My company&#x27;s dev team is on Slack, so I log in there whenever I need to talk to them--unless we&#x27;re doing a video conference, at which point we switch to Google Hangouts.  Most of our clients prefer the phone, email or SMS&#x2F;iMessage, but the ones that don&#x27;t use Skype.  If I&#x27;m chatting with friends it&#x27;s probably on Facebook, unless it&#x27;s on Hangouts.  Any video chat my family does is over Facetime.<p>These services are never going to inter-operate, and I hate it.  Imagine if we had to maintain different telephone numbers or different email accounts just to communicate with different groups of people.  It&#x27;s almost unimaginable, but that&#x27;s what we have now with text and video chat.<p>This is core communications infrastructure.  These segregated private networks have begun to displace the public telephone network in terms of popularity and importance.  These are also the platforms over which video communication is being rolled out--not the public telephone network, as most people would have thought twenty-five years ago.<p>The FCC needs to step in and set some inter-operability rules for the major players here.  I have mixed emotions suggesting this, considering that I&#x27;m generally opposed to regulation of the Internet. But unless the government steps in, can the situation ever change?  Doesn&#x27;t it need to?