The moral is, in a way, obvious: it’s a confirmation of Bruce Schneier’s original observation that “surveillance is the business model of the Internet”. Being a pedant, I would have said “of the Web”, but since many people can’t distinguish between the two, we’ll leave Bruce’s formulation stand.
Gratuitous, but fun:
Ernst Mayr, a prominent figure in biology had opined that hybridization was an unimportant factor in evolution, as far as I can tell for no particular reason at all. For equally mysterious reasons, people paid attention to him.
I have a sneaking suspicion that if tomorrow Apple or Google just subscribed everyone to 99% Invisible and waited, FM radio would be dead in a year.
Sweet thought, but unlikely.
Owning your content isn’t about portable software. It’s about portable URLs and data. It’s about domain names.
Cannot say this often enough.