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Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

> and were thinking about a acq with Yahoo

> and it would be nice for y! not to have them

> their content quality is worse than ours ... if we pick them up it would be defensive vs yahoo

> I think we should talk to them, if nothing else to make it more expensive for Yahoo

Holy anti-competitive moly, how can these people talk like this while (supposedly) knowing the laws in the country they operate in? In clear text emails on top of that... Google supposedly has the smartest people working there, but doesn't seem like it's true for management.

I hope they get to pay for this, at least to prove that no companies are too big to get sanctioned for anti-competitive behavior. If they are not, I think we can all conclude that the government has lost all of its spine.

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Aren't they doing the opposite: making the bid on Youtube competitive? They would have to outbid Yahoo, giving the Youtube team a competitive price. Buying a valuable asset does not seem anti-competitive to me at all.

Anti-competitive in my mind is when there is an agreement to not compete, like the Apple-Google case where they agreed to not compete on salaries.

Yeah but this is in 08 right? I was under the impression you can do whatever you want if you aren't already a monopoly in the market

Edit: 05

Are defensive buys really illegal in the US in the first place?

In Microsoft's day they were looking to 'knife the baby' and 'cut off air supply'. That was about a decade earlier and nothing too terrible happened to them.

None of that is anti-competitive? It's just business?

Do people generally know the laws of the United States? There are a lot of laws.

OP’s remarks are more accurately paraphrased as “how can the executive of a major tech company leave a paper trail of illegal-sounding things, surely someone so high up is aware of how antitrust laws work.”

OP doesn’t say anything about the general public being aware of the entirety of the legal code.

If you are in the management team working for one of the largest companies in the world, who happen to be based in the US, I sure do hope you know about things like insider trading, anti-competitive behavior and other ills described by US law, otherwise you can put your company in trouble at any time.

Especially if you're in the discussions around acquiring companies. You want it to be very obvious you're not acquiring something in order to fuck it up for a competitor, you want to acquire a company in order to further yourself.

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