TechTarget published an October 7, 2022 article, Experts torn on impact of antitrust bills passed by House, extensively citing AAI on the importance of more resources for the U.S. antitrust agencies. From the article:
Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act gets thumbs-up
Merger filing fees represent an important funding source for antitrust enforcement agencies, meaning that updating those fees would provide the agencies with much-needed additional resources for more vigorous antitrust law enforcement, said Diana Moss, president of the American Antitrust Institute.
“This bolsters and supports the agencies’ ability to do more thorough first looks through the second request process — to move those cases that raise competition concerns to the investigatory process and all the way through to the resolution of those cases, whether it’s going to federal court to litigate them or hammer out settlement agreements,” she said.
In addition, the Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act creates three new categories for merger deals over $1 billion, which Moss applauded as a “great development.”
Merger deals over $1 billion tend to face more challenges on anti-competitive grounds, but they also tend to be deals that reach settlement rather than being resolved through other enforcement means such as litigation, according to an analysis paper by Moss.
Lumping all $1 billion-plus deals into one category “masks important information about how enforcement levels and trends potentially vary by different sizes of billion-dollar mergers,” Moss noted in her analysis paper. Under existing law, all deals over $1 billion are included in a single category, while deals under $1 billion fall into multiple categories.
“It’s long overdue to have those categories,” Moss said.
