You are framing your argument, even if you don't recognize you're doing it. You response is evidence of the framing and your blindness to it.
I agree completely with most of what you have said. It's obvious that it's harder to make a decentralized solution as convenient as a centralized platform. Yes, it would be great if decentralized solution could also offer a new feature that made them able to compete on the market on their own merits. This is yet another example of a situation that becomes pathological in an unregulated market.
What you seem to be missing is that the centralized solution is not safe for the user, and therefor shouldn't be an option. There are many products that could be made much easier to use if we removed their safety features. When profit motive conflicts with user safety is when regulations are added to the market to correct that imbalance. I'm suggesting that the makers of networked software might want to add their own regulations - such as preserving an open web - before governments decide to get involved with poorly designed legislation.
There are pros and cons to both centralization and decentralization and it is never that one is better than the other, therefore your statement "Centralized solution is not safe for the user, and therefor(sic) shouldn't be an option" is not correct. There are tons of cases where decentralized systems are unsafer for the user than centralized systems.
Safeness is not just about whether something is technically sound, it's also about how it works in practice. Banks are extremely centralized and for a good reason. You may say it's very unsafe since it's a "single point of failure" and one robber can break in and take everyone's money. But what makes banks appealing is the single point of failure functions also as a "single point of responsibility", so by centralizing responsibility it makes it much more efficient to manage risks. If we didn't have banks, every family probably will be spending tons of money just for securing their money--they will probably need to buy super secure vaults, secure their household from intruders, etc. Again it's not whether one is better than the other. There are pros and cons.
Try owning a Bitcoin in as secure way you can, and you'll understand how cumbersome AND unsafe it is to not have a single point of responsibility. A lot of people on HN seem to think the reason people "don't give a shit about security and privacy" is because they don't know enough. But that's not correct, they have better things to do and they're simply delegating some things to a centralized authority because it makes financial sense. People are not stupid.
Anyway, all these comments don't really matter because this was not at all my point, you keep saying I'm missing the point, but I think you are the one who's missing my point. I didn't say what is better or not. I didn't say open web is not necessary, I didn't say it shouldn't happen. I just said the approaches these people are taking is far from ideal, it's not even about centralized/decentralized argument. It's about "if you're gonna do something, do it smart, instead of thinking something will magically happen if you keep doing something the same way even though you keep failing". How can you succeed at something when you don't even understand why your enemy is winning?
I agree completely with most of what you have said. It's obvious that it's harder to make a decentralized solution as convenient as a centralized platform. Yes, it would be great if decentralized solution could also offer a new feature that made them able to compete on the market on their own merits. This is yet another example of a situation that becomes pathological in an unregulated market.
What you seem to be missing is that the centralized solution is not safe for the user, and therefor shouldn't be an option. There are many products that could be made much easier to use if we removed their safety features. When profit motive conflicts with user safety is when regulations are added to the market to correct that imbalance. I'm suggesting that the makers of networked software might want to add their own regulations - such as preserving an open web - before governments decide to get involved with poorly designed legislation.