I wasn't aware doing your hair or driving a taxi had a dearth of competition. Not arguing necessarily in favor of licensing, but that doesn't exactly support your point.
Sure it does. I guess I had this column in mind when I wrote that:
The Cancer of Regulation by John Stossel on Creators.com - A Syndicate Of Talent
The point is the barriers to entry are made artificially high in some places. There's no reason for such restrictive regulations except as a tool for established businesses to use the force of government to lock out competition.
The three specific industries I've mentioned so far - airlines, cellular providers and ISPs - do not have to compete with each other. When you're providing a service that most people consider necessary (as almost all of those except for possibly airlines generally are), and there are a grand total of two, maybe three options in an area for that service, both companies are well aware that the only real way to draw in new customers is to attempt to increase brand loyalty (which is almost always cheaper to do through advertising than through improving their services).
Since they're aware that many of their customers are emotionally invested (or as is the case for cell phone companies, contractually obligated), they can easily get away with practices such as raising their prices, removing options and limiting usage, and there's not much of anything anyone will be able to do about it. Airline companies have been continually raising their rates and increasing fees on every minor thing ever for the past 10 years. Cell phone companies have been increasing their costs and slowly limiting what users are allowed to do with their services more and more lately. ISPs want to create tiered networks at slower speeds rather than compete to improve network quality and speeds, while still raising monthly rates.
A company may be able to get people to try their product with good advertising, but it takes a lot more than that to keep them coming back. People aren't stupid and these companies know that. Companies only wish they could win that kind of loyalty so easily, but they know it's impossible, so they have to keep trying to beat their competitors. Even in the cell phone market where contracts are involved, they know customers can always go look elsewhere once the contract's up or use pay-as-you services.
Let's look at your three examples.
Airline companies- The reason they've been raising rates and increasing fees over the past 10 years is that they've been very unprofitable for most of the past 10 years. First, they survived 9/11 and then oil prices went through the roof. For all the nickel-and-diming they're doing, it's still wasn't enough to cover the cost of business. I remember in 2008 when gas prices were heading towards $4/gallon and airlines started charging for luggage. Southwest managed not to do that because they had bought several years of fuel before prices went up. They advertised that like crazy. That's competition at work. And as much as I like Southwest and feel some loyalty to them, if I see an American Airlines flight for cheaper, I'll take it.
Cell phones- You complain about limiting options and I have no idea where you get that. Just ten years ago, all you could really do with cell phones was call people and text. Nowadays, you can use them to take pictures, record videos, surf the net, download apps, and even watch entire movies on demand, all with improved coverage from nearly every corner of the country. If you're talking about limiting data usage, well yeah, that's made necessary by all the options that have been added over the years. People didn't use to use gigabytes of bandwidth every month like they are now and bandwidth is not free.
Internet- It's a contradiction to simultaneously complain about tiered services and lack of options. If you want really fast internet for gaming or watching movies, you can get it in most places if you're willing to pay. However, if you're just interested in checking email, looking up the occasional website, and yapping on forums, you're probably better off getting the slow internet and paying less. Heck, I use the slower service and I have no trouble watching movies or doing whatever. Like cell phones, internet usage has increased exponentially over the years and people use far more bandwidth than they used to. It was estimated that in 2007, YouTube alone was responsible for more internet traffic than the entire internet in 2000, and it's only exploded since then. Yes, my internet bill has increased some, but it's been pretty modest, especially considering all that.