This is so far from outlawing. And we are soooooo far from having a shortage of tech startups.
It's not that far. A bureaucrat will decide if you can exit the way you want to. Still want to fund this venture?
> And we are soooooo far from having a shortage of tech startups.
Because there hasn't been a fear of them blocking exits.
It's not up to the bureaucrat but to the courts. The FTC doesn't "approve" or "reject" deals--it can just take legal action to try to stop a deal, but that still gets adjudicated either in a federal court or in an FTC administrative law court to a judge which is appointed independently.
https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/merger-review
https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/administrative-law-...
Depending on specifics, the EU stopping blockbuster acquisitions in the US startup ecosystem feels ripe for abuse.
FWIW, I think there are good reasons to limit tech consolidation, including this one. But anyone should realize that it will reshape the industry in unpredictable ways, including some that harm "real" consumers and builders.
If anything, IMHO, we've been too lenient with anti-trust in Tech in particular over the past 5-10 years. This just dials things back a little, and makes it so that "hard to quantify" risk is a little more likely than it was before, and certainly a little more likely than zero
I don't think Adobe / Figma specifically is an "otherwise obvious deal" precisely because it has such obvious anti-trust risk. The fact that this merger was even announced is all the proof I need that we were being too lenient. Figma can still sell to any number of huge Tech companies
Blocking acquisitions creates precedents.
In fact, there are all kinds of things you can't arbitrarily do because it hurts consumers, both physically and financially. This includes strengthening industry monopolies which has time and time again demonstrated that it causes incredible harm to entire segments of society.
I don't think you can take a hypothetical worst case and make it apply here. You could also say that we shouldn't have governments, because look at WW2 and all the war they declared.
Adobe buying Figma wouldn't cause incredible harm to entire segments of society. It's barely even a monopoly, in that Adobe doesn't really do what Figma does already, and there is incredible potential in just making another Figma competitor if Adobe ruins Figma.