Doctorow is correct here: interoperability is necessary, from a social perspective. Governments should mandate it.
The one major problem I see with all this is mass adoption: it feels like most folks just don't care, and most of the folks who do care wind up using the "bad stuff" anyway (mostly out of convenience, but also due to FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).)
Even the right-to-repair and "comcom" mandates rest on popular support, eh?
To me that seems like the "800 lb gorilla": how do you get the average user to care about this stuff?
The path for mass adoption of the new, p2p and interoperable technologies is the same: make them work on web browsers (using the browser as a full peer, not a client). It is the ubiquitous VM: JavaScript, WASM, IndexedDB, WebRTC+WebSockets, all the pieces are there.
The building blocks for a representation / data model are all in the air as well: CRDTs, Merkle-ized structures, content-based addressing, etc.
I'm a believer.
They do care, but most of us lack the understanding and vocabulary to change. All these things can be overcome. FOMO, worship of convenience, lock-in, or fear of being different. Never give in to bullying by weak-minded naysayers and defeatists who shout "resistance is useless", or demean others by presuming to know "what they want" or saying that "ordinary people are too stupid..." etcetera. These are the vestiges of the 20th century hacker that we must shake-off as a culture.
These are mild obstacles in the end. People can be educated. Please help spread the word about Digital Vegan [1] which is an attempt to make a case for "healthier technology". Spread the word about Humane Tech [2] and the harms inflicted by incumbent monopolies
As an ordinary citizen. speak your mind and remain true to the values of what you think technology can be, not the pale imitation offered by so-called "Big Tech". I personally refuse to use any big-tech products and I use what influence I have to convince others to drop them too.
Interop will not happen by legislation alone, it also requires awareness, dissent and self-determination. People must be reminded that it is their right to be masters of the technology necessary for modern life, not slaves to it.
All costs must be taken into account.
Cost of opportunity is immeasurable.
This is not an easy task.
But now suppose we standardized on Java or Ada or something for app dev. That would not be good, and the opportunity cost of inhibited language development would be awful. Standardization in APIs is worse even, if you disallow extensions, but is less nasty if you do allow extensions.
So, yeah, "it depends" is the best I can do for an answer.
Sometimes it's possible to reduce the opportunity cost of innovation inhibition by standardizing in mature technology spaces, but sometimes a sector that appears mature is ripe for disruption, so it can be really hard to predict. And we cannot know what we've lost for quite some time after the standard is imposed.
So on the whole I'm disinclined to have standardization forced on the market.
Why? There's less room for innovation in the protocol. Take TCP, for instance. Could it be improved? Probably. But how much gain are you going to get by innovating there? On the other hand, how much was enabled, on both ends of the wire, by everything standardizing on TCP? Far, far more than we could ever get by a "better TCP".
SCTP failed to replace TCP for various reasons, such as too many middleboxes filtering ULPs that aren't TCP or UDP, or SCTP being far to rich and complex, or just inertia.
But TCP has had a ton of problems, and while there has been a ton of research into those problems and the solution spaces for them, adopting even hacky solutions into TCP has been difficult. As a result, TCP has gotten complex and bloated over the years without at the same time solving all the problems that a new protocol could solve.
On the plus side, in spite of inhibiting innovation at the transport layer, TCP enabled innovation at the application layer by making the application layer possible at all.
you could have used UDP for example which being as old as TCP has spawned many new protocols on top of it (including quic) and in its own right has been the backbone of many applications.
I don't begrudge FB and Twitter their success. But I think that, as with the previous generations of captains of industry, it is time that the winners take into account the public good.
Something like the living web standard for social media would be nice.
His "comcom" methodology consisting of "reverse engineering, scraping, bots, and other improvisational techniques", is not exactly something I want near my personal information because unlikely the old days you're not reverse engineering hardware schematics, you'd be scraping people's private information.
Many people have the problem that their life's information is sitting in a proprietary silo, without a nice way to extract it. (Truth be told, Google does offer the "takeaway" thing, kudos. FB apparently does not.)
2) Scraping your data for your use might be fine, but what about the private data of friends and family that you have access to? Do you want grandma to be able to scrape all your posts/pictures/etc just because she wanted to take the "What kind of harry Potter broomstick are you?" Quiz?
So yes, as long as grandma has access to my pictures, it's fair use for her to collect them. Republishing them to a wider circle than originally posted is a different matter.
This is the reason I only post online such things which I can repeat under oath, or see posted on the busiest crossing.
At least as of a few years ago (~2015/2016) they did; when I deleted my own FB account I found an option that allowed me to download a zip archive of my photos and posts. No idea if they still support that now, or where they've hidden the option if so.