I think this bill is a great idea. it doesn't address all the issues associated with locking users into these sites, and the attendant influence and market power of them, but it's a good start.

I just emailed my senators and representative urging them to support this bill. In those emails (the text of which is reproduced below), I address some of the reasons I think it's a good idea and make some suggestions for amendments to it.

What additional reasons do you have for supporting (or not) this bill, and what other amendments would you suggest?

Text of email to my House/Senate representatives:

I strongly urge you to support the ACCESS Act (S.2658 - Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching Act of 2019) introduced by Senator Warner and encourage your colleagues to do so as well.

The bill requires that large communications platforms such as Facebook and Twitter provide mechanisms for other platforms to interoperate with their platforms.

This is important for several reasons:

1. The sheer size of these platforms lock your constituents into them, creating huge barriers to entry for competitors and stifling competition in the Social netwotking market;

2. The ACCESS Act would create a mechanism for other platforms to interoperate with these huge platforms, some of which already exist and others which could provide users not only with superior capabilities, but also with the ability to exert more control over their personal data and information (cf. Diaspora, https://joindiaspora.org );

3. These huge platforms have enormous control, not only over the news and information that their users see, but also over the marketplaces created by their sheer size. Requiring them to freely interoperate provides an opportunity to create a true public commons divorced from any particular corporate entity;

4. As we've seen in the recent (and not so recent) past, these platforms exert an enormous amount of influence and have a huge economic impact on us. As such, there have been calls to break up these companies to limit that impact and influence. I posit that creating an environment which will significantly reduce barriers to entry into this space will encourage competition and limit the impact/influence of these corporations, while creat new opportunities, new jobs and a broader set of voices on the Internet.

I'd further urge you to introduce amendments to this bill to accomplish the following:

1. Reduce the size of impacted platforms from 100,000,000 users to 100,000. This would allow a rich ecosystem of communication and social networking platforms that can interact and give everyone an opportunity to connect with others in a decentralized, open way. It would also provide strong incentives for entrepreneurship in this space and encourage innovation and competition;

2. In addition to tasking the National Institute for Standards and Technology with creating the protocols and interfaces required to implement this bill, invite the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to participate as well. The IETF (https://ietf.org/about/ ) are the people who have, for more than 30 years, been developing, documenting and implementing the technical standards that have made the Internet the economic and cultural dynamo it is today.

Please make this a priority, because broad-based, open communication, discussion and the potential for enhanced personal privacy are critical to our democracy and cultural cohesion.