From Leonardo, who founded MPEG, on the page linked:
"Even before it has ceased to exists, the MPEG engine had run out of steam – technology- and business wise. The same obscure forces that have hijacked MPEG had kept it hostage to their interests impeding its technical development and keeping it locked to outmoded Intellectual Property licensing models delaying market adoption of MPEG standards. Industry has been strangled and consumers have been deprived of the benefits of new technologies. From facilitators of new opportunities and experiences, MPEG standards have morphed from into roadblocks."
It's been such a disappointing trend of companies initially welcoming developers, just to then eat their lunch. Twitter has been one of the worst: they killed their developer ecosystem.
Marginal costs can be upheld through protection, self-regulation, and enforcement -- essentially of human rights.
I think people who are able to make a living by doing such work - won't burn all the money by buying yachts and party airplanes (like modern Internet "heroes" of entrepreneurship) - but by creating more pro-bono information work.
I like your statistic about people not keeping up their resolutions: it's perhaps the best argument for using a tool. But how to formulate a realistic goal?
Hmm, would it would be possible to actually detect if Google's got information about a visitor - by creating a web page with google ads and then snooping what targeted ads are getting shown (which is possible through DOM traversal)? This way, information can leak.
Snowden with NSA should be considered to be white hat hackers: they demonstrated the inadequacy of private information protection by Google and other companies https://medium.com/p/1bcff7c0f25f