alt Hacker NewsCurrently there are laws but not for hosting. Look at the contract of Steam for example or Ubisoft, or anything else - Q: What happens to your game collection if we shut down our servers? A: You own nothing and lose everything, GG!
It is like that we must protect users privacy from greedy websites so we will make the bad ones spell out that they use cookies to spy on users - and the result is what we have now with the banners.
I agree with you! And your point about cookie banners underlines that we can't just rely on regulation (because companies are so good are subverting or outright lobbying their way out of them).
Just as with the open source movement, there needs to be a business model (and don't forget that OSS is a business model, not a technology) that competes with the old way of doing things.
Getting that new business model to work is the hard part, but we did it once with open source and I think we can do it again with cloud infrastructure. But I don't think local-first is the answer--that's just a dead end because normal users will never go with it.