Biden to sign an EO calling on regulators to enact reforms such as increasing scrutiny of tech mergers and focusing more on moves like “killer acquisitions”
- The White House on Friday will announce a new executive order aimed at cracking down on anticompetitive practices in Big Tech, labor and numerous other sectors.
Context & Ripple Effects
The planned order became a signed directive the next day, followed by a deep dive into its whole-of-government challenge to concentrated markets. The immediate significance is not a new merger rule itself, but a White House instruction for regulators to elevate competition enforcement against large businesses.
Later orders directed CFIUS to scrutinize deals involving critical technology and personal data, extending the administration's use of executive action to deal review with national-security and data-access concerns.
First-order effects
- Federal regulators are asked to give greater scrutiny to Big Tech mergers, including acquisitions of smaller companies that could remove emerging competitors.
- Big Tech and acquisition targets face a less predictable review environment as regulators are urged to focus on the competitive rationale of transactions, not only their immediate market overlap.
Second-order effects
- Startups that treat acquisition by a large platform as a likely exit route may face longer or more demanding transaction reviews, while Big Tech must make a stronger case for deals involving nascent rivals.
- The order gives agencies a shared policy signal to pursue competition issues across concentrated markets, reinforcing the later use of executive orders to direct deal scrutiny around technology and data.
Third-order effects
- If agencies act on the directive consistently, federal competition policy shifts from assessing only established market power toward preserving potential competition before it is absorbed.
- The broader pattern is a more state-mediated approach to technology governance, in which merger review, data protection, and national-security screening are treated as connected policy levers.
The trend: The White House is using executive directives to coordinate more interventionist oversight of technology firms, transactions, and sensitive data.