Seen in that light, it’s no surprise that Big Tech is refusing to comply with the rules. If the EU successfully forces tech to play fair, it will serve as a starting gun for a global race to the top, in which tech’s ill-gotten gains - of data, power and money - will be returned to the users and workers from whom that treasure came.
The architects of the DMA and DSA foresaw this, of course. They’ve announced investigations into Apple, Google and Meta, threatening fines of 10 percent of the companies’ global income, which will double to 20 percent if the companies don’t toe the line.
It’s not just Big Tech that’s playing for all the marbles - it’s also the systems of democratic control and accountability. If Apple can sabotage the DMA’s insistence on taking away its veto over its customers’ software choices, that will spill over into the US Department of Justice’s case over the same issue, as well as the cases in Japan and South Korea, and the pending enforcement action in the UK."
#OpenWeb#BigTech#Interoperability#Splinternet: "If we’re make a serious case for a splinternet, the central plank should be the elimination of massive global platforms like we’ve gotten used to over the past couple decades. Governments will have to use regulatory and legal tools to erode the power and influence of those firms, squeezing their business models by restricting the ways they can use and collect data and enforcing much stronger rules on their operations. Higher taxes wouldn’t hurt either — something the US has been holding up globally for years. Regulation of global firms can be hard when undertaken by a single state on the national level, which is why it’s so important to start building an alliance of states that refuse the binary choice being offered by the United States — and rein in both US and Chinese tech giants with sectoral rules.
At the same time as regulatory pressures escalate, governments will need to think about what alternatives look like. This is where forced interoperability and open protocols come in, as long as they’re paired with regulatory measures and efforts to build public technology. Users will still want to communicate and share things with people they know from around the globe, and they should still be able to do that. But access to those federated services should instead happen through platforms conceived of and developed on the regional, national, or even local level. That will allow governments and communities to exert much more power over how they work and what they deem acceptable on them — instead of leaving it to a global monopoly or a tech-savvy group that has technical skill few other people hold — and given the different rules and cultural contexts of different countries, the choices they make may differ."
RT @1Br0wn
"Together, we hope to redefine social media—not as a domain dominated by a few giants, but as a diverse, decentralized, and democratic space, where users hold the key to their digital experience.” (Invite-only) event 30 Apr #interoperability.
‼️ Comunità XMPP:
📢 Annuncio: Eventi mensili in italiano sulla messaggistica XMPP! 🇮🇹
Trovate il video dell'XMPP Happy Hour di aprile nel canale Peertube https://video.xmpp-it.net/c/happyhour
della comunità italiana degli utenti XMPP: https://www.xmpp-it.net/
🌟 Unisciti a noi per partecipare alle discussioni, e incontrare altri appassionati di XMPP. 🚀
Freedom requires no-lock in, which is why we self host domains, don't we? Rather than building on somebody else's domain. Oh, you use Gmail. Still?! 🤦♂️
Our desire for ease in a difficult world is what betrays us.
So freedom requires we make the following easy to obtain:
Prof. David Erdos has shared his latest (excellent) research “showing i) little UK GDPR enforcement, ii) worrying gap with formal law expectations & iii) limited accountability for this.”
A less polite version would be: the 🇬🇧 government has demonstrated how a law on the books it dislikes (the General Data Protection Regulation) can be undermined by the appointment of supine or actively hostile Information Commissioners. (As prime minister, Margaret Thatcher was against its predecessor Data Protection Directive from the start; not much has changed.)
I hope the European Commission is not going down the same route with the Digital Markets Act’s Art. 7 (on NIICS interoperability), which it was hostile to from start (early 2020) to finish (enforcement). Legislators learned from the GDPR that it is too easy for national regulators to be deliberately undermined by governments looking to attract technology firm investment (see also: Ireland and Luxembourg). The Commission therefore has a central enforcement role. So I’m especially disappointed by the flimsiness of its finally-published decision not to designate iMessage as a DMA gatekeeper NIICS. It hardly justifies the “exceptional” non-designation decision (Art. 3(5)), or “manifestly call[s] into question” the quantitative tests it meets [1]. I wonder if Meta now feels slightly foolish to have obeyed that provision in (somewhat) good faith 🫠
I still remember the jaw-dropping moment the new 🇬🇧 Information Commissioner in 2009 told a law conference (just about his first public appearance) he didn’t think data protection law should apply to the private sector. (He previously ran the advertising “self-regulatory” Advertising Standards Authority.) It’s fortunate indeed for GDPR enforcement it contains rights of private action, so effectively taken up by Max Schrems. Meanwhile, the Commission’s lack of legal action to force some member states to properly implement the legislation, enchantment with mass surveillance/data retention, and some of its adequacy decisions, are much less impressive than the Court of Justice’s judgments on Schrems’ two cases.
