Markets, left to their own accord, naturally tend to monopolies and cooperation. Cooperation just works better than competition. Competition is, really, a zero-sum game, a race to the bottom for companies. Cooperation is optimal, it’s “everybody wins”.
Even if companies didn’t just buy up each other (why wouldn’t they? We need laws against that), they would certainly work together to set prices as high as the market can bear. Which is then, effectively, a monopoly.
I mean, imagine a perfect market with hundreds of thriving competitors. What happens over time? As the industry matures, competitors buy each other up and consolidate capital. Then, newcomers can’t break in, because they don’t have the capital. And any newcomers who have a new innovative process or product, just get bought out before they threaten the market share. Then, eventually, there are only a handful of companies left. It’s trivial for them to move in lock-step and everyone wins… except the consumer.
Look at any domain in the US - they’re all like this. The only exceptions are new domains, like AI. That will change, too, we’ve seen this pattern thousands of times.
There’s two moats here: regulation, and capital. You can eliminate the regulation moat with libertarianism, sure, but not the capital moat. And, you strengthen the capital moat when you remove the regulation. So nothing changes. Best case scenario, the situation is the same. Worst case, it’s accelerated.