The law prohibited contracts, combinations and conspiracies in restraint of trade. The act was ineffective due to intentionally vague language by Congress who passed it to placate the public rather then really restrain corporate power.

For more than a decade after its passage, the Sherman Antitrust Act was invoked only rarely against industrial monopolies, and then not successfully. Ironically, its only effective use for a number of years was against labor unions, which were held by the courts to be illegal combinations.

– The major purpose of the Sherman Antitrust Act was to prohibit monopolies and sustain competition so as to protect companies from each other and to protect consumers from unfair business practices.

Antitrust law is the law of competition. Why then is it called “antitrust”? The answer is that these laws were originally established to check the abuses threatened or imposed by the immense “trusts” that emerged in the late 19th Century.

ANTITRUST LAWS The most common antitrust violations fall into two categories: (i) Agreements to restrain competition, and (ii) efforts to acquire a monopoly. In the case of a merger, a combination that would likely substantially reduce competition in a market would also violate antitrust laws.

Tying agreements—along with price-fixing, market allocation, bid-rigging, and certain group boycotts—are considered per se antitrust violations. That is, a court need not perform an elaborate market analysis to condemn the practice because it is inherently anticompetitive, without pro-competitive redeeming virtues.

For the second question: The government was able to control monopolies by implementing rules and regulations such as: putting a price capping by regulators, regulations of quality of service, merger policy, breaking up a monopoly, rate of return regulation, and investigation of abuse.

Antitrust. By virtue of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, the US government can take legal action to break up a monopoly. In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt used the Sherman Antitrust Act as a basis for trying to break up the monopolization of railway service in the United States.

There are 3 major methods to increase the benefits of monopolies to society: removing or lowering barriers to entry through antitrust laws so that other firms can enter the market to compete; regulating the prices that the monopoly can charge; operating the monopoly as a public enterprise.

Monopolies were among the first business entities the U.S. government attempted to regulate in the public interest. The Federal Trade Commission Act established a government commission aimed at preventing unfair and anti-competitive business practices.

Why Monopolies Are Created While governments usually try to prevent monopolies, in certain situations, they encourage or even create monopolies themselves. In many cases, government-created monopolies are intended to result in economies of scale that benefit consumers by keeping costs down.