Congressional Bills Would Ban Tech Mergers Over $5 Billion (engadget.com) 100
Senator Elizabeth Warren and House Representative Mondaire Jones have introduced legislation in their respective congressional chambers that would effectively ban large technology mergers. Engadget reports: The Prohibiting Anticompetitive Mergers Act (PAMA) would make it illegal to pursue "prohibited mergers," including those worth more than $5 billion or which provide market shares beyond 25 percent for employers and 33 percent for sellers. The bills would also give antitrust regulators more power to halt and review mergers. They would have authority to reject mergers outright, without requiring court orders. They would likewise bar mergers from companies with track records of antitrust violations or other instances of "corporate crime" in the past decade. Officials would have to gauge the impact of these acquisition on labor forces, and wouldn't be allowed to negotiate with the companies to secure "remedies" for clearing mergers.
Crucially, PAMA would formalize procedures for reviewing past mergers and breaking up "harmful deals" that allegedly hurt competition. The Federal Trade Commission has signaled a willingness to split up tech giants like Meta despite approving mergers years earlier. PAMA might make it easier to unwind those acquisitions and force brands like Instagram and WhatsApp to operate as separate businesses.
Crucially, PAMA would formalize procedures for reviewing past mergers and breaking up "harmful deals" that allegedly hurt competition. The Federal Trade Commission has signaled a willingness to split up tech giants like Meta despite approving mergers years earlier. PAMA might make it easier to unwind those acquisitions and force brands like Instagram and WhatsApp to operate as separate businesses.
Why not make a law(tariffs) for exporting jobs. (Score:2)
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Why not make it more attractive to keep jobs here (in the US)?
This administration is already busy running around the world trying to get other nations to agree to "fix their corporate tax rates" to reduce the incentive for US companies to move overseas. Sure, they say it's so other countries can "compete" but what it really does is prevent poorer countries to offer lower tax rates to attract foreign investment.
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Sherman Act on steriods (Score:2)
This isn't a push to prevent jobs from leaving the country. This is a push to add strength to the Sherman Act that prevents companies from dominating a market. Sen Warren has been pushing for this for a long time. https://www.theatlantic.com/id... [theatlantic.com]
Her proposal would ban mega-mergers like ExxonMobil-Chevron, T-mobile-Sprint, Aetna-CVS, Monsanto-Bayer, AOL-Time Warner, Dow-Dupont, and Heinz-Kraft.
The bill is certainly not in for an easy passage. There are too many special interest groups that will fight to
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I am the CEO and main programmer / Architect of a small web development firm that has been in business for 10 years next month (so hardly a startup).
If I were to hire an American as an independent contractor, i have to 1) get them to fill out a W9, 2) submit a 1099-NEC for them every year, and 3) mail them the 1099 each year.
If I were to hire an American as a W2 employee, I have to 1) get them to fill out an I9, 2) verify employability (docs, please), 3) register them with their state’s unemployment b
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I get the point you're trying to make about hiring employees involves more work than getting contractors (foreign or domestic). I think you are blowing it out of proportion, though. You mention #9 - sign them up in the payroll processor. Unless your payroll processor is screwing your over, then t
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And if you "have to" 10) buy them health insurance via the Marketplace you have at least 50 employees, so you're not that small.
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Right. And you don't mention what everyone I've worked with or know says about those programmers in southeast Asia: they're crap, they write crap, and do a generally lousy job.
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Dear libertarian: fuck off.
The US has the lowest corporate tax rate in the developed world. Remember all those "tax breaks for job creators"? No, why would you remember, you've got your idiotology.
From the IRS website:
1972: corporate taxes were just over 24% of the federal revenue stream, while individual income taxes were 16.67%
As of 2016 or so, corporate taxes are just over 10% of the federal revenue stream, while individual income taxes are over 44%.
But you're one of those assholes who yells about being
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1. Other countries would retaliate. Many millions of Americans work for foreign-owned companies.
2. If a job can't be exported, that is a huge incentive not to create the job in America in the first place.
3. America exports low-paying labor-intensive jobs and imports high-paying capital-intensive jobs. Since we have a full-employment economy, prohibiting the former effectively prohibits the latter.
There are many more reasons why protectionism is a dumb self-destructive policy. The best analysis was done
An interesting point (Score:2)
> America exports low-paying labor-intensive jobs and imports high-paying capital-intensive jobs. Since we have a full-employment economy, prohibiting the former effectively prohibits the latter.
