A federal judge approved the U.S. Justice Department's antitrust settlement over Hewlett Packard Enterprise's (NYSE: HPE) $14 billion purchase of Juniper Networks late Wednesday, resolving the last court challenge to a deal that has already been consummated. The business at the center of that settlement — the Instant On wireless unit HPE agreed to sell — drew a top cash bid of as much as $15 million in the court-supervised sale process, or about one-tenth of one percent of what HPE paid for Juniper.
That second figure determines whether Wednesday's ruling ratified a real antitrust remedy or a formality. The merger itself was never in doubt at this stage. HPE completed the acquisition in July 2025, days after signing the consent decree, and has spent the intervening year folding the two networking portfolios together. What the court reviewed was not whether the deal could proceed but whether the price the government extracted for allowing it was adequate.
What the court actually decided
U.S. District Judge Casey Pitts, sitting in San Jose, issued a 41-page ruling entering the amended final judgment, according to Bloomberg, which first reported the decision. The review took place under the Tunney Act, the 1974 statute barring a court from rubber-stamping an antitrust consent decree and requiring an affirmative finding that the settlement serves the public interest. In most merger cases that review is brief and uncontested. This one was contested for months by state attorneys general who won the right to take discovery into how the settlement was reached.
Pitts found two violations of that statute in the process that produced the decree. HPE failed to disclose lobbying efforts aimed at the CIA and the Pentagon, and the Justice Department withheld information about alternative remedies it had considered, per reporting on the ruling carried by Free Malaysia Today. Neither violation blocked approval, the ruling said, because the concealed material had by then been forced into public view by the intervening states.
The more striking passage concerns the judge's own authority. The acquisition "may lessen competition," the ruling said, but the court "lacks the independent power to prevent that outcome," per the same account. That is a judge recording, in the order granting the government's own motion, that he believes the deal may harm competition and that entering the decree anyway is the only course the statute leaves him. It is an unusually plain statement of the limits of Tunney Act review.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, whose office led the intervening coalition of state attorneys general, said in a statement the same day that the court had characterized the government's settlement as a "limited" one "approved under duress after the Trump Administration threatened to dismiss the lawsuit, leaving the public with no remedies at all — Americans deserve better." HPE's response, per Free Malaysia Today, was brief: "We are gratified by the judge's approval of the settlement. No further action is required."
Both statements can be true simultaneously. The company obtained the outcome it needed; the states obtained an evidentiary record of how that outcome was produced. Nothing about the structure of the combined business changes as a result of either.
What the states say that record shows, per Bonta's office, is that departmental leadership disregarded the recommendations of Antitrust Division staff and rejected alternative settlement proposals that were never disclosed publicly. The ruling's finding of two disclosure violations acknowledges part of that. The court simply declined to treat process defects, once cured by publicity, as grounds to refuse the decree.
Why It Matters
The question this ruling settles is not who owns Juniper — that was decided when the acquisition closed in July 2025 — but what a merger challenge is worth once the government chooses to settle rather than litigate it. The judge wrote that he could not stop a deal he believed might harm competition. The buyers who examined the asset the government demanded be sold said, in their own filings, what they believed it was worth. Those two statements sit in the same record.
For a reader following how consolidation gets policed, that pairing is the story rather than the approval itself. The remedy is measurable, it was publicly bid, and it is small relative to the business it was meant to discipline. The combined company is intact and reporting results.
Pricing the remedy
The consent decree signed on June 28, 2025 has two operative parts. HPE must divest its global Instant On campus and branch wireless LAN business — assets, intellectual property, R&D staff and customer relationships — to a Justice Department-approved buyer within 180 days, per Network World's summary of the terms. Separately, the parties must auction a perpetual, non-exclusive license to Juniper's AI Ops for Mist source code, the software layer automating wireless network management.
The auction terms were drafted with notable specificity. The winning licensee may request transfer of up to 30 Juniper engineers and 25 salespeople familiar with Mist, and a second licensee can be admitted if two or more bids exceed $8 million, according to a summary of the decree by industry publication Packet Pushers. Use of the Mist brand itself is excluded from the license.
Then the business went to market. Fortinet (NASDAQ: FTNT), a Sunnyvale-based network-security vendor, offered between $5 million and $15 million. Technology investors Kevin Duffy and Eric Zimits offered $1 to spin the unit out as a standalone company, writing that "the business is not profitable" with "flat revenue and gross profit margins that are well below industry average." Extreme Networks (NASDAQ: EXTR), a North Carolina-based enterprise networking supplier, and Tech Mahindra, an Indian IT services group, both declined to bid, per court records reported by Bloomberg and carried by The Star.
HPE told the court Instant On generates about $100 million in annual revenue. Set the highest bid against that disclosure and the implied price is roughly 0.15 times a single year of sales. Measured against HPE's own networking operation, Instant On amounts to under 1% of that segment's annualized revenue, using the quarterly figure in the company's most recent filing.
A price expressed as a fraction of one year's revenue, rather than a multiple of it, is what buyers offer when they expect to inherit costs rather than earnings — and the bidders said as much in writing. That does not by itself prove the remedy was inadequate; unprofitable product lines sell cheaply regardless of antitrust context. It does mean the divestiture transferred little competitive weight to whoever ends up holding it.
One comparison drawn entirely from inside the decree makes the scale plain without any outside data. The Justice Department set $8 million as the threshold above which a second bidder could also license the Mist source code. That threshold, set for a single software license, is more than half the highest cash offer anyone made for the entire divested business.
At a spring hearing, HPE attorney Samuel Liversidge told the court the company had selected a buyer, described only as "one of the Tier One competitors in this space," with the name withheld, per The Star. No completed sale has been announced publicly since.
What the government said it was preventing
The Justice Department sued in January 2025 to block the deal, arguing that HPE and Juniper were the second- and third-largest suppliers of enterprise wireless LAN equipment in the United States behind Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO), and that combining them would leave Cisco and HPE controlling more than 70% of the U.S. enterprise wireless LAN market, as summarized by IT Pro.
Place the government's two documents side by side. The complaint described a market consolidating toward two firms holding more than 70% of it. The decree that resolved that complaint transferred a product line worth under 1% of HPE's networking revenue, for which the open market bid no more than $15 million.
The segment mismatch compounds the size mismatch. Instant On sells to small and midsize businesses, while the rivalry the complaint described — Aruba against Mist — is fought in large enterprise accounts. The states argued that selling a small-business product line does not restore competition in a market it never served. The ruling declined to treat that objection as disqualifying, which is a different thing from finding it wrong.
A 1995 precedent for what happens next
There is one prominent instance of a judge doing what the states wanted here. In February 1995, Judge Stanley Sporkin refused to enter the consent decree the government had negotiated with Microsoft, finding it did not reach far enough. The D.C. Circuit reversed him that June, removed him from the case, and directed another judge to enter the decree.
That outcome is the backdrop against which Pitts's line about lacking independent power should be read. A Tunney Act judge who rejects a negotiated settlement does not thereby obtain a stronger remedy; he obtains an appeal over the separation of powers, while the merger proceeds regardless.
What is now measurable at HPE
Juniper has already reshaped the reported results. Networking segment revenue was $2,690 million in HPE's fiscal second quarter, which ended in April, against $1,084 million a year earlier — an increase of about 148%, driven principally by Juniper.
Segment earnings from operations were $581 million on that revenue, and total company net revenue for the quarter was $10,678 million, per HPE's quarterly report on Form 10-Q. Against those figures, the divested unit the settlement produced — roughly $100 million in annual revenue, bid at no more than $15 million — is the part of this case that remains unfinished, and the only part still without a named buyer.
