Possible Compatible Products and Business Models

An internet influenced by Solid Pods urges some businesses to adapt different business models: data collection can't be the main source of income anymore. Instead you possible get focus on different sources of income. Of course there are still many ways to earn money and I think a Solid based online infrastructure could even boost local economies more. Next to that, it also opens some other digital niches.

1. Information Brokerage

Say I want to know reviews of a certain restaurant. Of course the restaurant can link themselves to reviews, but this selection won't be reliable, as they can decide not to show all the negative reviews. Instead you want a third party that collects links to individual reviews. The person looking for a review gets references from this third party and can then query the needed reviews from separate users.
In an ideal situation the reviewing users only share the fact that they have reviews with the third party. The contents, ideally, would only be shared with the user that is querying the reviews.

This neutral information broker could thus be a very important role within the Solid ecosystem. They collect and aggregate any kind of information, but only when users trust them with their data.

2. Data Processing

Although simple data collection by service usage may become something from the past, users could still decide to share their data with another party if this party can do something special with their data, like making predictions, for example by feeding it to a bigger model that is stronger because of the combined data of multiple users.

3. Cloud Computation and Storage

I think I don't have to explain that demand to these types of services will rise anyway. The difference that wide adaptation Solid Pods could deliver, is that more parties could offer this, as online services are not tied anymore to the companies that control the users data (like Google Docs).

4. Paid Apps

An increase of the adaptation of Solid Pods of course doesn't imply an open source internet. People could still offer specialized closed source applications.
Personally I do think that it should become normalized to run them in some kind of monitored container, so the user can control the internet traffic of the app, to prevent data leakages.

Conclusion + Reflection

There are probably way more potential business models or products we can think of. This list is not supposed to be exhaustive, but just give an idea.

Some risks: the combination of 2 and 4 could still lead to powerful monopolies. However, if clients keep control of their own data and adapt standardized ways to share it, the risk to vendor lock-ins should at least be decreased.