When Your Landlord Controls Your Internet

I really want to talk about something that's happening right now, something most of us haven't fully noticed yet. We're losing control of our network infrastructure, and with it, we're losing something far more fundamental than the ability to port forward or run a home server.

Let me start with a simple question: can you plug in your own router in your apartment?

If you're living in a newer building, especially one built in the last ten years, there's a good chance the answer is no. Or more accurately, yes, but it won't do what you think it will. Your apartment probably came with internet "included" in your rent. There's an access point on the wall that you didn't choose. It connects to an ISP you didn't select. And if you want to add your own router, you're stuck behind their equipment, double-NATed, unable to host anything, unable to configure your network the way you want it.

This isn't by accident. It's their business model.

Apartment buildings, especially modern ones, sign "bulk billing" agreements with internet service providers. The building buys internet for everyone, bundles it into your rent, and you have no choice in the matter. The landlord gets a revenue cut from the ISP. The ISP gets guaranteed customers who can't leave. And you get whatever internet they decided you should have.

Most apartment buildings built in the past ten years now operate this way. The FCC actually banned exclusive agreements between ISPs and landlords back in 2007, but there's a loophole you could drive a data center through. While ISPs can't sign exclusive contracts, landlords can simply refuse to let other providers into the building. They can say you're "free to choose any provider," but only one provider has access to the infrastructure. It's regulatory theater.

The revenue sharing arrangements are straightforward. ISPs give landlords a percentage of the revenue from subscribers in the building, with higher percentages as more tenants sign up. This creates a direct incentive for landlords to block competing providers. They can also mark up the internet cost when bundling it into rent, creating yet another recurring revenue stream from something that used to be a utility you controlled.

When we ask why we're seeing this trend everywhere, the answer is simple: it's profitable for everyone except us.

Let's be concrete about what this means. If you're stuck behind a landlord-controlled network, you can't run a VPN server to securely access your home network while traveling. You can't self-host a website, a Nextcloud instance, or a Plex server that friends can access. You can't segment your network with VLANs to isolate your IoT devices from your computers. You can't run your own DNS filtering with Pi-hole. You can't implement proper firewall rules. You can't use the security tools and configurations you might actually want.

You're not operating a network. You're a subscriber to someone else's network, living in their walled garden, subject to their monitoring, their bandwidth management, their security policies.

And let's talk about privacy for a moment. When you don't control your router, you don't control what's logged, what's monitored, or who has access to your traffic patterns. The managed networking equipment provided by bulk ISP arrangements can collect data about your internet usage. Your landlord's chosen provider, not you, decides what security practices are in place. You have no visibility into what's happening at the network edge.

The cost argument is revealing too. Landlords claim bulk billing saves tenants money through volume discounts, but you're paying whether you use it or not. If you're a light internet user, or if you could get a better deal elsewhere, tough luck. It's bundled into your rent. You're paying for the landlord's revenue share and the ISP's guaranteed profit margin.

Now here's where it gets darker. While all this is happening with internet infrastructure, there's been another trend running in parallel. Private equity firms have been buying up housing stock at an unprecedented rate.

As of 2025, investors bought nearly 27 percent of all homes sold in the first quarter. Private equity firms now own approximately 2.2 million apartment units, representing about 10 percent of all apartments nationwide. But that percentage varies wildly by location. In Georgia and North Carolina, private equity owns one in five apartment units. In metro areas like Atlanta, Denver, Austin, and Charlotte, private equity owns more than 25 percent of the total apartment stock.

The projections are even more stark. Private equity firms are expected to control 40 percent of the U.S. single-family rental market by 2030. These aren't small-time landlords. These are institutional investors with billions in capital, buying up housing at scale and converting it into rental properties.

The majority of private equity-owned apartment units were acquired recently. Sixty-three percent were bought in 2018 or later. Forty-three percent were acquired in 2021 or later. This is accelerating, not slowing down.

What happens when the same institutional investors who own your building also have strong incentives to implement bulk internet agreements? You get consolidation at every layer. The landlord who controls your physical space also controls your network access. And you can't leave, because they own an increasing percentage of available housing.

Think about what we're really talking about here. There's a stack of control being built, layer by layer, and at each layer, our ability to make choices is removed.

At the bottom, you have the physical space itself. You're renting, not owning. You have no equity. You're paying someone else's mortgage, building their wealth, not yours.

One layer up, you have network infrastructure. The building has chosen your ISP through bulk agreements. You can't bring in a competitor because the landlord won't allow it. You don't own the connection.

Another layer up, you have the equipment. The ISP provides a managed access point. It's pre-configured. It's locked down. You can't access the settings that matter. You don't own the router.

And at the top, you're already being pushed toward subscription everything. Software as a Service. Streaming instead of ownership. Cloud storage instead of local drives. You don't own your tools, your media, or your data.

