Open source image generators already exist and have been widely disseminated worldwide.
So all you'd end up doing is putting up a roadblock for legitimate uses. Anybody using it to cause harm will not be seriously impeded. They can just pick up the software from a Russian/Chinese/EU host or less official distribution methods.
It would be as effective as the US trying to outlaw the exporting of strong encryption standards in the 90s. That is to say, completely ineffective and actually harmful. Enemies of the US were still using strong encryption anyway.
Is Lemmy using a predatory algorithm designed to enrich itself at the expense of the well being of its users and utilize its platform to influence US policy against its own interests?
Yep! The security guard is also given a bunch of rules to follow such as "don't let anyone outside of our neighbourhood (aka your local network) contact door 22", which will also determine whether messages get delivered or not
Imagine your computer is a big block of flats and your applications are all people who live in the building.
Mail sent to the building address alone isn't going to reach the intended recipient, because the postman doesn't know what flat to post it to. So they need additional information such as 'Flat 2C'
That's the basic concept of ports. It's basically additional addressing information to allow your computer to direct internet traffic to the correct applications.
When an application is actively listening on a port, it means that they are keeping an eye out for messages addressed to them, as designated by the port number. While an application is sending or receiving messages using a given port number, that port number is considered 'open'.
Now, all sorts of applications do all sorts of things. Some are for the public to use and there are some that are useful within trusted circles, but can be abused by malicious people if anyone in the world can send messages to it. Thus, we have a firewall, which acts as a gatekeeper. A firewall can 'block' a port, denying access to a given group of people, or 'unblock' it, allowing access.
VPNs are a totally different thing. They are literally middlemen for your internet traffic. Instead of directly posting a message to somewhere and receiving a direct reply back, imagine you flew out to Italy to use a post box there and receive replies from there.
In the long term it might have a bad effect on the market, as it further helps to cement Microsoft’s control over multimedia APIs, since game developers now have little incentive now to target anything other than DirectX…
However, there are others that would argue that Microsoft's control over multimedia APIs was fully cemented since decades ago, and developers have never had much incentive to target anything other than DX since then.
Back in 2014, Valve tried to bring Linux gaming to the spotlight by offering solid and targetable APIs for developers to port their games. This approach failed hard, and most games had serious deficiencies because most publishers would rather stick a half-assed DX wrapper (like DXVK only infinitely worse) than actually do the work for a proper port.
So, with only a handful of games and what did appear was usually worse than on Windows, releases stopped coming after a year or so.
Because that's an opinion question. Very different to 'what is inflation?'