There's been some of that already, not in the sense of governments forcing the separation, but in the sense of governments making the keeping of data a liabilit

There's been some of that already, not in the sense of governments forcing the separation, but in the sense of governments making the keeping of data a liability, e.g. with the EU's GDPR. There's certainly still a whole class of applications when owning the data is a competitive advantage, but there are also lots of organisation whose core competency is not selling data, even though they do have to work with user data. When storing data yourself is a risk, it becomes a lot more attractive to just let the user store that data somewhere themselves and have them give your application access to it. I'm sure this one of the reasons we're seeing a lot more interest from Europe than elsewhere in Solid [1]. Then of course, there are also lots of organisations struggling to maintain correct and up-to-date data. If multiple organisations access the same data as controlled by the user, the user is more likely to have kept that data up-to-date. (Disclaimer: views are my own.) [1] https://solidproject.org/ https://solidproject.org/