The FTC is Still Unhappy About Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard Deal

The sore losers at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) can’t stop obsessing over their stunning back-to-back defeats at the hands of Microsoft in federal court. And now that the software giant’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard is complete, they just had to remind the world that they’re still opposed to it and are seeking to retroactively unwind it someday.

“We remain focused on the federal appeal process despite Microsoft and Activision closing their deal in advance of a scheduled December appeals court hearing,” an FTC statement reads. “Microsoft and Activision’s new agreement with Ubisoft presents a whole new facet to the merger that will affect American consumers, which the FTC will assess as part of its ongoing administrative proceeding. The FTC continues to believe this deal is a threat to competition.”

So that’s all over the map. Let’s unpack what they’re really saying.

That first bit about the federal appeals process refers to an internal FTC trial—the “administrative proceeding”—that the agency decided to revive after its defeat in federal court. This is unprecedented: The FTC usually tries its cases internally first and then brings them to federal court if the internal battle is successful. But if it loses in federal court, it almost universally closes all internal actions related to that case. And it originally did just that with Microsoft. Only to reverse course three months later.

Microsoft’s agreement with Ubisoft was made to appease regulators from the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), but in keeping with the software giant’s efforts to keep things fair worldwide, it will apply worldwide: Ubisoft now has exclusive game streaming rights to all Activision Blizzard games that are released over the next 15 years, preventing Microsoft from dominating this nascent market. This change also raised questions with the EU regulators in the European Commission, as they had previously gotten separate concessions with Microsoft. But the EU isn’t expected to challenge this agreement. And neither should the FTC, but they’re insane. Which explains the next sentence.

“The FTC continues to believe this deal is a threat to competition.” Sadly for the agency, the FTC also continues to have no logical rationale or evidence to back this spurious claim, which is why it was so thoroughly rebuked by a federal judge back in June. The word “belief” here is ironically a good one: There are beliefs and there are facts, but the FTC has none of the latter to back its beliefs.

Why the FTC would pursue this matter after its one-sided defeat in court is unclear: It is wasting time and taxpayer money by pursuing Microsoft when it should be focusing on the many real and unpunished antitrust abuses that Big Tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta engage in every day.

Even the CMA, which spent most of 2023 successfully trying to out-crazy its partners in crime at the FTC, agrees that the Ubisoft deal allays its shared concerns about game streaming.

“The new deal will stop Microsoft from locking up competition in cloud gaming as this market takes off, preserving competitive prices and services for UK cloud gaming customers,” the CMA said in the wake of its belated approval of the acquisition.

As an American citizen and taxpayer, I expect federal agencies like the FTC to act on my behalf. But by ignoring ongoing abuses by Big Tech and focusing on imagined future crimes, they’re not doing that. As I have written before, this FTC clearly doesn’t understand the role it was mandated to play in antitrust. Frankly, that’s an abuse that needs to be stopped too.