[HN Gopher] The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnect...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context
       ecosystem is over
        
       Author : dbreunig
       Score  : 104 points
       Date   : 2025-06-17 00:13 UTC (22 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.dbreunig.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.dbreunig.com)
        
       | bigmattystyles wrote:
       | Laughs/Cries in SAP
        
         | _jholland wrote:
         | I have made it my mission to conquer SAP and gain control of
         | _our own critical financial data_.
         | 
         | As a business, they uniquely leverage inefficient and clunky
         | design to drive profit. Simply because they haven't documented
         | their systems sufficiently, it is "industry standard practice"
         | to go straight to a PS100/hr+ consultant to build what should
         | be straightforward integrations and perform basic IT Admin
         | procedures.
         | 
         | Through many painful late nights I have waded through their
         | meticulously constructed labyrinth of undocumented parameters
         | and gotchas built on foot-guns to eventually get to both build
         | and configure an SAP instance from scratch and expose a
         | complete API in Python.
         | 
         | It is for me a David and Goliath moment, carrying more value
         | than the consultancy fees and software licences I've spared my
         | company.
        
           | piva00 wrote:
           | It's unfortunate it is your employer's IP, this shim on top
           | of SAP would be extremely valuable if you sold as another
           | product to enable internal teams in SAP-world corporations to
           | develop without the knowledge of SAP arcana.
        
             | robertlagrant wrote:
             | Yes I would strongly recommend monetising this, even though
             | you'd have to rebuild it from scratch. Worth filling in a Y
             | Combinator application?
        
               | dbreunig wrote:
               | Yes, look up Winshuttle.
               | 
               | A very successful company with some of the happiest
               | customers I've ever seen, whose entire product was a SAP
               | hack that allowed people to enter their data using Excel.
               | As someone unfamiliar with SAP, absolutely blew my mind.
        
           | jgraettinger1 wrote:
           | Hi, I'm a cofounder / CTO of estuary.dev. Our whole mission
           | is democratizing and enabling use of data within orgs.
           | 
           | Open to a conversation about your work here? Reach me at
           | johnny at estuary dot dev.
        
       | robertheadley wrote:
       | I am still mad that Facebook mostly abandoned the Open Graph
       | protocol on their own sites.
        
         | mxmilkiib wrote:
         | for me, when both Facebook and Google rejected Jabber/XMPP
         | federation :(
         | 
         | but yeah, in general, what happened to the dream of true Data
         | Portability?
        
           | JumpCrisscross wrote:
           | > _what happened to the dream of true Data Portability?_
           | 
           | It got muddled into the privacy/security debate and then we
           | all got distracted.
        
           | immibis wrote:
           | Capitalism happened. You can't extract value if the usership
           | can flow away from your site like water.
        
           | julik wrote:
           | Capitalism happened. My hope is on regulation - I don't see
           | any other force being capable of prying these moat cans open.
        
           | rahoulb wrote:
           | As other posters have said - capitalism.
           | 
           | But also privacy - it would be amazing to just be able to
           | connect to any app or service you want, interact and react to
           | stuff that's happening _over there_.
           | 
           | However, do you want any old app or service connecting to
           | _your_ data, siphoning it and selling it on (and, at best,
           | burying their use of your data in a huge terms of service
           | document that no-one reads, at worst, lying about what they
           | do with that information)? So you have to add access controls
           | that are either intrusive and/or complex, or, more likely,
           | just ignored. Then the provider gets sued for leaking data
           | and we're in a situation where no-one dares open up.
        
