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The Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division Friday announced that it closed its investigation into Fox Corp.’s $22 billion acquisition of Roku after finding the deal “is not likely to result in harm to competition.”
However, Fox — which announced the completion of the Roku deal Friday — made several commitments to the DOJ in connection with the deal.
According to the DOJ, “Consistent with the Division’s finding that the transaction is unlikely to result in harm to competition, Fox has committed that Roku will remain an open and neutral content partner post-merger.”
Specifically, Fox has committed to abide by the following four conditions:
- Fox will continue carrying non-Fox content on Roku for a period of at least three years “consistent with historical Roku practice.”
- Fox “will not discriminate against non-Fox content” in search results. For application placement on Roku, Fox will continue to allow users to reconfigure application configurations on the home screen.
Fox will continue to provide data products to third parties on commercially reasonable terms consistent with Roku’s standard distribution agreement. - 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 three years.
The DOJ’s Antitrust Division opened an investigation into Fox’s proposed Roku acquisition, as is customary, and in September issued second requests for documentation to Fox and Roku. According to the agency, the division “analyzed whether the proposed merger may harm competition among free, ad-supported streaming providers” and “considered whether Fox might use its control of the Roku platform to disadvantage its content rivals post-merger.”
The Justice Department concluded that Fox’s Roku takeover would be “unlikely” to introduce “substantial risk of harm.”
“The Division 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,” it said in its statement. “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.”
It’s true that if Fox were to discriminate against TV and streaming rivals in deals for the Roku platform, that would hurt Roku’s existing business. In the first nine months of 2026, Roku has topped financial forecasts, delivering 23% revenue growth for the period to hit $4.1 billion in sales. About 49% of that came from advertising and 40% is from subscriptions.
Fox Corp. has consistently promised to continue to run Roku as an “open ecosystem” following the merger since it announced the agreement in June 2026.
“Beginning today, our top priority for the combined company is to continue to relentlessly serve audiences and partners, while reinforcing the openness and choice that is the essence of the Roku platform,” Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch said in a statement Friday.
The DOJ said the Antitrust Division will “continue to evaluate competition in the industry and may take appropriate action in light of changing facts or circumstances.”
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