While I agree with you on having the market decide, I do think that there is a small role for the gov't to play in encouraging competitive markets by mandating data portability between services. The trap that users find themselves in now are similar to that of phone users before the Telecommunications Act of 1996 mandated that one be able to take their phone number from one service provider to another without incurring any additional switching costs (such as reprinting business documentation, contacting customers about the change, etc.).
As a side effect of Europe's GDPR, a number of these social media services already offer this ability (Facebook's actually pretty good on this front), but in general - and especially with respect to advertising-funded ventures - it would be good for the American Internet user if they enjoyed the same rights as our European counterparts to not only be able to take our data with us, but ALSO to be able to query online services precisely about what data that they do hold on each and every one of us[1].
And on the commercial side, we need to support new services that take advantage of this data portability. For all the attention that Parler received, I think it's madness - and it negatively impacted the tenor and available content on the service - that they didn't support importing one's Twitter history, which is readily exportable.[2]
Once we address the issue of porting content from one service to another, the final missing piece of the puzzle is the forwarding address. Academia's been attempting to address this issue with persistent publication references[3], and I can see something similar working as a method to avoid the issue of dead links as folks bounce between services. Alternatively - under the aegis of data portability - providing users the right to specify redirect addresses to new services would be a lightweight bit of infrastructure to mandate (old service provides a user-level redirect to the new service, the new service is responsible for doing any fine-grained content resolution).
While I agree with you on having the market decide, I do think that there is a small role for the gov't to play in encouraging competitive markets by mandating data portability between services. The trap that users find themselves in now are similar to that of phone users before the Telecommunications Act of 1996 mandated that one be able to take their phone number from one service provider to another without incurring any additional switching costs (such as reprinting business documentation, contacting customers about the change, etc.).
As a side effect of Europe's GDPR, a number of these social media services already offer this ability (Facebook's actually pretty good on this front), but in general - and especially with respect to advertising-funded ventures - it would be good for the American Internet user if they enjoyed the same rights as our European counterparts to not only be able to take our data with us, but ALSO to be able to query online services precisely about what data that they do hold on each and every one of us[1].
And on the commercial side, we need to support new services that take advantage of this data portability. For all the attention that Parler received, I think it's madness - and it negatively impacted the tenor and available content on the service - that they didn't support importing one's Twitter history, which is readily exportable.[2]
Once we address the issue of porting content from one service to another, the final missing piece of the puzzle is the forwarding address. Academia's been attempting to address this issue with persistent publication references[3], and I can see something similar working as a method to avoid the issue of dead links as folks bounce between services. Alternatively - under the aegis of data portability - providing users the right to specify redirect addresses to new services would be a lightweight bit of infrastructure to mandate (old service provides a user-level redirect to the new service, the new service is responsible for doing any fine-grained content resolution).
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nightmare-letter-subject-access-request-under-gdpr-karbaliotis/
[2] https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/how-to-download-your-twitter-archive
I wonder which phones come with it pre-installed: I've been buying Google Pixel phones for a while, and they only come with base Google apps.