Many barriers to entry are caused by regulation, but not all, and perhaps not even most. Some problems are just hard, and tend to favor incumbents with economi

Many barriers to entry are caused by regulation, but not all, and perhaps not even most. Some problems are just hard, and tend to favor incumbents with economies of scale. Until very recently (post-GDPR), there were no regulatory barriers protecting Search, for example; nevertheless, new entrants found it very difficult to get traction because search is a hard problem. Same goes for putting up cell towers, and burying fiber lines, and maintaining an electric grid. I'd also argue that most oligopolies aren't formed by technical or government constraints, but rather by branding and consumer behavior. Consumers usually have a desire to stick with familiar, trusted brands, and to try new brands only when they've been recommended by people they trust. This creates barriers to new entrants, because you don't start out with any baseline trust and you have to compete against companies that have been in use for a century. There's nothing technically difficult about bottling carbonated sugar-water; regardless, Coca-Cola enjoys enormous margins because it's ingrained in the habits of hundreds of millions of people. When there's actual regulatory capture, we should address that, and untangle the regulations so new firms can enter. But don't expect that solving regulatory capture is going to fix all instances of monopoly.