Their brazen ways risk riling antitrust regulators, still giddy from smacking around that rapacious monopolist, Microsoft.
Competition for consumers, moreover, increasingly will be replaced by competition for the favor of antitrust regulators.
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Antitrust regulators are typically influenced in their decisions by the perceived impact of a merger or acquisition.
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Federal antitrust regulators approved the purchase with the caveat that Comcast must divest the stake by 2007.
In approving the merger, antitrust regulators required that AEG be allowed to compete with Ticketmaster for ticket sales.
Such a get-together would probably invite the attention of antitrust regulators, as would a deal with Exxon Mobil.
This should have made antitrust regulators happy, instead of leading them to threaten to sue Apple and the publishers.
The deal would be one of Google's largest to date and antitrust regulators are likely to study it closely.
Antitrust regulators are unlikely to block either the Navteq or Tele Atlas deal.
The agreement with the AG lays out the concerns antitrust regulators will likely have in other jurisdictions around the country.
Last spring, federal antitrust regulators launched a broad civil probe into whether Google has abused its dominant position in search advertising.
At the same time, he lobbied antitrust regulators against Microsoft's bundling plans and courted Microsoft's bitter rival in the Web-browser market, Netscape.
Are the parties to the NYSE Euronext negotiation worried about antitrust regulators?
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The complementary nature of the markets they serve should help the airlines avoid any major hurdles with antitrust regulators, industry experts say.
With any company as large, complicated and fast-moving as Google, antitrust regulators inevitably will find some problems if they look hard enough.
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Microsoft, for example, saw its shares knocked down by its battle with antitrust regulators, yet still managed to be the world's second-biggest wealth creator.
Antitrust regulators worry especially about the effects on competition and innovation when it is a maverick, like the price-cutting TNT, that is being eliminated.
Brown, an investment bank, is the desire to gain pricing power, something that firms rarely discuss for fear of attracting the attention of antitrust regulators.
This could be one reason why the two companies are reportedly in merger talks - a deal that could have antitrust regulators crawling all over it.
In that case, Facebook could run into trouble of a different sort: as it gets bigger, the company may find itself under the gaze of antitrust regulators.
News Corp. struck the deal for Hughes earlier this year after antitrust regulators refused to approve GM's earlier deal with EchoStar (nasdaq: DISH - news - people ).
Antitrust regulators had no choice but to step in.
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That deal was approved by U.S. federal antitrust regulators on the condition that Comcast divests the stake by 2007, and with that deadline now approaching Comcast wants to sell the share back to Time Warner.
And while Tesco may still the dominant player in the U.K., with one in every 8 British pounds spent in its stores, sniping from antitrust regulators and increasingly stiff competition means Leahy is now looking to cut reliance on his own turf.
But what seems incontestable, and a point on which Mr Schmalensee chooses not to dwell, is that even if Microsoft is acquitted of the charge of anti-competitive behaviour, its practices have already been tamed not just by conditions in its markets but also, directly and indirectly, by the antitrust regulators.
Those that can do it without setting off the antitrust alarm of regulators should be thinking this way, especially if too little market power is concentrated in too many hands.
Microsoft had pressed regulators to bring an antitrust case against Google.
And the specific cause of the dip below 10K--Dow component Microsoft (nyse: MSFT - news - people) dropping 5% after European Union regulators stepped up their antitrust investigations--was bland in the extreme.
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