> FB is big enough to afford investigation teams that cooperate with law enforcement to tackle the spam at the source.

Same can be said about Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc

Yet spam still exists, how is that possible if your assumption was true?

Lack of incentives due to costs being externalized.

It's not that they can't, it's that they don't want to enough.

Their profit motives are entirely aligned with reducing spam.

I don’t understand why people always think hard problems aren’t solved because of some deep conspiracy. Sometimes they’re just hard.

> I don’t understand why people always think hard problems aren’t solved because of some deep conspiracy.

I didn't allege any conspiracy. I alleged that it isn't done because it isn't profitable enough.

Moderating is expensive as fuck, so platforms do the bare minimum required by law. Facebook makes 23 billion dollars net profit a year, Microsoft 72 billion dollars, Google/Alphabet around 60 billion dollars.

Even investing just 20% of these insane amounts of money into a joint effort to combat scams and cybercrime at the source (both by assisting law enforcement and by lobbying for laws) would put a serious dent into cybercrime. Imagine what someone like Pierogi of Scammer Payback, Trilogy Media and the other scambaiters could do if they had an actual budget, and now imagine what actual law enforcement could achieve if they had the resources to actually Follow The Money.

The FB Messenger XMPP client gateway was never very good or complete. Certainly it was functional enough to use for basic chats, but no heavy user was ever going to be happy with it unless Facebook put a lot more work into it... So they opted to turn it off instead and make us write our own.

Mind elaborating on why you think that should be a law?

Because platforms intentionally go away from their open beginnings once they gain traction and moat. Facebook's removal of xmpp was the first, then Twitter came along with restricting features to only the official client (polls and medis in DMs) years ago, and now it's cat and mouse, with Twitter kicking off apps with zero notice.

Even Reddit, which has historically been extremely open towards third party apps, now gates features - RIF for example can't integrate with rewards, which is IMO pretty moronic as it could be a pretty good revenue stream for Reddit.

Capitalism has failed, and it's high time governments step in to break open the walls of the gardens.

I’m not saying that walled gardens aren’t bad, but they’re the property of those organisations. Even if you wanna start bashing holes into problematic gardens then they’d be the bottom of the list, cloud providers being more open (or at least consistent) would have a massive reduction in human time / cost.

property is a man made idea. No reason to treat is as something sacred. And we already don't care about property when government bails out these crooks.

On that basis, hand over the keys to your house and car and kindly vacate promptly.

Matrix has a bridge that interfaces (very well might I add) with messenger. I haven't looked at the code but some control messages suggest the bridge uses a MQTT listener to connect to messenger.

Fun fact: there is a 'wishlist`-priority task sitting in FB's Tasks system with detailed plans for how to change the MQTT API to break third-party clients should any of them become too popular.

Did you learn about this first hand or is there any source you can cite?

There's nothing I can cite. Saw it myself many years ago. I doubt many of the people who worked on that iteration of Messenger are even there any more, but it shows the attitude of the organization as a whole.

So the government will get to decide whose business is defined as a 'platform' before they enforce this requirement of maintaining an API suitable for 3rd party clients? Do they also decide what features are required to be in that API? I guess on a case by case basis?

Software in the pharma industry works kind of like this. That's why it can take months to years to make a tiny one line change to an application once it's been validated by the FDA.

At some point a public company becomes an utility. I'd argue that Meta and Google are at this point, albeit for different reasons.

The specifics are obviously difficult to reason about, but the scale of network effects and/or amount of internet communities which only exist as facebook groups or whatsapp groups and would simply be gone if either stopped existing is... troubling.

At the point that a public company becomes a utility, why not nationalize it? The alternative being presented here is that private companies should be legislated and regulated into behaving in a particular way which is an incredibly inefficient way to manage a public good.

Honestly in practice I'm not sure there's much difference. A "nationalized" utility would still be regulated by legislation to behave "correctly" when operated by the executive branch. See e.g. USPS.

I think the difference between the USPS--which has laws preventing it from making a profit--and a US-based tech firm that profits by selling user data to advertisers would be a massive one.

That's almost what the EU's Digital Markets Act will require them to do: https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/24/22995431/european-union-d...