Data Transfer Project by Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc.

The data subject shall have the right to receive the personal data concerning him or her, which he or she has provided to a controller, in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format and have the right to transmit those data to another controller without hindrance from the controller to which the personal data have been provided

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/

Traditional leftist position is that evil is structural, class etc. People are people. Changing structures fixes problems.

Traditional right position is that structures don't matter, less the better. People are mainly poor because they are lazy. Corporations are evil because they have bad people in them. Remove those people and you fix things.

That evil behaviour from corporations is largely due to the focus on maximizing shareholder value to the exclusion of all else. That's a fairly recent way of running a business that came about around 1970, primarily from Milton Friedman.

I think most people expect a company to work towards healthy profits, while also taking into account all stakeholders, not just shareholders, their business interacts with.

You're right in the sense that the rules are the way they are, so corporations act within those rules. However, those rules were largely put in place to make it easier to pursue the maximization of profits and were pushed by corporate lobbying.

So, if an entity wants to act in an evil way, but is constrained by rules, then gets those rules changed so it can act evilly with impunity, surely that entity should be seen as evil?

Yeah, this is the actual problem the left has: profit-driven entities. Nobody cares about groups of people working towards a common goal (ie, "corporations").

Of course profit-driven entities want to increase their profits at all costs. What's desired is systemic change and reorganization of production around different principles beyond just profit (or rather, eliminating it entirely). No leftists have a problem with companies themselves.

No they aren't. They are mostly amoral. Meaning they aren't inherently moral or immoral. They just act in accordance with their main directive which is to make the largest possible profit while keeping with the letter of the law (mostly).

However, what the left emphasizes and the right often forgets is that they (corporations) aren't just reacting to pressures from the competitors, the public and the law makers. They also exert enormous pressure in all these spheres in the direction that benefits them. Not too rarely to the detriment of the public at large. That's when they can and do sometimes turn evil.

* Interoperability is feature just like any other, and the difficulty of implementing/maintaining it must be a fraction of the difficulty of competing with the network effects of entrenched online services. Indeed, I would hope that interoperability would pay for itself, in terms of effort, because of the number of users that can migrate to the new service, as well as being a selling point in itself (since people would be reluctant to sign up to yet another incompatible silo).

* I think incumbents don't need to rely on interoperability to do market research and copy features of competitors. It's true that Facebook would be able to see private posts on Mastodon instances that it federated with, but I don't know what useful data Facebook could gain from that which it couldn't gain from A/B testing its own huge user base. If anything, I would expect Mastodon instances to gain more from this exchange, because they are gaining access to the bigger pool of data.