This kind of dispute existed long before IoT. For example, television channels routinely disappear from carriers like cable and satellite providers [1] as contract disputes go on longer and the existing contract expires. The disappearance of a channel is used as a tactic by the channel's owners to entice complaints by the carrier's customers to the carrier, hopefully convincing the carrier that it should try to get the channel back.
The reality of the situation is that many things these days are fundamentally services instead of objects, and services are subjects to Terms of Service, and can often morph into something else or entirely disappear subject to the provider's strategies or whims. Internet-enabled devices merely enable this business model, which can be advantageous (e.g. it's really hard to consume live content without some kind of live content delivery; or, stuff I upload into a particular cloud is stored durably and resiliently with nice uptime SLAs and I can frequently access it from other devices; or, this device actually gets security updates instead of running an ancient 5-year-old kernel vulnerability), but also detrimental to the end-user (e.g. sometimes stuff disappears from Netflix and never comes back; online services that get shut down; DRM services that get shut down such that playback rights can no longer be renewed, etc).
It seems to me that in your comment, Internet-enabled things are standing in for 'captive devices'. A Fire Stick, a Google Home, an Apple TV are tiny outposts of their host companies inside your house, connected through your LAN to their HQ. They're not actually yours in any meaningful sense. You can use them if you wish to take advantage of the services they provide, but those services are ephemeral and may be radically altered or entirely go away at any time, and the giant wall of text that we all click through warns us of that, even if we shrug and use it anyway because it gates features we really want.
> The reality of the situation is that many things these days are fundamentally services instead of objects, and services are subjects to Terms of Service, and can often morph into something else or entirely disappear subject to the provider's strategies or whims.
That, in a nutshell, is the heart of the problem, and it has only become worse as walled gardens proliferate.
This is hardly about devices, though. This is about content.
Also, your laptop is still a device. It just so happens to be more compatible. Google could just as easily pull support for your laptop. It's highly unlikely for YouTube, but not for other services.
Whether you like it or not, if you consume media that you didn't create, this affects you.
The reality of the situation is that many things these days are fundamentally services instead of objects, and services are subjects to Terms of Service, and can often morph into something else or entirely disappear subject to the provider's strategies or whims. Internet-enabled devices merely enable this business model, which can be advantageous (e.g. it's really hard to consume live content without some kind of live content delivery; or, stuff I upload into a particular cloud is stored durably and resiliently with nice uptime SLAs and I can frequently access it from other devices; or, this device actually gets security updates instead of running an ancient 5-year-old kernel vulnerability), but also detrimental to the end-user (e.g. sometimes stuff disappears from Netflix and never comes back; online services that get shut down; DRM services that get shut down such that playback rights can no longer be renewed, etc).
It seems to me that in your comment, Internet-enabled things are standing in for 'captive devices'. A Fire Stick, a Google Home, an Apple TV are tiny outposts of their host companies inside your house, connected through your LAN to their HQ. They're not actually yours in any meaningful sense. You can use them if you wish to take advantage of the services they provide, but those services are ephemeral and may be radically altered or entirely go away at any time, and the giant wall of text that we all click through warns us of that, even if we shrug and use it anyway because it gates features we really want.
[1] https://consumerist.com/tag/blackouts/