A different 1984: The Tipline for 1 July 2020

The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission finalised their joint vertical merger guidelines yesterday in their first public statement on vertical deals since the DOJ issued guidance in 1984. Democratic commissioner Rohit Chopra argued in a dissent that the new document does not adequately address the harms of vertical deals in technology markets. It isn’t surprising that the 1984 guidelines had not already covered that ground – as that was the year that Apple introduced the first Macintosh computer.