These are infrastructure problems, they should be treated as such, i.e., maintained by tax dollars.
The failure of the semantic web and the sad state of personal data are primarily failures of the free market to solve these problems, imho.
- People are moving from Microsoft Office to Google Docs
- Designers are moving from Sketch/Photoshop/Illustrator to Figma
- People are moving from Evernote/Text Files/Whatever to Notion
- People are moving from HTML files to Webflow
- People have already moved from native mail clients to Gmail
There's a problem here, but it isn't that the free market hasn't solved this problem, it's that people are choosing other features (mainly collaboration) as more important than data ownership.
Note that this is a transition mainly driven by tech people, none of these products have gone mainstream yet (excluding Gmail of course), and the products that offer data ownership are still far more popular overall. But if the mainstream follows tech peoples lead, that won't be for long.
If it were treated like infrastructure, we could have both.
Pointing to a product that got replaced by another product doesn't inherently prove anything.
And seriously, who uses Gmail voluntarily? The complete non-existence of a suitable SMTP implementation is a pretty good example of a _clear_ failure of the market to properly allocated resources.
edit - thanks for pointing out Figma though, might have to check that out