[One expert called the guidance "a game-changer for antitrust
enforcement, incorporating decades of new learnings and thousands of
public comments from working families and small businesses." ]
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FTC-DOJ MERGER GUIDELINES AIM TO ‘RESTORE COMPETITION AND
STRENGTHEN DEMOCRACY’  
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Jessica Corbett
December 18, 2023
Common Dreams [[link removed]]

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_ One expert called the guidance "a game-changer for antitrust
enforcement, incorporating decades of new learnings and thousands of
public comments from working families and small businesses." _

Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan speaks during The New York
Times' annual DealBook summit on November 29, 2023 in New York City.,
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

 

Antitrust campaigners and experts on Monday celebrated the Biden
administration's new guidelines
[[link removed]] for
mergers and acquisitions, which supporters say will "restore
competition and strengthen democracy."

Farm Action co-founder and chief strategy officer Joe
Maxwell commended
[[link removed]] the
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ)
"for delivering on their commitment to restore competition to our
economy."

"For more than 40 years, the merger guidelines have been void of a
review for competition," he said. "During this period of time,
unprecedented concentration across U.S. markets has driven farmers and
small businesses out of business."

"The new guidelines provide a roadmap to bring first principles of the
antitrust laws into the 21st century."

Erik Peinert, research manager and editor at the American Economic
Liberties Project, declared
[[link removed]] that
"the finalized merger guidelines are a game-changer for antitrust
enforcement, incorporating decades of new learnings and thousands of
public comments from working families and small businesses."

"After almost 50 years of significant underenforcement, we're thrilled
to see the antitrust agencies make a comprehensive update to the
merger guidelines, and look forward to seeing them vigorously
enforced," he continued. "The new guidelines provide a roadmap to
bring first principles of the antitrust laws into the 21st century."

"Previous guidelines ignored or underappreciated the harms from
practices like vertical mergers and serial acquisitions, as well as
the harms to workers," he highlighted. "A generation of these deals
has suppressed worker pay, increased prices, and embrittled our supply
chains."

The new guidelines will “reflect the new realities of how firms do
business in the modern economy” including potential harms to
consumers, workers and small businesses, and will guide the regulators
to even more robust enforcement of competition.[link removed]

— Revolving Door Project (@revolvingdoorDC) December 18, 2023
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Open Markets Institute legal director Sandeep Vaheesan also praised
the agencies behind the new guidelines, which he said "put fealty to
law front and center again and seek to implement congressional intent,
instead of their own ideological preferences."

"By relying on market share tests for deciding the legality of certain
mergers, the new guidelines are more faithful to the Clayton Act
[[link removed]] than
the 2010 horizontal merger guidelines were," Vaheesan explained. "They
are also more in accord with empirical research on the effects of
mergers and acquisitions, which finds that corporate consolidation can
harm democratic balances and institutions, as well as workers,
producers, and consumers."

"In our comments on the draft guidelines
[[link removed]],
we called on the DOJ and the FTC, in the final guidelines, to adopt
lower market share tests to cover consolidations outside the most
highly concentrated markets and to reject unequivocally an
efficiencies defense for presumptively illegal mergers," he noted.
"Although the agencies stuck with their original approach in the final
document, these guidelines are a material improvement over the status
quo and will help the two agencies do a better job of stopping and
deterring harmful corporate consolidation going forward."

The new @DOJ [[link removed]] and @FTC
[[link removed]] merger guidelines are a
game changer for antitrust enforcement and a clear break from the
neoliberal economics of the 70s and 80s.

Now mergers will be judged based on whether they work for consumers
AND workers. This is good news. [link removed]

— Chris Murphy 🟧 (@ChrisMurphyCT) December 18, 2023
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The guidelines released Monday reflect feedback the agencies received
after putting out
[[link removed]] a draft
in July.

FTC Chair Lina Khan
[[link removed]] expressed gratitude for
"the thousands of comments submitted by American workers, consumers,
entrepreneurs, farmers, business owners, and other members of the
public," stressing that "this input directly informed the guidelines
and allowed us to pursue this work with a deeper understanding of the
real-life stakes of merger enforcement."

Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement that the
guidelines "provide transparency" into Justice Department action and
pledged that the DOJ "will continue to vigorously enforce the laws
that safeguard competition and protect all Americans."

_JESSICA CORBETT is a senior editor and staff writer for Common
Dreams._

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