Within a brief span, Congress adopted the Interstate Commerce Act (1887) and the Sherman Act (1890). In imposing federal regulation on railroads, the Interstate Commerce Act inaugurated the era of substantial federal regulation of individual industries, while the Sherman Act created a baseline for the control of competition in the United States by generally barring contracts in restraint of trade and forbidding monopolization. The rise of the railroads and the great trusts raised concerns about economic power and spurred politicians to formulate a national policy toward competition. Since 1890, policy makers have been forced repeatedly to work through how to interleave a fully general approach to competition under the antitrust laws with industry-specific approaches to competition under regulatory statutes. That has been a process of learning, but even without learning, shifting political winds would naturally lead to fits and starts as antitrust and specific regulatory statutes have jostled and combined and sometimes even competed in establishing a