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You don't generally get to choose who pipes the water to your house.




That is true and it makes my analogy not so fit. Oh well.

Would it help if you could? Hasn’t the bottled water industry demonstrated lower standards and more scams and marketing FUD than the EPA?

Water in the pipes is higher standards precisely because we don't accept that the water utility can pump sewage to us 10% of the time.

The problem with this analogy as I see it is that water supply is heavily regulated and uncompetitive due to exactly the fact of it being impossible to switch.

For this to work for the likes of Meta, it would mean elevating Meta’s services to some sort of country-wide public utility, which I’m sure would create probably an even stronger moat than network effects, hindering any competiton.

However, is there such a constraint in case of social media? There are mechanisms and open standards that could allow interoperability between providers who implement them. It seems that it should be possible to leave it up to market forces and competition, but for that we have to have competition and be able to vote with our wallets.




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