If you live in the EU, you might've heard of the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act. To keep it short, these are laws that make it harder for companies to build monopolies and proprietary standards on their own; Or well, I guess you could say these two laws combined completely prohibit such behaviour.

Wanna make some sort of new gadget? Chances are you'll have to use USB-C for charging. Wanna make a nearby-share like feature? You better use open WiFi standards to facilitate connections.

These are just two examples you might heard of, namely Apple and others being forced to use USB-C or forcing AirDrop to use Wi-Fi Aware instead of a proprietary standard. Or how WhatsApp was forced to allow interoperable messaging.

Some may argue the reception to this has been mixed, but really in my classes, my family and my friend group everyone uniformly loves changes like these because it breaks down barriers. It allows people to have chat messages between ecosystems, use the same charger, 'airdrop' to their android friends, or have tightly integrated smart-home setups.

These kinds of things are constantly being seeked out by people, remember Beeper? They were hugely popular because one thing they did was break down iMessage's barriers.

What I'm trying to say here is, time and time again we've seen that people get excited over standards being established and barriers broken down, and that it generally ends up just being integrated into every day life until people can't imagine a life without it; We're starting to see this happen with USB-C, people don't even have Micro-USB or Lightning devices around anymore, and when we say “do you have a charger?” it's just assumed that it's going to be USB-C

And quite frankly, you should care about that.

It may seem a bit mundane in nature, it's just some standards, just every day life, but I firmly believe you should care about open standards just a bit more because without them, we would slowly be locked into corporate ecosystems and under their control.

It really doesn't take much, just look for standards-based alternatives to the things you already use, or try looking for something like that before you make the decision to use a particular thing; I.e if you're looking for an instant-messenger, look for one based on open standards and see if you like it. And if you don't, be sure to tell 'em! Many of these projects are not only based upon open standards but often Open-Source, meaning they work in the open, often for the public, and they depend on feedback and (financial) support from people like you.

And even if you don't end up using something based on open standards, that's okay! I'm not asking you to like every single open standard there is, but I believe them to be incredibly important to our freedom and our personal independence, or more specifically our independence from big-tech corporations that dictate how we use technology.

I mean, that is also why my devices run Linux, for independence and openness of the ecosystem; For the same reason I've started using XMPP in addition to Matrix (sort of) for my instant messaging needs.

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(this post is from my backlog of posts, I tried to clean it up a little but quite frankly lacked the energy; hopefully my point comes across)

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