I have been terminally online since the age of 7 and this would probably make me shut everything down and go outside. Maybe that'd be good for society, but I suspect most people will just shrug and go along with it.

"It can't be that bad if everyone else is also doing it."

I'm not sure how principled I would be if/when it comes to that. I hope I will be.

Conceptually it’s difficult to explain to most people why this would not benefit them.

Like, I don’t maintain the delusion that I can’t be precisely identified by the apps I use. I just am vehemently opposed to it being tied to my government issued identity, which could be arbitrarily revoked and controlled by people who dont have pure profit as their motive. A lot of people probably find that overly paranoid.

I'm much more convinced Microsoft wants to do stuff like sell cloud subscriptions at the click of a button in the desktop than Microsoft gives a crap about those subscriptions being tied to a consistent account ID. The latter certainly sounds evil, but not in a way that particularly helps Microsoft over their competitors.

Uncle Bob probably would probably need to do a decent amount of work to figure out how to purchase a OneDrive subscription from having no account, particularly if they think "I've already got an account - that's how I log in!". If the PC forces Bob to walk through creating a cloud Microsoft account before he even sees the desktop then the only step remaining is to click to OneDrive (or whatever) sales notification and enter a credit card so his "important personal files stay backed up" (or however they pitch the service in the notifications).

> I'm much more convinced Microsoft wants to do stuff like sell cloud subscriptions at the click of a button in the desktop than Microsoft gives a crap about those subscriptions being tied to a consistent account ID. The latter certainly sounds evil, but not in a way that particularly helps Microsoft over their competitors.

Bless your cotton socks, you had it in the first part MS wants to sell stuff, but then you failed to realise that by tying people to a consistent account ID builds a profiling on them that lets MS serve targeted advertisements, through Edge.

Edge (and the entirety of ad tech for the last few decades) does this today without needing a Microsoft account at all, let alone your real legal identity.

In that case, we should build a new internet designed specifically to prevent this kind of behaviour and the slopification of the current internet. Let HTTP rot and build something a little less spartan than gemini but still resistant to slop. If anyone has the resources, my current idea is a p2p protocol for sharing some kind of markup that can do minimal styling and a client that doesn't need some kind of scripting language to do things like use buttons

http isn't the internet. al gore created a series of tubes, and other folks built protocols to share information through those tubes. http is one protocol

You're right, I should have specified a new web. Gopher and usenet both still exist and aren't http