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Comment by anonylizard | Hacker News Reader

You don't own what you can't sell. Any asset value will be massively reduced if its untransferable.

Mistral isn't exactly some decade-long state funded national champion. Its a 1 year old startup whose core staff all come from American tech companies. With 0 revenue and minimal market share, there's like no conceivable metric in traditional antitrust theory to block this. Yet the EU prevents it from taking foreign investment all the same.

Look at TSMC in comparison. It IS the national champion of Taiwan, yet its majority foreign owned, doesn't stop it from underpinning the Taiwan economy and spawning massive ecosystems in its local areas.. Taiwan's government understands its place in the international economy, so prefers to cooperate and trust its international partners.

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You would have an anti-trust problem if somebody went out and bought all of the promising AI startups.

So at what point in their buying spree do you cut them off? Do you wait until they've bought 90% of AI startups? 50%? Does it matter if there are 4 AI startups or 40?

It starts to matter when the broad public is adversely affected by the lack of AI diversity. I don’t think we’re there yet, let them buy.

The problem here is that, if you can see the adverse effects on the public, you're too late. So you need to anticipate them. That's not an easy thing to do.

So, pre-crime?

It's not illegal to be a monopoly[0] (at least in the US) but abusing your monopoly is what gets you in trouble. Copyright and patents are examples of gov't granted monopolies.

[0] Fully conceding the fact that MS is a convicted monopolist and has to play by different rules than everyone else.

From my perspective, the only name and products people (who are not here) know are ChatGPT/OpenAI API based.

Do you have a different experience?

> Yet the EU prevents it from taking foreign investment all the same.

No they haven't.

True. In Kafkaesque sense they haven't. They are just checking things are in order.

I mean, they're looking into the situation where MS keeps ~taking over AI startups. I'd be quite surprised if the FTC is not at some level also looking into this. Like, it would be weird if they weren't! At this point, no-one's telling MS it's not allowed to do this, but it would be strange if no-one was taking note of it.

It's not about antitrust. It's about national security.

This is the second problem with the EU.

They can't defend their own backyard, refuses to pay for their 2%, and free-rides off of US protection.

They tried to court China as their partner, only to now face a flood of Chinese car imports that outcompete their once prided industries.

They seem to only care about national security when it comes to fleecing US companies, rather than say defending against Russia, or strategizing against China.

> They seem to only care about national security when it comes to fleecing US companies

Stop with that nonsense. Every single country that imports American goods has regulations on how it is imported. Your expectations are misaligned if you think the concept of a Free Market extends to other countries carte-blanche. Not even the United States can stop itself from regulating it's own businesses, and usually it's for the better.

These comments pop-up all the time but never have a reasonable alternative to suggest. This is what governance looks like; I'm sorry if you're offended on Apple or Microsoft's behalf.

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