Most of your premises in a numbered list are quite inaccurate from a business POV but this one is definitively wrong: "Free customers are far more valuable than

Most of your premises in a numbered list are quite inaccurate from a business POV but this one is definitively wrong: "Free customers are far more valuable than captive ones". Captive customers aka vendor lock-in aka high switching costs is a very significant factor of a long term company valuation/capitalization. Absolute majority of companies would prefer totally locked-in customers if such lock-in doesn't hurt customer acquisition.