           | Lammy wrote:
           | > for me, when both Facebook and Google rejected Jabber/XMPP
           | federation :(
           | 
           | I agree with you in principle, but this is only half-true.
           | You're right that Facebook's XMPP was always just a gateway
           | into their proprietary messaging system, but Google did
           | support XMPP federation. What Google did _not_ support was
           | server-to-server TLS, and thus it was "us" who killed Google
           | XMPP federation.
           | 
           | In late 2013 there was an XMPP community manifesto calling
           | for mandatory TLS (even STARTTLS) for XMPP server-to-server
           | communication by a drop-dead date in mid 2014: https://github
           | .com/stpeter/manifesto/blob/master/manifesto.t...
           | 
           | "The schedule we agree to is:
           | 
           | - January 4, 2014: first test day requiring encryption
           | 
           | - February 22, 2014: second test day
           | 
           | - March 22, 2014: third test day
           | 
           | - April 19, 2014: fourth test day
           | 
           | - May 19, 2014: permanent upgrade to encrypted network,
           | coinciding with Open Discussion Day
           | <http://opendiscussionday.org/>"
           | 
           | Well-intentioned for sure, but the one XMPP provider with an
           | actual critical mass of users (Google Talk) remained non-TLS-
           | only, all Google Talk users dropped off the federated XMPP
           | network after May 2014, and so XMPP effectively ceased to
           | matter. I'm sure Google were very happy to let us do this.
        
       | renewiltord wrote:
       | It's inevitable. You can't afford to just provide a platform for
       | free that someone else monetizes. I wonder what API plans are
       | reasonable:
       | 
       | * Just let your users pay for API access at a per-call rate
       | 
       | * Charge app developer per user
       | 
       | The problem is that ultimately the LTV of the average user is
       | high, but this is skewed up by the most valuable users who will
       | switch to a different app that will inevitably attempt to hijack
       | your userbase once they control enough of your users.
       | 
       | A classic example is that imgur became a social network of its
       | own once it had enough Reddit users and only Reddit doing their
       | own image/video hosting stemmed that bleeding.
       | 
       | And then there's the fact that if you choose the payment-based
       | approaches, one app will suction the data out and compete with
       | you for it; inevitably some user will lose his data through some
       | app breach and blame you; and the basic app any newbie developer
       | will build will be "yours but ad-free" which is fine for him
       | because you're paying the development and hosting costs of the
       | entire infra.
       | 
       | It's no surprise everyone converges on preventing API access.
       | Even Metafilter does.
       | 
       | I'm curious if anyone has an idea for API access that can
       | nonetheless be a successful company. Everyone's always got some
       | idea with negative margin and negative feedback loops which they
       | bill as "but that won't make you a billionaire" (that's true,
       | because your company will fail) but I wonder if there is some way
       | that _could_ work without ruining social network network-effects
       | etc.
        
         | immibis wrote:
         | Probably not. But there can be API access from a nonsuccessful
         | noncompany - look at Fediverse or whatever.
        
       | seydor wrote:
       | I m optimistic, because LLMs can understand plain language. MCP
       | won't last as the article correctly states, but you will always
       | be able to say to your AI to open your email and search whatever.
       | And companies cannot block you from doing that as long as it is
       | your own PC / Phone.
       | 
       | If we do allow companies to block AI agents from accessing our
       | own computers and data, then the users are to blame for falling
       | again into another BigTech trap.
        
         | visarga wrote:
         | Computer use over screen and keyboard comes to the rescue
        
         | msgodel wrote:
         | I think the demand for this will actually kill closed
         | ecosystems like iOS. I feel strongly enough about this that I'm
         | shorting Apple over it. They won't be able to get it right
         | because every integration will have to be canned while
         | companies giving the LLMs/users a shell will allow them to do
         | anything. People get confused because that used to not matter,
         | most users couldn't do anything with a shell. That's no longer
         | the case with LLMs.
        
           | robertlagrant wrote:
           | > I feel strongly enough about this that I'm shorting Apple
           | over it.
           | 
           | How long do you think it will take for this to meaningfully
           | override Apple's share price?
        
             | msgodel wrote:
             | I think it's already starting. Apple can't produce anything
             | people just have to have anymore because of the attitude
             | that's causing this. You can see this in their sales
             | numbers.
        
               | layer8 wrote:
               | People "have to have" an iPhone because it's a status
               | symbol. Not sure how AI is going to change that.
        
