> Legally speaking, Robinhood is a private entity with no obligations to provide users the ability to trade.
This is mostly false. trading platforms are regulated by a bunch of orgs like the SEC, they absolutely cannot do whatever they want, there are heavy regulations on these activities or it would be easy for a broker to scam their clients out of their money with backroom deals with this or that third party and create conflict of interests.
Those regulations still allow brokers some freedom in how they run their business, and even require brokers to take actions like this (according to some interpretations). AFAIK, there isn't an SEC regulation requiring all brokers to provide services for every stock. In fact, brokers have limited the buying and selling of stocks in the past, so there is precedent here.
The SEC is also extremely strict about market manipulation, and especially when there's a conflict of interest. RH uses Citadel which had billions of dollars invested into Melvin. RH is saving its partner billions of dollars with this action to the detriment of its actual users.
This is mostly false. trading platforms are regulated by a bunch of orgs like the SEC, they absolutely cannot do whatever they want, there are heavy regulations on these activities or it would be easy for a broker to scam their clients out of their money with backroom deals with this or that third party and create conflict of interests.