On consolidation and craft beer - it's already happened; the top "craft" beers were acquired by the corporate drinks industry and now account for 80% of the volume of sales.
Well, there's a bit of semantics here- we might not be using entirely the same definition of consolidation. If you're talking just about the volume of sales the dominance of the big brewers never went away. It got chipped away at, a bit, by craft brewing, but... well, I live in a small town that has a big university but is also something of a mecca for craft-brewing, and I'm pretty sure the most common beer purchase here is a 30-pack of Natural Light.
And that's fine- I was young once, and I know where the frat boys are coming from. I'm not a snob- well, actually, I am a bit of a snob, or at least very particular in my tastes when it comes to certain things, but I'm far too old, and far too much of a plebe when it comes to my tastes in other things, to want to look down my nose at anyone for their tastes.
That's not to say that I don't sometimes catch myself doing so. Old habits die hard, and I'm afraid I come from a background full of otherwise very nice people who were terrible snobs, and very willing to let their aesthetic sense justify their desire to control other people's behavior in ways I find.. unseemly
. I'm going to guess a lot of them would favor regulating vaping out of existence, because vaping is the sort of thing they would never do and it offends their sensibilities.
The thing is, I don't care if 80% of the volume is awful "craft" beer like Blue Moon. That's fine, and if that's what people want it's not my job, or my place, to police their tastes. I can still get an amazing variety of very interesting beers made within 30 miles of my house, and I still have a liquor store down the street that carries hundreds, if not thousands, of interesting and varied beers from all over the country, and the world.
Do I _need_ to be able to choose from hundreds, even thousands of beers? No. Will I ever even sample more than a relatively small number of them? No. Am I better off because there is so much ferment in the industry? I'd say yes, by a mile. And that ferment is only possible because (well, let's thank yeast as well,) while there is some regulation around brewing, perhaps more than there should be, it is not too onerous, and almost anyone with a bit of capital who yearns to start a brewery can (even if it will likely fail in a year or two.) If it cost millions of dollars to get each new beer approved there just wouldn't be the kind of small-scale craft brewing that allows me to be beggared by choice in a way that even the very rich couldn't have been a few decades ago.
Vaping, early on, benefitted greatly from the almost complete lack of regulation around it. I wasn't a super-early adopter (I might have started earlier if it hadn't been for all those claims that you couldn't actually get any nicotine from vaping- I'd like to invite those researchers to take a pull of my current juice in my current very conservative MTL setup, but I'd make sure they were sitting down first,) but I started vaping more than 5 years ago and it's _amazing_ how far things have come in that time.
I haven't been a regular poster here, but I'm aware of how much of a role ECF has played in that. People mooted ideas, other people picked them up and turned them into garage businesses, Chinese companies picked up on them and made them more affordable, adding their own innovations... there was very little friction involved and things could go from something only a dedicated hobbyist could make use of to something fairly accessible in a matter of weeks or months. Imagine what vaping would be like today if it had been heavily regulated from the beginning.
And, just like craft beer, the power law tells us that the volume of sales is going to be heavily biased toward a few companies mass-producing goods that people buy en masse (which is what I think you mean by consolidation.) But there are a zillion little companies out there innovating, and those innovations not only give us lots of choices but will spur innovation in mass-market applications, as long as those small experimenters are not regulated out of existence. But if they are- watch for the pace of innovation to slow dramatically.
