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How can an unencrypted internet API be not open? We aren't talking about secret binary commands like Skype here.

• magicalist 14y ago
  It certainly can be, but it's not an open ecosystem. I hate when discussions dissolve into arguments over "open" just because the participants didn't have the same definition for the word "open" to start with, so I probably should have been more careful with using it. I was really just using it in direct reference to the OP's post, trying to say that "the relatively open ecosystem we had back in 2005" wasn't really that, at least in this context. If an API is the sole source of a service, and, even worse, if it's the sole source to access data that users put into a system (e.g. feed history for essentially all feeds, facebook posts, etc), you're totally dependent on that API making enough money to justify its existence based on the whims of the people who make that decision. Luckily there's google takeout this time, but some data is still being lost. One benefit of usenet was that everyone could have a copy of everything, though there's many privacy tradeoffs there (in the modern social networking sense). Anyway, it's not really a novel argument, just the same "dangers of monoculture/single-point-of-failure" point that has been made many times.