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Wouldn't imposing interoperability be the opposite of stifling innovation? It's forcing companies to allow others to innovate as well, as they'll actually have

Wouldn't imposing interoperability be the opposite of stifling innovation? It's forcing companies to allow others to innovate as well, as they'll actually have a chance of breaking into the market of the dominant player. If Twitter can (and will) act without interoperability, they can shutdown anyone who tries to interop, stifling innovation in the space at large, while if they are forced to allow interoperability, other players can also enter the market.

cryptonector 5y ago
It depends! For example, IPv4 did inhibit some innovation (think CNLP, OSI, IPv6, etc.), and TCP did too (probably), each at their respective layers, but TCP/IP produced a great deal of innovation at layers above, and that's easily worth the opportunity cost of missed innovation at the the network and transport layers. But now suppose we standardized on Java or Ada or something for app dev. That would not be good, and the opportunity cost of inhibited language development would be awful. Standardization in APIs is worse even, if you disallow extensions, but is less nasty if you do allow extensions. So, yeah, "it depends" is the best I can do for an answer. Sometimes it's possible to reduce the opportunity cost of innovation inhibition by standardizing in mature technology spaces, but sometimes a sector that appears mature is ripe for disruption, so it can be really hard to predict. And we cannot know what we've lost for quite some time after the standard is imposed. So on the whole I'm disinclined to have standardization forced on the market.