We've reached a dangerous point. Everybody in the world joining the internet combined with a lack of knowledge about how things work means the unwashed masses gravitate towards centralized services. Instead of building distributed competitive services on top of a distributed fault-tolerant bi-directional network, we have rampant mass centralization. Protocols and interoperability are dead.
People aren't building billion dollar companies on top of application level protocols because open protocols would invite competition. Why compete when you can do a land grab for average people mindshare and lock 'em in forever?
We are fighting pressure of hundreds of millions of new pocketputers being sold every year. Our tiny idealistic cries of "more decentralization, no ads, and open data!" have the importance of a fish farting in the ocean. The teenagers and moms want to access their monkeysphere gossip. Their only care about technology is if somebody they find attractive is using it.
We can now almost legitimately say "The Internet is down!" when AWS goes tits up. People can't get news from their favorite boy bands when mysql hoses twitter (for the 7,000th time). Apple is centralizing document and data structure storage. Google could reproduce the thought patterns of a billion people if they cared enough. Distributed openness lost about five years ago.
I forgot my point. Anyway, go read http://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocked...