While I agree with some of your points - which to me mostly boils down to rent-seeking monopolies / duopolies - I think you're seriously underestimating the "Ye

While I agree with some of your points - which to me mostly boils down to rent-seeking monopolies / duopolies - I think you're seriously underestimating the "Yes, it's managed..." part. People are still perfectly at liberty to run their own servers, and the fees for running servers that handle the kinds of traffic that used to happen "when the Internet was actually pleasant" are peanuts. Running any kind of server used to involve purchasing hardware, bandwidth was orders of magnitude more expensive and so on. This server-as-a-service means that for $5 a month I was able to build a Python Twitter bot that tweets the diary entries of a 17th century English naturalist[0,1]. It means I got to do something fun without the overhead of actually running the server. It's a small thing, and as I said I agree with what was probably the main thrust of what you were saying, but it really feels like you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater through your obvious exasperation. [0] https://twitter.com/gilbertwhitetwt https://twitter.com/gilbertwhitetwt [1] https://gilbertwhitetweets.org/ https://gilbertwhitetweets.org/