> Standards that help combat vertically integrated monopolies seems like something HN readers would be in favor of.

This. You can pretty much think of schema.org as "The Semantic Web - The Good Parts". It's not a literal description of course (there's plenty of potentially worthwhile 'semantics' that isn't covered there) but it's in the ballpark. And the best part is that sites are incented to be truthful wrt. their machine readable info, because they might get banned/downranked by the major search engines otherwise. So everyone benefits.