This page provides an overview of the mission and goals of the Antitrust Division.

Related pages:

• Brochure: Antitrust Enforcement and the Consumer
• Antitrust Division Organization Chart
• Antitrust Division Sections and Offices
• Timeline of Antitrust Enforcement Highlights
  • PDF version of timeline (in color)
  • HTML version of timeline (with descriptions of images)

For over six decades, the mission of the Antitrust Division has been to promote and protect the competitive process — and the American economy — through the enforcement of the antitrust laws. The antitrust laws apply to virtually all industries and to every level of business, including manufacturing, transportation, distribution, and marketing. They prohibit a variety of practices that restrain trade, such as price-fixing conspiracies, corporate mergers likely to reduce the competitive vigor of particular markets, and predatory acts designed to achieve or maintain monopoly power.

The Division prosecutes serious and willful violations of the antitrust laws by filing criminal suits that can lead to large fines and jail sentences. Where criminal prosecution is not appropriate, the Division institutes a civil action seeking a court order forbidding future violations of the law and requiring steps to remedy the anti-competitive effects of past violations. Many of the Division's accomplishments on these fronts were made possible by an unprecedented level of cooperation and coordination with foreign antitrust enforcement agencies and with state attorneys general.

The Division is also committed to ensuring that its essential efforts to preserve competition for the benefit of businesses and consumers do not impose unnecessary costs on American businesses and consumers.

The Division has provided more guidance to the business community in a shorter time than ever before, much of it jointly with the Federal Trade Commission. This guidance — in the form of new and subsequently revised and expanded joint statements of policy regarding the health care industry, revised joint guidelines for the licensing of intellectual property , revised joint guidelines on international operations and an accelerated individual business review process — lowers the costs to business of complying with the law by reducing uncertainty about the parameters of legal behavior. It saves money for both business and the government by helping companies to structure and organize their operations in accordance with the law, thus avoiding the need for expensive litigation.

The historic goal of the antitrust laws is to protect economic freedom and opportunity by promoting competition in the marketplace. Competition in a free market benefits American consumers through lower prices, better quality and greater choice. Competition provides businesses the opportunity to compete on price and quality, in an open market and on a level playing field, unhampered by anticompetitive restraints. Competition also tests and hardens American companies at home, the better to succeed abroad.