Quote:
Originally Posted by chemgear
The judge has a son that works at Microsoft? Strange, wouldn't you normally recluse yourself from that obvious conflict of interest?
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This was made known by the judge in a pre-hearing conference, he works outside of the gaming division and doesn't stand to gain or lose anything by the outcome of the case. If the FTC had an issue knowing this before the hearing took place, they could have asked for a recusal yet they did not.
Here a great tweet about why it is a non-issue:
https://twitter.com/user/status/1673347633748799496
Another thing that points to this being a non issue is in the filed decision that denied the PI, it states that it was the FTC that wanted her handle the case while Microsoft wanted it to litigate in D.C. To put it another way, the FTC preferred to litigate where they lost Meta-Within (in San Francisco where the cases have not much of an overlap with Microsoft-ABK) over where they lost AT&T-Time Warner in D.C.
D.C. is the only district/circuit with any vertical merger case law in recent history. Which is why Microsoft preferred the case to be heard there.