Use Protocols, Not Services

Published on 15 February 2026

The Internet was designed with anonymity and privacy in mind. By default, there's no built-in identity layer—unless an administrator actively tries to track you, the network itself doesn't know who you are. What breaks this fundamental design isn't the technology itself, but the centralization of communication onto closed platforms.

When we concentrate our conversations on proprietary services, we create single points of control that governments can easily pressure. One subpoena, one court order, one regulatory demand—and the service likely complies or faces severe consequences. This isn't theoretical; it's happening right now.

Services Are Easy Targets

Recent events have made this painfully clear. Governments worldwide are passing laws requiring platforms to verify user ages. Discord, anticipating future regulatory obligations, is voluntarily rolling out mandatory "teen-by-default" settings that require proof of majority through face scans or government-issued IDs.

This kind of invasive identification would be impossible with decentralized protocols. You cannot require age verification on IRC, XMPP, ActivityPub, Nostr, or Matrix because there's no single entity to compel. Each server operator makes their own decisions. A government would need to individually pressure thousands of independent operators across dozens of jurisdictions—a legislative and enforcement impossibility.

Even if one server complied with such demands, users would simply move to another. The decentralized nature of protocols makes them inherently resistant to top-down control.

Switching Services Solves Nothing

After Discord's announcement, the natural instinct is to migrate to another service. This is futile. The new service will either operate under the same jurisdiction and face identical rules, or it will be offshore and eventually blocked or pressured once it becomes large enough to matter.

You're just moving from one regulable entity to another. The actual solution isn't to find a better service—it's to stop depending on any specific commercial service altogether.

Protocols Are Resilient

This isn't a radical idea. We already use protocols successfully in other areas. Email is based on SMTP, a protocol. You can switch providers, self-host, or use any combination. Even though email has become dominated by a few large providers like Google and Microsoft, the protocol itself remains resilient.

If Google bans your account, you can move to another provider and still reach every Gmail user. In an extreme scenario where Google and Microsoft discontinued their services or blocked you entirely, SMTP implementations would still exist and function—albeit in a degraded mode. You'd need to migrate and convince some connections to follow, but there's no need to reimplement anything.

That's the crucial difference with a service like Discord. On a centralized platform, if your account is deleted or banned, you're gone for good. There's no alternative implementation, no migration path, no resilience.

The Choice We Face

Every time we choose a service over a protocol, we opt into a system where a single company can be compelled to identify us, restrict us, or hand over our data—whether for their profit or a government's advantage.

The solution is straightforward: use protocols instead of services. Support decentralized alternatives. Run your own server when possible. Choose tools that can't be easily controlled by any single entity.

The Internet's original design gave us privacy and freedom by default. We've traded that away for convenience, but we can reclaim it by returning to the protocols that made the Internet what it was meant to be.