To clarify, i came up with this position paper with a specific "solution?" in mind.

With careful regulation the eu could ensure fair competition between software publishers.

A possibility would be to require SaaS products to offer permanent licences alongside their SaaS pricing model (even for 100% cloud hosted applications). These would cost no more than 2 years of the regular SaaS rental price. After two years you would break even and if you bought the permanent licence, you now have the opportunity to see if newly developed features are worth upgrading for. If not, you can keep using the old version at no additional (licencing-)cost. Monthly subscriptions could still be neccecary but those would verifiably only cover server costs and not include any licencing or service charges.

This would incentivice companies to keep innovating to retain paying customers instead of locking in consumers just because they need the subscription to keep the day-to-day business running and to keep access to past projects.

These measures would ensure that companies don't scale back the continous development and improvement of their product to a bare minimum that retains customers. It would reignite competition between, currently almost dormant, software publishers and give the consumers back the feasability of voting with their wallets which a free market should entail.