> The best anyone can hope for is a free market, with everything properly priced. But for decades, the American market has not been free. It’s used purposefully added friction to exploit a time asymmetry between the business and you. And due to things like call centers, this has been very profitable for the businesses.
I just think this analysis is wrong from the start. The "proper" pricing structure, the one tracking the actual costs involved, would be that you don't get to talk to a human being at all unless you pay for their time. Human frictions are what allow no-charge customer support to exist.
you do pay for their time, when you (or someone else) buys the company's products. but customer support exists because it makes the company money, so really they should be paying you
Again, while this is a popular and widely desired price structure, it works only because the annoying customers who generate bad customer support tickets are constrained by human friction. If Bonzo who doesn't know what he's doing starts generating 10 pages a day of plausible LLM slop demanding a response, you can't tuck the cost of handling that behind a standard product price. Enterprise-facing businesses will have to be more aggressive about rejecting or overcharging customers who are insufficiently sophisticated; consumer-facing businesses will be pushed towards the Gmail route of just not offering meaningful customer support at all.