Each layer extracts a recurring payment. Each layer removes your ability to opt out, to configure, to control. This is the economics of the modern rental market taken to its logical conclusion. You will own nothing, and at each layer where you own nothing, someone else collects rent.

We need to talk about the generational aspect of this, because it matters. Homeownership rates for younger generations are dramatically lower than previous generations at the same age. This isn't just because houses are expensive, though they are. It's because housing has been financialized as an asset class. When private equity can buy houses in bulk with cash and outbid individual families, when institutional investors treat housing as a portfolio optimization problem, the game is rigged before you even start playing.

But here's the infrastructure angle that doesn't get discussed enough. If you never own a home, you likely never learn how to configure a network. You never have the opportunity to run ethernet through your walls, to set up a proper home lab, to understand routing and firewalls and VLANs. These become specialist skills instead of baseline knowledge.

An entire generation is growing up in environments where networking is something that just happens in the background, controlled by someone else, invisible and inaccessible. You don't learn to be a network administrator when you're never given a network to administer.

This isn't accidental. When technical literacy decreases, dependency increases. When you don't know how to host your own services, you buy them from someone else. When you don't understand networking, you can't troubleshoot, can't optimize, can't escape the provided solution. The loss of hands-on access means the loss of the knowledge that comes from that access.

The FCC is currently debating new rules about bulk billing. FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel has proposed allowing tenants to opt out of bulk billing arrangements. It sounds reasonable, right? If you don't want the building's internet, you should be able to bring your own.

But the Bulk Broadband Alliance, representing landlord interests, is fighting back. Their argument is straightforward: bulk billing only works if everyone participates. If tenants can opt out, the economics fall apart, and they can't offer the low rates they claim to provide.

What they're really saying is that the business model requires captive customers. It only works if you can't leave.

The whole debate misses the deeper point anyway. Even if you can technically opt out of bulk billing, you still can't bring in a competing ISP if the landlord won't give them access to the building. Even if you can bring in your own service, you're likely still stuck with whatever physical infrastructure the building has installed. The ability to truly control your network requires control over the physical layer, and that's the one thing renters categorically don't have.

There's a word for a system where a small class owns all the productive assets while everyone else pays rent for access to them. Feudalism. The modern version is just more abstract.

In the medieval system, you didn't own land. You worked land owned by someone else and paid them for the privilege. You couldn't leave because all the land was owned by someone in the aristocracy. You were tied to the land, dependent on the landlord for everything.

Now we don't own housing, and increasingly, housing comes bundled with infrastructure we don't control. We don't own the connection. We don't own the equipment. We have no ability to modify, to improve, to escape. We pay rent at every layer. And the ownership of all of it is consolidating into the hands of institutional investors with more capital than we could ever accumulate.

The parallel is nearly perfect. Capital accumulation at the top. Ownership concentration. The productive assets becoming the exclusive domain of a class that doesn't work those assets, just extracts value from them. And the rest of us paying rent for access to the basics of modern life.

Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the 21st Century, warned us about this. When the return on capital exceeds the rate of economic growth, wealth concentrates. The rich get richer not through productive work but through ownership. They own the house, so you pay rent. They own the infrastructure, so you pay for access. They own the platform, so you pay the subscription. And because they own it all, you have nowhere else to go.

I'm not exaggerating when I say we're watching digital sovereignty die in real time. The ability to control your own infrastructure, to make your own technical decisions, to host your own services, these are not small things. They're the foundation of technical independence.

When you can't configure your own network, you can't learn networking. When you can't self-host, you're dependent on platforms that can change terms, raise prices, or disappear entirely. When you don't control your data's path, you can't guarantee your privacy. When you can't inspect your own traffic, you can't secure your own systems.

We're creating a world where technical autonomy becomes a luxury good, available only to those who can afford to own property in locations where they can actually control it. Everyone else gets a managed experience, a walled garden, a curated reality provided by whoever owns the infrastructure.

The FCC might debate bulk billing rules. Private equity might face some scrutiny over housing consolidation. But the trend is clear. Ownership is concentrating. Control is centralizing. And every layer of the stack is becoming something we rent rather than own, something we consume rather than build.

If you're reading this and you're thinking about your ability to run a home server, or configure a VPN, or just understand how your own network works, I have bad news. That window is closing. Not because the technology is going away, but because the access is going away. The infrastructure is being locked down, professionalized, consolidated into the hands of entities that have no interest in your technical literacy or digital independence.

We're not heading toward a dystopian future where we own nothing. We're already there. The question is whether we're going to notice before it's too late to do anything about it.

The router you can't configure in your apartment isn't just an inconvenience. It's a symptom of something much larger, much more systematic, and much more dangerous than most of us have realized. We're losing our digital sovereignty one lease agreement at a time, and we need to start paying attention.