Of course, cartels are neither a new occurrence; nor are they a peculiar situation that exists only in India. In fact, cartels first originated in the heartland of capitalism, the United States and continue to be a serious threat to economic as well as consumer interests across the world. It is said that with great power comes great responsibility. But 
with the passage of time, this proposition has failed to hold the above assumption, as things like cartelisation, price-fixing, collusion & bid-rigging has taken place. Let’s take two distant examples – one of the early 20th century and other of the late 21st century and see how rampant cartelization was then and now.
Today, Fortune 500 companies and oil behemoths like Chevron, Conoco & Exxon trace their origin from 1860s when they were a part of Rockefeller empire – Standard Oil. At that time, Standard Oil had control of almost all of America’s oil market. Standard Oil gradually gained almost complete control of oil production in America. At that time, many legislatures had made it difficult to be incorporated in one state and operate in another. As a result, Rockefeller and his partners owned separate companies across dozens of states, making their management of the whole enterprise rather unwieldy. In 1911, the Supreme Court of the United States held that Standard Oil originated in illegal monopoly practices and ordered it to be broken up into 34 new companies. The logic was quite simple, there was (pseudo) competition, that too on paper.
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