(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]


Messenger Interoperability: pushing for conformity, destroying functional diversity, enabling abuse and dangerous monocultures

2022-04-14 07:59:56+00:00

There’s a genre of jokes about a city-slicker visiting the countryside, asking for directions and being told “…if you want to get there, I wouldn’t start from here.”

This is where we are today with messenger interoperability.

Not only is there no way to fix it, but also any attempt to mandate delivery of full interoperability (e.g. that “someone on TikTok or Telegram should be able to directly message someone on iMessage”) is fundamentally wrongheaded, based on a fallacy that “all messenger software is basically the same, innit?”

I am not being flippant re: that last remark.

The written goal of the EU / of the people advising the EU, has been to pursue regulation of “big tech” without regard to impact on user privacy or app function, because the interoperability goals are centred on “pro-competition”, “choice”, and “quality” — whatever that latter means in the context of high-definition digital communication?

Is TikTok somehow “quality”? Or Instagram, perhaps?

Some supporting verbiage, this white paper abstract, from Ian Brown:

Interoperability is a technical mechanism for computing systems to work together – even if they are from competing firms. An interoperability requirement for large online platforms has been suggested by the European Commission as one ex ante (up-front rule) mechanism in its proposed Digital Markets Act (DMA), as a way to encourage competition. The policy goal is to increase choice and quality for users, and the ability of competitors to succeed with better services. The application would be to the largest online platforms, such as Facebook (social media and instant messaging), Google (search and Android), Amazon (marketplace), Apple (iOS), and operating system ancillary services, such as payment and app stores. This report analyses up-front interoperability requirements as a pro-competition policy tool for regulating large online platforms, exploring the economic and social rationales and possible regulatory mechanisms. […]

…and a quote from the associated blog post:

Interoperability is the online equivalent of interconnection that the EU imposed on the telecoms sector in the early 1990s, and was fundamental to the successful opening up of these markets to competition. Interoperability has been fundamental to competitive communications markets since their inception, and underlies many technologies today, including email, digital TV, and indeed the Internet itself. Users can exchange calls, text messages and e-mails irrespective of their phone, network or e-mail service. […deletia…] Interoperability would boost competition by obliging such platforms to compete on the merits of their products and services, rather than relying on the sheer size of their existing user base. This would enable new market entrants to offer users a real choice, and allow users to choose their providers on the basis of their needs and preferences

The context for telecoms interoperability was “everyone has a telephone, it has a dial or buttons, you dial a number, talk into one end and listen at the other” — and this is/was the complete feature set for almost all phone systems under telecom regulations. Phones are really, really simple. “Advanced” phones had something like an auto-redial button.

That’s about as far as the user experience of phone technology went, in the 1990s; perhaps “voicemail” was exciting, but it wasn’t required to be “interoperable”.

Apps are far, far more complex beasts than voice telephones of 1993, and differentiation is fundamental to each app’s user experience. To re-quote the blogpost: messenger apps already “compete on the merits of their products and services”, and the DMA’s plan of coercing platforms to standardise upon “interoperable” features will perversely reduce diversity, not increase it.

What are the “merits” of different platforms? What are their purposes? They are/were designed to be good at tasks like:

Instagram was invented for people to share pictures of their inspirational lunches

TikTok was invented for people to experiment with short-form video and play with filters and lip-sync

Snapchat was invented for clubbers to share lewd pictures with each other in reasonable safety

WhatsApp was invented to be SMS-and-MMS-but-over-the-Internet

Messenger is now an ancient, pedestrian messenger, following Signal’s and WhatsApp’s lead towards ubiquitous end-to-end encryption in order to make itself (a) more competitive with other platforms, not least by becoming (b) more secure

So: all these apps have different goals and user experiences, and therefore all these apps have different functions. How would interoperability make them more diverse?

Interoperability demands that they would all have to be either:

closer to functionally identical, or else… implementing each other’s functions in a half-assed, lower-quality manner; for if third-party clients are not half-assed they would be functionally identical, other than in “gathering several messengers into one place” or “implementing iMessage on Android which ought to be being done by Apple, not by a Belgian startup”

Elsewhere in misunderstandings:

Some apps use the same {transport, and cryptographic} protocols to communicate — but that doesn’t mean that they can trivially talk to each other — the actual messages passed back and forth have huge semantic and cultural differences in what they convey or achieve (this is an attachment, that is a Rickroll GIF)

Short of instituting some kind of Messenger “Esperanto”, interoperability means “a lot more apps, doing a lot more messaging, speaking all the different protocols, and invariably speaking them all a bit badly and proliferating bits of private messages all over the internet.”

A disaster example of the latter was where in 2014 an unofficial third-party Snapchat client (of a kind that EU Interoperability is attempting to make obligatory to support) leaked a huge set of lewd photos which were intended for one-on-one conversation participants; and it’s notable that Snap has now locked-down such content with end-to-end encryption (for images only) and also talks about “Privacy by Product”, recognising that locking down their APIs and building encryption walls to protect user data, is part of their value proposition.

And now the EU wants to undermine all that: once a platform becomes arbitrarily large, it will be required to open up its APIs and provide access to third parties and alternative clients which will not offer the security and privacy guarantees that made the platform successful in the first place.

The DMA interoperability proposal is de facto a poisoned pill against attempting to implement and offer strong security and privacy as a mass-consumer application feature; and this is the bind which Meta is now facing with deploying end-to-end encryption in the face of some government agencies who would prefer that it did not.

Meta has spent 3+ years attempting to make its own systems interoperate; throwing the rest of the world into the mix will be a substantial impediment to furthering that goal.

Elsewhere, Signal is arguably the flagship “secure messaging” app of our time, and it’s really telling to observe that whereas Signal themselves are dead set against interoperability and federation, proponents of interop are motivated to point out that Signal would not be impacted by interoperability because it’s not big enough.

The only good response to which is “not big enough yet — until when?”

Re: an EU-wide “have all the messengers implement some kind of Messenger-Esperanto” approach to interoperability (keywords: MLS, Matrix) we already have a microcosm of that: all of Messenger, WhatsApp, iMessage, Telegram and many others, can already talk to each other over SMS.

Somehow SMS is not a huge enabler of new and meritorious functionality, and when mingled with secure messenger apps it tends to confuse people re: how secure any given conversation actually is. I’m supposed to be a computer expert, yet I use the standard SMS app on my phone to deal with SMS messages so that all insecure communication is happening using one app, and one app only.

This mirrors how other people use apps to compartmentalise their “user experiences” — WhatsApp for family, MS-Teams for work, Tinder/Grindr/etc for dating…

I suspect that the non-political audience for interoperability are the “there are too many apps on my phone”-brigade, and — personal opinion — I don’t feel that “all messengers are basically SMS and nothing more valuable than that will ever be invented or interesting to me, so why don’t we require that they can all just talk to each other” — is a substantial enough perspective to be worth reifying with law; I also believe that people who first-and-foremost want to beat up Zuck should find a way to do it that does not harm the security and privacy which large platforms can offer to user messaging.

As a parting shot: demanding open access to messenger platforms is only a short step away from demanding backdoors to content – such as the GCHQ “Ghost” protocol, or the EU’s own “Chat Control” efforts. There may well be more than competition regulation driving this attempt to assert power over how large-scale platform software is permitted to work.

Todo…

And I haven’t even touched on the matters of:
[END]

[1] URL: https://alecmuffett.com/article/16151#comment-261950
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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