Related to this, Cory Doctorow's appearance on Future Tense podcast (Australia) is truly excellent.
After being introduced, he goes on an 8-minute disquisition. We should all aspire to rap tech like Cory Doctorow can.
After being introduced, he goes on an 8-minute disquisition. We should all aspire to rap tech like Cory Doctorow can.
Big tech companies must pay the bills for their servers in one way or another and charging people money to keep the data in their digital vaults is a tradeoff most consumers and producers are more than happy with. Consider the alternative to this. It would require every creative to manage their own payment gateway and digital delivery infrastructure and they would more than likely end up either even or in the negative as far as their own profits were concerned.
Maybe Doctorow has a big enough audience to manage his own digital delivery infrastructure but most authors I'm certain don't have the same luxury.
If there was a competitive ecosystem of client software and hardware and also online stores and it all interoperated, we would have a lot more choice, control of our purchased media and devices, and lower prices too.
So if the data centers and protocols are not the problem it must be consumer preferences and going by the software quality that most consumers are willing to put up with I am certain they don't know and care enough about interoperability to actually force the big players to develop the necessary interoperability protocols.
You're ignoring the elephant in the room, which is anti-trust is dead, and the tech companies running the show are too damn big. If you start a competitor to audible, it can use its leverage with both AWS and Amazon and squeeze you until you're dead, and then continue on with its monopoly.
It's in the OP and in my post: "anticompetitive DRM lock-in". Lack of interoperability.