Yeah, it protects Jimmy from having to unconditionally contribute to society & its many organizations.
It allows Jimmy to set conditions and control who can use it and who cannot. For example, he can ally with one particular big corpo (or even start building one himself) so they can hold that thing hostage and require agreements/fees for the use of that thing for a long long time.
So now, instead of all people, including big (and small) corpos, having free access to the idea, only the friends of Jimmy will.
The reality is that if it wasn’t for Jimmy, it’s likely that Tommy would have invented it himself anyway at some point (and even improved on it!). But now Tommy can’t work on the thing, cos Jimmy doesn’t wanna be his friend.
So not only does it protect Jimmy from having to contribute to society without conditions, it also protects society from improving over what Jimmy decided to allow (some) people access to. No competition against Jimmy allowed! :D
Even without patents, if the invention is useful I doubt the inventor will have problems making money. It would be one hell of a thing to have in their portfolio / CV. Many corpos are likely to want Jimmy in their workforce. Of course, he might not become filthy rich… but did Jimmy really deserve to be that much more richer than Tommy?
You share public keys when registering the passkey on a third party service, but for the portability of the keys to other password managers (what the article is about) the private ones do need to be transferred (that’s the whole point of making them portable).
I think the phishing concerns are about attackers using this new portability feature to get a user (via phishing / social engineering) to export/move their passkeys to the attacker’s store. The point is that portability shouldn’t be so user-friendly / transparent that it becomes exploitable.
That said, I don’t know if this new protocol makes things THAT easy to port (probably not?).