Dangerous Duopolies
Ads, duopolies, economics, being alive - its all connected.
Rage-ranting about ads was supposed to be a one-off.
A moment to vent about the noise, the manipulation, the sheer absurdity of how much of our mental space is occupied by someone trying to sell us something.
But that rant led me somewhere else.
It opened up a door — not just into the mechanics of advertising, but into what ads actually stand for.
If nothing else, ads are the vehicle of Competition. And it blew my mind to know more about the significance of that competition in today’s consumer economics.
And strangely enough, it was Arnab Goswami who provoked the thought.
Yes, him.
During his unusually non partisan monologue on the tragic Air India 171 crash, one line stuck with me.
“There’s no choice in Indian aviation anymore.”
That line landed hard. Because it wasn’t just about aviation.
It was about markets, systems, design — and how when options disappear, power concentrates. Quietly. Permanently. Potentially leading one day to something extremely costly, stomach churning, undue & irreversible.
Growing up, I always felt a discomfort around competition.
It made people act out — turn desperate & insecure.
It often felt like people cared only about winning and the optics surrounding that, rather than doing something actually useful.
But maybe, what I witnessed wasn’t competition itself — but a toxic version of it.
Because in economic theory, competition is vital.
It’s the immune system of capitalism.
It plays important roles. It keeps prices true to market, players on their toes, and ideas alive. Biggest of all, it gives us choice.
And when that breaks down, when you move from competition to unhealthy or no competition—
You get mono / duo / oligopolies.
Each poly has its own con, but in this read, my focus is on duopolies and how they endangering consumers.
Let’s talk Duopolies
Duopolies exist in many industries. (e.g., Visa/Mastercard, Coke/Pepsi), they can be behemoths but they don’t really stifle competition. You still see an Amex, RuPay, Paper Boat, Bisleri, Appy etc.
However, duopolies — or monopolies — in critical sectors like aviation, healthcare, or information don’t just reduce competition; they concentrate risk. With limited market players, incentives to improve diminish, regulation leniency (aka regulatory capture) becomes more likely, and systemic failures can cascade without alternatives to absorb the shock.
And here’s 3 such duopolies that are playing out in our lives and 2 of them that enabled the AI 171 tragedy.
Dangerous Duopoly 01
In the Indian Commercial Aviation Sector, two airlines — Indigo and Air India — control over 90% of the market share, rest being Akasa, Spicejet etc.
Indigo alone flew nearly 85 million passengers in 2023. source
Rewind ten years and we had Vistara, GoAir, AirAsia India, Jet Airways. One by one, they vanished — through mergers, shutdowns, or attrition.
So now, whether you're flying from Kochi to Delhi or from Chennai to Srinagar, you hardly have a “choice” to make between a high price tag vs convenient timing.
As they are dictated by duopoly dynamics — not competition.
Routes are scheduled based on their convenience or profitability, not your preferences.
Prices can rise unchecked on high-demand routes, because there’s no viable competition to undercut them. This article tells more.
Flight timing diversity decreases — if both carriers decide not to fly during certain hours (say, late night or early morning), you simply can’t go.
So, now, what about it?
When 'Khatara' leads to ‘Khatra’
At mercy of two carriers, you’ve picked, you’ve paid, you’ve checked in. But then..
Air India’s recent fleet has become notorious for poor maintenance, inconsistent service, outdated interiors. Passengers are often found 'fanning’ themselves for the lack of proper air conditioning.
The once-proud national carrier has been reduced to an ‘Indigo Alternative’ — like a bus to the train.
An annoyed Hindi speaking passenger would call it a khatara.
You know what else is khatara? A bare-skeleton, rusting bus, still on road making noises as it rolls.
On the other hand, while Indigo’s flights have the highest frequency available, giving you many travel time options, lot of their services come at an additional cost.
Hidden behind a seemingly inescapable ‘choose your seat’ screen is a paywall. There’s a deceptive ‘cabin baggage only’ ticket fare, which you won’t realise until you double check the flight details before you pay. Bigger leg room? In-flight food? few kgs extra? Its everything that soars the price of India’s Low Cost Carrier. This is done by other carrier(s?!) as well.
That’s what happens when competition fades.
The customer doesn’t lose access.
They lose choice.
Dangerous Duopoly 02
The crash of AI171—a Boeing 787 Dreamliner headed for London—took 265 lives.
Investigations are still underway but aviation experts deduce that both engines failed during takeoff. A mayday was called. The RAT was deployed. The plane crashed into a hostel building with a full tank (1.25 lakh litres) of jet fuel.
Fate sealed in 1 minute?
Air India’s fleet is predominantly Boeing, while Indigo’s is Airbus. Each have their own reasons like budget, haulage and sector strategy that make their choice, but then only between 2 options.
Are there no other players in this industry? There are, there’s Embraer from Brazil, COMAC from China, Irkut from Russia, Mitsubishi from Japan etc. but they aren’t as large or established in the narrow-body and wide-body commercial aircraft offering as Boeing or Airbus, who have a reputation and a global network of maintenance and support.
But where does that go wrong?
Boeing planes have been in the spotlight for years.
Whistleblowers. Safety violations. Rushed production.
And still, airlines keep buying them.
Why?
Because it’s either Boeing or Airbus.
Another duopoly. Airlines don’t really have anywhere to go.
They are prioritizing profits over safety. There’s no fear of consequence anymore.”
- Boeing engineer testifying to the U.S. Senate
Can Duopolies Cause a Plane Crash?
No, not directly. A duopoly doesn't physically crash a plane. But it can create the conditions under which risk-taking, neglect, or corner-cutting becomes:
easier to get away with,
less likely to be scrutinised,
and less likely to have real consequences.