I was reminded last week talking to a BigTech competitor these much smaller firms have to be extremely cautious about upsetting a company they may rely on for key resources, and the Commission has spent most of its time preparing for DMA enforcement talking to those two groups. So perhaps Schrems’ None of Your Business, or something similar, will have to take up the rights of the individuals the legislation is ultimately supposed to help 🤷🏻♂️ Fortunately the DMA also contains rights of private action, as well as the ability of organisations to take representative actions (thanks to campaigning by consumer and digital rights groups in its final stages). As with the Schrems I and II cases, these apparently small issues can ultimately have enormous global impact [2].
[1] Where does the DMA talk about the relative intensity of use of one core platform service versus another? This provides two of three reasons for the decision! Who cares if iMessage for Business is lightly used, given it’s likely iMessage itself is used by many microbusinesses, very few of whom I imagine were part of the “corporate users of iPhone to whom the Commission reached out during the market investigation”? Really, the EC didn’t even bother with a large-scale survey, and/or demand data from Apple?
I also heard from an impeccable source Apple threatened to withdraw iMessage from the EU if it had been DMA-designated. The EC should not be rewarding such blackmail, even if it was highly likely to be a bluff.
[2] For now, we might have to rely on technology and philanthropy to improve messenger interoperability, such as this great project: a cross-platform, memory-safe OpenMLS library to enable interoperable, end-to-end encrypted messaging (E2EE) in multiple clients, combining “Matrix’s decentralized and federated infrastructure with Signal’s low metadata footprint.” 🎯
What’s happening with TikTok in the US is a strong reminder about the vulnerability of centralized platforms to censorship and surveillance. The Open Technology Fund notes Signal “provides a high level of metadata protection, but is centralized and thus easily censored. In addition, Signal cannot efficiently provide E2EE for large-group communications.” I hope Signal will move in this direction over time, as well as towards interoperability with other platforms implementing its own protocol (with metadata guarantees) as well as the IETF’s open Messaging Layer Security standard.
Very worthwhile read on the fallacy, yes fallacy of "if you're not paying, you are the product".
@pluralistic argues that this implies you have some power from paying because you can stop.
But the reality is different: if you are locked in you won't stop so your payments have no leverage. So we can't make companies behave by paying for services.
The key is freedom from lock in, #interoperability and #privacy. That's what would help, not being able to pay for privacy.
I’m the current editor of the Vision for W3C and helped get it across the line this year to reach #w3cAB (W3C Advisory Board @ab) consensus to publish as an official Group Note, the first official Note that the AB (Advisory Board) has ever published.
I’m very proud of this milestone, as I and a few others including many on the AB¹, have been working on it for a few years in various forms, and with the broader W3C Vision TF² (Task Force) for the past year.
W3C also recently announced the Vision for W3C in their news feed:
One of the key goals of this document was to capture the spirit of why we are at #W3C and our shared values & principles we use to guide our work & decisions at W3C.
If you work with any groups at W3C, anything from a Community Group (CG) to a Working Group (WG), I highly recommend you read this document from start to finish.
See what resonates with you, if there is anything that doesn’t sound right to you, or if you see anything missing that you feel exemplifies the best of what W3C is, please file an issue or a suggestion:
Check that list to see if your concerns or suggestions are already captured, and if so, add an upvote or comment accordingly.
Our goal is to eventually publish this document as an official W3C Statement, with the consensus of the entire #w3cAC (W3C Advisory Committee).
One key aspect which the Vision touches on but perhaps too briefly is what I see as the fundamental purpose of why we do the work we do at W3C, which in my opinion is:
To create & facilitate user-first interoperable standards that improve the web for humanity
“Interoperability: We verify the fitness of our specifications through open test suites and actual implementation experience, because we believe the purpose of standards is to enable independent interoperable implementations.”
These are both excellent, and yet, I think we can do better, with adding some sort of explicit statement between those two about that “We will” create & facilitate user-first interoperable standards that improve the web for humanity.
