Albert Wenger

And that's actually pretty easy, I think, to regulate.

You just say, look, your API needs to be related to what you're making of your free users that you're monetizing via advertising.

So you can't make more money on the paid users than you're making on the advertising users.

So I think these are all things that can be handled through regulation.

And there's sort of two regulatory paths forward.

One is to mandate these APIs.

In fact, there is a draft bill in the US.

It hasn't made much progress, but Senator Warner has put

captures most many of these ideas um there is actual legislation in place in the eu for bank accounts so your bank account needs to ship with an api and that has already shifted the power balance between banks and their customers substantially and similarly here this would shift the power balance substantially

But it has to be a regulatory act because, as you rightly point out, that act is going to potentially destroy some of the market value of these companies.

And so the companies aren't going to do this by themselves.

Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely.

And I think there's an interesting historical analog here, which is the phone system, right?

So

At one point, just building a telephone system when it was the circuit-switched era was very difficult.

It required a lot of technological resources.

It had huge network effects, right?

We all want to be on the same phone system.

But eventually, we went from circuit switch to packet switch and we, today, are in a way very happy that the phone company isn't the one providing all of our innovations on top of that network.