Nice to see your comment on minekey. have you worked on semantic web and personalization ?

You are right in a way when you say that it would probably be a more holistic solution if this process was entirely decentralized. Don’t all of us know the benefits of distribution and decentralization.

But there are problems too. Lots of them. Most predominantly, the technology itself has to develop. Secondly,What about privacy of data. Everybody worries about security nowadays. And all websites try covering their backs as much as possible by making you sign their ‘Terms of Service’ and putting everything possible in the TOS, in order to enable their snooping around the data safely.And you for one, know who you have allowed to snoop around and who you haven’t.So you try and make as informed a decision as possible, by considering the reputation and credibility of the company under question.
But if it was decentralized, who would we hold responsible for all the data? Would people actually be willing to give away access to data?

Thirdly how would the existing giants react to this? Will they be ready to work together?

In an ideal technology oriented experimental setup where everyone are do gooders, this will be a huge success. But in a more realistic world, a more business oriented world, someone has to figure out how to solve these problems to get anywhere