I think theres two aspects to it

• social licensing - e.g. Google tries and gets away with X, so the others now perceive they're less likely to receive excessive pushback and are emboldened to go for it. This is why I feel there needs to be a pervasive and continuous push towards consumer rights - smaller cases can snowball quickly in the wrong direction, never so in the reverse.
• share price driven margin pressure, a figurative ideal business that balanced perfectly its price/margins/costs against consumer demands/buying power would still be pushed to make graph go up and right - the usual enshittification argument.

The first feeds into the second, once your competitor moves against consumer interests, C suites are/perceive they are then under pressure to match peers, else fall behind.

Screwing over customers is baked into Capitalism, even more so with the current scale and concentration of a handful of business operating in a weak regulatory environment.