A Legislative Path to an Interoperable Internet

It’s not enough to say that the Internet is built on interoperability. The Internet is interoperability. Billions of machines around the world use the same set of open protocols—like TCP/IP, HTTP, and TLS—to talk to one another. The first Internet-connected devices were only possible because phone lines provided interoperable communication ports, and scientists found a way to send data, rather than voice, over those phone lines.

In the early days of the Internet, protocols dictated the rules of the road. Because the Internet was a fundamentally decentralized, open system, services on the Internet defaulted to acting the same way. Companies may have tried to build their own proprietary networking protocols or maintain unilateral control over the content on the network, but they ultimately failed. The ecosystem was fast-moving, chaotic, and welcoming to new ideas.

Today, big platforms are ecosystems unto themselves. Companies create accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube in order to interact with consumers. Platforms maintain suites of business-facing APIs that let other companies build apps to work within the boundaries of those platforms. And since they control the infrastructure that others rely on, the platforms have unilateral authority to decide who gets to use it.

This is a problem for competition. It means that users of one platform have no easy way of interacting with friends on other services unless the platform’s owners decide to allow it. It means that network effects create enormous barriers to entry for upstart communications and social networking companies. And it means that the next generation of apps that would work on top of the new ecosystems can only exist at big tech’s pleasure.

That’s where interoperability can help. In this post, we’ll discuss how to bring about a more interoperable ecosystem in two ways: first, by creating minimum standards for interoperability that the tech giants must support; and second, by removing the legal moat that incumbents use to stave off innovative, competitive interoperators.

Interoperability is corporate entropy. It opens up space for chaotic, exciting new innovations, and erodes the high walls that monopolies build to protect themselves.

If Facebook and Twitter allowed anyone to fully and meaningfully interoperate with them, their size would not protect them from competition nearly as much as it does. But platforms have shown that they won’t choose to do so on their own. That’s where governments can step in: regulations could require that large platforms offer a baseline of interoperable interfaces that anyone, including competitors, can use. This would set a “floor” for how interoperable very large platforms must be. It would mean that once a walled garden becomes big enough, its owner needs to open up the gates and let others in.

Requiring big companies to open up specific interfaces would only win half the battle. There are always going to be upstarts who find new, unexpected, and innovative ways to interact with platforms—often against the platforms’ will. This is called “adversarial interoperability” or “competitive compatibility.” Currently, U.S. law gives incumbents legal tools to shut down those who would interoperate without the big companies’ consent. This limits the agency that users have within the services that are supposed to serve them, and it creates an artificial “ceiling” on innovation in markets dominated by monopolists. 

It’s not enough to create new legal duties for monopolists without dismantling the legal tools they themselves use to stave off competition. Likewise, it’s not enough to legalize competitive compatibility, since the platforms have such an advantage in technical resources that serious competitors’ attempts to interoperate face enormous engineering challenges. To break out of the big platforms’ suffocating hold on the market, we need both approaches. 

Mandating Access to Monopolist Platforms: Building a Floor

This post will look at one possible set of regulations, proposed in the bipartisan