What’s in a name: The Tipline for 23 September 2020

Antitrust officials from the US and EU yesterday praised the catchiness of the term “killer acquisition”. “I think it is a great phrase that obviously has captured a certain zeitgeist within the antitrust community,” said Ian Conner, director of the Federal Trade Commission’s competition bureau, before expressing concern over the broad application of the expression. But Conner also added that the most important contribution the phrase may have had over the past year is raising the profile of acquisitions of nascent competitors, flagging “the difficulties in challenging those transactions under the potential competition doctrine.”