[nucleative]

We really need an internet Bill of Rights. Google has too much power to delete your company from existence with no due process or recourse.

If any company controls some (high) percentage of a particular market, say web browsers, search, or e-commerce, or social media, the public's equal access should start to look more like a right and less like an at-will contract.

30 years ago, if a shop had a falling out with the landlord, it could move to the next building over and resume business. Now if you annoy eBay, Amazon or Walmart, you're locked out nationwide. If you're an Uber, Lyft, or Doordash (etc) gig worker and their bots decide they don't like you anymore, then sayonara sucker! Your account has been disabled, have a nice day and don't reapply.

Our regulatory structure and economies of scale encourage consolidation and scale and grant access to this market to these businesses, but we aren't protecting the now powerless individuals and small businesses who are randomly and needlessly tossed out with nobody to answer their pleas of desperation, no explanation of rules broken, and no opportunity to appeal with transparency.

It's a sorry state of affairs at the moment.

[quentindanjou]

I know someone with a small business that applied for Venmo Business account (which is the main payment method in their community industry) and Venmo refused to open the account and didn't provide any reason as to why saying that they have the right to choose to refuse providing the service, which they do. But all the competitors of that business in the area do have a Venmo and take payment this way so it is basically a revenue loss for that person.

It's a bit frustrating when a company becomes a major player in an industry and can have a life and death sentence on other businesses.

There are alternative payment method but people are use to pay a certain way in that industry/area, similarly there are other browsers but people are used to Chrome.

[slenk]

Same thing with Paypal - I opened a business account, was able to do one transaction and was shut down for fraud. I tested a donation to myself. Under $10. Lifetime ban.

fuck paypal

[0_____0]

Force interoperability. In 2009 I could run Pidgin and load messages from AIM, FB Messages, Yahoo... Where did that go?

I suspect the EU will be the first region to push the big tech companies on this.

[RajT88]

Or enforce antitrust.

As firearm enthusiasts like to say, "Enforce the laws we already have".

[LorenDB]

In 2025 you can use Beeper (or run your own local Matrix server with the opensource bridges) and get the same result with WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Discord, Google Messages, etc. etc.

[rw_grim]

The project is still alive and we're trying to finish our next major version to be able to better support modern protocols and features.

We do monthly updates on the status of the project that we call State of the Bird and they can be found here https://discourse.imfreedom.org/tag/state-of-the-bird.

[CaptainOfCoit]

> I suspect the EU will be the first region to push the big tech companies on this.

Supposedly, DMA should enforce this already.

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/meta-announces-next-st...

Haven't heard much about it lately though.

[account42]

Your Pidgin example isn't even real interoperability - you still needed real AIM, FB and Yahoo accounts for that.

[gjsman-1000]

> 2009 I could run Pidgin and load messages from AIM, FB Messages, Yahoo... Where did that go?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBcY3W5WgNU

But seriously; the internet is now overrun with AI Slop, Spam, and automated traffic. To try to do something about it requires curation, somebody needs to decide what is junk, which is completely antithetical to open protocols. This problem is structurally unsolvable, there is no solution, there's either a useless open internet or a useful closed one. The internet is voting with Cloudflare, Discord, Facebook, to be useful, not open. The alternative is trying to figure out how to run a decentralized dictatorship that only allows good things to happen; a delusion.

The only other solution is accountability, a presence tied to your physical identity; so that an attacker cannot just create 100,000 identities from 25,000 IP addresses and smash your small forum with them. That's an even less popular idea, even though it would make open systems actually possible. Building your own search engine or video platform would be super easy, barely an inconvenience. No need for Cloudflare if the police know who every visitor is. No need for a spam filter, if the government can enforce laws perfectly.

Take a look at email, the mother of all open protocols (older than HTTP). What happened? Radical recentralization to companies that had effective spam management, and now we on HN complain we can't break through, someone needs to do something about that centralization, so that we can go back to square one where people get spammed to death again, which will inevitably repeat the discretion required -> who has the best discretion -> flee there cycle. Go figure.

[cyberes]

They're too busy trying to strip encryption to do anything

[itopaloglu83]

It’s almost as if those companies have country like powers.

Maybe they should be subject to same limitations like First Amendment etc.

[mrtesthah]

The solution is just to enforce the anti-trust act as it is written.

[immibis]

FWIW in some jurisdictions you might be able to sue them for tortious interference, which basically means they went out of their way to hurt your business.