Companies shouldn't be expected to individually make suboptimal decisions in order to preserve the health of the market. They should be regulated by a functioning government.
Let's just say that the government decided in the year 2005 that no private company can ship something that will replace SMS as the defacto messaging system because it wants interoperability.
We would have never had iMessage, Whatsapp, Messenger, etc. Other countries would have far surpassed us in messaging communication tech.
It doesn't have to be "you can't replace SMS" because that would be stifling to innovation. It could simply be "messaging protocols should be open and/or interoperable".
The web is what it is today because its open. The telephone network is what it is today because its interoperable. Imagine if the web was bifurcated based on the operating system you wanted to use (that was Microsoft's vision in the late 90s and early 00s: to create a large section of the web that required Windows). Imagine if a Verizon customer had a limited feature set when calling an AT&T customer (like the inability to leave a voicemail for instance). No one would tolerate these things. But yet people will argue in favor of this with messaging (as long as its Apple doing it)
> It doesn't have to be "you can't replace SMS" because that would be stifling to innovation. It could simply be "messaging protocols should be open and/or interoperable".
It doesn't seem the same, but that's effectively also stifling to innovation.
For one thing, if the whole reason something like iMessage got created was to ensure an Apple monopoly, if they couldn't use it to do that, they just wouldn't build it, not build it open instead.
For another, what does "open and interoperable" even mean? There isn't necessarily a defined protocol for these things already. So who would come up with one? Almost certainly, the big companies would have to be involved, and they could steer the standard to benefit themselves, even just by making it closer to something they've already built (which makes total technical sense too - of course you want to base the protocol on existing tech!).
But that means that compliance is much harder for smaller companies, which would mean you're giving a huge advantage to a big player anyway.
As opposed to the no-regulation world, in which Whatsapp was a startup that could do whatever it wanted, and ended up being the default messaging platform that half the world uses.
SMTP, IMAP and POP did not prevent gmail or outlook from launching products
2G/3G/4G/5g did not hinder the mobile industry it only fostered it .
Standard payment interface like UPI did not stop apps for payments being built , India didn’t need a Venmo or WeeChat to innovate here before standardization
Innovations happen despite or without regulations if there is market demand for it . FRAND patents exist for a reason.
I can’t think of any common example where interoperability killed innovation
That's a poor option to regulate from. They could just as easily have required messaging apps to make their protocols open, allowing for competition in the app space messaging over them and not facing lock in.
So what's the financial incentive for companies to develop & maintain open standard messaging protocols? For example, I'm sure it costs Meta a pretty penny to facilitate messages with central servers, store historical messages, and pay engineers to maintain and develop new features. If they have then be forced to open up Messenger for free, they might not have started Messenger in the first place.
Also, SMS is the open protocol so we have at least one interoperable standard for people to choose from.
So... Meta might not choose to develop a messenger? Or maybe they would choose to use someone else's system (since again it's open and interoperable)? I'm sorry, where's the issue here?
We had lots of progress despite regulation of technical standards in the past. And the regulation doesn’t have to force a particular communication protocol, it could simply be forcing a separation between hardware and communication providers.
