In short, legislating a solution is a workaround that can turn out to be a huge detriment not too long down the road. I'm no libertarian, but it seems like a bad idea to me.
The first link I got: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/02/south_korea_to_depo...
That is just for voice, now imagine you are a phone company and want to send a call to another phone company. There must be so many different things you need to cooperate on to make it happen - billing, switching, physical connections, numbering, codecs, etc. Yes the actual protocols may be standardised, but the main part is cooperation.
It's not standards we need, it's companies that are willing to cooperate and work together. None of the big tech companies want to do that now though. Everyone wants their own walled garden so they can say they have more users that X competitor.
(I'd argue that XMPP is good enough, or with a few extensions could be made good enough, for a company who really wants to push open IM)
Spectrum is owned by the public, and regulated as spectrum is a limited resource. IP messaging isn't by any practical means a limited resource.
> As far as I know, as long as I have the right to use the frequencies, I could start my own cellular telco that transmits whatever format I want.
No. Spectrum is regulated in terms of what technology you can use, and kind of usage is supported. You can't buy LTE spectrum and broadcast radio on top of it, and vice versa. You can't (in most cases) take 2G spectrum and deploy LTE on top of it.
Interesting! I was not aware of that. Thanks!
For example:
If a carrier "owns" the block between 1900MHz and 1940MHz, and let's say LTE supports 2 bits/Hz using Frequency Division Duplexing (each direction, up and down, gets a chunk of spectrum), with 3 sectors per cellular tower, the carrier can support a total of 40x2x3 = 240Mbps per tower, or 120Mbps each way.
If the tower serves 1000 users (they serve far more in dense urban areas), each user will have 120kbps of capacity, and if they all use it at the same time, that's the speed they'll get. If there's a single user, the maximum down speed for that user would be 120/3 = 40Mbps.
Point I ("I have the right to use the frequencies") directly depends on point II ("whatever format I want"). When applying for using a certain frequency band, you have to specify usage and purpose, and you can't just change your mind, i.e. you can't apply for GSM frequencies and say you will be running a GSM network, but then run the PavelLishinOverAir protocol.
While this is mostly true, in practice (at least on the 450-470 MHz band I work with), you can give fairly vague purposes, like "telemetry" or "SCADA", and it doesn't matter what vendor or what protocol you use. In fact, there is no section of the licence that says "I am going to use protocol X on equipment Y manufactured by vendor Z" or any part thereof (emissions designators are a different story).
I don't have any experience will cellular licences, though. Given that carriers frequently repurpose spectrum as technology changes, I can't imagine their licences say "GSM only" or anything like that. The band that used to be 3G GSM is being used for 4G LTE on my phone right now.
The same regulatory body (BNetzA) is also responsible for licensing telecommunications providers in general. This is probably the crunchpoint - if you're not a licensed telecommunication provider, it's simply illegal to offer telecommunication services.
I feel another such example is IPv6. It could move much faster if it would have been mandatory already.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERNET
- https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...
- https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/CN vs https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/US
Everyone moans about AGPL. Fine. Make something better that says if you're going to interoperate with a service, you better damn well actually interoperate. Make the license viral like GPL and hopefully when we all push in that direction, everyone needs to join up.
This is totally crazy to me. It would be like the government legislating when and where people have spoken conversations with each other.
I think a more achievable version would be that any online service which maintains user data must provide a method for a user to retrieve that data in an open-source format. Some companies would deliberately obfuscate formats, such as calendar appointments as JSON rather than iCAL or another existing standard, but I think it would give users more control than they currently have.
Oh, I agree. You're describing the effect of a corrupt government allowed to prevent or eliminate laws meant to protect its voters. I was talking about what law would be necessary if voters cared enough to push one.
The result of open-sourcing all data formats and protocols would obviously be all the data formats and protocols released as open-source. OOXML is not the only one in existence.
The company itself has to use the format for live message exchange, have to publish a full working protocol document.
With OOXML Microsoft aren't required to be able to read & write a files correctly when it's written to the protocol. As I envisage it the requirement would be to open the protocol actually used "on the wire"; again with Word Microsoft don't use OOXML as primary.
I think it's workable except perhaps in requiring political will. It's an internet age equivalent of allowing third-party car parts manufacture.
Microsoft don't use OOXML as primary.
Sure they do, that's what .docx files are. They've been the default since Office 2007.
Microsoft was compelled to create and implement the standard so that governments can comply with their requirements to use "open standards". And they followed all the steps, including getting it past ISO, despite the mess that the format is. And so governments can now tick the "open formats" box when purchasing Office. It's all a sham, and I don't see how it'd be otherwise with this proposed law.
Then why do you need open standards? Every major proprietary IM protocol has been re-implemented by open source software, including Hangouts: https://bitbucket.org/EionRobb/purple-hangouts
It might also be handled in the courts if the law includes language that specifically instructs to attempt simple, readable protocols to "facilitate interoperability.
XMPP, the thing Google is being roasted for dropping support for, is often decried as being very complex and hard to implement correctly. If genuinely open protocols often end up like this, how can you possibly punish companies for writing complex, hard to implement protocols?
"This is to prevent or reduce lockin, walled gardens, etc."
What I said. I'll add that it's hard to copyright API's to sue over compatibility when the API's and their implementation are released as open-source software.
"If genuinely open protocols often end up like this"
What are you talking about? There's all kinds of results from protocol design. You chose one of the worst ones. I was a PSYC fan over that if I had to choose an IRC replacement or open chat standard. A test for new ones might be trying to run it through LANGSEC's Nail, Cap n Proto or ZeroMQ to see if they handle it easily. Anyway, it's easier to do compatible implementations if you have source and can't be sued/imprisoned for imitating it.