Yes. Tech entrepreneurs need to be very wary of platform vendors. You can and will be NetScaped. Why give away a web browser for free? Because it gives Microsof

Yes. Tech entrepreneurs need to be very wary of platform vendors. You can and will be NetScaped. Why give away a web browser for free? Because it gives Microsoft instant dominance over the web. Platform providers work very hard to maintain their platform because it allows them to control consumer attention. Big tech companies will only acquire companies that bring something to the table that they can't get by locking 4 of their own engineers in a closet for a year. That means a brand or patents. Any software-based tech can be copied for around a million bucks without much issue. The other thing here is that in cyberspace, the effects of the network are enforced only by artificial legal barriers like the CFAA that make it a felony for users to contact web sites in a manner that the operator dislikes. The CFAA essentially takes the ToS (and sometimes even less; just an operator's expression that he no longer wants you to access the site can suffice the CFAA's standard of "exceeding authorized access") and evals it as part of the criminal code. This is the law under which Aaron Swartz was prosecuted. Facebook has invoked this power repeatedly, most notably against Power Ventures, which was destroyed in court for allowing users to export their own data only, the data in which they have an exclusive copyright interest. Power infringed Facebook's copyright because it downloaded a page into RAM (RAM copies that exist for milliseconds are eligible for copyright protection per MAI v. Peak) that contained Facebook's IP in order to extract the user's information. It's why you never see third-party exporters and have to rely on the crappy ones that Facebook/Google offer and bury so they can avoid flak. Things would look much different if our law wasn't so thoroughly committed to entrenching the extant digital players. There's no reason that another application should be legally restrained from multiplexing/multicasting one's Facebook feed. IANAL.