Interesting arguments in favour of technology transfer/diffusion that I really needed. However, I wonder if letting greater economies of scale form would accelerate progress overall when those economies of scale are applied to research.
Fundamentally, I think the best companies have a symbiotic (or at least respectful) relationship with their customers and not an adversarial one.
Tech companies that I use and (more importantly) I pay for and I think there is a "respectful" relationship: Google (via Android), Microsoft (via office365), OVH (via servers), Proton (via email). And there are others, but tried to select known ones.
Do I like all that they do? Definitely not. But the services for which I ended up paying are reasonable. I would not like to build my one OS for a mobile, install the 10s applications required in an enterprise or manage my own data center/mail server.
Of course there are some that I find adversarial, but that is more a personal feeling - like Apple which asked X times more in price for minor (in my view) better quality for their devices.
It might help you to consider that pricing in direct proportion to bill of materials means the base model must increase in cost to balance the lost revenue from the higher spec devices. That is, people paying "over the odds" for the larger ssd and so forth subsidise the base model.
There are so many actors out there that collect data (ex: GSM companies, utility companies, CCTV, states, etc.) but nowhere near as much discussions as mobile phones.
Regarding Google, I’m consistently disappointed by the ads they suggests to me. I’d prefer relevant recommendations, but what I get is irrelevant. My favorite example: couple of years ago they kept showing me ads for a household appliance like 6-10 months after I already bought one, even if I had lots of emails regarding the buying process in gmail. I can't think "oh, they are evil masterminds" if they fail at their most basic stuff.
So they can record how many times per day I unlock the phone or open an app or the location if the GPS is on, good luck using that for something useful.
I do have limits to what I think they should collect in bulk (ex: video or audio), but I did not see allegations that they do that so far, and I think sometimes it's healthy anyhow to behave "as if they do it", just in case.
Fundamentally, I think the best companies have a symbiotic (or at least respectful) relationship with their customers and not an adversarial one.