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Comment by aurareturn | Hacker News Reader

  What do you mean over reach? It's the FTC's job to prevent consumer market consolidation.

It is over reach because it seems arbitrary.

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It's not arbitrary, there are many reasons to block the merger and they were explained in depth when the decision was made.

Also, the EU and UK also made it clear they were against the merger. In fact, if you look at most reporting, the EU and UK seem to be the main reason they gave up, presumably because they know the US FTC has no teeth, even with a competent chair.

Even if EU and UK wanted to block the deal, it doesn't make it the right thing to do. Free market.

I don't have a popular opinion on HN. I don't think Google should be broken up because new technology has made Google search much less needed. I don't think Apple should relinquish control over its app store because it's Apple's platform and they should do what they want. I don't think Adobe should be stopped from buying Figma because even if Adobe buys it, maybe some rich ex-employees might quit and make another competitor or make an open source alternative. Who knows.

People on HN wants the government to weaken tech companies but not when it's the tech company they're working in.

For someone who believes in free market, how is it acceptable to have consolidated monopolies? The market is free when there is competition. If there is no competition there is no freedom. Of course I know that for many "free market defenders" "competition is for losers" (was it Peter Thiel?), and ultimately nobody cares of the abstract value of freedom.

Monopolies are natural in highly technical industries. But monopolies don't last forever. New technologies wipe out monopolies all the time. ChatGPT is disrupting Google search monopoly. Solar/EV is disrupting oil. Tools like V0 is disrupting Figma. ChatGPT itself is disrupting iOS and Android. The list goes on and on and on.

“Solar/EV is disrupting oil” — where exactly has solar/EVs disrupted oil without the benefit of (wise, IMO) government intervention and subsidies?

You are mixing industry and company. LLMs are overtaking Google search (I.e., internet search which is a monopoly), but it doesn't have to be chatGPT (I.e. openAI).

In any case, it's irrelevant they are not eternal (especially if we go from monopoly to monopoly), the point stands: if you have a monopoly you don't have freedom and free market doesn't work at all.

My point is that is is the right thing to do and multiple countries' regulators agree. Monopolies have proven themselves to be bad and consolidation is how they are created. The "free market" (as if there is such a thing) does not take care of this, because it's not profitable to compete with such a powerful incumbent. Any attempt to compete would require insane capex and have a higher price tag for consumers, who would likely have to pay it not instead of but alongside the current incumbent's price, which very few would accept. If instead, you intervene and block the merger, the company can (and is incentivised to) grow and branch out, competing with the one that tried to acquire it.

Obviously this is a YC forum and many people have a startup bias, but I'm nowhere near that scene. Many startups do even worse things than some of the big guys, because they aspire to become them. The "burn investor money to get market share at a loss, kill all competition, become a monopoly, then enshittify and make infinite money" strategy wouldn't be nearly as effective if we had proper antitrust enforcement.

I, too, think we should just let rich people do whatever they want!

> Free market

Free market requires maintenance. Laissez-faire is a lie and always has been.

If you let all the companies consolidate into mega monopolies who have a stranglehold on the market, where is the free market?

Without regulations (which are laws) Dominant companies would just send gangsters to break up rival businesses. They still do that today, but through different strategies e.g. price dumping, where they operate at a loss in order to squash competition, then proceed to hike up prices and extort as much value as possible.

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