Dave Michaels

The Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against Amazon.com alleging that the e-commerce giant manipulated prices businesses paid to advertise on its retail platform, reaping tens of billions of dollars for itself over seven years.

Stanley Woodward, a top Justice Department official, has told antitrust enforcers he prefers they stop taking cases to trial and settle them instead. Some lawyers at the department interpreted the comments from the department’s third-ranking official as a directive to resolve any litigation against companies and avoid future litigation. Woodward, who now directly oversees antitrust enforcement, has said internally that he favors avoiding drawn-out, manpower-intensive litigation. Woodward’s posture could weaken the department’s ability to challenge anticompetitive mergers and could put settl

A federal jury found that Live Nation illegally monopolized the ticketing market for major concerts in the U.S., in a win for a group of states that accused it of overcharging music fans and pressuring venues to use its dominant Ticketmaster service. The verdict came after five weeks of trial and nearly four days of deliberation by jurors in a New York City federal court.

Amazon has reached a $2.5 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, just days into a civil trial examining whether the company duped customers into signing up for its signature Prime service and created a confusing process to cancel.

A federal judge on Tuesday barred Alphabet’s Google from paying to be the exclusive search engine on devices and browsers but declined to order more drastic changes that the company had opposed. The judge didn’t bar Google from making payments for distribution of its products, saying such a move would harm downstream partners. He also declined to require other remedies sought by the Justice Department, such as divestiture of Google’s Chrome browser.

Andrew Ferguson started his legal career with such a conventional antitrust practice—defending companies facing investigations and allegations of anticompetitive conduct—that his parents joked he was a “pro-trust lawyer.” A decade later, Ferguson’s rapid ascendance through Republican circles has put him in charge of the Federal Trade Commission, where he will try to chart a new course for antitrust enforcement: mixing MAGA populism with strains of the GOP’s traditional lighter-touch approach to regulation. While Ferguson has been outspoken in criticizing his 

The Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether Microsoft structured one of its latest deals with an artificial-intelligence startup to avoid a government antitrust review of the transaction. Microsoft in March hired Inflection AI’s co-founder and almost all of its employees and agreed to pay the startup around $650 million as part of a licensing fee to resell its technology.

The Federal Trade Commission and 17 states sued Amazon, alleging the online retailer illegally wields monopoly power that keeps prices artificially high, locks sellers into its platform, and harms its rivals. The FTC and states alleged that Amazon violated antitrust laws by using anti-discounting measures that punished merchants for offering lower prices elsewhere.

Microsoft can close its $75 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, a federal judge ruled, delivering a major setback to the Federal Trade Commission’s attempt to rein in big mergers. The deal would combine Microsoft’s Xbox videogaming business with the publisher of popular franchises such as Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Candy Crush.

The controversy over what Facebook has said about social and emotional hazards stemming from its products could become a test of the Securities and Exchange Commission's growing interest in policing corporate risks that hurt reputations more than profits.