When corporations prioritize digital-first products, where does that leave consumer ownership?

Accessing media—be it books, movies and television, or video games—changed drastically since the dawn of the internet. Where Blockbuster was once the go-to place for movie and video game rentals, bookstores (or libraries) and record stores became places of exploration and discovery. Now these third spaces have been replaced with digital marketplaces such as Apple Music, particularly around the introduction of the iPod; and Netflix, which first reinvented physical movie rentals before changing the landscape altogether through the introduction of online streaming.

Mostly gone are the days when people would gather outside of stores for midnight releases—the gatherings might still happen but are far less common than they were during the early 2000s—as more people opt to shop from the comfort of home. And in some instances, the media people once sought out has become increasingly difficult to find, if it’s available at all. This shift to a digital-first era brings about questions of ownership amid the proliferation of digital-only or expensive subscription-based models.

Sony, for example, is under scrutiny regarding the company’s decision to move away from producing video games and consoles with physical discs in favor of an all-digital format. While there is a reasonable sales metric—physical disc sales account for a small percentage of sales—to support the company’s decision, the rationale doesn’t soothe consumer concerns around digital-only media. Ken Kutaragi, PlayStation’s founder and former Sony chairman, shared in an interview that it makes sense for the company to move away from disc production, but understands the outrage by consumers over the decision. In his words, “Physical discs have become a metaphor for owning games.”

This question of ownership has landed Sony in a class-action lawsuit, which argues the corporation hasn’t made it clear that buyers of digital games do not receive ownership for their purchase. The counterargument from Sony? According to Game File, Sony claims its disclosures for digital purchases are enough so that “reasonable consumers would not be misled” to believe they own these digital games. Of course, the criticism goes deeper, but on the surface it focuses on a lack of clarity around Sony’s terms of digital license disclosures and the language within them.

There is a fragility to digital records that didn’t exist when all was documented in a more physical, tangible manner.

Although the issue of leasing versus owning Sony’s digital games may seem fairly innocuous, there are deeper implications. As more media turn to a digital-only model of distribution, consumers face ongoing challenges both around the questions of ownership and around the issues of historical recordkeeping.

A history of digital erasure

The proliferation of digital-only media creates an easier path toward digital erasure. What is removed is, in most cases, lost to the annals of forgotten history. This loss creates inaccuracies or even manipulation in record-keeping, delegitimizing the historic accounts from the turn of the century on.

According to Pew Research, 38 percent of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible—a significantly higher number than the 8 percent of 2023. This “digital decay,” as this loss of content is called, occurs in a wide variety of online spaces, from government websites to Wikipedia pages. Pew’s investigation of this myriad of digital domains further found that 23 percent of news webpages and 21 percent of government websites contain at least one broken link. When it comes to Wikipedia pages with “references,” 54 percent contain at least one broken link to pages that no longer exist. As for social media, one in five tweets are no longer visible on X (formerly Twitter for the bulk of this analysis), with 60 percent of these accounts made private, suspended, or deleted entirely, while the remaining 40 percent are comprised of deleted tweets.

Although the event of each disappearance is different (webpages removed due to a buyout or closure of a host site versus a tweet deleted due to user decision or suspension), they all play into the malleability of history in the digital age. There is a fragility to digital records that didn’t exist when all was documented in a more physical, tangible manner. Those skeptical about this problem can look at the Donald Trump administration’s current efforts to take down or alter hundreds of federal datasets, as reported by The Guardian.

When the news outlet questioned Denice Ross, former US chief data scientist under the Joe Biden administration and co-founder of dataindex.us, he said, “We’re at a very vulnerable point as a nation. We’re facing a future where we are not going to have the information that we need to make decisions that will save lives and benefit American communities.”

This is the ongoing struggle with our twenty-first century recordkeeping: How do people accurately keep records when those records can be rendered useless at virtually any point? This is not a new worry. In “Will Digital Era Mean End of History?,” a brief article by ABC News published back in 2001, a centuries-old Buddhist sect in Kyoto, Japan, was already concerned with information fading from history “like the ghosts of so many failed dot-coms.” The Buddhist group acknowledged the inevitable change from paper record-keeping to electronic devices, although it was not without worries of humankind losing important historical context to digital decay.

Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit group trying to preserve a record of the Internet, told the article’s author, “If the last century was built on the exploitation of oil…this next century is all about intellectual property and knowledge, and right now we are mishandling the most important resource the world has.”

While paper records are secured and periodically checked for signs of decay, the preservation of digital media is a more involved process, requiring conversion from old storage media to new ones (think floppy disks that hold very little data to portable external hard drives that can hold a massive amount of data).

This is in part why Kahle founded the Internet Archive in the first place: To have some kind of permanence in the digital (internet) age. In a recent op-ed for The Atlantic, Kahle spoke to the goal of providing this to future readers: “The idea was simple but urgent: If the internet was going to become humanity’s principal publishing platform, then it needed what every great publishing system that came before it had needed. It needed a library.”

And yet, a growing number of news organizations blocked the Internet Archive’s ability to preserve articles. Nieman Lab identified that over 340 news outlets are limiting the Internet Archives access “due to concerns that AI companies might scrape the nonprofit’s repositories for training data.” To Kahle, this is not the appropriate solution to this particular problem and will only serve to “prevent historians, researchers, courts, ordinary readers—and most ironic, journalists themselves—from consulting an accurate record of what once appeared on the web.”

Kahle went on to cite an analogy offered up by Joe Mullin, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit defending civil liberties in the digital age: “Imagine a newspaper announcing its physical libraries will no longer be permitted to preserve copies of its past issues. This is effectively what is happening now.”

Digital ownership and economic mobility

The lack of preservation—digital but also physical—introduces another conundrum into the mix, one that stems from the digital-only, subscription-based models that are ubiquitous anymore: Without ownership, economic issues also arise.

Before the rise of the digital age, there was a time when consumers relied on second-hand stories for aspects of pop culture: films, television series, video games, and so on. Nowadays, that is no longer an option, which places a new stress on individuals who want to participate in pop culture but are locked out due to poverty or other economic challenges.

In a listen mailbag episode, hosts of the podcast Triple Click asked readers to share with them the economic challenges they face purchasing consoles and video games. One listener shared their observation about how wage stagnation has limited their ability to purchase newer games, opting to wait for sales that happen on many of the digital-only platforms, such as Steam. Another listener, Mikey from Mexico, wrote in to share how they’ve been priced out of owning newer consoles and games due to the extreme cost, and often seek out second-hand media, which is becoming more difficult to engage in due to the shift away from physical media.

When Disney+ raises the price and removes movies or television shows, subscribers have no agency or way to advocate for themselves (or others) in getting what they paid for.

Consider the curious case of the much-anticipated Grand Theft Auto VI. Rockstar Games is offering a physical edition of the game, with the caveat that it doesn’t include a physical disc. Instead, for the standard edition at $79.99 the consumer will receive a box that contains a download code, nothing more. This fundamentally increases the overall cost of the game since anyone interested will need high-speed internet to play the single-player only game. Without a physical disc, this drops the resale value to $0, while also limiting ownership.

Back in 2024, the blackbox Lab at the Harvard Business School AI Institute hosted a panel on the topic of ownership, rights, and governance in the digital era. During the session, one of the panelists, Nien-hê Hsieh, the Kim B. Clark professor of business administration, discussed the Ownership Project, which investigates ownership as a key element in the economy that can address societal issues and support human values. When speaking of the work done, Hsieh argued that ownership is “foundational to achieving inclusivity and fairness, as it determines who can benefit from economic activities.”

The idea here is that the concept of ownership is restructured, moved from a byproduct of the economy to a central tenet of broader social values to promote wellbeing in economic activity. The potential of protected rights and more agency could be offered to consumers if society moved away from subscription-based models, which limit accessibility through time constraints (either by tiered systems of use with caps or by revoking access altogether if the product subscribed to is taken down), and toward a system akin to what physical assets offer (ownership that is maintained indefinitely and can be transferred at the owners discretion).

In other words, ownership allows consumers to have more economic control (through resale or transferring ownership). When Disney+, for example, raises the price and removes movies or television shows, subscribers have no agency or way to advocate for themselves (or others) in getting what they paid for.

