Regulation and forcing independent companies to expose IP are two different things entirely. The services you mention are regulated for customer safety, not to provide market opportunities for other independent businesses. The EU are pretending that their measures are to benefit customers, but no customers are being harmed or prevented in doing anything they wish to do. This is purely about enriching private competitors.
I don't say this very often, but I regret that I have but one upvote to give you. Everything you say in this post is spot on.
This is not true at all. I've been using computers since I was a child in the 80s. Pretty much everything was proprietary. You couldn't run commodore programs on an Atari! You couldn't use the floppy disk drive from your C64 on an IBM PC etc.. etc..
Very much this. Personal computers (as in, computers that persons could own, before IBM co-opted the "PC" title as their own property) had lots of competition and almost none of it was compatible with each other. Competition is good, it helps us work out which competing bits are better (often, but not always, it's the better design that wins out). You don't have a government design, and then mandate, a particular format for floppy disks. For one, they don't have the experience or expertise to do it right, for another, they don't have the interest to keep iterating for a better design, replacing the old design when necessary.
You're talking about low level networking interoperability. Http etc.. are built on TCP/IP. But even that is not legislated. Its not a standard that you are bound to use. I'm not aware of any popular protocol/standard in computing that is legally enforced by a government to my knowledge.
The reality is standards happen by choice not by being dictated to in this industry. The reason is simple: There could be something better, so why force everyone to do the same thing? If something settles down and enough people see value then the standard prevails. If it doesn't, then it dies. The tech industry is just a process of evolution.
This! The entire fundamental underpinnings of what makes the internet work (and thus makes much of the modern world work), is controlled by standards that were designed and debated and tested, and then adopted, by companies and organizations, because they saw a need. IP, TCP, UDP, BGP, DHCP, DNS, HTTP, IMAP, NTP, SMTP, TLS, SSH - these (and others) are the standards that make the internet work, and they were designed by interested parties, who then agreed to implement them in their software and products, in the name of interoperability. Vanishingly little of it is required by law, and I don't know any bits that were designed/mandated by bureaucrats (that is, cases where a government came along and said, "
I've decided that
you have to use this protocol that I've thrown together" - I expect that in Europe, parts of the GSM standard and related standards are mandated by the governments, but were not
designed by the governments).
And, yeah, before the current push to mandate USB-C, the EU was working hard to mandate MicroUSB, but the timing didn't quite work out. Just think how great it would be if they had made that a legal requirement - we'd never have gotten adoption of USB-C. The governments would be thinking, "but we've already got MicroUSB", and would refuse to change the laws.
As I said earlier, MS's success was a fortunate accident by IBM that MS capitalised on. If you want to see MS's real business decisions how about getting access to MS's Word and Excel formats?
The bit that really annoys me about Word/Excel is how the actual standards bodies were working on an open document format standard, that was coming along well, designing something that could be implemented by all sorts of software, and and then Microsoft
bribed sorry, lobbied a number of small countries that had otherwise zero interest in the standard to vote for amendments that read into the standard a whole bunch of existing Word/Excel crap - if I recall correctly, there are literally places in the resulting standard that say, "or there can be this big opaque block of binary data here that is the way Microsoft Word does it" - which has no place in a
standard, and is literally impossible for anyone besides Microsoft to implement. They literally ****ed over what would have been a good standard so that it wouldn't be able to compete with MS Word, and so that they could keep selling Word into government offices (that were required to buy only standards-compliant software), without having to make any changes in Word. This still infuriates me.
And lets not get into actual criminal behaviour that MS did to entrench their position as the no.1 OS. They illegally bullied OEM's into not selling rival OS's with their machines. This is on record. MS' success is not just built on "low barriers to entry" as you suggest.
Yep, Bill Gates is spending a lot of money now doing very nice and very worthy things (fighting diseases worldwide and such), but it feels more than a little like the robber barons of a hundred-ish years ago, who set up all sorts of foundations and museums and scholarships and such to try to make up for their previous awful behavior that had made them so rich. Like, couldn't you have done philanthropy after a long career of running a great
and ethical company?
Basically it should be up to the inventor of software and services to decide how they fund their company. How they generate cash. Not some government lobby.
As I said, opening up services that provide differentiation is directly attack Apple's business model.
Very much this. But people on this forum (and the bureaucrats in the EU) keep telling us "it's for your own good!", in much the same impassioned tone of "think of the children!".
As I said earlier, private companies are lobbying the EU to shakedown Apple. Its that simple. Its like corporate gangsterism.
Yep. People need to stop saying, "but think of the children!" and start looking at who is paying for the lobbying behind these regulations.
