Originally Posted by
orbitmic
(2) In the land of liberalism and free and fair competition, it so happens that major US airlines have for many years behaved in an explicitly oligopolistic way, imitating each others' pricing (on many itineraries, the exact same lowest fare across the major airlines), policies (e.g when withdrawing free food, when withdrawing free checked luggage allowance on domestic flights for non-elite customers and charging exactly the same fees of $25 for first bag and $35 for second bag, on withdrawing the second free bag on international itineraries, etc).
Arguably, this is how a competitive market works when that market is not atomistic.
I think that these two points considerably limit the notion of what they can imitate, if only because it seems to me that 'low cost' in the US simply means something entirely different (arguably essentially single class) from 'low cost' in Europe (essentially much lower fares and historically lower service)
Indeed. In addition to the factors you mention, another very important one is that LCCs in the US are network carriers allowing connections whereas European LCCs like FT or U2 are strictly point-to-point and systematic in minimising costs, which their US counterparts are not to the same extent, notwithstanding the fact that Southwest might have been the grandfather of them all that inspired the MoLs of this world.