[waltbosz]

I was sincere in my thought experiment idea. I'm curious what would happen.

I expect they would be in beach of contract because of the underlying SLAs, but then what happens if they refuse to comply? Could the board go to jail or be sued? Could company assets be seized?

...

I'm not trying to convey anything. At least nothing along the lines of you should be grateful to Apple.

But it's their ecosystem and their vision for how it all fits together. And there are alternative smartphone vendors, consumers have choices.

Maybe I don't understand anti trust law well enough to see what Apple has done wrong and why they should have to compromise their vision.

[mutatio]

My provocative take of your thought experiment is that there might be social strife from the fallout, from the mass bricked devices and effects on communications. This in itself implies anti-monopoly investigation is warranted, I'd also argue it's a failure of government to allow it to get this far in the first place. That is to say the government itself should be interrogated as to why this took so long, I don't like how the gov is cheered in these circumstances whilst allowing it to get to this.

I don't think consumer choice is an argument for the allowance of these walled gardens because it's mostly an illusion of choice, that's what these corporations are experts at, and this applies to the Android ecosystem too.

I say all this as a Adam Smith fanboy and general fan of free market economics.