Also, I don’t believe the FTC mission is to increase US tax revenue, so that aspect seems irrelevant.
If the standard is "they don't compete against each other now, but would be disincentivized to compete against each other in the future," that could be used as a rationale to block literally every merger.
Don't you threaten me with a good time. Imagine, companies actually forced to collaborate via the ordinary mechanism of contract arrangements rather than by assimilation into a horrifying megaconglomerate.
The problem is when some companies form a cartel of sort (with our without contracts) anyway. The same way Intel was not licensing x86, but since AMD already had it they were both incentivized to keep users on x86 and keep arm out.
(Of course the nvidia-arm acquisition is more about nvidia trying to build an army, oh pardon, portfolio. As Intel and AMD already have. They acquired Mellanox, plus they have GPUs and CUDA chips. Intel and Apple kind of have everything of course. AMD has Radeon, but AMD is probably still trying to catch up financially. There's also Qualcomm with their snapdragons and modems. And there are probably others, but the important thing is that snapdragons are arm based. And while selling high-end ML and gamer/miner cards is certainly not bad, but nvidia is probably trying to expand into a different market too, let's say high-volume but older semi tech.)
Even though that would hurt me businesswise I would happily sign for that future. And while we're at it: make it illegal for one company to hold shares in another. Just natural persons holding shares in companies would be fine.
It would make it impossible for governments to own minority stakes in local subsidiaries of global corporations to veto some things. It would make it impossible to impose capital requirements on subsidiaries of big financial institutions. It would be impossible for larger competitors to rescue failing peers and keep them operating as a going concern.
And it would very likely create the most suffocating oligopolies on a national level as well as on an industry level as competitors would find it extremely hard to enter markets with entrenched incumbents if the only way to do it was to build from scratch.
So? That would enable local companies that occupy the same niche to do so. All these multinationals are not necessarily a good thing.
> It would make it impossible for governments to own minority stakes in local subsidiaries of global corporations to veto some things.
Only if you believe that those local subsidiaries should exist in the first place and that need not be the case.
> It would make it impossible to impose capital requirements on subsidiaries of big financial institutions.
There would be no such subsidiaries.
> It would be impossible for larger competitors to rescue failing peers and keep them operating as a going concern.
These could be structured as asset sales. And a whole lot of trickery that causes these peers to fail would go out the window.
You are making the mistake of looking at the glass 'half empty', when in fact the better way to look at it is what we would get for it in return. Capitalism, but with a much more direct link between UBO and the companies they have a hand in, far less opportunity for nation state level wealth to end up concentrated with a very small number of people and less opportunity for companies to play shell games with their income.
Capitalism, like money is a great invention. But like everything else when taken to extremes it is a net negative, in moderation it could well be uniformly good. But the whole externalization game needs to stop or it will harm us greatly.
All failing companies should be liquidated and sold off in bits and pieces, employees fired, contracts and debts voided, pension schemes closed.
Entrenched local incumbents could only ever be disrupted by individuals starting new companies, funded exclusively by other individuals. Presumably, none of these individuals would be allowed to own a controlling stake in another company, otherwise it would effectively be one company.
You would have to convince those wealthy individuals to start companies in small countries in spite of the fact that the growth potential of their company would be far more limited than if they started a company in a big country. The only incentive would be local protectionism.
You would also have to make sure that companies don't enter into contractual relationships that effectively make them act as one (such as McDonald's franchises)
You would effectively hand absolute power to local family clans and oligarchs closely intertwined with local bureaucrats and politicians. It's a recipe for stagnation and corruption.
This is not a glass half full and it's not moderation. It's a glass smashed in an act of vandalism and blind rage. It's the sort of revolution that countries take a century to recover from.
Turning the clocks back a couple of centuries is not progressive either.
No, that's not what I'm saying, besides that could be easily covered through employment law, but we already have the concept of internationally operating free-lancers.
> or do anything else across borders that requires a legal entity that can be locally regulated, taxed and held accountable.
Not if that legal entity is going to have a company as its shareholders. But there would be no reason why it could not exist and have natural persons as its shareholders, they could even be the same shareholders as in some other company abroad.
You are still arguing about this from the perspective of everything that it can't do, which is pretty easy to deal with because most of those things it can do. What it can't do is to hide the UBOs, which is really the only big change. Everything else can easily be worked around.
No, I also told you what I think it would do. Create a corrupt local oligarchy that is extremely hard to disrupt. It would create a mediocre, low productivity, stagnant economy shaped by the most extreme form of protectionism I have ever heard of.
>Everything else can easily be worked around.
Your use of the word "easy" for something that would require a root and branch redesign of company law, tax law, employment law, competition law and scores of other laws in every country on earth tells me that you really haven't thought this through. Not to speak of changing the ownership structure of tens of thousands of existing companies.
I don't know many individual directly handling shares with the exchange and the settlement. How do you avoid the enormous volume of trading that happen due to retirement account reuse for shorting ? Would you forbid that too, removing the incentive for company to be honest because nobody can short anymore ?
You know why? Because working with Nvidia has become such a pain in the ass. That it's better just to do it yourself.
They charge you 10x for a gpu that's a little better than their consumer GPU but won't sell you the consumer GPU because they want you to pay 10x.
Now they will definitely do the same with ARM licensing.
A while back they made a change to the terms of the GeForce driver, barring it from deployment in datacenters except for blockchain processing.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nvidia-updates-ge...
That's an honest question, I can't fully recall.
They need their datacenter GPU numbers to look good at the end of the Q, they can't do that when all they are selling are 3090 that are perfectly fine to train the majority of AI models.
Try it this way: How many other companies are likely to compete with them in the future? If the answer is a thousand, the loss of potential competition is not very significant. If the answer is less than ten, it is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_mergers_and_ac...
CVS buying Aetna was a particularly sick joke.
NVIDIA, on the other hand, is suspicious. It is in their interest to use and manipulate ARM to release/restrict products in such a way that will strengthen their already strong market position with accelerators, and push down its competitors like AMD and Intel.
I'd rather Nvidia be kept away from Arm at all costs.
They don’t need to collude, they’ll “compete” by siting on their ass like Intel did, barely being better yet jacking up the price, only “Haswell” is renamed “Zen 3”.
> monopoly
Pick one?
As much as it's easy to forget, the free market is supposed to be a tool for the benefit of consumers (through both price and innovation), and while it's not very common, every once in a while the government actually looks at that as important and steps in.
The reason for competition law is to regulate the free market to ensure that consumer choice is not limited by the uncontrolled acquisition and merger of suppliers.
The merger of NVidia and ARM is inherently non-competitive unless NVidia accepted limitations/restrictions on their licensing freedom which they are not willing to propose or accept.
That's leaving aside the international and other ramifications of a company that is involved in the entire vertical of chip production and sale through to retail having control of the licensing of the most used ISA and other IPRs that are available to its competitors throughout that vertical.
This isn't a question of "will the economy collapse if X buys Y" it's a question of "Which will yeild the best outcome, Y being acquired by X or no". The exact definition of "best outcome" is where the entire battleground though.
It is quite difficult to see who actually could acquire ARM though - because of ARM's quite unique position, any of the potential acquirers are either customers (Apple, Nvidia, Qualcomm) who would be vertically integrated to beat out competitors or direct competitors (AMD, Intel). I think almost the only people who could buy ARM at this point would be TSMC.
Softbank can still sell ARM to anyone including the public market, they just won't get as much money for them that way. Presumably.
I guess the other option is to list it on some stock exchange.