7 ms·

Adversarial interoperability: reviving an old weapon to slay today's monopolies

132 points by liotier 7y ago

sprafa 7y ago
It’s absolutely obvious that FB needs to be forced through legislation to allow for interopability of its basic features. This has been obvious since it achieved its hegemony. When this happens FB will be dead.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
m463 7y ago
This reminds me of a friend of mine whose dad was a state senator. I asked how his dad dealt with all the craziness of lobbyists? Turns out he used them a lot. If he had trouble with a school textbook issue he would call up an unrelated lobbyist (such as oil) and ask him about it. Very quickly, he would have a thick report from leading exports on his desk outlining and analyzing in detail the school textbook issue. Pit em against each other. Steve Jobs was a master of things like this. He made the phone companies compromise and got smartphones to market. He made the music industry compromise and got online music jumpstarted.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  "Hey, Joe, it's your buddy the Oil lobbyist. Yeah, the Senator is asking about school textbooks again. I know that's your area. You got anything?" "Sure, buddy. I'll have a thousand page report ready in a couple days. By the way, yesterday a Congressman asked me about the safety of fracking..."
  - BLanen 7y ago
    Yep, his example was pretty shady.
    - m463 7y ago
      (note: my example of "textbooks" and "oil" was arbitrary, and this was also in a completely different era, maybe 50s?)
starmole 7y ago
The elephant in the room here is strong cryptography. We now have the technology that makes this kind of interop pretty much impossible.
- Too 7y ago
  Not cryptography by itself, it's more the sprawling reliance on SaaS. Compare to the .doc-case. It's just a static file format where the shrinkwrap software reading it would only be updated once every 3 years. It's possible to reverse engineer the format and catch up long before they have a chance to release a new format, and even when they do they can't drop support for the old format because millions of users have files stored on disk that way. When everything is in the cloud all you need to do is block API access, or make your API crippled to begin with, and it's instant game over.
  - mntmoss 7y ago
    That's giving up way too early. This cat and mouse game is played on the regular between makers of online games and makers of online game cheating tools. If you invest a sizable amount of engineering resources, you can stay a little bit ahead of cheaters and ban the ones that slip through. But your adversaries will never give up, and even if you limit their encroachment, it will slowly but surely impact your product; the tricky part of dealing with this software is that using harsh measures to defeat it will harm goodwill and incite the cheating users to campaign against you. The same basic principles are true of adversarial compatibility: users may be ambivalent about having choices, but they will rarely have a reason to dislike it; they just don't want to be caught in the crossfire if war gets waged. What stops this from being applied across all internet-available software is more about the legal reprisal threat: Although leveraging Facebook's own frontend code to start interacting with their systems is within the reach of any keen-minded and hard-working CS student, a company built on that principle would be vulnerable to burial by lawsuit. Companies selling cheats tend to be overseas fly-by-nights, safely out of reach from the long arm of the law. Perhaps all we have to do is wait for WeChat or Weibo to announce Facebook compatibility.
GeekyBear 7y ago
The EU came fairly close to forcing Microsoft to open up the Office document formats as part of their string of antitrust actions against Microsoft. In the end they did force Microsoft to open up the protocols used by Windows clients to communicate with Microsoft's own servers (to allow third party interoperability with server products like Samba), but did not do the same thing with the various Office document formats. After an additional $1.3 billion fine, Microsoft stopped dragging it's feet and complied with the ruling. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2537525/eu-fines-microsoft-another--1-3b.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2537525/eu-fines-micro...
HillaryBriss 7y ago
the link included in the article to "Usenet's alt.* hierarchy" actually points to an article about the Hayes Modem. I hope the author changes it to something that explains the adversarial nature of the alt.* hierarchy.
kbenson 7y ago
The meat and potatoes of this are at the end. To make any headway with this there needs to be some legislation that gives more rights to consumers. As a simple example of there adversarial interoperability used to work well (so much so that we had an ecosystem of interacting technologies), look at chat. First, before there was much encryption we had AIM and ICQ (and then AID/ICQ), and then an open standard in XMPP, and then Gchat used XMPP, and people used aggregating chat clients to handle all their chat needs in one application. There was no real downside to another account on another service, you could just add it to your chat handler and you were good to go. Then we started seeing proprietary forays into this space with enough clout and lock-in to actually change the status quo. I might be wrong, but I've always attributed this primarily to Apple. When Apple provided a Mac only chat protocol and then used it to extend standard messaging but only for their platforms (SMS/iMessage interoperability), that was the beginning of the end. This was embrace, extend and extinguish as seen by Microsoft applied to a new medium, and with a slightly different strategy (instead of overall market dominance driving the change, it was vendor lock-in). Other big players followed suit in the next few years (I assume because otherwise they would be at a disadvantage). Gchat was superseded by Hangouts which was closed, and Facebook closed off their XMPP support around the same time. The excuses never held water to me. XMPP was extensible, and if it wasn't, it's not like companies like Google and Facebook (and Apple, as iChat was XMPP based as well) could not push forward whatever changes were needed for the advanced features they wanted. We had a wonderful world of interoperating competing chat networks, a protocol that embraced this and even allowed federation, which a bunch of what are now some of the biggest companies in the world embraced, and then once everyone had an account, they revealed the extent of their bait-and-switch. There's a lesson to be learned in there about commercial companies taking advantage of open source and open standards for their own profit (which is to be expected) but at the expense of their customers (which is unfortunate).
- heymijo 7y ago
  Very nice post, however, I recall a bit differently... "I might be wrong, but I've always attributed this primarily to Apple." RIM and BBM had a four year head start on Apple messaging. Unless Apple had a pre-mobile messaging protcol that I am unaware of. Even so, BBM was the hotness back then and people were lining up to buy a Blackberry just so they could use its exclusive messaging service.
drtillberg 7y ago
Why stop at adversarial interoperability? When we're talking about monopolistic participants, why not compel them to open the network and standards that are serving as a barrier to entry. We take for granted that a Verizon phone can call a T-Mobile user; the situation in social media in particular, as well as .doc/.docx, is archaic.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  I was under the impression that the docx format is a published standard, first under ECMA-376 then ISO/IEC 29500:2008. Microsoft has also promised to not enforce any patent claims they have that are necessary for someone to adopt those standards.
  - na85 7y ago
    >Microsoft has also promised to not enforce any patent claims they have that are necessary for someone to adopt those standards. Why would any sane person trust a corporation's word, let alone Microsoft's? Corporations are not your friend and will happily fuck you over for a few percentage points' increase in shareholder returns. Have we forgotten embrace, extend, extinguish already?
    - sokoloff 7y ago
      It's not like it's a pinky promise. They published an irrevocable declaration, which if they tried to walk back would undoubtedly be problematic at a minimum when it went to court. http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2006-09-12-a.html http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2006-09-12-a.html
      - paulryanrogers 7y ago
        Can such declarations remain unchangeable in the face of a company collapsing and its assets being sold to new stewards?
  - anoncake 7y ago
    AFAIK docx as produced by Word doesn't even comply with the standard.
dmos62 7y ago
Yes, yes, yes. Legislation and regulation towards proper competition in the IT space is the only way forward. For all of its history, high-tech has been the wild-wild-west: good for the powerful few, not good for others. GDPR or the-right-to-repair are baby steps. The monopolies we have now are like your grandma putting sleeping pills in your food so you don't leave. It's a rigor mortis hold on tech.
HillaryBriss 7y ago
The article uses it as an example, but I don't quite see how a search engine's web crawler user agent string (or whatever Doctorow is talking about) is an example of adversarial interoperability.

