>At the end of the day all of these companies would do the exact same thing as Apple
and with that sentence you've just described the exact reason precisely why antitrust legislation is long overdue and whyy your solution doesn't work. Running to an alternative will, in due time, just reproduce the same result. In fact Spotify is itself a walled garden for artists suffering from the same dynamics.
That would probably require redefining antitrust, yes? Neither Apple nor Google hold a monopoly in the phone space. Are they colluding, or just making similar business decisions. Is there a requirement that we subsidize a market entrant that is all about open fields instead of walled gardens?
It's been done before with the Hollywood Anti-trust case of 1948 [0]. Studios were neither colluding nor holding a monopoly. But it was an oligopoly building walled gardens by not allowing theaters to carry their movies without a lot of restrictions.
Also anti-trust doesn't require a literal monopoly, just a company "with significant and durable market power" [1]. I think Apple fits into that definition easily.
and with that sentence you've just described the exact reason precisely why antitrust legislation is long overdue and whyy your solution doesn't work. Running to an alternative will, in due time, just reproduce the same result. In fact Spotify is itself a walled garden for artists suffering from the same dynamics.