I think there's a larger picture here. It's time to declare war on middlemen, period.
There are producers and customers. There is no place for anything else in the 21st century.
Here's a startup formula for you all:
1) Identify a place where a middleman is taking a cut or gate-keeping an industry.
2) Design a system, technology, or service that either eliminates the middleman entirely or replaces it with something far more efficient and much lower margin.
To be honest, most of what I see startups doing is creating middle men, not destroying them.
In fact in most cases that's all startups are, someone trying get between a customer and something they want. Hopefully adding some value on the way.
Facebook: Want to talk to your friends? Talk through us.
Dropbox: Want your files? Get them from us.
etc etc
If startups were serious about decentralizing anything they would be developing P2P protocols and open formats, not putting everything behind a big web app wall (with ads).
You are saying exactly what I just said to another reader. Replace distribution with an open standard that has an embedded financial model, then we might have something interesting. Everything else is just a different middle man.
"Open standard" and "embedded financial model" are kind of mutually exclusive.
The whole point of an open standard is that it allows anybody to compete in a particular market, e.g browsers or word processors.
As soon as you have an open standard for distribution, you basically have something like bit torrent where the content producer/rights holder is in the same marketplace as the pirates or anybody else wishing to redistribute the same content under different terms (i.e free).
Only if you assume the financial model depends on that open standard. For example, try to make money by distributing media using an open standard for distribution. Then I agree with you.
But you could have an open distribution model that is compatible with a parallel financial model. For example, fund an art project on kickstarter and then distribute it using an open standard. Or distribute your for free game in an open standard then charge for players to play in your server which has exclusive closed data that they might care for.
Eliminating middlemen means going into the product business (especially in software), but we live in a service economy where there's little support for product businesses compared to middleman service businesses.
Disintermediation may at first seem to be the destiny of a network whose connectivity trends toward a full mesh... But this superficial impression is later proved wrong by the rise of intermediaries made necessary by the wealth of possible connections. The trick is that those new intermediaries offer value by helping to achieve more connections, not by restricting connectivity. The old intermediaries die but the new world has a niche for new ones.
This will be your outcome: each system will race to the bottom, a market leader will emerge and converge into a monopoly, this market leader will begin exploiting everyone. Nothing will change except for the names of the companies.
Golgafrincham is a red semi-desert planet that is home of the Great Circling Poets of Arium and a species of particularly inspiring lichen. Its people decided it was time to rid themselves of an entire useless third of their population, and so the descendants of the Circling Poets concocted a story that their planet would shortly be destroyed in a great catastrophe. (It was apparently under threat from a "mutant star goat"). The useless third of the population (consisting of hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, management consultants, telephone sanitisers and the like) were packed into the B-Ark, one of three purported giant Ark spaceships, and told that everyone else would follow shortly in the other two. The other two thirds of the population, of course, did not follow and "led full, rich and happy lives until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone".
The B-Ark was programmed to crash-land on a suitably remote planet on one of the outer spiral arms of the galaxy, which happened to be Earth, and the Golgafrinchan rejects gradually mingled with and usurped the native cavemen*, becoming the ancestors of humanity and thereby altering and distorting the course of the great experiment to find the question for the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything, or so Ford Prefect presumes. A lot of them didn't make it through the winter three years prior to Arthur Dent's reunion with Ford Prefect, and the few who remained in the spring said they needed a holiday and set out on a raft. History says they must have survived.
People from Golgafrincham are called Golgafrinchans. In some versions of the novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the planet is also referred to as "Golgafrinchan", but this usage is less common and is thought to be an error of typography.
There are producers and customers. There is no place for anything else in the 21st century.
Here's a startup formula for you all:
1) Identify a place where a middleman is taking a cut or gate-keeping an industry.
2) Design a system, technology, or service that either eliminates the middleman entirely or replaces it with something far more efficient and much lower margin.
3) Profit.