But let’s be real with each other. You want to know why Netflix keeps raising its prices? Because it can. Because Netflix won. The rest of the streaming industry is competing ferociously over a finite pool of money, dealing with carriage disputes because of dwindling subscriber numbers, and panicking over the future of TV. Netflix is the future of TV.

Over the last couple of years in particular, Netflix has gone from a solid streaming service to a practically unavoidable, virtually uncancellable part of mainstream culture. It has developed a slate of hit originals — Stranger Things, Wednesday, Squid Game, The Night Agent if we’re being really generous — that give it at least something approximating HBO-style appointment TV. It has proven, through things like the Paul / Tyson fight and the Tom Brady roast, that it can manufacture cultural events more or less out of nothing. It pulled off a day of NFL games without a hitch and spent billions of dollars to get WWE’s Monday Night Raw, one of cable’s biggest ongoing hits, onto the platform. And underneath it all, it has built a massive library of reality shows, cooking competitions, and the other filler TV that makes up most of our TV viewership.

The other way to understand the specifics of the pricing strategy is that Netflix would very much like you to have that ad-supported plan. The company has said repeatedly that it makes more money on the combination of a smaller monthly fee and advertising than it does from the larger subscription price alone. A large percentage of new subscribers are choosing ads — about 55 percent in the latest quarter — and Netflix is beginning to test exactly how much its existing subscribers will pay to keep their Netflix ad-free. It’s no accident that the ad-free price just jumped two and a half times as much as the base price did. And remember: even if we all switch to the ads plans, the prices might still go up. Cable TV is expensive and filled with ads, after all, and Netflix sure likes that business model.