This era has been a long time coming.

We've known for decades now that the philosophy underpinning Free Software ("it's my computer and I should be able to use it as I wish") breaks down when it's no longer my computer.

Attempts were made to come up with a similar philosophy for Cloud infrastructure, but those attempts are largely struggling; they run into logical contradictions or deep complexity that the Four Essential Freedoms don't have. Issues like

1. Since we don't own the machines, we don't actually know what is needed to maintain system health. We are just guessing. Every new collected piece of information on our information is an opportunity for an argument.

2. Even if we can make arguments about owning our data, the arguments about owning metadata on that data, or data on the machines processing our data, are much murkier... Yet that data can often be reversed back to make guesses about our data because manipulation of our data creates that metadata.

3. With no physical control of the machines processing the data, we are de-facto in a trust relationship with (usually) strangers, a trust relationship that is generally not the case when we own the hardware; who cares what the contract says when every engineer at the hosting company has either physical access to the machine or a social relationship with someone who does, a relationship we lack? When your entire email account is out in the open or your PII has been compromised because of either bad security practices or an employee deciding to do whatever they want on their last day, are you really confident that contract will make you whole?

If there can be, practically, no similar philosophical grounding to the Four Freedoms, the conclusion is that cloud hosting is incompatible with those goals and we have to re-own the hardware to maintain the freedoms, if the freedoms matter.