The MoginRubin blog offers informative analysis and insightful commentary on timely issues related to competition and antitrust actions, mergers, acquisitions and associated regulatory and legislative activity.
Written by Jonathan Rubin, Partner and Co-Founder of MoginRubin LLP -- I was not alone in noting the significance of the D.C. district court's ...
Written by Jonathan Rubin, Partner and Co-Founder of MoginRubin LLP -- This week’s decision in United States v. Google represents a significant ...
Written by Jonathan Rubin, Partner and Co-Founder of MoginRubin LLP -- When federal agencies review bank mergers, the competition issues typically ...
Continuing to make good on President Biden’s pledge to root out and challenge anticompetitive mergers, the Antitrust Division of the Justice ...
Written by Jonathan Rubin, Partner and Co-Founder of MoginRubin LLP The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on April 22, 2024, filed an administrative ...
Written by Jonathan Rubin, Partner and Co-Founder of MoginRubin LLP It is an application of artificial intelligence (“AI”) that many businesses, ...
The Federal Trade Commission and attorneys general from six states – California, Illinois, Minnesota, New York, Washington, and Wisconsin – joined in ...
Following its ten-month investigation, the United States Department of Justice appears on the verge of filing an antitrust suit against Live Nation, ...
U.S. Judge Leo T. Sorokin has permanently enjoined American Airlines and JetBlue from continuing their Northeast Alliance (“NEA”), in which the judge ...
Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and 10 consumer advocacy groups, including the American Economic Liberties Project, Public Citizen, and the Open Markets ...
In a deal announced on May 9, Tempur Sealy International, Inc., the world’s largest mattress manufacturer, has agreed to acquire Houston-based ...
On April 26, 2023, the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (“CMA”) announced its decision to block Microsoft’s purchase of global gaming leader, ...
On April 12, 2023, the European Commission informed Broadcom Inc. of its preliminary view that its proposed acquisition of VMware Inc. may harm ...
In a unanimous bipartisan decision, the Federal Trade Commission released an opinion Monday (April 3, 2023) finding Illumina’s $8 billion acquisition ...
Dan Mogin, Tim LaComb, and Jonathan Rubin
April 05, 2023Photo by Alexandru Tugui on Unsplash Roughly five months after announcing the largest merger in retail grocer history, Kroger and Albertsons are ...
Photo by Super Straho on Unsplash For the second time in a year, Amazon lost its bid to toss an antitrust action brought by online consumers ...
Photo by Taylor Vick on Unsplash Following its Phase 1 investigation, the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) determined Broadcom Inc.’s ...
Photo of cervical cancer cells by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash Pfizer Inc. announced on March 13 plans to acquire cancer drug maker Seagen ...
Photo by Nathan Rogers on Unsplash On March 7, 2023, the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals revived an antitrust lawsuit brought by Relevant Sports ...
Image: March 7, 2023, screen capture of Ticketmaster notices re Taylor Swift tickets. Live music fans have been dealt another setback in their war on ...
Photo by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash The FTC has decided to abandon its challenge to Meta Platforms Inc.’s acquisition of virtual reality (VR) exercise ...
Photo by Marquise Kamanke on Unsplash What's Happening On January 23, 2023, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) announced the Hart-Scott-Rodino ...
Photo by Owen Lystrup on Unsplash Christmas 2022 was bedlam for thousands of travelers as Southwest Airlines cancelled 16,700 flights amid severe ...
If anyone knows the workings of Washington’s antitrust machinery, it’s Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, who served as the company’s general counsel ...
What was promised in 2010 to deliver a robust pro-consumer ticketing and live events industry has created exactly the opposite 12 years later. That ...
Finding the deal would substantially lessen competition in the U.S. market for publishing rights for potential top-selling books, U.S. District Judge ...
Federal lawmakers troubled by The Kroger Co.’s impending acquisition of one of its chief competitors, The Albertson Cos., for $25 billion, will hold ...
Three poultry processors and a consulting firm that circulated wage information among them have entered a consent decree with the Department of ...
A group of AT&T and Verizon wireless subscribers have filed a proposed class action arguing that the T-Mobile / Sprint merger – despite all of ...
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit recently slammed the courthouse door on the plaintiff in Continental Automotive Systems v. Avanci, ...
In early February, Frontier Airlines and Spirit Airlines announced a $6.6 billion merger that gives Frontier a 51.5% controlling interest in a ...
Timothy Z. LaComb, Jonathan Rubin
May 05, 2022Premerger reporting is now required for companies working on transactions that will have an estimated value of $101 million or more at the ...
