Embrace Extend Extinguish, the root of Electronic Evils. Hopefully it doesn't happen with IRC as it has with other lovely parts of electronic history. Microsoft was the origin of the term with their browser and OS products of old, yet it has been unfortunately more and more relevant with Google, particularly email and android openness (gmail only features and Google play services, respectively).

It's being extingushed right now because nobody is extending or embracing it.

That didn't really answer the question that was asked. IRC is an open protocol. Whats your fear?

There are some seriously paranoid people on HN these days, and it is rather disenchanting to have to sift through all the negativity. Failure to embrace new things and new ways of doing things is a surefire way to irrelevancy.

London Trust Media owns the networks where almost all users are, and either funds and closely works with most client developers, or directly employees those.

That’s the fear.

The IRC protocol isn’t great, nor worthy of protection. The users, the community are.

If tomorrow freenode and snoonet went down, IRC would be forever changed.

RSS is an open standard too, but Google effectively killed it.

They really didn't. Most websites that publish articles in any form still have RSS feeds, and there are plenty of feed readers out there that work.