It's artificial scarcity, which to me is immoral, but it is what it is.
In your example, you have the choice not to buy the license. In the case of Protonmail, they already have your emails, and are already serving them to you, so holding your correspondence hostage if you want to export it all in one go is a bit of a dick move.
that's obviously a strawman. What's being critized is the heroin-dealer model of doing business, i.e. "the first dose is free" but you'll be locked in, which seems increasingly popular among a lot of services that try to compete with the big players.
no because the comparison is in the mechanism of luring in customers, not the substance or the price. We can go with any commodity you feel comfortable with if that improves the analogy for you
Exporting an XML file from a database of already existing emails is very likely a query that takes milliseconds to run automatically.
If it's true they require you pay to export emails it sounds like borderline extortion.
Then buying any digital good or licence is extortion. After all it’s just an INSERT query! They could just do it for free, yet they refuse to…
It's artificial scarcity, which to me is immoral, but it is what it is.
In your example, you have the choice not to buy the license. In the case of Protonmail, they already have your emails, and are already serving them to you, so holding your correspondence hostage if you want to export it all in one go is a bit of a dick move.
Is that why a Google Takeout of your Gmail takes 24 hours to complete?
that's obviously a strawman. What's being critized is the heroin-dealer model of doing business, i.e. "the first dose is free" but you'll be locked in, which seems increasingly popular among a lot of services that try to compete with the big players.
Wouldn't comparing paying a few dollars to leave a service forever to a "heroin dealer" be the strawman here?
no because the comparison is in the mechanism of luring in customers, not the substance or the price. We can go with any commodity you feel comfortable with if that improves the analogy for you