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Federal Trade Commission regulators are taking a closer look at small deals by big tech companies that may have harmed competition. John D. McKinnon and Deepa Seetharaman report for The Wall Street Journal:
Federal regulators opened a new front in their investigation of big tech companies, seeking to determine whether the industry’s giants acquired smaller rivals in ways that harmed competition, hurt consumers and evaded regulatory scrutiny.
The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday ordered Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Facebook Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google owner Alphabet Inc. to provide detailed information about their acquisitions of fledgling firms over the past 10 years.
The new probe likely will involve hundreds of transactions that never drew federal scrutiny because they were under the dollar-value threshold for antitrust review, which is edging up to $94 million this year.
“This initiative will enable the commission to take a closer look at acquisitions in this important sector, and also to evaluate whether the federal agencies are getting adequate notice of transactions that might harm competition,” FTC Chairman Joe Simons said.
Read more here.
