The point of radical interoperability isn’t merely to provide “choice” or “competition” or “innovation,” or any other empty Silicon Valley buzzword: it’s to let people decide for themselves how to live their lives. It’s to clear the way for the exercise of self-determination. You, the user of a product or service, know more about your needs than its designers ever will. A farmer with a hailstorm on the horizon knows whether she wants to trust her own tractor repair to bring in the crops to a degree John Deere will never be able to match. A person with a physical or cognitive disability knows more about how they need to adapt their tools than even the most empathetic design team. A person who is poor, or facing an emergency, or in physical danger, knows more about whether it’s appropriate to change the operation of a product than the company that made it. Good products and services—like good art—routinely outlive their makers. You know more about how you want to use a computer program to recover your old working files than the company that made it ten years before.

The case for interoperability isn’t about creating competitive markets in which the best products win. It’s about creating a world of tools, devices, and services that are under the control of the people who depend on them.