EEE

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
...or is that "Exterminate"?

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish is a strategy used by large tech companies to sabotage community-owned technology, which they rightly see as a threat to their ability to control users and dominate resources.

The earliest known use of this concept – described using the inaccurate term "innovate" instead of "extinguish" – is in a 1994 Microsoft (MS) memo regarding efforts to destroy the dominance of Netscape's web browser by "embracing" the web with Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE), "extending" web standards using technology that nobody else could support or keep up with, and thereby positioning MSIE as the "leading" browser defining the latest standards that all others had to copy in order to be fully compatible.

MS had previously tried this strategy in hardware when they tried to recapture control of the Personal Computer standard by replacing the then-industry-standard ISA card format with their own proprietary "microchannel" standard. This, fortunately, failed, and ISA was able to continue evolving (through EISA, PCI, etc.) into the standards we use today.

The battlefield in software, especially with regard to federated protocols, is unfortunately much more vulnerable to this technique:

• In 2011, Google+ was able to capture the increasing interest in social networks and thereby divert resources and attention away from Diaspora, the first-ever federated social network.
• Social media companies at first embraced XMPP (an open federated protocol for realtime chat) in the form of GTalk and Facebook Messenger, then later disabled federation after many XMPP users had abandoned open-source XMPP clients for the seemingly-friendlier interfaces offered by Google and Facebook. XMPP still exists, but is a ghost of its former self and an even larger ghost of what it could have been.
• RSS feeds, which once dominated social media, were effectively killed off by Google's termination of Google Reader. RSS still exists, but is again a shadow of what it was even before Reader.
• Email is currently under siege, as both Google (Gmail) and especially Microsoft (Outlook) increasingly block or auto-spam messages from independently-operated email servers.
  • Anecdote: I have not been able to send email to outlook.com addresses for a decade or more. For several years, I thought my auldest friend was ghosting me, as I never got back any bounce messages (which is what servers are supposed to do when they reject an incoming message); it was only when I enabled "Delivery status notification" (something that is not supported by many email clients) that I was able to determine that Outlook was in fact silently rejecting them. Further research found that MS does not offer any clear explanation of why they are doing this, much less how to get greenlisted so they will stop. --Woozle

While we don't yet know whether Meta Threads or BlueSky intend to pursue this strategy, it is easy enough to imagine how to apply any or all of the above techniques to the ActivityPub protocol and fediverse – and there is absolutely no reason to think that doing so isn't among their plans.

Reference

• Wikipedia