Too Long; Didn't Read
The Internet Computer allows platform developers to plausibly promise that they will not revoke API access from applications that build on top of their platform. Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn all benefitted early on from third-party developers who built applications on top of their platforms. Yet when those platforms reached maturity, they all changed the rules surrounding their APIs—throttling the very applications that helped them grow years before. The precedent set by Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn means that application developers today will think twice about building on top of the new generation of platforms, because they know that they are actually building on sand if they do. The Internet Computer solves this problem because it has a feature that allows (but does not require) developers to designate their canisters’ APIs as “permanent:” meaning that nobody can later revoke or degrade access to them.