Im guessing they’ll make it illegal for users to try to bypass the restriction.

The company could, at any time, render my entire system useless unless I meet their demand

That’s already happening. Louis Rossman has a saga on the topic, including the company threatening legal action against him.

This is happening at my company. They gave us 6 months to build an AI-tool to replace a non-AI tool that has been very well built and tested for 6 years, and works perfectly well. The AI tool has some very amazing features, but it could never replace the good old tool.

The idiot in charge of the project has such a bad vision on the tool, yet likes to overhype it and oversell it so much.

He was being chased by the US government, and Assange proved that being in an US allied country will still get your arrested/tortured. What other options did Snowden had other than escaping to Russia?

IMO don’t hate the player, hate the game.