This is exactly what I'm trying to say. To me it would be like if back in the day mIRC rerouted IRC traffic between fellow mIRC users into a proprietary protoco

This is exactly what I'm trying to say. To me it would be like if back in the day mIRC rerouted IRC traffic between fellow mIRC users into a proprietary protocol when everyone believes they are just using IRC and treated non-mIRC users differently and even degraded their service. There used to be bots/add-ons etc but nothing ever skipped over the original IRC protocol. To me that is akin to hijacking.