What happened to Anti-Trust laws in the Untied States?

Question

What happened to Anti-Trust laws in the Untied States?

Answer 1

The Republican controlled FTC, is undoing them and tolerating violations all over the place

Answer 2

The FTC is supposed to enforce the Sherman

Act and other similar ones for the good of the economy. However, there are a few things at play here:

1.) There are very strong business interests that put a lot of money into lobbyists which give them a lot of political sway. For instance, Bill Gates was even able to get Congress to pass a law so he could import and drive his Porsche 959 which was illegal. With enough to do this imagine what he would do to save MS.

2.) There is a real debate over how to enforce anti-trust regulations. For instance, there are three ways to enforce monopolies:

a.) Have the gov't regulate the rules of operation, size, profit margins, etc.

b.) Have gov't run the business itself (like a public water company)

c.) Show no favoritism to the monopoly, but don't try to destroy it. Eventually, the market will bring it down.

Right now we do a mixture of all these things, but the business environment is very competitive so option C is used often. Look at MS, it lost all of it's server software market to free software (Apache) and it loosing market share to Mac and Linux. It takes a while (especially with gov't officials in MS's pocket) but they can come down without gov't intervention.