Or DNS. Or probably any number of other foundational systems of the internet. At the bottom of it all, the basic concept of communicating data across distributed systems is the internet.
This is where the original post is spot on - the new players are not interesting in distributing, they want to collect and retain, but not share, except in their own limited and controlled ways.
To break out of that you need to break away from centralization. Yes, I don't know how you make this is self-supporting business, but then again, I doubt the Wikipedia folks did either and they went forward (open platform, freely available data), not to mention the folks who wrote the SMTP, NNTP, FTP, HTTP, and every other RFC we have built our global communications on top of.
