This year, a decision of the German Competition Authority made headlines, titled “Competition concerns about the acquisition of a daily newspaper in the Zollernalbkreis district”. The remarkable thing about this case is that it was scrutinized at all. The Zollernalbkreis is tiny and consists of a handful of small towns and villages. The daily newspaper in question has a circulation of less than 17,000 printed copies with a monthly subscription price of approx. 45 EUR. But : its acquisition was subject to a merger filing and raised competition concerns to a degree that the German Competition Authority blocked one potential buyer. The case is somewhat indicative for merger cases in the media sector : the significance of media companies often is considered to exceed their turnover and economic weight ; they are being reviewed with a particular scrutiny and they attract a considerable amount of public attention. The patterns that may be deducted from the cases in this Special Issue, show a worrying result : The understandable wish for control over competition in media businesses might lead to suffocating the economic development of the ‘Fourth Estate’. These patterns are : Mergers in the media sector are subject to special scrutiny (see 1.) ; markets continue to be (mainly) defined narrowly (see 2.) ; and regulation is applied rigorously despite the decisive influence of digitalization and the role of Big Tech players on the continuance of media markets (see 3.).
