Their sales won't tank, because this will start to get rolled out across the industry. They might take a hit for being the first mover, but once this is normalized they will ride the same gravy train as everyone else.
This is classic industrial organization economics. These companies know that they are all in tacit collusion agreements with each other. It's not hard to set up "repeated prisoner's dilemma"-type games where collusion is the dominant strategy.
Basically, as long as companies know that it's in their long-term best interest to all do the same thing, then they will all do the same thing, even if it might yield some extra profit in the short term to deviate.
The only way to stop this garbage is to make it so bad for companies to engage in this behavior that the costs outweigh the benefits. Given the above situation, where the supply of alternative goods is likely to dry up, the only other forms of recourse are punitive court damages or prohibitive policy/law from a suitably powerful government.
that's certainly possible, but I don't think it's an inevitability. For example, Samsung tried the exact same thing in the mobile space, despite holding a much more dominant position in the market than Vizio in TV's. But the rest of the competition didn't follow suit. Even amongst billion dollar coporations, a prisoner dilemma still has that allure to suddenly have one "defector" (or more) turn around and suddenly proclaim "hey we aren't doing X bad thing!". Technical details may go over consumer's heads more of the time, but ads is a near universal experience in a first world country. Marketing something as "we don't have ads" would be understood quickly.
But maybe it's just my cynicism of the modern court system that makes the suing solution sound like a waste of an individual's time and money, only to end up with nil in terms of industry impact. If that user is a very outspoken millionaire ready to fight, I welcome it. But I'm unsure if that sort of user is around these parts making comments dreaming of such opportunities.
This is classic industrial organization economics. These companies know that they are all in tacit collusion agreements with each other. It's not hard to set up "repeated prisoner's dilemma"-type games where collusion is the dominant strategy.
Basically, as long as companies know that it's in their long-term best interest to all do the same thing, then they will all do the same thing, even if it might yield some extra profit in the short term to deviate.
The only way to stop this garbage is to make it so bad for companies to engage in this behavior that the costs outweigh the benefits. Given the above situation, where the supply of alternative goods is likely to dry up, the only other forms of recourse are punitive court damages or prohibitive policy/law from a suitably powerful government.