"Natural Competition" in this space can never be. What you're seeing is exactly how this space turns out. Verisign controls the registry for the .com TLD. They

"Natural Competition" in this space can never be. What you're seeing is exactly how this space turns out. Verisign controls the registry for the .com TLD. They run the centralized authority that ultimately says if a .com domain is "legit" or not. The Registrars like Namecheap and friends are just the messengers authorized to register .com domains into this larger database and they pay Verisign for the privilege to do so. While it's possible for anyone to go out and stand up their own .COM zone in DNS, any domains created by that registrar don't actually exist in the eyes of the larger Internet and will not work.