That's an interesting point. I hadn't thought about it that way.
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Have you read it? I have. It isn't that great. Don't get me wrong, I'd slog through every stupid page about corn-equivalent wages again every month if the only alternative was Keynes.
He wasn't dumb, but he was writing in the infancy of his field. Also, he was writing something like 130 years before the invention of the monetary system that we have now - that we have had for so long that no living person has ever known anything else.
And we've learned a lot since his time. It turns out that many of his a
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the correlation between protectionist policies and prosperity are about as clear and obvious as these sorts of things could possibly be.
I have no idea what planet you are referring to, but here on earth, that is absolutely not true. The most prosperous places are North America and the EU, which are both free-trade blocs (the exact opposite of protectionism). The EU not only has free trade in goods but free movement of labor as well.
The most protectionist countries are North Korea, Eritrea, Venezuela, and other countries at the bottom of the economic pile.
Countries like India and China that switched from protectionist and isolationist "sel
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The concept of a "full employment economy" meaning something is outdated. Sure there are jobs for all, but quality jobs that pay a living wage?
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Not all jobs are designed (or have the skill level / requirements) to pay a living wage for a family. It's not needed now that most families have multiple people working. Women (both parents) being in the workforce has consequences (and it is worth those consequences)
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Kinda screws people who don't have two incomes though.
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What's the solution? Go back to single working households?
Honestly, with automation becoming more and more a thing, we need to be careful not to outprice jobs that require no skill.
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Yes, let's go back to that.
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The concept of a "full employment economy" meaning something is outdated. Sure there are jobs for all, but quality jobs that pay a living wage?
In communism, it is "everyone according to their means, and to each according to their needs", so everyone gets the job they are qualified for and gets paid what they need -this aint that.
Welcome to capitalism. No one owes you an income, only an opportunity.
If you have quality skills, you may get a quality job. If you want a better wage, get a better job. Or don't. But you have the opportunity to do so. Nobody promised that it would be easy.
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> Sure there are jobs for all, but quality jobs that pay
> a living wage?
Yes. Those jobs are available and attainable. My LinkedIn inbox is stuffed full of them even though my profile has been set to "not looking" since I landed my previous job. So is my "job hunting" gmail account. And even my work email gets regular hits from recruiters. Hell... a while back one of our customers tried to poach me the Monday after the Wednesday I sat in on a Zoom call with said customer and our support team to he
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You can't export all the dumb jobs and expect to have full employment, because not everyone can do the smart jobs.
Full employment is a dumb idea. Why don't want people to be able to stay home and care for their kids so they grow up to be decent humans?
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But I am not a economist.
Clearly, you're not. The previous administration went with the tariffs approach, and the current one didn't repeal them. How you enjoying this inflation we've been having?
Tariffs don't fucking work when there's not enough domestic competition to keep prices low. If all the companies are reliant on overseas labor/manufacturing, they all just raise prices and pass what is essentially a regressive tax increase, onto the consumers.
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Because where a lot of these companies are at now in the game, their IP overseas would be gone and in the highest bidders hands in no time.
You get what you pay for overseas. Want strong IP protection that lands anyone who dares sneeze the wrong way in jail for 15 years? Might want to stay here. Want to pray the US takes issue with the WTO about stealing while you watch competitors copy paste your technology, all to just save a buck? Overseas might be a fine middle ground. Average pay for Indian softwar
stunting tech? (Score:1)
What if there is tech requiring the resources of a company worth tens of billions? Fusion, room temp superconductor, real AI, preventing cancer, etc.
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Why would that have to be the same company?
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not saying it would be same company, just thinking that any one of those breakthroughs or something not even imagined yet might require massive company. Of course, maybe someone in their garage has a breakthrough too.
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The proposal is a profoundly stupid idea for many reasons. But perhaps the biggest is that it effectively protects big companies from competition.
Google is worth over a trillion dollars. No company can grow up from nothing to compete with them because they don't have the economy of scale. The only chance would be to merge smaller companies worth a few billion each. That can't happen if it is illegal.
What we really need is better enforcement of existing law, which allows mergers that enhance competition
That's the dumbest thing I've read all week (Score:4, Insightful)
And if you're worried about Google running those companies out of business before they can go the mousetrap, well we have laws for that. We have a wide variety of antitrust laws specifically designed to make that illegal. You just need to go back to enforcing the laws.
