Unless Apple would make an anonymizing VPN connection mandatory, I don't see any difference to the situation as is. As long as people can be pressured to turn off the VPN, nobody loses any customers. Additionally, I don't think paying customers are the target, since they usually provide identifying information anyway.
Agreed. Though for reference, Apple's private relay has an architecture that makes it much more privacy preserving than most VPNs.
Traffic is sent through two independent relays: Apple sees your IP but not the destination, while a 3rd party egress partner sees the destination but not your IP, with encryption preventing either side from correlating both ends. It's some of the benefits of Tor. But of course you still need to put a lot of faith in Apple's implementation, which is the hardest part.
If Apple started routing all iPhone/Mac traffic through some anonymizing VPN by default, services that block it would absolutely lose lots of customers.
Yes, but Apple wouldn't do this, because Apple is also at risk of losing customers when people get blocked by network security at work. We could also fantasize about Apple fighting all the tracking everywhere, including their own services...
Quite frankly, it's a bit silly to paint Apple as some privacy fortress, who wouldn't have to comply with law enforcement/intelligence to unmask/tap traffic. I mean, for a lot of people VPN choice is done considering legal jurisdictions somewhere far away. Apple could/would never possibly offer this level of protection.
