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Comment by this_user | Hacker News Reader

With the current administration, anything can be legal.

Besides, they still have plans to spin off the cable networks, so this would mostly concern the streaming assets, movie studio, and the IP.

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The merger needs to be accepted by other markets, too. No offense but I find it quite amusing how Americans keep forgetting about that.

How does this work? I assume there would be one parent company at the end and if that's an American company what does any other country can say about it? Sure if they incorporated a child company there they might interfere, but they could also just close the company to deal with the situation and go forward with the merger.

Either they comply or exit the country. Remember how the UK blocked the Microsoft/Activision merger for a time?

Yeah, "blocked" is a misleading word, if they merged anyway.

The merge was only allowed after changes.

If a US company operates in a different country as well, it has to abide by the laws of that country, or leave it. For example, Adobe's acquisition of Figma was blocked by the UK and EU regulators, despite them both being US companies headquartered in San Francisco. They could have chosen to leave the UK and EU markets entirely, in which case their merger would have been able to proceed, but they wouldn't have been able to sell anything to UK/EU citizens.

They have production, distribution, and marketing ops in other markets. Those could be flogged until compliance.

Then they lobby Trump who threatens the country with tariffs

Don't think this works anymore as much

The threat of sanctions and drone strikes usually makes everyone pretty friendly.

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