Taking a stand against unofficial Ubuntu images

Could it be OVH?

OVH founder on June 19 2016 "@ubuntu asks us to bill you 1e-2e per month for each VPS/PCI/PCC/SD. If not, prohibition to use the mark "Ubuntu" on our website."

We had a story about this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11934459

I am not sure how I feel about this.

On the one hand, this would theoretically guarantee a minimum user experience. Which is nice. And a lot of those changes sound stupid and dangerous.

On the other hand, many of these changes may be with the intent of providing a better user experience as the goal of the provider is a sandbox or a temporary resource where security and updates are less of a concern.

But mostly, this fills me with concern over what this means for Ubuntu. It is clear that this is about ensuring a strong brand, and I am not sure why they would need that now. Is it just concern over other distros (like Mint) accomplishing what they spent decades trying (being a desktop Linux worth using for sane people)? Are they losing out on the server-space too now? Or are we looking at something else?