Aside:
>It's a wonder we can send e-mails between many servers.
I have a shared account on a small ISP, Microsoft won't receive our emails, even when replying to an email from a Microsoft user, even when user whitelisted. [It's probably the same with some other suppliers?] The only way to reply to people using Outlook/Hotmail/Live (I'm a user of hotmail for something like 16 years) is now to send via MS servers - basically had to make an account for this purpose.
The sending IPs aren't blacklisted with Senderscore (or other blacklists, I mention senderscore because they apparently provide domain reputation services for MS); some "related IPs" have medium reputation scores (senderscore 72).
http://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made-...
If I send a new person an e-mail, I have to contact them on Facebook and tell them to check their spam folder. Fuck Google and Microsoft and their terrible e-mail filtering. Just because people are so dumb they will open any ransomware sent to them doesn't mean you drop all e-mail you don't trust with no way to account for it.
I run some websites that have their own mail servers. One thing you didn't mention which can help is to be sure to use an email signature. Basically short emails are more likely to be flagged as spam, especially if there's an attachment.
Had problems with hotmail before, it's just associated IPs being factored in too strongly. Same ISP has an IP address that spam has been sent from; support responds with won't fix. In their favour at least they responded.
Domain has SPF but not DKIM.
Thankfully no other mailbox provider blocks us. We could pay to be added to the third-party "friendly" domains list of course ...
I'm surprised they wouldn't whitelist our domain but leave it on a tight leash.
In short, legislating a solution is a workaround that can turn out to be a huge detriment not too long down the road. I'm no libertarian, but it seems like a bad idea to me.
The first link I got: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/02/south_korea_to_depo...
That is just for voice, now imagine you are a phone company and want to send a call to another phone company. There must be so many different things you need to cooperate on to make it happen - billing, switching, physical connections, numbering, codecs, etc. Yes the actual protocols may be standardised, but the main part is cooperation.
It's not standards we need, it's companies that are willing to cooperate and work together. None of the big tech companies want to do that now though. Everyone wants their own walled garden so they can say they have more users that X competitor.
(I'd argue that XMPP is good enough, or with a few extensions could be made good enough, for a company who really wants to push open IM)
Spectrum is owned by the public, and regulated as spectrum is a limited resource. IP messaging isn't by any practical means a limited resource.
> As far as I know, as long as I have the right to use the frequencies, I could start my own cellular telco that transmits whatever format I want.
No. Spectrum is regulated in terms of what technology you can use, and kind of usage is supported. You can't buy LTE spectrum and broadcast radio on top of it, and vice versa. You can't (in most cases) take 2G spectrum and deploy LTE on top of it.
Point I ("I have the right to use the frequencies") directly depends on point II ("whatever format I want"). When applying for using a certain frequency band, you have to specify usage and purpose, and you can't just change your mind, i.e. you can't apply for GSM frequencies and say you will be running a GSM network, but then run the PavelLishinOverAir protocol.
I feel another such example is IPv6. It could move much faster if it would have been mandatory already.
Everyone moans about AGPL. Fine. Make something better that says if you're going to interoperate with a service, you better damn well actually interoperate. Make the license viral like GPL and hopefully when we all push in that direction, everyone needs to join up.
This is totally crazy to me. It would be like the government legislating when and where people have spoken conversations with each other.
I think a more achievable version would be that any online service which maintains user data must provide a method for a user to retrieve that data in an open-source format. Some companies would deliberately obfuscate formats, such as calendar appointments as JSON rather than iCAL or another existing standard, but I think it would give users more control than they currently have.
it's wild to me how quickly "we should find a market-external pressure source for forcing interoperability given the profit motive seemingly guarantees lack of federation because it relies on competition as its motive force" becomes "we must frogmarch innovators to the death pits"
Any emails they send to Gmail automatically go into the spam folder.
Why? I reckon it is because there is no SPF configured, no DKIM configured, etc.
We could try to get that small web hosting company to configure all that.
Instead, the plan is to move to G Suite for Nonprofits.
Even if we assume they are American companies, and we can sue them if they violate the rule; how on EARTH would we define an IM protocol broadly enough to avoid an easy avoidance of the law, but narrowly enough to not basically block all proprietary protocols?
If a company doesn't publish the protocol in use within, let's say 3 months of a valid request by a third-party then they'd be liable to a fine, perhaps something like $1 per day per registered user, plus costs of government and registered third parties in pursuing the interoperability request.
Small companies might escape, but if Facebook tried it they can't really run away. You'd need to be able to issue notices to ISPs to block those convicted of breaking the law, such orders are already part of UK law (against torrent discovery websites for example). Again you'd get some leakage but big providers like Microsoft couldn't feasibly expect enough customers to move to VPNs to bypass such a block.
IM client definition could be hard but in practice you'd have clauses requiring a judge to decide if the traffic exchange amounted to an IM communication. I see no problem with having a broad definition, if the definition were narrow then it would just get worked around. The definition would probably include email as a subset.
Were there other person-to-person communications protocols you are concerned would fall in the scope that definitely shouldn't be open?
And most of us in the US hope we never lose the right to open access in the way citizens of the UK have. I can't think of a worse thing to happen to the internet. The UK has proven that once you allow a government to censor the content of the internet they will aggressively and rapidly expand that power to censor and control.
