I didn't mean it was a streaming service, as you said it is a distribution service which is implemented via a freely available distributed process.

I've never used it because I don't watch videos much.

The meme is a little bit exaggerated. However, like ink as a service, companies do try to exploit consumers.

Here in the US, even the owners of small farms and homesteads owned their own land.

You could argue, however, that the land they owned was stolen from Native Americans. In any case, it wasn't rented.

Yeah, i'm not sure what the situation was in past centuries. In Europe I think land was owned by the wealthy and rented out. But products were owned. Now large farm equipment is only partly owned, but most stuff is owned. There is a big issue about right to repair, so there's that. Recently software has partly shifted to subscription service to pay for constant updates.

If people look at their monthly bills, most things are owned. But i can imagine some people have lots of subscriptions to things. So, someone would have to clarify what this meme is trying to say.

Oh, AI services seem to be going the rental route. However, things like this tries to get around that:

The free AI already on your Mac.
https://apfel.franzai.com/

apfel - Your Mac Already Has AI

Your Mac already has AI. Apple ships a language model with macOS -apfel unlocks it with one brew install. No downloads, no API keys, no config. The fastest path to local AI.

^apfel