> 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.OAuth/APIs were a beautiful thing until the marketing departments figured out they could use it to spam even more people.
Please check out Braid project initiative that is working towards fully interconnected eco-system for the web [1],[2].
[1] Stop using REST for state synchronization (2024) - comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44000810
[2] A Synchronous Web of State:
I am still mad that Facebook mostly abandoned the Open Graph protocol on their own sites.
The moment MCP was announced, my first thoughts were "oh, those summer children". MPC is idyllic and not for this world.
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.
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.
…news broke that rival Meta, opens new tab is taking…
(emphasis mine)
Been awhile since I’ve seen this kind of content error.
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.
Laughs/Cries in SAP
AI infighting, hilarious
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.
> 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.
> 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...