Big Tech Acquisitions — Towards Empirical Evidence

Big Tech, commonly associated with the firms Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM), makes up the most valuable companies worldwide in 2020. In the ten years leading up to 2020, these five companies alone acquired more than 400 firms, predominantly in the technological sector.1 However, most of these transactions were not scrutinised by competition authorities as they did not reach the traditional turnover thresholds, whereas those reviewed were not blocked following current merger control procedures. Prominent examples include the Google/YouTube, Facebook/Instagram, Facebook/WhatsApp, and Microsoft/GitHub mergers. [...]