American trustbusters are losing their focus

In recent YEARS trustbusters have made no secret of their distaste for big firms and big deals. Lina Khan, the head of America’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC), came to office after saying that the agencies had failed for decades to do enough proper policing. In addition to suing Amazon and Google for abusing their market power, regulators sought to block Microsoft’s $69bn acquisition of Activision Blizzard and are holding up the purchase of Horizon Therapeutics by Amgen, a health-care firm. The activist approach has been mirrored in Europe. Britain’s trustbusters have been conspicuously aggressive, and on July 12th the European Commission slapped a €432m ($480m) fine on Illumina, a biotech giant, for buying Grail, a cancer-screening firm.