What would we say if there were only 2 car makers, 2 grocery chains, 2 companies building houses?
We'd argue endlessly because of pedantry over 'monopoly', whilst the oligopolists sell us down the river.
There are two major building materials suppliers (Carters and Fletchers). There's one manufacturer of drywall (Gib) that is easier to get council plan approval for than any other cheaper manufacturers of drywall because they provide some material strength documents that saves the councils some engineering review time and effort.
We technically have 4 major banks, but 3 of them are just offshoots of big Australian banks and siphon the insane profits offshore.
The government keeps making investigation commissions into breaking these up, but doesn't do anything. The companies just point fingers back and forth at each other blaming "the competition" for price gouging. Meanwhile the recommendation from the politicians is we cut back on avocado toast, lattes, and our Netflix subscription.
Banks are not much better. There are a couple of small players additionally to the 3 big ones, but competition is limited to very few products. If you are interested in something else, choices are very poor.
Not an option for the wide public.
There is also a GNU/Linux option here. Sent from my Librem 5.
> I use Linux, but that's not for the broad masses currently
Unless "broad massses" require some unique MS Office or Photoshop functionality, they can easily switch to Linux. My relatives did and are happy.
How well is that holding up nowadays, as a phone?
I'm really happy to be able to run desktop apps (also on a big screen!) and have full control over my phone.