The playbook of many tech giants has been to treat their users like customers while burning through VC funds to obtain a dominant market position, then start treating them like expendable resources once it's time to cash in. I'm not sure how I can exercise my market power to avoid this strategy as I'm unfortunately not privy to the long term business plans of every company I interact with.
> I'm not sure how I can exercise my market power to avoid this strategy
That's easy: don't be misled by "free" services which obviously aren't actually free because they obviously require significant costs to produce. That's how tech giants like Google and Facebook actually got their dominant market positions: not just by using VC funds to build the infrastructure needed, but by deliberately not charging their users for the service and instead going for the ad-supported business model.
In terms of market power, this is (or at least should be) obvious: if you aren't paying for the service, you don't have any market power, and that's not a good position to be in.
