This isn’t new but it’s becoming more common.

A couple of years ago, there was an incident with Amazon, who deleted every buyer’s copy of 1984 and Animal House because of a dispute over “right to distribute” in the US. (The lawsuit was later settled.) This called into question whether “purchased” digital properties were actually “owned”. After that, I decided I would buy all the books I cared about in paper. (There are still “right to distribute” issues, but they can be worked around by having a friend in another country buy it.)

This is also the case with music. Before digital downloading, there were “import record stores” which basically dealt in music that was not allowed to be distributed in that country. So someone would fly to the UK or Europe, buy a bunch of inventory, then go back to the US and add it to their collection for the discerning buyer. Now, due to DRM on digital properties, listeners in countries without distribution rights are unable to do the equivalent of visit the local record store — basically, locked into whatever pap is available to you. One could get around it by buying physical CDs while in another country, if that’s even an option, but my convertible tablet can’t even power an external CD drive now. I found that I just stopped “buying” music and listen to my existing thousands of songs more often. (At some point, when I want to freshen my collection, I hope there will be a better scheme on the horizon. Until then, my trust level is still too low to engage.)

And don’t get me started about apps. Moving countries has made me curse app stores on both sides of the Apple-Android fence. (Hint: Multiple devices, accounts, and settings for everything.)

So to your point, yes, this is a concern. (I imagine we will see a day where the kids run to their parents’ homes during a bricking crisis because mom and dad never bought into the crazy notion of the IoT and their houses still work.) Call me crazy, but when I “buy” something, my expectation is different than what is happening with the Revolv. A cautionary tale worth reading.