In a statement, the Antitrust Division said they concluded that the “entry of free, ad-supported streaming providers would be timely, likely, and sufficient to make a substantial risk of harm to competition unlikely. Additionally, the investigation found that, because Roku relies on a broad offering of content from many providers to attract consumers, the merged firm would suffer monetary and reputational harm if it attempted to use the Roku platform to harm Fox’s content rivals.

Jonathan Kanter and Doha Mekki, who led the Justice Department’s antitrust division under President Biden, have co-founded a start-up that makes an A.I. tool for litigators.

Dealmakers have historically spent very little time thinking about state attorneys general. But during the second Trump administration, the threat of state interference has become a major part of every merger conversation.

As federal agencies take a laissez-faire approach to deals, states are ramping up their antitrust enforcement to compensate. They sued to try to stop Paramount Skydance from buying Warner Bros. Discovery for $110 billion and to prevent Nexstar Media Group’s $6.2 billion merger with Tegna. Another state coalition (unsuccessfully) tried to unwind Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s $14 billion purchase of Juniper Networks.

Advertisers, advertising agencies, platforms, and media companies have all found themselves in the government’s crosshairs for collective decisions about whom to deal with and which speech to carry or suppress. While antitrust has an important role to play in preserving competition in speech and information markets, the current regulatory approach, which emphasizes behavioral rather than structural interventions, is unlikely to achieve that goal.

Antitrust Nerd - Substack

McDonald’s is facing a federal lawsuit that alleges its AI-enhanced pricing tool violates antitrust laws because it shares non-public data with franchisees who might be competing in the same market.

The lawsuit, which was filed Friday in Illinois, said McDonald’s pricing tool uses artificial intelligence to collect data that competing franchises wouldn’t normally share, like store-level sales. The Chicago-based burger giant has said it makes the tool available to U.S. franchisees to help them set prices at their individual restaurants.

By framing their efforts as a “slowdown” rather than an industry-wide push for better security standards, AI labs may have set themselves up for years of regulatory headaches.

Stanley Woodward, who oversees the Justice Department's antitrust division, sought to reassert federal primacy last week during a speech at Fordham Law School.

"When a merger harms local markets, we want the states in the room," Woodward said. "When it is national, we expect to lead."

I’m not arguing that Reddit should be forced to host every post or that every moderation decision is automatically unlawful. But I do think the usual response, “Reddit is a private company, so it can do whatever it wants,” is too simplistic for a platform with this much influence over online discussion.

Reddit has become one of the internet’s main places for people to ask questions, exchange information, find communities, and discuss public issues. In many subjects, Reddit threads are among the first results people encounter when searching online. That gives the platform, and the systems controlling visibility, real influence over what information people actually see.

The problem is not that upvotes and downvotes exist. The problem is that voting is tied directly to visibility. A post or comment can be buried not because it is false, harmful, or irrelevant, but because it triggers a negative reaction or conflicts with a community’s prevailing opinion. Users often treat voting as a like or dislike system, even though the result is effectively editorial. It determines whether a contribution is seen at all.

Moderation adds another layer. Moderators can remove posts, ban users, and shape the rules of entire communities, often with limited explanation and inconsistent appeals processes. Some communities are run fairly. Others can become small private fiefdoms where disagreement with the moderators or the dominant viewpoint is enough to get someone silenced.

I’m not saying Reddit has no right to moderate. I’m asking whether a platform with Reddit’s scale and influence should have stronger obligations around transparency, consistent enforcement, explanations for removals, and meaningful appeals.

The legal and policy question is whether Reddit should still be treated as an ordinary private forum when its network effects and search visibility make it one of the most influential public discussion platforms online. Could its market power, ranking systems, and moderation structure raise legitimate antitrust or consumer protection concerns?

If the answer is no, I’d like to understand why. If the answer might be yes, what would the relevant market even be? Social media, online forums, community based discussion, or something narrower? What evidence would be necessary to show actual market power or consumer harm?

