All of that hardware would be just fine if we had a Bill of Rights for the Internet that ensured free speech rights and ability to host content (of any sort that isn't strictly prohibited already) is enshrined in law.

Pity all these laws end up spending most of their time enabling obscenity instead of political speech.

This is all probably true, but doesn't change the point that the consequences of those perfectly reasonable business descisions will have massive effects on personal freedom.

It's been an incremental war. For context, I've been posting about this for 20 years; during that time all the devices you say "we already have" were invented.

This has eaten away at the average person's computing freedom, ironically while providing them a ton more computing power and capability.

> They don't threaten the 'ordinary' PC market.

Not directly, but think about this:

* I know people who do not own a PC anymore, they just have tablet, phone, and TV. No need, apparently, but...

* This results in a ton of kids growing up without early exposure to general purpose computing

* This has been an increasing trend for quite some time now, and Pluton is just the next incarnation of Palladium, which tells us that Microsoft really does still see a completely captured market in their future. Linux plays a role, but in the embrace-and-extend sense; while WSL helps squeeze Linux out as a desktop OS down on the ground, Microsoft's ownership of Github cements it in the cloud.

I know, I know, old man yells at cloud, I don't expect this train to stop, I just want people to stop and think once in a while about where it might be going. It's OK to dream up worst-case scenarios and then strategize for how you might fend off that eventuality even if it's unlikely.

The issue is that the device may not be able to go to blogs hosted outside of the Trusted Ecosystem of Fact-Check Verified Not-Fake-News Websites, one day. Who knows?