https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190731/17390142693/dont-let-this-get-lost-shuffle-data-transfer-project-is-expanding-could-help-create-real-competition-online.shtml

While lots of people are angling to break up the big internet companies in the belief that will lead to more competition, we've long argued that such a plan is unlikely to work. Instead, if you truly want more competition you need to end the ability of these companies to lock up your data. Instead, we need to allow third parties access so that the data is not stuck in silos, but where users themselves both have control and alternative options that they can easily move to.

That's why we were quite interested a year ago when Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter officially announced the Data Transfer Project (which initially began as a Google project, but expanded to those other providers a year ago). The idea was that the companies would make it ridiculously easy to let users automatically transfer their own data (via their own control) to a different platform. While some of the platforms had previously allowed users to "download" all their data, this project was designed to be much more: to make switching from one platform to another much, much easier -- effectively ending the siloing of data and (worse) the lock-in effects that help create barriers to competition. As we noted last year: