When we last looked at President Barack Obama's campaign promise to strengthen antitrust enforcement, Christine A. Varney, the newly appointed head of the Justice Department's Antitrust Division, had just announced that the department was reversing a Bush administration policy that she said "raised too many hurdles to government antitrust enforcement and favored extreme caution" in antitrust activity. Since then, in July, 2011, Varney announced that she was leaving the Obama administration to return to private practice.

"I came in with President Obama committed to fulfilling his promise to reinvigorate antitrust law, and I think we've done that," she told the Wall Street Journal in an interview discussing her decision.

So Varney declared the promise kept, but what do other experts think? Several said they saw increased enforcement, although some of the developments they pointed to occurred after Varney's departure.

The Obama administration has produced "more enforcement," said D. Daniel Sokol, who teaches antitrust law at the University of Florida Levin School of Law. Sokol pointed to the recent collapse of AT&T's proposed $39 billion takeover of T-Mobile under pressure from the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Department's successful opposition to a merger of H&R Block and TaxAct (two of three of the largest makers of do-it-yourself tax preparation products) as two important cases.

Sokol added, "in the shadow of the law (the vast majority of matters that we do not see such as mergers never filed or mergers that get cleared within 30 days), there seems to be the perception among practitioners that merger enforcement is up on the margins."

"It certainly seems as if the administration has indeed been more aggressive, especially with respect to merger enforcement," said Phillip C. Zane, a specialist in the regulation of competition and trade with the law firm Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz, PC. The Justice Department's success in heading off the merger of AT&T and T-Mobile "gives them encouragement to be aggressive, because it worked." he said.

The acting assistant attorney general for the Antitrust Division, Sharis A. Pozen, noted in a speech Nov. 17, 2011, that in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2011 that the Justice Department had filed 90 criminal enforcement cases, noting it was "the highest number of criminal cases the division filed in the last 20 years." Criminal cases are filed for infractions such as bid rigging and price fixing.

"I think the pace has picked up in the last year, particularly in the last six months," said Bert Foer, president of the American Antitrust Institute, also citing the AT&T and H&R Block cases, several pending cases, a settlement with MorganStanley,and a major cartel case in the auto aftermarket. "Both AT&T and H&R Block  indicated a more activist positioning on mergers," he said, although he noted that objecting to mergers that reduce the number of horizontal competitors in a highly concentrated market isn't unusual.

But Foer noted that the administration has also gone after several vertical mergers, mergers of companies that are not direct competitors but which are in different distribution levels of the same industry. "They actually brought cases where the prior administration probably would have let them go," he said, although he said some of the settlements in these cases should have been considerably stronger.

One expert who hasn't been impressed with the Obama administration's approach to antitrust is Daniel A. Crane, who teaches antitrust at the University of Michigan Law School. The AT&T case "is not a particularly adventurous complaint," he said, and "not different than what could have occurred in the prior administration."

Crane also noted that, though the administration had "made a lot of noise about monopolization," it has brought only one such case in three years. "True, one is more than zero (the number brought during the Bush years), but it hardly indicates a major reinvigoration of monopolization enforcement," he wrote in an e-mail.

While the American Antitrust Institute's Foer gives the administration more credit, it's still measured when it comes to the Justice Department's performance. "The bottom line is that they've reflected the Obama administration, which has been middle of the road on business issues, generally prone to compromises."

"Obama in his statement as a a campaigner indicated that they would be more aggressive than the Bush administration, and that's true. They certainly have been," said Foer. "But they were up against a fairly low benchmark. It's still not as aggressive as we'd like to see, but it's not out of pace with the administration."

While antitrust enforcement may not have been bolstered as much as some had hoped, it is definitely stronger. We rate this a Promise Kept.