previously on HN:

“New EU law could require iMessage and WhatsApp to work with other platforms” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30800576

“EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30799567

It seems less about reigning in tech giants and more about breaking encryption. How is WA going to be interoperable without publicly exposing the keys to a third party?

As a citizen of the EU I can say fu%k off, EU. The only way to make interoperable messaging I'd use is if the clients are not reading the messages, but only shuffling encrypted blobs around. I'll stick with Signal for messaging otherwise.

I may have misunderstood your message, but I don’t see why interoperable messaging apps should require clients to exchange data in clear text.

Indeed, XMPP is perfectly interoperable and yet end-to-end encrypted.

Read the actual proposal — it'll never affect Signal in any bad way. Summary of the summary: Very big messengers have to interoperate with smaller ones if the smaller ones want to do that.

Signal is a smaller one and will always be below the threshold, so it'll have the choice: Allow whatsapp interop like it allows SMS now, or don't. Signal's choice.

You can see it the other way round. You could use a client you trust or compiled yourself to interact with signal users. Interoperable doesn’t necessarily mean back doored

What is the technical requirement for this to be interoperable, what if I have my own walled garden that doesn't use xml or json but it's own spin on s-expressions, and all messages are in a markle tree, and the messages are displayed using my own graphics stack instead of html/css, and all of this with e2e encryption, what do these jokers expect me todo, asking for a friend?

Based on those technical details I confidently predict that you're not going to have a «market capitalisation of at least 75 billion euro or an annual turnover of 7.5 billion» and «at least 45 million monthly end users in the EU.and 10 000 annual business users» so this won't apply to you.

ok thx

Would replacing SMS with RCS solve this? So far Apple has been very reluctant to implement it.