[wutbrodo]

> Your point is great if there is an incentive to only benefit the consumer.

The entire point of my comment was explicitly claiming that this isn't required in order for regulation to benefit companies' bottom-line. I'll repeat: there are collective action problems where coordination (between companies) benefits every party (company) in a way that individual (company) action wouldn't, even when the coordination takes the form of constraints on individual behavior. My comment was assuming the model of corporations as solely profit-maximizers, and it still occurs under that assumption.

It's fairly basic game theory. If the defect-defect equilibrium leaves everyone worse off, and defect-cooperate leaves the defector better off than cooperate-cooperate would, then then under certain fairly reasonable assumptions, putting constraints on the behavior of all parties (i.e., regulation) makes the cooperate-cooperate equilibrium stable in a way it otherwise wouldn't be.