I generally agree with this sentiment, but sometimes I think mandating cooperation between walled gardens is the only way to help consumers. Take healthcare for

I generally agree with this sentiment, but sometimes I think mandating cooperation between walled gardens is the only way to help consumers. Take healthcare for example: Epic, Cerner, Athena, etc all have NO incentive to build any interoperability into their products. It greatly benefits them to create walled gardens and wall-off hospitals and healthcare institutions from other institutions that use their competitors' software. It took Congress to mandate open standards and to spell out that healthcare institutions must offer a public APIs to patients. We are only now starting to be able to download health records from hospitals as a result of this despite it being technically possible for decades. In fact there are still many patients that are required to request stacks of DVDs containing their health records, and this is their only option. Obviously this is more a commentary on how shitty healthcare in the US can be, but also a good example IMO of how sometimes government intervention in technical standards requirements can greatly benefit consumers.