Information Also Wants to Be Expensive: Data Portability and the Open-Systems Creed

Data portability is now a fixture of privacy and competition law, from the GDPR and the EU’s Digital Markets Act to new state laws in the United States. It is advocated as a way to give users control over their information and to loosen the grip of dominant platforms, but its fitness for either purpose is more often assumed than shown. This essay traces that assumption to the open-systems movement of the 1980s and early 1990s, which treated the free movement of information as good in itself. I