The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is now appealing last week’s decision allowing Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard to proceed.
The plan is for the deal between Microsoft and Activision Blizzard to be officially completed on July 18th. The FTC had previously sought to delay this in order to further investigate how the deal might potentially negatively impact competition in the gaming market. However, last week, a US judge rejected this, indicating that the deal, at least from the US perspective, appeared to be able to proceed.
With yesterday’s appeal from the FTC, it once again appears uncertain whether the deal between Microsoft and Activision Blizzard can proceed according to the intended timeline. There are also some questions regarding the position of the UK competition authority on the deal. The EU competition authority had previously cleared the deal with certain conditions.
