If that happens then people will just switch to the less premium, fully ad supported platform, Android, because the platform have just become commodities.

It might increase profits in the short term but it will hammer the brand.

> It might increase profits in the short term but it will hammer the brand.

Publicly-traded companies fairly consistently follow a particular arc. At first they produce something people like, and thereby become popular. This is often before they go public. Then they grow for a while, until the market becomes saturated. But they're a public company, so they're still expected to grow. And if you can't get more users, the only thing you can do is extract more out of each one.

That's enshitification in a nutshell.

People often suggest things like "consumer protection" regulations, but then you get malicious compliance and regulatory capture. There are only really two things that work:

The first is that the company is still controlled by a founder who actually cares about their reputation. This works pretty well when you can find it, but it tends not to last. Eventually people die or retire.

The second is competition. Not a duopoly where they each point to the other and claim there's an alternative while mirroring every bad act of their partner in crime. Actual competition, where the market share of new companies that have only entered the market in the last 5 years isn't zero. This is why e.g. Costco can be rated higher than Comcast by an amount represented by the difference in altitude between a scenic view at a local park and the depths of hell.

So that's where you want to direct regulatory efforts. Breaking up companies in concentrated markets, repealing regulations that raise barriers to entry or allow incumbents to lock out competitors, etc. Because once a company is beholden to Wall St, the only thing that can keep them honest is real competition.