Squashed usually means bought up, but of course there are plenty of other ways to destroy a competitor. It really depends on the state the local judicial system en political system is in. To name but one example in Brazil, a few big construction companies could just bribe some politicians and top brass of Petrobas for all kinds of big deals, that their competitors would not get. That got blown up in the end because the judicial system does still work over there.

About the cell phone operators, I was asking you if you had seen any new ones recently. Because you haven't. An example of a cell phone company that got squashed by being bought in my country (NL) is Ben, which got bought bij T-Mobile. Or Telfort, which is now part of KPN. We only have a couple of operators left, I'm guessing you have too.

Point being of course in practice,in any industry where companies need large amounts of capital to be competitive, it's not only very hard to enter the market as a new player, but existing players will do anything they can to prevent new players to succeed. I mean why wouldn't they. They only thing stopping them is laws, like anti-trust laws.