Then what did?
The fatal failure point was the dual-engine loss just after takeoff.
That left pilots with virtually no time or altitude to recover.
Preventing this would have required:
Stronger technical oversight (preventive maintenance, systems monitoring)
Procedural discipline (checklists, drills)
Better design standards (fault redundancy)
265 lives.
at the mercy of no choice.
Only if they had another viable commercial airline.
Only if there were more players threatening Boeing into fixing safety.
Only if they had choice.
What caused the crash was a catastrophic chain of system failures.
What enabled those failures to persist unnoticed, uncorrected — and unaccounted allowed by years of inertia, consolidation, and corporate immunity, is a market where two names hold nearly all the power.
Duopolies weaken fear of consequence.
When only two companies control a market, they’re rarely punished by market forces. Boeing, despite multiple crashes and safety scandals, still dominates because there’s nowhere else for airlines to go.Duopolies reduce urgency to improve.
Competition forces innovation. Lack of it often leads to complacency or, worse, shortcuts in safety and quality.Duopolies hurt consumer trust — and give regulators a narrower lens.
With fewer alternatives, regulators often become reluctant to fully sanction a dominant player — because doing so could collapse the system (as happened with Boeing’s 737 MAX grounding in 2019–20).In aviation, mistakes are irreversible.
In most industries, a design flaw or service failure leads to bad PR or returns. In aviation, it leads to fatalities.
Competition — real competition — keeps companies accountable.
Without it, even something as high-stakes as aviation becomes reckless.
By no means is the scale or impact similar, but my eyes turned to something as reckless:
In case you hadn’t noticed,
Another duopoly is cooking, right at our homes.
Food apps.
Zomato + blinkit.
Swiggy + Instamart.
Zepto is the third player but in a different zone. Big Basket who?
Today, if you’re a city-dweller in India, you’re most likely using Swiggy or Zomato.
They started off as liberators — platforms that helped you discover new food, try local places, and skip the line. They both started around 2015.
10 years later, they have become an essential app on our smartphones alongside Whatsapp & Instagram.
Ever paid attention to their pricing?
They charge:
platform fee.
delivery partner fee.
GST
Packaging and Handling
Jacked up menu prices.
Surge fee / Rain Charges
Pre-added donations (which you need to uncheck)
Skip the bag and save planet? Classic corporate greenwashing.
God save you if you use an iPhone.
This is not just profiteering — this is manipulative UX. (Zepto is the worst with Dark UX). Dark patterns, scarcity tricks, mental fatigue. All Unchecked.
Both platforms dominate the food delivery space.
With ~20 million active transacting users monthly for each, these apps capture a substantial portion of urban India’s food spending.
The high volume makes them powerful enough to influence pricing, UX patterns, and consumer behavior — reinforcing the concern that a duopoly holds significant leverage over users’ wallets and experiences.
The sad part is, these apps have become essentials for young people, busy families, working professionals.
They’ve become infrastructure — without being regulated like infrastructure.
The Warning We Keep Ignoring
In aviation, it took a tragedy for people to notice how fragile the system really is.
In food delivery?
We’re still scrolling. Still paying. Still thinking it’s normal to pay ₹500 for a ₹300 order.
But the pattern is the same:
Power without peers
Design without checks
Ease without awareness
And once again — no meaningful way out.
Connecting the Dots
In aviation, a duopoly (Boeing–Airbus) led to complacency, reduced safety scrutiny, and systemic fragility.
In food delivery, a duopoly (Zomato–Swiggy) leads to complacency, exploitative pricing behavior, and unchecked manipulation of digital interfaces.
In both cases, the user has no exit. And in both cases, what starts as a convenience becomes a trap.
The stakes look different — one involves lives, the other livelihoods — but the pattern is the same:
When market power concentrates, transparency disappears, and trust gets taken for granted.
This is disempowerment. This is about how the loss of competition quietly erodes choice, and then makes us forget we ever had it.
It’s about the systems we’ve normalised:
Two airlines.
Two food apps.
Two aircraft manufacturers.
Two choices
So the real danger of a duopoly isn’t just economic — it’s psychological.
When choice shrinks to a binary, it conditions us to stop asking for better.
It breeds systems where defaults are disguised as decisions, and where power no longer needs to persuade — it just needs to persist.
That’s how complacency becomes culture.
And that’s when design stops being a tool for change, and starts becoming an accessory to control.
We’re not just scrolling. We’re surrendering.
So... What Do Ads Have to Do With This?
Here’s where my rant returns to the stage.
We often say ads distort markets — and they do.
But what if banning or stifling ads further entrenches power?
Advertising, for all its flaws, is often the only shot a new player has.
It’s how a third option even appears in our field of vision.
No ads? No entry.
If Zomato and Swiggy didn't advertise when they were new, we’d still be ordering from restaurant landlines. If Indigo hadn’t advertised its low-cost revolution, we’d still think flying was for the elite. But surprise surprise, when Indigo launched - it was competing against 3 major airlines. Now as the majority market share holder, its no more the low-cost carrier.
Advertising, in its most democratic form, is a visibility tool. Creating access to choice.
And taking it away doesn’t create fairness — instead it creates invisibility for the challenger.
As a Designer, Here’s What I’m Left Thinking
If we want to design for impact, we must design in full view of power — where it sits, how it shifts, how it behaves when all alone.
And maybe that’s what this is really about.
Not ads.
Not even capitalism.
But the systems we forget to question — until we crumble under its weight .
As designers, we have a responsibility to respond — to shape how narratives are framed, how choice is made transparent, and how fairness is built in.
We’re not just writing copy. We’re not just designing a screen. We’re not just creating a CTA.
We’re enabling a system.