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antitrust practices

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antitrust practices
Antitrust practices
Introduction
Antitrust practices are practices carried on by businesses that end up destroying perfect competition in the market. Antitrust laws are laws prepared to seek and promote healthy market competition by preventing anti-competitive practices by companies. Some of the illegal practices that constitute to antitrust behavior include corporate mergers, monopolies and price fixing conspiracies (Bailey, 2010). The Clayton Act of 1914 was passed by the U.S Congress. It was an antitrust law that was amended to stop and prevent practices that led to unhealthy competition in the market. The Clayton Act was amended in order to complement an earlier version of the antitrust law referred to as the Sherman antitrust Act of 1980. This was a federal law that sought to prevent practices that were harmful to consumers such as cartels, monopolies and other unfair business practices (California Association of REALTORS, 2005).
Google Company
One of the recent firms to be investigated for antitrust behavior is Google Company that leads the online searching industry. According to Weiss (2014), the firm recently was being investigated by Competition Commission of India (CCI) for claims that it abused its dominance in the online search engine industry by mainly promoting its own services over those of its rivals. This reason is considered to create unhealthy competition in the business as the search engine company dominates its rivals in what is considered almost a monopolistic market.
Antitrust behavior brings about both pecuniary and non-pecuniary costs. Since it damages healthy competition in the market, monopolies can result and this has adverse effects to the prices of commodities. The products end up becoming costly and expensive for the customers and, therefore, affecting the society negatively (Bailey, 2010). On the other hand, antitrust behavior leads to the output of products falling below the market competitive level and this is mainly

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