It's not inevitable. Centralization is a side effect of the CFAA and copyright laws. The reason that people aren't able to read Facebook on a user's behalf and

It's not inevitable. Centralization is a side effect of the CFAA and copyright laws. The reason that people aren't able to read Facebook on a user's behalf and multiplex the feed into a competing network is because Facebook will sue you and the FBI may arrest you if you do this. As such, users are denied true competitive freedom to say "I prefer the way that NewThing does stuff". They instead have to say "I prefer NewThing, but my social graph is held hostage by Facebook." I won't say anything in particular about network effects because it's usually taken the wrong way, but there's no reason any of this lock-in has to exist on the digital web. We've chosen it by giving extremely strong legal protections to existing tech incumbents.