               | msgodel wrote:
               | So was the Blackberry. Better radios and mobile SOCs
               | absolutely changed that.
               | 
               | Mathias Wandel (an ex Blackberry engineer) has a neat
               | video where he explains exactly how that happened and the
               | attitudes are strikingly similar to the ones today.
        
               | zdragnar wrote:
               | My brother's family and my parents all have iPhones and
               | apple devices because the whole apple ecosystem Just
               | Works for them, especially sharing pictures. They're far
               | from tech saavy, and telling them to "just install this
               | on your phone and this on your computer and this other
               | thing on your other computer" is a non-starter.
               | 
               | None of them actually care that they are Apple products
               | or iWhatevers. Most couldn't tell you what the difference
               | is between what they use and windows or android. They
               | just know to go to the apple store to get things that
               | work for them.
        
               | freeone3000 wrote:
               | I am completely uninterested to going back to the
               | privacy-stealing, ad-infested nightmare that is Android.
               | Besides, what would I even gain? iOS 25 just got live
               | translation in calls and item extraction from screen (not
               | just photos). So what am I missing?
        
               | msgodel wrote:
               | I think you should read and/or think more carefully.
        
               | achierius wrote:
               | This seems unrelated to your original thesis though, no?
        
           | skybrian wrote:
           | I think you're extrapolating too much from the enthusiasm of
           | early adopters? There is widespread skepticism about AI. A
           | lot of people aren't that eager to use it and resent having
           | new AI features pushed on them by overenthusiastic vendors.
           | 
           | Maybe users would rather keep their data safe than have it
           | exfiltrated by a confused AI?
        
         | _heimdall wrote:
         | MCPs are, in part, a response to the difficulties LLM companies
         | had when trying out LLMs interact online by visually navigation
         | the screen.
         | 
         | They need APIs for it to be efficient. For whatever reason they
         | didn't choose to use accessibility tooling to automate agents,
         | and we haven't written REST APIs for 20+ years - they're left
         | hoping a newly designed protocol will fix it.
        
           | TeMPOraL wrote:
           | > _For whatever reason they didn 't choose to use
           | accessibility tooling to automate agents_
           | 
           | That surprises me too. It's arguably the _only_ way forward
           | that has a chance of surviving for more than a moment,
           | because accessibility actually has a strong cultural and
           | (occasionally) legal backing, so companies can 't easily
           | close that off.
        
             | _heimdall wrote:
             | I was genuinely (maybe naively) impressed when google
             | pushed for https everywhere. Maybe there were nefarious
             | reason behind it that I missed, but it did a lot of good
             | for the average web user.
             | 
             | LLM companies could easily have made a similar impact by
             | leaning on accessibility tooling. Pushing companies to
             | better support ARIA standards online would have made a huge
             | impact for the better.
             | 
             | Heck, throw a little of that LLM money towards browser
             | vendors to even better support ARIA - personally I'd love
             | to see a proper API for directly accessing the
             | accessibility tree.
        
               | TeMPOraL wrote:
               | > _LLM companies could easily have made a similar impact
               | by leaning on accessibility tooling. Pushing companies to
               | better support ARIA standards online would have made a
               | huge impact for the better._
               | 
               | If anything, they'd have the reverse impact,
               | unfortunately. The thing is, the companies whose
               | sites/apps/resources would be accessed by LLMs _don 't
               | want this_. That's the entire point of the article we're
               | discussing.
               | 
               | All I'm saying is, accessibility is the only
               | interoperability wedge they can't just close off, without
               | a huge community backlash and in some cases because of
               | compliance reasons.
        
         | bobbiechen wrote:
         | I am less optimistic. Even paid products like Netflix or the
         | Amazon Kindle are ad-monetized now.
         | 
         | I think the current useful state of consumer LLMs is a
         | temporary subsidy, and the incentives to add ads are too large.
         | And that will change everything, even tools that should work
         | for the user. I recently wrote a blog post on this:
         | https://digitalseams.com/blog/the-ai-lifestyle-subsidy-is-go...
        
