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Comment by SOLAR_FIELDS | Hacker News Reader

Convince who? There is no such thing as antitrust anymore in the USA, it’s merely the size of the bribe required to let the merger go through now

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States have the ability to sue to block mergers as well as the federal government. See the recent 11 state lawsuit seeking to block the WarnerMount merger.

Just a couple of months ago, someone was still suing[1] to block Alaska Air/Hawaiian. This is a merger that already entirely went through. I would predict equal likelihood of some state lawsuit derailing a merger like this.

[1] https://viewfromthewing.com/passengers-demand-court-undo-ala...

There's a pretty clear difference between a lawsuit by 8 individuals, vs one filed by attorneys general representing a combined ~100m people.

Nevertheless, I have very little faith in states somehow blocking big mergers. Can you cite an example where this has happened? We've had basically every airline, several supermarket chains, and every major media company go through 1-2 rounds of megamergers. Which, specifically, have been successfully blocked by states?

In 2017, Valero tried to acquire some energy infrastructure owned by Plains All American. The FTC cleared it but California's AG filed to block the deal, which was ultimately abandoned before the trial could begin.

https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2017/10/futur...

Washington state was key to blocking Kroger-Albertsons.

Considering that California is one of the states and it’s Warner Brothers and Paramount, both entertainment companies based in California, the bark has a lot of bite.

If it isn’t red states the current admin won’t care at all. If it’s mostly or entirely blue states, they’ll just default to siding with the merger out of spite.

Which is funny because regardless of whether or not those states succeed in blocking the merger, those legacy video entertainment businesses will become irrelevant whether they are one business or two, due to the fierce competition from TikTok/Instagram/Reddit/Youtube/Whatsapp/computers/anything on the internet in general.

It's probably the most inconsequential merger, from a consumer standpoint.

Anything can be a monopoly or not, depending on how you define the market.

But not anything is worth litigating. The kids with a lemonade stand on the corner in my neighborhood have a monopoly on that corner.

Video media sellers are dime a dozen these days, and the barrier to entry for selling video media is basically none. Warner brothers and paramount are nowhere near the only business to buy and watch media, and it affects almost no buyers negatively if they merge.

Sure they have ability, they are just not doing it often enough

You think they'd only have to go through antitrust in the US? These are global payment processors, and the EU loves getting involved in this kind of thing. And no they can't just ignore it if they want to keep the majority of their customers.

How is Spirit airlines doing with your witty remark?

Maybe their bribe wasn’t big enough?

Quite true. Or honestly, it's really barely about direct financial bribery anymore[1] - all the recent ones have just hinged on incredibly naïve (and easily manipulable) readings of how a merger might affect culture war / red vs blue partisanship.

For instance, CNN really doesn't matter, and was a tiny part of WB/Discovery, but of course Trump cares deeply about (hating) CNN, so all that was needed to win over Trump and guarantee his approval was for the acquirer to whisper to him that they'd do a housecleaning there. This lifehack would work for acquiring any company that happens to control any media property that hasn't established itself as a Trump cheerleader.

Note: I'm not even a Democrat today, but the pure and petty corruption on display definitely sickens me.

[1] though, back when it was, the bribes were astoundingly high ROI due to how cheap they were!

Do you have any evidence that you can just bribe your way past antitrust regulations (which are enforced by hundreds or maybe even thousands of attorneys across the political spectrum) or is this just how you feel because you don't like who is in the White House right now?

Not anti-trust, but you can apparently bribe the FCC to get a merger through. This just came out today.

https://www.propublica.org/article/paramount-mergers-fcc-ken...

I was curious so to get a very rough ballpark figure. So I went to the Wikipedia List of largest mergers and acquisitions article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_mergers_and_ac...)

Added up all the free market enterprise section completed deals where the purchaser was indicated as US based

Obama era:

2009: 6,

2010: 1,

2011: 4,

2012: 1,

2013: 4,

2014: 5,

2015: 7,

2016: 6

Trump term 1:

2017: 4,

2018: 8,

2019: 13,

2020: 7

Biden term:

2021: 4,

2022: 4,

2023: 7,

2024: 4

Trump term 2 so far:

2025: 11*,

2026: 9*

Obama average: 4.25 / year

Biden average: 4.75 / year

Trump term 1 average: 8 / year

*Most of the last two years are indicated as still pending, so not sure if they will go through or not.

Not exactly the most scientific data gathering or study. But it does suggest that large mergers and acquisitions have generally been made more frequently under Trump.

Do you have data from 2000 to 2004? Not only covering an earlier Republican administration it also captures the last tech bubble.

"More business happens under comparatively pro-business Administration" is certainly a revelation.

I don't mean to be snarky but "I counted things on Wikipedia" is not exactly slam dunk proof when the GP was all but saying Trump is selling antitrust immunity on the open market.

It was still non-zero amount of evidence and that’s exactly what was being asked for.

Evidence of a process being used is not evidence of bribes in a process.

A thing happens in every administration regime where once it becomes clear that X is acceptable (e.g. renewables projects, LBOs, nuclear, oil drilling, etc), there will be a lot of submissions to do X without any bribes at all.

Fair.

I’ll toss in some better evidence then: the Paramount lawsuit settlement that paves the way for the merger, which includes future payments for things like pro-Trump advertisements/PSAs:

https://www.foxnews.com/media/how-trump-sued-cbs-won-60-minu...

Paramount shareholders are suing over this and accusing the administration of bribery.

https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/paramount-shareholders-a...

Here’s another giant unrelated article that details the Trump administration’s shakedown system:

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/unco...

I’ll remind everyone that it has been well established fact that Trump was basically the real estate guy for the Russian mafia in NYC before he got into politics. It isn’t some kind of strange coincidence that a lot of what he does feels mafia-like.

It’s honestly a howler to imply that this isn’t a deeply corrupt regime that’s openly doing crimes. The burden of proof is frankly on the argument to the contrary at this point.

The president is making a genuine, serious attempt to install his personal attorney to the office of Attorney General and he has a good chance of succeeding. This country is cooked.

> Do you have any evidence that you can just bribe your way past antitrust regulations

Well... we certainly know that preemptive appeasement is a thing [1]. IMHO, this is equivalent to a bribe - a favor, just not in monetary form.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/sep/26/kimmel-controv...

I would say “don’t like who is in the White House” is really underselling the situation.

The high level of financial corruption of the current administration is very well documented.

Let’s not forget that the president is a convicted felon, and his felonies were all financial crimes.

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