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The market-based approach wouldn't have these companies rolling back their surveillance, but consumers en masse moving over to paid, privacy-focused alternatives.

I don't actually consider this remotely likely, but the world is getting weirder, so I'm not writing off the highly improbable so easily.

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> The market-based approach wouldn't have these companies rolling back their surveillance, but consumers en masse moving over to paid, privacy-focused alternatives.

I see what you're saying, but you're referring to something like a "market-based solution" to this problem. The one and only market-based outcome is the one we have. This is a case of imperfect information. There's no reason to expect a market-only approach to deliver a desirable outcome when one party has so much more information than the other.

"What has happened is all that could happen" is surely not the best line of argument you have?

There's an excellent example in this very thread on how politics (i.e. democracy) can trump capital.

Read here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26034131