The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission are proposing tightening their merger review guidelines, citing what Attorney General Merrick Garland calls “unchecked consolidation” that “threatens the free and fair markets upon which our economy is based.”
Garland said the guidelines reflect modern market realities. One of those is the rise of the biggest of big tech, Facebook in particular. The Justice Department and FTC — under both Republican and Democratic administrations — as well as Congress have looked at Facebook with concern over efforts to buy up potential competitors before they get big enough to trigger serious merger reviews. For example, one of the new guidelines says that mergers “should not eliminate a potential entrant in a concentrated market.”
