To wit, there is exactly one business strategy: When you are small, be nice. When you are big, pull that ladder up behind you.
I'd add a "in venture capital and big capital" after "business strategy". When you don't have VCs or the stonk market breathing down your neck all the time, incentives massively change.
IMHO, there is only one solution left... once a publicly traded company gains critical market dominance and is reasonably profitable, the government buys all shares at the current market price and places the company in a public-good trust that has a clear mandate to run its companies in a way beneficial to society at large. That way the government doesn't have to spend taxpayer money on countless r&d experiments, VC investors have a perspective to payout, and the world gets kept from utter bullshit like API games.
If you expect the government to make a tender offer on the largest market-cap companies, they sure as heck _are_ paying for r&d indirectly. And a lot more!
> once a publicly traded company gains critical market dominance and is reasonably profitable, the government buys all shares at the current market price and places the company in a public-good trust
Interesting, haven't heard that one. I'll say maybe. I'd rather have Facebook not exist at all than have it be an *official* arm of the NSA
Or, perhaps more simply, The Oatmeal's Reaching People on the Internet: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people
So now not only is AI filling the web with garbage that poisons future model development[1], it provides incentive to further close and wall off access to (user-provided!) data.
Things are starting to flip. Increasingly, people would rather have access to the raw dataset to pipe into an LLM. The question, as always, is how to control this access and charge people accordingly.
But this case seems to be funny at least (acc to your text): A YT link about the 'old, open web'. YMMD!
That said... I think API policies are also vestiges of a defunct idea set that prevailed circa 2009.
At that time, "twitter is a protocol." APIs and openness were going to be the new worldwideweb. Social media was going to be an ecosystem of independent apps and services with complex interactions mitigated by protocols.
YC even did an "rfs" recruiting startups to build off the twitter API.
That didn't happen, but APIs intended to enable it were already in the wild.
As API access becomes strategic again (because AI), "why do we even have this?" is likely to come up.