This isn't so much to do with shaking the market up as a wrangle with Travelport over the size of their commissions. Refusing to play ball with the middleman isn't exactly innovation. It's not even a new step for American either; in the past they forced Kayak to remove Orbitz listings of AA flights. The consumer might theoretically gain from lower prices by only booking direct on AA's terms; in practice they lose the ability to easily compare/save on multi-flight itineraries across multiple unaffiliated carriers.

I'm not the biggest fan of the current travel site model, but I think it's a little unfair to suggest they haven't innovated at all over that period; Orbitz didn't even exist at the start of the last decade. What American are doing is no more likely to stimulate innovation than Microsoft deciding on behalf of their OEM vendors what software options consumers should be offered.