The cloud era seems to exacerbate these kinds of issues. The only way to truly have "long term" service is to be a subscriber, not a "buy once" customer. If you're a part of their revenue next year, they're going to try to keep you. Otherwise, you're just one excuse away from being dropped.

The "right to repair" laws being developed might help here, but I don't know what this means for anything "connected to a service". If the service goes down, are there laws that say we need to be able to connected to something else? I'm not aware of much.

I mean, as an Arlo customer, I knew this was coming, but that's because I've worked in tech for over 20 years, and know none of these companies can operate a plan that looks ahead more than 2 years.

Ultimately technology is either subscribed, or "rented" for an undefined period of time. It's never "bought". It's gonna take some serious regulation to make that happen, and I'm not even sure how that will work.