>barely legal (revoking people's access to what they bought ...)

Kind of like when Microsoft bought Mojang and locked one of the world's most popular online experiences behind talking to M$ servers? There is no way to play the game you paid for - even offline - if you are not interested in creating a Microsoft account. They don't seem too concerned with the whole "terrible idea which is barely legal" thing when there's an opportunity to force people into giving them data.

How is this different from a mojang/minecraft.net account?

my mojang account was not banned for alleged ToS violations which i can buy myself free from by providing them with a phone number they promise to only use for "validation"

(this is not related to bans for chat, this is about MS just arbitrarily banning accounts)

> revoking people's access to what they bought on shoddy evidence - if this actually starts happening to a lot of people I hope they get sued

I wouldn't put my money on them winning that one. It's wrong, but the laws were written by and for companies. I don't think a judge is going to say that a company who runs an online service can't ban users for violations of their policies. Hell, if the law cared about making sure companies couldn't arbitrarily cut off people's access to their purchases DRM would be outlawed.

They are not running the online service. These are community servers.

Microsoft's service is the account system that they also forced everyone to sign up for. They took a popular product that didn't need them and inserted themselves in-between the game and the players so they could collect the players money, take their data, and control their behavior.

Minecraft always had accounts, and you always had some amount of communication with mojang servers for authentications (otherwise anyone could spoof usernames and get other people banned).

> You can simply mod servers so that they don't have this chat reporting.

This will keep people from getting banned on your server, but it doesn't do anything to help all of the people who have already been banned.

If you are banned, it also reasons that you would no longer be able to authenticate to 3rd party servers either, and it would be most likely an infringement of DRM to bypass, if not simply against TOS.

> You can simply mod servers so that they don't have this chat reporting. If everyone in the Minecraft community is so opposed, just create and exclusively join modded servers.

This only applies to people who own the JAVA version. People who only own Bedrock/Windows 10 version do not have this option.

Note that you can't mod Bedrock servers (which is the remade, not-running-like-dogshit Minecraft. For now, they are at feature parity, but nothing guarantees that Java edition stays for long)

Sure, but there's a second order issue -- what's overblown is the extent to which "misinformed John Q. Public backed by scary Microsoft" is going strongly argue absurdities like "this is against Minecrafts intellectual property" or some nonsense and fight against it, or say it's bad or naughty or something.