Jennifer M. Oliver, Timothy Z. LaComb
April 01, 2022In 1990, the Department of Defense could turn to 13 companies to produce tactical missiles, eight to make fixed-wing aircraft, and another eight to ...
Various leaders in the federal government have made it clear that they are now applying greater scrutiny to mergers and acquisitions and are not ...
HBLC · Ninth Circuit Opinion In Telescope Case By J Rubin And T LaComb 12 - 13 - 2021 The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals this month upheld judgment ...
Jonathan Rubin, Timothy Z. LaComb
December 13, 2021The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has ordered the company formerly known as Facebook to unwind its acquisition of Giphy, Inc. due to ...
Prior approval is once again standard practice. The Federal Trade Commission has resuscitated its long-dormant policy of routinely restricting ...
Despite agreeing on almost nothing, Democrats and Republicans have found a common cause: the anticompetitive tactics of dominant digital platforms. ...
Saying the deal would create a “publishing behemoth,” the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit on Nov. 2 ...
Since February 2020, staff members at the Federal Trade Commission have been studying past acquisitions by Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and ...
Jonathan Rubin, Jennifer M. Oliver
September 21, 2021President Biden’s July 9, 2021, Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy reflects a movement toward greater enforcement of ...
A quick recap of recent antitrust-related developments in semiconductors, real estate, college sports, insurance brokerage, digital advertising, ...
When it comes to companies offering workplace collaboration software platforms such as Microsoft Teams and Slack there is little in the way of ...
Dan Mogin, Jonathan Rubin, and Jennifer Oliver
April 01, 2021The number of players in the rapidly consolidating $140 billion global eyewear market just dropped by one as the biggest player grew bigger. The ...
FTC Commissioner Noah Phillips and George Washington Law School Competition Law Director William E. Kovacic, who once chaired the agency, appeared on ...
Salesforce.com, Inc. and Slack Technologies Inc. have received requests for additional information from the Department of Justice Antitrust Division ...
Dan Mogin, Jonathan Rubin, and Jennifer Oliver
February 26, 2021Following a unanimous vote, the Federal Trade Commission lowered by $2 million the size of mergers and acquisitions that require the parties to ...
Calling the case a “poster child for divestiture,” the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the divestiture of a company in the door ...
Dan Mogin, Jonathan Rubin, and Jennifer Oliver
February 20, 2021A decision by the Federal Trade Commission to challenge a proposed transaction as unlawful under antitrust laws, and setting the matter for a hearing ...
Agency review of business deals submitted to the federal government will now take at least the permissible full 30 days while the Federal Trade ...
On Dec. 8, 2020, the Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint challenging the merger of The Procter & Gamble Company and Billie, Inc. According ...
This is especially true in antitrust, where industries and markets undergo constant change brought about by innovation and changing consumer ...
Jonathan Rubin, Jennifer M. Oliver
December 10, 2020Facebook’s acquisitions of one-time rivals Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 drew a great deal of criticism from pro-competition experts. And ...
On October 7, 2020, the European Commission accepted commitments offered by Broadcom Inc., ending its investigation into the chipmaker. Although a ...
Dan Mogin, Timothy LaComb, Steven Benzand Jayme Weber
November 11, 2020At the end of the beloved 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy famously says to her Auntie Em, "There's no place like home!" It's one of the best ...
Altria must show it was failing in the e-cig business for deal to survive. Altria Group, Inc. and JUUL Labs, Inc. fired back at the FTC’s April ...
The sky is not falling. Opinion limited to 'at will' contracts. When a third party craters a contract, you and the other contracting party almost ...
On Feb. 24, 2020, the Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals revived refusal-to-deal and tying claims brought against Comcast Corp. by Viamedia Inc. ...
Jonathan Rubin, Timothy Z. LaComb
June 16, 2020Driven by competitive pressure and pandemic-related losses, Uber Technologies Inc. has expressed its intention to acquire competitor Grubhub Inc. to ...
[Editor's Note: An earlier version of this post inaccurately described the work of the Federal Trade Commission. The authors wish to thank Bruce ...
Jonathan Rubin, Timothy Z. LaComb
May 19, 2020Antitrust law doesn't take a back seat to bankruptcy. While bankruptcy is no one's idea of a dream, the beauty of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code is that it ...
Live Nation Threatens Anyone Who Doesn’t Play Along, Plaintiffs Allege Concert-goers tired of paying “supracompetitive fees” on ticket purchases from ...
