Streaming norms exist because cloud ownership reduces users to data renters.

Evidence

Once data generated by individuals is stored in the cloud, it is the corporations that decide what data other users are allowed to “borrow” from the bank, without those users being able to permanently store it in a way that would let them freely reproduce or transform it. That is why streaming—or downloading content in a format intended for short-term storage and access—is the norm instead of storing content locally and permanently. In this model, users are no longer the proprietors of any data they produce or acquire, and they don’t get to decide what is collected or shared or for what purposes. From producers and owners, they pass into being renters of data, laborers who generate data to be sent back to the servers or, as earlier discussed, who are the source of life streams from which such data can be automatically extracted. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 184

Categorization

• XREF: The producer-to-renter shift parallels the dispossession logic of enclosure in the data-colonialism frame; connects to dominant school’s notion of prosumer exploitation under platform capitalism. — connects to: Platforms replace markets with fiefdoms and profit with cloud rent; The cloud centralizes data ownership in corporations that earlier internet models distributed. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 183; Cloud capital required the prior privatisation of the internet commons (+2 more)
• SEED: An essay contrasting the rhetoric of ‘immediacy and convenience’ around streaming with its structural function as data-ownership dispossession could reframe convenience culture as rentier extraction.
• QUESTION: Does this causal claim — that streaming is structurally mandated by cloud ownership, not just chosen for convenience — survive comparison with genuinely free local formats like podcasts one downloads and owns?

Broader Connections

• Platforms replace markets with fiefdoms and profit with cloud rent #expands (0.85)
• Apple and Google’s wealth comes from cloud rent, not profit. #expands (0.80) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 481
• The cloud centralizes data ownership in corporations that earlier internet models distributed. #qualifies (0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 183
• Cloud capital required the prior privatisation of the internet commons #complicates (0.70)