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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 cont

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.

immibis 11mo ago
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.
0_____0 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  Or enforce antitrust. As firearm enthusiasts like to say, "Enforce the laws we already have".
  - TheCoelacanth 11mo ago
    We need to fix the jurisprudence around anti-trust. > No person engaged in commerce or in any activity affecting commerce shall acquire, directly or indirectly, the whole or any part of the stock or other share capital and no person subject to the jurisdiction of the Federal Trade Commission shall acquire the whole or any part of the assets of another person engaged also in commerce or in any activity affecting commerce, where in any line of commerce or in any activity affecting commerce in any section of the country, the effect of such acquisition may be substantially to lessen competition, or to tend to create a monopoly. Taken at face value, that would forbid companies from buying any large competitors unless the competitor is already failing. Somehow that got watered down into almost nothing.
    - ethbr1 11mo ago
      The issue is that current law around monopolies defines them from the wrong angle. Instead of taking a consumer-centric / competition perspective, they should be defined in terms of market share (with markets broadly defined from a consumer perspective). >10% = some minimal interoperability and reporting requirements >25% = serious interoperability requirements >35% = severe and audited interoperability requirements, with a method for gaps to be proposed by competitors, with the end goal of making increasing market share past this point difficult Close the "but it's free to consumers (because we monetize them in other ways)" loophole that every 90s+ internet business used: instead focus on ensuring competition as measured by market share.
      - calvinmorrison 11mo ago
        well exactly, Verizon, Amazon, etc all LOVE more regulation. they have armies of lawyers who not only help in constructing the laws, they help pass, lobby and implement them. then the same law firms help amazon, verizon, etc execute it. It's regulatory capture now a small competitor wants to do something like get into the wifi game and they're look at huge fixed fees to get started.
        11mo ago
- LorenDB 11mo ago
  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.
  - breakingcups 11mo ago
    You'd have to break most of those platforms' TOS to do so.
    - LorenDB 11mo ago
      Was Pidgin TOS-compliant back in the day? I'm a young whippersnapper, so I don't have experience with it myself.
      - taink 11mo ago
        Well it did have to change its name from GAIM to Pidgin at some point because it infringed on "AIM" by AOL. And whether or not Pidgin was fully "TOS-compliant" (which it might have been depending on the service we'd be looking at) is not as relevant as whether these terms would have been actually legally enforceable or not.
        rw_grim 11mo ago
        That was due to a trademark violation and nothing to do with TOS.
      - rw_grim 11mo ago
        We (Pidgin/Gaim/Finch/libpurple) have never been TOS compliant.
    - immibis 11mo ago
      That's always been the case. Jailbreaking your phone is also breaking TOS. Sideloading apps on iPhone by using the developer features is breaking TOS. Almost anything that gives a corporation less money or control over you is against that corporation's TOS. That's not the law, though, and we need to grow a collective spine. ... It's a lot easier to have a spine about risking getting banned from a service if getting banned from that service wouldn't destroy your life.
- cyberes 11mo ago
  They're too busy trying to strip encryption to do anything
- gjsman-1000 11mo ago
  > 2009 I could run Pidgin and load messages from AIM, FB Messages, Yahoo... Where did that go? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBcY3W5WgNU 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.
  - immibis 11mo ago
    I run an email server with no specific spam filter. Sometimes I get spam. Then I add a filter on my end to delete it and move on. It's nowhere near as bad as people proclaim. Neither is deliverability, for that matter, even after I forgot to set an SPF record and some random internet server sent a bunch of spam on my behalf (which I know because I got the bounces).
    - gjsman-1000 11mo ago
      You have a dirt path to your house and are therefore convinced the interstate highway system should allow direct residential driveways. Gmail processes 376 billion emails per day. At that volume, even 0.1% spam getting through is 376 million messages. However, we're not talking about 0.1%, but 45.6% of email being spam globally. For Gmail, that's 171 billion spam messages daily. Congrats that your private server works at your scale. It's completely irrelevant, and only works because bad actors don't care about it. Imagine though, if we even accepted spam culturally and handled it individually, as per your solution. That would mean spam can get through with brute force, which it can't right now, meaning that 45.6% would probably explode closer to 90%, 95%, or more overnight. It's only manageable at 45.6% for you because Gmail's spam filters are working overtime harming the economics.
- CaptainOfCoit 11mo ago
  > 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-steps-eu-messaging-interoperability/726385/ https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/meta-announces-next-st... Haven't heard much about it lately though.
- rw_grim 11mo ago
  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 https://discourse.imfreedom.org/tag/state-of-the-bird.
  - account42 11mo ago
    Remind me (in a millenium or two) when you can finally do XMPP MAM + message carbons. Until then: lol
- account42 11mo ago
  Your Pidgin example isn't even real interoperability - you still needed real AIM, FB and Yahoo accounts for that.
itopaloglu83 11mo ago
It’s almost as if those companies have country like powers. Maybe they should be subject to same limitations like First Amendment etc.
- mrtesthah 11mo ago
  The solution is just to enforce the anti-trust act as it is written.
  - b00ty4breakfast 11mo ago
    As long as wealth can be transduced into political power, that boat is beached as
quentindanjou 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  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
  - sithadmin 11mo ago
    That’s not unique to PayPal. Pretty much any payment processor that detects a proprietor paying themselves is going to throw up a red flag for circular cash flow fraud and close the account. Bank-operated payment processors are often slower to catch it, but they will also boot you for this.
    - calvinmorrison 11mo ago
      real payment processors also you just call on the phone and they fix it. That's not a real problem. we do test orders on many go lives per year and never see this. Yes there are sandboxes, but you always gotta test real transactions by the end.
    - GoblinSlayer 11mo ago
      Here clown world is going strong too. My bank bans me every time I pay taxes.

immibis 11mo ago

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.

