The thing is that the government is co-conspiring with the large companies to allow them to enforce their walled gardens through the wholly-artificial means of the CFAA, copyright, etc.
If the government stopped allowing large companies to haul innovators to court for accessing the data that that company willfully shared with the innovator's browser, the wall, at least on SaaS-style services, would be broken as third-party federators would be free to come in and tranform that data into something compatible with competing solutions. The data would be able to flow freely and the user would be free to access the data through Facebook directly or through a competitor service, and products would need to compete for users on merit instead of taking one's social graph hostage.
The web enables this portability, but the government has set up rules (in some cases, inadvertently and through negligence) that stop people from competing on an even playing field. We need to fix those rules. CFAA, EULAs, and copyright for RAM copies is a start.
If the government stopped allowing large companies to haul innovators to court for accessing the data that that company willfully shared with the innovator's browser, the wall, at least on SaaS-style services, would be broken as third-party federators would be free to come in and tranform that data into something compatible with competing solutions. The data would be able to flow freely and the user would be free to access the data through Facebook directly or through a competitor service, and products would need to compete for users on merit instead of taking one's social graph hostage.
The web enables this portability, but the government has set up rules (in some cases, inadvertently and through negligence) that stop people from competing on an even playing field. We need to fix those rules. CFAA, EULAs, and copyright for RAM copies is a start.