Please stop shilling. Cardell herself, in the most recent interview criticised their engagement with the process saying how it cost time and money from them failing to offer the same concessions earlier.
‘Shilling’, because I don’t subscribe to your conspiracy theories?
Cardell’s statements were nonsense, because all parties had had significant engagement with the CMA resulting in behavioral remedies in the console space. The Cloud block caught practically everybody by surprise.
It makes zero sense for a regulator to say the purchasing party should have offered long term, unwieldy structural remedies from the start, something no other regulator had asked for.
At the end of Phase 1, the CMA did not explicitly rule out behavioral remedies. Why then would any party propose a divestment?
We all saw them threaten the UK in the press, and lobby in newspaper adverts, bordering on breaching rules, because rules like having politicians in your pocket, as is common in the US, and we've seen in the US used against the FTC regulator, are illegal in the UK.
The ‘bordering on breaching rules’ stuff is your imagination. It’s a major acquisition. and they were on the hook for over $1bn in penalties if it fell through.
They followed the right, legal process by taking the decision to CAT.
I’m not sure why you’re complaining about the FTC. They had their day in court and bungled it.
Throughout the process Microsoft have given less than was asked of them and have only arrived at this point kicking and screaming, having earlier tried to bully the CMA with a judicial review appeal with dates that meant the CMA would struggle to man the case. If they thought the UK population were stupid enough to eat the "tax payers' money wasted" line, they would have used that here too in the process.
Again, this is a dishonest view of the situation. There’s no regulator out there that’s accused MS of not cooperating in this merger, with respect to engagement.
Deriding MS for asking for an accelerated CAT hearing when you know deadlines existed that translated to increasing penalties in billions of dollars to be paid to Activision. Why would you make claims you know are clearly disingenuous?
The fact that the CAT judge agreed with MS on the timing should show you the lack of merits in that argument.