content: If you consider this technology in a vacuum it's awesome.  That's exactly how the programmers are thinking of it, I bet. Industry strongly encourages building a New Thing over maintaining an Old Thing. It's why Excel and Word are so bloated.  there is a huge market for a trusted third party  And as soon as this trusted third party exists, it is immediately compromised by everyone who wants access to that sweet, sweet user data. We can design systems that are headless and encrypt from end-to-end, but they'll have trouble being adopted due to the extra hurdles. Consumers are lazy and stupid, remember. Finally, if one of these systems actually becomes popular it'll immediately be associated with illegal filesharing and porn. This will be emphasized by a drama-hungry media.