The main design goal of cryptocurrency protocols and the like is immutability, so that the protocol operates according to formal specs and not according to the whims of economic stakeholders.

This is why the Finnish central bank's paper on Bitcoin called it a 'monopoly without a monopolist'.

I think the immutability of these kinds of protocols is certainly an improvement over the total control that economic stakeholders have in a centralized server-client architecture, with respect to power distribution.