…is over.
I think this is a good thing. A lot of people hate a la carte pricing, but when you bundle things, there are no signals as to what the real demand for various goods and services are. Also, I don’t like subsidizing other people for stuff that I don’t need.
This is just a normal long term cycle in marketing. As firms eliminate competition and become less efficient they focus on gleaming more profits from existing customers, especially if you are able to lock them in. It goes on a while, until a new general of entrepreneurial spirited managers come along who see opportunities for cutting waste and making firms more efficient. Then they use these increased efficiencies to offer new free stuff and so undercut their competition. That is just how markets work in the long run.
As long as “FREE!!” has marketing power, it will return in one guise or another. And what you see as a bug (“subsidizing other people for stuff that I don’t need”) is seen as a feature by the people selling you the extra stuff.
As firms eliminate competition
For once Thomas, you nailed it. Free enterprise requires free competition to work. We are strangling off such competition with an end result that will not be good for us at all. Not good being defined as beyond your imagination not good.