The Competition Tribunal of South Africa has unconditionally approved Microsoft's plan to acquire game publisher Activision Blizzard, although it did not reveal the reasons for its decision.
I don’t think a merger of this scale should occur. It reduces competition in the marketplace and is unlikely to provide any benefits to consumers.
However, that said, I’m not sure blocking a merger like this makes sense in a world where Disney was allowed to acquire a significant percentage of pop culture, or Warner Bros. Discovery can own DC Comics, CNN, HBO, and of course the titular movie studio and television networks. The mega-merger barn door isn’t just open, it got ripped off of its hinges.
I find it absolutely ridiculous that the availability of fucking Call of Duty, specifically, has been the subject of top level scrutiny by regulators in multiple nations when there was nary a peep when Disney acquired Lucasfilm.
The reason ActiBliz + MS deal it is getting scrutinized more is because Lina Khan became head of the FTC, and she looks at mergers and acquisitions with the same dislike that everyone had towards Standard Oil monopoly and AT&T monopoly back in the day.
The Obama Administration had a very lax antitrust policy. For example, they approved the Ticketmaster + Live Nation merger despite it clearly being a vertical merger that gave a single company control of the majority of both the venues concerts were held at and the tickets being sold for those concerts, ultimately resulting in the Taylor Swift fiasco that was in the news a couple months ago. Monopolies like Ticketmaster are complacent because there is no one to compete against and therefore no reason to make things better for the consumer. Things have changed because the head of the FTC (and many other government agencies) changes when a new president gets elected.
People like to only focus on how prices change as a result of mergers, but until the 1980s everyone including judges also considered the political and social cost of mergers, in addition to the monetary cost to consumers. Maybe if we continued to do that and didn’t largely stop in the 1980s we would not have too-big-to-fail banks or a mobile app store duopoly.
Wish I could upvote this more than once. This is very trenchant insight. I wonder if future corporate mergers will be timed with appropriate presidential administrations and their appointees.
My argument for this merger going forward is primarily one of precedence. I strongly believe that most legal questions should be already settled - one should be able to look at established precedence to identify the most likely result, and if precedence is upended, then it needs to thoroughly establish a new legal paradigm that allows prediction of most future cases. Given the recent history of mega-mergers, it should be safe for executives to assume that similar mergers would be approved.
If the most relevant criteria for whether the FTC permits a merger is “the ideology of whoever is in charge” then we have major problems. (And yes, I know this can and does apply to the US Supreme Court…)
What annoys me in the UK is how much monopolisation has messed up out public services like water, public transport and energy, yet we do very little to reign any of that in. However when something non-essential like gaming comes up, we move to take action.
I don’t think a merger of this scale should occur. It reduces competition in the marketplace and is unlikely to provide any benefits to consumers.
However, that said, I’m not sure blocking a merger like this makes sense in a world where Disney was allowed to acquire a significant percentage of pop culture, or Warner Bros. Discovery can own DC Comics, CNN, HBO, and of course the titular movie studio and television networks. The mega-merger barn door isn’t just open, it got ripped off of its hinges.
I find it absolutely ridiculous that the availability of fucking Call of Duty, specifically, has been the subject of top level scrutiny by regulators in multiple nations when there was nary a peep when Disney acquired Lucasfilm.
The reason ActiBliz + MS deal it is getting scrutinized more is because Lina Khan became head of the FTC, and she looks at mergers and acquisitions with the same dislike that everyone had towards Standard Oil monopoly and AT&T monopoly back in the day.
The Obama Administration had a very lax antitrust policy. For example, they approved the Ticketmaster + Live Nation merger despite it clearly being a vertical merger that gave a single company control of the majority of both the venues concerts were held at and the tickets being sold for those concerts, ultimately resulting in the Taylor Swift fiasco that was in the news a couple months ago. Monopolies like Ticketmaster are complacent because there is no one to compete against and therefore no reason to make things better for the consumer. Things have changed because the head of the FTC (and many other government agencies) changes when a new president gets elected.
People like to only focus on how prices change as a result of mergers, but until the 1980s everyone including judges also considered the political and social cost of mergers, in addition to the monetary cost to consumers. Maybe if we continued to do that and didn’t largely stop in the 1980s we would not have too-big-to-fail banks or a mobile app store duopoly.
Wish I could upvote this more than once. This is very trenchant insight. I wonder if future corporate mergers will be timed with appropriate presidential administrations and their appointees.
My argument for this merger going forward is primarily one of precedence. I strongly believe that most legal questions should be already settled - one should be able to look at established precedence to identify the most likely result, and if precedence is upended, then it needs to thoroughly establish a new legal paradigm that allows prediction of most future cases. Given the recent history of mega-mergers, it should be safe for executives to assume that similar mergers would be approved.
If the most relevant criteria for whether the FTC permits a merger is “the ideology of whoever is in charge” then we have major problems. (And yes, I know this can and does apply to the US Supreme Court…)
I don’t think “but we’ve done worse things” is a good argument to allow bad things.
What annoys me in the UK is how much monopolisation has messed up out public services like water, public transport and energy, yet we do very little to reign any of that in. However when something non-essential like gaming comes up, we move to take action.