         | TeMPOraL wrote:
         | > _but you will always be able to say to your AI to open your
         | email and search whatever._
         | 
         | Can you _actually_ even do that today? Not on iOS, I presume,
         | definitely not on Android, at least not without hacking it six
         | ways to Sunday with Tasker and Termux and API access to LLM
         | providers.
         | 
         | (And no, firing Gemini and asking it to kindly maybe search
         | your GMail doesn't count - because GMail is not the only e-mail
         | provider, and GMail app is not the only e-mail client. If I
         | want this to be possible with FastMail as provider and
         | FairEmail as the app, it's hack o'clock again.)
         | 
         | Vendors all across the board _really_ hate to give users useful
         | features, because useful features tend to side-step their
         | monetization efforts. And if history is any lesson, they 'll
         | find ways to constrain and shut down general-purpose use of
         | LLMs. "Security" and "privacy" were the main fig leafs used in
         | the past, so watch out for any new "improvements" there.
        
       | ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
       | ...news broke that rival Meta, _opens new tab_ is taking...
       | 
       |  _(emphasis mine)_
       | 
       | Been awhile since I've seen this kind of content error.
        
         | io84 wrote:
         | I wonder if that's a dictation artefact
        
           | dbreunig wrote:
           | Not dictation...copy/paste I think. Thanks, fixed.
        
       | eadmund wrote:
       | At the end of the day, servers and software engineers cost money.
       | One way to pay for things is ads, but ads are hostile to
       | integrations (because there is no good way to guarantee ads will
       | be shown) -- I believe this is why Twitter and Reddit killed
       | their third-party clients. But there are alternate ways to pay
       | for things, e.g. subscriptions. The good news here is that the
       | sorts of things one pays for are IMHO more likely to be the sorts
       | of things worth MCPing together. Using MCP to post to Reddit or
       | Twitter? Low value, to oneself and to society. Using MCP to work
       | with one's AWS account? Higher value.
       | 
       | Incidentally, why do the article's links all use strikethrough
       | rather than underlines? Is this a deliberate style choice, or
       | some Chrome/Firefox/Safari incompatibility? It's pretty ugly.
        
       | bsenftner wrote:
       | The moment MCP was announced, my first thoughts were "oh, those
       | summer children". MPC is idyllic and not for this world.
        
         | spacecadet wrote:
         | Hacky scrapper go brrrr
        
         | TeMPOraL wrote:
         | Yup, same here. But it's also super painful to watch it being
         | neutered by people who tried to force-fit MCP to their usual
         | smelly business models, and then started to make a fuss about
         | "security issues" that are actually _core features_ of MCP and
         | LLMs in general. In most cases, it 's not MCP that was a
         | problem, it's someone's -as-a-Service business model they cling
         | to.
        
       | Permit wrote:
       | > Once network effects crowded a few winners, the drawbridges
       | slowly pulled up. Previously simple APIs evolved into complicated
       | layers of access controls and pricing tiers. Winning platforms
       | adjusted their APIs so you could support their platforms, but not
       | build anything competitive. Perhaps the best example of this was
       | Twitter's 2012 policy adjustment which limited client 3rd party
       | apps to a maximum of 100,000 users (they've since cut off all 3rd
       | party clients).
       | 
       | One thing I haven't seen written about much is how these APIs
       | turned into massive liabilities for privacy. If a Twitter API
       | allows me to siphon tweets off of Twitter, you can never delete
       | them. If a Facebook API allows (user-approved apps) to view the
       | names of my friends and the pages they like, this data can be
       | used to create targeted political ads for those users[1].
       | 
       | So a company considering creating a public-facing API must deal
       | with the fact that:
       | 
       | 1. This API could be helping my competitor
       | 
       | 2. This API makes internal changes more difficult (typically
       | there is a strong effort to maintain backwards compatibility).
       | 
       | 3. If company XXX uses the API to extract data (that users have
       | given them explicit access to), the ensuring scandal will not be
       | called the "XXXX Data Scandal", but rather the "MYCOMPANY-XXX
       | Data Scandal"[1].
       | 
       | [1]
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
        
         | MichaelZuo wrote:
         | It does like seem there are so many inherent disadvantages that
         | the original proponents must have been confused or
         | intentionally ignoring realistic factors...
         | 
         | It's like they never even tallied up all plausible advantages
         | and disadvantages in the first place. So how did anyone
         | determine it was an overall net positive?
        
