When users don't own their technology, they get jerked around by whoever does until they jump ship for greener pastures.
You can claim the market will solve this (users will sell their time and speech to a higher bidder, now that Twitter's prices no longer seem competitive), but if people were empowered to have their computers do what they want, it never would have happened in the first place.
For $1000 and $30 a month, anybody in the world could hire someone to setup and maintain a personal email server.
Of course being user owned, by definition users should be allowed to outsource their email service to large companies, and they do, because it's a lot cheaper that way.
But an email server they own themselves, with their own rules, own display preferences, compatible with billions of other email accounts, is well within their reach. And millions of people do just that.
Nobody is arguing that you can't set up your own system. You can build your own version of fb/twt etc... if you wanted.
The distinction is that 99.9% of consumers and an increasing number of organizations don't want to do it in house and would rather let someone else do it.
Again, it's not about capability, it's about what people actually are doing.
However, with gmail filtering out email from untrusted domains, you could argue that you actually can't build an email host that can send emails to all of your friends.
A year ago I would have agreed with you, but it is getting to the point where it is very difficult to run your own mail server (I still do).
In the name of fighting spam, Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc. have made it a real chore to get messages delivered to their networks. I still haven't figured out how to get messages delivered to AOL.
The market can't solve anything if the product is free. Users aren't voting with their wallet.
Twitter (and other dominant free products like Facebook) will behave the way our overlords want them to behave. Consumers have surrendered the free market. Capitalism is only played behind the scenes.
>The market can't solve anything if the product is free
It can absolutely work. The product is not free. The product is our attention and internet services (Twitter/Google/Facebook) are competing for that limited supply of attention in order to sell it on to their advertising customers. We won't give our attention to them for free though, so they have to buy it by providing a service we want. If they don't provide an attractive enough service, we turn around and sell our attention to someone else. That's how this market works.
I agree that there is a free market effect with how we sell our attention. Certainly this works well enough for TV, as ad-supported content is quite competitive with paid content.
Perhaps the problem arises when the product is not only free but also a virtual monopoly. Changing the TV channel is easy. Changing to a Twitter alternative is not. As consumers, we get to choose between an 80% Twitter or no Twitter at all.
You can claim the market will solve this (users will sell their time and speech to a higher bidder, now that Twitter's prices no longer seem competitive), but if people were empowered to have their computers do what they want, it never would have happened in the first place.