Antitrust Attorneys: Investigating and Protecting Your Rights

Sometimes the first sign of a competition problem is a pattern that keeps repeating. The same players seem to stay on top no matter what, pricing and fees shift in unison, or key access points in the industry come with strings attached. Some of that can happen in a healthy market. But when those patterns are driven by coordination or exclusionary tactics, it may cross the line into illegal, anticompetitive practices. Here, we discuss some common antitrust violations, how they show up in the real world, and red flags to help you determine if your competitors aren’t playing by the rules.

What Antitrust Law Is Designed to Prevent

Antitrust law targets conduct that replaces open competition with manipulation, coercion, or coordination. It is not about penalizing success. It is about stopping strategies that distort the competitive process, such as agreements among competitors, exclusionary conduct by dominant companies, and certain contracting practices that can shut out rivals.

Common Antitrust Violations and How They Work

Antitrust issues usually fall into a few recognizable buckets. Common examples include:

• Price-fixing: Competitors agree to raise, stabilize, or coordinate prices, fees, surcharges, wage rates, or other key terms instead of competing independently.
• Market allocation: Competitors divide territories, customer groups, or product lines to avoid competing against each other.
• Bid-rigging: Competitors manipulate bidding through bid rotation, sham bids, or agreements about who will win, which can inflate costs and shut out honest bidders.
• Monopolization and attempted monopolization: A dominant company uses exclusionary tactics, not just better products or services, to maintain or build market power by blocking rivals from key inputs, distribution, or customers.
• Group boycotts and concerted refusals to deal: Multiple companies coordinate to cut off a supplier, distributor, customer, or new entrant.
• Exclusive dealing and restrictive contracts: Access to essential supply or distribution is conditioned on exclusivity or punishments for working with rivals, which can foreclose competition.
• Tying and anticompetitive bundling: Access to a must-have product or service is conditioned on purchasing a second product or service that is not truly optional.
• Anticompetitive information sharing: Competitors exchange sensitive data (pricing, capacity, customers, wages) in a way that predictably reduces competition.

Practical Examples of How Anticompetitive Conduct Shows Up

Antitrust problems often look like “patterns that do not make sense” in a normal competitive market. For example:

• A bidding process seems oddly predictable, with the same winner rotating among a small group while the others submit inflated prices or bids with obvious defects.
• Multiple suppliers adopt identical new fees or surcharges at roughly the same time, using nearly identical language to justify the change, and no one will negotiate.
• A powerful distributor pressures manufacturers into exclusivity that blocks alternative channels, making it harder for rivals to compete on price and availability.
• A company conditions access to a must-have service on buying an additional service, even when it is not needed and opting out is not realistically possible.
• Companies that normally would compete head-to-head appear to avoid certain territories or customers entirely, and you keep hearing variations of “that account is taken” or “we do not go there.”

Red Flags That a Market May Not Be Operating Competitively

Anticompetitive activity is often designed to blend in. The point is not to treat every frustrating business decision as a violation, but to understand signals that the playing field may be tilted. Common red flags include:

• Pricing moves that match too closely: If rivals repeatedly change prices, fees, or surcharges at the same time, in the same direction, with the same explanations, it can suggest coordination or information sharing.
• “Scripted” bidding behavior: Bids look oddly similar, the same group appears every time, the winner rotates in a predictable pattern, or bids cluster in ways that do not reflect real competition.
• Artificially tidy boundaries: You hear things like “we do not compete on that,” “they handle that territory,” or “that customer has always been theirs.” Competitive markets are usually messier than that.
• Access conditioned on compliance: A powerful player ties access to supply, distribution, or a platform to exclusivity or restrictive terms that limit working with rivals.
• A newcomer gets iced out quickly: Competitive responses are normal. What is suspicious is conduct that appears designed to make entry impossible, such as coordinated refusals to deal or blanket cutoffs that are hard to justify.
• Bundles that feel like a toll: You cannot get what you genuinely need unless you also buy something unrelated, with no realistic path to decline the add-on.

How Antitrust Violations Can Cause Real-World Harm

Anticompetitive conduct can create concrete business problems. It can raise input costs, limit access to vendors, restrict distribution, reduce the ability to win bids, or force unfavorable contract terms. It can also suppress innovation and investment, because companies end up spending time working around artificial barriers instead of competing on quality and service.

If Something Feels Off, We’re Here to Listen

If something in your industry feels artificially constrained or too coordinated, give us a call at 866-778-5500 or reach out through our online contact form. We can talk through what you are seeing and share a straightforward perspective on whether it sounds like normal competition or something antitrust law was designed to address.