Step 1: acquire ARM
Step 2: make life more difficult for other ARM license holders and/or easier for NVidia
Step 3: be the only viable supplier of ARM chips
I'm not seeing how this scenario warrants more scrutiny than "normal".
Speculating: maybe the old "normal" was too low, this was just the easiest first move, and other more difficult antitrust moves are in the pipeline.
They already have killed off any effective competition, and that's a bad thing. If x86 was more diverse and was moving toward the current set of two, blocking it would also be good.
At least the important parts are falling out of patent...
> In reality if we stop this merger what we're saying is that it's a problem for any company to own IP that they license to competitors while at the same time producing and selling an in-house product that leverages the same IP.
Well it is. How much of a problem depends on how much competition the different parts of the market have.
Still, you raise a good point. Maybe along with blocking more mergers, we should be looking at breaking some companies up.