132 points by liotier 7y ago

It’s absolutely obvious that FB needs to be forced through legislation to allow for interopability of its basic features. This has been obvious since it achieved its hegemony. When this happens FB will be dead.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

m463 7y ago

This reminds me of a friend of mine whose dad was a state senator. I asked how his dad dealt with all the craziness of lobbyists? Turns out he used them a lot. If he had trouble with a school textbook issue he would call up an unrelated lobbyist (such as oil) and ask him about it. Very quickly, he would have a thick report from leading exports on his desk outlining and analyzing in detail the school textbook issue. Pit em against each other. Steve Jobs was a master of things like this. He made the phone companies compromise and got smartphones to market. He made the music industry compromise and got online music jumpstarted.

whatshisface 7y ago
"Hey, Joe, it's your buddy the Oil lobbyist. Yeah, the Senator is asking about school textbooks again. I know that's your area. You got anything?" "Sure, buddy. I'll have a thousand page report ready in a couple days. By the way, yesterday a Congressman asked me about the safety of fracking..."
- BLanen 7y ago
  Yep, his example was pretty shady.
  - m463 7y ago
    (note: my example of "textbooks" and "oil" was arbitrary, and this was also in a completely different era, maybe 50s?)

starmole 7y ago

The elephant in the room here is strong cryptography. We now have the technology that makes this kind of interop pretty much impossible.

Too 7y ago
Not cryptography by itself, it's more the sprawling reliance on SaaS. Compare to the .doc-case. It's just a static file format where the shrinkwrap software reading it would only be updated once every 3 years. It's possible to reverse engineer the format and catch up long before they have a chance to release a new format, and even when they do they can't drop support for the old format because millions of users have files stored on disk that way. When everything is in the cloud all you need to do is block API access, or make your API crippled to begin with, and it's instant game over.
- mntmoss 7y ago
  That's giving up way too early. This cat and mouse game is played on the regular between makers of online games and makers of online game cheating tools. If you invest a sizable amount of engineering resources, you can stay a little bit ahead of cheaters and ban the ones that slip through. But your adversaries will never give up, and even if you limit their encroachment, it will slowly but surely impact your product; the tricky part of dealing with this software is that using harsh measures to defeat it will harm goodwill and incite the cheating users to campaign against you. The same basic principles are true of adversarial compatibility: users may be ambivalent about having choices, but they will rarely have a reason to dislike it; they just don't want to be caught in the crossfire if war gets waged. What stops this from being applied across all internet-available software is more about the legal reprisal threat: Although leveraging Facebook's own frontend code to start interacting with their systems is within the reach of any keen-minded and hard-working CS student, a company built on that principle would be vulnerable to burial by lawsuit. Companies selling cheats tend to be overseas fly-by-nights, safely out of reach from the long arm of the law. Perhaps all we have to do is wait for WeChat or Weibo to announce Facebook compatibility.

