Re: 'People in the middle snoop'
The thing we all need to see is that the only monopoly that exists is the one we vote for; government.
Big IT is not creating standards that permit competition, Big IT is hell bent on achieving a monopoly position through expanding their walled gardens and is hoping that the politicians don't notice. So far it seems that the only body that hasn't been fooled thus far is, ironically, the unelected European Commission.
As for standards that survive outside of Big IT, you are being very short sighted if you think that there are none. What do you think carries your Web traffic? TCP/IP. What is that traffic? Likely http. How does your email flow around the world? SMTP, IMAP, etc. How does your domain login work on a Windows network? LDAP, Kerberos, implemented either by Windows or SAMBA. What is the system API on top of which Android, Linux, and most software is implemented (unless it's for Windows or MAC/ios)? POSIX.
Big IT has decided that openness is for pansies, and there's billions to be made by providing proprietary over the top services. They're right, and they've made billions. Trouble is that the consumer has paid for that through the cost of goods and services, the sellers of which have to buy advertising on these proprietary platforms to survive in their market places. In this way Google is far from free, it's costing the average wage earner in the UK and everywhere else a lot of money, without the option. That's a monopoly.
Facebook are even worse coz they're having to be very aggressively acquisitive of data to make cash from a very limited and, frankly, piss poor service