I think the federal antitrust regulators are asleep.
Edit: antitrust regulators' job has just begun -- we'll see how this deal gets adjudicated by the FTC (if at all).
Have been for a long time. All of the big techs should have been broken up long ago.
That is what will happen to torrents. Followed by VPNs. China, Russia and Iran had paved the way already.
Can't you see the puzzle coming toghether?
If the House or Senate turn that might actually stop or slow down. The market falling by 30% when the AI bubble eventually pops would also trigger it.
And some former Roomba employees may have thoughts about Kahn.
IMO allowing Roomba to hit chapter 11 was still a better option for the consumer than handing them to Amazon. They’re still in business as an independent competitor on the market, consolidation was successfully avoided.
Yellen, I don’t have much of an opinion on, but she absolutely wasn’t alone in that opinion (the nuance of that opinion being inflated by this hyperbole), and the treasury is a lot less involved than the federal reserve in doing anything about inflation, anyway.
They are essentially on equal footing with other robotic vacuum manufacturers. iRobot didn't go out of business or get absorbed into a larger company lowering competition in the marketplace.
It's also not the FTC's job to ensure that companies, especially ones with zero/trivial national security or domestic labor force value, remain under domestic ownership. Amazon itself is not really a "domestic" company, it's publicly traded. Anyone from any non-sanctioned country can buy shares of Amazon.
Huh?
Robots with vision + sounds sensors and connected to the internet in professional homes across your country are definitely a security issue.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-05/robot-vacuum-deebot-e...
One of the leaked images taken by Roomba robot vacuums shows a lady sitting on her toilet - personal.
These companies are generally large enough that they do not need the competitive aid of buying an existing company and starting with that sort of structural advantage.
E.g., did Nvidia not have enough money in their bank to start a company to compete with Hugging Face? This is a company that reportedly has ~200-300 employees with investment rounds totaling $400 million. Nvidia made $31.9 billion in net income last quarter.
I look at a company like Xiaomi which just developed its automotive division in-house without resorting to buying car companies. I think our traditional business and finance mindset has an overreliance on acquisitions.
I heard (literally with my ears, during a pseudo-dinner-thing, so this may be apocryphal, so you may have to do some spelunking through sources) that Microsoft "bought" the source code of some browser-project, for a percentage of the revenues that come from Internet Explorer. The catch was that IE was bundled with Windows for free, so a percentage of zero is zero.
A definite fact, is that when Netscape folded, the industry -- and the investors that got burned by the rapaciousness of Microsoft -- finally got in-sync enough to lobby and agitate for the antitrust lawsuit that almost broke Microsoft up. A consequence of that lawsuit is that quasi-monopolies like Meta, Google, etc, started buying promising startups instead of burying them.
I am not sure that a world where Nvidia just out-spends Hugging Face, via its quasi-monopoly-revenues, is better than the one we are currently in.
If I have to choose between two evils, I'd obviously choose the lesser one. But maybe we can do even better, and choose the absence of evil?
Maybe companies should have "weight-classes" the same way that most sports have those, to match opponents. (After all, despite both being remarkable sportists, Koga cannot defeat Ogawa, who is a few weight-classes heavier). Something like this is how France protects (or tries to) its own small business owners (I am told, they still have many small independent bookstores, despite competition from Amazon, and chain-bookstores before that).
The venture-capital does _somewhat_ balance the scales, but not by much, and it encourages the pursuit of _exits_ instead of _excellence_ (not shaming anyone for taking an exit, I am just saying that the alternative is systematically penalized -- only the very lucky or very protected can pursue excellence).
Is either of those worse than what actually happened: the company is now a zombie brand for a Chinese company?
Amazon could email/push notification/text customers asking for reviews of iRobot vacuums but then not do the same for competing vacuums, skewing their reviews higher (asking for reviews boosts ratings by gathering opinions from happy customers who usually don't bother writing a review). Competing brands potentially don't even have your contact information to ask for a review.
Go on Amazon right now and search for "usb cable." There's a giant banner at the top that recommends the Amazon Basics brand, three across horizontally, which on my desktop monitor takes up nearly 50% of the screen real estate. Then below it are the Anker cables that you're more likely to be looking for.
They would have almost certainly been manipulating pricing on them as well. For example, they could take the strategy of lowering the price of the vacuums to break even or sell as a loss leader, but use them as a data-gathering robot in your house to help Amazon sell more of everything else. They could make their Alexa smart home platform preferential to iRobot or lock out competing models.
Robot vacuums are a consumer goods category that is heavily skewed toward Amazon.com as the place of purchase compared to other retailers.
I think "zombie brand owned by a Chinese company" is actually preferable, yes. They still operate and sell vacuums competing with the other robot vacuums on the market, and they aren't in service as household data collection bots for a monopoly e-commerce platform.
I don't think the ownership of the company being foreign or domestic is very relevant to the FTC's goal of preserving positive trade conditions. Would we think the iRobot situation was a bad outcome if iRobot was purchased by a foreign company we view more positively like Miele? We only think of it negatively due to anti-Chinese bias. iRobot being Chinese-owned is almost certainly the best possible outcome for preserving the amount of competition in the market.
I spent a little time working there around 2017. Whatever you're implying my former colleagues' thoughts on the subject are (or mine, for that matter), you're probably wrong.
Fear over economic damage due to immigration is perhaps the last remaining unifying force among the American political right wing. Biden actually did a lot of good things as president -- arguably a lot more good than he did in his time as senator. But his administration was too eager to just run the federal government as a quiet meritocracy and avoid dealing with any of the hot political issues of the day. He and his administration fucked up so bad that now not only is most of that good undone, but we are in a dire existential situation, facing generational-scale damage that might be unfixable.
It's one thing that they genuinely fumbled the handling of the huge immigration/refugee waves spanning the entire continent and it took them well over a year to start coordinating a response (which they never really did apart from eventually just closing the border) -- it's another that they kept trying to insist everything was fine, there was no problem, there's nothing to see here. People were freaking out about it all over the country, and of course they were being heavily propagandized, but that's not the point. A strong and proactive White House would have made all the propaganda look stupid. Instead, it looked like the truth.
It's absolutely mind-boggling to look back on just how weak the president had to have been from 2020-2024, to somehow let the party of Jan 6 and the disastrous handling of the Covid-19 pandemic regain enough control of the political narrative to make Trump seem like anything other than a narcissistic mobster.
If you maintain a list of shortcommings or good new features it could sound like a sweet deal.
If the company was aquired to shut it down it would work even better.
Marketing is increasingly expensive. Any hype is valuable. One might as well design the product for the promotion.