I'm not sure this article proves its point. Companies certainly want to prevent interopability and create walled gardens, but that's not what's stopping competi

I'm not sure this article proves its point. Companies certainly want to prevent interopability and create walled gardens, but that's not what's stopping competition. What is stopping them is that we live in a different world, where much more people use the internet and do so much more casually, expect everything to be of the popularity and quality only the big companies can create. Take Reddit: there are a lot of bots on Lemmy which simply copy and re-post from Reddit. There are tools to freely export all of your Reddit posts and comments. And Reddit at least up to July has been 100% archived. If people had enough motivation, we could all migrate from Reddit to Lemmy almost instantly; Reddit wouldn't even have a legal leg to stand on because the posts and comments belong to those who posted/commented them. But most people really don't care, and much more don't care enough to actually transfer their data or refuse to stop using Reddit; as a result, Lemmy has <1/100th of Reddit's user base and isn't a threat anytime soon. The same take could probably by applied to Twitter and Mastadon as well. > A worker can’t reverse-engineer the Uber app to compare wages with other workers and algorithmically determine when a job offer is a lowball. A consumer can’t install an ad-blocker in an app without risking felony prosecution for violating the DMCA. An entrepreneur can’t mod the Amazon app to remove all the paid results and display comparison prices from rivals. An investigative journalist can’t scrape grocers’ websites to build the case that large firms are colluding to raise prices while blaming inflation. This is funny because the second thing (ad-blocking) is something which possibly the majority of Internet users do and nobody absolutely gets prosecuted for. Blocking in-game ads? Pi-hole. Nowadays, people don't even get prosecuted for cheating and piracy unless they're distributing it (and though individuals could theoretically be prosecuted, the likelihood is low to the point of it being stupid to worry about). Also, there are multiple sites which do the third thing (scraping comparison prices) though none of them are really popular and I doubt any use the Amazon app. The first thing (scraping Uber rates) I haven't seen, but I'm sure if someone really cared they could make a website for that as well. And the fourth thing (price collusion) has been alleged by many with evidence that didn't need to be collected from the apps, people just reported the prices themselves.