This doesn't seem right to me. It is often in companies' best interests to adopt standards, but that is because it allows them both to have an optimized supply chain.

Car manufacturers today have a lot of standards that I expect would make competition from any new contenders harder not easier. Tesla would be an example of that, they did survive but the industry thought it was never going to work precisely because of all the standards and regulations required.

On the other hand, early car manufacturers didn't have standards and shared technology stacks. At that time new car makers popped up everywhere and we had a ton of competition in the space.

Open standards are good for the consumer and good for any features that require interoperability. It has nothing to do with competition though.

Sorry, but you're incorrect.

If a particular product is tied to a specific proprietary tech stack, then the consumer is also tied to specific suppliers. This is known as vendor lock in.

Microsoft used this approach with Internet Explorer back in the old days; ensuring that it provided proprietary elements and implementation, that would encourage developers to provide websites that only functioned using their browser.

Open standards allow choice.

That can be one aspect of it, though I would argue that doesn't mean open standards are always better for competition.

I think you're also assuming the only competition that matters is long term. In the short term the potential for locking users into your own ecosystem can incentivize short term competition.

Long term competition seems like a good goal, but that assumption wasn't part of it at the beginning of this chain.

If we don't think about long term competition we end up in the scenario we are in now.

Two main players. No choice.

> that doesn't mean open standards are always better for competition

Yes, they are. Show us a counter-example.

The web is open and is famously very competitive. We have three whole browser engines and only two of them are implemented by for-profit corporations whose valuations have 13 digits. I mean other ones exist, but the average modern developer claims it's your fault when something doesn't work because you use firefox or safari and also demands the browser rewrap all the capabilities the operating system already provides for you because they can't be assed to do the work of meeting users where they are.

In a world with over 3 billion people we have 'three whole browser engines'.

I don't want to be mean, but this isn't a great counterpoint.

I'm not sure what the number of people in the world has to do with whether an open standard does or doesn't promote innovation. The user asked for a case where an open standard didn't do that and I provided one. Whether you think it's a great counterpoint is entirely irrelevant to me.

But browser engines are entirely functional based on open standards!!!!!

This is the core proposition!

The presumption that started this thread is that open standards are always good for competition. I think browsers are a good counter example where open standards led to three browser vendors, we have less competition rather than more.

Do you expect that browsers relying on closed standards would result in more competition under the same circumstances? You didn't demonstrate that.

My original demonstration wasn't actually the browser question. Auto manufacturers did show much higher levels of competition before standards and shared components.

Though it is worth noting that there was heavy competition in the browser space prior to the specs we have today. Part of the reason we ended up with a heavily spec-driven web is precisely because the high level of competition was leading to claims of corporate espionage, and it was expected that end user experience would be better with standards.

I absolutely agree the end user experience is better. I disagree that has anything to do with competition.

Without open standards, we would likely choose _one browser_, due to the economic cost of development.

One manufacturer would call all the shots for the _one browser_.

There would be zero competition until something calamitous happened to the manufacturer and the pendulum swung to a new monopolist.

We even have an example of how this plays out to fall back on; Macromedia Flash.

Without open standards, we would need to pick a browser and provide for it.

If we needed to support another browser we'd need to provide a new solution built to its specification.

Open standards have allowed the possibility of multiple browser vendors, without making the life of browser consumers (i.e. developers and organisations providing apps and sites) a living hell.

Without this, we'd be providing apps and sites for a proprietary system (e.g. Macromedia Flash back in ancient history).

Furthermore, when Flash had cornered a market, it had absolutely no competition at all. A complete monopoly on that segment of the market.

It took Steve Jobs and Apple to destroy it, but that's a different story.

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The reasoning for only three engines, isn't the fault of open standards.

There are many elements of our economic system that prevent competition. Open standards is not one of them.

Browser engines are extremely difficult to start today because of the extensive, complicated, and ever growing list of specifications.

We had a web before open standards. It wasn't the best user experience and each browser was somewhat of a walled garden, but there was heavy competition in the space.

It was a literal hellscape before open standards.

I imagine there's most likely a subset of the population who believe that open standards are aligned conceptually to regulation, and that any form of regulation in a free market is wrong.

This subset of the population is misguided at best, and delusional at worst.

Open standards are essential.

Did that hellacape include more competition between companies building web browsers?

With Microsoft bundling IE with the OS, no.

Did you see my earlier comment? Car manufacturing for decades or so years didn't have open standards with regards to parts used or how they were built. We ended up with a huge number of competing car manufacturers compared to what we have today.

Didn't older cars rely on open standards making it possible to go to any repair shop? Or maybe it was effectively open stanards, i.e., nothing prevented you from learning how they worked and modifying them.

Nowadays, all cars became hostile to users thanks to the closed software: https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/06/mozilla_vehicle_data_... I wouldn't call it "better competition".

Older cars could go to most mechanic shops because older cars were more simple. The fundamentals of how the cars worked were similar not because the companies collaborated on parts and designs but because they were comparatively simple and all were based on combustion engines that required certain components and physics to be similar.

Well, most. There were the odd steam powered and even early electric vehicles back then. I wouldn't expect either to roll into any mechanic shop in town and get service.

