Maybe not regulate. Maybe just don't prevent adversarial interoperability from happening. In an ideal world, a company trying to sue someone who built an unoffi

Maybe not regulate. Maybe just don't prevent adversarial interoperability from happening. In an ideal world, a company trying to sue someone who built an unofficial client for their service should be laughed out of the court building and fined for wasting judge's time. Remember ICQ? The official clients were bloated and generally meh. Many people didn't ever see them, not even once. Almost everyone I knew used QIP, Miranda, Adium, or something else third-party. ICQ the company sometimes broke the protocol and then there was a massive uproar. Then clients got updated and everyone carried on messaging. But the system being involuntarily open like this meant that there were ICQ clients for so many things that wouldn't ever get official treatment otherwise. Basically — if it has a network interface, a screen, a means of text input, and can run arbitrary code, it'd have an ICQ client built for it at some point. There was one in the form of an ELF binary for Siemens phones for example. No one is asking for a standardized protocol. It is my understanding that what is being asked for here is the documentation of their existing protocol that would allow third-party clients and bridges to be built. And this is an unequivocally good thing.