Honest question: How can we help companies here "playing by the rules" in a global field against (in your airport example) entities like heavily subsidized UAE airlines, when they are essentially capped in some ways like this?

Now my "opinion" section WRT the above: If preventing consolidation and economies of scale forces airlines to other avenues such as sardine can planes, deceptive ticketing (economy levels that just take away things at the same price to push upselling), and govt protectionism (potentially exemplified by the laptop bans to some arab countries recently), is this the route we want to take? I don't have fantastic suggestions outside of "treat air as part of a US infrastructure which drastically needs govt. investment" so thus my question 1. (since I neither see my pipe-dream of infra commitment coming to pass, nor am completely sold on routing tax dollars to private corps, even if it would be an improvement on where they're being routed now. Perhaps build/maintain airports and infrastructure and be a "common carrier" of hardware that the companies simply rent? (I recognize states do this now, but I also know the level of infrastructure funding my state has available, and even intact roads are a fantasy.))