The US tech company says it violates the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to be sued by the Federal Trade Commission, the FTC.

It’s been almost a year since Microsoft announced it would acquire Activision Blizzard King for $68.7 billion, but the deal can only close once the tech giant gets regulatory approval. CNBC reported on Redmond’s response to the FTC’s antitrust lawsuit against it. It is a 37-page document, and Microsoft says the Commission is committing a constitutional violation against them!

“The Commission’s procedures violate Microsoft’s right to procedural due process under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. The structure of these administrative proceedings, in which the Commission initiates and finally adjudicates the Complaint against Microsoft, violates Microsoft’s Fifth Amendment Due Process right to adjudication before a neutral judge. These administrative proceedings violate Microsoft’s Fifth Amendment Due Process right to adjudication before a neutral judge as applied to Microsoft because the Commission has prejudged the merits of the instant action,” Microsoft writes, saying it is irrelevant that Starfield, Redfall and an unnamed third game (from Tango Gameworks?) were made Xbox-exclusive after they acquired Bethesda’s parent company, ZeniMax Media.

The company added that Fallout 76 (rumored to be one of the PlayStation Plus Essential games for January!) or The Elder Scrolls Online, for example, remain multiplayer titles, and believes that Call of Duty falls into a similar category, as it is a mainly multiplayer IP that a larger audience would play, so there is no question of CoD disappearing from PlayStation. But there is one more thought to be made: Microsoft has also responded to the FTC’s claim that the tech giant lied to the European Commission:

“Any suggestion that Microsoft’s statements to the European Commission about ZeniMax were misleading is incorrect. Microsoft explicitly said it would honor Sony’s existing exclusivity rights and approach exclusivity for future game titles on a case-by-case basis, which is exactly what it has done. The European Commission agrees it was not misled, stating publicly the day after the Complaint that Microsoft did not make any “commitments” to the European Commission, nor did the European Commission “rely on any statements made by Microsoft about the future distribution strategy concerning ZeniMax’s games.” Instead, the European Commission cleared the transaction “unconditionally as it concluded that the transaction would not raise competition concerns.”

And one more jab at Sony: “Sony may prefer to protect the revenues it gets from more expensive individual game sales, but the antitrust laws do not insulate the dominant market player and its favored business model from the competition.” They should have skipped this comment.

Source: WCCFTech