This is about protecting the entrenched players in the OS games; Microsoft, Google and Apple. The likely end play for all this is the erosion of personal computing so they can rent (and therefore control) all the compute available to you, so you don’t get uppity and think of running your own AI, which they believe will be as integral to everyday life as the internet is today.

You joke, but this is actually how it works in places. As recently as 2015 we paid some % of all storage media sales (think HDDs, nvmes, flash drives, anything that can hold data really) to our RIAA equivalent to ”compensate for private copying”. Now it’s no longer baked into the prices, but they are paid directly by the government, as in through taxation.