Sure I can keep running my xmpp server & begging people to contact me over xmpp. But I'm going to miss all the life updates & chatter my friends are doing on Facebook or Instagram or Discord.
The points in this article seem super spot on. The anti-cirumvention laws obstruct any kind of fair rise of an interesting alternative. We can walk away, but only if we are ok severing ties. Competitive compatibility is the relief we need to allow meaningful choices.
The world of physical products allowed consumers a lot of property rights to the stuff they purchased, but in the cloud age these lords of the cloud have everything tightly sealed up in data-keeps and you likely stand 'in felony contempt of business model' (and are likely liable for these fines that start at half a million dollars for first infraction for just making the tool), if you do anything that isn't explicitly built into the app already.
This shift from the world having some property rights to being ruled over from afar by contract law was pointed out by Mark Lemley, decades ago, and highlighted in the lovely Web scraping for me but not for thee, which points out that big companies all got their start off the exact sort of violations & scraping & mercenary-done competitive compatibility that would get you or I blasted out of the waters in a heartbeat. https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2023/08/web-scraping-f... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37264970
Exit is only interesting if it doesn't mean going off to live in a digital barrel. I absolutely fully agree, we need to own the means of connection. We fully need to bootstrap real alternatives. But if the alternative has to create a walk-away movement to succeed, that's a horrible thing. And, people everywhere should have some informational property rights. That there are digital system & cloud stuff involved shouldn't so fundamentally strip people of rights & freedom as it does.