good questions

Much like a popular car surveillance system, the Internet is "Always there, always ready". But these individual services, the ones we define as being at the core of a supposed "Web 2.0" are not. They are commercial ventures, as unpredictable as any other profit-seeking endeavor, as subject to bankruptcy or lunatic management practices.

Here is a game: let's say you have one day to download your pictures out of Flickr and your mail out of GMail. Can you? Do you even have access to the data? Do you still really own it?

Have we sold our most precious possession, our data, to companies? Worse, have we given it to them, along with our blessing to blend it with context-sensitive ads? Loaning it, using a specific service for a certain time is definitely OK, even if that service is proprietary, closed-source or whatever, but what about selling it, giving it away?

Is Web 2.0 about the success of a few technologies or the success of a few companies?

from "A fake freedom" by François Joseph de Kermadec