It has taken the US Department of Justice (DoJ) a year to intervene in HPE’s intended $14 billion purchase of Juniper Networks, by suing to block the move, on the grounds this would seriously weaken competition in the US wireless LAN (WLAN) field. When announcing its intent in January 2024, HPE made no mention of WLAN, depicting Juniper as a leading specialist in AI-native networks. The DoJ by contrast regards the move as cynically motivated to take out a competitor that was eating into its margins in the WLAN field by keeping prices down. This view does not really survive close scrutiny of the US WLAN market. The first point though is that the WLAN field globally has been booming,…