I don&#x27;t see it that way. We don&#x27;t get WebKit through Google and Apple. We get long tail contributions to the project:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ted.com&#x2F;talks&#x2F;clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_collaboration?language=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ted.com&#x2F;talks&#x2F;clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus...</a><p>What we have is centralization in phone manufacturers when it comes to Apple, but not Android. Google tried to re-centralize by making the Play Store but Amazon and others already forked Android. In fact, Chrome is a fork of WebKit which Apple started for Safari! And that is how we had such an acceleration of features. Open source and commercial competition.<p>I don&#x27;t deny FOSS commingles with commercial offerings. Rather I&#x27;m saying that when platforms became freely forkable, the quality AND the freedom rose dramatically. That has yet to happen in social -- as you say, Diaspora* didn&#x27;t take off.<p>But once there is a viable FOSS social tech platform, it will disrupt all the big players. Who needs <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;MyBrand" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;MyBrand</a> when I can just add the Twitter module to mybrand.com !<p>You can also see the problems with Facebook campaigning for India to have a billion people have their internet signal go to Facebook&#x27;s server farms. Besides state spy agencies, this is also simply bad engineering. Early internet apps like email worked even if email.com was down. I could use the local network.<p>I think we will actually soon have software that runs on social mesh networks and that&#x27;s going to enable everyone in the world to share files, communicate and collaborate faster and wasting less energy than going through a central hub. You&#x27;ll see a re decentralization of the internet in the next several years.