When four airlines carry eighty percent of domestic passengers, and four banks hold sixty percent of American deposits, and two companies control most of the nation's pharmacy benefits. You are not operating in a market. You are operating in a managed system, and the people managing it are not you.
The word competition does a lot of work in American political discourse. It suggests something dynamic and corrective: prices fall, quality rises, the consumer wins. That is what competition does when it actually exists. The problem is that it increasingly does not exist in the sectors that matter most to working people, and the word is being used to describe markets that are really oligopolies dressed up in the language of competition.
Take the rental market in major metro areas. It has been well documented that algorithmic pricing software sold by a small number of vendors is being used by landlords across different companies in the same market to coordinate price increases. The companies are separate. The algorithm is shared. Rents go up together. This is not what competition looks like. It is what market coordination looks like when the coordination is one step removed from a phone call.
The enforcement mechanisms that are supposed to prevent this, antitrust law, the FTC, and the DOJ's Antitrust Division, have been systematically underfunded and philosophically redirected over the past forty years in ways that have allowed this consolidation to proceed. The shift happened across administrations of both parties, and the argument that enabled it was that big companies are more efficient and efficiency benefits consumers. The evidence on that argument is now in, and it is not supportive.
We looked at specific markets, specific consolidation events, and what happened to prices afterward. The pattern holds across sectors. That’s not anecdote. That’s a policy problem, and whether anyone with the power to treat it as one actually will is where the story goes next.