In an interview with Politico’s Leah Nylen and Betsy Woodruff Swan, Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.) explained that he wants the next coronavirus relief ...
Living by the adage “if you can’t beat them, join them,” tobacco giant Altria Group, Inc. acquired a 35% stake in e-cigarette market leader Juul ...
Reuters has reported that Gray Television Inc. has withdrawn its $8.5 billion offer to buy Tegna Inc. due to the potential impact of the COVID-19 ...
On March 10, 2020, the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority gave Cengage and McGraw-Hill an ultimatum – provide remedies that cure the ...
On March 10th, the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) gave Cengage Learning and McGraw-Hill an ultimatum: address competition concerns or ...
Timothy Z. LaComb, Jennifer M. Oliver
March 24, 2020Big Tech mergers make big headlines, but there is much more to a deal than how much money changes hands. More important questions need to be ...
Anticompetitive conduct and misleading advertising practices in the burgeoning biosimilars market – where nearly identical versions of bioilogics are ...
Morgan Stanley’s proposed $13 billion all-stock acquisition of the popular E*TRADE online discount brokerage made big headlines last week. While no ...
The U.S. Treasury Department’s final regulations, giving it more power to scrutinize any national security risks that may arise from deals between ...
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) voted unanimously to challenge Edgewell Personal Care Co.’s proposed $1.37 billion acquisition of Harry’s, Inc. ...
The Federal Trade Commission and the New York Attorney General have sued Vyera Pharmaceuticals and two of its executives for antitrust law ...
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced on Jan. 28, 2020, that the “size-of transaction threshold” for reporting proposed mergers and ...
Two of the three dominant college textbook publishers – McGraw-Hill Education, Inc. and Cengage Learning Holdings II, Inc. – have agreed to merge. ...
The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have released for public comment their joint draft guidelines which courts may ...
“If that procedure sounds unfair, that’s because it is.” That’s how Axon Enterprise, Inc. describes the inner workings of the Federal Trade ...
Jonathan Rubin, Jennifer M. Oliver
January 13, 2020Charles Schwab Corp. has announced it will acquire TD Ameritrade Holding Corp. for $26 billion in stock. But the merger should receive significant ...
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is challenging Illumina Inc.'s $1.2 billion acquisition of Pacific Biosciences of California Inc. (PacBio), ...
You have to give Google credit. It’s no quitter. Despite pressure in the United States and Europe that might tell other companies to take a breath, ...
Copy equipment giant HP Inc. turned down the much smaller Xerox Holdings Corp.’s acquisition overtures twice in one week as the exchange of ...
After a 25-year business relationship, Anheuser-Busch InBev Worldwide, Inc. (ABI) has agreed to acquire the Craft Brew Alliance (CBA). ABI currently ...
Reuters broke the story that the Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) is conducting a national security ...
DNA sequencing giant Illumina, Inc.’s proposed $1.2 billion acquisition of Pacific Biosciences of California Inc. has drawn opposition in the U.K. ...
Moderator & Speaker: Daniel J. Mogin | Managing Partner, MoginRubin LLP Speakers: Jennifer M. Oliver, CIPP/US | Partner, MoginRubin LLP Thomas N. ...
Two of the three dominant college textbook publishers – McGraw-Hill Education, Inc. and Cengage Learning Holdings II, Inc – have agreed to merge, ...
In a September 13, 2019 letter, seventeen consumer advocacy groups and unions (led by Public Citizen Inc.) sent a clear message to the Federal Trade ...
Dan Mogin, Jennifer M. Oliver, Timothy Z. LaComb
September 18, 2019When a company with a new idea shakes up an industry and delights consumers, it is tempting for established players to devour them. But is that in ...
By Dan Mogin and Timothy Z. LaComb CBS Corp. is buying Viacom in an all-stock transaction that values Viacom at its current stock market ...
The federal government and five state attorneys general reached a proposed settlement with T-Mobile and Sprint on July 26, ending their opposition to ...
Jonathan Rubin, Timothy Z. LaComb
July 29, 2019AbbVie Inc. is acquiring Dublin-based Allergan PLC for approximately $63 billion in cash and stocks, the companies announced to today. This will give ...
With the uptick in global private equity add-on acquisition activity comes the usual M&A-related risks, but getting out in front of any potential ...
Employers and business owners who wish to protect themselves when employees leave for new positions -- taking with them valuable knowledge that ...
In a move that could redefine how 2.6 billion people use Facebook Messenger and Facebook’s acquired WhatsApp and Instagram apps, The New York Times ...
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