How will billions of devices be made interoperable with each other and with people if there is so much proprietary, privatized, enclosed knowledge and ownership of intellectual "property"?
Or perhaps it won't be an "internet" where things work together on their user's behalf. Perhaps it will be how we accept things as they will become with Vague Dread.
I fail in my attempts to exploit interoperability all the time already, whether it's trying to sync timers for Xmas lights or using two different email clients for the same email account without unexpected effects. I certainly do not want my motorcycle talking to my refrigerator as it orders things from Amazon based on patterns of my behavior. Maintain the air gaps!
On a walk today--bloody cold here, by the way--I was struck that this page's title may not be strictly true. Don't public standards work as a common agreement among enterprises to enable their proprietary systems to work together? Are Standards Sufficient?