America wants its allies to come together and help it lead the way in defining 6G communications standards, with security and resilience seen as key goals for next-generation networks. The latest effort to corral international work on 6G comes from the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), which says it is pursuing the objectives of a December 2025 memo from President Trump on "Winning the 6G Race." That memo didn't identify who America is racing against, but it is a fair bet that it is China, which gained a lead during the development of 5G technology. Huawei in particular is understood to hold more declared 5G standard-essential patent families than any other company. The NTIA says it is launching this initiative alongside more than 20 governments, including several European nations like the UK and the Nordic countries, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. The Nordics are significant as they are home to telecoms equipment suppliers Nokia and Ericsson. These governments have all pledged to strengthen cooperation on 6G over the next 12 months and beyond in support of greater security, interoperability, and resilience for next-generation networks, the NTIA claims. "The Call to Action for 6G Leadership and Security reflects an unprecedented level of international coordination on the future of communications technology," stated NTIA administrator Arielle Roth. "By working now with trusted partners, we will ensure that next generation networks reflect our shared security interests, strengthen our competitiveness, and drive innovation." So after President Trump has spent 18 months since inauguration disparaging and threatening America's "trusted partners," the US has decided it would really like their help in becoming the world leader in 6G technology. Isn't that nice? The initiative lays out specific milestones on strategic coordination over the next year or so, as 6G moves toward commercialization. These include engaging with the telecoms industry to understand the "political and economic landscape" for 6G networks and meetings to identify the potential for more coordinated approaches. It also calls for a big meeting in 2027 to review joint progress, where the partners are expected to evaluate funding strategies, share information on 6G research and development, assess 5G and 6G technical and cybersecurity risks, and promote common 6G policies. All of this seems aimed at coordinating positions on the spectrum needed for 6G ahead of the next World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC-27). Scheduled for October 18 to November 12 in Shanghai next year, the conference will consider which frequency bands are made available for next-generation mobile networks. But it isn't the first attempt at international collaboration over the next-gen wireless standard. The US-UK Tech Prosperity Deal, agreed last year, proposed greater cooperation in a range of science and technology areas including 6G, but this was put on ice by President Trump after just a few months over trade disagreements. Earlier this year, the Global Coalition on Telecommunications (GCOT) unveiled a set of security and resilience principles it wanted to see baked into 6G from the start. The organization includes many of the same nations as the latest US scheme. "This is a clear attempt by the US and its allies to shape the 6G landscape before commercial networks arrive," PP Foresight founder and analyst Paolo Pescatore told The Register. "The priority is to embed security, resilience, interoperability, and supply-chain diversity from the outset, rather than repeat the costly mistakes and geopolitical tensions that defined the 5G era. "Although China is not explicitly mentioned, the strategic intent is obvious: to reduce dependence on high-risk suppliers and to ensure that trusted nations have greater influence over standards, investment, and innovation. However, this remains a political framework rather than a binding agreement." The first 6G deployments could arrive as soon as 2029, with the US and South Korea likely to lead in early adoption, according to a report from Juniper Research earlier this year. Despite this, the exact characteristics that will define 6G networks have yet to be thrashed out. Bodies representing the mobile networks want to see a smooth and cost-effective migration path for their members, avoiding the mistakes made with 5G, while the GSMA has already put it out there that 6G networks may need up to three times the spectrum currently allocated to meet the anticipated demands for data. ®
Users are always seeking more control over their social networking experience to make it better, whether to improve privacy or enhance flexibility. Interoperability between social networking platforms like Facebook and TikTok has so many benefits that solve those issues.
Say you’re on multiple platforms because you have friends you follow on different networks, but you’ve decided to choose one platform with better privacy practices. With interoperability, you could switch and still interact with friends who remain on larger platforms. It could also enable independent apps with better privacy controls and more user choice. These are the untapped possibilities that could benefit users in the European Union under the 2022 Digital Markets Act (DMA).
Yet, the European Commission, in its first review of the DMA, announced in April it had decided not to extend the DMA’s interoperability mandate to social networking and didn’t give a deadline or a timeline for enforcing that part of the Act. The Commission said “there is no clear demand” from users and businesses for social networking interoperability and, in any case, it’s too technically complex at the moment. Meanwhile, the Big Tech platforms that have been slow-walking interoperability over the last two years, erecting a myriad of hurdles for users seeking more freedom to choose other platforms, get a pass.
