Mostly a great article, and makes a strong case that you need a profit motive for an application to succeed, and cannot be both decentralized and capture profit

Mostly a great article, and makes a strong case that you need a profit motive for an application to succeed, and cannot be both decentralized and capture profits. But the final proposal would destroy all that is good about the internet: >>What we’re dealing with here is far removed from physical resources, however, and the system has not been adapted at all. Although some like to idealise the aforementioned market as a free and unregulated system, the truth is that it optimises rather poorly under those circumstances, and needs heavy regulation to align profit motives in the direction of efficient processing and distribution of resources. If we are to keep these profit motives at all,7 we need new regulation to align them toward creating software that better serves our society. What is needed is heavy government involvement in another way: subsidizing the development of open-source and decentralized applications. If they are better than the products produced by for-profit firms, then consumers will adopt them voluntarily, and if they're not, we wouldn't want consumers to. Leaving the market free and having publicly funded projects compete with what the market produces on its own instills accountability for those allocating the public funds, by forcing them to get results better than what the private sector is producing on its own in order to validate their judgment on what should get funded.