Twilight of the open tech era

Today's tech giants achieved success and scale by promoting their openness, but the industry's open doors are shutting, one by one. Today's dominant tech platforms are privately owned and governed, and their owners will readily adjust the "openness" dial to suit their needs — booting users perceived to be undesirable, blocking competitors, and locking down key data structures (like Facebook's "social graph") to prevent users from choosing alternatives. Today's cloud-based software model pushes businesses and individuals away from the digital commons and toward closed, privately owned dataspaces. Those who still want to own their own digital real estate find that cybersecurity threats mean they can't realistically protect themselves. Network access in the US and most other countries is controlled by a small number of giant service providers, and the reversal of net neutrality rules means that they have a free hand to promote their own properties and stifle competitors. The escalating trade war between the US and China, which threatens to throttle growth in both countries, is splintering the global network economically, technically, and culturally, placing new barriers to international exchange.