Federal Antitrust Enforcers Release Long-Awaited Vertical Merger Guidelines For Public Comment

The last time the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission (the Agencies) published formal guidance on vertical mergers, Ronald Reagan was in the middle of his first presidential campaign, Ghostbusters was leading box office sales, cell phones were the size of a lunch box, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was just north of 1,000. 

On January 10, 2020, the Agencies released a draft of their 2020 Vertical Merger Guidelines for public comment (Draft Vertical Guidelines). The Draft Vertical Guidelines describe the principles and analytical framework the Agencies use to evaluate whether vertical mergers violate antitrust law. Vertical mergers combine entities providing different but complementary services, operating at different points of the same supply chain (such as AT&T and Time Warner, or CVS and Aetna), as opposed to horizontal mergers, which combine entities typically competing to offer the same or substantially similar