Geoff Manne & Gus Hurwitz on the Draft Merger Guidelines

City Journal – ICLE President Geoffrey Manne and Director of Law & Economics Programs Gus Hurwitz were cited in a post at City Journal about the Federal Trade Commission and U.S. Justice Department’s recently unveiled draft merger guidelines. You can read full piece here.

The FTC has had a busy summer. It proposed severe new disclosure requirements for parties seeking to merge. Joining forces with the Justice Department, it moved to de-modernize the government’s merger guidelines. (“Weighted by the number of citations,” observe Gus Hurwitz and Geoff Manne, “the average year of the 50 cases the FTC and Justice Department cite in support of their approach is 1975—ages ago in antitrust law.”) The agency launched an investigation of OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, and signaled its intent to regulate artificial intelligence more broadly. It accused Amazon of using so-called dark patterns to trick users into subscribing to Amazon Prime. (It also claims that Prime is too hard to quit. Never mind that one can do so in fewer clicks than it takes to file a comment with the FTC.) And any day now, Khan is expected to file her biggest lawsuit of all: her long-planned quest to break up Amazon.