By Diana Moss
On April 9, 2024, Concurrences and CCIA released a new volume “The 2023 Merger Guidelines: A Review.” PPI’s Diana Moss is a contributing author with her chapter titled: “Antitrust Ideology and the 2023 U.S. Merger Guidelines.”
Introduction
In late December 2023, the U.S. antitrust agencies jointly issued new merger guidelines. The 2023 Merger Guidelines (“2023 Guidelines”) are the seventh substantive version since they were first issued 55 years ago by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Promoting competition in the U.S. economy is a priority for the Biden Administration, as reflected in a 2021 executive order that set forth an ambitious plan to harness a “whole of government” approach. An uptick in resolving challenged mergers through injunctions, restructurings, and forced abandonments is visible evidence of this commitment. The same is true of a surge in monopolization cases, limited thus far to the digital sector, the outcomes of which will likely be determined by a future administration.
As part of the broader competition mandate under the current administration, the DOJ and FTC issued a draft of revised merger guidelines in mid-July 2023. After collecting comments and holding public workshops, the Agencies turned a final version of the guidelines six months later, which will replace the 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines. The
changes to the draft guidelines, which presumably reflected public input, were far from cosmetic. Indeed, they reflect pressure to move the draft version away from the far left of the ideological spectrum and towards the center. This tells us a lot about the debate over antitrust ideology in the U.S. is today.
Keep reading in “Antitrust Ideology and the 2023 U.S. Merger Guidelines”.
