That kind of "pull the ladder up behind you" strategy would be a natural thing for today dominants players to try. They benefited from an open playing field, but now they no longer need it. If they succeed, they have established a massive moat to stave off competition. If they manage to get it into standards and legislation, then undoing it would require a tectonic shift. Google is especially well positioned for this - Chrome, Google Search, Android and Youtube being potentially very effective places to do DRM media gatekeeping. "don't be evil" had to go from their mission statement. Maybe "universally accessible" will be next...

The way they do it is to bake DRM mechanisms into platforms. Intel ME, AMD PSP, Apple T2 chip/SE, those secondary computers bear the DRM hardware features, so end product manufacturers don’t have to handle it.

It's still going to be hardware everyone already owns, just with specific features. It's not a separate purchase of a dvd player, you're buying a phone that has the licensing chip built in

And HDCP is already a thing for authenticating screens.