Sources: alongside the UK's CMA, the EU is expected to launch an in-depth investigation into Microsoft's $75B Activision bid due to size and competition fears
Regulators in Brussels expected to follow CMA with plans for prolonged competition investigation
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft's $75B bid for Activision Blizzard has been under formal scrutiny since July, when the UK's CMA opened its antitrust investigation into the deal. This report adds Brussels to the queue: the European Commission is expected to follow the CMA with its own prolonged, in-depth competition examination rather than wave the acquisition through at first review.
Subsequent coverage validated the expectation — the Commission escalated to preparing a statement of objections, and the CMA went on to find the deal would harm UK gaming competition before ultimately blocking it. What looked like routine sequencing in September 2022 became the template for how the deal was actually judged.
First-order effects
- Microsoft now faces parallel deep-dive investigations in London and Brussels, stretching the approval timeline for the $75B acquisition and leaving Activision's shareholders holding the deal-timeline risk while both regulators deliberate.
- The dual-probe structure forces Microsoft to defend the same competitive arguments — chiefly around game exclusivity — to two separate enforcers with different legal tests, doubling the burden on its deal team.
Second-order effects
- When Microsoft declined to offer pre-emptive remedies, the EU probe proceeded without an easy settlement path (the in-depth probe was confirmed after no remedies were filed), pushing the company toward either substantive concessions or a confrontation.
- Rival platform holders' exclusivity concerns become the de facto test case both regulators converge on, giving competitors indirect veto influence over a deal they cannot block themselves.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, UK, EU, and US enforcers reviewing big-tech acquisitions in loose alignment mean any single regulator's objection can stall a megadeal — Microsoft's own lawyers flagged exactly this cross-border enforcement risk (expecting CMA opposition could signal US-UK-EU alignment) — imposing a structural tax on scale-driven M&A.
- The endgame visible in the corpus — the CMA's outright block of the acquisition over competition and innovation concerns — points toward a regime where dominant-platform acquisitions face substantive rejection, not just delay-and-remedy outcomes.
The trend: Big-tech megadeals are moving from single-regulator sign-offs to simultaneous deep probes across the UK, EU, and US, where each jurisdiction's findings compound the others' leverage.