This paper surveys the field of vertical integration and vertical restraints, with particular reference to implications for competition policy. It outlines the existing legal framework, then discusses some particular U.K. examples involving vertical restraints. The theoretical discussion includes analyses of technological economies, transactions costs, contractual rights, monopoly effects, verticle restraints as externalities, interbrand versus intrabrand competition, the strategic effects of vertical separation, and agency issues. Some policy implications are drawn, amongst these being the points that vertical linkages can have strong anticompetitive effects, that there is little support for separate treatment of resale price maintenance, that policy should focus on economic effects rather than legal form, that the case for the block exemption of franchising in the EC is unclear and that the law has failed to take the implications of the vertical separation literature into account. Copyright 1993 by Oxford University Press.