In general markets are pretty good at arbitrage. If you can get a $50 discount for a product by doing X, someone is going to set up a service whereby they do X for you, resell the product for a $45 discount and put $5 in their own pocket. At which point nobody would pay full price to the original seller and the convenience fee for not doing it yourself is $5 instead of $50.

The problem comes when the original seller doesn't want their price discrimination scheme to be thwarted by efficiency-improving arbitrageurs and takes measures to prevent that, because that's rent-seeking behavior and shouldn't be tolerated.

Being the status quo doesn't change that it's an inefficient waste of resources. That's still true.

The airline wastes resources on their end, and so do the consumers. They're both doing what they're incentivized to do, but that's not what's actually efficient for society. The whole point of a good economy is that these two are always pulled into alignment (Efficient Market Hypothesis), but ours has failed in this case.

It was fascinating to chat with the software engineers at ITA Software.[0] Turns out flight routing (which everyone knows "should be" just a simple A*) is actually NP-Hard because of how convoluted the airline pricing systems are. At that company it was obviously a group of super smart people solving super hard problems..... and for what?

This is Kurt Vonnegut Jr's "Dynamic tension": muscles working against muscles, with no work being done. This is what Bullshit Jobs (good title, disappointing book) should have been written about.

To quote Eisenhower, this (lesser) scourge also

  signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.  It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

Maybe an outright ban isn't the best intervention (and maybe it is), but I'm certain denial of the underlying problem will yield us zero progress.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29425650 or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software