I'll switch to legacy systems before I pay for a subscription service.

This assumes really good internet infrastructure and still requires some sort of terminal at the user end. Of course, Bezos is a billionaire and so might be dumb enough to believe it himself.

There are more barriers to digital sovereignty every day.

My wife hit the 15GB Google limit last week. Holy shit.

Her phone storage was full, so:

• Photos were silently removed from the device and uploaded to Google Photos.
• Once it was full, it locked her out of Google services. It even locked her email and took forms offline.
• It then demanded payment to get access to her files.

Google Photos is ransomware by definition.

I ended up doing a takeout, and found that all the photos had the exif tags stripped and I had to re-merge them from a .json file that sat next to it. Otherwise they had no timestamp/location data and no other software would index it.

Fixing the mess required me to alter my photo import program (written in C) and use some scripts I found on github. It was a full weekend project.

I can see why a lot of people will just pay the ransom.

I think this might fail for the same reason VPN companies began wildly profiting recently.

Porn.

Just have a few organizations say "Want everyone at Amazon/Microslop to know your fetishes and what porn you search for? Buy (thin client offered) now!"

Big tech is making wayyyy to much money selling artificially inflated parts and pieces, Some people may buy into a second generation Web TV but gamers and builders won't. ( I know - I was there 3000 years ago when net nanny's were buying Web TV and I was selling Packard Bells with 4MB RAM).