# Antitrust > [!info] Chronology > For the dated sequence — English common law through the Trump II enforcement record — see **[[US Antitrust and Monopoly Timeline]]**. **Antitrust** is the body of U.S. law and enforcement aimed at preserving competition by restraining monopoly power, cartels, and anticompetitive mergers. Its statutory spine is the [[Sherman Antitrust Act]] (1890), extended by the [[Clayton Antitrust Act]] (1914) and the [[Federal Trade Commission Act]] (1914), which created the [[FTC]]. Enforcement authority is split between the [[FTC]] and the [[Antitrust Division]] of the Department of Justice. The canonical early target was [[Standard Oil]], broken into 34 companies by the Supreme Court in 1911; the AT&T breakup of 1984 and the Microsoft case of the late 1990s are the other landmark structural actions. ## The consumer welfare standard and the Bork revolution For most of the late twentieth century, enforcement was governed by the **"consumer welfare standard"** associated with [[Robert Bork]]'s *The Antitrust Paradox* (1978). Bork — a [[Chicago School]] legal scholar — argued that the sole legitimate goal of antitrust is consumer welfare measured by price and output, so that conduct should be lawful unless it could be shown to raise prices for consumers. This narrowed antitrust dramatically: mergers that concentrated industries were waved through so long as they promised efficiency and lower prices, and concerns about the *political and structural* dangers of bigness — the original Brandeisian rationale — were dismissed as economically illiterate. The standard became bipartisan orthodoxy from the Reagan era onward and presided over decades of consolidation across airlines, telecoms, agriculture, hospitals, and technology. ## The neo-Brandeisian revival The early 2020s saw a sustained challenge to the Bork consensus. The **neo-Brandeisian** movement — named for Justice Louis Brandeis and led intellectually by [[Lina Khan]], whose 2017 student note "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" became its manifesto — argued that antitrust should police market structure itself, not just consumer prices. Khan, as FTC chair from 2021 to 2025, brought cases against [[Amazon]] and [[Meta]] and (with DOJ) [[Google]], targeted "killer acquisitions" and roll-ups, and pushed antitrust to recognize labor-market power, or [[Monopsony]] — the harm done when dominant employers suppress wages, an injury invisible to a pure consumer-price test. ## A live partisan and intra-right battleground Antitrust is unusual in cutting *across* the normal partisan lines, and it has become a genuine fault line on the right. A populist, "khanservative" faction (associated with figures like J.D. Vance and Josh Hawley) embraced aggressive enforcement against [[Big Tech]] as a weapon against perceived censorship and concentrated cultural power, sometimes praising Khan directly. The donor-aligned, free-market wing and the tech-right (see [[Monopoly as Doctrine]], the explicit pro-scale argument associated with [[Peter Thiel]] that monopoly is the reward for and engine of innovation) opposed her vigorously. The result is that the future of antitrust depends less on a stable doctrine than on which faction controls enforcement appointments — making the FTC and DOJ Antitrust Division genuine prizes in the intra-coalition struggle the KB documents. ## See Also - [[Sherman Antitrust Act]] — the 1890 statutory foundation - [[Standard Oil]] — the canonical early breakup - [[Robert Bork]] — architect of the consumer welfare standard - [[Lina Khan]] — neo-Brandeisian FTC chair (2021–2025) - [[Monopsony]] — buyer-side market power, a frontier of modern antitrust - [[Monopoly as Doctrine]] — the tech-right's pro-monopoly counter-position - [[Big Tech]] — the central modern enforcement target