Consider how much money is at stake: some industries have leveraged their power to lobby for bombing entire countries or topple regimes across the world for much less.

Creating an industry around an elusive concept of safety to force regulatory capture seems pretty straightforward to me.

It's standard regulatory capture.

You don't say "let's ban my competitor".

You say "let's create laws that make it uneconomical for my competitor to access the market".

I mean... I'm not even extraordinarily cynical about this stuff, but to me this seems like a totally normal level of corporate gamesmanship?

Companies look for and seek to maintain competitive moats. This is not particularly clever, it's a core part of corporate strategy.