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Signal president Meredith Whittaker says they had no choice but to use AWS, and that's a problem
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2025
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Is this even the solution in this case? These are truly global companies which begs the obvious question: Which government?
Which single government is incorruptible? Two or more you say? All governments maybe? What happens when regulatory rules are dissimilar? Lowest common denominator then perhaps? Would the Taliban-led Afghan government be able to weigh in and block resources showing women working if that was their want?
Yes, that’s the solution.
There’s a reason why every rich piece of shit is 100% against government regulation. They want absolute power to exploit, pollute, abuse, bribe and every other anti-social activity we can imagine.
Okay, then. Describe the law that would fix this. This is your chance to write the bulletproof legislation.
Well, now you can show them! Just describe your perfect regulation right here and tell us how it will be implemented worldwide.
Are you some kind of lawyer? You seem to think that I can write a law on an online forum. Things like that usually take a lot of work to figure out the details.
The FCC has had media market size laws on the books for decades. I can imagine something similar to that but for the digital world since it is so important to the modern economy.
The idea should be that if a business is too big to fail then it is too big to exist and should be broken up.
I'm not, but I've got a brain and like to use it. I saw your post suggesting regulation (which I normally agree with) and then started thinking about how regulation would have to be written. I then came up with the questions I put in my post. I figured if you were suggesting a regulatory fix, you'd thought of these questions too and had some answers.
Imagine my disappointment when you just replied [paraphrased] "People against regulation suck".
See? Thats more what I'm looking for! The FCC model has some possibilities, but shortcomings. While FCC does have global reach, as it is the body that regulates any communications satellite in space, the FCC angle still depends on the USA being the arbitrator of global law. With the current government in Washington, we can see why that may not be a good idea.
Do you have a solution?
I don't. Which is why I'm trying to discuss it here. I have formed a number of questions that I posted would have to be solved. Feel free to jump in and help solutioning with us.
The most practical solution is something similar to particular features of GDPR - where greater scale / marketshare increase the responsibilities the company has, like increased requirements to support competitors (API compatibility, infrastructure access, etc) and prohibition against anticompetitive behaviors.
I had thought about that possibility too. In this would be a "lowest common denominator" method. Meaning the most restrictive law, in all regions that the services serve, would have to be followed by the global service companies. If we're just talking about USA and EU regulations it can look potentially better, but do we just stop with those two regulatory bodies? What if China wants to have a say, and we can guess what some of their laws would impose?
The solution is to break up Amazon's monopoly. In addition to breaking up Amazon itself into smaller competing companies, a large government like the EU can insist that these private backbones interoperate such that you can use local providers without the overhead of dealing with 20 different interfaces
We already have smaller competing companies. If you read the article you see that Signal says that only a global company with its globally-integrated services can support the Signal application because of its requirements.
I'm not quite sure where you're going here. Its not just a problem of different interfaces. The Signal app cites the need for global endpoints with low latency and a consistent platform for deployment of services including resiliency. You're not going to get that spreading your app over 20 different providers. Its even difficult for a single provider, which the most recent AWS outage proves.
Good point. Laws are useless. Case closed.