“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices” - Adam Smith
Some things never change.
So, the CAB is maybe a useful contrasting example. The CA/Browser Forum (CA/B or CAB for short) was a meeting that happened as a mixture of conference calls and email lists back in 2011 or so. This is where Extended Validation (the green bar) comes from, but ultimately CA/B metamorphosed into a standing (in the sense of ongoing, not you can't sit down) meeting, still going on today, for the Certificate Authorities and the Browsers (today in practice the Operating System vendors, but with Mozilla standing in for the Free Unixes) to get together to figure out what the rules are.
Because of what Smith notes, the CA/B's rules are explicit that discussion about prices, product offerings and so on is prohibited, if you want to conspire to raise prices you'll have to do it somewhere else.
But plenty of _good_ things can be agreed this way. Contrast the many years it took to get rid of MD5 from certificates (which happened before CA/B existed) despite collisions being known - against SHA-1 where CA/B was able to co-ordinate industry wide discontinuation of SHA-1 with only a handful of minor defections before even a single proven collision of the hash was published.
More broadly I'd argue that the IETF, and certainly the thrice annual IETF physical meetings (the most recent was in Singapore last week) are exactly "people of the same trade... meet together" and you could characterise plenty of the work done at many Working Groups (obviously DPRIVE and QUIC but I don't see any reason you couldn't make this claim for KITTEN for example) as a conspiracy, just that it's only "against the public" if you think global surveillance was what "the public" wanted...
Most of my friends are co-workers, or other people in the industry, including competitors (more the field/sales types than the corporate/management types, because you see them when you are bidding for a client's buisiness).
One of my friends used to be an employee. He quit. He then forked me. He then undercut me (or, well, my prices).
Somehow, I don't know how, maybe because I am such a sterling man of honor (ed: throwaway prince Andrew reference), we are still friends. But I've got to tell you! In terms of price? It's kind of still a race to the bottom. (At least for the vanilla, not the value-add, product)
So - even though Adam Smith has it right (he often does!), the public does not. We are enjoying shared stories of battle, over large accounts, and the blow-by-blows during large-account acquisitions go, and toasting one another's accomplishments, after battle, but ... the prices end up going down. It is the nature of competition.