They also don't pay for the non-standards stuff, what's your point? Chrome, Facebook, Instagram. For the paid services like Apple's there's no even an alternative following open standards.

They don't pay because there are no options of services provided by these companies following open standards, exactly because companies wouldn't be able to lock users in their solutions if open standards were commonly deployed and used...

It's kind of a chicken and egg problem. Let's say for the sake of the argument that you can check out all the data and metadata from all of the sites you want to. Now what? Where would you check it in?

"Build it and they will come" kinda falls flat when there's no there there to, you know, build it. It's like advocating for building a highway to the middle of nowhere because in our mind the field of dreams is inside all of us, so the center of the universe would be ideal, but there are already things built there and we want folks to appreciate the game and our collective love of it, so we had to build it way out here. Open standards are one part of "building it," but not the whole of it, so it might be a bit premature to be asking where everybody is. You have to draw the rest of the owl.

We're building sandcastles in the sky. What is the point of all these column inches if it doesn't lend itself to building the destinations that you wish to visit? The best defense is a good offense. Whining and complaining can help identify a problem and motivate others to share your view that the problem exists and is worth solving. Making new year's resolutions and telling folks about it isn't actually doing the work.

Community organizing is like step 0. Now comes the actually hard part, being the change you want to see in the world.