I skimmed both of your links and they both sound like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_for_order_flow, which is regulated. Specifically, they can't give you a worse price than what the NMS provides, so you're not getting a worse price. What's the issue here?

Robinhood is a small operation that’s skimming pennies off your transactions to fund its operation. The alternative is banks who are doing the sambut times a hundred and banks are making a ton of money off their customers even with 100 times as many employees as robinhood.

They are not bad guys’s. They are still making money(surprice!?), but they are much much more modest about it than traditional banks. This account is a fine example. They don’t need to give you a 3% deal, but they are doing it anyway because it’s benefitting both them and their costumers.

> Robinhood is a small operation that’s skimming pennies off your transactions to fund its operation. The alternative is banks

There are other alternatives, e.g., credit unions.

So, they're exploiting users in some of the ways banks are, but not all ways currently. Other banks do all of the things listed above already, have been for decades.