Comment by Adam Thierer

I’m in league with Doctorow and EFF on some of these things, but also find myself thinking they go much too far in other ways. At root, their work and advocacy raise a profound question: should there be any general right to exclude on digital platforms? Although he doesn’t always come right out and say it, Doctorow’s work often seems like an outright rejection of any sort of property rights in networks or platforms. [...] Where we differ is that I would still leave the door open for Apple to exercise various other common law contractual rights or property rights in court. Why not take that logic further and just say Apple’s App Store is tantamount to a natural monopoly or digital essential facility that Epic and everyone else is entitled to on whatever terms they want? [...] I think that would end miserably, but would like to hear Doctorow’s preferred approach before saying more. [...] Thus, I prefer to work at the margins and think through how to balance these competing claims of access / interoperability rights versus contractual / property rights. [...] Taken too far, adversarial interoperability threatens to undermine this goal. AI Unverifiable source (2020)