[0] ...often legally protected...
Want a free market? Stop messing with it.
Yes, they do. Price competition and R&D are expensive activities. Businesses seek to maximize profit, as they're not charities or governmental entities. Neutralizing competition (whether by eliminating it or colluding with it) and entering into private agreements with suppliers and vendors to box out any potential upstarts increases profit. Another fine way for a monopoly or cartel to increase profit is to make their product cheaper to produce by adulterating it with inferior ingredients, but mislead customers about the fact of the quality loss, the reason for the quality loss, or both.
The natural stable state of a profit-seeking business is the establishment of a monopoly or cartel. You get the most profit when there is neither a need to compete on price nor a need to expend resources on improving one's product.
You might be surprised to learn that the private sector can enter into durable agreements much like the public sector does. It's how things like mon/oligopolies and cartels form and persist.
Anyway. I'd suggest you go read your histories, but you're either unlikely to, or don't have enough supporting information to understand what they're telling you. If you're young enough [0] to be alive thirty to sixty years from now, and you're living in a place -like the US- that's steadily dismantling its consumer protection regulations, then do pay attention to how things have changed between now and near to the end of your life. Take especial care to track down the root causes of the differences, rather than just uncritically swallowing whatever explanations you're handed.
[0] ...and lucky enough...
A lot of ISPs need permitting that they will never get in order to enter a new market/location.
Open societies, in contrast, must balance many competing interests and voting factions, meaning that free market supporters have limited power to enact their preferred policies, meaning they rarely can be implemented in a “pure” form.
“Open society!” coos the fox to the henhouse. LOL, no thanks!
If your system needs absolute theoretical purity to work, then it's worthless. And that's true of both communism and free market.
It seems a bit like saying humans will never fly. It's a question of technology level, in the sense that governance is a form of economic technology. Which is what leaves it open to people saying it can be done better.
The best solution changes over time, essentially. It's a question of fitness to the current context.
And until you get a technology that prevents leadership to be egoistic and corrupt, Communism is never going to work.
I'm not holding my breath for any of those tech to happen.
[1]: interestingly enough, such a condition is pretty much antithetical to capitalism as it requires capital to be free.
Most successful economies are largely market-based, as things stand today. Even the successful command economies (i.e. China) use markets extensively.
Unless you mean perfectly free markets will never be perfect resource allocators. Well yes, perhaps, but what does that matter if there's no perfect solution? The nudges required to 'fix' markets are a form of technology, as discussed. As such, it either exists and is effective or not.
And even these economies are structured around monopolistic and oligopolistic actors.
They are as related to “free market” as northern European countries welfare state is related to Communism.
Like there's a whole zoo of healthcare provision approaches, for example. Single payer can work fine (ala Norway), but so can Bismarck (ala Switzerland). The latter is a technological architecture that _enables_ similar or better outcomes, while being closer to a fully market-based approach.
Also, if you call regulations “technologies” (which I don't disagree with) then “free market” means technology-free.
Also, I'm not sure a free market is technology-free per se. What you're talking about is specifically ancap-like, but most free market frameworks involve a state actor that should (among other things) not allow for itself to be weaponized against other market participants.
Like the paradox of tolerance, you can't tolerate a free market for bribing your way to benefit from the state's monopoly on violence. I don't think the existence of this paradox destroys the value of free markets or tolerance.
I'm sorry to tell you we don't build spaceports on top of mountain, for a reason.