There is a story that gets told about networks and markets, over and over, in a tone that treats it as simple observation rather than as a story: that anything which isn't consolidating into one dominant version is failing. Fragmentation reads as a symptom. Multiplicity reads as immaturity, a phase a system passes through before it matures into a monopoly. The endpoint is assumed. The only live question is which contender gets there first.
It is worth noticing how recent, and how contingent, that assumption usually is.
Broadcast television did not start out believing there could be only one network. Early radio and television markets were genuinely plural before regulatory and capital pressure narrowed them, in the US, to a handful of dominant players who then got treated retroactively as the natural shape broadcasting had always been reaching for. Once the narrowing happened, its own outcome became the explanation for why it had to happen: of course there are only a few networks, that is what a mature broadcast market looks like. The contingency disappeared into the result.
Retail tells a similar story, with the modern logistics-and-marketplace giant standing in for an endpoint that was supposedly always coming. Main streets used to hold dozens of independent shops with overlapping inventories, no single one of them expected to serve everyone. The idea that one retailer should be able to fulfill nearly any purchase, at a price that outcompetes local specialization, was not the market's destiny revealing itself. It was a specific set of financial choices — sustained unprofitability subsidized by investors willing to wait years for a payoff, logistics investment at a scale no competitor could match — that produced a result now narrated as though it had been inevitable from the first mail-order catalog.
City planning did this too, and more violently. The postwar insistence on a single downtown core, a single central business district organizing an entire metropolitan region, displaced older patterns of multiple overlapping neighborhood centers, each sufficient unto itself, none needing to be the city's one legitimate heart. The multi-centered pattern wasn't a failed draft of the monocentric city. It was a different, complete way of organizing urban life that got treated as unfinished simply because it hadn't consolidated.
What connects these is not that consolidation never happens — obviously it does, repeatedly, for identifiable reasons involving capital, regulation, and network effects that are sometimes real and often manufactured. What connects them is the retrospective trick: once something has consolidated, the fact of its dominance gets read backward as proof that dominance was the goal all along, that everything preceding it was a rough draft rather than a genuine alternative. The few-network era becomes "how television works." The logistics giant becomes "how retail works." The single downtown becomes "how cities work." Plurality gets demoted to a transitional state on the way to a legitimacy that only monopoly can confer.
This retrospective trick has a particular cruelty when it's applied to things that are still plural, still undecided, still in the middle of their own history — it tells them, in advance, that their present shape is a failure to have already become something else. It forecloses the possibility that fragmentation might just be what a healthy version of the thing looks like, permanently, not on the way to anywhere.
The honest question is never "why hasn't this consolidated yet," as though consolidation were the health condition and multiplicity the illness. It's whether the forces pushing toward one dominant version are actually serving the people inside the system, or whether they're serving the much narrower set of people who profit from being able to point at a single chokepoint and own it.