This is a great piece and is deservingly getting the attention it deserves. And I agree wholeheartedly with one of the central premises: that there is a generation of Internet users unfamiliar with its more open past and therefore unaware of the benefits of that era.

This quote stood out to me, however: "The primary fallacy that underpins many of their mistakes is that user flexibility and control necessarily lead to a user experience complexity that hurts growth."

You don't establish why you think this is a fallacy and I'm interested in hearing more. I don't *necessarily* think flexibility and control lead to complexity but there is more truth than not to that notion.

Obviously Apple is the great example of how control and design are interlinked. But I would point to the Great Spirit of Internet Openness: Google.

Despite all their manifestos in favor of openness, you cannot reorder search results, or even know much about how search results are ordered or even do much to the *display* of search results.

I'd argue that this is not because Google is tyrannical but because they believe they know how to create the best user experience through control of that experience.

And they are probably right.

I think Anil's post is a love letter to the web of a decade ago, and it makes me wistful for many of those things. But I think losing many of those things was inevitable as the web scaled to a broader and less technical audience. I won't go into detail, as I want to stick to Jason's point about control.

I think the reason the big web companies want control is not to avoid complexity, but because their business model demands it. If your model relies on people seeing ads on your site, then your incentive is to make your service a one-way valve (Google Search, Facebook). If you charge for your service, then your incentive is to make it as useful as possible in either direction (Flickr).

Is that too obvious?

I think this is a good point because this the second thing Anil calls out as a fallacy. Specifically: "And the second, more grave fallacy, is the thinking that exerting extreme control over users is the best way to maximize the profitability and sustainability of their networks."

I don't think "extreme" control maximizes profits. But certainly, as Laurie argues, the incentives are such that control is often a useful means toward business objectives.

I can sympathize with the lament that we've given up so much privacy, and apis have become closed off, and the march to profane and commercialize every pixel proceeds apace.

But 5-10 years ago was not a very golden era. That's the world of banner ads and popunders and pets.com and geocities and friendster.

There was a very interesting flowering in ~2007 of open APIs: flickr, google maps, and twitter, for instance. But today we have Github, which while not an exact replacement is so much larger in scope and impact, and is so much closer to a left-wing utopian fantasy...

I just find it hard to be nostalgic about that period. Sure, there were some good things, we were all so innocent then.

Two points:

1. As someone who didn't experience the Web you allude to, Anil, I can't say that the things you're nostalgic for sound all that awesome and enticing to me. Sure, ignorance is bliss but so is nostalgia. Jason, you were the first person to teach me that (re: people's nostalgia for Twitter's Global Feed).

2. I very much disagree w/ this: "regular people need an identity." No, identity is stressful! Most people don't want to have to build and maintain a digital representation of who they are. We're far too self-conscious for that task. Remember when listing your favorite movies/books/music was a big part of the Facebook Profile experience? It was tough! Maintaining an online "identity" is, and always will be, a 1% use case.