>to me, the defining sadness is that the past decade has been the death of apis, the end of interoperability. the word web evokes a weaving together, a connectedness, and that, to me, always extended far beyond the link.

I think to an extent, interoperability is forced upon businesses for commercial reasons. Its business 101 to want silos and total ownership and control over services and data.

I think we need a law that states that if you capture/index public data, it must be made available to the public in one form or another. You may have a modest fee to cover your expenses.