Oh God, that's horrifying. I'm also surprised it hasn't happened... although technically it has, with all websites saying "by registering you agree to this unbearably long and confusing terms of usage document that we know you're not going to read".
> Oh God, that's horrifying.
The legal terms would be for corporations, developers, and implementers, not end users.
We might have had open, interoperable chat today had we done something like this to protect our protocols.
If email and HTTP had been developed much later (ie. in the 2000s), we'd probably have unilateral corporate control of those protocols too. And by god, Google is certainly trying.
In this case, more like Embrace, Extend, Exsanguinate.
Exsanguinate is actually an interesting way to phrase it for this type of take over. Much like with Jabber, Meta would never aim to acquire competitors out of business. They'll just try to grow enough domestic traffic that they can break compatibility with Mastadon and gain full control over the protocol. Exsanguinate feels like a more accurate term for this sort of a parasitic take over.
Protocols should encode "legal preambles" in their handshakes that forbid unilateral extensions, eg.
or could become, Breaking the rules could hold the company liable, and not including the contract in the protocol preamble or handshake renders talking impossible.