I wanted to ask for long time this question, Why does this keeps happening?
Apple, Kagi, Vivaldi, news companies and even Google.
I started seeing a good amount of people who stopped caring about consumer rights/freedom and started to think and advocate for companies.
Even in non-brands cases, a lot of people buy the product with the highest price, because they think that it has a higher quality despite the fact that there is no necessary correlation between both.
How do I know that? I know a shop that buy cheap products and sell them with very expensive price tag, to my surprise they are making insane profits.
What is happening?
Unlike one of the main assumptions capitalism is built on – that people always act in their own best interest – people are extremely easy to manipulate. Basically, capitalism is broken (does not actually work on the assumptions it is said to be built on) and there is financial incentive to keep it that way and exploit it. This is what happens when profit is king.
In short: late stage capitalism is what’s happening.