Tech Companies' Friendly New Strategy to Destroy One Another

More than a decade ago, in a prescient essay for Scientific American, the inventor of the World Wide Web denounced what Facebook and other tech giants were doing to his signature invention. "Why should you care?" Tim Berners-Lee wrote at the time. "Because the Web is yours." These companies, he warned, were restructuring the web itself, turning an expanse of interconnected websites all built on the same open infrastructure into a series of "fragmented islands" where users were kept hostage. On Facebook's island, he wrote, people give over their entire digital life for the chance to connect with their friends, but have no way to transfer their information to any other platform.