Comment by yndoendo

A solution to the problem was developed in the late 90s / early 2000.

Games allowed for personally hosted servers and the ability to connect to them. This is how original Call of Duty, Counter Strike, Quake III, Doom 3, Enemy Territory, and more worked. A person did not have to create a user account with the company that produced the title.

Modern day games require an user account for their services and you are only allowed to connect to their servers without being able to self-host.

Self-hosting was very beneficial during dial up days because the local ISP could run the server to reduce connection latency.

Games like Battlefield Bad Company 2 is a great example of how bad it has become.