> Who asked for this, exactly?

That's a good question. And how would it work.

A couple cases I can see - photos and email. Export my email from gmail, import it to protonmail, delete gmail account. OK. How about incoming email though? That's not content I created or own the copyright to. What about emails I sent to people that are copy pastes of news article material or attached photos determined to be copyrighted by someone else. Perhaps these should be filtered out so it's only the user's personally created content that is downloaded. Now photos from one service to another have that same check that should be done. But the matter of comments on the photo. Some comments are responses from the photo owner. Others are comments by random people. Those comments should not be exported since they don't have the rights to transfer them. So I upload this to some other photo site and have a bunch of one sided conversations. Fair enough though I can see how that works.

Then I want to export all my conversations from Hacker News and import them to Reddit. Hacker News will give me a zipped set of xml files or perhaps a SQLite database. Then I create some custom subreddit and upload these comments there. But they'll all be one-sided conversations of course since the people I'm replying to or who reply to me can't be part of the data dump. So I've done this, but why is it necessary this be supported at all? How about reverse? I tell Hacker News, hey the law says you have to let me import my comments from reddit here. So I do that. And what is that supposed to accomplish. Not sure. Maybe people will then say hey I want to upload my photos from Instagram to the Steam Store's comments section. Or upload all my email there.

Also of interest is that every site will have to support every conceivable possible export format generated by every other site. Complex job for those of us who have struggled with similar data migration problems with a finite set of formats and possible errors in the data. And what about the data that has errors? Will the exporting company by liable for costs by the importing company due to errors in the exporting company's export job?

Also the article suggests the bill is a bit more extreme than this. The user will not actually download the data and reupload it somewhere, instead they will go to Facebook and pick "Hacker News" from a drop down menu and then Facebook will be required to send all the user's data to Hacker News automatically and Hacker News will be required to accept it and do something with it, presumably provide similar functionality that the user is accustomed to. Perhaps Hacker News will then be legally required to implement a clone of Facebook, gmail, Instagram, and every other social media site simply to be able to handle these import requests. And every other site likewise will be required to do the same.

What about illegal content and content that violates the importing services TOS? Will they be forced to accept the data and yet responsible still for hosting it even if they don't want it? Someone wants to export their homemade videos from their YouPorn account to YouTube or maybe to the comment section of the New York Times which should now support and host video. Can they refuse to interoperate under this bill mandating interoperating?

Everything should be interoperable and all formats exportable from every site and importable to every other site, automatically. Is this a sensible goal.

I have a suspicion that the senators supporting this bill really just want to be able to export their email from gmail and yahoo for free and import it to some other email service so they want to pass a law. And then they were brainstorming and someone said hey let's make this law apply to all forms of data, not just email. And they all thought that a great idea. Then the masses hear about this and think "Wow this is great, I'd love to get all my data from every site and upload it to every other site." without actually realizing that a law mandating companies support that is probably not a good idea.