Competitive compatibility

Competitive compatibility (a.k.a. adversarial interoperability is the strategy of nonconsensually lowering artificial market barriers erected as a moat to lock-in customers into using a walled garden product. Examples of barriers include DRM as with ebooks designed only to be decryptable by Amazon hardware or inscrutability as with Microsoft’s DOC format that Apple Computer reverse engineered for iWork in 2005.

History

• 2020: “Competitive compatibility” promoted by Cory Doctorow in an EFF article.
• 2022: “Competitive compatibility” mentioned in chapter 16 of Chokepoint Capitalism (2022) by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow.
• 2023: “Competitive compatibility” mentioned in The Internet Con as output of brainstorming session to create alternative to “adversarial interoperability” which has many syllables and abbreviates to AI, an already frequently used abbreviation for artificial intelligence.

See also

• Wikipedia:Competitive compatibility