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Metrics, Markets, and Merger Scrutiny: A Netflix-WBD Combination
Truth on the Market
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This morning’s announced merger between Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) would create a global media company of unprecedented scale. The transaction will also almost certainly attract scrutiny from antitrust regulators—most likely the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) Antitrust Division, rather than the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
The deal would offer a direct test of the agencies’ 2023 Merger Guidelines—a framework that, as my colleagues and I at the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) have argued, represents a return to the structuralist enforcement approach that dominated antitrust in the 1960s.