From childhood you were taught that the market rests on competition. Coca-Cola fights Pepsi, so both try harder for you. Airlines undercut each other, so the ticket gets cheaper. Banks compete for the customer, so deposit rates rise. Competition is the engine that forces companies to work for the consumer.
A lovely theory. It has one problem. If you look at who owns all these "competitors," it turns out the owner is one and the same.
One master on both sides
Back to the Big Three's arithmetic. They hold 15–25% of nearly every major company. The word "every" is the key here. It means the same funds own both Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Both American Airlines and Delta and United. All the big banks at once. And competing pharma companies simultaneously.
Now ask a simple question — the way someone who holds stakes in both companies would ask it. Do you want your two companies to wage a brutal price war? No. In a price war both lose profit. As the common owner, you want exactly the opposite: that they do NOT compete too hard. That they keep prices a bit higher, don't slash margins, don't destroy each other for the sake of your wallet.
There it is, conflict of interest in its purest form. Whoever owns all the players on the field roots for no single team. He roots for the game to bring more money to him — which means he roots for the teams not to try too hard.
A cartel that needs no meeting
In the old days, to avoid competing, factory owners secretly met and agreed to hold prices. That's called a cartel, and people go to prison for it. It required a gathering, minutes, collusion — that is, evidence.
Common ownership does the same thing, but with no meeting at all. No one agrees on anything in a smoke-filled room. The "competitors" simply share the same major shareholder, who at each of their meetings votes for the same priorities: profit growth, caution about price wars, generous bonuses to management for "discipline." The result is cartel-like — but collusion is impossible to prove, because in the legal sense there is no collusion. There is a structure.
In IT it's as if all the "competing" cloud providers belonged to one holding company. Why would they truly fight on price? From the outside, a choice of five logos. Inside, one owner who has no interest in them brawling. Competition turns into theater: the set is there, the fight is not.
Where fact ends and caution begins
Let's be honest and careful. Fact: common ownership of major competitors through the Big Three is real and described in academic work; economists have seriously studied how it relates to prices in airlines and banking. Caution: proving that a specific price on a specific ticket rose precisely because of the common owner is very hard — too many factors.
But the logic of the structure doesn't require a direct order. It's enough that the most influential shareholder has not a single reason to want real, fierce competition — and every reason to want the opposite. The incentive is built into the design. And incentives, as any systems engineer knows, beat good intentions over the long run.
How it hits you
Right in the wallet. If "competitors" quietly don't fight, you pay more — for tickets, for medicine, for banking, for everything. The competition that was supposed to work for you is switched off not by a ban, but by the ownership structure. You still see ads saying "we're cheaper!" but the real downward pressure on prices keeps fading.
And a separate bitter irony: you finance this machine, again. It was your pension money that filled the funds that now own all sides at once and have no interest in prices falling for you. You funded a structure that works against your own wallet.
Where is the ordinary person here
You are both the consumer who overpays and the unwitting co-investor in the very machine that makes you overpay. Your shareholder vote (via your pension) could push companies in your favor — but it's in the hands of a fund whose interest is the exact opposite. The classic trap: your resource works against you, because it's wielded by someone whose goals don't match yours.
What to do about it: the MAAT token and DAO
The root of the problem is a mismatch of interests. The common owner's goal is "let the companies bring more money to me"; your goal is "let goods and services be fair and affordable." As long as he votes, his goal wins. The cure is to return the vote to those whose interest is that of a consumer and a worker, not of a holder of all sides at once.
That is MAAT. The MAAT token is membership in a cooperative and a single vote. Not "one dollar, one vote" like the funds, whose interest diverges from yours, but one human, one vote. Decisions are made in a DAO — a decentralized organization with a transparent treasury where every movement of funds and every vote is visible. A million coordinated co-owners whose interest is that of normal people can push, at the meeting, exactly where the fund finds it unprofitable to push: for fair prices, against the quiet cartel.
The Big Three owns all sides and therefore roots for no one but itself. MAAT is the side that roots for you, because it is made of you. The entry is simple: read the book, take the token, get your vote.