LITIGATION TRENDS 2025 | 17 T O C E M P E S G A N T I I P C A P R O W C S P O R T C O N T A C T I N T A P P P A T C C L S E C new administration. We believe this leaves open the possibility that the second Trump Administration may not scrutinize or challenge mergers to the full extent contemplated under the 2023 Merger Guidelines, but nevertheless have decided to leave the Guidelines in place to preserve resources and avoid undermining the value of the Guidelines to courts by rescinding them too early or too often. Third, within weeks of Trump taking office, the federal antitrust enforcers initiated two merger challenges. On January 30, 2025, the DOJ sued in the Northern District of California to block Hewlett Packard Enterprises’s proposed acquisition of Juniper Networks, a transaction involving a horizontal overlap between the alleged second- and third-largest providers of enterprise-grade Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) solutions. Notably, the parties’ combined market share would be relatively low (20-30%) and the transaction was unconditionally cleared in the UK and European Union on seemingly similar facts. Nonetheless, the DOJ challenged the transaction, citing the 2023 Merger Guidelines and alleging that the transaction would eliminate “fierce” head-to-head competition, “weaken innovation,” and facilitate coordination among the remaining WLAN providers. The lawsuit reveals that antitrust enforcers still are willing to push the envelope in challenging transactions that they believe are anticompetitive, although the theory of harm – i.e., head-to-head competition between rival firms – is hardly groundbreaking. Antitrust Enforcers Still Have a Full Docket of Monopolization Cases While many credit the Biden Administration with the anti-monopolist movement, most of the Big Tech monopolization investigations were launched by the DOJ and FTC during Trump’s first term. Since that time, there has been a historic wave of monopolization lawsuits brought by federal antitrust enforcers and state attorneys general – and 2024 was no exception. We expect the Trump Administration will continue to vigorously prosecute these cases, particularly given the Trump Administration’s apparent focus on Big Tech. In the biggest antitrust news of 2024, DOJ secured a liability victory in the Google Search monopolization case, which found that Google’s exclusivity agreements with other tech companies allowed it to monopolize internet search queries and certain search advertisements. In March 2025, DOJ filed an updated remedy request seeking for Google to divest the Chrome browser, suggesting that the Trump Administration is committed to an aggressive approach. The case now has a trial on remedies slated for April 2025. The DOJ’s Google Ad Tech trial concluded in November and is awaiting an opinion, while the State of Texas trial against Google’s Ad Tech practices begins in March 2025. As the DOJ’s Google trials were winding down, DOJ launched monopolization suits against Apple (monopolization in the smart phone market), Live Nation-Ticketmaster (live events), and Visa (debit card networks). DOJ also sued RealPage for monopolization in commercial revenue management software used for apartment pricing, as well as alleging that instituting algorithmic pricing was an illegal agreement on price between RealPage and its landlord customers. These cases are all in early days, and while a Antitrust The lawsuit reveals that antitrust enforcers still are willing to push the envelope in challenging transactions that they believe are anticompetitive, although the theory of harm is hardly groundbreaking. I 16 | Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP
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