Technology

Except the trap works when their subscription services are still competitive, and locally hosted solutions are part of competition regardless of what they want.

There are industry-wide attempts to ramp up complexity of everything, so that everything were more centralized and local solutions harder to support. I'm not sure what they hope for.

Home consumers can be trapped this way, but they are subject to competition from many businesses.

Also while crypto stuff is unpleasant, it involves decentralized commercial calculation with some of the solutions, meaning possibility of automated service choice in a decentralized network. You can in theory have an alternative to Office 365 running in such a network paid for with Ethereum or TON or something similar. I haven't researched this supposition.

Businesses are harder to trap this way, because they usually can afford an employee or two to support basic local solutions. Or to pay another small business of 3-4 people doing that.

Or one can think of (playing EU4 right now, so a limited set of associations) gunpowder and chinaware production in Europe, the secrets of both were slowly and steadily spreading, until they were no longer secrets. Here it's not as much about secrets as it is about evolution catching up with revolution.

The commonality of people just needing to do their work and willing to use computers to help it is slower to react to change than big corporations, but big corporations can't direct their reaction, they can only slow it down.

So - renting computational resources you possess right now is hard and big cloud providers are doing it, while people just owning hardware don't. That's the problem to be solved. Things like boinc and seti@home were altruistic, and I think there's a similar distributed hentai hosting. The problem is in making such a market for everyone.