FTC’s New Merger Guidelines Touch a Nerve. Big Business Won’t Like it.

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America's biggest companies have butted heads with the Biden administration's antitrust regulators, which held a Tuesday workshop.

America’s biggest companies have butted heads with the Biden administration’s antitrust regulators. The Federal Trade Commission’s merger interventions have made its chairwoman Lina Khan into a meme for industry attacks and a bane to some investors.

A proposed merger should be evaluated for its effects on competition, say the new guidelines. Still, the document lays out certain thresholds of market concentration that would trigger a presumption of harm—obliging the merging companies to prove their combination wasn’t anticompetitive.Market power isn’t the ultimate concern of antitrust law, said Georgetown University economist and law professor Steven Salop, but rather the harms from market power.

The proposed guidelines discuss a merger’s potential effect on workers, suppliers, and customers—not just consumers. An impressive number of the comment writers are screenwriters who belong to the Writers Guild of America, which is now on strike over Hollywood’s digital economics. Many say that the increasing concentration in giants like Disney and Netflix has crippled their livelihoods.

“We must express significant concern about the proposed shift away from the consumer welfare standard to a presumption that large companies are intrinsically bad,” said Longe. There will be two more workshops on the guidelines. The agencies hosting Tuesday’s workshop promised to carefully consider the day’s criticisms. Several panelists said they hoped the final guidelines would include more details and court citations.

 

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