There's no fundamental reason. I think the internet swings back and forth between periods of openness and periods of walled gardens. We're in a walled garden period. My gut says it won't last forever.
Our current walled gardens succeeded by refining the user experience of the open web they supplanted. They made it easy for normal users to do the things that only advanced users were able to do before: easily publish your own stream of content, find other people's content you care about, aggregate other people's content, and then let everybody generate new content that references the previous content.
None of that is new functionality, but Facebook and Twitter fixed the user experience and taught normal people how to do all of that.
But now that the bar has been raised and the average user groks the benefits of "social networking", there's nothing to stop the technology from eventually being commoditized.
As for business models, a decentralized competitor doesn't actually need a business model, because their infrastructural costs could be zero. "HTTP" doesn't have or need a business model.
Our current walled gardens succeeded by refining the user experience of the open web they supplanted. They made it easy for normal users to do the things that only advanced users were able to do before: easily publish your own stream of content, find other people's content you care about, aggregate other people's content, and then let everybody generate new content that references the previous content.
None of that is new functionality, but Facebook and Twitter fixed the user experience and taught normal people how to do all of that.
But now that the bar has been raised and the average user groks the benefits of "social networking", there's nothing to stop the technology from eventually being commoditized.
As for business models, a decentralized competitor doesn't actually need a business model, because their infrastructural costs could be zero. "HTTP" doesn't have or need a business model.