ANALYSIS: FTC Finds Tech Giants Have a Big Taste for Small Fish

A Federal Trade Commission report on a decade’s worth of mergers and acquisitions by the “big five” technology companies found that most unreported deals were very small, both in terms of the size of the acquisition and the number of employees involved.

The FTC studied transactions that were not reported under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act for pre-closing review by the FTC and Department of Justice, and where the acquiring company was Alphabet Inc. (which includes Google), Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Facebook Inc., or Microsoft Corp. The FTC staff then concentrated its analysis on those deals larger than ...