Flutterby™! : Same Origin Paradigm

TechDirt: How One 1990s Browser Decision Created Big Tech’s Data Monopolies (And How We Might Finally Fix It) quotes a lot from and resummarizes Alex Komoroske's Why Aggregators Ate The Internet.

Unfortunately that piece seems to deeply misrepresent the notion of the "Same Origin Paradigm" that it talks about, or doesn't meaningfully describe what it is, because the larger issue is that everyone wants to own your data.

When identity was working itself through the system, there was much discussion about how we were gonna own our own identities. How that fell apart into OpenID is a rant for another time (or, likely, many times previously on here), but the reality is that everyone wants to own your identifier, and nobody wants to help you reclaim it.

Your bank? They sure as hell don't want to cede authentication to you, the consumer, who's getting popped by people impersonating your relatives and asking you to send bail money as gift cards.

Google? Ditto, and, if they can convince other places that they can provide that security (or at least more than you alone) they can get data out of those other places.

Apple? That's why they're pushing Passkey, 'cause it lets them get a little back from Google, and because it deeply locks you into a platform (lots of stuff about issues with migrating those identities).

And once a company is able to be miserly with your identity, that gives them even more leverage to silo your data. Google doesn't want to share your calendar information. The only entities which do want to make it easy are small startups, who are gonna get tromped by asymmetry.

This has not been a technical force, this has been a socioeconomic force. And no amount of AI boosterism is gonna tear down capitalism and replace it with something that works better.