【USA Archives】

Business can,USA Archives at times, be so simple. For example:

1. Fewer companies means less competition.

2. Less competition means less incentive for companies to be great to customers, who have less choice.

3. Less incentive to serve customers... can end with a guy being dragged off an airplane, bloodied, after he'd already been seated.

If only someone could've seen this coming.

Spoiler alert: They did.

"I’ve come to think that the ritualized abuse that we, as consumers, have become accustomed to in so many areas of life is a sad indictment of our civilization. So, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, I didn’t actually leave United Airlines: the airline left me," wrote Columbia University professor Tim Wu in the New Yorker—in 2014.

Yes: Almost three years ago, Wu penned a letter to United, an airline he professed to have once held a strong affection for. Why? Because the company's service standards had dropped since the company's 2010 mega merger that combined United Airlines and Continental Airlines.

It's part of a decades-long trend of airlines buying up other airlines—full-on industry consolidation—that has significantly decreased the number of options available to travelers. An Associated Pressanalysis in 2015 found that competition among major airlines had decreased, particularly as many airports became hubs dominated by a single carrier.

It's a situation that's left us, the passengers, with little choice in airlines. And it's left airlines with little pressure to better serve consumers, or really, anyone but their shareholders.

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It didn't have to be like this. Even in the 1800s, people understood that it's not good for business (or society) when massive companies can just buy up the competition. Consumers get screwed, and innovation gets stymied. By the early 1900s, the U.S. was putting laws in place to ensure that no companies could become so big that they had a negative effect on whatever market they were in.

Cut to: the Obama administration, which said it was going to be aggressive in trying to block consolidation in a variety of industries—and looked ready to back up its talk by blocking a merger of American Airlines and U.S. Airways in 2013.

Then, the administration let it through.

A ProPublica report found that an aggressive lobbying campaign succeeded in overcoming the objections of those in the government.

Could there be blue skies ahead? Don't count on it. The airline industry doesn't show many signs of changing its ways (and United's leadership hasn't exactly been apologetic). And Donald Trump isn't providing any answers.

In fact, the easiest way to jumpstart competition (and conceivably force airlines to improve service) has come from slightly more conservative, free-market voices. Put simply, let foreign companies into the U.S.

Foreign airlines are currently heavily restricted in what routes they can offer to American customers. As if that wasn't enough of an advantage, stateside-based airlines constantly complain that foreign carriers are unfairly subsidized by their governments. And any time a foreign company tries to open new routes to or within the U.S., domestic airlines pitch a fit.

One proposal is to eliminate or drastically reduce the amount of regulation on U.S. service that foreign airlines can provide. That would mean companies like Emirates and Lufthansa could start operating in the U.S. alongside United and Delta. It's a quick way to add competition to a market that isn't exactly welcoming to startups thanks to the incredibly high costs of purchasing airplanes and getting set up in airports.

The move to allow foreign airlines would have to be voted on by Congress and approved by President Donald Trump. Could a Republican-led U.S. government be swayed to further deregulate the airline industry and herald a new era of competition?

Nope. If anything, Trump has already been swayed by U.S. airlines over foreign competition.

"Probably about one hour after I got elected, I was inundated with calls from your industry and many other industries, because it’s a very unfair situation," Trump said at a White House meeting with representatives from the airline and freight industries, according to Bloomberg.

With no significant increases in competition on the horizon and little interest from the U.S. government to change things, any faith you have in the airline industry is misplaced, or moreover, needs to be—as United Airlines so poetically put it—fully "re-accommodated." After all, our government has the power to effectively change the very nature of just how friendly our skies are. And guess who put our government into power?

Yep: We did. That includes you. And until we do something about it, it's only right for us to ask everyone to deplane from this article, and take your complaints about air travel with you.