But we could have an open social network that operates outside a single company... building on the foundational principles of the internet.
These "social networks" exist because it's still too hard to setup and manage a personal website, and those sites lack the interactiveness of FB.
Imagine if everyone had their own 1-click website with glorified RSS feeds, webrtc-based chat, access control, media sharing, and standard APIs for 3p apps - plus, perhaps, a web-of-trust or some other mechanism for validating identity. All rolled into standardized APIs backed by large competitors of FB (perhaps MS/Goog/etc?).
If the ISP monopolies can be broken, perhaps all that could be hosted on a little Android-like box connected to a home ISP - your little social box, connecting you to every human on earth... always online, it caches messages from friends when your phone looses signal, p2p shares videos from friends so you can watch high quality with no load time, and automatically curates content from connected feeds (perhaps with some on-board ML).
No ads, no big brother, for pennies a month.
I know Google's ad revenue is getting eaten by FB - perhaps they would profit from something like this. Cap FB at the knees by giving people FB's functionality without the corporate data-mining/lock-in, and reap ad revenue from the increased relevance of el Goog's search.
There are similar benefits to shops, manufacturers, services, bands, etc all too. Standard information/inventory protocols, and a review system connected to those individual personal identities, could undermine Yelp and even AMZN.
I've been thinking about this quite a bit and I think it's mostly a matter of execution. There is prior art covering all of the pieces, but no one has assembled all the pieces into a compelling product (think: iPod vs prior mp3 players, FB versus the myriad of ex-competitors)... hard but tractable with the right support.