It was that mentality that, finally, made me buy a little piece of land in cyberspace (others may call it a domain name) - yeah you can get your blog hosted a million places for free, but by owning your own you can move to a new host.
Actually, you don't own that domain, only rent/lease it. And you don't own the servers neocities uses to host websites either, and they can "terminate the agreement at any time for any reason for no reason.".
There's a lot of confusion surrounding what defines ownership in the information age. For example, IP addresses are held like real property despite just being numbers in a database. However, a physical device isn't owned by the user if the carrier can restrict what can be done with it and/or modified/disabled it at any time for any reason without explanation. It also varies by culture too, with most 'Eastern' countries treating virtual goods like real property, and most 'Western' ones treating them as non-transferable services which can be cancelled.
Mind, that post you link to has the right idea, just that the only way to achieve what it recommends is to buy a server and IP address, and lease a T1 line or the like.
Thanks for the link! Great advice for everyone building on corporate owned platforms today. Yes, sometimes it is the right way for your business to start or grow, but make that choice consciously, not in ignorance.
"Our stuff [his company put a CMS in the browser] didn’t do all that much more, but given a choice between client and browser, the people wanted the browser."
And now, you can make the case that given the choice between a mobile web browser and a mobile app, people have chosen the app.
Although his context was for users, I think the same thing applies to developers.