Avoiding the hyperbole and answering the heart of your question:

No, I honestly don't believe that centralized content silos are a good thing for anybody besides their owners who are hoping to become the new gatekeeper communications middlemen.

Your shoplifting analogy would only be appropriate I were saying that I run Adblock to make anti-Adblock technology stronger. The problem is not that centralized websites allow the possibility of "freeloaders", it's that in addition to being expensive, the centralization itself has harmful effects on expression, culture, and self-determination.

Just look at something like Youtube - you have content restrictions (no "porn", etc), internationalized lowest-common-denominator copyright restrictions, public pressure to hide majority-objectionable content from searches, length restrictions, extrajudicial takedowns from an algorithm rejecting a video with no legal judgment, an unchangeable UI, a UI that changes when you don't want it to, terrible search, nagging of asking for signups/G+ account linking/etc, no ability to easily download videos for later viewing or posterity's sake, limitations on video quality, and I'm sure a whole host of other features that I cannot even fathom because they're impossible to experiment with.

A market of many centralized providers will indeed correct some of these things with time, but there's always going to be details that competition will never fix, especially while battling the inherent non-linear network effects.

As another straightforward example, take something as benevolent [1] as Wikipedia. The main thing they need these massive donations for are because they distribute content by fulfilling every individual request, using a massive number of servers.

Imagine a different system instead using current technology - Wikipedia could instead publish a magnet link in DNS, which interested clients would periodically refresh and restart the torrent. If Wikipedia was not a popular site, their initial seed would be enough to handle the load of casually-interested people who retrieve what they want and close the torrent. But as they get popular, people incidentally contribute to helping them host by re-serving content.

Current torrent clients of course have limitations that would make this annoying and/or not scalable across sites. But this is merely a straightforward example meant to wet your whistle.

[1] Since their editing process is centralized as well, we can certainly question whether it's universally benevolent. But for this example, let's keep our focus on their publishing method - of course similar things can go on on the content-production side. There should really be no need for me to be submitting this comment only to news.ycombinator.com, supposedly agreeing to their terms, hoping they indefinitely rehost what I have to say, suffering the annoying dead-continuation bug on long posts, etc

Devil's Advocate:

The "centralized content silos" are side effects of the copyright system, which exists to ensure distribution of IP generation costs across the people who consume it.

Wikipedia doesn't care as much about this because most of the content is an aggregate of the Wikipedia community. Wikipedia's costs lay in distributing the information, not in generating content.

For most content companies that have IP generation costs, how do you propose that they distribute the costs?

Torrenting only solves the distribution cost problem.

The sheer majority of centralized services operate on content generated and submitted by users simply looking to express themselves and communicate with others, and do not reimburse them. I explicitly used Wikipedia because it's a very pointed result of specifically how much money is required solely due to terrible technology.

As for the funding of big budget films and the like, I'm not terribly worried. First, they have an awful lot of fat to trim, like all those lawyers and lobbyists they hire in an attempt to put the Internet genie back in the bottle, and that whole parallel management chain of Orwellian-named "producers".

But more importantly, we're already in a post-copyright world on that front. You accept that any information can be freely propagated, and that is just a new rule of the game, and you move on. You sell things like the experience of going to a movie theatre, concert venue, and physical merchandise. You explicitly appeal for fans to directly support you, and you take preorders instead of doing big-money gambles. Things about this model aren't ideal, but it's just how it is going to be.

You still didn't answer the question.

While there is a large quantity of user-generated IP out there, it is not the majority of what is being torrented, nor do the content holders of user-generated content have any generation cost.

Also, the lobbying, legal fees, and other "fat" costs that you allude to are necessary for larger organizations to survive, less they become subject to rent-seeking by their competition, who do participate in the agency behavior. Even if Adobe were to never spend a dime on lawyers or lobbyists again, would they no longer have to pay software engineers too?

Again, for most content companies that have IP generation costs, how do you propose that they distribute the costs?

How does torrenting help solve the problem with the IP generation cost, considering you are claiming it's the future?

You're harping on a completely different subject from what I was talking about, and while I also have a strong opinion on it, you're attempting to muddle the two into one general ball of "ownership is the only option" without looking at the details of each one.

Alas, I directly answered your question in my last paragraph, by telling you how to figure out how to distribute exotic-bit-combination "generation costs":

> You accept that any information can be freely propagated, and that is just a new rule of the game, and you move on... Things about this model aren't ideal, but it's just how it is going to be.

In Adobe's case, they can strongarm prominent obviously-using businesses with some reduced notion of commercial copyright (as every software vendor has basically been doing for the past decade), set up support contracts that give access to prerelease features (currently works well for smaller, more expensive niches), or (as they're starting to do) further lock down their software by moving to a server-side model and buy time until a Free competitor gets good enough to overrule their inconvenience. If they were just starting off, asking for donations would also work, but clearly at this point they have way too much overhead for that.

Also note that if their product is deprecated by something else, then under the current regime it is considered appropriate that their costs are never recovered. Conversely, at some point their costs have been completely recovered yet they keep right on seeking rent.

Thanks for your detailed explanation!

For what it's worth, I've run adblock since before web ads even became prominent, and installing it is my first step on any web browser. So I've never believed in or consented to the idea that viewing ads is somehow an integral or reciprocal part of viewing a website. I was actually surprised when I eventually learned that banner ads had come to be seen as a respectable business model. To me, setting up a server and publishing content is borne out of some intrinsic motivation (publishing something interesting, expressing an opinion, informing about a business, personal hobby, etc), and those who systematically pollute the information environment in hopes of making money are the parasites of the system.