> As a relative "youngin" (I'm 27), at what point did we make the shift from protocols to corporate-owned ecosystems? What caused it?
41, in retrospect I'd say this change happened around 2000-2010, why being not-invented-here-syndrome as Web 2.0 became a thing with some corporations publishing free-to-integrate XML-based APIs (technically also JSON, but I never saw them until much later); every API was different, so the only part which could be seen as a "protocol" were the meta-level of "how to define any API" e.g. XML, JSON.
41, in retrospect I'd say this change happened around 2000-2010, why being not-invented-here-syndrome as Web 2.0 became a thing with some corporations publishing free-to-integrate XML-based APIs (technically also JSON, but I never saw them until much later); every API was different, so the only part which could be seen as a "protocol" were the meta-level of "how to define any API" e.g. XML, JSON.