[cookiecaper]

>The same story plays out over and over again in tech, and it does so for very obvious reasons.

Yes, and that reason is anti-competitive supercharged intellectual property laws, plus anti-competitive obsolete computer access laws that can't tell the difference between a parcel of land on someone's farm and a network-attached server. Together, these laws make it virtually impossible to break the grip of ingrained players.

Instead of competing on the merit of their offering, big internet companies only need to take the basic steps that qualify them for those legal protections, like a non-sensical Terms of Use that, if read literally, would ban any access at all. These companies thus conspire to use the law to prevent the use of technical solutions to make switching costs reasonable for consumers.

(PayPal deals with an extra type of regulation, and even its founders have said it would be impossible to start a new PayPal today given the current state of financial regulation.)

We should consider how much money is being monopolized by copyright and ask ourselves, as a society, if that's really proportional to the value provided by granting said monopoly. I would say that copyright's constitutional purpose of "promoting progress in Science and the Arts" is actually being impeded by the massive, virtually unlimited (effectively "forever minus one day") monopoly that copyright now represents.