The past year marked the culmination of the Biden antitrust era. Under assertive leadership, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the United States Department of Justice Antitrust Division (DOJ) adopted a more aggressive stance toward perceived anticompetitive practices. Agency leaders pursued increasingly complex and less traditional theories of harm in both merger and conduct cases. On the transactional front, agency scrutiny expanded beyond conventional horizontal mergers to encompass nonhorizontal and nascent competition theories of harm as well as a new emphasis on the effect of mergers on labor markets. On the conduct front, enforcers grappled with dynamic markets alleging harms to innovation as opposed to more traditional price effects.
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