These types of restrictions are exactly what refute the grandparent's claim that the web is more open today. Legislation, copyright, centralization and consolidation of services (ISP, cloud applications, cloud servers) have certainly made the Internet more powerful, but these trends have weakened what the Web was really about, as stated in the parent.

For me one of the greatest times of freedom was during the life of Geocities. This was actually the only time I had a website, and I was in middle school. Sure, there was a lot less people on the Internet, but it was a very wild wild west atmosphere and I feel like a larger portion of the users created their own home pages than today. Malicious parties were not as widespread and powerful, and there was overall not so much control over everything. I was also using Napster at this time.

I've studied computer engineering and I've still had a hard time having the feeling / spirit of freedom and ease of contributing to the Internet as I did back then. Maybe it's because I'm not creative anymore, or because I'm too cheap to pay for or too disinterested in putting my content onto services, or because there's a lot more to worry about with running your own server, or because there's too much visibility/scrutiny/copyright enforcement. Doesn't have the same feeling of openness as back then.