On January 18, 2022, the FTC and DOJ (the “agencies”) issued a joint request for information (RFI) asking for comments on how they should update their approach to merger enforcement. Similar to past RFIs, a variety of academics, attorneys, and other antitrust practitioners submitted detailed comments based on their experience and expertise in the field.¹ However, in this case, the general public also took an interest: over 5,000 comments were submitted,² compared to only 74 comments submitted during the 2020 public comment period for the Vertical Merger Guidelines.

…

We found that roughly 37% of the 1,688 general public comments were generated by just two mass campaigns: one by the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP), an organization founded in 2020 with the purpose of pushing greater antitrust enforcement; and one by the American College of Emergency Medicine. Our programmatic text analysis identified 458 comments, or about 27% of all comments from the general public,⁵ that appear to have been based off a common template offered on an AELP website, which also offered an easy process for submitting comments.⁶ This percentage could be even larger among the full set of 5,000 submissions: it is possible that the agencies did not post multiple submissions that exactly duplicated the template … The success of these mass campaigns may indicate that many people share the concerns they are intended to highlight.

###