Comment by toss1

Externally subsidized predatory pricing is the opposite of a free market — precisely because it sells things at below market rates.

Free markets are where players compete on quality, efficiency, and supply. Prices are a result of cost and supply and provide real information on these factors. Competition for customers selects the most effective and efficient producer.

Sustained efforts of selling at a loss to gain market share is the exact opposite. The entire purpose is to corrupt the free market by sending false price signals which SUPPRESS free market competition and push market share to whoever can burn the most capital (whilst providing an actual service/product), not whoever is most efficient or highest quality or lowest actual price provider.

Uber and AirBnB are better examples of your "selling at a loss to gain market share", where they burned capital to undercut prices for close to a decade on falsely low pricing to destroy incumbents.

Spending on R&D while developing expensive technology is different and arguably very much a part of a free market, and is not what I was talking about.

Spending capital to steal your competitors' technology, and then spending more of it to make it available at below-market rates, is absolutely not a free-market activity.

Just because it is not stopped by someone enforcing a free market, does not make it a free market.