GitLab Had Begun Planning To Track Its Users But Quickly Changed Course

[Luke]

Surely you have things backward? That's exactly how things were originally... way, way back. The "free" hosting services came about precisely because they discovered they could make money out of providing a service that the user didn't have to pay for.

Now the ISP's work hand in hand with the big cloud providers by attempting to scan for users self-hosting sites and threatening to terminate service. Prepaid cellular can make shutoffs impossible but can't handle much bandwidth. The 5g transition might change that.

Real worst offender is Facebook's offer of "free" internet service limited to themselves and a tiny number of whitelisted sites in places that has not been banned. That moves enough of the public to facebook-only access to censor anyone who is banned by Facebook or is not willing to comply with their TOS.