I think it betrays cynicism about the tendency for single-objective optimizing market actors to rent-seek and cartelize. I don't think it's a stretch at all. On the surface it would be equally preposterous to suggest that breathing could be theoretically revoked by the government, which truly is preposterous but we do have those laws in place depending on whether the air you breathe has "illegal substances" in it. But then again, explicit revocation is a high bar when you can throttle the free use of computational resources by regulatory capture: the AI incumbents could say, for example, that AI is so dangerous that it must be kept out of the hands of the unwashed masses. Another excellent strategy (with a rather high bar to entry) would be to distort the markets themselves by ensuring that your prospective renters can't afford basic compute.