Today, the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) are extending by one month the deadline to submit comments as part of the enforcement agencies’ process to modernize the merger guidelines to better detect and prevent anticompetitive deals. The new deadline is April 21.
In January, the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division and the FTC launched a joint public inquiry aimed at strengthening enforcement against illegal mergers. Recent evidence indicates that many industries across the economy are becoming more concentrated and less competitive – imperiling choice and economic gains for consumers, workers, entrepreneurs and small businesses. These problems are likely to persist, or worsen, due to an ongoing merger surge that has more than doubled merger filings from 2020 to 2021. To address mounting concerns, the agencies announced in January that they were soliciting public input on ways to modernize federal merger guidelines to better detect and prevent illegal, anticompetitive deals in today’s modern markets.