Setup a different system, and other motivations will drive their innovation, right?
Unless your claim is that innovation can only EVER be driven by profit?
1. Observed value drives innovation.
2. Profit / profit-motive is one of the most straightforward / most efficient means we have to observe value.
1. Human [curiosity, desire, necessity] drives innovation.
2. Profit mandate suppresses most of those innovations by promoting the few money making ideas (however beneficial or harmful they may be).
Sure it does. Developing a cure for 100 people will generated far less profits than a cure for 100,000 people.
It's why you see cars get better every year and constant attempts to appeal to the widest customer base possible. (That didn't happen with Soviet built cars, which tended to never improve.)
As for advertising platforms, the customers are the advertisers.
But in the first paragraph, the side effect is that developing a not-quite-cure treatment for 50,000 people is more profitable than both the others.
As for the last paragraph, this is perhaps the essence of the problem. The motive is profit, so we only care about the advertisers. But the users are real people too, and they are getting screwed.
Until someone else develops a cure and takes all your business away.
Recall that a company blinded by greed developed a cure for Hepatitis C, not a treatment.
Socialist funded research is driven by politics, not maximizing the benefit to the maximum number of people.
Note that a lot of university research is funded by corporations.
I await your list of medical advances from the USSR.