It’s not uncommon for any of us to trade our personal freedoms for various perks. As a most well-known example, in most modern societies it’s expected to give up one’s freedom to use force in exchange for a safer society altogether. And it makes sense: if it’s not corrupt, letting the state own a monopoly on the use of force is a net positive for everyone. We are significantly more cautious when a privately owned company requests that we relinquish some of our freedoms, but it’s not uncommon for us to accept even those monopolies, often in exchange for a better level of conformity (think credit cards or smartphone platforms). But what happens when we, consciously or not, allow this concept to go a bit too far, relieving us of more freedom than we initially anticipated and subduing us to monopolies whose walled gardens were not evident at first sight?
Although there are more than one example of such cases, the one that surprises me the most is how keen we all are in giving in to privately owned monopolies with the communication channels we use daily. Monopolies are not that dangerous if we can afford to live without them, but opting out of popular communication networks doesn’t seem to be something any of us would willingly accept. Could you imagine living without a phone, in a world where you couldn’t reach almost any person on the entire planet at any moment? Or without an email that allows you to send any type of document to anyone you choose? Or instant messaging apps that enable you to chat with virtually any audience? However, while phone and email networks are open to any company to participate in, almost all of the IM apps we use today are walled gardens owned and fully controlled by only one respective company. A company that can choose to, for whatever reason or possibly even by sheer mistake, forbid you from accessing their network, locking you out of friends, family, and all the communities you have built there. Agreed, the probability of such a scenario is small, but it’s far from being zero. So, the question here is: do you accept a non-zero chance of being stripped of the ability to reach out to the rest of society? Or, in a less dramatic scenario, what would you say if your least favorite billionaire were to buy your favorite IM app? Or a country where the company that owns that IM app is incorporated turns rogue? It’s not that we haven’t witnessed all of those scenarios in our lifetimes.
It seems businesses have already answered those questions by being reluctant to abandon email for any of the existing IM solutions. They recognize that allowing other companies to control the communication channel to their customers puts them in a subordinate position and refuse to play along. Governments are a bit slower in recognizing that, but are moving towards that point slowly. However, we, the end users, seem to be mostly indifferent and are willingly accepting whatever IM app people around us use at the moment. Most people I talk to, when presented with the option of being denied access to whatever the network they prefer at the moment, simply respond with “Well, if X kicks me out, I’ll simply switch to Y or Z!”. However, what they do not recognize is that while they can switch, their communities will almost for sure stay wherever they currently are, effectively leaving the kicked-out user permanently disconnected. And that’s the level of control no single company in this world should have.
Looking at why we are where we are, I recognise two main drivers making proprietary protocols so amenable. Firstly, they are way easier for authors to develop, leading to their faster pace of innovation and thus being more feature-rich. Secondly, they are also much more straightforward for users to use, leading to their speedier adoption. However, although I could not imagine developers wishing for more complex development cycles, I do believe users would strongly benefit from accepting a bit more complexity if that would allow them to win back their freedom from being denied access to the network or the network itself being enshittified. History teaches us that breaking out of walled gardens is not only possible but actually very likely, especially once technology matures and the pace of innovation slows down. For instance, the whole telephone network in the USA was one big walled garden until Bell System was broken up in 1984, or that the first commercial online services were all walled gardens until the Internet took off.
In today’s world, communication is essential and should be treated almost as a basic human need. As such, no single entity, be it a corporation or state, should be in a position to rule who will and who will not have access to it. Communication protocols should be “federated” by default (anyone should be able to create an app that can communicate with any other app), allowing you to switch providers/apps without losing access to the rest of the network, just as you can, for example, switch between telephone companies or email providers, but remain able to contact anyone you were contacting before. If this comes at a price of some added complexity, we should embrace it, as any inconveniences caused by that complexity seem minuscule when compared to the potential inconveniences we may encounter if we let any single entity have a monopoly over the communication channels we use.
Or, as the saying goes: freedom is not free.