normally i'm against heavy handed government, but in the case of cell phones and other electronic devices being slowed down by companies/made unusable I am greatly in favor of this!
I'm not sure about that. Consumers can easily tell which phone is less expensive, which one has more storage, etc. It is much harder to know, much less decide based on, which ones will last a long time. Especially since by the time we can confidently say "these last 5 years", you can't buy that model anymore.
This is a problem with nearly anything more complex than a kitchen knife.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics)#Law_of_R...
The Invisible Hand worked great when you had 1000 people making hammers and sewing pants and harvesting wheat. It doesn't work so well when you've got 2 multi-national companies producing handheld supercomputers.
Writing a regulation or law is how the market (i.e., the people collectively) tell an industry that it needs to do something, always. The industry can't just hide behind "I'm going to do things A and B that you hate, because I'm also doing things C, D, and E that you can't live without".
While apple is definitely a monopoly in the ios market the phone market as a whole is definitely not an oligopoly
Is a $50,000 phone a realistic alternative to an iPhone?
The whole point of this exercise is to get a phone that is well-supported for longer. Should I really believe that an Android name from a no-name brand is going to have better long-term support? On what would I base that?
The "which is why upgrading takes so long" is a perfect example of an axis upon which consumers, via the market, have no control. If you want the latest version of Android, there's only 2 brands that offer it so far (Google and OnePlus), so you'd better agree with all of the other decisions that one of these two made.