Case Summary
The FTC issued an administrative complaint on 5/7/2010 challenging The Dun & Bradstreet Corporation February 2009 acquisition of Quality Education Data (QED) and alleging that the deal hurt consumers by eliminating nearly all competition in the market for kindergarten through twelfth-grade educational marketing databases. The data sold by these companies is used to sell books, education materials, and other products to teachers and other educators nationwide. The combination of the two companies gave Dun & Bradstreet, through its subsidiary Market Data Retrieval (MDR), more than 90 percent of the market for K-12 educational marketing data. Dun & Bradstreet acquired QED from Scholastic, Inc. for about $29 million, which was below the threshold amount that would have required the companies to notify U.S. antitrust authorities before finalizing the deal.