Google has signalled it’s dialling up efforts around portability, announcing a plan yesterday to spend $3 million and “hundreds of hours” of its engineers time over the next five years to build on existing (sometimes very long-standing) initiatives in this area, such as the 2018 open source Data Transfer Project (DTP) to which Google is a contributor.
The move comes at a time when lawmakers in multiple jurisdictions are paying increased attention to barriers that prevent service switching and interoperability — and considering how best to remove such friction from digital markets to foster competition, whether through new digital legislation, specific competition reforms and enforcement, or a blend of all three.
In its blog post announcing extra time and money for portability — to “help expand open sou …
