> If you defer to a politician, you simply centralize more power into a body of government constrained by only cultural norms and donor interests.

You're taking it as a premise that someone should have this power, i.e. that the centralization should actually exist.

Compare two alternatives.

One, each person has (is required to have) a single account across all services. You use the same account for the DMV, YouTube, your bank and the IRS.

Two, you have an independent account for each service. You have separate accounts with the IRS, Medicare, DMV, YouTube, etc. If one of them gets messed up or compromised it doesn't affect the others. If you have a dispute with any of them it limits the blast radius.

The first one is a dystopia regardless of who controls the single account. It's subject to abuse of power whether it's a politician or Mark Zuckerberg. So the solution is to demand the second one.

Open standards, protocols, and interoperability are definitely part of my values.

But you're still relying on a law if I understand you correctly.

If the society lacks them as deeply ingrained values as opposed to somehow to getting lawmakers to force them, then they will be implemented cynically and not within the spirit of the values. The type of thing that happened with apple's implementation of the anti-gate-keeping laws 'enforced' by the eu.

What you describe requires a flexible values system - not a single semantic standard. I'd love to live in a world where if you were big enough to have people wanting to interoperate with your service on behalf of your users and you were actively preventing it, you'd be an outcast in the deepest sense. That no users would touch your service, and it would be politically unfeasible to deal with you.

We don't live in that world because people have not developed this sort of social norm.