While I agree with you, there's certainly other ways to make money in an open protocol. Email perhaps is a good example, we are still on SMTP/IMAP and there's lots of business built on custom clients and whatnot. (Ok, maybe not the best example haha but hopefully you get my point here)

Email is a glorious relic from the truly distributed internet that could have been...

That is why its so useful! It was just designed to work not enslave or en-silo.

The opportunities came after the market was created and adoption was wide-spread because it was just so useful.

The security business opportunities exploded once Microsoft got into the market and things like computer viruses spread via email due to their total negligence and enabling ;)

I can still remember nasty things like Lotus notes or ccmail but once email became widespread and the momentum was undeniable they could not give that sh*t away -- they did try that too.

There are definitely ways to make money.

The problem is that you cannot make as much money as you would by gatekeeping, which means billions of dollars of VC money goes to the gatekeeping app that offers its experience for free and no ads, and spends hundreds of million on ads, influencers, and partnerships to promote their offering and kill the open competition.

And once they’re entrenched enough that’s when they turn the screws on the customer.

Unfortunately our antitrust laws didn’t imagine a world where the marginal cost of serving a new customer was close to 0, so offering a product for free in order to kill competition doesn’t really trigger antitrust laws even though it’s the same kind of behavior.

I think the closest we came to something like this was Slack suing MSFT for bundling Teams, and that probably only stood a chance because of Microsoft’s history.