After the purchase, Simon & Schuster would continue as a separate publishing unit under the Penguin Random House umbrella.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that the U.S. Justice Department filed a lawsuit on the same day that seeks to block Penguin Random House’s upcoming purchase of publishing business Simon & Schuster due to antitrust concerns.
ViacomCBS announced in November 2020 that it had agreed to sell the publishing business Simon & Schuster to Penguin Random House LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA, for US$2.175 billion.
The Justice Department said that if the deal went through, Penguin Random House would “hold unprecedented control and outsize influence over which books are published in the U.S. and how much authors are paid.”