Wednesday, April 28, 2021 With antitrust enforcement of the technology sector making headlines daily, and as lawmakers focus on strengthening and potentially reforming antitrust laws as a tool to regulate the tech industry, we anticipate a significant increase in scrutiny by US federal antitrust authorities of vertical mergers, [1] including merger of complements and so-called “diagonal mergers” in the technology sector. Notwithstanding the current challenges of vertical merger enforcement, [2] on June 30, 2020, the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) and the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) issued guidelines (the “Vertical Merger Guidelines”) [3] describing the practices, techniques and enforcement policies the agencies use to evaluate vertical mergers, and on December 22, 2020, the FTC issued additional guidance on Vertical Merger Enforcement (the “Commentary”).