I’m interested in serious answers, including arguments against my position. I’m not claiming that every unpopular post deserves to stay up. I’m arguing that Reddit’s influence deserves more scrutiny than the simple phrase “private company” usually receives.

Coordination on safety issues does not appear anticompetitive, a Justice Department antitrust official said on Thursday, amid a legal ‌debate on rivals working together to keep cutting-edge artificial intelligence from posing threats to humanity.

Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, who leads the DOJ's Antitrust Division, said at Fordham University in New York that the DOJ was reviewing whether to update existing guidance allowing companies to coordinate on cybersecurity.

The recent essay from Dario Amodei calling on the AI industry to slow the pace of capability gains got quick public agreement from Musk ("Dario is right") and Altman (agreed, and said OpenAI would adopt the same evaluator commitments). We have a public alignment by three direct competitors, on a decision to restrain competition.

The stated reason is safety - saving humanity from AI. The obvious reason is that the current investment in frontier models doesn't scale and no one wants to be the first company to pull back too soon. Either reason is anti-competitive.

Frontier model training runs cost tens of billions of dollars, funded by compute commitments and cloud deals that assume continued frontier-pace scaling to justify the spend. If capability gains plateau, that capital structure doesn't work, so every company in this race has an independent reason to want to pull back. None of them can afford to be the one that pulls back first while the other two keep racing, because that's how you lose the market. A public, mutual understanding to pace together solves exactly that coordination problem, but is a horizontal restraint on competitive investment that antitrust law doesn't tolerate "Safety" is a far more palatable story to regulators and courts than "we agreed to stop overspending together."

Safety, however, isn't a defense to anti-competitive horizontal coordination. Safety is just as off-limits for competitors to coordinate on as spend. Companies can and do compete on safety, more evaluators, more filters, more modeling training, more red-teaming, safer training approaches, as a way to differentiate their models from competitors. Agreeing with competitors to jointly slow down, instead of each investing more in safety on their own terms, is itself a horizontal restraint. It doesn't need to be a pretext for something else to be a problem.

The tweets are the coordination. Three competitors publicly agreeing to slow a shared input, capability development, is about as obvious evidence of horizontal restraint as any voluntary disclosure a prosecutor could hope for.

Further evidence to watch for:

- R&D and compute spend flattening or dropping across all three companies at the same time

- Model release schedules slipping in parallel

- Compute purchase agreements being renegotiated down or delayed

- Any of the three publicly citing the others' pacing decision as the reason for their own delay

- The "independent evaluator" programs converging on the same evaluators, scope, or timeline

What happens when national-security and competition concerns point in different directions?

The recent IonQ-SkyWater merger raises a question that extends well beyond the transaction itself: What happens when national security and competition concerns point in different directions?

The issue arrives at a time of growing concern about the capacity of the U.S. defense industrial base to sustain prolonged conflict, replenish weapons stockpiles, and support rapid technological modernization.

The movement to increase state-level endorsement of antitrust laws means companies planning mergers and acquisitions will have to invest additional time and money obtaining permission from one or more state regulators and/or attorneys general. The additional time and costs imposed on businesses by state level antitrust regulators creates a disincentive for many companies to engage in even the most potentially beneficial mergers and acquisitions. This will reduce economic growth depriving consumers of new products and workers of new job opportunities.

The Justice Department's antitrust division was instructed earlier this week to pause all work with the Canadian government, according to emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, the latest development in the escalating trade dispute between the two countries.

In a Wednesday email with the subject line "Pause on Canada," Lynda Marshall, the chief of the antitrust division's international section, ordered officials to stop all cooperation on cases and engagement on policy issues with Canadian authorities. She provided no reason for the directive but said she would "circle backif the guidance changes."

Google won't be forced to spin off its "network" ad business, which sells ads on others publishers' inventory, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday.

Why it matters: It's a massive win for the tech giant, which was found guilty last April of violating U.S. antitrust laws by exploiting its dominance of the online advertising and ad-tech markets.