GeekyBear 7y ago

The EU came fairly close to forcing Microsoft to open up the Office document formats as part of their string of antitrust actions against Microsoft. In the end they did force Microsoft to open up the protocols used by Windows clients to communicate with Microsoft's own servers (to allow third party interoperability with server products like Samba), but did not do the same thing with the various Office document formats. After an additional $1.3 billion fine, Microsoft stopped dragging it's feet and complied with the ruling. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2537525/eu-fines-microsoft-another--1-3b.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2537525/eu-fines-micro...

HillaryBriss 7y ago

the link included in the article to "Usenet's alt.* hierarchy" actually points to an article about the Hayes Modem. I hope the author changes it to something that explains the adversarial nature of the alt.* hierarchy.

kbenson 7y ago

The meat and potatoes of this are at the end. To make any headway with this there needs to be some legislation that gives more rights to consumers. As a simple example of there adversarial interoperability used to work well (so much so that we had an ecosystem of interacting technologies), look at chat. First, before there was much encryption we had AIM and ICQ (and then AID/ICQ), and then an open standard in XMPP, and then Gchat used XMPP, and people used aggregating chat clients to handle all their chat needs in one application. There was no real downside to another account on another service, you could just add it to your chat handler and you were good to go. Then we started seeing proprietary forays into this space with enough clout and lock-in to actually change the status quo. I might be wrong, but I've always attributed this primarily to Apple. When Apple provided a Mac only chat protocol and then used it to extend standard messaging but only for their platforms (SMS/iMessage interoperability), that was the beginning of the end. This was embrace, extend and extinguish as seen by Microsoft applied to a new medium, and with a slightly different strategy (instead of overall market dominance driving the change, it was vendor lock-in). Other big players followed suit in the next few years (I assume because otherwise they would be at a disadvantage). Gchat was superseded by Hangouts which was closed, and Facebook closed off their XMPP support around the same time. The excuses never held water to me. XMPP was extensible, and if it wasn't, it's not like companies like Google and Facebook (and Apple, as iChat was XMPP based as well) could not push forward whatever changes were needed for the advanced features they wanted. We had a wonderful world of interoperating competing chat networks, a protocol that embraced this and even allowed federation, which a bunch of what are now some of the biggest companies in the world embraced, and then once everyone had an account, they revealed the extent of their bait-and-switch. There's a lesson to be learned in there about commercial companies taking advantage of open source and open standards for their own profit (which is to be expected) but at the expense of their customers (which is unfortunate).

heymijo 7y ago
Very nice post, however, I recall a bit differently... "I might be wrong, but I've always attributed this primarily to Apple." RIM and BBM had a four year head start on Apple messaging. Unless Apple had a pre-mobile messaging protcol that I am unaware of. Even so, BBM was the hotness back then and people were lining up to buy a Blackberry just so they could use its exclusive messaging service.

drtillberg 7y ago

Why stop at adversarial interoperability? When we're talking about monopolistic participants, why not compel them to open the network and standards that are serving as a barrier to entry. We take for granted that a Verizon phone can call a T-Mobile user; the situation in social media in particular, as well as .doc/.docx, is archaic.

sokoloff 7y ago
I was under the impression that the docx format is a published standard, first under ECMA-376 then ISO/IEC 29500:2008. Microsoft has also promised to not enforce any patent claims they have that are necessary for someone to adopt those standards.
- na85 7y ago
  >Microsoft has also promised to not enforce any patent claims they have that are necessary for someone to adopt those standards. Why would any sane person trust a corporation's word, let alone Microsoft's? Corporations are not your friend and will happily fuck you over for a few percentage points' increase in shareholder returns. Have we forgotten embrace, extend, extinguish already?
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    It's not like it's a pinky promise. They published an irrevocable declaration, which if they tried to walk back would undoubtedly be problematic at a minimum when it went to court. http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2006-09-12-a.html http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2006-09-12-a.html
    - paulryanrogers 7y ago
      Can such declarations remain unchangeable in the face of a company collapsing and its assets being sold to new stewards?
- anoncake 7y ago
  AFAIK docx as produced by Word doesn't even comply with the standard.

dmos62 7y ago

Yes, yes, yes. Legislation and regulation towards proper competition in the IT space is the only way forward. For all of its history, high-tech has been the wild-wild-west: good for the powerful few, not good for others. GDPR or the-right-to-repair are baby steps. The monopolies we have now are like your grandma putting sleeping pills in your food so you don't leave. It's a rigor mortis hold on tech.

HillaryBriss 7y ago

The article uses it as an example, but I don't quite see how a search engine's web crawler user agent string (or whatever Doctorow is talking about) is an example of adversarial interoperability.