Asklemmy

Except when the vast majority of people will not "walk away" when they're shafted like this in the UK, shafting your costumers just keeps on working way beyond the next quarter. They only stop if a competitor pops up that doesn't shaft costumers and gets a significant market share from doing it, and only long enough to see away the threat or for said competitor, once established, starting to shaft costumers.

As the UK has a hugelly incestuous relation between top politicians and large companies and an anti-Corruption system designed not to work at all (lets just say the only Judicial entity allowed to investigate it in the whole country, has less budget that the smallest of city halls) there are tons of markets with high barriers to entry due to artificial "licensing" restrictions and the local Regulators are the weakest, most passive and even most often captured in all of Europe, so no politically connected company (or just large) will ever be made to stop such practices by regulators, hence it's up to consumers to force them to.

In over a decade in the UK, what I saw over the years was that kind of practice by companies not improving, and in some cases becoming worse, and people just kept on taking it and not walking away, with at best a passive agressive response

On the consumer side, you can see the behaviour I describe in how the previous poster responded to it: he/she went through the effort of jumping through hops to keep a subscription to pay TV, hardly something necessary in this day and age of Digital Over The Air TV with tons of channels and online streaming services and that's actually in the higher range of assertiveness when it comes to UK consumers, IMHO - most people just passivelly accept almost any crap from dominant companies.

IMHO it's both a consumer culture and a politicial problem, but even in an environment were the authorities couldn't care less, consumer behaviour could go a long way to change things at least in domains were it is a reasonable option to "do without" (so not things like internet connectivity or housing, but most definitelly something like Pay TV), only there is way too much passive acceptance of what would in my experience in The Netherlands, be seen as outrageous unnacceptable shit.