We don't need agreement for this. In the past, hardware was limited, and you could only really implement one (maybe two) network stacks before things got silly. Nowadays, a software-defined radio can speak ten thousand protocols, for a lower cost than saving a cat video to your hard drive.

We only need that the standards are open, and described clearly enough for a schoolchild to implement, and that we are not prevented from adding additional protocol support to systems we acquire.

Hardware protocols are a bit different, but I actually dislike the USB-C standardisation. We already had better de-facto standards (e.g. small, "fixed-function" devices like feature phones and e-readers all use Micro USB-B for charging). Our problems were mainly "this laptop barrel charger is incompatible with this other laptop barrel charger", and proprietary Apple connectors.

The most important hardware protocol is power supply, which we can fix by requiring well-documented, user-accessible contacts that, when sufficiently-clean power is applied to them, will power the device. These could be contacts on the motherboard (for something designed to be opened up), or something like Apple's Smart Connector (without the pointless "I'll refuse to charge until you handshake!" restriction).

Requiring open, well-documented protocols which aren't unnecessarily-complicated is imo more important than requiring standard protocols.

We're not just talking about hardware here.

Any standard that is developed closed-source and is protected or proprietary, can and will prevent consumer choice further down the line.

Interoperability of data, choice between vendors, and the ability for smaller players to compete with established larger players are all directly negatively affected by a lack of open standards.

They're negatively affected by a lack of openness. Some proprietary XML nonsense that's well-documented makes interoperability a week's work, maximum. Meanwhile, Microsoft's incomprehensible "open standard OOXML", supported by every document editor I care to name, is a huge impediment to interoperability. Limiting myself to even the well-designed ODF format means there are features I can't implement in my software: standardisation comes at the expense of innovation.

In software, the problem is closedness, protectionism, and undocumentedness, not proprietary wheel reinvention.

>In software, the problem is closedness, protectionism, and undocumentedness, not proprietary wheel reinvention.

Quite simply, the first three problems are actually caused by proprietary wheel reinvention.

Correct. But proprietary wheel reinvention is necessary (albeit clearly not sufficient) for progress, so we mustn't prohibit it!

No it isn't necessary for progress.

Standards can be (and are) developed cooperatively and these still allow and encourage progress.

C23 would not be nearly as good as it is without proprietary C compiler extensions, and other non-C programming languages. Sure, C23's versions of some features are better than many proprietary implementations, but they wouldn't exist at all if the lessons hadn't been learned from that exploration.

Once upon a time, Jabber was the messaging protocol. But what killed interoperable instant messaging wasn't a shift away from Jabber: it was a shift away from interoperability. Requiring all chat communication systems to be Jabber wouldn't have helped, and it would have prevented IRCv3.

>Once upon a time, Jabber was the messaging protocol. But what killed interoperable instant messaging wasn't a shift away from Jabber: it was a shift away from interoperability.

And how is interoperability possible without agreed standards?

The same way it always has been? Microsoft Office implements the WordPerfect formats, and WordPerfect implements the Microsoft Office formats.

Which is a process of reverse engineering and guess work.

Unless the formats are clearly-documented, and not overcomplicated. The WordPerfect format is philosophically similar to RTF, except that it's easier to get a plain-text version. Quoth http://justsolve.archiveteam.org/wiki/WordPerfect:

> If you're a programmer attempting to get a program to extract the plain text out of a WordPerfect document, and are not interested in the fancy formatting and other features, this is a fairly simple process; just make the program skip the parts that are not text.

The "fancy formatting" is pretty easy to parse, too, as I understand (though I've never tried it): it's pretty much one-to-one with what's shown in the program's UI, which is literally designed to be easy to understand.

Formats like DOC (Microsoft Office's pre-DOCX format) and PSD (PhotoShop's horrid mess) require reverse-engineering, even given the (atrocious) documentation, because they're overcomplicated and the documentation is not complete. This is what I'm saying should be prohibited. We don't need to mandate that people use existing protocols or file formats.

None of this is about mandating or forcing adherence.

Open standards allow interoperability by default. Open standards simplify development. Open standards encourage the creation of new markets. Open standards allow competitiveness that provides the consumer with choice, which is ultimately what a free market economy thrives on.

How would you suggest we ensure that the large corporations adhere to open standards, if not by mandating it?

Are browsers mandated to follow standards?

It is literally impossible to implement the full WHATWG spec, as an independent developer.

You haven't answered the question.

That's because it's a big question. You can make a browser like Dillo, but it won't be able to run web-based banking software. You can make a browser like Konquerer, but it won't be able to use Netflix, or reliably get past Cloudflare walls. So, I'd say… yeah, browser developers are effectively mandated to follow standards – except that (as I said before) it's impossible for an unauthorised developer to implement the full WHATWG spec.

You're being obtuse.

Standards aren't the issue here.

I'm not opposed to open standards, but what makes you think that a corporation which simultaneously violates anti-trust law in three markets and evades meaningful enforcement can be forced to comply with standards?

The problem is not primarily technological, it is a problem of rule of law. Google is a serial violator, found guilty multiple times. So it is a failure of enforcement of law (unless government actions in the near term end up being very dramatic).

If someone points a gun to your head, I guess you could solve that by inventing a personal forcefield. But until you do, we need law enforcement as a deterrent against murder. Otherwise murderers will just keep on doing it.