Topic
Government and court action against anticompetitive conduct—mergers, cartels, interlocking boards, dominant-firm abuse—spanning US and Asian regulators.
Korea's Fair Trade Commission sent investigators to Daesang, Ottogi and CJ CheilJedang on Oct. 14 over possible price collusion in six food categories. The conduct under review goes back to 2018, and the unit doing the reviewing is temporary, with a mandate that ends in 2028.
Reality
Paramount closed its $111 billion purchase of all Warner Bros. Discovery assets on October 6 and renamed the merged company Skydance. Netflix bid only for the studios and streaming, so CNN now shares an owner with HBO Max and CBS.
Reality
David Ellison's Skydance closed its $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery carrying roughly $80 billion of debt. The terms that cleared the deal leave staff and the overlap between HBO Max and Paramount+ as the likeliest sources of savings.
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Korea's Fair Trade Commission accuses SK Energy and HD Hyundai Oilbank of four years of fuel price sharing, with fines of up to about 4.6 trillion won. The bill turns on how the commission prices that sharing, the conduct behind most of the 44.1 trillion won in related sales.
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Skydance's David Ellison plans to merge Paramount+ and HBO Max, a pairing he puts at over 200 million subscribers, now that the Warner Bros. deal has closed. The company says it carries roughly $80 billion of debt, so that scale has to turn into cash.
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Skydance now owns Warner Bros and Paramount, cutting Hollywood's major studios from five to four and putting HBO, CBS and CNN under one owner. Writers and directors feel the lost buyer first, while cable distributors and streaming subscribers meet the combined company later.
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A DOJ inquiry into Andreessen Horowitz board seats at Databricks and Fivetran has run for nearly a year, and an unconditional merger clearance did not end it.
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The twelve attorneys general leave with two promises they will have to police themselves, and Free Press says parts of the deal ask less of Paramount than the two companies already do separately.
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Samyang, Sajo Dongaone, Daehan Flour Mills and TS Corporation have had payment and price-rollback orders put on hold, and the trials that decide whether the money is owed will turn on which sales the FTC counted.
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On Decoder, former DOJ antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter takes up the frontier labs' request for permission to coordinate on safety. His first point is that OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Elon Musk do not much like each other.
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Economists tracking German fuel margins after 2017 found the increase showed up only where two rivals in the same market had automated their pricing. The FTC says Amazon's Nessie tool reached a similar result by design.
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Amazon's Project Nessie raised prices where rivals' repricing software was likely to follow, and the FTC puts the take at more than $1 billion over six years. The core federal claims go to trial in October 2026.
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The remedy people familiar with the probe describe is a penalty rather than an unwind, and nobody has put a figure on it, which leaves the cost of routing a $17bn deal around merger review still blank.
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The New York Times says the Justice Department has sent a formal demand for information about the $20 billion Groq agreement, which puts a structuring assumption much of the industry uses into investigators' hands.
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The Antitrust Division says the withdrawal is neither an enforcement action nor a finding of violation, and under its own rules the letter only ever covered ISS, which is why the brief DOJ filed in May 2025 carries more weight.
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STAT reports investigators are asking about Epic's employee non-competes and its control of hospital data access. No charges are near, but procurement assumptions should move now.
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Two partners, two portfolio companies that grew into rivals, and an antitrust statute almost never pointed at VCs. The cost of that theory falls on any firm making several bets in one category.
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A nearly year-old interlocking-directorate inquiry names Databricks and Fivetran. The usual remedy is a resignation, which makes a board seat a term of investment worth repricing.
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