That’s how business works. You aren’t entitled to your customers. Either they come to you, or they go to someone else. Ultimately, it’s their choice.
You say it’s parasitic, but really all it is is customers making a different choice. The whole concept of the status quo is an abstraction. A customer that bought from you yesterday is not “your customer”. She may make a different choice tomorrow.
> As the bread startup grows it does so on the backs of the local bakers who lose direct business because the start up is more convenient.
If you aren’t constantly working to make life easier for your customers and deliver more value, someone else is going to. You can’t just wake up and bake bread the same way for 30 years and expect it to yield you the same amount of revenue it did years earlier. The world is changing and people participating in it need to adapt and grow, or get left behind.
Everyone in a market needs to actively level up or get out of the way of those who are. It’s always day one.
There is a long and consistent history of dirty, dirty incumbent moat defense in telecommunications in the US.
Just look what happened with Uber, with that broadcast TV re-streaming service, with internet radio, with online banking and microlending, and especially with cryptocurrencies, for a few examples. Billions upon billions of opportunity and new wealth creation strangled in the crib. Pretty much wherever there is a big new opportunity, there are new heavy-duty restrictions on what you are allowed to do with this new communications tech.
People don’t give up wealth-creating income streams and associated power in society without a dirty fight.
Try starting an ISP or a telco to see how much of the promise of the future has been robbed from us by government overzealous to protect existing greedy and inefficient businesses.
Even the ones they thought safe to let roam free that wouldn’t affect them, social media, are now in danger of getting the hammer brought down on them because it turns out that anyone being able to talk to anyone is insanely powerful and disruptive, and they’re going to start regulating the kind of communications you are allowed to have there; either directly via public policy, or by veiled threats that cause the resulting winners (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter) to self-censor to be allowed to continue to exist.