Will Europe muddy the future of Microsoft’s big deal?
European antitrust regulators are set to weigh in Monday on Microsoft’s $69 billion takeover of Activision Blizzard. In a twist, the European Commission is reportedly set to approve a video game megadeal that its American and British counterparts have already rejected.
If that happens, tech giants will be left with an even more confusing regulatory landscape to contend with, as three of the world’s most powerful antitrust regulators take different policy tacks.
The E.U. is expected to be satisfied with Microsoft’s concessions on the deal, namely pledges to make sure top titles like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft are available to rival video game platforms like Sony’s and Nintendo’s.
That would be a very different conclusion than that reached last month by Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority, which argued that Microsoft could end up dominating the nascent business of cloud gaming — and that no solution…
This article was written by Andrew Ross Sorkin, Ravi Mattu, Bernhard Warner, Sarah Kessler, Michael J. de la Merced, Lauren Hirsch and Ephrat Livni and originally published on www.nytimes.com