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Well, he seemed to be saying the prices are made artificially low (ex: free) because of VC's subsidizing the businesses.

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Sure, but since technological innovation tends to decrease prices, calling a price "artificially low" is the same thing as calling it a future price.

When GMail launched, it offered artificially large amounts of free storage, in the sense that they couldn't support many users at that size. That's why they had to start with invites. But they knew that disk would keep getting cheaper, so they just gave people a number that would make sense in the future.

A very large percentage of sites/products start off free and without ads but then start requiring subscriptions, reduce the value of their service and cram it with advertising once they get big. In these numerous cases, "future price" would not equal lower. Certainly, technology drives prices down but technology is not the only factor that affects pricing. Unless you mean very long term? But in very long term, everything is just going to go to zero so that frame of reference is not very useful.

I agree that this elimination of competition is bad for the consumers, bad for innovation, and bad for those more capable companies that didn't get the huge funding. It's just making the rich richer.

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