Will the FTC Block Microsoft From Acquiring Activision Blizzard? Legal Experts Are Divided

ign.com:

Ever since Microsoft announced its intention to acquire Activision Blizzard in an unprecedented $69 billion deal, it’s felt like the news around regulators swarming to slam on the merger brakes hasn’t let up.

There are pages of arguments, tweets and interviews and quotes from executives, and plenty of internet chatter about what’s happening and why. From the outside looking in, it can be tough to sift through what’s important and what’s not, and who’s speaking from a position of expertise and who’s just guessing at the outcome.

Regardless, this deal has the potential to impact gamers more than any other merger to date, so it’s important to be informed on how and why governments look at this stuff, how unprecedented this is exactly and why, and what the possible outcomes might actually be beyond “Will they or won’t they?”

To help untangle this, IGN consulted three legal experts about the particulars of this deal and what the outcome might be. But while their analysis of what’s happened so far was in agreement, their predictions of the deal’s future were surprisingly divided.

For those who aren’t up on every gritty legal and regulatory detail of the corporate, regulatory, and antitrust worlds, here’s the rundown. In the US, it is the job of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to stop business practices that are either anticompetitive or likely to reduce competition in the market and lead to one company controlling prices, quality of goods and services. This involves a lot of different activities, but one of the big ones is overseeing acquisitions to make sure that two companies merging together don’t become one big company that can monopolize a market.

Given the sheer amount of money involved in the Activision Blizzard deal,