This is a huge disappointment and a missed opportunity by the Commission. Interoperability dismantles one of the biggest barriers faced by users who want to leave the tech giants’ platforms: the choice between changing to a platform you prefer or staying behind on a platform where all your friends, communities, and customers are.
The DMA, which went into force in 2024, aims to foster more choices for European Union users and encourage competition and innovation by forcing so-called gatekeeper platforms like Meta, Apple, and Google, to open their ecosystems to competitors. The regulation does a great deal to foster the integration of competing services and devices with the ecosystems of very large online platforms that act as gatekeepers. It even requires interoperability for messaging services, despite the significant technical and privacy challenges involved.
So, it’s odd that the Commission is using complexity as a shield against taking on social networking interoperability. The internet already runs on complex interoperable systems. Approaches like ActivityPub, the decentralized networking protocol behind the “Fediverse,” which gave rise to decentralized networks like Mastodon, already exist. The DMA shouldn’t mandate a specific protocol, but it can require meaningful interoperability outcomes.
The argument that there’s no real demand for social networking interoperability also falls flat. Users want the ability to move across platforms, choose the content they’d like to see from platforms, and not be tied down to a single platform. But there’s no way to get there—the platforms are doing little to open their social networking ecosystems. And now you have the DMA’s enforcer saying it’s not going to make them change. Demand for alternatives won’t materialize at scale until users see real progress towards interoperability, something the Commission has the power to do.
Having decided there’s little demand and too much complexity to proceed with mandating social networking interoperability, the Commission said it “will continue to monitor and assess how these services evolve.” This wait-and-see-posture only hurts users and strengthens and further entrenches Big Tech incumbents.
The DMA is supposed to center on the rights of technology users and be the pathway to an internet experience where you decide which software runs on your devices, where it’s easy to find the best products and services, and where you can leave a platform for a better one without forfeiting your social relationships.
Meanwhile, Big Tech is also resisting the DMA’s openness requirements. For example, Apple is supposed to be opening up iOS devices to rival app stores. Yet, the smartphone giant’s plan for opening its App Store levies junk fees and onerous conditions on app makers and is effectively impossible for any competitor to use.
It’s not just Apple pushing back against DMA enforcement. Meta's response is a “pay for privacy “system, in which users who do not consent to Meta’s surveillance will have to pay to use the service, or be blocked from it. Whether their plan complies with the DMA remains under review.
Nowhere in the DMA does it say social networking companies get to install a toll booth for users seeking to benefit from privacy rights the regulation grants them. The future EU Digital Fairness Act is another opportunity to protect users from such practices by declaring them unfair.
The Commission has responded to these developments with investigations, preliminary rulings, and fines. Meanwhile, users are missing out on greater choice and flexibility in how they communicate and connect online.
Poke your head into just about any online social network—or any general conversations about internet culture—and you’ll likely find a boogieman: the algorithm. Since at least the moment Facebook introduced (and apologized for) its News Feed, “the algorithm” has been shorthand for the ways the tech giants control what we see and when we see it. In the age of enshittification, there is a push to reclaim our feeds and networks. Good news: there’s a tool that’s been around for decades that can help wrangle many of your feeds into something manageable: Really Simple Syndication, more commonly known as RSS.
RSS may seem complicated, but it boils down to one general concept: when websites publish new content, like news articles, blog entries, webcomics, videos, or podcasts, that content gets added to an RSS feed, where your RSS reader (aka newsreader, feed reader, or aggregator) will show you that content in chronological order. If you’ve ever used a podcast player like Apple Podcasts or Spotify to follow different podcasts, you’ve used RSS. You can think of it like an internet-wide “follow” button, where you can track the contents of websites, users, and more.
People talk about RSS like it’s a power user’s secret trick to making the internet more usable, but the real secret is that it’s not that hard to set up and use. Here’s what you need to do:
Find an RSS reader: RSS readers come in many forms. Feedly, NewsBlur, or The Old Reader, are web-based, but have their own apps (though they also support third-party apps). Others, like NetNewsWire, are app-based, and support either using a web-based RSS reader like Feedly, or a local file. Some live in browsers or web extensions. There’s an abundance of choice in RSS readers, and part of the fun is finding one that best accomplishes what you want to do. But don’t worry about finding the right RSS reader right away. One of the many magic tricks of RSS is that it is platform agnostic, and nearly every RSS reader—whether it's a website or an app, supports importing and exporting a list of the sites you subscribe to. This means you can change RSS readers in a couple minutes. If you need some help finding an RSS reader, Wired, The Verge, and Privacy Guides all have useful roundups.
