It did work. Chrome who used a fork of the safari webkit engine was nobody at the time. Fostering competition and choice doesn’t mean a monopoly can’t exist, especially if it won fair and square by being best without making it harder for competitors to challenge them.
In 2011 Firefox and chrome had 30% each.
We currently have 3 engines in different flavors. We have chromium( blink) based engines such as Edge, chrome, opera. Internet explorer doesn’t exist anymore after it became a version of chrome.
You make a good case if you ignore the data and the reason for the law.
In March 2010, when the EU order went into effect (ostensibly to break the "IE monopoly" and give people choice), worldwide market share for browsers was approximately
46% Firefox
35% IE
12% Chrome
4% Safari
2% Opera
There was no monopoly. There was no problem of choice. In fact, the time to argue that Microsoft was engaged in some kind of anti-competitive behavior was 8 years earlier, when they had beaten back Netscape to have over 90% market share. That didn't last long, though, because by the end of 2008, IE had already dropped below 50% market share, primarily due to competition from Firefox.
People had no problem finding alternate browsers on Microsoft. Chrome was released in December of 2008, so was a little over a year old at the time and had already garnered 12% market share without any government interference because, as every knew at the time, IE sucked. The market responded.
We now have a market in which Chrome has over 80% and the remainder is split among all the also-rans (Firefox, Edge, Safari, Opera, and "other"). Notice how no new competitors entered the market and succeeded.
The market merely shifted from one dominant player to the other based not on interference, but on the better product. The EU action was merely a blip and putting its thumb on the scale. The market outweighed the interfering thumb by giving us a new dominant product.
Here is an easy visualization for you:
The paradox of choice is nowhere near a settled scientific consensus and it depends on many factors having to choose amount 100 thing isn’t equally to choose among a handful things that costs 0$ can be changed at anytime and used simultaneously.
A growing body of empirical evidence suggests the existence of a Paradox of Choice, whereby a larger choice set leads to a lower expected payoff to the decisionmaker. These empirical findings contradict traditional choice-theoretic results in microeconomics and even social psychology, suggesting...
link.springer.com
The paradox of choice is just one component. Marketing science shows that people want a choice between two or three adequate products. They want to make their decision once. They don't want to think about changing their minds, let alone change their mind. This is why we have Coke and Pepsi, each of which enjoys exceptional brand loyalty. This is why we have Mac vs Windows, Android vs iOS, Chrome vs. whatever is bundled, etc.
Deny the science. Its okay.
Personally, I am all for laws to hammer the crap out of companies that engage in collusion, price-fixing, and any other manner of anti-competitive behavior. Having a great product that people like isn't anti-competitive, especially in the case of Apple, against which there is ample worldwide competition.