Two things spring to mind reading this. First, I can't remember who said it but there's a quote that goes something like (paraphrased) "open standards are for

Two things spring to mind reading this. First, I can't remember who said it but there's a quote that goes something like (paraphrased) "open standards are for losers" (side note: if anyone has the original quote, please let me know). It's a pithy way of pointing out that the winners in any market don't care. Others want open standards to level the playing field. Second, and I can't stress this enough, literally nobody wants federated systems apart from a handful techno-enthusiasts. It doesn't solve any problem users care about. In fact, it tends to create problems users do care about. Look no further than the POTS system. Part of the reason you have spam and robocalls is one provider is pretty much free to send or forward traffic to anyone and to essentially spoof the sender such that things like caller ID do very little. Plus there's all the routing issues. Users tend to want to keep their numbers so you can't use a phone number as an identifier anymore. You have to use something lower level (think of this as the difference between a domain name and an IP address) and then deal with all the porting issues and the security issues that creates (eg SIM jacking).