Cable, airlines, internet, insurance, food, cellular service, social networks, medical supplies, mattresses, search engines, and many more industries have very little competition. It's absolutely emblematic.
Cable is by all accounts perfectly fine in areas with multiple providers and real competition. Airlines were for the rich in the 70’s. Now they’re flying buses. Unpleasant and cheap. Competition in airlines is so brutal that it’s uncertain whether the US airline industry as a whole has ever turned a profit or if on net it's just burned investor money. In social networks I remember Friendster, Bebo, Google+, MySpace and many others. Snapchat still exists. This is a contestable market and it’s absolutely contested. Search engines likewise. Bing and DuckDuckGo are perfectly serviceable for most purposes, if not academic search, and the switching costs are non-existent.
In industries with little relevant competition it’s either because the government gave one company a monopoly, the Comcast effect, or because they’re just crushingly better than the competition, Alcoa or Google. The dangers of monopoly are in oversold to a completely ludicrous degree compared to the historical record. Look at Standard Oil, the poster child for the trusts. It drove competitors out of business through expertise and economies of scale while increasing quality and decreasing prices. Then the government broke it up after it had started to lose market share anyway. Monopoly gets an insane amount of coverage in economics compared to how often it arises in the real world outside of government mandates[1].
It is a myth that natural monopoly theory was developed first by economists, and then used by legislators to "justify" franchise monopolies. The truth is that the monopolies were created decades before the theory was formalized by intervention-minded economists, who then used the theory as an ex post rationale for government intervention. At the time when the first government franchise monopolies were being granted, the large majority of economists understood that large-scale, capital intensive production did not lead to monopoly, but was an absolutely desirable aspect of the competitive process.
Parent poster said, "Very little competition" not "no competition". I'm not arguing these industries are monopolies, but they have very few players and very large conglomerates that own most of the market share -- often between 1-3 players.
Insurance, food, cell service, and mattresses all have a fair amount of competition and lower prices. Airlines and medical are heavily regulated industries and regulation drives industries toward monopolies, not away from them. Search engines and social networks are different animals--they're already "free" to use and there aren't more of them in Europe (or the rest of the world) than in the US, so to the extent that those industries are monopolized, it's not because of some American cultural or political artifact.
