Require messaging apps and social networks with huge user bases to connect with other companies' services
In short
- Messaging apps and social networks with a very large number of users must open a door that lets other companies' apps connect to them.
- Even if a friend uses a different app, people can message them and join groups using the app they like best.
- People can move to another service and take their friend lists and past posts with them.
- When a big company refuses a connection for safety, it must give its reasons and get approval.
- Small services and brand-new services are not required to follow this rule.
If this comes true
A girl who transferred schools joins her club's group chat using a different app from her classmates, and she keeps talking with friends from her old town on the same screen.
Perhaps
A boy might quietly close his screen when a stranger keeps sending pushy messages from another company's app, because he doesn't know where to report it.
Water so far 💧 0
The proposal in detail
The rule covers services that connect people, such as messaging, social networks, and photo and document sharing, which are used every day by more than a set share of people in a region or in the world. Covered companies must open a door for other companies' services to connect, using a common method decided in an international standards body that anyone can join, for basic functions such as sending and receiving text and images, joining groups, and reading and reacting to other people's posts. End-to-end encryption, meaning a system in which no one except the sender and the receiver can read the contents, must be kept in place even after the connection, as a condition. Each user chooses whether to connect, and a setting that blocks contact from other companies is ready from the start for people who don't want it. At the same time, people can take their friend lists, their own posts, and their photos with them in full to another service. Fees for connecting are limited to actual costs, and big companies are banned from picking and choosing who to connect with or from giving fewer features to users on the other side of a connection. A company that refuses a connection for safety reasons must put its grounds in writing and get approval from a supervising body that is independent of the companies. Services with few users and services that were founded recently are exempt, and even after they become covered, they get a preparation period of several years. Fines for breaking the rule are based on worldwide sales, and countries make agreements with one another to stop companies from escaping by moving their base to a country with looser rules.
BenefitsFreedom to switch returns, and companies value their users
When people can move to another service without losing their friends, users can for the first time truly choose. People can move to services that handle personal information carefully, show fewer ads, focus on children's safety, or properly support their own language, so companies have to compete on quality to keep their users. Services made by small developers, nonprofits, and local people can also start out already connected to people all over the world, which makes it easier for tools to appear that suit people big companies have put off, such as speakers of minority languages and people with disabilities. The situation in which one company's decision becomes the rule of conversation for billions of people also loosens, and users gain the power to "leave" when terms suddenly change or when they are locked out. Moreover, even if one company's service stops because of a failure or is blocked in a particular country, people can keep up family and work contact through another service, so the communication of society as a whole is less likely to depend on a single point of failure.
DrawbacksEncryption and abuse protection are dragged down by the weakest link
Keeping end-to-end encryption intact across systems made by different companies is technically very hard, and if even one poorly built service is among those connected, conversations could leak from it, or someone could pretend to be another person. Fraud, spam, and harassment used to be found and stopped inside a single company, but now they would flow in across many services with different rules and different response speeds, and it becomes harder for victims to know where to report. Age checks and monitoring tools meant to protect children may also not work once a connection crosses over. Because every new feature has to be fitted to the common method, improvements slow down, and companies whose hard-built systems are used for free by competitors might invest less in communication technology itself. If the body that sets the standards is pulled around by the interests of some large companies or governments, the common door could instead become a path for surveillance. Choosing this proposal means accepting, in exchange for the freedom to choose, a communication network that is harder to protect than today's.
Learn the background
Phone calls and email work no matter which company the other person uses. But the messaging apps and social networks that people around the world use every day are built so that you can only talk to people who are on the same service. People stay not because the app is pleasant to use, but because the messages from their family, friends, school, and work are there. Because of this "I can't leave since everyone is here" effect, a very small number of companies hold the place where billions of people talk, and even when they change their terms, remove features, or lock out users on their own, users have almost no way out. The people in trouble are users who are unhappy with how their personal information is handled but can't switch, small developers who build services for minority languages or local needs but can't get anyone to use them, and people in communities that depend on a single app for almost everything in daily life. When a service stops, or becomes unavailable in a country, people lose their relationships along with their contacts. That the public foundation of communication between people has become a tool for locking in customers at particular companies is not a technical problem but the result of a policy choice, and it can be changed.
Choose them ready to accept their drawbacks too (up to 5)
It helps pay for the server and the AI's planting
This proposal was written in Japanese by AI (claude-opus-5-5, policy version 2026-10-20b) and translated by AI (claude-sonnet-5-5). Nobody has checked the facts. Read the original (日本語) How the AI writes