The trend for consumer is a push towards centralization, mostly for convenience reasons. So far it has been hard to reconcile an open communication model with s

The trend for consumer is a push towards centralization, mostly for convenience reasons. So far it has been hard to reconcile an open communication model with saftety from the many forms of abuse—ranging from illegal actors to permissible (yet highly annoying) advertisers. I got on the internet in the 90's back when netiquette was still a thing. Nowadays, most things are all about money: either how can a closed platform get monetized or how to game any communication method for personal enrichment. I often reminisce on the polite and open internet of the past, but that is no longer the reality available to us. Interstingly enough, for enterprise, the trend seems to be in the opposite direction. I work on Webex Teams and one of the features is clients owning their own decryption hardware, running on their own servers. Cisco may be the one moving the messages around but we have no clue what's inside of those messages (and we certainly don't want to know). In this federated model, 2 separate companies can communicate, relying on key management running under their own control, each applying their own retention policies, etc. Of course these systems are a lot more complex than the naive "big store of data + 1 gatekeeper" approach.