Re: Facebook closing in the EU may be an unexpected opportunity for interoperability

> Il 07/02/2022 18:05 hellekin <how@zoethical.com> ha scritto:
> 
> Meta.verse CEO has an interesting view of this problem: closing off an 
> entire region of the world from accessing its services. I must say I 
> have never agreed more with him. With this 'social network' unavailable 
> to European citizens, another Fediverse is possible.

The message that either you play by our (democratically decided) rules or you're out of here is an extremely powerful one. Indeed there is a strong tension with the ideal of a global, borderless, unfragmented Internet. That's another thing we need to elaborate upon (not here :) ).

> As I already mentioned in my introductory post, 'opening up the walled 
> gardens' is not so much of an objective for interoperability, since most 
> walled gardens are powerhouses, and I'm more concerned about 
> safeguarding the cultural diversity through voluntary association, than 
> mandatory compatibility with hostile parties.

Interop would be mandatory only for gatekeepers, i.e. huge companies that have a dominant position in the general purpose use case (current requirements are >8B€ in annual turnover, multiple countries and >45M users in the EEA). Everybody else could interconnect or not as they like. For example, there are multiple closed messaging systems based on the open Matrix protocol, including one for the French army if I remember well; no one will ever force them to interoperate.

One of the things we are now trying to achieve is that interop is mandated through the use of an independent open standard, rather through the gatekeeper's own APIs. The former solution promotes interop across the entire ecosystem (for those who want it) and reduces a lot the implementation costs for smaller/community players.

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Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
vittorio.bertola@open-xchange.com 
Office @ Via Treviso 12, 10144 Torino, Italy

Received on Tuesday, 8 February 2022 12:47:44 UTC