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sylware
I don't understand, why US based companies would require anything from outside the US to merge???
thomasthetrain
Because antitrust laws from other countries say the clearance is required if the merger affects their market.

Both Microsoft and Activision have customers in the UK. The merger will affect these customers, so the UK regulator needs to approve the merger.

wdb
Do find it out that a small country like UK can force a world wide requirements, though. I think they should only consider their own market and not force the Ubisoft
pjmlp
Because they are actually local in each market, and have to obey local regulations.
sylware
... and they can close their offices in troublesome countries, merge in the US, and then re-opened in those countries.

This is inconsistent, at best seriously weird.

tlb
Judges aren't so easily fooled.
sylware
Those are UK branches of US companies. I still don't know why UK judges would have any say in US internal matters.
pjmlp
Because the UK branches also have to become one legal entity, and obey to the UK legal system.

As strange at is might look like, US companies have to obey the law of countries they operate on.

Which seems to be quite strange apparently, as I have to educate some of them on how German work law works.

sylware
Activision just needs to close its UK branch. It is gone anyway.
pjmlp
As it happens in Europe, one company cannot just close their branch willy-nilly.
sylware
Never heard of a non-local company unable to close their branch, this does not make any sense at all, it looks more fishy than anything else, more marketing to me to make people talk about them, since we all know they would have managed, UK agreement or not. Maybe UK is building "a case" to be able to fine msft/activision, since they are not part of EU anymore, they have to do that by themselves now. And I am on UK side (I quite dislike msft and activision), but anti-trust (mass default install), obvious planned obsolescence are plenty to fine them all the time at their scale, namely gigantic. That should be "fixed" by the US administration, but they have no clue how to do that, actually who has?