           | __MatrixMan__ wrote:
           | Are you proposing that interoperability is not an overall net
           | positive? If it's getting a bad rap right now it's just
           | because it's not always simultaneously a competitive
           | advantage. But that line of thinking is a race to the bottom.
           | 
           | I mean, why not just kill your competitors? Then your
           | product, however bad, would be the only one. Clearly a net
           | negative, but a competitive advantage.
           | 
           | What has changed is that we've recently lowered the bar for
           | how much of a net positive we plan on shooting for. Top dog
           | on the trash heap is, I guess, now an enviable position.
        
             | MichaelZuo wrote:
             | Privacy, reputation risk, etc., seem like huge
             | disadvantages... so it's not clear at all if it's a net
             | positive overall.
             | 
             | Someone has to actually do that analysis in the first
             | place. It doesn't just automatically become true.
        
               | ImPostingOnHN wrote:
               | What are the privacy and reputation risks for me as a
               | user, if I'm able to access my data via API?
               | 
               | If you're referring to 'net positive [for facebook]'
               | rather than [for users] or [for society], then the point
               | is conceded that facebook can make more profits abusing
               | their users versus being more considerate of them.
        
               | MichaelZuo wrote:
               | How is this relevant? The user isn't the one making the
               | decision to implement it or not.
        
               | __MatrixMan__ wrote:
               | In general there are more users than implementers, so
               | their experience is more relevant to whether it's an
               | overall net positive.
        
               | ImPostingOnHN wrote:
               | _> How is this relevant?_
               | 
               | How is it relevant to _what_? We were discussing  "net
               | positives" as in net positives _for society_ , but it
               | sounds like you're referring to net positives for
               | Facebook alone, at the expense of all others.
               | 
               |  _> The user isn't the one making the decision to
               | implement it or not_
               | 
               | This is true. Here is another difference between them:
               | Facebook isn't the one being harmed by cutting off
               | approved API access to 3rd parties.
               | 
               | It seems like we both agree that Facebook and users are
               | different groups, in different circumstances, with
               | different things to gain and lose from different
               | decisions made here.
               | 
               | With that shared foundation of understanding: Why should
               | we care about what Facebook wants, more than we care what
               | users want? Why should we care about Facebook wanting to
               | stifle startups and other competitors, more than we care
               | what users want? Why should we care about Facebook's
               | profit margin, more than we care what users want?
               | 
               | Of course Facebook is free to do what is good for them
               | and bad for users, and they indeed chose (and continue to
               | choose) to do so. Here we see the predictable result:
               | Users criticizing them for that decision.
               | 
               | We are all smart and can comprehend Facebook's purely-
               | economic "fuck the users, we wanna make _money_ "
               | decision criteria just fine, but we don't have to respect
               | it.
        
         | skybrian wrote:
         | Nowadays we expect popular tweets to be screenshotted, just as
         | popular webpages are usually archived somewhere.
         | 
         | Bluesky has decided that it's not a bug and is not going to be
         | fixed: you can delete a post, but someone could have saved it,
         | and worse, it's digitally signed.
        
           | pfraze wrote:
           | We generally would characterize the monopolies as the bug,
           | not the public nature of the data
        
             | skybrian wrote:
             | Yeah, I don't think it's the wrong decision. Maybe I should
             | have called it a design tradeoff.
             | 
             | Edit: editing posts is nice to have.
        
               | cryptonector wrote:
               | > Yeah, I don't think it's the wrong decision. Maybe I
               | should have called it a design tradeoff.
               | 
               | How would you design Bluesky to prevent analog holes?
        
