[xg15]

If nothing else, it's that the users get pulled into some braindead power struggle between two companies that they could care less about. Yet they are the ones who find that they cannot use the products anymore properly. Moves like this decrease the quality of both your product and your competitor's. Yet the whole sense of competition in capitalism is supposedly to increase quality.

Of course that's just the obvious consequences, ignoring the larger implications of allowing companies to place arbitrary restrictions on their services - when at the same time those services become more and more critical infrastructure.

[Justsignedup]

Generally in a competitive market, you have one company selling product / service X and a competitor selling service Y which does something similar.

This is fine.

However online communication is different. Imagine if the telephone company would bleep out any time your friend mentions a competitor's company. You'd never know a competitor exists. Especially if that competitor is up-and-coming and doesn't have the pockets to send flyers to every damn house in the state.