Decentralization sounds like a great idea but I've been watching that generally fail since the 90s and I think there are some challenges beyond aggressive acts by big players. Part of this comes down to how the terms are used to cover different levels: most of the advantages of decentralization at the infrastructure level are less pronounced in an era where a single entity can easily run code around the world and there are some drawbacks related to things like caching or security. “Distributed, run by one party” is probably going to outperform “Distributed, run by many parties” for most users and the things which are going to make them switch to something else would be high-level things like decisions about the product direction.

The higher-level organization trade-offs are less clear cut, I think. There's an advantage in having more than one party making decisions but it also harms your overall reaction time somewhat substantially. Other than the web and email there aren't all of that many success stories and I wouldn't feel too secure about email long-term. That suggests to me that we might be prone to give the drawbacks insufficient weight when we're thinking about decentralization, especially when it comes to the challenges of controlling abuse. I ran my own Jabber servers for a while and it worked well at work (centralized) but basically all of my personal messages came either from people on Google Talk or spammers. It wasn't just that Google put more money into running servers or building apps but that there wasn't a great path forward for a lot of features which federated services offered.