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Why Big Tech’s Lobbyists Are Targeting Self-Hosted Servers
(unknownuniverse.uk)
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this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2026
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It is a massive threat. They are ready to move from "you don't own any of your software" to rental and cloud models so you don't own your hardware either. How dare you to undermine those plans with self-owned and self-operated cost efficient hardware?
It's not. "Normal" people think running my own Jellyfin server is impressive, and I'm a scrub doing it for fun. Most people will never be able to pull off self-hosting anything, it's too much work.
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...
I just don't think it was possible back then. Not enough internet bandwidth/integration.
Now, cloud gaming is just another use case/revenue stream for data centers.
Not really. It's something that's been around for a very long time and popularity has only wained as time goes on and people find other ways to host their content. It's really not a threat to any corpos, as much as I wish it was.
I cannot believe this argument. I'd like to see the numbers. I bet sell hosting is a drop in the ocean.
It sounds like you agree with me...?