The perils of federated protocols

These things seem to come in waves. Most of the reasons Federation of protocols in RFC's came up was due to the fact of the many walled gardens of proprietary mainframes kept various people from being able to inter-operate. This was the 'cloud' of the 1960's and 1970's where it was really convenient to be able to do something with someone else on a similar IBM 7030 but woah if you tried to communicate with the guys down the hall on the PDP-8 or the Burroughs. And then it became more important when various 'features' you had your system built around changed underneath you. So that feature you had come to rely on for communication on the 360 ? It doesn't work the same way or is a paid upgrade on the 370.. However there was a lot of ability to also innovate and figure out what features were useful and which weren't during this time also.

I expect that once Google does a spring cleaning, figures out a way to charge for certain features that make using their closed garden useful, or it turns out the metadata being shared was a useful sidechannel for the real communication.. then there will be a push for a federated protocols. By that point hopefully the things that people know will be useful or not are known.