Buying-Up The Competition...

So, what’s the point of “free enterprise” if the most powerful one buys out all the others? Do consumers really get the bets price? Ultimately, who pays for “free enterprise”? - Jinx

In the US and EU, among other places, antitrust laws regulate mergers among competitors. Where the antitrust regulators determine that a particular merger will have an anti-competitive impact, they can prohibit it or impose conditions to lessen the impact on competition.