I think we all sympathize and feel this way.

But it's also because we are getting older, and we are romanizing those sleepless nights getting 3D acceleration to work in Slackware with Dropline Gnome. Our first chat experiences, first emails, IRC, making your first website, getting your first server online...

It's easy to think that the weary giants of steel messed up our beloved internet, and they certainly took a large share of it (and indeed messed it up). But our internet is still there, faster and better than ever, and there are still social spaces naturally independent of the tyrannies they seek to impose on us. When I go to i.e. FOSDEM I feel that feeling from my youth, it's still very much there.

Ok, it is very annoying that they are messing with the prices of our hardware and I feel that. But that will pass. Perhaps in a year or so we get a wrinkle effect and stuff will be cheap for some time. And we can do "AI" our way (on our terms and hardware).

Let's not get so negative, just try to ignore the negative things and focus on the positive (like my gigabit symmetrical connection whoop whoop, yes it has cgNAT but I have WireGuard).