I recently came across a video by Loyal Moses titled “They’re Banning Your Home Server”.
This got me thinking about what it means for anyone who likes running their own gear.
The industry lobby’s framing around private servers feels like a major mask-off moment for big tech, treating user-controlled hardware as a threat.
I have written a short piece in reaction to the video and would love to hear your thoughts.
Original content by The Unknown Universe, written by a human and not AI generated!
I have no doubt that these corporations (well, some of them) consider it a “threat”. “Massive”, though? No.
If it was a “massive threat” they would’ve lobbied long and hard long ago, joining with the MPAA and RIAA (which Sony was part of even back then!) in the 90s and 2000s era of “you wouldn’t download a car!”
Yes, even back then people were hosting their own game servers and not much has changed, really other than there’s a lot more online games now (even ones that shouldn’t be “online”).
This feels like corporate lobbyists trying to justify their jobs. Hopefully they’ll get “outsourced to AI” soon and articles like this will become a thing of the past. Replaced with AI-written legislation making the news because now rocks are required on all pizzas.
They are in fact lobbying for legislation that declares self-hosting a security risk and akin to piracy. The fact that they use Minecraft servers as an example actually shows that this is not even remotely a new thing, but that they are working on those idiotic arguments for quite some time.
In the 90s and 2000s self-hosting was just not as simple yet. But nowadays cheap SoCs can basically handle the vast majority of the stuff they want to “sell” you as a service (and get your private data at the same time). The new frontier is AI (and only because they have driven up pices so much - else even self-hosted AI would be more prevalent). Everything else most people use, from messages to calendars to collaboration tools to media hubs to “cloud” storage, you can do yourself on devices with some low double digit price tag (the storage itself is now the more expensive part - again thanks to the AI bubble). Or next to free given all the older consumer hardware Windows11 just made obsolete…