I think the parent commenter has a pretty straightforward point: the services are "free" in the common sense of the word, meaning you need not directly pay for

I think the parent commenter has a pretty straightforward point: the services are "free" in the common sense of the word, meaning you need not directly pay for them. You can reason about abstract value transfer relationships involving the concept of "free", but the core idea is that people are getting something in return for their money, and most people are observably okay with it. > You pay for them in high prices for good and services. Those companies pay advertising which increase prices plus their tech size profits. I don't think this is falsifiable. It sounds sort of feasible in the abstract, but how can we empirically measure that effect? As it stands, I could just as easily respond that, no, these companies make prices more efficient, because their advertising methodologies are more effective so companies spend less on their platforms than they would for equivalent ad campaigns elsewhere. Then we'd have to figure out how to investigate whether modern companies advertise more due to growth of the market, or because they have to due to catch up with everyone else using the tech advertising platforms. Narrowing down the answer, if there is one, would be nontrivial. Then I could also say that advertising makes tech services cheaper, because Facebook and Google earn more from user data than they would if they forced everyone to pay $20/month. Which of us is right? We can't really say, it's effectively an opinion because, even if technically falsifiable, these claims are far from being empirically demonstrable.