Today, many users are only reachable via platforms/shops that are severely restricted and/or dominated by a few all powerful overlords that can ban you for life, rendering your skills null and void in the blink of an AI - no recourse.
Some of that is understandable. Users' trust was misused. There is a constant onslaught of all sorts of miscreants trying to exploit every imaginable loophole, technical or social. Everyone is seeking protection in the arms of someone powerful.
But there is also a very large degree of market dysfunction. Just look at their margins. Look at their revenue cut. Look at their terms of service. They can dictate absolutely everything and grant you absolutely no rights whatsoever.
And there are like five of them on the entire planet ruling over those distribution channels.
The only right you have is to walk away. Now try walking away from the only market there is. You're leaving behind 99% of your potential customers.
Not in my worst nightmares would I have imagined a dystopia like this back in the 90s.
I was worried about this too back in the late 90s/early 00s. It certainly seemed to be the way the world was heading at the time.
But I sort of feel like, due to the low startup costs of software, it is going to be much more difficult to happen. Also, in software, economies of scale kinda work in reverse: the more customers you have, the more complex your software has to be, the more people you have to hire to write it, and the less efficient per developer you are.