It's not only about resources. Things which are not controlled by a company, or at least a foundation of some kind, are essentially a commons. The tragedy of t

It's not only about resources. Things which are not controlled by a company, or at least a foundation of some kind, are essentially a commons. The tragedy of the commons then goes into effect. Who is responsible for upgrading the system? Nobody. Who resolves disputes over technical vision? Nobody. The internet and web 1.0 were an aberration - they came out of government funded research (DoD/CERN/universities). People built decentralised things because their salaries were very safe and accountability against any kind of commercial metrics (like userbase size) were non-existent. But at the same time, beyond salary, they didn't have big budgets to run centralised services. Early internet protocols are a reflection of the funding model used to build them .... NOT what was technically the best approach and NOT even anything privacy related! Which is why despite being decentralised most early internet protocols didn't really think about privacy much: those weren't research topics that interested the government funding sources. In a sense, the early internet was a product of a hard-left entirely state-driven economic model. So we now have a strange kind of rose-tinted glasses effect where people hark back to a better era of cooperation and friendship, a time without dirty dirty things like "profit" and "digital rights" getting in the way. This is a common theme amongst those on the political left: stuff was better when it was run by the state. But the state didn't want to continue funding the internet in perpetuity, so it was opened to commercialisation, and since then virtually all technical progress has been driven by the profit motive and by implication, the ability to make lots of money by getting lots of users on your centralised platform (which are a lot easier to build anyway). Is this worse? Maybe. It's capitalist. Whether that's better or worse than what we had before depends on your political perspective.