[adam_arthur]

The company doesn't need to expose custom APIs on their data. If they implement a chat protocol, they must allow other clients to interface with it.

For the data side, likely any requirements wouldn't go into effect until a dataset is deemed sufficiently large/societally important, and there could be a period of exclusivity similarly to the patent system to encourage innovation. This system works very well for new drug creation, with competitors free to copy the drug for pennies on the dollar after patent expiry, so I very much doubt it would stifle innovation in tech, especially given the lower capital requirements to innovate.

I'm not suggesting at all the government mandates private companies implement a public write api into their own datacenter. I'm suggesting the privately hosted data must be replicatable and thus hostable by competitors. Likely the practical way to do this, technically, is to support a public kafka/persistent eventing system such that anybody can firehose all historical and new data. Ideally with funding help.

Hosting data is cheaper than ever, and continues to deflate in cost. The companies in this line of fire are already quasi-monopoly behemoths, so I don't buy into the cost-prohibitive/stifling innovation perspective.

[9dev]

> The company doesn't need to expose custom APIs on their data. If they implement a chat protocol, they must allow other clients to interface with it.

And how would that work without a way to talk to the company’s chat server, and document the way to do that, and commit to keeping that way of communicating reasonably stable? In other words, an API?

Which implies sort of a commitment to the way that chat protocol works, maybe even before the company knows how that looks like. Modern development methodology, that is, working in sprints and iterating towards a local maximum, doesn’t really go well with an API that’s required to work pretty much stable from day one. So when would the point in time be where you’d be required to open up to other clients?

[adam_arthur]

The comment you're replying to already answers this, so I'll refer you to that

[9dev]

not really. An API doesn’t necessarily have to be a HTTP interface. A data schema is also an API, if the documents are made available. The endpoints where that data is available is. And you still need heaps of documentation that someone needs to maintain. Not every system has simple to, from, and content fields.

I just doubt you really thought this through.

[Waterluvian]

It’s going to be hard to actually draw a line on what ought to be public.

If I make a multiplayer video game and it has a chat feature, do I have to expose that?

Opinions and feelings won’t cut it: what’s the prescriptive rule to know?

[bionhoward]

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