Thank you for writing this up, there’s an excellent amount of detail here. The proliferation of silo’ed chat protocols has been one of my pet peeves and has definitely (thus far) been heading the wrong direction; as bad as the proprietary protocols were back in the aughts, they were at least neutrally interoperable in their heyday – these days most companies are downright hostile in how their enforce their ToS when it comes to third-party clients etc.
I’m hoping the relatively smaller ecosystems (e.g. Discord) take note and at least loosen their ToS to allow for calling user APIs without fear of a perma-ban.
A couple of additional questions: is it known if companies might attempt to limit the exposure of their APIs to EU markets only, or does the DMA cover that explicitly? Is the DMA a pre-requisite for fully scaling out use of Matrix Bridging Services – i.e. does the interoperability climate pre-DMA preclude you from offering bridging as a commercial service?
is it known if companies might attempt to limit the exposure of their APIs to EU markets only, or does the DMA cover that explicitly?
I don’t believe the DMA covers that explicitly, but IANAL. Much like some sites decided to cut off EU traffic rather than implement GDPR, I guess it’s possible that the gatekeepers might only offer open APIs to EU IP addresses - but it feels like the negative PR of doing so (and the theatre of doing so, given how easy it is to get a EU IP) would not be worth it.
Is the DMA a pre-requisite for fully scaling out use of Matrix Bridging Services – i.e. does the interoperability climate pre-DMA preclude you from offering bridging as a commercial service?
Any kind of bridging to a closed service from Matrix (or XMPP) is pretty miserable today, given you have to do adversarial interoperability, which massively reduces the interest in building bridges or relying on them. So yes, DMA would be transformative for bridging and interop in general :)
So yes, DMA would be transformative for bridging and interop in general :)
How much of this do you suspect will be bridges for alternative open protocols vs alternative clients? Also, how do you foresee abuse/spam issues being handled?
Thank you for writing this up, there’s an excellent amount of detail here. The proliferation of silo’ed chat protocols has been one of my pet peeves and has definitely (thus far) been heading the wrong direction; as bad as the proprietary protocols were back in the aughts, they were at least neutrally interoperable in their heyday – these days most companies are downright hostile in how their enforce their ToS when it comes to third-party clients etc.
I’m hoping the relatively smaller ecosystems (e.g. Discord) take note and at least loosen their ToS to allow for calling user APIs without fear of a perma-ban.
A couple of additional questions: is it known if companies might attempt to limit the exposure of their APIs to EU markets only, or does the DMA cover that explicitly? Is the DMA a pre-requisite for fully scaling out use of Matrix Bridging Services – i.e. does the interoperability climate pre-DMA preclude you from offering bridging as a commercial service?
Thanks for the positive feedback :)
I don’t believe the DMA covers that explicitly, but IANAL. Much like some sites decided to cut off EU traffic rather than implement GDPR, I guess it’s possible that the gatekeepers might only offer open APIs to EU IP addresses - but it feels like the negative PR of doing so (and the theatre of doing so, given how easy it is to get a EU IP) would not be worth it.
Any kind of bridging to a closed service from Matrix (or XMPP) is pretty miserable today, given you have to do adversarial interoperability, which massively reduces the interest in building bridges or relying on them. So yes, DMA would be transformative for bridging and interop in general :)
How much of this do you suspect will be bridges for alternative open protocols vs alternative clients? Also, how do you foresee abuse/spam issues being handled?