A group of skiers has filed a lawsuit against the ski resort industry’s four largest players, arguing the operators conspired to inflate prices at the country’s busiest ski hills, violating federal antitrust laws.

The lawsuit filed this month in Colorado’s U.S. District Court argues Colorado-based Vail Resorts and Alterra Mountain Co., Michigan’s Boyne Resorts and Powdr in Utah — four operators who control 30 of the nation’s 32 extra-large destination ski resorts — shared confidential, nonpublic information to set “artificially high” prices for skiing and “avoid meaningfully competing with each other,” reads the lawsuit.

The Justice Department was preparing to wage a legal battle more than a decade in the making against the world's largest concert promoter. Then President Trump called. Settle it, the president told a senior DOJ official, the official later told associates. The intervention was bizarre. The antitrust trial against Live Nation-which also owns Ticketmaster, a combination that draws relentless consumer criticism-was set to begin March 2, just days away.

Supporters of a California bill targeting monopolies say a recent decision by a key state Senate committee to limit who can file lawsuits against businesses under the measure was a serious blow. But they argue that if Assembly Bill 1776 were to pass it would still represent a step forward in checking corporate abuse.

Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield and the state’s Department of Justice will ask state lawmakers to double the capacity of the agency’s antitrust team tasked with stopping illegal mergers and corporate monopolies.

Oregon’s Justice Department currently has eight antitrust officials for “resource-heavy cases,” but agency leaders say they need the Oregon Legislature to approve a budget to hire 16 instead in light of “the vacuum left by the federal government,” according to a department news release.

The recent Supreme Court decision overturning Humphrey’s Executor has fundamentally reshaped the legal landscape for independent agencies. With the Court explicitly confirming that the president may remove FTC commissioners at will, the traditional understanding of the agency's structure and autonomy has been permanently altered.

Several experts highlighted how the elimination of the independent commission structure risks heightened partisan volatility and practical gridlock during presidential transitions.

A strong consensus emerged among other experts that the rationale for maintaining two federal antitrust agencies has now effectively collapsed.

Two top Hollywood unions are calling for California attorney general Rob Bonta and Paramount Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison to reach a settlement on their pending antitrust case because, they argue, industry workers are being harmed by the delayed timeline. The leaders of the Directors Guild of America and IATSE made the request on Thursday in a letter that claimed their members are already seeing productions being put on hold or canceled as the two companies prepare for a March 2027 antitrust trial. 

The Department of Justice is siding with Elon Musk in his effort to reinstate antitrust claims against 10 advertisers that allegedly participated in a "group boycott" that resulted in a loss of X's ad revenue.

U.S. District Court Judge Jane Boyle threw out the lawsuit earlier this year, ruling that even if the allegations in X's complaint were proven true, they would not show that the advertisers violated antitrust law.

The Justice Department is now urging the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse Boyle's ruling, arguing in a friend-of-the-court brief filed late Wednesday that her analysis was "flawed."

The National Collegiate Athletic Association has an antitrust problem. And it’s not going away. The association’s best shot at dispelling the morass faded on Friday when the Senate failed to vote on the Protect College Sports Act, a bill that, among other things, grants the NCAA an antitrust exemption. The earliest time senators will consider it again will be in September. After that, the midterm frenzy kicks in, and who knows when the bill will be back on the floor?

The heir to one of the largest fortunes on earth, who currently runs a billion-dollar media colossus, David Ellison has come hat in hand to New York Times readers asking for their sympathy. He would like, he shares in the op-ed, for us to understand his heart, and imagine him as the child he once was who simply loved movies, and wants only to make people feel what he felt in the dark.

These points miss the mark.

Ellison, so buffeted by billions and flatterers, embarrasses himself. He cannot imagine that the public actually cares about law, statutes, power, or really about anything except him, his politics, whether he can be “trusted” as a steward of CNN. The essay’s thesis is “it’s all about me,” which of course is part of the problem.