           | bunderbunder wrote:
           | I haven't read it in 10 years, but this used to be pretty
           | explicitly spelled out in Twitter's privacy policy, in plain
           | language, in a way that I really appreciated. (Not that
           | anyone ever reads the privacy policy.)
           | 
           | But it really does make sense. Nothing you publicly tweet can
           | ever be private, nor is there any real way you can reliably
           | take it back. Because as soon as the tweet's been transferred
           | to someone else's device, they now have every bit as much
           | control over that content as they do over any other content
           | that makes it onto their device.
           | 
           | I'm a pretty pro-privacy person, to the point where I
           | generally avoid social media sites. But this was also my
           | policy back when I administered an oldschool Web forum: once
           | it's posted, it's out of your control. Period. That's really
           | the only policy for a public forum that makes any sense at
           | all. If that's scary to you then maybe the things you're
           | posting should be, y'know, _kept private_ instead of being
           | broadcast to the entire world.
           | 
           | tl;dr: group chats are actually pretty cool.
        
           | cryptonector wrote:
           | > Bluesky has decided that it's not a bug and is not going to
           | be fixed:
           | 
           | It's called an "analog hole". It's very difficult to prevent
           | analog holes. By difficult I mean: impossible.
        
         | veqq wrote:
         | Precisely what kneecapped the semantic web. Why make it easier
         | for the competition to take all of your data?
        
           | Y_Y wrote:
           | I remember when the internet was collaboratorative rather
           | than competitive. I think then tech companies got so big that
           | they ran out of scientists and engineers and had to hire
           | fairground hucksters.
        
             | pixl97 wrote:
             | Yes and no.
             | 
             | The internet was collaborative when it was very small. You
             | still had islands like AOL and Compuserve and such.
             | 
             | Then as it got bigger the big islands like AOL broke, and
             | the views started going to larger and larger websites
             | (think things like news sites). These sites had to work
             | with vendors (Microsoft/Apache) to be able to support the
             | load without crashing. While this is occurring hardware got
             | a lot faster and databases more performant (along with
             | things like K/V caching).
             | 
             | This lead to the last 'social media' wave where just a few
             | large companies could host enough servers to serve everyone
             | on the internet (within reason). These companies sucked a
             | lot of wind out of the smaller companies that were
             | successful. You could wake up one day and find out Google
             | had implemented your entire business model and is giving it
             | away for 'free'.
             | 
             | But free was never free. Those big companies need your
             | eyeballs. They need your attention. And they will do
             | anything regardless of the ethics to keep it (what are
             | small fines between friends). There was not much more room
             | to expand in to, you're only expanding into other
             | companies. You take over/replace the ones that give their
             | data away and 'compete/fight with' the ones that don't.
        
           | jandrewrogers wrote:
           | More precisely, one of _several_ things that kneecapped the
           | semantic web.
        
         | ImPostingOnHN wrote:
         | _> If a Twitter API allows me to siphon tweets off of Twitter,
         | you can never delete them. If a Facebook API allows (user-
         | approved apps) to view the names of my friends and the pages
         | they like, this data can be used to create targeted political
         | ads for those users[1]._
         | 
         | Not only is this already possible (I can open up twitter and
         | press "control-P"; I can open up Facebook and see names)*, but
         | it's already being done _by those companies_. If you thought
         | Cambridge Analytica was bad, imagine what _Facebook_ is doing
         | with _even more_ user data.
         | 
         | That indicates that the issue isn't protecting users from that
         | sort of abuse (since they are the abusers in that sense), but
         | to prevent business competitors from doing the same and reduce
         | user choice (eg users who don't want to have to have their eyes
         | bleed to read their content on these sites).
         | 
         | If the goal is to keep information secret from X, disclosing it
         | to X via 1 programmatic means while restricting it via another,
         | fails to achieve that goal.
         | 
         |  _> So a company considering creating a public-facing API must
         | deal with the fact that:_
         | 
         | 1. It could be helping users, which is more important to users
         | than Facebook winning some corpo-war-on-data-access. Is it more
         | important to Facebook et al, though? Clearly not, and therein
         | lies the ethical failing of Facebook et al.
         | 
         |  _* - "but wait" I hear some saying, "you're just a human, you
         | can't do that at scale!" Well: the data got on my computer
         | screen programmatically, and it's trivial to reuse those
         | methods to get the data you want. It's just an extra step or
         | two that frustrates legitimate users._
        
