That's a good point - especially important if someone's thinking about legislating a particular technology. On the other hand, maybe in this case it would be enough to legislate a requirement for openness of the protocol? I.e. whatever it is, if it has enough many users, it has to be fully available to third party integrations.
What about SMS? Everyone has it, it works, and is usually fairly instant. It's not very feature rich, but could there be an SMS 2.0 protocol that was backward compatible?
