What's the mechanism by which a private company does e.g. income verification to figure out who gets subsidy or not?

Or would the idea be to only subsidize students and not poor adults?

It would be one thing if we had like a national "verify I'm on SNAP or equivalent API"

Think of Discord. Anyone can create and participate in a discord server. There are no ads. People with money pay for the premium features and perks and that is how the company makes money [1].

Not every product category is amenable to such business models but many are.

[1] To be fair, Discord likely sells user data to advertisers to make additional money.

> structured to extract as much as possible (by law, if they are public).

This is not true and it’s not what fiduciary duty means. Stop repeating it, it’s really dumb.

Companies very frequently do not monetize things that they could under the guise of “building brand recognition” or “establishing a user base”. It’s even as easy as “raising the price will alienate customers we think are important to long term revenue”.

It’s trivial to justify not extracting maximum price and public companies do it all of the time.

Look at Costco’s business model if you want an example

I mean, we could also just direct-pay websites (for example with Brave's Basic Attention Token model).

Imagine a utopian world where you just pay per site visit, and in return all companies selling stuff don't have an inflated advertising budget and free market effects force them to pass the savings on to you, meaning the net cost increase for you is zero. And as a side-effect, quality products float to the top, since you hear of them mostly by word-of-mouth, meaning products compete on value-per-dollar.

Sadly human psychology and economics does not work that way haha. We pay what the market will bear, and increasing sales via a torrent of ads is cheaper than increasing the value-per-dollar ratio of the product.

Companies are not bound by law to extract as much as possible as soon as possible.

Correct. Wall Street will punish them for violating this principle, not the government.

Our only recourse is that we punish them with our wallets, advice and habits and reward good actors.

I'm a firm believer of this but we need more people to join in.

And it already works to some degree.

I've now had a working search engine for almost 3 years.

My last 3 jobs (9 years) haven't forced me to use Windows.

I can chat and organize events without Facebook knowing.

And it is not like the quality has gone down either. My choices have mostly given me better experiences in a number of ways.

Edit:

If more people start

- advocating for better hardware and software,

- canceling subscriptions and memberships when it becomes clear they are reducing value or increasing price,

- building skills both to get independent from their current cloud (so you can move around or at least having a credibile possibility to do so)

- and for individuals to get better jobs

then I think things will change.

For inspiration: at least here in Norway, with several gym memberships, if you cancel they will quickly approach you with good offers, and they can get really good: I got several months free, a friend got offered free months and a sizable gift card.

Bonus: if more people join in this will get picked up by Wall Street and they will begin punishing this nonsense too ;-)

I envy your bubble.

I admit it is a nice one.

My base salary has doubled and I enjoy my work a lot more now that I don't have to accept all kinds of MS shenanigans to play a part in how I work.

Having a working search engine shouldn't be underestimated either: living from 2012 to 2022 knowing that search used to be a solved problem but wasn't anymore was really annoying.

Sorry, what do you mean when you say “punish”? How?

Indirectly by pushing down the stock price. CEO compensation is usually tied to the stock price through options, bonuses, etc.

Directly through activist investors and shareholder groups (which nowadays usually are institutional investors) who vote to change company policies, fire the CEO, or in some cases fire the whole board.

Private companies' interest in what Wall Street thinks is generally not very large.

Which is why GP stated "if they are public." That was the context of my comment.

Ah - fair point!