FTC Releases Proposed Revisions to the Horizontal Merger Guidelines

On April 20, 2010, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released for public comment proposed revisions to the Joint FTC/DOJ Horizontal Merger Guidelines (Guidelines). The revisions are the product of a series of public workshops held over six months involving leading antitrust practitioners, enforcers, scholars, and economists. The consensus from those workshops was that the Guidelines needed to be updated to better reflect the current federal antitrust agencies' actual merger review practice. Much has changed since 1992 - the last time the Guidelines had been substantially updated. New economic theories have developed and are widely used by the federal antitrust enforcement agencies to analyze mergers between competitors. Additionally, the agencies increasingly rely on sources of evidence other than market share and concentration to predict a merger's effects in a particular market. While such realities became apparent to antitrust attorneys who regularly defend mergers against the federal antitrust agencies, the general public was kept in the dark.

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