Which is why the government should demand interoperability just like they did with instant messaging, email, etc....

Government did what ? Which government ? In which country ?

And let's look at interoperability :

Now that Google is blocking server-to-server XMPP fedaration (and not even using XMPP internally, only as an interface for client), is there a single interoperable instant messaging ?

- Google's Talk/Hangou/whatever it is going to call next week, once it gets merged into the next beta experiment

- Facebook's Messenger.

- WhatsApp (also in facebook's possession, but not even interoperable with the other facebook instant messaging system).

- Snapchat (strongly popular among a very young generation)

- Microsoft's Skype

etc.

Every single instant messaging system is an isolated silo, with no way to send message accross.

SMS are the only interoperable thing, and that's not as much due to government decree as it is due to it being a telecom standard that existed and was interoperable from the beginning with, and lots of companies (mostly in Europe and Asia) saw "inoperable" as a potential selling point ("You can now send SMS to your gand-ma, even if she's in a different country and thus very likely on a different network") rather than a drawback (as in the US. "Want to exchange messages ? Then you need to move all your friends on the same network as you").

Even the only systems that ARE currently operable - e.g.: Microsoft's Skype for Business and Cisco - are only so because they are business software designed to work on interoperable industry standards (SIP and XMPP, respectively) that predate them and onto which the company only have bolted they branding.

And regarding e-mails:

Yes, same situation : it's basically interoperable, not because of some recent government law, but because from the beginning they were industry standards a long time ago back in the age of "internet across universities", long before service providers even existed, long before companies such as Google suddenly became mastodons on the market.

Imagine if suddenly a small upcoming service provider arrived saying "yes, we do offer some mailing system, but it's a different one and not compatible with what everybody is currently using", or if Google began this way with their mail system (although currently some of their "spam filtering" borders on becoming so).

They wouldn't have attracted any interest, just like a phone company giving you a phone line that only works with their system

(although in several countries, there ARE actual law design to fight potential such abuse by a big telco refuse to interconnect with smaller ones).

If your friend list and your posts carried from service to service then people could use competing services without lock-in. At the very least they should allow some sort of aggregation service that sits on top of facebook and other social media services. Google doesn't really have the lockin, there is plenty of competition, it's easy enough to switch to bing, duckduckgo, etc... if people found them more useful. Amazon is probably the hardest to break up. It's lockin is economy of scale and convenience. It's really hard for someone to go head to head with amazon but I once thought that about ebay so anything's possible.