That's still a race to the bottom if the price isn't going up.
I don't want to be a doomer and have have surely unknowingly misused terms as well, but its definitely noticable how these originally clearly defined terms are getting used in entirely new ways.
And it's not just with technical terms like this, it also applies to originally obvious terms such as racism, sexism etc which have lost their original meaning entirely
For example, the word "term" comes from the original latin "terminus" that means "end" or "boundary". It only got the meaning you used it for centuries after it was first used in English. See: https://www.etymonline.com/word/term
I was just pondering that our originally clearly defined terms are rapidly getting used in very confusing manner, which increases the difficulty of a discussion, as participants interpret words very differently.
I dont think that people look up the actual definition of terms in a thesaurus anymore. They hear it in some context and create their own personal definition. It wasn't as obvious before the internet i think, but nowadays everyone is bombarded with technical terms all the time, which likely contributes massively to this increasingly fluid terminology
The race to the bottom refers to a competitive situation where a company, state, or nation attempts to undercut the competition's prices by sacrificing quality standards or worker safety (often defying regulation), or reducing labor costs.
This appears to the the exact opposite, a race to provide more services and more features for a lower price, based on optimising and/or lower profit margins. AKA Capitalism actually working for a change.