Enabling companies to categorize themselves as 'platforms' or otherwise and then stipulating both benefits and requirements based on those labels makes a lot of sense comparatively. The general problem though is that the government isn't typically using regulations to improve freedom and competition. The government looks at regulation as a way to extract money, so solutions that encourage competition on a level playing field through market forces (like OP's) aren't given fair consideration.
Nothing Apple does is a natural monopoly.
Artificial monopolies can be maintained through vertical integration. If you don't like their app store, use another one. If all they provide is the app store, that's easy, and every platform would have half a dozen or more.
But if using a different app store requires you to develop your own operating system, and convince millions of third party developers to make applications for it even before it has any users, and make your own hardware, on and on, well then it's infeasible to make a competing app store and you get an uncompetitive and abusive market.
The solution there isn't to regulate it like a utility, it's to break up the company so that the operating system isn't made by the same company as the app store and has no reason to restrict the users to only the one. Then you have competition again and don't need any regulation other than the constraint on vertical integration.
Said state of affairs is the expected outcome of Apple having a natural monopoly and there being only one other substantial mobile OS market participant, who just so happens to also operate a natural monopoly for app sales - albeit a much, much more tenuous one.
That's very much not a natural monopoly, but a constraint that is forced onto the ecosystem by Apple. There is no technical reason for it existing, but it exists by design.
In my local municipality I have no way to choose renewable energy apart from building my own power plant on my roof. That’s a complete failure of these government granted monopolies.
Which is a curious statement: why would a electrical utility want people to use less electricity?
The reason is because the regulatory agencies created incentives within the regulatory framework to encourage them to do it. Basically the regulators start with an outcome, bake that outcome into how utilities get paid, and then let the utility innovate to figure out how to do it. This led to meaningful reduction in energy usage across many markets.
You can learn more by looking into Demand Response programs and Demand Management programs around the country.
> The Myth of Natural Monopoly
> Most so-called public utilities have been granted governmental franchise monopolies because they are thought to be "natural monopolies." Put simply, a natural monopoly is said to occur when production technology, such as relatively high fixed costs, causes long-run average total costs to decline as output expands. In such industries, the theory goes, a single producer will eventually be able to produce at a lower cost than any two other producers, thereby creating a "natural" monopoly. Higher prices will result if more than one producer supplies the market.
> Furthermore, competition is said to cause consumer inconvenience because of the construction of duplicative facilities, e.g., digging up the streets to put in dual gas or water lines. Avoiding such inconveniences is another reason offered for government franchise monopolies for industries with declining long-run average total costs.
>It is a myth that natural monopoly theory was developed first by economists, and then used by legislators to "justify" franchise monopolies. The truth is that the monopolies were created decades before the theory was formalized by intervention-minded economists, who then used the theory as an ex post rationale for government intervention. At the time when the first government franchise monopolies were being granted, the large majority of economists understood that large-scale, capital intensive production did not lead to monopoly, but was an absolutely desirable aspect of the competitive process.