I think you give the idiots in charge of the corps that can’t see beyond a 3 month window of time too much credit. It is just the natural progression of unchecked and unregulated Capitalism that will always lead to this place, regardless of the industry or technology.

Don’t get me wrong, I want to blame them too for their evil plot, but they’re too dumb to have contrived the whole narrative.

Example with the cloud:

• Look over past decades, storing your data in servers has been a thing for decades. Companies have tried time and again to get the concept to stick in various forms, and it always waxed and waned. (Reverse-example right now is AI, since people barely want it, and having it in the cloud is even creepier, manufacturers are trying to make people comfortable with cloud-executed AI queries, and otherwise releasing limited subsets of compute that run locally on the phone.)
• Voice recognition tech like Voice Command (predecessor to Siri for those super young) started on phone-only. Then Siri used to run on the cloud until phones became powerful enough to run more commands locally and they moved more commands to the phone.
• Apple used to synchronize SMS messages between iPhones and other Apple devices in a secure local method on your local WiFI network. Then, as they sold more types of devices, it made it evolutionarily (made up word) necessary to move that logic to the cloud. They probably didn’t pre-think that all this would be clouded, they just got there out of need to sell a new toy, and suddenly screw the alleged privacy they purport to worship.

The reality is, a lot of these cloud techs have been held up by:

• Lack of fast enough Internet bandwidth to make it doable, nobody is going to spend 4 hours a day uploading photos somewhere
• Lack of fast local compute, hilariously, local compute can do most things now, but in the past, the local compute wasn’t fast enough to be able to parse/process the data to send to the cloud
• Lack of local storage, again, prepping data for cloud transport and having local caching be performant requires enough throwaway space on the local machine that users don’t become frustrated with the latency of remote disks in a datacenter
• Lack of metadata for trust verification like FaceID, fingerprint, GPS geolocation, and other security functions so the company could avoid fraud
• Lack of quality mobile cameras and recording devices making the input content garbage

Once these problems ended up being solved, it wasn’t some visionary with a big plan executing. It was just another Business Weenie being paid 9 figures having the same idea 300 other people had, and it just sticking this time because the technological environment is different.

(Replace Apple examples with Google, Microsoft, Cisco whoever as necessary.)

Hell yeah to those websites that still publish RSS feeds, though