> Consumers actively choose walled gardens over free alternatives.

This is the specific thing that customers are prevented from doing. If you want Apple's hardware, whose processors are faster than Qualcomm's, you get Apple's App Store. If you want iOS instead of Android, you get Apple's App Store. If you need iMessage, you get Apple's App Store. And no other.

It's not a separate choice. If it was, what it would look like is multiple app stores on iOS, and the choice would be whether to use any other than Apple's. And then tons of people would use the other stores, especially if Apple continued to reject apps people want.

If you don't want green bubbles, you have to choose walled garden.

And it's not like Android is so much better.

Do you want the one with the wall, or the one with the barbed wire fence with a tunnel under it?

What if I just want to come and go as I please without crawling through the mud?

Exactly, the android ecosystem is only better in that the code is more open and the hardware manufacture more diverse. You still run into the competition being brutally squashed. Computers and devices should be completely open and accessible to their owners. If someone wants to run Tizen or windows or ios on a phone, or should be entirely up to them. Instead, the world has basically 2 choices, with a vanishingly small minority of users able and willing to try things like pinephone hardware or Linux on personal devices.

Consumers are given a false dichotomy - they have as much choice and agency as a child being asked "do you want a 7:45 or 8:00 bedtime? Mommy and daddy will let you pick!"