Remember there's a huge difference between Microsoft and Apple, and that is that Apple is an OEM, they can do whatever they want in that capacity, bundle software etc (something MS has tried to stop PC OEMs to do). Microsoft is an ISV, which has punished companies like IBM (that was '95) by delaying OEM shipments leaving IBM with old OS's. In order to punish it's competitor. It has used it's position in a way to limit the OEM's ability to bundle competitive software to programs included in Windows. And so on, and has lost in court due to their practices or have settled for lots of cash which matter because they had a monopoly in the PC-desktop business. Most of that practices has been solved now with Win 7, you can include another browser cleanly without hacking. They have opened up much more now. You can get specs for most systems including the proprietary doc-format. (But although not as much as Apple were which the core of the OS is open source, as well as lots of other system components).
Apple won't have that problem as they are the only ones who can bundle software with their hardware and systems.
But in a way it would kinda be like locking out Adobe Premiere and Avid from using quicktime to displace them from the marketplace. They wouldn't have much chance to win in court for doing that.
As for phones I don't think it's that bad as portrayed, but of course a cell phone vendor can choose to do pretty much whatever. Operators are often even worse.
It's hard to strike an OEM to be anti-competitive, they can pretty much only be that towards other OEMs. There's plenty of markets where there's only a single vendor dominating the market yet aren't anti competitive or put up barriers for competitors to form.
And it's pretty much only anti-competitive if they abuse their market share and power to maneuver to hurt competitors and gain market share by preventing them to act in the market or tying a unrelated product to another maybe to harm a competitor who also releases a product in that segment or just lessening the competition or put them out of business and then jack up the prices. Including a free iPhone in any mac purchase in order to lessen the competition or otherwise effect the competition in the cell phone market would be anti-competitive and might be judged for it. But not if the purpose and the effect, is not to hurt or harming the competition in the unrelated bundled product, but just for selling the macs.
Apple aren't allowed to move towards monopolizing the market and destroying threats to it, but they can't really monopolize their own product They are far from constituting a monopoly in desktop computers or cell phones. They are one of the smallest phone vendors. With a insignificant share of the market. But for example even though they where early in the finger-touch revolution it could be deemed anti-competitive if they had built barriers for others to use it. Like refusal to license essential tech. Monopolizing by shutting out competitors or building barriers is as said not allowed. But without them coming a monopoly I don't see how any government / court could force them to open up their software for other OEMs or forcing them to separate software components. If they had a monopoly in computers it would be of interest to split them up in order to allow competition and limit price fixing or gouging. For them to have a monopoly in the cell phone market they would have to sell like a billion phones and just to have one in the smart phone segment some 5 times their current sales. They would also pretty much had to planned the monopoly or prevent competition for anything to happen for them. Anti-trust might be stopping them to buy all the competitors to achieve it. Or doing other things that would seriously affect the competition. In short world domination just for achieving domination is not a valid business plan. Dominating a market by fair competition is.
Kmax82, every mobile OS is non-free and proprietary, you can't flash any phone with your own software without cracking it. Your not allowed to flash your own flavors of Android it's a closed proprietary system thanks to many of it's components and drivers being non-free and not possible to be released freely. You can thank hardware vendors and patents for that. Bootloaders won't allow you to load your own images on those phones either. Just if they are crackable. There will never be a free mobile OS, there will never be a free Flash runtime, we simply live in an unfree world. With free meaning as in freedom, open source and redistributable without any licensing. We are moving more and more into the black box world. Where you aren't allowed to open the box and are forbidden too.