I totally appreciate the point, and I think there's a certain amount of validity to it. Open standards and interfaces make it better and easier to consume data

I totally appreciate the point, and I think there's a certain amount of validity to it. Open standards and interfaces make it better and easier to consume data – in theory. That said, there are complexities. Monetisation is the obvious one; if you have an app or service that relies on advertising—Twitter is the obvious example—then the first thing that you'll find is an app that strips your advertising out. It also seems quite reasonable that a company like Twitter is entitled to payment by people who want to use the data they aggregate. Sure, they're not the publisher, but they do provide the infrastructure. We could hypothesise about replacing that with an open, peer-to-peer infrastructure, but nobody has done so yet.