In an attempt to tighten the screw on the forerunners of tech industry, FTC has announced it will review all unreported transactions made by the leading tech companies during the last decade. FTC has ordered Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon to present detailed documents of all the unreported transactions completed between 1st January 2010 and 31st December 2019. None of the five companies were ready to give an immediate response on the matter.
FTC’s focus is on the deals that are quietly executed by these companies to acquire promising competitor for their own business. According to the official press release, the FTC will utilize the documents presented by the big tech companies to map out the acquisition trends in the tech market and also analyse the performance of smaller tech companies after getting acquired by a big company. This will give FTC a clearer picture of what details they will need to scrutinise any deals in the future. Also, if the FTC finds out any major anticompetitive merger deal during the said period, it will be ready to enforce encroachment action by the agency. A few members of FTC also requested the agency to also probe the companies on ground of consumer security, data privacy, and targeted advertising.
Talking about acquisitions, a U.S. District judge on Tuesday approved the year-long pending merger between T-Mobile and Sprint worth USD 26 billion. The stocks for both Sprint and T-Mobile went up as soon as the news broke out during the extended trading hours on Monday. The two companies still have a few hurdles to clear though with one of them being an approval from the California Public Utilities Commission. The company have battled strong resistance from states regarding concerns over competitiveness.