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INTRODUCTION
Recent trends in merger enforcement demonstrate the importance of understanding the economic issues involved in platform mergers. The number of significant platform transactions reviewed by agencies has increased. For example, in 2014, both the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the European Commission (EC) investigated Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp and cleared the merger.1 In 2018, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) unsuccessfully sued to block AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner.2 More recently, in 2020, after a phase II investigation, the EC conditionally cleared Google’s acquisition of Fitbit.3
In this paper, using three recent platform mergers as examples, we discuss several economic issues…