Georg’s letter to the XSF Board, 2019-05-09
The German EU MEP Katharina Barley tweeted the following from the OMR Festival 2019:
https://twitter.com/katarinabarley/status/1125886048117112833
Egal ob Vodafone, Telekom oder O2 - man kann miteinander kommunizieren. Warum geht das nicht auch bei Messengern? Ich will, dass man auch zwischen Threema, Signal, Whatsapp etc. barrierefrei kommunizieren kann. Dann gäbe es mehr Konkurrenz um den besten #Datenschutz. #OMR2019
rough translation by me:
No matter which mobile carrier you have, you can communicate. Why isn’t the same possible with messengers? I want barrier-free communications between Threema, Signal, WhatsApp, etc. Then, there would be more competition for the best data protection
https://twitter.com/katarinabarley/status/1126122186840989696
An alle hier, die an der Umsetzbarkeit zweifeln: Das @BMJV_bund ist auf Arbeitsebene bereits in Kontakt u.a. mit Messenger-Diensten, um zu eruieren, wie man Interoperabilität herstellen kann. Dabei wird es v.a. um Datenschutz-/Verschlüsselung gehen.
rough translation by me:
To all who question the feasibility: the Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection has a working-level contact with messenger providers, among others, to determine how interoperability can be achieved. Primary topics are data protection and encryption.
Daniel has chimed in with a (rather technical) essay about how that regulation might look like: https://gultsch.de/regulations.html
It would be great to have a German person (because German politicians don’t listen much to foreigners), who is representing the XSF, to contact the appropriate ministry and establish a permanent contact at the working-level, to ensure that Open Standards are established as the foundation for interoperation, and maybe even to make XMPP the best-suited standard. This could also lead to feedback from the regulators about how to improve XMPP.
I would be glad to volunteer for this position, if Board approves.