I agree with the title, but not the solution and that’s okay. Is the future endlessly tinkering with and running stuff out of your house? I think nope, that’s just your hobby.

I think of the centralization of content and the licensing as something that works so long as it’s a commodity market, that is, it’s hard to 2x the price of an ebook over a dead tree which I can own. Investors may wish otherwise, but they have to add tons of value to get consumers to play along.

I’m fine with commodities in my life. Power and water and gas come to mind. They cost what they cost and I don’t have problems with it.

I could build a nas and run software and admin it, or I could pay $20/mo to Adobe and another $33 to Apple for my family’s shared storage. Done. Of course, if the benefits of commoditization evaporate and it looks like the streaming market, then I’m wrong and would have to change track.

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drew_lytle 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Couldn't agree more! And most of those commodities/utilities you mentioned are usually either publicly funded, cooperatively owned, or regulated to keep prices down and protect consumers

Thanks for reading and commenting!

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meonkeys 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Will you clarify "centralization of content and the licensing"? Regarding DRM, specifically. If you own said content then sure, you can E2EE and store it in whatever cloud you prefer while avoiding common attention/control/data hoarding (read: enshittification) of commercial online cloud & online services. If you're saying DRM is OK then you're conflating commercial commodities with public utilities. The point of the former is to make money, the latter is to enrich our lives by taking care of basic human needs.

	▲	9x39 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Centralized delivery of content licenses might be more accurate. Similar to your point about using public utilities as examples, I think it's a distinction without difference for what the OP was talking about. I think the point is in a delivery of commodities (storage, IP licenses, water, power) there is some benefit from the generally fungible nature of the commodity, which makes it harder to put high prices on them, which makes doing it yourself more expensive and inefficient unless you value something very specific. It's true I don't own the water from my city nor own access to it (it's a license, effectively), and I pay a delivery fee and purchase units of water. But like most people around, I don't value the intangible of truly owning access to the water under my land and drill a well, I just use the commodity. So it goes with e-book licensing and video licensing, too, and I don't think that they're regulated utilities affects this decision whatsoever - enough people value cost and convenience sufficiently to think licenses are fine for their use case instead of ownership. >The point of the former is to make money, the latter is to enrich our lives by taking care of basic human needs. The former could say they make money by enriching lives in their own way. Is this arguing basic human needs should be charity? If so, even the most humble city will charge for water. Further, companies are often created to make money by providing production and distribution of that human need. Utilities are not altruistic but can be fair enough when held in check by a state.