They usually don’t have any way to leverage their models to increase the cost of not buying their product or service though; so such a situation is still missing at least one criterion.
Modern social networks and messaging networks would seem to be a strong counterexample. Any software with both network effects and intentional lock-in mechanisms, really.
And honestly, calling such products a blend of extortion and trade seems intuitively about right.
To try to get at the extortion / trade distinction a bit better:
Schelling gives us definitions of promises and threats, and also observes there are things that are a blend of the two. The blend is actually fairly common! I expect there’s something analogous with extortion and trade: you can probably come up with pure examples of both, but in practice a lot of examples will be a blend. And a lot of the ‘things we want to allow’ will look like ‘mostly trade with a dash of extortion’ or ‘mostly trade but both sides also seem to be doing some extortion’.
Modern social networks and messaging networks would seem to be a strong counterexample. Any software with both network effects and intentional lock-in mechanisms, really.
And honestly, calling such products a blend of extortion and trade seems intuitively about right.
To try to get at the extortion / trade distinction a bit better:
Schelling gives us definitions of promises and threats, and also observes there are things that are a blend of the two. The blend is actually fairly common! I expect there’s something analogous with extortion and trade: you can probably come up with pure examples of both, but in practice a lot of examples will be a blend. And a lot of the ‘things we want to allow’ will look like ‘mostly trade with a dash of extortion’ or ‘mostly trade but both sides also seem to be doing some extortion’.
The cost of not buying is not the same thing as the cost of switching.