A new coup from Big Tech – or, as they are called in the United States, ‘Big Tech’ – to the left wing of the Democratic Party. The Justice of that country has approved, against the criteria of the competition regulator, the purchase by Microsoft of the online games company Activision Blizzard, owner of, among others, the games Candy Crush, Call of Duty, and World of Warcraft , for 75,000 million dollars (68,000 million euros).
Microsoft’s goal is to integrate Activision’s games on its Xbox console, although Call of Duty will continue to be available on rival Sony’s Playstation until 2028 and, under a recent deal, on Nintendo consoles. Since the Covid-19 pandemic arrived, the gaming industry moves more money than the film and music industries combined. In 2021 alone, it had a turnover of 180,000 million dollars (close to 165,000 million euros), according to estimates by the specialized financial website Marketwatch. Only the game Grand Theft Auto V, released in 2013, has generated sales of 6,000 million dollars (almost 5,500 million euros), which is more than double that of the 2009 movie Avatar, which is the film that has produced the most sales. collected from History.
Future prospects are also favorable for online gaming, as new generations of consumers already grow up with them and new augmented and virtual reality devices are developed. According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), if this operation were carried out, Microsoft would have a dominant position in the online gaming market through Xbox, despite the fact that the consultancy Bloomberg Intelligence estimates that its percentage would be around only 11%.
The speed and forcefulness with which the judge in the case, Jacqueline Scott Corley, has acted thus allows the purchase to be completed next Tuesday, as planned. The FTC can appeal the ruling, but that is very rare. The only remaining obstacle to global purchasing is that of the British competition authorities, although they appear to be in favor of authorizing it.
The decision is a complete defeat for Lina Khan, the president of the FTC, who, since taking office, has launched a crusade against ‘Big Tech’ that has been characterized by failure. Khan came to office thanks to the pressure of the senator of the Democratic left Elizabeth Warren, who in 2020 demanded that Joe Biden, in exchange for his support for the White House’s legislative initiatives, that he nominate to the head of the regulatory agencies people with no experience in the sectors they were going to supervise and who were also ideologically close to her.
Khan ticks both boxes. In fact, more than a regulator, she is an activist, as she herself made clear in December when she affirmed that her mission was accomplished only if the FTC influenced legislation on excessive market concentration. It’s an approach that, if nothing else, consoles him for her failures. Because the FTC has not only failed to prevent the acquisition of Activision by Microsoft, but also the acquisition of the virtual reality company applied to sports Within by the giant of social networks and virtual reality Meta. In any case, Khan continues in her efforts, and two weeks ago she announced a new case, this time against Amazon.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
