Following the announcement that a Judge has blocked the Bertelsmann Corporation (Penguin Random House) takeover of Simon & Schuster, Demand Progress Education Fund Legal Director Ginger Quintero-McCall issued the following statement:
“This is an important victory for everyone in the literary community. This merger would have negatively impacted authors’ ability to negotiate book deals and readers’ access to new books by consolidating more than half of many key U.S. book markets under the control of this single corporation.
“The Department of Justice’s decision to challenge the merger in the first instance signals a more aggressive approach to antitrust enforcement. We applaud this approach, which prioritizes the needs of workers, consumers, and small businesses over the bottomline of massive corporations. We hope to see this more aggressive approach applied to Big Tech companies, which have abused their power and market dominance for too long, harming consumers, small businesses, and the economy at large.”