Or think of #BigTech, locking up whole swathes of your life inside their silos, so that changing mobile OSes means abandoning your iMessage contacts; or changing social media platforms means abandoning your friends, or blocking Google surveillance means losing your email address, or breaking up with Amazon means losing all your ebooks and audiobooks:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs
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Businesspeople understand the risks of competition, which is why they seek to extinguish it. The harder it is for your customers to leave - because of a lack of competitors or because of lock-in - the worse you can treat them without risking their departure. This is the core of #enshittification: a company that is neither disciplined by competition nor regulation can abuse its customers and suppliers over long timescales without losing either:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
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