It's not that these points aren't valid; they are, and I know some people who've been rightfully hammering the exact same points for, well, decades, at this point.<p>But we arrived here neither out of pure accident or grand overarching malice, but simply out of the necessity of the now-commercial web and its lack of good business models, and perverse incentives.<p>Back when most of the traffic on the Internet was academic, institutional, government, or hobbyist, the incentives were to get the content out there and interoperate with others, because the dissemination of the information was seen as having intrinsic value, and the expenses were covered by out-of-band means (i.e. not monetized through the content or the consumers).<p>On today's particular flavor of a commercial web, especially when your next funding round depends on showing user numbers, easy out-migration is a liability, easy in-migration is a feature, so even the use of APIs frequently helps the product and the company more so than it helps the user.<p>When commercial entities started appearing on the Internet, particularly on the World Wide Web, some sites were pure billboards containing only an about page and contact information, e-commerce sites funded the operation through selling actual wares, but news/media/entertainment sites brought with them their previously trailblazed business model of giving away content and trying to recoup some of the cost with advertising. Later, VC-funded content silos took a page from early hobbyist web forums (that were mediocre reimagining of BBSes) and created login-walled playgrounds that funnel the content inward, making it easier to track, analyze, and monetize. It's no surprise that today's four largest display ad servers are Google, Facebook, Verizon/Yahoo/AOL, and Twitter.<p>Other business models only work for specialized players who can command some brand awareness and attract a discriminating customer willing to pay for quality (e.g. big-name or niche newspapers, streaming media sites, data brokers); and, as the HN meme goes, micropayments get much more interest from those who want to collect them than those who want to pay for them, so the everyman's market is full of me-too sites vying for limited attention, or captive content silos that re-create everything on the inside. The battle is largely lost, unless realistic progress is made in the web monetization space.<p>Luckily, there are no technical barriers to people banding together and making interoperable services like the way things used to be -- and keeping up the protocols that make that a reality. It's just that they will have to contend with the realities of playing in that space and competing with similar offerings that don't. Havens on the old web, or the old Internet for that matter still exist, just like amateur radio still exists along with public access television. It's just not where the mainstream attention-hours go.