It looks like the pumpkin hour for AMR and perhaps it's time to revive the economic regulation debate. So I'd like to toss a few thawts into the forum to see what everyone is thinking these days: Would the "deregulated" electric utility model work for the US airline industry? That is, would it be possible to treat the existing carriers as regulated utilities and push all the seats into a commodity market? It would be an extension of the code-sharing model except that the regulated "operating" carriers would not be allowed to participate in the market for the seats except as suppliers to the "marketing" companies who would be challenged to wrap the commodity in value-added services. A true commodity market could then develop that would include truly transparent spot, forward and futures mechanisms that would allow efficient price discovery. Of course the operating carriers would have to give up their right to participate as market makers and would necessarily have to abandon their massive 3rd degree price discrimination infrastructure (aka "revenue management"), but then, those models are all disfunctional now anyway. The operating carriers would have to be content then with a regulated, modest, but steady, long-term return on their monumental capital investments. The marketing companies, virtual airlines if you will, would assume the risks of seat ownership in exchange for the opportunities to extract as much consumer surplus as they can legally get their hands on. The implications of such a model are quite profound of course, but then so is the prospect of chapter 11 for the top 5 carriers in the industry.