Comment by pessimizer

Capitalism, an undeniable driver of innovation, incentivizes firms to endlessly innovate ways to avoid competition. The only question is whether the anti-competitive innovation is more or less expensive than the innovation they'll have to do to compete.

It's not even really a question, it's a collective action problem, nominally hampered by price-fixing laws. Price-fixing laws are an indication that the desire to avoid competition is so strong and so dangerous that to slow it down we're willing to abridge the supposedly universal freedoms of speech and of association.