According to[1], the average number of competitors per US domestic city-pair is 3.5 and has been increasing over the last few decades.
Big companies buying small companies is good. It’s a reward for improving the market. Big companies preventing smaller companies from even starting via government regulation (i.e. regulatory capture) is what’s bad.
Giving it to the government is just skipping to the worst possible outcome. Nobody has any incentive to compete.
One of the takeaways was that as organizations grow they become more married to spending resources to maintain their existing system which comes at the cost of innovation. So they “innovate” by buying other firms/ideas and it eventually leads to consolidation of an industry.
[1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/in-praise-of-maintenance/
How about a market for destinations? Oh wait that will be immediately controlled by one player.
Hm it seems consolidation is the natural path we prefer towards solving a problem. Why not let the bureaucracy manage it then?
Give up the pretense. This is all market capture of finance by low effort grifters who will throw a fit when they don’t get privilege for nothing but being an obnoxious talking head.