> The bill would require communications platforms with more than 100 million monthly active members - Facebook has more than two billion - to allow its users to easily move, or port, their data to another network, Warner’s office said in a statement.
I assume that this proposal is based on good intentions. But how they want to overcome the technical hurdles is a mystery to me.
Who decides, how facebook should structure their exported data? Will there be a standard? Social media platforms like facebook, twitter, reddit or youtube are so fundamentally different that I doubt it is possible to create a common standard.
And who decides which services need to have a compatible data format?
The idea of downloading my twitter feed and post it on mastodon and vice versa is, I guess, a pipe dream. Or will I be able to download my Imgur posts and import them in Reddit? Can I export all my Youtube videos and import them on Vimeo? Yeah, go figure...
I think a better alternative would be a requirement for such companies to open up their API. I want full access to my twitter feed for free. This would allow third parties to create a single interface to many different networks, like twitter and mastodon.
> Who decides, how facebook should structure their exported data?
You might find clarity in the bill [1].
It avoids, as good laws do, defining how companies must comply, instead setting principles for clarification by the FTC and courts. ("A structured, commonly used, and machine-readable format" is the bill's language (§ 3(a)).)
> who decides which services need to have a compatible data format
Congress. "A product or service provided by a communications provider that...generates income, directly or indirectly, from the collection, processing, sale, or sharing of user data; and...has more than 100,000,000 monthly active users in the United States" is the bill's threshold (§ 2(7)).
One of the reasons that open banking works well is that every bank has essentially the same offerings and therefore the same type of data. It's perhaps possible that social networks may be marginally less uniform.
> Who decides, how facebook should structure their exported data?
Facebook. As long as it's well documented the format isn't that important. The requirement should just be that if you take the exported data and reimport it, you get back to the original state (or at least reasonably close).
Exporting data is alot simpler than importing data. I therefore doubt that all platform providers will sit together and debate, how to structure your content. In some way this could even be impossible. Let's say platform A uses id's for references, platform B uses hashes. platform C uses GUIDs. This doesn't stop here. Think about image codecs or internal links. This makes writing importers a huge pain.
Only large companies will be able to maintain different kinds of data, which will push new user to them, because they provide most integrations.
Yet, there is a lot of incentives to allow importing into your social net.
Right now, if only facebook was authorizing scrapping instead of actively fighting it, even in the absence of a clear documented API, people would be writing bridges to import your contacts just by making http requests.
The law will probably use words like "reasonable" and "common". While legal language is supposed to be as precise as possible, it is fine to be as vague as necessary, too.
In practice, I'd expect exporters to export in a format that doesn't cause them huge contortions, and importers to write the converters. Any lawsuits about unreasonably obfuscated formats would be quite messy, but maybe it's time for the legal system to handle questions of software adequately anyway.
And it should be no less vague than necessary. A decade or so ago, XML was all the rage, can you imagine if a bunch of laws had been stamped in stone mandating XML everywhere? Yuck!
I assume that this proposal is based on good intentions. But how they want to overcome the technical hurdles is a mystery to me.
Who decides, how facebook should structure their exported data? Will there be a standard? Social media platforms like facebook, twitter, reddit or youtube are so fundamentally different that I doubt it is possible to create a common standard.
And who decides which services need to have a compatible data format?
The idea of downloading my twitter feed and post it on mastodon and vice versa is, I guess, a pipe dream. Or will I be able to download my Imgur posts and import them in Reddit? Can I export all my Youtube videos and import them on Vimeo? Yeah, go figure...
I think a better alternative would be a requirement for such companies to open up their API. I want full access to my twitter feed for free. This would allow third parties to create a single interface to many different networks, like twitter and mastodon.