Justice Department Explains Why It Gave Fox-Roku Merger Its Greenlight, Outlines Company Commitments

The Justice Department issued a statement on its clearance of Fox Corp.‘s $22 billion aquisition of Roku, concluding that the transaction was “not likely to result in harm to competition.”

In a statement, the Antitrust Division said that they concluded that the concluded that the “entry of free, ad-supported streaming providers would be timely, likely, and sufficient to make a substantial risk of harm to competition unlikely. Additionally, the investigation found that, because Roku relies on a broad offering of content from many providers to attract consumers, the merged firm would suffer monetary and reputational harm if it attempted to use the Roku platform to harm Fox’s content rivals. If the merged firm were to degrade the Roku platform, consumers could switch to other connected TV platforms.”

The closing of the transaction was announced earlier on Friday, less than five months after the deal was proposed last June – well ahead of the initially projected window of the first half of 2027.

Per the DOJ, Fox committed that Roku would “remain an open and neutral content partner post-merger.”

Among the commitments that Fox made was to continue to carry non-Fox content on Roku for a period of at least three years, and to not discriminate against non-Fox content in search results, and to allow users to reconfigure applications on the home screen. Fox also will continue to provide date products to third parties on “commercially reasonable terms” and consistent with Roku’s standard distribution agreement, the DOJ said.

The Antitrust Division also said that Fox “will maintain existing contractual firewall commitments to content partners for competitively sensitive non-Fox content data, including aggregated and non-aggregated data that can be inferred from, or collected through, commercial activities of non-Fox content providers or their uses on Roku products, including click, search, view, and voice data for a period of at least 3 years.”