Over the past two months, SPARC has been working with industry and antitrust experts to build a complaint against the merger, which they intend to file with the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division.
Announced in May, McGraw-Hill and Cengage plan to merge and operate under the name McGraw Hill. This comes at a time when talks of limited competition within textbook publishers are very active. Textbook prices are rising at an all time high rate with no foreseeable future of them ever slowing down.
Seeing this problem, New York based educational company SPARC has begun working with top antitrust professionals in filing a formal complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice. The announcement from SPARC states that the share of the market held by the new McGraw Hill would be around 45%. "This is well above the threshold in federal guidelines to consider merger anti-competitive. Bottom line, the merger would turn the market into an effective duopoly." states SPARC in their Q&A.
Full Article from sparcopen.org More details to follow in the coming weeks.