Is there a mechanism to prevent fees from spiraling up?

Assuming we achieve enough adoption to be used as payment gateway for more than half of the world commerce, what prevents corporations to front-run transactions by paying higher fees, keeping competitors (and retail) pinned down?

Imagine Corporation A paying higher fees than Corporation B to front-run their transactions, Corporation B notices and pays higher fees, and so forth. Little Jimmy wants to send grandma $100 for her diabetes medicine, which is suddenly stuck in this bidding war.

Is there a way for preventing "ransoming" transactions if you have enough money to do so? Or are we just relying on people's good faith? I do realize that people will always try to pay the lowest fee possible, but if Intel can fuck AMD by locking their transaction to acquire X or Y behind a fee wall, they could.

I do remember waiting almost a month for a tx to complete after China exiled its miners, for example.