The US DoJ carries out first large-scale crackdown on potentially unlawful interlocking directorates which leads to 7 board resignations across 5 tech companies

On Wednesday, October 19, 2022, the Department of Justice Antitrust Division (DOJ) announced that seven directors resigned from their board positions because of DOJ’s concerns that holding the positions violated the Clayton Act’s prohibition on interlocking directorates. [1] Discussed more fully below, Clayton Act Section 8 generally prohibits a person from sitting on the boards of two competing companies. Although the interlocking-directorate prohibition has existed since 1914, government challenges to interlocking directorates have been historically rare and largely limited to the merger-review context. Perhaps the most high-profile enforcement action outside the context of a merger review occurred in 2009 when Eric Schmidt—Google’s then-CEO—resigned from Apple’s board and Arthur