A digital ether

I was just thinking, the blockchain is sort of like a digital ether – it’s a universal ambient space where content can just reside distributed over the internet, not held by any one person or entity or in any one location. I see it as a step forward from the cloud, where data could be retrieved over the internet but it was still held by some party you had to interface with. Now it’s just “out there”, almost like air. And ethereum itself seems to hint at this in its name.