One of the problems we have had in tech is that there aren’t large monetary incentives to create and sustain open protocols. If they are open they cannot be easily monetized by traditional means. post 
Now, however, we have a new way of providing incentives for the creation of protocols and for governing their evolution. I am talking about cryptographic tokens.
The original creator of a protocol based on tokens will make money to the extent that it is adopted and to the degree they have retained some of the tokens to sell at a higher price later on.
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I am reminded of the notion of 'competitive open standard' where a vendor sacrifices some market by opening an interface to competitors and gains back control over that competitor through versioning the standard. An example would be IBM mainframe disk drive interfaces that encouraged knock off models but controlled those competitors as a consequence.
Some comments make similar points.