The US used to heavily punish that sort of behaviour, but in this case it took EU action to reign in a US company
FWIW in this case it was Chinese action - China is requiring all phones sold domestically to support RCS. The EU DMA would have forced Apple to open up access to iMessage, not implement RCS, but they found that in the EU, iMessage market share is too small for the DMA to kick in (probably due to the overwhelming popularity of WhatsApp).
To be fair, a LOT of people swear by Popcorn Time, which is exactly that. I was surprised it worked as well as it does, too.
Microsoft's thing takes a screenshot of everything on your screen and saves and indexes it. Opened up your password manager and revealed a password? Saved. Opened a porn site in a private tab in any browser aside from Edge? Saved. Opened up a private encrypted chat to try to get away from your abusive partner/parents? Saved and indexed. Logged into a portal at work showing HIPAA information? Saved and indexed.
Apple's thing is basically a better search feature of all the data you already have saved, that apps have already opted-in to sharing. It runs on device, and Apple has promised they do not send the data back to train the models. They also have some generic ChatGPT-like tool to help rewrite your documents, but that's 100% opt-in so nobody really cares about it, it's easy to just not use.
Tim Cook even famously responded to a right-wing troll during a shareholder meeting asking Apple to commit to only doing profitable things and dropping stuff like making their production climate neutral with "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don't consider the bloody ROI.” “If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock.” and somehow he's still around
edit: it really pissed them off too haha https://nationalcenter.org/ncppr/2014/02/28/tim-cook-to-apple-investors-drop-dead/
Some places are basically cashless already though, look at Sweden
How about what the viewers want
As long as the viewers refuse to pay for content, they get what the customers (the advertisers) want.
YouTube Premium actually pays out to "demonetized" channels. What people call "demonetized" is actually called "limited ads".
It's not that they got DDoSed, it's that unregulated off-shore gambling is illegal in many countries, so their IP addresses were getting blocked in these countries. The way CDNs like CloudFlare work is that many customers share the IP addresses, so they were getting other CloudFlare customers blocked as well.
CF wanted them to move to a "bring your own IP" plan so that their IP blocks wouldn't affect other customers, and that came with the steep price tag.
A bunch of carriers implemented it originally, but their implementations were all horribly broken, with messages between carriers usually not working, the carrier-installed messaging apps sucking, etc. Eventually they all dropped it and Google picked up the ashes and "fixed it" by making their server the only one instead of having per-carrier servers like SMS/MMS.