What Does Open Skies mean?
US has always been odd about transport-open market. In marine there was a law involving "bottoms". Churchill and FDR clashed on open-skies in 1944 - "US' vainglorious ambitions for its airlines". It's all to do with cabotage-sabotage. In the days of Clipper-luxury, US' fear was of superior F/J service, not from surly Swiss, but Singapore girl - would you pay up to be snarled at Transcontinental by an AA grandmother if a flirty had domestic add-on legs? (mind wanders). Now its cheap Asian/Latino labour undermining all the ts&cs so harshly secured. It's not local add-ons by BA/LH, certainly not AF, that US fears, but a deluge of EK, Mex. and WhereStanAir claiming me-too and depressing domestic yield. Frequent Flyer bribes dont work anymore. This is why US' perception of open-skies has intra-EU as international up-for-grabs, intra-US as sovereign, so mine. Canucks have suffered 5th.Freedom discrimination for most of a century.
Protectionism will lapse here, as anywhere, when movers and shakers see net benefit. The new ingredients are demise of the post 9/11 "insurance" subsidies, and IRS attention to gates/slots-as-assets. US Legacy carriers, minus these, are profoundly loss-making, so need to build on Alliance sector-pooling, which is the cheap, invisible way of improving utilisation, loads and yields. "Ownership" is irrelevant.