<nettime> Messengers cry foul at Digital Markets Act

[carlo von lynX <lynX@time.to.get.psyced.org>]

It's out, and I'm already seeing more rants than love
for it. My rant would be, it's 20 years late so we'd
need something much harsher now, but "disruptive" people
prefer to leave the Internet unregulated and maintain
the condition whereby users are fodder for surveillance
capitalism. Here's one of them speaking:

    "I am ever more convinced that the #DMA is a
     spectacularly poor piece of legislation, mostly 
     aimed at US-based "big tech" to cover for European
     companies' failings and lack of imagination, especially
     by its telcos which prefer regulation to innovation."

Where is this guy from? Where was he in the late '90s
when Europe was doing super good with its plethora of
Internet startups coming up everywhere? There was no
lack of imagination, there was no lack of innovation.

Europe had one thing ahead of the US, it was this
concept called "data protection," the bureaucratic
wording for basic human rights in the digital era.
What Europe lacked was a way to enact any form of legal
defense to protect data protection from bypass by 
US-based companies.

Within only a decade the flourishing start-up scene
of Europe shrank to the few business models that could
still compete with the Googles and Facebooks that would
arise from the US and become unbeatably successful by
monetising on totalitarian knowledge about what human
beings have in their heads, worldwide.

So here comes the DMA, 20 years too late, and doesn't
even forbid these obscene business models. It merely
expects them to suck a bit less. To provide for inter-
operability. To allow users to switch to non-capita-
listic messaging platforms without finding themselves
isolated from the rest of the world. The DMA requires
these corporations to at least provide for a common
standard.

But the corporation guys know how to whine in a way
that will capture the general attention, at least on
Twitter.

    "The new EU #DigitalMarketsAct ruling on
     #interoperability between #messaging applications is
     utterly ludicrous, and should be challenged robustly
     by all parties. It is a deeply anti-consumer and anti-
     innovation policy, that seems to have been driven by 
     ignorance about the nature (and differentiation) of 
     messaging functions and applications. The presumption
     that "platform" messaging systems such as Apple's and
     Meta/FB Messenger/Whatsapp are functionally equivalent,
     and can be made interoperable via APIs with others
     such as Signal and Telegram is very flawed."

Interoperability will make it a lot less relevant to be
on this messenger rather than that one, since they will
have to adapt to be compatible on most basic features -
or face the grim reality of becoming illegal in the EU.

It's not the sharpest knife I can think of. My choice
of regulation would have been a lot harsher. I would
have wanted to make it a fundamental human right that
private conversations must never traverse corporate
infrastructures unencrypted, that even metadata about
who speaks to whom shalt never be mined commercially.
That even governments may only access such information
in limited individual cases, not on the bulk of the
whole population. This to me implies that a common
free software standard must exist, using a distributed
strategy that needs no commercial clouds, running on
trustworthy hardware and operating systems. This is
what European legislation should be like today.

Instead we have this DMA which is humbly asking for
the bare minimum for a reasonable Internet standard
communications system, still supporting the broken
ideology whereby users are psychologically capable of
estimating what it means and implies, when they allow
companies to mine their most intimate data, still
failing to see how democracy is at stake if such
individual profiling is done in bulk, making entire
populations predictable and subject to manipulation.

And these corporate fellows are still crying wolf as
if an impossible challenge has been placed on them.
It is not. I have designed messaging systems myself.
I proposed a messaging standard for the Internet in
1995. It is an utter shame that human society on the
Internet has devolved into much worse condition than
we were in when oblivious messaging was still a dream.

    "Examples of non-interoperable aspects include:
     - Any-to-any vs. buddy/friend-list contacts vs invites
     - Permanent vs disappearing messages
     - Encryption methods
     - Cross-device sync & browser access
     - Emojis, filters, stories, avatars etc. 
     - B2C integrations
     - Group management
     - Video & image handling (eg codecs)
     - Integration with others apps (eg LinkedIn DMs)
     - Read-message & "last online" functions
     There simply isn't a "lowest common denominator" to
     which interop can be applied."

That's the blues of not having adhered to an open
protocol standard since the beginning. Now you have
to rip your whole architecture apart and agree on
standards. I fully understand that XMPP and IRC
would never do, they were never up to the task of
delivering a modern messaging experience.*  But
taking that as an excuse to establish silos was,
well, not nice, and pretty soon no longer legal.

You're lucky you got that far in the first place.
Your whole business model should never have been
legal to start with.

Are you proud of disrupting democracy?
You call that innovation?


*) P.S. the PSYC protocol supported encodings for
many of the things the person listed and was 
designed in a way that would still function today.

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