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When done correctly, data control stimulates competition, as it allows mobility from service to service and OS to OS (and even platform to platform; e.g., iPhone for application data encapsulated in HTML.)

Data control has many aspects/axes:

• data: can you export it?

  • three major types of data; analysis may be different for each:

    • private data: can others get out your personal/private data? can you take down old personal data that you've published? Potentially (like export control and the GPL) this can just be deferred to relevant national legislation?

    • public, but personal, data: What about data that has been made public (for example, comments on a blog) but which are still in some sense identified with a particular individual?

    • collaboratively created data: what about collaboratively created/owned data? e.g., a wikipedia page, or the implicit data of a myspace/facebook/linkedin personal network?

  • axis ranges from:

    • can't export data
    • can export data, but in an undocumented binary format
    • can export data, but in an undocumented text format (e.g., CSV, XML)
    • can export data in a documented format
    • can export data in a standardized format
  • related: is there a source-available, freely-usable implementation of the service? (see, e.g., GPL v3's expanded system library exception for possibly analogous language)

• identity: do you control your identity? e.g., can I use 'luis@tieguy.org' to make it easier to leave gmail, or tieguy.org/blog/ to make it easier to leave wordpress.com? How do technologies like openid play into this?

  • identity tied to service host (e.g., luis.villa@gmail.com)

  • mixed: public-facing identity not tied to service host, but some services may still be (e.g., public uses luis@tieguy.org, but I retrieve mail from http://gmail.com/ rather than tieguy.org/mail/)

  • identity not tied to service host (e.g., google hosted, public uses luis@tieguy.org and I use tieguy.org/mail/ to access the mail.)

• DRM: axis is nearly binary:

  • uses DRM or DRM-like controls to prevent distribution of data (i.e., flash video)
  • doesn't use DRM at all