People don’t even want you to play a video game in private now.
"Gibbons cut in: “They’re illegal. They are not in any way affiliated with Microsoft. Microsoft, for Minecraft, has gotten a lot of criticism because of those community servers not employing the same safety standards that Microsoft does on their Minecraft servers.”
I thought Microsoft itself provided the means for the players to host servers.
They do. As the article says, you can download a .jar file from Minecraft’s official website to host your own server