The Penguin Random House trial is widely seen as part of a growing DOJ trend during the Biden administration of taking a tougher stand on mergers in a bid to crack down on big business combinations."This literary leviathan would have 70 per cent of the US literary and general fiction market," News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson said in a statement.
"I came because I think that consolidation is bad for competition," Mr King said during his testimony earlier this week. "You might as well say you're going to have a husband and wife bidding against each other for the same house. It's kind of ridiculous," he said.Mr King's remarkable career came amid waves of consolidation in the industry.
The publisher of Carrie, Doubleday, is now part of Penguin Random House, as is another former King publisher, Viking Press.During the trial, Penguin Random House chief executive Markus Dohle admitted that while he has promised to allow the two merged companies to continue to bid against each other for deals with authors, the publisher's German parent firm, Bertelsmann, had no legal obligation to honour that commitment.
This is a problem for global human culture.