“Price gouging” isn’t a thing in competitive markets (which cars are). It’s like how you’re not “price gouging” when you put your Levittown 3BR house in Palo Alto on sale for $2.5 million. BMW is just charging what they think people are willing to pay.

I agree with you, but that's the language the article used and I make it a point to let other people use the words they want to use to describe what they're trying to describe, unless the use is egregiously wrong or I can make an entertaining argument as to why they should use a different one. A lot of people would consider charging on the basis of "what the market will bear" as price gouging. So I didn't object to that so much.

That said, now that I think about it, BMWs are a luxury good, and charging what the market will bear is clearly fair game when it comes to luxuries. Competitive vs noncompetitive doesn't even need to come into play. So long as commodity automobiles are available at reasonable prices, luxury items available at higher prices are just adding diversity to the marketplace. Nothing wrong here.

So I totally agree with you that the premise of the article is bunk. Debating the philosophy of what journalists cover and why is pretty far out of my scope of knowledge, I'll admit. I think that journalism based on faulty premise is so ubiquitous that trying to fight it is all but pointless, so we need new forms of rigor to judge journalism by these days.

But back to the semantic point of debate, an analogous example in the "definition of colorful terminology shifting over time due to the original no longer being a thing" vein is how the definition of slavery shifted over time from "legitimate economic trade of human beings" to "any instance of forced labor", because the former didn't exist anymore (except in exactly one country in Africa) and slavery is just too poignant and riveting a word to just give up. I tried to fight this particular definitional shift myself until I realized it was pointless. Not everybody treats history with the same care and reverence that I do, and that's probably for the best.

Finally, what I took issue with on this article was net neutrality, not any of the other myriad problems with it, dunno really why. Perhaps it should have been their usage of 'price gouging'. For whatever reason it wasn't. I'd muse about it, but this comment is already far too long as it is.

> I didn't understand the net neutrality dig. Price gouging is price gouging, the practice is far older than the Internet.

Got to keep that net neutrality is bad narrative going.

How is switching from a one-time fee to an annual fee in any way similar to charging extra for a specific website other than that they both involving charging money?

I think the intention is something like:

A service which is free from the creator's perspective (YouTube / CarPlay) will now carry a new fee imposed by the company which delivers the service (ISP / BMW) despite the intention of the creator.

1. It carries a cost before, just the way it's charged had changed 2. It's not free

1. It shouldn't.

2. Other Manufacturers provide it for free.

To the consumer, it is as if Verizon were to start charging extra annual fees to access YouTube content while Comcast, AT&T and every other ISP don't.

Oh, "other manufacturers" you say? So you mean, the market is competitive and I have a choice? That, among the other reasons listed, is why it's nothing like net neutrality. Also, your #1 is an opinion.