2024 Antitrust Update: Agencies Sharpen Their Teeth, But Is It All Bark and No Bite?
The following post was originally included as part of our recently published memorandum “Selected Issues for Boards of Directors in 2024”.
Antitrust in 2023 was marked by a series of policy developments—some still nascent, some ripe for enforcement for the first time. In the U.S., the FTC and DOJ finalized their drastically transformed merger guidelines. In the EU, landmark new digital regulations became applicable for the first time. And the UK government introduced a bill promising major new digital and consumer protection rules.
Regulators may be getting new tools, but the question for 2024 will be how they use them. Enforcement remained healthy on both sides of the Atlantic last year and we can expect that to continue. U.S. agencies continued their focus on allegedly anticompetitive labor and employment agreements, while seeing mixed results in their enforcement litigations. While the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) showed signs of relaxing its interventionist stance, it remained unafraid to pursue novel theories of harm.
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