Antitrust law is the law of competition, and it is perhaps the least understood law of all. This article provides an overview and explanation of the essential principals of antitrust law, along with comments on certain recurring themes and recent developments in the voluminous case law by which the courts have struggled to give meaning and practical effect to the principal antitrust statutes.
What Is Antitrust Law? Broadly speaking, antitrust laws seek to promote fair competition on the merits and to protect consumers and wronged competitor businesses from anti-competitive business practices — practices undertaken in effort to undermine competitive commercial behavior in a given market or line of commerce.
The antitrust laws therefore forbid the wrongful acquisition or preservation of monopoly power, the abuse of monopoly power in order to establish a new monopoly, and concerted restraints of trade (i.e., business practices undertaken by two or more firms that improperly stifle or suppress “competition on the merits” in a given market). They also govern proposed mergers and acquisitions that are sufficiently large to constitute a threat to competition, and they address commercial practices that pose an arguable danger to competition on the merits in a properly defined antitrust market.
The Principal Antitrust Offenses. Antitrust law is the law of competition. It is concerned with wrongs committed against competition on the merits in a given line of commerce or market. It is never enough for a plaintiff to allege that it has been harmed by an unscrupulous defendant. Rather, an antitrust plaintiff must show that the defendant or defendants have undermined competition in a distinct market, and that this injury to competition in general has specifically harmed the plaintiff in particular. Thus a plaintiff in an antitrust case must make a showing of “antitrust harm”