializing said content, and arbitrarily deciding what is and isn’t allowed. And they also still don’t want to be treated as publishers. It’s hard for me to muster up even the smallest amount of sympathy for these vampires. I expect this will take a decade to shake out as US tech firms work tirelessly to protect their spyware walled garden models.

You’re severely overreacting. These features you so passionately hate are an important part of the reason why the general population is using the apps, and the business model of the large majority of chat apps is definitely not ‘spyware’.

What’s going to happen, if this ever goes through, is that the networks will open some kind of api so outsiders can send and be sent basic messages. And you will never be happy using it because you’ll always look like an outsider.

And there is no way to fix this because a big draw of these networks is that they keep adding new features and they are not in the old api so you can’t use them.

And of course it’s going to be a big source of spam so users will get the ability to block the outside from sending messages to them, which means you can’t reach half the people you want.

Re: New EU law could require iMessage and WhatsApp to work with other platforms

#63

Post by tomrod »

igravious wrote: post #36
tomrod wrote: post #26

Yes! Like another comment mentioned I'd love a return of pidgin. Further, the law should specificy that the protocol allows E2EE, and we have traction.

Double yes! I had thought for the longest time that a Linux-like open landscape would develop for messaging and social. I no longer believe this is going to be the case. I truly believe we are at a Standard Oil / AT&T moment (as documented would happen by Tim Wu in the Master Switch[1][2]) There is no conceivable way other than politically/legally that big tech will of their own volition lower their drawbridges to sp…

Matrix would be a nice approach, if not for weird edge cases like spamming IRC (if that still happens).

Re: New EU law could require iMessage and WhatsApp to work with other platforms

#64

Post by teekert »

stingraycharles wrote: post #58
teekert wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He indicated multiple times that he does not want other (third party) clients, does not want the server to be open and federated. Let him have it, it works for many people. Imagine you were him and you are getting issues filed from people using services the government forced you to build, or were even build by others but forced on your once clean solution. I'd say "screw you guys, I'm going home" (Build your own solu…

The same can be said about WhatsApp et al. I’m going to bet that Meta also indicated they don’t want other third party clients. From my point of view, the advantages of opening up these platforms outweigh the disadvantages for those who don’t like that. The whole idea of this type of regulation is that it tries to do what’s best for the consumer, and the market as a whole, not not necessarily for the businesses behin…

And then we keep Moxie as a slave forcing him to get motivated to implement all this? Or will the government cease control of the code? Stop Moxie from Forking, then tell people to stay on the government branch?

And the arguments hold for Meta too if you ask me. WhatsApp is not a public service. It was not build (or in this case bought later on) with our interests at the top of the priority list. If we want public services with the public's interest at heart, we have to build those services, or sponsor those. Not take them from companies. In this case we already have a nice solution in the from of Matrix.

What are you suggesting?

Re: New EU law could require iMessage and WhatsApp to work with other platforms

#65

Post by qzx_pierri »

Diggsey wrote: post #43
tluyben2 wrote: post #19

Just force monopolistic/abusive/anti-competitive companies to expose API's ; it's not a stretch; they did it for banks (psd2) and it's great for consumers and companies alike. Do it for everything; open systems make the world better. And they can still be monetized; it's not like forcing everyone to open source everything. Edit: more subtle choice of words to indicate what I meant

As someone who works on a SaaS product, one of our biggest costs is our stable API surface. Internal APIs are essentially free, but for a public API we have to: - Implement a conversion layer from our internal representation so we can keep it stable. - Complicate all further feature work because we have to consider how it will affect existing customers of the API. - Write and maintain documentation for the API. - Kee…

For smaller companies, I can see how that would be rough. However, for large tech companies, this law seems really necessary.

Also relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAlTOfl9F2w

Re: New EU law could require iMessage and WhatsApp to work with other platforms

#66

Post by hetspookjee »

Retric wrote: post #51
hetspookjee wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily we’re kept totally safe by our benevolent overlords. Except for our good friend Jeff Bezos that got hacked through a WhatsApp image. Or the overt spam that any publicly posted business WhatsApp number receives. WhatsApp replaced SMS as a free alternative with media. Sms is just a protocol. It is not necessary that a replacement is walled garden, especially not under the sole guise of spam protection - somethi…

iMessage and WhatsApp are just a tiny selection of social networks. Depending in the specifics everything from Yahoo! Messenger to MMO chat either needs to get shut down or made interoperable.

I can only expect the matter to be applied to large applications in some sense. Hopefully they learned a lesson or two from GDPR, and tangentially I don’t expect this roll out to happen anytime soon.

Re: New EU law could require iMessage and WhatsApp to work with other platforms

#67

Post by Jcowell »

parkingrift wrote: post #42
grishka wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most social media companies' businesses models rely on having complete control over the presentation of content. Forcing them to allow third-party client apps would ruin that, and it's going to be beautiful.

Complete control of the presentation of content, editorializing said content, and arbitrarily deciding what is and isn’t allowed. And they also still don’t want to be treated as publishers. It’s hard for me to muster up even the smallest amount of sympathy for these vampires. I expect this will take a decade to shake out as US tech firms work tirelessly to protect their spyware walled garden models.

Since we’re talking about the messaging component of services , what messaging service “[editorize] said content?

[arbitrarily deciding what is and isn’t allowed] Everything so arbitrary. Either allowing everything or nothing is not sustainable for anything on the internet so you need arbitrary rules to stop arbitrary things.

Re: New EU law could require iMessage and WhatsApp to work with other platforms

#68

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

thinkmassive wrote: post #57
tinus_hn wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck blocking a person that pretends to be 10000 different strangers.

“block stranger requests” could mean using your contacts as an allowlist

This. I am somewhat surprised allowlist isn't a thing. I get that there are times, you want to be open to the world ( say you are actually waiting for an interview call ), but this would easily solve a good portion of the issues. Am I missing something?

Re: New EU law could require iMessage and WhatsApp to work with other platforms

#69

Post by Retric »

hetspookjee wrote: post #66
Retric wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iMessage and WhatsApp are just a tiny selection of social networks. Depending in the specifics everything from Yahoo! Messenger to MMO chat either needs to get shut down or made interoperable.

I can only expect the matter to be applied to large applications in some sense. Hopefully they learned a lesson or two from GDPR, and tangentially I don’t expect this roll out to happen anytime soon.

That’s possible, but they don’t have a great track record.

Re: New EU law could require iMessage and WhatsApp to work with other platforms

#70

Post by midasuni »

alexklark wrote: post #16

So no more security , innovation and progress for EU? Everything including encryption usage and data transfer will be decide by old fat bureaucrats. Forgot to add a pop up window about transferring message to different country and your own 1 billion eurofiats to them.

How about you simply don’t transfer their information, then there’s no worry about getting permission to do so.
Post reply on HN