Passengers sleeping on terminal floors, boarding gates turned into waiting halls of uncertainty, and call centres playing automated apologies on loop — IndiGo’s recent operational collapse did not look like a blip in a competitive market. Rather, it felt like the inevitable outcome of a system where “choice” no longer disciplines firms and where the consumer, the supposed centrepiece of the market, has quietly been relegated to spectator status.AdvertisementIndia once imagined aviation as the triumph of its economic opening. Affordable flying democratised aspiration, routes expanded, and competition appeared vibrant. But somewhere between the withdrawal of the public carrier, selective encouragement of private consolidation, and regulatory inertia, we replaced the promise of plurality with dominance. IndiGo’s staggering market share is not simply an achievement of efficiency but also a product of design.Antitrust scholars have long anticipated this arc. Market dominance is rarely a neutral feature — it reorganises market behaviour, regulatory posture, and consumer expectations around the interests of the largest actor. Scholars like Joseph Schumpeter warned of capitalism’s paradox: The forces that generate innovation eventually consolidate into stability, and stability calcifies into entrenched power. Further, scholars like Lina M Khan, who shift from a price-centric antitrust understanding, are especially relevant here because they have consistently argued that harm is not always visible in fares; it often manifests in dependency, exploitative tolerance, and the gradual erosion of choice. India’s skies now mirror these elements.Also Read | Yes, IndiGo is responsible for the current meltdown. But so is the DGCAThe privatisation of Indian air, particularly Air India, while not solely responsible for today’s aviation crisis, removed a key structural counterbalance in the market. In a context of high-entry barriers, slot scarcity, and regulatory inertia, this retreat of the public actor made the conditions ripe for consolidation, enabling a single private airline to dominate. What we are witnessing, then, is not just corporate success but the unintended outcome of a policy and institutional design that normalised concentration.AdvertisementNowhere is this clearer than in the silence of India’s anti-trust regulator. A regulator that was meant to prevent dominance increasingly seems to behave like one waiting for explicit misconduct, intervening after harm, never before. As if the regulator isn’t aware that markets do not deteriorate through abrupt collapses; they erode slowly — first in structure, then in behaviour, and finally in public expectation. By the time the effect is visible, competition is already gone.It may be more useful to move beyond the vocabulary of monopoly and toward the logic of the Essential Facilities Doctrine: A framework from modern competition law used to identify when a private actor controls infrastructure so indispensable that rivals cannot realistically operate without accessing it. Traditionally applied to rail networks, electricity grids, ports, and telecom infrastructure, the doctrine clarifies that the problem is not size but control over irreplaceable bottlenecks.Essential facilities in the aviation ecosystem can be seen from its scarce and structurally controlled chokepoints: Peak-hour landing slots at constrained airports, bilateral traffic rights, dominant route share on commercially critical corridors, and priority access to gates and infrastructure. These are not assets in the traditional corporate sense; they are quasi-public gateways, without which market entry is theoretical rather than meaningful. All of this helped IndiGo expand, and its role shifted from competitor to gatekeeper. The question is not whether it intends to exclude competition, but whether structural dominance now makes competition practically impossible. Competition fails long before prices rise. It fails when the architecture of the market hardens around a single firm’s operational gravity. What remains is not rivalry, but a choreography where smaller actors survive only in the spaces the dominant firm does not occupy.To reduce IndiGo’s meltdown to operational mismanagement, therefore, would be intellectually convenient but deeply insufficient. The failure is systemic and shared: Policymakers who embraced consolidation as efficiency, regulators who equated silence with stability, and a public that learned to confuse on-time flights with functional competition.most readIf India is serious about restoring balance, reforms cannot stop at apology statements or temporary staffing solutions or full refunds. They must begin with a fundamental recognition: Aviation is no longer a discretionary luxury; it has now become a mobility infrastructure. And infrastructure, when controlled overwhelmingly by a single private actor, requires proactive oversight, ex-ante competition tools, enforceable consumer rights, and institutional courage.IndiGo will recover operationally. The harder question is whether India will use this moment to confront what its aviation market has quietly become. If we continue down this path, the free-market ideal may not just be fading; it may already be passé.The writer is a lawyer and a research scholar at the University of Massachusetts, US