Overall great comment, I wanted to highlight the part about "dumping". A huge amount of dumping-equivalent behaviour guess on in the software industry, I sometimes wonder what kind of market we'd see if it were prevented.
It's one of the biggest problems with "sustainable software" if you will. How is honest software supposed to outcompete "free", especially for key "platform" things like email, where "getting platformed" (in the sense your mail delivers) is non-trivial?
things like that really need to cost money, because they cost money to deliver. and "I get it with my ISP" isn't a satisfying answer either.
SMS 2FA is another similar problem. It's basically an identifier token at this point and you have very little choice over it etc. I actually have been denied for credit cards twice (I think, microcenter told me why it usually fails for them and it makes sense) because my phone number is in my parents' name... (I pay them for a line on a family plan as an additional line). It's obviously not the same problem but it's getting at the problem of these "bundled" services having become de-facto identity providers.
Cause it's not adobe making photoshop free, right? It's bundled search, mail, identity provider, as a free service (you don't pay with money).
But there are many many smaller places it happens etc. I don't quite know how to draw the line of "this is a feature that's bundled" vs "this is actually a separate service" but like, in the large picture there are places where it's not really questionable, right?
"Free as in freedom" is obviously on the clear side of the line. I don't quite know how to draw it for everything, because again, you can see ways where "free MS windows" could be exploitative even if it were free. I guess that falls into the "actual damages" sort of regulatory scenario.
I haven't exhaustively developed the concept but yeah, I mean, "dumping" seems obviously problematic in a market-fairness sense.
