> they make their products highly interoperable and integrated.
The 90s componentware comes to mind as a possible direction here. Allow interop & integration, but require it to be over public APIs that anyone can use.
I was a kid messing around with basic and c++ and then web for a lot of this time, but it seems the object-oriented world of the 90s was trying hard to create all manners of components that could integrate, embed, & use each other. Corba, DCOM, OLE, ActiveObjects, whatever NeXTStep was doing... this was going to be the future, before the internet showed up & rescoped the scale of interconnectivity to be beyond the machine level.
> This is systemic to big tech: as consumers, we need much more than flabby antitrust investigations. We need big tech to be dissolved completely, and a limit on the absolute size of tech companies so that
Not really sure if I'm opposed or not. But I do think we absolutely should have Competitive Compatibility/Adversarial Interoperability. We should be able to riff off & extend each other's software, without everyone making software getting to write whatever incredible legal moat their army of lawyers can masterfully craft around the products/business.
We are stuck in the old Ma Bell age, where Facebook says you can only use Facebook provided software to connect; it's so rampantly apparent that this hijacking of software & property law by contract law & terms of use - that gives companies whatever control they please - is a terrible curse & constraint on humanity. We need a Carterphone decision for the 21st century (for all software, not just the big softwares).
The 90s componentware comes to mind as a possible direction here. Allow interop & integration, but require it to be over public APIs that anyone can use.
I was a kid messing around with basic and c++ and then web for a lot of this time, but it seems the object-oriented world of the 90s was trying hard to create all manners of components that could integrate, embed, & use each other. Corba, DCOM, OLE, ActiveObjects, whatever NeXTStep was doing... this was going to be the future, before the internet showed up & rescoped the scale of interconnectivity to be beyond the machine level.
> This is systemic to big tech: as consumers, we need much more than flabby antitrust investigations. We need big tech to be dissolved completely, and a limit on the absolute size of tech companies so that
Not really sure if I'm opposed or not. But I do think we absolutely should have Competitive Compatibility/Adversarial Interoperability. We should be able to riff off & extend each other's software, without everyone making software getting to write whatever incredible legal moat their army of lawyers can masterfully craft around the products/business.
We are stuck in the old Ma Bell age, where Facebook says you can only use Facebook provided software to connect; it's so rampantly apparent that this hijacking of software & property law by contract law & terms of use - that gives companies whatever control they please - is a terrible curse & constraint on humanity. We need a Carterphone decision for the 21st century (for all software, not just the big softwares).