I have a hunch, The past 10-15 years has seen a large slew of mergers in all industries, (tech, telecoms, pharma, food, grocery, etc) that have created shared monopolies in most sectors of the economy. Given that news, monopolies function is not to deliver productivity for productivity's sake, but to extract profits from inside that sector. Most of these companies are sprawling behemoths where managers are encouraged to grow headcount(as it makes them look more important) while still keeping the profit machines flowing. I'm not the least bit surprised as if we had a country where smaller players were duking it out in their respective sectors, you would get faster innovation.

Bottom line, more competition is good for end customers, and good for productivity as well.