[thejohnhenry]

My thesis is that the 2016 elections have graduated this question into a pertinent political problem. The Facebooks and Twitters of 2020 will have to be built on something, and the current model of "VCs/existing tech companies/etc" controlling larger and larger portions of the stack is simply inoperable, long-term, for a free society.

Every VC-funded startup is premised implicitly on "full monopoly" as the endgame for exits that demand extremely high returns from investors. This worked really well from 2002 to 2016, and is still a really good model for a lot of software innovation, but we need to start seriously thinking about other funding models -- grants, not-for-profits, institutions like Harvard/MIT/Stanford, etc., to be involved in funding the next generation of web software technology.

I know this isn't a super popular opinion here :). I'm pretty confident in the reasoning, though. The solution to the sociopolitical problems Facebook unearths isn't "another Facebook", it's rigorous rethinking of the relationship between users, companies, data, and new software applications. Sandstorm was exactly the right next step, but unfortunately kentonv & co had to spend most of their time on enterprise sales, because this is the tail end of what the VC-funding-only ideology expects you to do if you want to enact widespread software innovations.

Another approach I think will work well: https://solid.mit.edu/