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Comment by jaybrendansmith | Hacker News Reader

Ok great. They are blocking this one because Microsoft, but its perfectly ok that all of broadcast media is owned by four companies, all of food is owned by four, and all of computing is owned by five. And we sit here and wonder why most of inflation is actually just profit-taking.

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> all of broadcast media is owned by four companies

In television, the vast majority of broadcast and basic cable networks, over a hundred in all, are controlled by seven corporations: Fox Corporation, The Walt Disney Company (which includes the ABC, ESPN, FX and Disney brands), National Amusements (which owns Paramount Global), Comcast (which owns NBCUniversal), Warner Bros. Discovery, E. W. Scripps Company, Cablevision (now known as Altice USA), or some combination thereof. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownersh...

> all of food is owned by four According to Business Insider article from 2016, these 10 companies control almost every large food and beverage brand in the "world": https://www.businessinsider.com/10-companies-control-the-foo...

> and all of computing is owned by five I wonder whether "computing" and "owned" makes sense in the way you phrase your argument.

I sincerely appreciate the corrections, and I don't think it wrecks my argument to have the totals be seven, ten, and five. And owning should be construed as something more extreme than simply dominating in the latter case.

Near 100% of my food come from producers not one of the 7. I live in Los Angeles, so that might be a good explanation. But then, how would you economically produce and distribute food to people in more rural locales, if not for some consolidation? The question of course is what is a reasonable number - is it 7? Or 20? There's no objective answer etched into a tablet somewhere. Instead, dynamic social forces produce an outcome.

Also it’s totally okay for Sony to snatch up all these exclusivity deals, but Microsoft isn’t allowed to buy more first party game studios so that they can actually compete?

There's a lot of space between "buying nothing" and "buying the biggest game developer in the world" that Microsoft could have explored if they felt they needed to acquire more studios. You know, like when they bought Bethesda for $8 billion and had no trouble. But chose not to repeat that, and went for the throat instead.

There's only a handful of remaining game developers/publisher so systemically significant that a platform owner buying them should get serious antitrust scrutiny. (Activision, EA, Take Two, Ubisoft.)

The problem is that Microsoft performed so poorly in the last generation of game consoles, that it is critical that they find a way to compete during this one if they plan to stay in this space for the next generation.

Hardware wise the XBox Series X is as good or better than the PS5 on virtually all counts. Their library of games is a very different story. These acquisitions are crucial to their strategy.

I don’t want to see a Sony monopoly for next generation. Before you say Nintendo, they chose a different path long ago and don’t directly compete with Sony. They instead rely on handheld gaming and quirky, fun hardware with an extremely valuable line of first party exclusives (Mario and Zelda mostly).

> between "buying nothing" and "buying the biggest game developer in the world"

I wonder how much of that is because of IP and said IP's underperformance.

“They” as in the people taking these actions now, were not in the same position to do so when your complaint was allowed.

So tiring dealing with low effort notions the government is just a vague amorphous concept when it’s actually people colluding against the public, at which the public throws up their hands in a “we’ve tried nothing but compliance and we’re all out of ideas!” way.

I've often wondered how effective a capitalist economy would be if it limited for-profit companies to no more than N employees or forced a revenue cap. The idea being that hard cutoffs would promote more competition.

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