This also kicks open the door for corporations to do what they’d like on the consumer’s dime, with little to no implications—especially if Sony’s case is any indication. This malpractice has come to be known as “enshittification,” as coined by Cory Doctorow, who defined it as “a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a ‘two-sided market,’ where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.”

In short, platforms mediate products that are purposefully made worst, at the exploitation of the consumer. If we consider Doctorow’s idea of enshittification together with Hsieh’s ideals of ownership, within the context of the subscription-based model of consumerism, nearly every aspect of media acts as a platform, as Doctorow puts it, “between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other.” Of course, there are outliers of bad behavior, but in time, platforms begin to “abuse” users for profit until they fizzle out one way or the other.

Looking at the video game industry, where most of this debate is currently ongoing, exploitation of consumers for corporate growth is glaring. Look no further than Microsoft’s XBOX, which has undergone multiple rounds of layoffs since July 2026 and then filed a patent for an “ad-credit” system. This system would introduce ads into video games but offer players ad-free playtime at the expense of “credit.” It is unclear whether this will be implemented within XBOX’s Game Pass subscription, which allows for what is akin to digitally renting a game and playing via cloud, or if ads will also make their way into games people pay up to $100, in some cases, to “own” digital versions of the game. (But as it’s been stated by Sony executives, consumers should know better than to believe they own a digital version of a product they paid money for.)

Advocacy and organizing for digital rights

Amid the ongoing digital ownership issue, is there anything that digital rights advocacy groups or politicians can do in response to this shift and allow for more fair, equitable practices? Unsurprisingly, there is.

The EFF published an article following Sony’s decision to kill physical game discs arguing that the move is yet another in a long series to diminish the “right to access and engage with culture digitally,” citing similar playbooks deployed by television and music streaming services. The authors took it a step further, stating that the move becomes an economic issue since online streaming, particularly of video games, requires high-speed internet, which costs more but isn’t readily available in more rural areas of the country. Those downloaded games also require outsized storage for what the base consoles might have available, a nonissue for physical disc drives.

While the authors outline other issues with Sony’s decision, they suggest that “policymakers can and should work to restore our ownership rights for the digital age” to curb the practices that damage consumers. To this end, Rep. Ritchie Torres (NY-15) announced on October 15, 2026, that he will introduce the Power To The Players Act. Citing how digital games are often sold as “revocable licenses rather than owned outright,” Torres’ bill “would direct the Federal Trade Commission to establish regulations protecting consumers’ ability to own and play the video games they purchase.”

The bill would require that buying a video game gives ownership and would require any game with online modes to also provide an equal offline mode before the servers’ support for the online game are shutdown. The goal also is to preserve the “consumers’ ability to own and resell their games,” narrowing the economic burden of digital-only products.

As more media turns to a digital-only model of distribution, the challenges consumers face in historical recordkeeping and questions of ownership may seem like separate issues. But they are intersectional—both rooted in the same problem and requiring dynamic solutions.

“When you pay for a game, you should own it,” said Rep. Torres. “Consumers must have the right to own, the right to play, and the right to transfer the games they buy. A game that can be taken away the moment a company pulls the plug is not a purchase. It is a rental disguised as a sale.”

EFF has also demanded more meaningful consumer protections, such as California’s AB 1921—a bill that the gaming industry, as the authors point out, have attempted to kill—and reform Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

“If you bought it, you should own it,” the authors write, “and EFF will continue working to mitigate some of the worst harms of the DMCA 1201, defending modders, and fighting deceptive licensing that makes culture less free.”

As more media turns to a digital-only model of distribution, the challenges consumers face in historical recordkeeping and questions of ownership may seem like separate issues. But they are intersectional—both rooted in the same problem and requiring dynamic solutions. Without ownership—be it physical or irrevocable digital access—records of the past can become lost or overwritten, unable to be recovered. When physical media is lost, traces of it are left behind. This is not the case for digital files that are merely leased to consumers, be it video games, movies, or ebooks.

The nonprofit sector, and philanthropy specifically, should consider supporting the efforts of the Internet Archive and the EFF, while activists should advocate for digital ownership and consumer rights by pursuing legislation like Torres’ bill and AB 1921. Physical discs might be a metaphor, but ownership is ownership. In our all-digital world, it must be treated as the physical discs of a bygone era: maintained indefinitely and transferable at the owner’s discretion.