Collect your feeds: As for adding websites to your feeds, the process is straightforward. Most RSS readers are designed to help find the feed for a site for you, so you don’t need to go hunting down a special link. Just drop the URL of what you want to follow in your reader, and if an RSS feed exists, it should be able to find it. If not, some sites, including ours (and our current podcast, EFFector as well as our last series, How to Fix the Internet), provide direct links to our RSS feeds.
Sort, filter, and build your feed: Adding a bunch of new feeds can be overwhelming, particularly for news sites. RSS readers typically include folders, which let you group similar feeds together and can be great for lifting up low-traffic updates you don’t want to miss. Your reader may also have different filters, like the option to block any article that contains “sponsored post.”
RSS Is the Best Way to Follow the News
It can be very difficult to follow the news, whether that means politics, tech policy, or your hobbies. Solutions like Google News or Apple News have tried to make this simpler, but many find that their algorithmic feeds are as often a source of frustration and annoyance as they are genuinely useful. And no matter how often you tap on news stories that matter to you from publications you respect, there may always be stories that refuse to bubble up.
RSS can make reading the news much easier, reliable, and more private. The vast majority of news sites have RSS feeds you can subscribe to, and many, including CNN, The New York Times, BBC, Wired, Politico, and many others, offer RSS for specific sections or special feeds that include the full text of articles for subscribers, so you aren’t just pummeled with a firehose of news all day long (we’ll get to a tip below in the next section that tackles this problem if they don’t have separate feeds, though). In many cases, you can read articles right in your RSS reader, never being forced to engage with wonky comments sections or poor design choices on websites.
Of course, the news isn’t just general news sites, it also includes hobbyist or more niche sites, local news offerings, and blogs. Most of these sorts of websites also offer RSS feeds, as do newsletter platforms like Substack or Ghost.
RSS Offers One Way to Fix Some Social Feeds
Decentralized social media like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads, use RSS for user feeds, so you can follow your friend’s posts on Bluesky or Mastodon without actually having an account on either. This can be especially helpful for news sources, too—where you likely wouldn’t want to subscribe to a feed of everything a national news organization publishes because that would include dozens if not hundreds of stories a day, you can instead subscribe to their social media posts, which often get you the most breaking or important news.
The internet is more than just Facebook.
Some legacy social media works with RSS, too, including YouTube, Reddit (though that is currently at risk), and Tumblr. But others, like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, wall off posts behind account requirements that seem to pop up if you simply look at an account page for too long, let alone come in from an RSS feed. These walled gardens prevent information from getting out there, which ranges from annoying, like when your favorite local brewery only posts their food truck schedule on Instagram, to dangerous, like when local public services only post to a Facebook page.
The internet is more than just Facebook. It’s more than Mastodon or Bluesky, too. It’s a decentralized smorgasbord of websites, tools, feeds, newsletters, social profiles, and more, and treating it as such will help us wrangle the information we want and trust.
Other Surprising Places You’ll Find RSS Feeds
When in doubt, try copying and pasting the URL for a site into your RSS reader of choice, you might be surprised to find a feed that proves useful to you. Many places on the internet may offer RSS feeds without you even realizing it. For example, if you want to keep an eye on an artist’s prints that you like, but you don’t have Instagram where they usually post, you might be able to subscribe to their webstore, as some shopping platforms, like Big Cartel, create XML feeds that some RSS readers can read. And for something even more tweakable, even Google Alerts can be turned into RSS feeds.
RSS is one of the best examples we have of the open web, where we can design and customize how we experience the internet, not the other way around.
If you prefer to track policy over products, then you’ll be happy to know that government sites often support RSS, including most U.S. government sites, many of which break them into different sections like the U.S. Department of State’s various feeds. Many local governments or other public services, like fire departments may offer the same. Some universities (and university newspapers) also sometimes offer some RSS feeds.
And even if a website doesn’t have an RSS feed, there are workarounds from tools like RSSHub, RSS-Bridge, and RSS.app that require varying levels of technical expertise or a willingness to pay subscription fees.
RSS is one of the best examples we have of the open web, where we can design and customize how we experience the internet, not the other way around. RSS has come in and out of fashion, been declared dead, and has come back, every time. Open systems are the best way forward to a free, equitable internet, and the resilience and continued reinvention of RSS has shown just how creative the web community can be with open protocols.
Correction: clarified that Big Cartel creates an XML file, not an RSS feed.
Login
