Seems like the next logical step. Most big games are always-online Games as a Service where your local storage is useless if the company server doesn’t handshake. A lot of business and productivity software already requires subscriptions and is partially online. Every single fucking company wants to have an app on your phone so they can watch you in the bathroom. And there’s talk that MSFT might start moving Windows off the PC entirely and in to the cloud.
I figure at some point it’s in the shareholder’s best interests to prohibit users from actually storing anything locally. Storage is really just stolen subscription revenue, when you think about it. Every time a user accesses something on a local drive they’re stealing the chance for you to extort them in to paying a subscription fee.
What do think, too distopian? Back when tapes, CDs, MiniDiscs, all the old generations of data storage that you could write to at home were first circulating the media industries tried real, real hard to make them illegal to privately own. We’ve been fighting an escalating battle against digital (and analog I guess) IP regimes ever since then. Streaming has pretty much killed physical media afaik. I have no idea if blu-rays or DVDs are still printed for sale.
Idk, just a thought. Let me know what you think.
They won’t have to make it illegal.
Data storage is going to become a niche. Apple and Microsoft will stop supporting data storage in their software, and once every business and the average person stop buying data storage mediums then the commercial availability will drop off a cliff.
The only people who will store data will be Linux nerds that build custom machines from parts imported from other countries. For 99% of people data storage won’t exist, no laws required.
Yeah, that’s a good analysis. I’ve gotten in to it with friends over “consumer choice”, where they tell me “Oh, the customers didn’t want x thing that’s why you can’t get x thing” and I’ll hit back with “The manufacturers decided they didn’t want to support x thing for whatever reason, or that they could squeeze people for more money without x thing, and they have hegemonic control over the market share for that kind of product, so they can force the consumers to do what they tell the consumers to do” and they look at me like I have three heads. : p
Makes me think of the guy who, afaik, is the only guy in the world who is a reliable source for working floppy disks. The little ones, the big ones, the really big ones that are from before even my time. He works really hard to track down any intact ones he can get, then re-sell them to people who have ancient, ancient systems running key infrastructure.
Dammit someone turned on accessibility features and now there’s confetti on my screen whenever I click.
Ted stop messing with my machine! 
You just gave me horror shivers, what a dystopian idea. But I can totally see devices coming with just 64-128GB of built in flash for the OS and system files and all storage for anything else just defaults to their own cloud services.