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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

DOE needs to stop approving mergers and acquisitions over $150 mil or so. Every such merger: Facebook/Instagram, Google/Youtube, etc has been a disaster.

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$150 million is way too low today. Nearly every small acquirable company will meet that threshold. I do think that a limit could possibly be set though for companies with significant market share in the same sector. The Sprint acquisition was over $20 billion. Exxon's acquisition of Pioneer last year was around $60 billion.

> Google/Youtube

Just a reminder that Google purchased YouTube in October 2006, about 18 months after it launched. Google already owned YouTube when "Charlie Bit My Finger" went viral in 2007. Google owned YouTube before they launched Chrome, back when they were still the heroes of the internet.

There might be some people who are still nostalgic for a pre-Google YouTube, but for most people the better times that they're remembering were still part of the Google era. The acquisition didn't ruin YouTube, Google ruined YouTube about 10 years later when Google as a whole pivoted for the worse.

YouTube as we know it today is only possible with Google’s acquisition. YouTube burned through literally billions of dollars for many years until it became profitable much later.

Only likes of Google could have bankrolled it. Google did this intentionally to destroy all competition in the video space. Ultimately successfully.

What do you think would happen to the venture-capital-funded tech ecosystem and the resulting tech salaries if this were to happen?

The hope would be a vast increase in employers available rather than consolidation down to FAANG, increasing demand and driving salaries up.

> increasing demand and driving salaries up.

Despite the demand, the revenue per employee for the company might be low, and those companies might not be able to pay high salaries to employees.

do you know how easy it is to get to a million bucks a year in revenue? Do you know how easy it is to have that pass 50% margin? 75?

If you know how to build a stack, and have a useful service finding people to pay 20 bucks a month for it is not that hard.

5000 users is a fairly low target...

DOE? The Department of Energy?

Department of Education. https://www.ed.gov

I can only assume a typo in the comment.

Way off topic, but apparently Energy is the canonical "DOE". https://www.doe.gov redirects to https://www.energy.gov. <Insert joke about whoever had the most nukes wins here.>

yeah, DOJ apologies

They were great investments for soon to be has beens. And helped the acquisition flourish too.

Yeah. The FTC under the current admin has done more anti-merger work than in the entire rest of my lifetime. I intend to do my part to let them continue on that path this November.

“Let’s just abolish capitalism”. Seriously though, a world in which the government runs the economy and picks the winners is a bad one indeed.

Where in the parent comment does it say that?

That's exactly how it works right now actually. I'm proposing a rule where everyone is treated equally.

Google and YouTube seems pretty good. YouTube is the most old school webby experience I have these days, although now in video form, now that the web web is so walled off.

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