First of all, there's no such thing as "your data". Nobody "owns" data, it just is. You don't own the photons your body reflect, you don't own the noise you produce, you don't own the ripple in the pool you dive in, you don't own the temperature of the room you heat. Data is a side effect of actions, and some of it happens to be captured by some agents. As you grow up, you realize that it's not about the data you "own', but it's about the data you "know". Ownership of data is an illusion, and all that really matters about data is knowledge.

Agents (people and/or machines) collect data to get a better idea of the world. The more you know about the world, the better you can navigate it. It let you make good decisions and accurate predictions. Collecting data is not good nor bad, it's just a natural process used to reach truth.

You used to have to collect all the data you needed yourself, leading to data duplication over distinct individuals. However, as communication improved, we started to delegate knowledge to third-parties. You no longer need to recall phone numbers by heart, as you can store this data in a cloud service you trust. However, we quickly realized that being too trusting can be a mistake, and that it is often necessary to spread data over an array of different knowledge base in order to make sure the data is not lost. This also helps with query speed and uptime, which is a practical bonus.

The way data will be exchanged in the future is quite obvious. Agents will gather data, and broadcast it over the network, to make sure that it's as available as possible. Nobody will care about where the data physically comes from or whether it exists in multiple places. Distribution and caching will all be done systematically for all data, and all you'll have to care about is the data itself. Once we have a good semantic framework and naming conventions, you'll be able to directly think about the data and completely ignore everything else. There won't be such a thing as "Facebook" and "Amazon" and "iTunes" and "Youtube". There will be People, Products, Music and Videos, and whether they come from service A or service B will be irrelevant.

The "API vendors" have 3 distinct jobs. First, they can act as relay/nodes that store/cache/distribute data. Second, they can act as functions/services that manipulate/transform data. Third, they can act as gateways with the physical world, acting as agents that read and write to the physical world (I/O). In any case, they offer an actual service, not data.

People will no longer pay for data. Data is cheap, data is easy to clone, data is easy to distribute. Therefore, data will be free and distributed without any restriction. However, people will still pay for the infrastructure, for the machines that serve them data on demand, for the machine that customize their data, for the machines that watch them, listen to them, talk to them. But data? People won't even imagine that data can or should be restricted, and won't care at all about the source of the data, they just want it fast.

The whole privacy issue is a non-issue that will resolve itself over time. It's not a technical issue, but a social issue. We don't have to fix privacy, we have to fix people. If there's anything accurate about this "API war", it's that privacy won't be a major concern. The real problem with the future described by the article is the inferior way APIs will communicate. They still require manual transaction, they still require the use of dirty adaptors to let APIs talk to one-another. This human intervention is not necessary, and semantic standards and ontologies are the key to this issue.