This makes me remember a thought I was having a while ago. I'm not a fan of regulation on the internet, but there's some regulations i'd really like to see for the purpose of creating a more competitive atmosphere. They're probably too extreme today, but in the future I can see them being necessary as our lives increasingly become more digital.
One of them is that all data I create, which is stored, I should have access to, programmatically preferably. If I sign up for a site like Facebook, and create data such as friend connections I should have direct access to that data. Without access, there's an anti-competitive atmosphere. It is near impossible for me to create a new social network today on a similar scale to Facebook, because people's data is locked up. Even Google+ with google's resources, and popularity couldn't get people to detach from Facebook. I watched as people enthusiastically went to Google+, but then left as they found everything they wanted to do with it was locked up elsewhere. It is true that Facebook has this data available on their API, however it also has the ability to choose who can use it. That's the problem. I feel this data should be available for the express purpose of allowing competition to flourish.
of course there's other examples. Linked in has almost exclusive access to my resume + business contacts. Gmail has my life's history. Literally. I probably talk to my girlfriend on gchat more than when we're home. By the time we get home, there's nothing new :D Almost every big decision we've made has been while chatting at work. I can go back, and look at the record of our conversation I had when we came up with the name for my dog. Or when we decided to move to a different state, or when I told her my mom was hit by a car. No one company should be able to wipe out my life's memories. No one company should have exclusive access to this data. It is MY DATA (i realize the law doesn't recognize this as true yet, but it will).
Every day as we move to digital lives, the services we use go from being fun things we do, to critical infrastructure. Those gchat logs are really important to me. Those facebook status conversations are important to me. I didn't choose facebook based on their features. It kind of just happened. But now its a part of my life (a lot of our lives). I want control over it.