It’s only round one (trial court ruling) but about time someone spoke some reasonableness to the idiotic FTC attempt to block the Activision acquisition. The FTC was literally fronting for Sony, who despite being offered a ten year guaranty of access to Call of Duty just wanted to put Xbox out of business.
“This Court’s responsibility in this case is narrow. It is to decide if, notwithstanding these current circumstances, the merger should be halted—perhaps even terminated—pending resolution of the FTC administrative action,” Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley wrote in her decision, published on Tuesday. “For the reasons explained, the Court finds the FTC has not shown a likelihood it will prevail on its claim this particular vertical merger in this specific industry may substantially lessen competition. To the contrary, the record evidence points to more consumer access to Call of Duty and other Activision content. The motion for a preliminary injunction is therefore DENIED.”
PS - I can’t remember the last time I saw a court’s order so heavily redacted.
Not always the case (pun intended) but the government had no business getting involved here and the action would have in no way “protected” the public at large.
It’s especially egregious when you consider that where a case of actual harm to the public is ongoing and has been for years now (the X86 spectre flaws) and are still with us and have at best been only partially mitigated by software code band-aids which are easily circumvented .
One of my more conspiracy oriented friends thinks this is deliberate on the part of the government as a response of the Snowden revelation that Cisco was putting backdoors in their networking gear at the behest of the NSA
This going through would not be good for computer gaming.
Microsoft, having failed to develop enough popular games in-house are just trying to buy their way to the top.
Anyway, hopefully the CMA cloud gaming ruling holds up and this wretched deal is scuppered.
This has all been a mess and few involved are coming out of this looking good. From Microsoft execs blatantly emailing each other that this is removed the competition to an FTC expert witness not bothering to read his own data, with Microsoft execs threatening a country thrown in for good measure.
That seems to be a very CMA-centric viewpoint. After five days of testimony and other evidence the court ruled this deal was only going to broaden game availability - the antithesis of the FTC and CMA viewpoints
The cat’s out of the bag - Sony has finally (13 months later) signed M$'s offer to keep Call of Duty on Playstation for 10 years…
If the FTC continues its insistence on appealing it’s loss, the head of the FTC should be sacked - Kahn had a pretty rough go of it last week in a House hearing already…
