Implementation of messaging interop in the DMA

Hi all,

the European Commission and other European institutions are now looking into the implementation of the interoperability clauses of the DMA. Last week I had a chat with a high ranking official at EuroDIG, and he was very pleased to learn that W3C has a group to discuss the related technical issues - but then he asked, what about the IETF? After all, XMPP is an IETF standard.

Was there ever any discussion on this between the two organizations? Generally speaking, an offer by the global SDOs to host a process could be welcome, though there will definitely be concerns over the fact that the so-called "gatekeepers" have such a strong role in leading the work at these organizations in this area.

In fact, I also met people who are openly challenging the idea that the Internet SDOs are still capable of agreeing on open, global standards for key Internet services in front of strong business pressure not to do so by the gatekeepers. These people suggest that the dominant companies should be allowed to only offer proprietary APIs and interfaces, rather than support an open protocol. Their argument is that standards for the email and the Web could only be agreed because "the Internet at the time was only used by nerds" and no money was involved; when pointing at the work still going on at the IETF and at the W3C, the reply was "you are naive, we are not in the '70s any more". I would much like to see this claim disproved :-)

Ciao,
-- 

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