When IP video calling started being worked on in the 90s it was via an open standards process, specifically h.323. Back then the web was driven more by engineers, before money men truly tookover.

It is a miracle that the web itself has survived as one of the few open interoperable protocols. Though I think this golden period will soon end, strangled by the death of net neutrality on one side and proprietary walled gardens on the other.

Ultimately, a commons is not compatible with unrestricted capitalism.

Its easy to blame money (boogey) men when you don't understand the finite problems that have held back this space.

They are also very easy to blame when you do. Productization is ruining tech.

This. It's easy to forget that in the beginning, stuff like AOL and CompuServe offered their version of the internet, not "the internet". We've now paved the way for Comcast, Time Warner, ATT, and Verizon to do the same. Look at what the wireless ISPs already do to phones on their network today with locking, proprietary apps (many of which take advantage of zero rating), "free" phones, etc.

Sadly but somewhat hilariously, the thing which might prevent them a bit from offering exclusive-to-their-network content is the fact that in the US, you often don't have a choice of which ISP to go with, so if I really wanted some content which was exclusive to ATT's network, I simply can't switch off of Comcast (apartment building with no other option, past 3 apartment buildings were the same) since they've so successfully monopolized markets.

Edit: on the beginning: http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2014/04/chapter-3-part...

Facetime works very well, my family uses it from 4 different continents around the world, from cities to villages, varying from toddlers to nonagenarians who didn't even go to school or know English. I don't know why something cross platform can't work as well as Facetime does.

I had hope for Hangouts, but Google dropped the ball big time in terms of user complexity and quality of product as they are wont to do.

Someone had me use Hangouts for a press livestreaming thing a couple of weeks back. I was actually surprised at how the UI had improved since I last used it.

I agree that video conferencing is rather fragmented but I'm honestly not sure how much that has slowed adoption. People just don't want to use video in a lot of cases. Essentially all my internal calls are on a videoconferencing system and I doubt I turn on the webcam 25% of the time. (We do use screen sharing a fair bit though.)

Google Duo is a vast improvement over Hangouts for quality and resilience. It has been almost as good as Facetime for me. Duo is also available on iOS and Android.

It is conspicuously absent on any other platform; even Android tablets can't use Duo, let alone a Linux, Windows, or macOS machine. So it's a hell of a walled garden.

It's hard, but I disagree that it hasn't been solved. As long as your device has a built-in camera and microphone, they pretty much Just Work these days.

Sure, bringing everybody together would be tough. You'd need a lot of discussion and probably glue/bridging code between different services. But it could be done! None of the big services are even trying to integrate with each other.