Trump's FTC may impose merger condition that forbids advertising boycotts
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Isn't this literally covered by the first amendment ?
> "If advertisers get into a back room and agree, 'We aren't going to put our stuff next to this guy or woman or his or her ideas,' that is a form of concerted refusal to deal,"
This is an incredible stretch to claim, first you would have to prove that if the other company changed their political views that you would still refuse to deal.
Even from the FTC itself its explained that this "Refusal to deal" is centered to prevent monotpolizations.
> the focus is on how the refusal to deal helps the monopolist maintain its monopoly, or allows the monopolist to use its monopoly in one market to attempt to monopolize another market.
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
What this WILL do will give the administration another tool to harass companies who vote with their wallet.
> The FTC website says that any individual company acting on its own may "refuse to do business with another firm, but an agreement among competitors not to do business with targeted individuals or businesses may be an illegal boycott, especially if the group of competitors working together has market power.
This is actually reasonable. Any one company can refuse to do business but can’t coordinate with competitors
So if a merger could create an excessive distortion in the advertizing space, this could be rational.
This is not imaginary as we have seen these collective boycotts happen before.
If there is any kind of concern about content monopoly, they shouldn't grant the merger, period, it seems to me. Singling out political content is where their discussions seem questionable from my perspective. Otherwise the tacit argument is "content monopoly is ok unless it is political in nature" which seems somewhat arbitrary and very much about the government restricting speech, as it is of a specific nature being targeted.
I think the specific question was how the merged company intended to prevent GARM style collusion in advertzing boycotting.
This is very obvious cronyism, in support of Elon.
The only "consumers" helped by an M&A are investors and execs.
YouTube could not have survived without the Google merger.
Sprint was losing money for over a decade and wouldn’t have survived without merging with T-mobile and T-mobile needed the spectrum to compete with AT&T and Verizon.
Sprint should have died to free up assets for someone that's not already a huge player in the space to pick up. I don't see corporate immortality through M&A's as a good thing.
If Apple died who was going to make an alternate operating system to Microsoft? Do you think that would have caused “The Year of Linux on the desktop”. Apple was far from a huge player in 1996 when the Next acquisition happened. It was almost bankrupt.
A new company isn’t going to just come along and start a nationwide cell phone network and especially not with what was Sprint’s limited spectrum.
https://nuumobile.com/android-oems-vs-odms-5-things-you-shou...