Making a journey involving two different companies is, for an individual bus company, a different proposition to tickets which are interavailable on competing services. A problem being that your customers will not understand the difference! The only solutions acceptable to bus operators are likely to be called collusion and not acceptable to the competition authorities!
I've highlighted in bold something I mentioned further up the thread: that the cack-handed way provincial privatisation occurred means that any attempt to collaborate would look like collusion or a cartel.
I still don't understand how you reach the conclusion that cowboys would come crawling out of the woodwork if there was integrated ticketing. West Yorkshire, which has always had strong integrated ticketing, is a beacon of light with the all-operator WY DaySaver costing as little as £5.50 on a smartcard for one day and £8.50 for the whole weekend. Yet the only independents you see operating are on tenders. This is despite the ticket acting as a brake on operator-specific fares: the WY FirstDay is only 30p cheaper than the WY DaySaver and the Bradford FirstDay is only 80p cheaper. Arriva's day ticket is only 60p cheaper than the any-operator alternative.
As an aside, that weekender ticket is a great example of how good public-sector public transport bodies can develop really good and useful products and get leisure travellers out on spare capacity. The weekender is valid from 6pm Friday and is both well promoted and extremely good value. Compare a ticket like that with First, who without any sense of shame charge £3.60 for a single ticket from Queensbury to Halifax, a distance of about three miles.
With my robber baron hat on I would completely agree with you - carve up the areas that are profitable between a few of us, (giving us monopolies and integrated fare structures), gang up on any newcomers to the High Street [not letting them into our cartel] before going for Amazon, run rings round the rules regarding sharp practices as they would be fairly blunt because one size won't fit all. Sounds ideal. Sounds like high fares and poor service could get some short term profits before tackling Amazon. Maybe enough so I can retire first.
In reality this happened a long time ago, though. Most bus operators now exist in their own little bubbles, with little or no on-road competition. In areas with multiple operators, they all have patches. In Greater Manchester Stagecoach, Rotala, Transdev, (the remains of) First and Go have their own little kingdoms, and there is little or no interaction between the different patches. It's the same in West Yorkshire- Arriva/Yorkshire Tiger, First and Transdev all have their own little patches. And in Tyne and Wear between Go, Stagecoach and Arriva. And in Merseyside. And in Nottingham. And in Glasgow. You get my drift.
And the vast majority of areas will only have one dominant operator- Go in Brighton, Isle of Wight, Bournemouth/Poole. Arriva in south-west Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire. National Express in Birmingham and Coventry. Lothian in Edinburgh.
As I said, the real competitor is the private car and, sometimes, taxis. Monopoly operators could charge stupid money for a ticket but nobody would travel with them (see First Potteries for more information).
On-road competition has largely been a fallacy for 20 years or more. The "bus wars" in recent times- Preston, Manchester, Nottingham- are more notable for how unusual they were.
Here I will give a special mention to Arriva and Go, who after a succession of secret handshakes now only really directly compete on the Coast Road corridor (but not exactly- Arriva and Go take different routes) and, at a stretch, along the A69 to Hexham.
As a comparison, the First weekly ticket in Bristol £18.90. The multi operator Bristol Rider ticket is £20.00 but then again, it's not well publicised (especially by First!)
Agreed, it's certainly not across the board that the any-operator ticket is eye-wateringly expensive. It isn't in West Yorkshire either, as above. Perhaps it's a north east thing. If you live in Teesside and only want a one-day any-operator ticket, your only choice is the Explorer North East at £10.90. A phenomenally good value ticket for bus bashing, but a bit pricey if you're only going from Ingleby Barwick to Billingham.