The Publishing Merger That Failed: Reed Elsevier and Wolters Kluwer

What was billed a year ago as the largest merger in publications industry history collapsed in early 1998, a victim of its overblown scale and the antitrust concerns it raised. This paper describes the nature of the proposed merger, the background of U.S. antitrust law and European Community competition law in which it was analyzed, and the specific antitrust problems perceived by the government enforcement agencies. In doing so, some predictions about the reaction of enforcers to future convergence in the publishing industry may be made.