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?
With tech it’s about convenience imo. I am privacy-concious, trying to avoid services like google, but a game’s EULA? scrolls to the bottom Accepted. Do Russians mine bitcoins on my machine? Is Unity surveilling me? Who knows.
Then of course these brands put a lot of effort into strengthening consumer loyalty. Make their stores a nice place to be, offer plans especially to minors, so they get used to their products and eco-systems early on. For example Google’s ChromeOS laptops in schools. They are cheap and… well… are cheap.
But overall, I think consumers do not realize what they are buying because many buy impulsively, or simply don’t know or care about the impact of their purchases. And to some degree, who can blame them? Who has the energy to sort through anything in the grocery store and determine which products are produced through slavery, animal cruelty, stealing the local population’s water, aren’t sourced locally etc. Because at that point, there’s probably nothing left.