In the coming weeks I’ll be reflecting how we (the VisionTF) can incorporate that sort of imperative “We will” statement about interoperable standards into the Vision for W3C, as well as working with the AB and W3C Team on defining a succinct updated mission & purpose for W3C based on that sort of input and more.
In a related effort, I have also been leading the AB’s “3Is Priority Project³” (Interoperability and the Role of Independent Implementations), which is a pretty big project to define and clarify what each of those three Is mean, with respect to each other and Incubation, which is its own Priority Project⁴.
As part of the 3Is project, the first “I” I’ve been focusing on has unsurprisingly been “Interoperable”. As with other #OpenAB projects, our work on understanding interoperability, its aspects, and defining what do we mean by interoperable is published and iterated on the W3C’s public wiki:
This is still a work in progress, however it’s sufficiently structured to take a look if interoperability is something you care about or have opinions about.
In particular, if you know of definitions of interoperable or interoperability that resonate and make sense to you, or articles or blog posts about interoperability that explore various aspects, I am gathering such references so we can make sure the W3C’s definition of interoperable is both well-stated, and clearly reflects a broader industry understanding of interoperability.
“In practice, no present or past demonstrations have shown that the inclusion of advocates in speech governance and the agreements they reach with companies have epistemic credibility to construct the public interest. Though those flaws might seem unsurprising, scholars and activists double down on independence, diversity, and expertise as design strategies that can result in self-regulatory bodies that could adequately set policy goals...” https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4785833
“This article advocates for pluralism as a framework that more effectively achieves the participatory goals of new governance. It argues that the state has a central role to play in creating a plural and contested public sphere. A robust legal system can complement self-regulation and push it structurally in the direction of public values.” << Interesting from a social media #interoperability perspective
Google Just Revealed When Apple Will Officially Adopt RCS: Possible Northern Hemisphere Fall 2024
The Android developer just published an updated landing page for Google Messages, showing off key features ranging from customization, privacy and security, and, of course, AI.
On this landing page, there are different sections for each feature s ...continues
The #DigitalMarketsAct mandates Meta to "enable end users to freely choose to opt-in to [combining or cross-using personal data] by offering a less personalised but equivalent alternative".
When I pointed out to Meta that by offering users to either #consent to #SurveillanceAds or pay € 275 per year for #Instagram & #Facebook isn't "equivalent alternative" they said, Meta has to do that because of #GDPR 😤 Really??
Ouh, so I just asked #Meta/#WhatsApp whether #interoperability with @matrix (should they request it) would apply to @element Inc, the Matrix.org reference server, or the entire federation?
Answer: probably the legal entity, so either Element Inc or the Matrix Foundation. I assume they would have to choose which server this includes.
But (did I hear that correctly?) the Meta person almost sounded as if a broadening to the federation could potentially be envisaged in the future.
In any event, it sounds like #WhatsApp is planning to make #interoperability opt-in only; but not in the way I suggested, which is give WA users a yes/no button when a non-WA user asks to connect, just like #Signal does already for Signal users.
I interpret #Meta's response to my question as meaning that WA users will have to actively switch on interop in the settings before people can ping them.
#EU#DMA#WhatsApp#Cybersecurity#Interoperability#Encryption: "Europe’s DMA mandates that interoperability should not weaken security and privacy: “The level of security—including end-to-end encryption where applicable—that the gatekeeper provides to its own end-users shall be preserved across the interoperable services.”
This was always going to be a near impossibility. End-to-end encryption with endpoint assurance clearly only works where the two “ends” can actually be assured, which means—realistically—they are the same. Two WhatsApp or iMessage or Signal apps. DMA envisages a world where Signal messages might be sent to WhatApp users. And that so-called interoperability, by its very nature, breaks that model.
As EFF warned back in 2022, “requiring interoperability without unacceptable tradeoffs in security or privacy is a very high hurdle, one that might turn out to be insurmountable.”
"#Meta says it's turning on third-party interoperability as a part of its efforts to comply with the #EU's Digital Markets Act (#DMA), which was passed to prevent large tech #gatekeepers from preventing fair market competition or otherwise dominating the region's digital landscape. The DMA also calls for tech gatekeepers like Meta to provide #interoperability."
Does anyone know what #Friendica is missing to correctly generate post link previews on remote systems? #OpenGraph#Interoperability
When a Friendica post is linked on any social network, it is never possible to preview it (unlike what happens with Mastodon or Pleroma: perhaps does it depend on the absence of open graph tags?) · Issue #13959 · friendica/friendica