U.S. v. AT&T: Five Lessons for Vertical Merger Enforcement

In this article, we look back at the AT&T/Time Warner vertical merger challenge and its aftermath. We derive five lessons for vertical merger enforcement from the arguments presented at trial, the court’s reasoning, and the subsequent voluntary dissolution of the transaction.

By Luke M. Froeb & Michael Vita^[1]

I. INTRODUCTION

In 2016, the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”) challenged the vertical merger of TimeWarner (an upstream producer of video content)