If your users can't leave, and if you face no consequences for making them miserable (not solely their departure to a competitor, but also fines, criminal charges, worker revolts, and guerrilla warfare with interoperators), then you have the means, motive and opportunity to turn your service into a giant pile of shit... Every economy is forever a-crawl with parasites and monsters like these, but they don't get to burrow into the system and colonize it until policymakers create rips they can pass through.

Or, in other words, communism will never work because the citizens can't leave, the government faces no consequences for making them miserable and their governments have the means, motive and opportunity to turn their nations into a giant pile of shit for personal gain (and do!)

And what's Cory's solution?

Doctorow argues that "more and more critics are coming to understand that lock-in is the root of the problem, and that anti-lock-in measures like interoperability can address it."

Oh - you mean like competition and free enterprise? Where the economic system sets up the government as merely the infrastructure and let's the businesses perform services as needed via... capitalism?

Yup - Cory's just proven why communism always fails and never works.