If Microsoft thought it had found a way to placate Washington and insulate itself from the regulatory backlash hitting Big Tech, it has just had a rude awakening.
The Federal Trade Commission’s legal challenge on Thursday to the software company’s $75bn purchase of gaming company Activision Blizzard marks the first direct regulatory threat to the US software giant in more than two decades. With competition authorities in the UK and EU intensifying their own investigations, it has threatened to touch off a spate of actions that could unravel the gaming industry’s biggest deal.
The FTC’s intervention, under the direction of chair Lina Khan, is also one of the first clear signs that the regulators will try to prevent the biggest US tech companies from expanding the reach of their empires through acquisition — even when the deals appear to pass muster under most traditional antitrust analyses.