0_____0 11mo ago

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 11mo ago
Or enforce antitrust. As firearm enthusiasts like to say, "Enforce the laws we already have".
- TheCoelacanth 11mo ago
  We need to fix the jurisprudence around anti-trust. > No person engaged in commerce or in any activity affecting commerce shall acquire, directly or indirectly, the whole or any part of the stock or other share capital and no person subject to the jurisdiction of the Federal Trade Commission shall acquire the whole or any part of the assets of another person engaged also in commerce or in any activity affecting commerce, where in any line of commerce or in any activity affecting commerce in any section of the country, the effect of such acquisition may be substantially to lessen competition, or to tend to create a monopoly. Taken at face value, that would forbid companies from buying any large competitors unless the competitor is already failing. Somehow that got watered down into almost nothing.
  - ethbr1 11mo ago
    The issue is that current law around monopolies defines them from the wrong angle. Instead of taking a consumer-centric / competition perspective, they should be defined in terms of market share (with markets broadly defined from a consumer perspective). >10% = some minimal interoperability and reporting requirements >25% = serious interoperability requirements >35% = severe and audited interoperability requirements, with a method for gaps to be proposed by competitors, with the end goal of making increasing market share past this point difficult Close the "but it's free to consumers (because we monetize them in other ways)" loophole that every 90s+ internet business used: instead focus on ensuring competition as measured by market share.
    - calvinmorrison 11mo ago
      well exactly, Verizon, Amazon, etc all LOVE more regulation. they have armies of lawyers who not only help in constructing the laws, they help pass, lobby and implement them. then the same law firms help amazon, verizon, etc execute it. It's regulatory capture now a small competitor wants to do something like get into the wifi game and they're look at huge fixed fees to get started.
      - 11mo ago
LorenDB 11mo ago
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.
- breakingcups 11mo ago
  You'd have to break most of those platforms' TOS to do so.
  - LorenDB 11mo ago
    Was Pidgin TOS-compliant back in the day? I'm a young whippersnapper, so I don't have experience with it myself.
    - taink 11mo ago
      Well it did have to change its name from GAIM to Pidgin at some point because it infringed on "AIM" by AOL. And whether or not Pidgin was fully "TOS-compliant" (which it might have been depending on the service we'd be looking at) is not as relevant as whether these terms would have been actually legally enforceable or not.
      - rw_grim 11mo ago
        That was due to a trademark violation and nothing to do with TOS.
    - rw_grim 11mo ago
      We (Pidgin/Gaim/Finch/libpurple) have never been TOS compliant.
  - immibis 11mo ago
    That's always been the case. Jailbreaking your phone is also breaking TOS. Sideloading apps on iPhone by using the developer features is breaking TOS. Almost anything that gives a corporation less money or control over you is against that corporation's TOS. That's not the law, though, and we need to grow a collective spine. ... It's a lot easier to have a spine about risking getting banned from a service if getting banned from that service wouldn't destroy your life.
cyberes 11mo ago
They're too busy trying to strip encryption to do anything
gjsman-1000 11mo ago
> 2009 I could run Pidgin and load messages from AIM, FB Messages, Yahoo... Where did that go? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBcY3W5WgNU 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.
- immibis 11mo ago
  I run an email server with no specific spam filter. Sometimes I get spam. Then I add a filter on my end to delete it and move on. It's nowhere near as bad as people proclaim. Neither is deliverability, for that matter, even after I forgot to set an SPF record and some random internet server sent a bunch of spam on my behalf (which I know because I got the bounces).
  - gjsman-1000 11mo ago
    You have a dirt path to your house and are therefore convinced the interstate highway system should allow direct residential driveways. Gmail processes 376 billion emails per day. At that volume, even 0.1% spam getting through is 376 million messages. However, we're not talking about 0.1%, but 45.6% of email being spam globally. For Gmail, that's 171 billion spam messages daily. Congrats that your private server works at your scale. It's completely irrelevant, and only works because bad actors don't care about it. Imagine though, if we even accepted spam culturally and handled it individually, as per your solution. That would mean spam can get through with brute force, which it can't right now, meaning that 45.6% would probably explode closer to 90%, 95%, or more overnight. It's only manageable at 45.6% for you because Gmail's spam filters are working overtime harming the economics.
CaptainOfCoit 11mo ago
> 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-steps-eu-messaging-interoperability/726385/ https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/meta-announces-next-st... Haven't heard much about it lately though.
rw_grim 11mo ago
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 https://discourse.imfreedom.org/tag/state-of-the-bird.
- account42 11mo ago
  Remind me (in a millenium or two) when you can finally do XMPP MAM + message carbons. Until then: lol
account42 11mo ago
Your Pidgin example isn't even real interoperability - you still needed real AIM, FB and Yahoo accounts for that.

itopaloglu83 11mo ago

It’s almost as if those companies have country like powers. Maybe they should be subject to same limitations like First Amendment etc.

mrtesthah 11mo ago
The solution is just to enforce the anti-trust act as it is written.
- b00ty4breakfast 11mo ago
  As long as wealth can be transduced into political power, that boat is beached as

quentindanjou 11mo ago

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 11mo ago
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
- sithadmin 11mo ago
  That’s not unique to PayPal. Pretty much any payment processor that detects a proprietor paying themselves is going to throw up a red flag for circular cash flow fraud and close the account. Bank-operated payment processors are often slower to catch it, but they will also boot you for this.
  - calvinmorrison 11mo ago
    real payment processors also you just call on the phone and they fix it. That's not a real problem. we do test orders on many go lives per year and never see this. Yes there are sandboxes, but you always gotta test real transactions by the end.
  - GoblinSlayer 11mo ago
    Here clown world is going strong too. My bank bans me every time I pay taxes.