[kbenson]

That sounds like an industry where a few large players have gobbled up everyone else and entrenched themselves, and they're all relatively happy with their market share (i.e. they aren't competing), and are thus happy to help "competitors" because what they want more than anything else is stability, and to keep new entrants from the market that actually might change things.

You know, collusion. Or emergent behavior that's essentially the same (but even that, while not necessarily illegal, is still bad for consumers).

[the_mar]

it's not really all that sinister. It's just you have a factory and you have workers and sometimes you need more work for them than your company can provide. Just because you can manufacture items for your competitor does not mean you are colluding. I'll tell you more, a lot of competitors use the same suppliers, like for example Ford and GM, will use LG for a lot of components. LG then can't share any tech they developed for GM when working with Ford, but it's not like they get a lobotomy.

People who work at Apple use AWS and people at Amazon use MacBooks. It's all complicated, but not sinister.

[bombcar]

Similar things happen in the tech world - lots of various products are manufactured by a few; TVs being a really good example. There are only a few panel manufacturers out there.