The United States Department of Justice, Antitrust Division, and the Federal Trade Commission have released new merger guidelines explaining how the enforcement agencies review horizontal mergers. The merger guidelines have existed in various forms since 1968. The last major revision was in the mid-1990s. The agencies announced last fall that they were planning to revise the [...]
Category Archives: Federal Trade Commission
Intel & FTC Settle Case
August 17, 2010 – 3:10 pm
Following up on a high profile EU action, in December 2009, the Federal Trade Commission sued Intel alleging violations of Section 5 of the FTC Act. The Commission and Intel agreed to settle the action in an agreement that will prevent Intel from restricting competition or limiting competitors sales of CPUs and GPUs by compeling computer makers to use Intel chips exclusively [...]
FTC Wins Order to Undo Battery Merger
May 28, 2010 – 1:36 pm
FTC ALJ ordered Polypore to sell the stake in Microporous to an FTC-approved buyer within six months of the final order. Polypore had acquired the battery maker just over two years ago, and the FTC at that time sought unsuccessfully to block the deal. The ALJ found that the FTC demonstrated that the merger had [...]
No Price Fixing Conspiracy in Text Message Price Fixing Case
May 26, 2010 – 6:35 pm
Update May 2010: The court has held that the plaintiffs more detailed amended complaint property alleges a conspiracy. The amended complaint alleges that the defendants used the Wireless Internet Caucus to facilitate price fixing agreements with respect to text messages, including specific dates and executives who attended the meetings. Although the defendants argued that the [...]
FTC Permits Google Acquisition of AdMob to Move Forward
May 26, 2010 – 1:55 pm
After expressing some concerns about the competitive effects of Google’s acquisition of AdMob, the FTC unanimously voted to close the investigation citing Apple’s recent acquisition of Quattro Wireless and plans to become an aggressive competitor in the mobile advertising network market.
Drug Purchasers’ Challenge to Exclusion of Generic Dismissed
April 19, 2010 – 2:04 pm
Southern District of Ohio Judge Michael Watson dismissed an antitrust claim brought be direct purchasers of the drug Plavix against the patent holder and its generic competitor alleging that they anticompetitively kept generic Plavix from the market. The patent holder and generic competitor had reached a settlement agreement that was rejected by the FTC. The parties [...]
FTC Announces a Drop in Hart-Scott-Rodino Thresholds
February 2, 2010 – 11:28 am
The dollar amounts used to determine whether a merger or acquisition is subject to the mandatory pre-merger notification requirements has been raised regularly since the law was first implemented in the 1970s. For the first time, the Federal Trade Commission recently announced that the thresholds will be reduced. The decision is based on the view that the [...]
US Supreme Court Denies Cert in FTC v. Rambus
December 8, 2009 – 5:16 pm
Update December 2009: The EC has agreed to close its investigation of Rambus in exchange for Rambus’s agreement to issue royalty free licenses for its SDR and DDR chips and to charge 1.5% for patents necessary for later chip standards, a percentage point reduction from the company’s current royalties for DDR chips. Ramus is not [...]
FTC Green Lights Panasonic/Sanyo Merger with Agreed Divestitures
December 1, 2009 – 3:30 pm
The FTC has agreed to permit the Panasonic/Sanyo merger to move forward pursuant to an agreement to sell Sanyo’s nickel hydride battery business, a type of rechargeable battery, to Fujitsu subsidiary FDK. Sanyo had previously agreed to sell other portions of its battery making business to the company. The divesitures resolved the FTC’s concern that the [...]
FTC Finds Multi-state Listing Service Has Violated Section 5
December 1, 2009 – 1:43 pm
Reversing an ALJ’s dismissal of the administrative complaint, the FTC has held that a Michigan real estate multi-listing service violated Section 5 by discriminating against low-cost listings in two ways. First, the service did not transmit low cost listings to publicly accessible websites such as Realtor.com. Second, the MLS’s own search mechanism defaulted to full price [...]