The Federal Trade Commission wants to make sure that Microsoft doesn’t complete its massive $69 billion acquisition of video game giant Activision Blizzard before the agency has the chance to block it in court.
The FTC will reportedly request a temporary restraining order from a federal court on Monday, which would stop the companies from merging before the deal’s July 18 deadline. The agency sued the companies to block the merger last December, but that trial won’t begin until August. The FTC says that the merger would harm competition in the gaming market, and this latest filing, assuming it happens, shows that the FTC is still very serious about stopping it.
The federal judge’s decision may play a pivotal role in the case going forward. If a judge does not rule in the FTC’s favor, the FTC is more likely to drop its entire case. If the judge allows the temporary restraining order, the FTC may see this as a good sign for its chances in its later trial.
The initial lawsuit to block the merger was FTC chair Lina Khan’s biggest yet against a Big Tech company in her tenure. Since Khan’s surprise appointment to chair the consumer protection and competition agency in June 2021, many waited to see which Big Tech merger Khan would go after, believing it was not a matter of if she would block a merger but when and which one.
Microsoft managed to avoid most of the scrutiny and criticism that its Big Tech peers endured over the last several years, and there was a sense that it already had its big reckoning and learned its lesson back in the late ’90s and early 2000s, when an antitrust lawsuit from the Department of Justice nearly broke up the company. Then Microsoft decided to make the biggest acquisition in its history as well as the history of gaming in general and became impossible to ignore.
The FTC’s suit noted that Microsoft has a track record of buying gaming companies and making some of their titles exclusive to Microsoft’s platforms,…
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