For the past 15 or so years, I’ve written about a new class of “meta-services” that would work across individual sites, apps, and platforms. OpenAI’s recent announcement of plugins, along with their already robust APIs, has brought the meta-service fantasy tantalizingly close to reality. Truly open systems rarely win over time – regardless of whether the company uses the word “open” in its name. Yes, there was “internet search,” but there was also “desktop search” – for a brief moment it seemed to make sense to have a search engine for the realm of our personal computing – back when we kept important files and communications locally on our own devices. Perhaps, but unfortunately, the same forces that built last year’s model of the Internet are now hard at work building this one.