Yep and you can come in and make a fully open and compliant competitor product, because your closed and uncompliant incombent is forced to charge a price which should give you enough margin to succeed.

I am admitting that yes closed beats open at money extraction/harvesting from customers, which is why you only ever see closed hardware. The whole idea is to kneecap business models which depend on handcuffing owners with digital locks. This is economic lawfare, I am not hiding that. We The People are not animals on a farm to harvest dollars from occasionally, as if they were milk and methane.

Yea but you know what's even better than a tax? Not being able to release those products onto the market. I really doubt products whose "value-add" is lock-in would be able to survive black-market dynamics. But Apple, Google, Microsoft, John Deere, what have you can totally afford extra taxes, and they probably even have the market power to just foist those increases on their customer base and not lose them because they're effectively a captive market in the current regulatory regime, and that's also the kind of market power that makes it so that you don't have to compete on price. I consistently can get cheaper laptops by seeking out ones that don't include windows licenses, but this clearly hasn't affected the laptop market much

Also, let's say I'm gonna undercut someone on price for electronic devices. Unless I'm starting from a place of great personal wealth and don't take any capital at all, this needs investment, which means that an obvious solution to any scenario in which I'm meaningfully harming the bottom line of one of these incumbents could just be buy it out from under me, which is indeed how this generally plays out in the real world

If we are serious about regulating monopolies, we have to understand that remedies that rely on raising operating costs are simply always going to be ineffective