Late last month, a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit announced its much-anticipated decision in the AT&T-Time Warner case, upholding the district court’s decision that the transaction did not violate the antitrust laws. Immediately after, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that it is not planning to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, ending the agency’s quest to block the merger.

AT&T-Time Warner was the first vertical merger challenge litigated to judgment in nearly forty years and, along with increased political attention to the antitrust laws, immensely renewed interest about vertical merger enforcement in the United States. While the merger was not enjoined, the D.C. Circuit did not rule out the potential for successful challenges to vertical mergers. Instead, the court abstained from speaking definitively on the proper legal standard for evaluating vertical mergers, despite noting the “dearth of modern judicial precedent on vertical mergers and a multiplicity of contemporary viewpoints about how they might optimally be adjudicated and enforced.” See United States v. AT&T, —F.3d— (2019).

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