What happens is you end up with a wasteful meta-bureaucracy where competing companies and governments form committees to set prices.

I used to work for an ocean container shipping company, and due to idiosyncrasies of maritime law and the fact that these companies are considered "too big to fail" by governments, they are exempt from certain price-fixing laws in many countries including the US and Canada (but they are no longer exempt in the EU since 2008). Carriers are required to publish their rate schedules and surcharges and jointly announce rate increases 30 days in advance of the effective date.

They also share service strings, so a weekly Transpacific service may have a rotation of five different vessels from different carriers, who lease each other container space. They are officially not allowed to restrict supply in a coordinated fashion to prop up prices anymore, but they have to jointly make operational decisions to downsize or cancel service strings, which is effectively the same thing.

The result of this, along with numerous government and private bailouts, is that many of these perennially loss-making companies with inefficient operations and terrible service continue to limp along and slowly bleed shareholder value, whereas in a free market they would have been bankrupted and their assets liquidated years ago.