This past September, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz and Department of Justice (DOJ) Assistant Attorney General Christine Varney announced the Joint FTC/DOJ Project to Modernize the Horizontal Merger Guidelines (“Merger Guidelines”) (“HMG Project”).1 Contemporaneously, the FTC and DOJ (the “agencies”) released a list of 20 questions for public comment relating to the possible revision of the Merger Guidelines and scheduled a series of five HMG Project workshops open to the public in December ’09 and January ’10.
The stated goal of the project is basically the same as it was for the 1982, 1984, and 1992 Merger Guidelines, i.e., “to determine whether the Horizontal Merger Guidelines accurately reflect the current practice of merger review at the Department and the FTC as well as to take into account legal and economic developments that have occurred since the last significant Guidelines revision in 1992.” AAG Varney and Chairman Leibowitz also note that the passage of 17 years, alone, warrants an update.2
