United States v. Monopoly: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of Antitrust Law

Antitrust law in the United States, once a populist crusade against monopolies, had faded into obscurity by the early 21st century. Today’s question is whether the movement’s revival under the Biden administration can be sustained.

In the late 19th century’s “Gilded Age,” America was faced with an unprecedented monopoly problem. Giant corporate trusts began to dominate industries by consolidating power and suppressing competition.

A well-known example is John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil trust, formed in 1882, which oversaw the collusion of independent oil refiners to dictate prices and supply. Similar trusts spread across other sectors, allowing a handful of firms to control markets like cartels. This concentration of economic power alarmed the public, and reformers warned that these trusts could use their dominance to manipulate prices and corrupt politics, thereby threatening the idea of a fair, competitive economy.

The public backlash over these trusts paved the way for the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which broadly prohibited arrangements that monopolised industries. Though intended to limit trusts, the law’s language was vague, and it was only sporadically enforced. It worked, for instance, to break up Standard Oil into 34 companies, but failed when the Supreme Court ruled that the American Sugar Refining Company, despite controlling 98 percent of all sugar refining in the US, did not constitute a monopoly.

Curbing monopolies was originally about safeguarding competition, innovation, and democratic equality, not just preventing price gouging. From the very start, US trustbusters understood that monopolies do more than overcharge consumers. They threaten the foundations of a healthy capitalist economy and democracy.

When one company dominates a market, it can strangle competition and distort markets, wielding outsized control over supply and quality. Such unchecked power disincentivises innovation: a monopolist can maintain profits without improving products or services, since customers lack alternatives. It’s not only consumers who suffer. Workers feel the impact as well, as fewer competing employers mean lower wages and weaker bargaining power, effectively allowing monopolies to command the price of goods and labour. Meanwhile, an extreme concentration of economic power often translates into robust political power. Giant firms can spend freely on lobbying and can sway media narratives, undermining fair public debate.

A new wave of antitrust measures followed in the Progressive Era: Congress passed the Clayton Antitrust Act in 1914 to fill in the gaps of the Sherman Act. The Clayton Act explicitly defined and outlawed practices like anti-competitive mergers, predatory pricing, and exclusive dealing. The same year marked the creation of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), a regulatory agency tasked with enforcing antitrust regulations. By the mid-20th century, antitrust enforcement had gained considerable momentum, challenging monopolies in industries from movie studios to telecommunications.

Despite this early success, the antitrust movement failed to stay its course. Its strict enforcement triggered backlash, and by the end of the 20th century, antitrust law was reinterpreted to limit its scope. Moving forward, it was reasoned that the sole goal of antitrust law should be maximising consumer welfare. In simpler terms, as long as prices remained low and output high, trusts and large corporations were not to be bothered––a sharp departure from the original anti-monopoly ethos.

The consumer welfare standard transformed US competition policy. Business practices once deemed anti-competitive were reclassified as benign or even efficiency-enhancing. Court intervention in market dominance decreased. From the 1980s onward, antitrust enforcement slowed, and corporate consolidation expanded. By the 2010s, the United States had little antitrust enforcement, and nearly no movement left. Antitrust law, once a fierce defence against monopolies, had been tamed.

In the wake of this decline, a handful of tech titans have achieved a dominance reminiscent of old trusts. Companies like Amazon, Google, Apple, and Meta have built platforms that countless consumers and businesses rely on.

Their power is supercharged by network effects: the more users a platform has, the more indispensable it becomes to all users. Meta’s platforms, particularly Facebook and Instagram, have attracted billions of users, making it nearly impossible for a new competitor to draw people away. Similarly, Amazon has become such a behemoth in online retail that many merchants must use Amazon’s marketplace to reach their customers.

An even clearer symbol of the current monopoly problem is the pattern of these tech megafirms buying out any would-be rivals. Meta (formerly Facebook) bought two of its biggest competitors: Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. Google and Amazon have each been on a similar warpath, each acquiring dozens of smaller firms in various fields, expanding their dominance horizontally and vertically. The result is an economy where key markets are controlled by a few giants.

Lina Khan emerged as a leading voice calling attention to these new monopoly threats. In 2017, while still a law student, she published a landmark article titled Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox. Khan argued that decades of narrow focus on consumer welfare had blinded regulators to the ways that online platforms were gaining chokeholds on the digital economy. Amazon, she pointed out, uses low prices as a weapon, sacrificing profits in order to undercut rivals and capture market share. The paradox, as described by Khan, was that Amazon’s very success in delivering cheap goods and convenient services insulated it from antitrust scrutiny, even as the company gained overwhelming market power.

Khan’s article advocated for a return to earlier principles that opposed excessive concentration even when consumer prices remained low. These principles argue that antitrust should protect not only consumer prices, but also the competitive structure of markets and democracy itself––echoing the original goals of the Sherman Act. By the late 2010s, this intellectual shift had laid the groundwork for policy changes.

The election of President Biden in 2020 brought many of these antitrust ideas into the spotlight. In 2021, Biden made the striking move of appointing Khan, then just 32 years old, as Chair of the Federal Trade Commission. With these and other appointments, the Biden administration quickly adopted an aggressive and public stance on antitrust. Under Khan’s watch, the FTC wasted little time: the agency refiled a major lawsuit against Meta seeking to walk back the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions, and sued to block big proposed mergers, such as Nvidia’s attempted takeover of Arm in the semiconductor industry and Microsoft’s bid to buy Activision Blizzard in gaming.

The Justice Department, for its part, filed landmark monopoly cases against Google––one targeting its search business, another its online advertising dominance––and sued to stop massive mergers in insurance, publishing, and other sectors. In July 2021, President Biden issued an executive order promoting competition across the economy, directing agencies to scrutinise consolidation across all sectors. After decades of inaction, the antitrust movement was revived.

Early results of these efforts have been mixed. Judges handed the FTC high-profile losses in its attempts to block the Meta-Within VR acquisition and the Microsoft-Activision deal. Legislatively, a bipartisan package of tough new antitrust bills stalled in the face of intense tech industry lobbying. Nonetheless, Big Tech firms that once assumed their acquisitions or business tactics would sail through are encountering serious pushback. The Justice Department prevailed in the landmark antitrust case against Google’s monopolisation of digital advertising markets. In his ruling, Judge Amit P. Mehta quotes, “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.”

Since returning to office in 2025, President Trump has taken a very different approach to antitrust, pushing back against the revival of recent years. Lina Khan stepped down as FTC chair, replaced by Trump’s appointee, Andrew Ferguson, who vowed to end the prior administration’s “assault on the American way of life” and usher in a more business-friendly era.

At the Justice Department, Trump installed Gail Slater to head antitrust. Slater’s “America First” antitrust agenda claims to focus on the needs of “forgotten” workers and small businesses, arguing that deregulation is key to this effort. The Trump administration has also moved to reverse several high-profile cases. The Justice Department, for instance, eased off part of its landmark Google monopoly suit, dropping a proposed remedy that would force Google to divest certain AI investments.

Overall, Trump’s 2025 term has been marked by hostility toward the antitrust resurgence: scaling back or settling aggressive cases, installing industry-friendly officials, and steering policy in a pro-business, anti-regulatory direction. Critics warn that his approach represents a return to laissez-faire attitudes, and even a weaponisation of antitrust to further his ideological agenda.

The fight over the future of antitrust is far from over. As the political current shifts, so too does the nation’s approach to monopoly power. Whether the United States can revive the spirit of its early trustbusters or return to lax enforcement will shape the economy and the health of democracy itself.