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In the wake of Cambridge Analytica, Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, and other Facebook scandals, cries to regulate the tech giant have risen. Virginia Sen. Mark Warner has composed a white paper, published by Axios, suggesting 21 different ways tech behemoths like twitter, Google, and facebook could potentially be regulated. At least one of them could help tear down the walls they've built to keep you trapped inside, and give us a freer internet like the one we used to have.
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The paper is a mishmash of approaches, none of which include severe anti-trust action like breaking up the companies in question. However, one of the most compelling suggestions calls for mandated interoperability. In essence, it would force giant platforms, which have a vested interest in keeping users inside their walled gardens, to cooperate with each other and foster competition whether they like it or not.😐😐😐😐

The tactic has precedent that dates back to the early 2000s. Back then, AOL and its hegemonic chat service AIM had a chokehold on the instant messaging market. The regulation put in place at the time forced AOL—which had a 90 percent market share between AIM and ICQ—to make its product interoperable with those of its rivals over a period of months.🙄🙄🙄🙄

It's impossible to imagine exactly how this might manifest today, but you can get an idea by just thinking of all the things that currently feel impossible. A competing Facebook app with a chronological timeline, a third party app for Instagram that actually works on tablets, or a chat client that lets you talk on Twitter DM, Facebook Messenger, and Google Hangouts from the same window. It's an attractive approach because it preserves the advantages of a sprawling network like Facebook that virtually everyone is on while simultaneously introducing competition.😯😯😯😯

Whereas breaking up Facebook into smaller companies would mean splitting one walled garden into several more, mandating interoperability just tears down the walls. The result would be an internet closer to the one we had before the rise of megaplatforms, where instead of branded services like Facebook Messenger or Facebook posts that are controlled by a private company, we had collaboratively developed open standards and file formats like the various protocols used for email and the universally supported JPEG image format.
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The decline of interoperability and open standards has long been chipping away at the freedom of the internet. The beloved GIF has been slowly eroded and replaced with proprietary looping videos that are virtually impossible to share between services. Links to Instagram photos used to auto-expand on Twitter, which used to have a whole army of competing apps. But now we've all been reduced to posting screenshots of tweets on Instagram and screenshots of Facebook on Twitter because there's no other way to move information between these locked-down digital fiefdoms.

There are downsides to the approach, as the paper notes. Forcing companies to expose their infrastructure to competitors in the name of cooperation gives hackers and other bad actors a whole new way to stir up trouble. The "Celebgate" incident in which nude pictures of famous celebrities were released onto the web was made possible in part by a weakness in Apple's iCloud API, which was exposed to the public for interoperability purposes.

All the proposals in the white paper still have a long way to go before any potential implementation. Obviously, any of these measures would first have to be baked into legislation and before that, a number of tech executives are expected to testify to Senators on Russian election interference, a discussion that will almost certainly include conversation about (and pushback against) any of these types of regulation.

But maybe, someday, th walls will come down.

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