Any time there is consolidation in an industry, there is little benefit to the customers. Prices up and benefits down.
True in many cases, but not all. One example is banking - an industry in which I spent over 20 years and was involved in many mergers. When I first started in that business, banks could not operate branches and ATMs across state lines from the state in which they were headquartered. As a result, we had a lot of small to medium sized banks in the US. The industry was very fractured. When those laws changed, allowing banks to grow, merge, and expand nationally, consumers and businesses both benefitted in many ways.
For example, In the last week I've been at home in NC, in Florida on business, and now in SC on vacation. My bank has branches and ATMs in all three places (as well as most other key destinations in the US). I can use their ATMs without paying fees and can use a branch if I need to when traveling. When my son moved to a new state for college and his first job, he didn't have to set up a new bank account. He could stay with the same bank. Back in 1980 when I first entered banking, that would have all been impossible.
Business has also benefitted, because when I started in banking, virtually all of the top banks in the world were based in Europe, Japan, or China. Because of the old restrictions that kept US banks small by comparison, larger companies had to deal with different banks in every state in which they operated and the credit needs of the largest companies could not be handled by a single US bank. US banks had to put together consortiums of US and foreign banks to provide the credit larger companies needed. Now, with bigger US banks, our banks can meet the needs of more big companies.
Obviously, there have also been negatives to consolidation - "too big to fail" is the most notable - but those are more artifacts of the regulatory environment not changing as the size and complexity of the banks changed. The regulatory infrastructure was still oriented toward smaller, less systemically risky institutions, so the financial crisis of 2008 helped teach us that the regulations and oversight needed to evolve as the banks grew.
