There are a lot of poor people, mostly brown people, who do not have the ability to get one of these licenses.
Some of them are feeding themselves with their ability to write, and Google is literally stealing that food from their mouths.
This is new to me, want to stay on top of it.
To "write", I mean the precursor to "read".
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
> Are you talking about literature / articles, or software?
All of the above.
> This is new to me, want to stay on top of it.
I am sorry to tell you it is not too new. Google tried this before recently with something called WEI (which you might be able to find on ddg or other search engines): It failed for reasons few people know for sure[1], but the initiative had the same basic bullshit about security, and the same outcomes.
[1]: The story I heard was a couple South-American countries noticed that this would prevent their people from being able to work on software that runs in the Google ecosystem and threatened to block Google en masse. Since then, one of the countries that Google has a lot of offices in invaded one of those South American Countries for conveniently unrelated reasons.