The ecosystem had a lot of diversity. When there was a new need or opportunity, new hardware arrived from a fairly diverse set of manufacturers and distributors.

Some of those still exist in niches - music hardware, ham radio, specalised navigation hardware for boats and planes, and high-performance high-end professional cameras and such.

But consumer-grade products are now mostly software, and the software runs on a handful of platforms controlled by a handful of corporations who charge access tribute (taxes.)

The entire system is very locked-down and brittle, and gives those corporations the option to create individual and collective kill-switches for people and/or activities they don't like.

That would have sounded unlikely a couple of years ago, but it sounds a lot less unlikely now.