The class action lawsuit against Delta Air Lines, American Airlines and United Airlines (Big Three) with plaintiffs alleging illegal collusion to restrict capacity for the express purpose of fleecing consumers and boosting record-setting profits took an important turn earlier this year.

A US Federal judge granted preliminary approval of Southwest Airlines’ settlement with plaintiffs in return for paying $15 million and pledging to cooperate against the Big Three. 

This so-called “Icebreaker” settlement is reason for consumers to cheer. It could well pave the way for the class action plaintiffs to prove that the Big Three “colluded to limit capacity on their respective airlines in a conspiracy to fix, raise, maintain, and/or stabilize prices for air passenger transportation services in the United States” in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The settlement could also provide unintended visibility to global coordination among airlines to conspire against the interests of consumers.

The scope of Southwest’s promised cooperation is broad, and therefore, likely to be extremely worrisome to the Big Three. 

Is it far-fetched that this class action lawsuit might prove to be just the tip of the iceberg of the Big Three colluding to increase record-setting profits by jointly working in coordination to stifle competition? Not at all! In fact, January marks the three-year anniversary of the Big Three’s political campaign against Open Skies and the important consumer-friendly choice provided by Emirates Airline, Etihad Airways and Qatar Airways (Gulf Carriers). 

Even though it is blatantly obvious that this political campaign against Open Skies is nothing more than a coordinated, joint anti-competitive initiative masquerading under the guise of a policy debate, the Big Three claim that they are not motivated by enhancing their already historic profits. Rather, they portray themselves as champions of American workers motivated solely by an altruistic sense of national and moral responsibility to protect US jobs. 

The Big Three know well that an Achilles’ heel of their fictitious “we are the champion of US jobs” narrative is the stubborn and indisputable fact that Gulf Carriers, not the Big Three, are loyal customers of US built wide-body aircraft and their orders are a vital engine for creating and supporting hundreds of thousands of US aerospace manufacturing jobs. So, feeling vulnerable that their jobs-concern façade is cracking, the Big Three turned once again to their expert advisor Rob Britton to develop the most compelling rebuttal possible. 

Let’s hope that Southwest’s Icebreaker settlement and pledge of cooperation is as illuminating and helpful to the plaintiffs as its appropriately broad scope suggests. With the Big Three and Southwest controlling some 80 percent of the US domestic market, consumers are counting on it. Importantly, the unintended outcomes for the Big Three flowing from this settlement could include more clear visibility to consumer-harmful coordination among them and their partners in the US-Europe market. 

Along with their European antitrust immunized alliance and joint venture partners, the Big Three control over 80 percent of the seats in the US-Europe market. Immunization allows those market participants to engage in commercial activities that would otherwise be illegal. The Big Three and their European airline partners, along with their labor groups, have run a coordinated, scorched-earth campaign against the Gulf Carriers and Norwegian Air International in Washington and Brussels.

This historically unprecedented dominance in the domestic US and transatlantic markets makes tacit and explicit coordination among market participants a super grave risk for consumers. To be fair, when granting antitrust immunity to these airline partners, regulators could not have possibly anticipated how a downstream force-multiplier effect from US airline industry consolidation could produce such massive airline economic, political and market power to be used to frustrate new airline entry and harm consumers.

As evidenced by initiating a fourth year of the political campaign against Gulf Carrier new entry, the Big Three will not likely stop aggregating and coordinating their economic and political power in an effort to eliminate competition, maintain monopoly market positions and benefit from supra premium prices in thousands of US city-pair markets. As such, the Trump Administration needs to forcefully reject the embarrassing, un-American and thinly veiled neo-mercantilism embodied within the Big Three’s political campaign.

Finally, regulators and legislators on both sides of the Atlantic need to revisit the assumed public-interest efficacy of airline antitrust immunity. Brussels, in particular, needs to take heed of the many damaging consumer impacts of recent massive US airline industry consolidation before that preverbal egg is forever scrambled in Europe.   

Mitchell is the founder of the Business Travel Coalition and OpenSkies.travel.