WASHINGTON – Tech giant Amazon announced plans to acquire movie and television studio MGM for $8.45 billion today.

In response, Barry Lynn, executive director of Open Markets Institute, issued the following statement:

“In announcing plans to buy MGM, Jeff Bezos placed a big softball on a tee for the Biden administration to knock over the fence. This deal is bad for anyone who watches movies in theaters or streams movies and other shows online. It is bad for the people who write, film, edit, produce, and act in movies. It is bad for workers. And it is bad for American democracy. It should be immediately blocked.

“The good news is that blocking this merger is easy to do. The takeover of MGM is a dangerous horizontal consolidation of two studios, in an already highly consolidated business. And it is a vertical consolidation of power between one of the primary platforms for the sale and distribution of movies and one of the studios that creates movies, which will only worsen Amazon’s already dangerous conflict of interest in dealing fairly with other studios.

“The deal also underscores the need for the Biden administration to use its appointment of a head of the Antitrust Division within the Department of Justice and a new chair for the Federal Trade Commission to demonstrate that it takes America’s severe and worsening monopoly crisis seriously. Further, the deal underscores the need for the administration and Congress to take a strategic approach to restructuring the market for movies and television to prevent a few giant corporations from controlling all entertainment and speech in the United States.”

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