Technology

The danger here is that they make "open" standards so horrendously complex and ever evolving that only the billionaire mega corporations can can realistically keep up with them.

See the web where Google now control it completely by having such an enormous amount of code that even Microsoft couldn't be arsed to keep up, or Office Open XML, where 100% compatibility is limited to exactly one product: The one that made it. I just downloaded the documentation for the standard. It is over 5000 fucking pages long. That was part 1 of 4.

Interoperability is how we “seize the means of computation.”

Good luck with that. If the success of the iPhone has taught me anything it is that the average person loves them some incompatible with anything but itself vertical integration.

Through no intervention or design, the market creates perverse incentives that only benefit a few. So the solution is to fiddle with the incentives?

Ya ever notice that "market reform" schemes always seem like negotiations with an angry god? Sometimes I think that ancient civilizations would be much better understood if we stopped referring to the "priest class" and started calling them economists.

I loved the net when you had to have a clue to be there.