It'll be a pretty long while before I manage to read through all of this, but I plan to. Got a small start today, and I'm going to keep going through at least a few dozen pages every day, and dedicate a couple of weekends to doing more significant reading.

I'm seeing some people around the Internet arguing that this is pretty typical and not surprising. The stuff I'm reading so far is surprising to me.

My prediction: similar to the Snowden leaks, there are going to be a bunch of people who say that none of this is unexpected, and we already knew most of the main points. With Snowden, those people are downplaying the environment that existed prior to the leak, and retroactively rewriting the arguments that people used to make. The same thing will be true with Facebook.

So I have personally had people argue to me on HN (recently) that the reason Facebook's APIs are so closed-off is because of privacy concerns, particularly around the 2016 election. If we want an Open Internet, that's fundamentally at conflict with a private Internet, so really we're to blame for Facebook's policies. These documents, to me, make that claim objectively false -- Facebook was talking about closing off access as early as 2012, and the reason they were doing so was to reduce competition.

There are people on this very thread arguing that really this is just a story about privacy, and everyone is being mean to Facebook -- and I don't know how to square that with the memos and emails I just finished reading that argue the opposite.

> "When we started Facebook Platform, we were small and wanted to make sure we were an essential part of the fabric of the Internet. We've done that - we're now the biggest service on Earth. When we were small, apps helped drive our ubiquity. Now that we are big, (many) apps are looking to siphon off our users to competitive services. We need to be more thoughtful about what integrations we allow and we need to make sure that we have sustainable, long-term value exchanges."

Regardless of whether or not anything here is actually illegal, based on what I've read so far, I feel like (for me) the debate over whether federation is compatible with privacy is over, barring some kind of crazy revelation half-way through this document. We should assume that platforms like Twitter are having the same conversations, and we should assume that when Facebook/Twitter executives say that closing down APIs is necessary for privacy, that they're gaslighting.