         | mb7733 wrote:
         | > One thing I haven't seen written about much is how these APIs
         | turned into massive liabilities for privacy. If a Twitter API
         | allows me to siphon tweets off of Twitter, you can never delete
         | them.
         | 
         | Is that really a privacy concern? Tweets are public. As soon as
         | you post them, others can just save the page. No need for an
         | API.
        
       | exabrial wrote:
       | OAuth/APIs were a beautiful thing until the marketing departments
       | figured out they could use it to spam even more people.
        
       | tempodox wrote:
       | > But it didn't last.
       | 
       | Of course not. All this gatekeeping is how every Tom, Dick and
       | Harriette make their money and wrestle for dominance. Believing
       | that any specific tech would fundamentally change that is
       | hopelessly naive. The honeymoon phases that make it look like it
       | could be different this time around are merely there to lock in
       | lots of users.
       | 
       | It's in the nature of capitalism and that's not a technological
       | issue.
        
       | walterbell wrote:
       | _> don't expect the platforms to let you compete easily._
       | 
       | Regulatory support of interoperability and competition:
       | 1. EU mandated interoperability on mobile and messages.       2.
       | US won antitrust legal case against Google. Remedy TBD.       3.
       | Epic lawsuit enabled non-Apple payments and lower fees for
       | content sale.       4. US has mandated that banks open up payment
       | history data to 3rd parties.       5. US halted Facebook/Meta
       | Libra/Diem digital currency.       6. China halted Ant Group
       | digital currency.
        
       | armchairhacker wrote:
       | Today, an external camera can record your computer screen and
       | audio, AI can extract the data and metadata, and a 2D contraption
       | can physically move your mouse to interact. In the future, these
       | will probably become more effective and cheaper (eventually the
       | AI becoming possible to run locally, though even today it's
       | possible with a good GPU on simple UIs).
       | 
       | Lots of other comments argue for regulation mandating open APIs.
       | I disagree, instead we should remove and prevent regulations that
       | block scraping. We should also create alternative monetization
       | paths for companies who charge for access or use ads, since
       | they'll lose those paths, and they're already suffering from
       | piracy and illegal scraping.
        
         | pixl97 wrote:
         | The biggest problem here is preventing said scraping from
         | shutting down the sites with cost.
         | 
         | Over the years most of the problems I had with sites getting
         | overloaded were from valid 'scrapers' like Google. Quite often
         | providers were adding more memory/cpu just to ensure Google
         | could index the site.
         | 
         | While hosting costs are cheaper than ever, being on the
         | internet can still get very expensive very fast.
        
           | armchairhacker wrote:
           | In theory it could be solved by websites charging a very
           | small fee (maybe crypto) for incoming requests, to pay
           | operating costs. The fees from human browsing (even excessive
           | like 1 site / second) would be negligible. APIs that use
           | scraping would forward the fee to their users. Training or
           | search (index) data would cost a lot to generate, but
           | probably still insignificant compared to training the ML
           | model or operating the search.
           | 
           | It already costs a small amount of electricity for clients to
           | send requests, so maybe paying for the server to handle them
           | wouldn't be a big difference, but I don't know much about
           | networking.
           | 
           | Although in practice, similar things have been tried and
           | those haven't worked out, e.g. Coil. It would require
           | adoption by most browsers or ISPs, otherwise participating
           | sites would be mostly ignored (most clients don't pay the fee
           | so they don't get access, they don't cares because it's
           | probably a small site and/or there are alternatives).
        
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