This is something I have been thinking about. I don’t like regulation, but imagine a small, surgically focused requirement that says, for example, “you are obligated to provide an API covering the entirety of your platform’s GUI features if you serve more than N users”.

As a consequence:

1) fully-featured third-party cross-platform client software allows users to transition across platforms more easily,

2) platforms start bleeding users,

3) platforms start charging for service,

4) platforms become pipes.

There are implications, though:

1) big tech might find ways to pretend to be smaller entities;

2) this does not guarantee that user data privacy is respected, but ideally this creates a scenario in which the user is free to choose a more ethical provider;

3) client app security & ethics will become paramount, client apps will become valuable targets;

4) downgrade to pipes will end of the age of cool Web 2.0 platforms and grand social startups. Unfortunately, I don’t see any other way—this business model is user- (society-?) hostile yet addictive, and there seems no other way around it apart from WeChat-like nationalization which is objectionable for a whole other chunk of reasons.

> 3) platforms start charging for service,

Possibly. If FB et al did, they would have to become a lot more responsive to users.

> 4) platforms become pipes.

Not sure what you mean by that.

A pipe is like a mobile provider: it provides an infrastructure for data to flow, but not necessarily the terminals. Here too, if platforms open up full APIs they’d be liable to become more like pipes for social data to flow through, to be displayed by third-party client of user’s choice. They can still offer a GUI and develop new features, it just has to be covered by an API. It’s an interesting thought experiment.

Ehh...

It sounds nice in theory, but in practice I suspect such a regulation would at best accomplish nothing and at worst would be a disaster. How do you even define a "social network?" The regulation would either be too broad and wind up covering the comments section of HN, or too narrow and easy to evade. In all likelihood the outcome would be similar to GDPR -- the big companies that inspire it would have little difficulty with compliance while startups would find it that much harder to compete.

> The regulation would either be too broad and wind up covering the comments section of HN

HN is clearly a social network. What I envisage is a regulation that applies to social networking and user-generated content sites with greater than a certain number of users, e.g. 1 million.

Obviously there shouldn't be onerous regulation on small sites.

Ben Thompson @ Stratechery does the most in depth analyses of regulating companies like FB, which I think reach similar conclusions for different reasons, such as it's actually in the users' best interest in some ways.

Why shouldn't it apply to the HN comment section?