[gfodor]

The problem is one of counterfactuals. Given the growth of the internet, something that provides the value of Facebook to people was inevitable. What wasn't inevitable was that it take on the form of a centralized service that ended up enveloping the world. In the past, centralized services gave way to shared internet protocols before they reached the size and scale Facebook has.

There are certainly other paths the world could have taken where such power and control would not be in the hands of one company (and one person, really) but that's not what happened and it's worth lamenting if you believe the problem of "keeping friends connected through the internet" could have taken on radically different forms.