This person should watch The Gate of Heavenly Peace, and honestly a lot of Hexbears probably need to see it too.
It's not that the documentary is "correct" in everything that it says, but it's thorough at over 3 hours long, and had plenty of criticism from "both sides" (yeah, I'm an enlightened centrist :D)
I think the model that you're referring to is generally more applicable to hardware, but since you can make free copies of an app, Uber for instance can keep things low cost till they eat the competition