Building the Common Voice corpus is critical to generating highly accurate transcriptions, check it out at https://voice.mozilla.org
If we do nothing, there will be no large organization standing up to build foundational technology outside of corporate siloes.
I guess in a way it's similar to having capital. If you don't have any money, it's hard to start a business. Similarly, if you have no data, maybe in the future it will be hard to start a business as well.
There's still a long way to go to reach that point, but I think we are seeing the start of it. For example, it's pretty hard to build an alternative to GMaps/Apple Maps. Even if you have a novel take on how mapping data could be used, you'd still first need the data to build the technology around it.
How do you fight that? Should it be fought? Or should we just accept it as a new requirement of building a business? In addition to starting with a good team (i.e. industry experts) and having money, you now need to immediately start building as wide of a dataset as you can.
The more data they have, the better-targeted advertising they can provide, because that data is more or less volunteered by their users even if conpanies don’t know to ask for it.
For most of the big companies, I’d say their UX is stuck in local maxima and can’t really become orders of magnitude better due to risk aversion — you’ll never collect the data that there’s a bigger maximum somewhere else that way. A smaller company willing to take risks can find those bigger maxima much more easily.
Just look at how much worse Google recently made the GMail UI.
Meanwhile, Apple has no scouts, a bad geocoder from OSM (compared to Google's), but notably better maps (on average) from all the footwork OSM does to import maps regularly from each of the thousanda of counties across the US.
Outside the US, countries like Germany literally use OSM as their offical map for plotting land ownership, utilities and numerous other functions.
Where Apple is dying is the lack of an Apple Scouts program and having massive teams in India essentially importing data from OSM, one other sketchy map vendor that is a decade out of date and user reports. The former should be automated, as Apple Maps India literally does not comply with the standards defined by Apple stateside, and there is no value being added in this process of manually importing map data.
I don't think that fighting back with specific technologies and products (which all come and go) is a good solution. It needs to be encoded in law. If mozilla makes a thing that is 'free and open', and it becomes popular enough, what happens when a Google or Amazon decides to throw serious money at acquiring it (or even Mozilla) so that they can control it? Nothing would prevent that.
[edit: found the following link] https://www.501c3.org/who-really-owns-a-nonprofit/
Just like with telecoms restricting and throttling access, these silos of technology are holding back progress in numerous fields, hurting the disabled and kneecaping upstart projects and businesses that may challege their dominance.