But I think the broader point I'm making is that what _is_ making all of the money nowadays is increasingly unethical and counter-productive to society. For example, see Kalshi and co. That, in our experience, is what the VCs are in all of the rage for right now, and as I said it's completely antithetical to our vision.
Why did Andrew Carnegie invest in building public libraries? Surely it wasn't because he was expecting a capital return.
The oligarchs (at least some of them) used to feel some responsibility to the betterment of man. It really seems like today's billionaires really only care about money and power and nothing else.
They are out there, but unfortunately very much on the fringe because it's difficult to raise money with that ethos.
"Carnegie spent his last years as a philanthropist. From 1901 forward, public attention was turned from the shrewd business acumen which had enabled Carnegie to accumulate such a fortune, to the public-spirited way in which he devoted himself to using it on philanthropic projects."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Carnegie
Bill Gates is in similar phase of life.
Sure you could make some money, but nowhere near the monopoly profits everyone is seeking. A decentralized Google would never be as profitable as a centralized one, so where would a capitalist prefer putting their money?
IMO this is also why decentralized systems or peer-to-peer applications never really caught on. Some point to technical challenges or usability issues or a lack of use-cases, but I believe all of those could have been overcome with enough investment. There just wasn't enough money in them compared to centralization. (It didn't help that the only really popular systems were almost entirely used for illegal or unproductive purposes.)
And these dynamics over time are what have led to the asymmetric Internet today. The Internet was supposed to be equal, with each node capable of being a client and a server and, heck, even a router. But that's clearly not what we have today: networks hostile to P2P connectivity, increasingly powerful centralized services, and decreasingly capable end-user devices.