
Ask HN: Is there any petition for messaging applications to be regulated? - pi-squared
I feel we are in a crazy world with chat&#x2F;messaging applications and it has been going for a while. It&#x27;s like if I have a mobile phone carrier I can only call numbers who are with that carrier but nobody else. Or email people only within gmail. The walled gardens of every single chat application (FB Messenger, Viber, Telegram, Signal, Skype, +probably thousands of others) makes users install several chat applications on their phones or computers in order to keep communicating.<p>My question is actually two-fold - do you think there should be a regulation from somewhere (EU,countries, app stores...?) that if you develop a chat application (I understand that&#x27;s vague but law usually is) you need to be able to provide a way to chat with other chat applications (via xmpp or whatever).<p>And the second part is - is there already some initiative that I am not aware of that is attempting something similar.
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chatmasta
When did so many people on HN become fans of regulation?!

This website used to be about startup news... _startups_ , aka those hurt most
my regulatory capture. Is this just not a consideration for people any more?
Have we really reached the point that regulating the negative externalities of
large corporations is worth sacrificing the ability for startups to compete
with them?

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vihren
How is enforcing a standard protocol for communication sacrificing the ability
of startups to compete with large corporations? I believe it's the contrary -
a standard protocol would mean that any new app (made by a startup for
example) can enter the big sandbox with all other users and they all can
communicate freely. E-mail is a good example for that. If you want you can
build an e-mail client and sell it or distribute it to the people and if it's
better than the alternatives - great! Imagine a world where the e-mail
protocol was proprietary and locked down and Gmail has become the dominant
player. How would we then have alternatives? How would an e-mail startup enter
the market?

Your argument further supports regulation and an unified standard than it
disproves it.

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chatmasta
I agree that a single standards protocol for chat would be good for everyone.
However, I’m _extremely_ skeptical that governments regulating, and defining,
that standard is a good idea. The first problem is that there are many
different governments. Will each have their own standard, or will it be
another extrajurisdictional legislation like GDPR? The second problem is that
any government regulation is going to include clauses that benefit the
government and law enforcement, e.g. backdoored encryption.

If, and it’s a big IF, the government could force a standard that was limited
in scope to interopability, with no backdoors in encryption or increased cost
of implementation, then I could maybe get behind this idea. But given the past
behavior of governments regulating technologies, and feature creep of
regulation, I am extremely wary of any new legislation to regulate technology
standards.

