Corps figured out sustained income was better than marketing and making products. All they had to do was take away every digital product and turn it into a subscription.
Then they’ll buy each other up until they are an effective monopoly and raise prices forever.
I don’t see a way out of this for products already captured if you need them.
Problem is, they should realise this only creates a gap for a competitor or even worse (from the companies’ perspective) a viable open source project that they’ll never be able to compete on price with.
Their solution is to buy them in most cases. It’s gets hard to turn down $100M.
Remember the “Cable Wars” of yore (the 90’s)? Guess who’s back… back again?