Companies are putting moats around their data (or the data they host) because AI needs data to train its models on. It is the same reason Reddit changed their API access.

I’ll even wager 20 imaginary internet coins that Wikipedia will require logins to do any searching within the next year.

Oh man you reminded me of bad init scripts that would prevent you from getting to multi-user login. I hope you remembered your root password so you can get into single user mode!