The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced Tuesday it will require the top five U.S. technology firms—Alphabet Inc. (Google), Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft—to provide information on acquisitions not previously reported to the agency dating back 10 years.
The FTC said it ordered the companies to “provide information and documents on the terms, scope, structure, and purpose of transactions that each company consummated between Jan. 1, 2010 and Dec. 31, 2019.” The acquisitions in question involved entities being purchased or acquired that were too small to be reported to federal agencies under the antitrust provisions of the Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) Act. The FTC said it was seeking to use the information to determine if “large tech companies are making potentially anticompetitive acquisitions of nascent or potential competitors that fall below HSR filing thresholds.”
