It’s no surprise at all, but yes, the Federal Trade Commission has indeed filed an appeal of Tuesday’s US District Court of Northern California decision to deny the regulatory body a preliminary injunction blocking the Microsoft buyout of Activision-Blizzard. The appeal is barebones and won’t see full arguments until it’s submitted to the Ninth Circuit court.
As we noted Tuesday, the judge in this suit found that “the FTC has not shown a likelihood it will prevail on its claim this particular vertical merger in this specific industry may substantially lessen competition” and was therefore unlikely to prevail in upcoming litigation over the merger, hearings for which are still set to begin in August, meaning the deal was allowed to proceed.
Nasdaq announced that Activision-Blizzard will be delisted from its indicies starting next Monday, pursuant to the merge into Microsoft; as GIbiz notes, part of the rush here is the July 18th deadline that if missed could force a deal renegotiation and big payout for ABK. And while the UK’s CMA initially suggested it would pause its legal dispute over its own block of the merger, it was back to being bullish about it as of Wednesday.
