Increasingly I see companies which succeed in establishing a monopoly, use their position to worsen their products to make more money.
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Increasingly I see companies which succeed in establishing a monopoly, use their position to worsen their products to make more money.
Take Apple for instance: First they advertised an iPhone for being much more durable because it had a titanium chassis, but then in their latest generation, they reversed to anodized aluminum which easily gets scratches.
Another example is Sony with their new FX5 that reboots constantly.
Is it just me, or are you also seeing many examples of this?
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@randahl It's not just you. In Australia the ABC supported consumer research to determine if labels on processed tomato products were honest. They found some top brands portending to be made with Australian or Italian tomatoes actually contained Chinese tomatoes. Then there was Cadbury ( now part of Mondelez) substituting cocoa butter in chocolate with cheap palm oil fats. After a consumer backlash they changed back. But all are examples of monopolies or oligopolies dumbing down products to cheat consumers.
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@Iveyline @randahl In most industries, we don't have competition anymore.
We either have a monopolist, or up to four massive corporations in an oligopoly.
The past 30 years if neoliberal "free market" ideology has seen competition/antitrust regulations ignored and defanged, self-regulation become a norm, and workers' collective power in unions broken.
Meanwhile, market power has concentrated in fewer hands.
In theory, competition means businesses are competing to provide consumers with better products and services.
In practice, what happens is the oligarchic corporations are in a race to the bottom, enshittifying products and services for profit.
What are you going to do as a consumer? Switch to the other corporation that's enshittified its products and services the same way? -
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