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I don't like this trend with services being shut down by the big guys in the industry. You see what happened with AppGratis, and now this. I understand the whol
by SurfScore 13y ago
I don't like this trend with services being shut down by the big guys in the industry. You see what happened with AppGratis, and now this. I understand the whole TOS violation thing, but when a big company can shut down a successful startup just because they don't like what they're doing, it doesn't jive with that whole capitalism thing.
Is there anything we can do about this, or is it just a product of building on someone else's platform? Obviously, this has happened throughout history, but on a much smaller scale. I can't recall something as prevalent and simply integral to most people's everyday lives as Twitter/Facebook/the App Store where this sort of heavy-handedness could happen. Even when Windows was in its prime, people could pretty much build anything they wanted for it (for better or for worse).
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- SoftwareMaven 13y agoIt would surprise me if this was new. I bet this kind of thing has happened for as long as business has happened, but the owned-resource being built on was more likely real estate, whether it was some lord who could kick a peasant off his land or some industrialist who could shut down a shop owner in the town he built for his factory. If anything, we might be less susceptible to it now. It would make a fascinating study, anyway.
- SurfScore 13y agoThe thing is that the instead of it being real estate with maybe 1,000 tenants, its a service that has hundreds of millions of users. Facebook has over a billion. I don't know if anyone has had the power to shut off access to that many people before.
- raylu 13y agoYeah, but there's a big difference between shutting off my Twitter access and literally removing me from the land I live on.
- jpatokal 13y agoIf you camp out in somebody else's walled garden, you can't really complain when they decide they don't like the mess you're making and throw you out. Trying to prevent this somehow (and how, exactly? Legislatively mandated API access?) would be much more anti-capitalist.
- gambiting 13y agoIf somebody started a very successful business on your lawn in a campervan, would you not want them off? It's not about them being successful or not - it's just that they are on your own property. Even worse in this case, because not only he is camping out on their lawn, he is actively cutting into their profits.
- bct 13y agoPower existing where capital pools is exactly what capitalism is. What did you expect?