Yeh. Never truely completely captive, but the potential shaftings they give us are hard to take. Full on denial can set in, I’ve noticed with some I know, the more we have invested into the given shittersphere. Understandable and sad. We are also talking about a relatively niche area here unfortunately. Obviously for the likes of google, amazon et al., we aren't the customer. Our relative loyalty to their walled shitterspheres are unlikely even a metric to them other than as ad / clicks/ conversion, as they'll just replace this week’s initiative with a shinier (to the masses) gadget next week. I really hope that whole industry’s days are numbered, but unfortunately all of it is a feature of consumer capitalism and not a bug. Competition, regulation , and DIY are our only defences. The fact that to varying degrees these big tech players are in control of information itself ( to anyone silly enough to consider using the yellowpages/google a fair and factual info source ) , helps them no end with whatever strategy they're onto this week.

Regarding not getting what you pay for. Ive often thought that having to pay the nominal cost price for say the firestick is merely to obfiscate what it really is. ”They should pay me for embedding this spy stick in my house” is the natural feeling, so paying some arbitrary amount to ‘purchase’ immediately elicits some sort of entitlement ( which should totally be the case ! ) in the consumer. The psychology behind such corporate behaviour is fascinating but it’s probably as much to do with regulation, ironically.