A good point, but there is an up and downside to everything. The centralization of IT does impact civil liberties and possibly innovation - unlike FOSS and other local systems, aspiring hackers can't tinker with Facebook code and see how it works.

I don't understand how Facebook relates to this, as they don't rent their cloud. Aspiring hackers couldn't tinker with MS Word 2000 code either.

> Aspiring hackers couldn't tinker with MS Word 2000 code either.

They could tinker with the binaries, something many did with game binaries. But your point is well taken; open source is also very valuable to innovation.

Web apps were also very useful for learning JS and browser APIs, before everybody started minimizing and obfuscating it. I learned how to write a rich-text editor just by looking at the code of Hotmail's email editor.

Fair enough, but think of that free and open stack: (layer 1), Ethernet, IP, TCP/UDP, HTTP/SMTP/DNS/etc, HTML/JavaScript. How many cut their teeth on those?

The apps on top, Facebook, Snapchat, etc., are not so open and much of what they do is out of reach from the user.

Also, I meant to add above: People could tinker with data files (e.g., Word docs), configurations, etc. The whole system was local and accessible. You could write local code, such as VB or for Windows, that integrated with those systems.

Creating 3 massive banks that the entire world gets to choose from would be terrible.

Not sure the banks:mattresses and cloud-companies:IT-companies ratios are that different.

That strategy resulted in the Great Depression and later 2008 crises. Damage was so high that country had to be rescued by the federal government. So, banking is a decent example of how such consolidation into private hands can go wrong. Now we just apply that to IT services and data.

That's a ridiculous argument: Banks started being a thing at the end of the Middle Ages. The Great Depression and the Great Recession were not caused by banks emerging, nor by people putting their savings in them.

Not emerging. Just being themselves with all their schemes and an economy dependent on them. A distrust of banks and their schemes at a national level might have reduced their ability to cause those problems. On top of the smaller stuff such as them delaying deposits or withdrawing stuff for bogus reasons.

Putting your savings under the mattress instead of in a bank account wouldn't have prevented the Great Recession. It was caused risky mortgages (debts, not savings) being sold as low risk from bank to bank, and then defaulting.

Putting your savings under the mattress instead of in a bank account wouldn't have prevented the Great Depression either.

The only thing it would have accomplished is making your savings easier to steal.

Storing gold or other valuables instead of Gederal Reserve notes for sale or bartering wouldn't have helped during Great Depression? I havent heard the angle that there was nothing to barter with on top if worthless dollars.