[alex_duf]

I think similarly to how europe has forced Banks to interoperate by making them write a protocol that can interoperate, governments need to force social media companies to write down a protocol and use it.

I like the analogy with utilities, but the issue is that we pay for electricity, but we don't pay for our usage of social media. As long as that's true we can difficulty do what I'm suggesting above

[simfoo]

Exactly that. There needs to be a mandated federation protocol for instant messenger apps that have lets say > 10 million user in the EU.

[vinay427]

I think India's Unified Payments Interface is a better analogy here. From what I understand (as an outsider, so based only on what I've read) it provides a universal API for mobile applications to interface with banks, essentially standardizing the federation of bank transfers. Therefore, your account at bank X can be used to pay an account at bank Y for some service that uses app Z.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface

[CRConrad]

Why would that be a better analogy than the European system that allows you to do the exact same thing?