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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

How is that different from, say, being forced to buy a PS5 or an X-whatever to participate in a gaming community, or to get a Spotify membership to hear a particular podcast?

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They aren't very different. With Spotify we actually gave up a lot of power that custom clients had for the lowest-common-denominator sort of stuff, which is really sad.

With each of these products we keep giving up more and more of the powerful variety that was available before. While the average person doesn't lose much, the average person doesn't really exist and we've really lost a lot of long tails of value.

I see the potential value, I just don't understand the principle that enables us to dictate that private companies provide it to us.

The same principle behind antitrust laws: dismantling monopolies is good for the public and good for innovation

Lacking an open-for-all-comers API is not in fact an antitrust violation.

I agree of course, it's not a violation of any laws. I just thought you were asking for some moral principle to justify pressing a developer to make an API available

I mean, it's just not antitrust, at all. A vendor is not coherently a "monopoly for their own products".

I feel a lot of laws dictate what private companies provide us. For example a butcher's meat cannot be covered in rat poison. A hyperbolic example but for giant chat services like this where the wield an incredible amount of power because of scale they are still subject to restrictions by the government for the benefit of the people. The government totally has that overriding right because your companies operating in there county. Don't like it the same way the user has no choice but to not use your interface the company has the right now to operate in the country. Personally I think the api format is a little ambiguous but it's incredibly naive to think that companies cannot be subjected to laws on how they do business just because they built a computer service. With adoption comes regulation to protect both users and companies

As the world changes, we can't always expect new behaviors to ideally fit existing moral principles.

Is there a moral principle preventing a power company from providing you with all your electrical appliances and forbidding you from using those not provided by them?

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