The decentralized applications don't need to "win" (in market share) to be successful. They just need to be viable alternatives for a non-insignificant number of principled people willing to use them. This is enough to ensure that big players are kept in check. It's a basic application of Taleb's "Minority Rule" [0]
I don't care that gmail has the majority of the market. I care that Google can not simply break compatibility with SMTP/IMAP and force everyone into their version of it. And no, "it's hard to self-host" is not enough of an argument. There are plenty of smaller professional hosting companies and as long as there is an option this is enough to stop Google from monopolizing the market.
Likewise, I don't care that Matrix still doesn't have a perfectly polished client. As long as it lets me talk and have video calls with my family and friends without being forced into WhatsApp or iMessage or whatever closed solution is popular, I'm willing to deal with its inconveniences and shortcomings. Bugs can be fixed, privacy violations can't.
Crypto as well. For all the talk about "investment opportunities" in crypto and the "get rich quick" schemes, there are still a good number of people working on it that understand that the important thing is to have an alternative to the existing financial system.
The worst part of the article though is not that it presents a problem that does not exist, it's the proposed solution: political intervention and regulation always works out in favor of the status quo. If you really want to kill whatever grassroots movement or attempt at breaking away from the big players, just throw the political/bureaucratic apparatus on top of it.
> political intervention and regulation always works out in favor of the status quo.
A bold statement needs strong evidence. "Always" is already debunked with one counter-example. A look at the history of the labor movement or that of anti-trust legislation proves you wrong. Former pushed for worker-friendly legislation out of a grassroots and labor party-based movement, achieving laws that are often more demanding of larger companies. And latter may have seen a lack of enforcement since the Reagan era, but is chiefly centered on making big companies pay.
Do you mean the same "labor-friendly" laws that pushed all manufacturing and labor intensive industry out of rich countries and into China, or do you mean the laws that made it impossible for small-medium business to compete with the big crony capitalists?
Never mind, it doesn't matter because it is completely orthogonal to my point. My point is that regulation works by applying top-down, global uniform of rules. It mandates centralized executive power, which is the polar opposite of bottom-up/localist/fractal/decentralized development of new tech and its applications.
"Making big companies pay" does not contradict "favoring the status quo". All that big banks want now is to be able to regulate crypto, so that they can keep away any threat of a disruptive business coming out of it. Same applies to Big Media and it is insistence of controlling information under the pretense of "battling fake news". Big Telco pushed for a long time to regulate OTT services, and this is until today it is so difficult to decouple voice from data plans. Facebook/ Twitter welcome regulation, because it will make basically impossible for small fediverse providers to grow and compete with them.
Regulation favors the status quo, how much more evidence do you need?
I don't care that gmail has the majority of the market. I care that Google can not simply break compatibility with SMTP/IMAP and force everyone into their version of it. And no, "it's hard to self-host" is not enough of an argument. There are plenty of smaller professional hosting companies and as long as there is an option this is enough to stop Google from monopolizing the market.
Likewise, I don't care that Matrix still doesn't have a perfectly polished client. As long as it lets me talk and have video calls with my family and friends without being forced into WhatsApp or iMessage or whatever closed solution is popular, I'm willing to deal with its inconveniences and shortcomings. Bugs can be fixed, privacy violations can't.
Crypto as well. For all the talk about "investment opportunities" in crypto and the "get rich quick" schemes, there are still a good number of people working on it that understand that the important thing is to have an alternative to the existing financial system.
The worst part of the article though is not that it presents a problem that does not exist, it's the proposed solution: political intervention and regulation always works out in favor of the status quo. If you really want to kill whatever grassroots movement or attempt at breaking away from the big players, just throw the political/bureaucratic apparatus on top of it.
[0]: https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...