And finally if Google is so big that those laws alone can no longer be enforced, then the solution is to break Google up. Force them to split off their search, and Android and other divisions. I don't personally think we're at that point but if you do, then again we already have the laws and legal structures in place.
What we don't have is a form of capitalism that can survive non-stop never-ending mergers. If you don't enforce antitrust law then capitalism dies. If you call yourself a capitalist this is the sort of thing you want. If you're a socialist or a kleptocrat then yeah, this is sort of thing might not be your bag. The socialists might want to see more integration to make things easier when the worker sees the means of production and well that we all know what the kleptocrats want. But if you're a capitalist? Then antitrust law is the bare minimum maintenance capitalism needs to function
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No you don't need to merge a few billion dollar companies together to compete with Google.
If you think it is so easy to build an exabyte-scale datacenter in your garage, why aren't you doing it?
Even Microsoft has been unable to break Google's dominance in search, and they have spent many billions trying.
With tech this really is one of those cases where you just need to build a better mousetrap.
If you "build a better mousetrap," let's say a better natural language DWIM search interface, you still need to scale it with exabytes of data. The obvious way to do that is to be acquired by Microsoft and incorporated into Bing. If that is illegal, you have no way to grow, and instead of acqui
Oh for f*** sakes (Score:2)
Microsoft has been unable to break Google's dominance because they're too big of a company. Instead of just mak
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Microsoft has been unable to break Google's dominance because they're too big of a company.
MSFT hasn't broken Google's dominance because Google gets more data simply for being the biggest, which reenforces the relevance of their results and therefore their usage numbers.
Google holds search because of bribes (Score:3)
Google was and is willing to spend more money on bribing Apple, Mozilla and others than Microsoft is willing to spend on Bing period. It's similar to the BeOS vs Windows 9X fight where Microsoft used financial incentives to ensure no one got a taste of BeOS delivered on a pristine new machine from a major vendor.
If Microsoft had been willing to offer 1.5x what Google did to Mozilla, Bing's marketsh
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The main reason that Microsoft's Bing hasn't beaten Google is that Bing really, really sucks.
Just try the same search terms in both engines and see which one actually returns results that you'd expect.
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Even Microsoft has been unable to break Google's dominance in search, and they have spent many billions trying.
That just reinforces his point. Spending billions of dollars doesn't guarantee a better product, and that's what you need if you want to break a large company's dominance.
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No you don't need to merge a few billion dollar companies together to compete with Google
Yes, you do.
One thing established companies invest in is measures to maintain their dominance. That can be getting patents and defending them, or just suing the start up into oblivion, or marketing, or collaboration with suppliers and other shady strategies.
Lock-in is real, especially in the tech world. If you really think some start up with a better mouse trap can, say, replace Microsoft Office anytime in the next 25 or so years - well, Google has tried and failed.
What we don't have is a form of capitalism that can survive non-stop never-ending mergers.
Agree. Which is exactly why not allowing s
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No company can grow up from nothing to compete with them because they don't have the economy of scale.
Yeah. I remember in 1998 Brin and Page just simply magically appeared with a trillion dollar company, factories, 10s of thousands of workers, office buildings. They definitely did not start in a garage. /s
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Yahoo and other search engines were huge companies, too. Google came out of nowhere and, long before it started gobbling other companies, totally dominated internet search.
Likewise with United Launch Alliance - it's got the combined weight of Lockheed-Martin and Boeing behind it. And
RIP, P.J O'Rourke (Score:2)
"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators."
Re: RIP, P.J O'Rourke (Score:2)
This company has performed an illegal operation and will be terminated.
You know we can easily stop that right? (Score:2)
And that brings me to my second point which is that you should never listen to what a politician says. Instead look up transcripts of their speeches and read.
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Yeah... no. I ain't gonna voluntarily put my contact details on the PUBLIC database of registered voters to get even more spam calls and letters.
I would like to vote if my privacy was assured.
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When there is no effective rule of law, the economy tends to be run by pirates, who obtain their profits by force. It is actually more profitable to trade, rather than plunder, but that requires that the trading partners agree on the rules. I think it fair to say that the people of Russia and Ukraine would both be better off if they got on with trade, instead of war. What is the point of blasting apartment blocks and hospitals into rubble?
Read: Pro-China law (Score:1)
So, US will play with both hand tied from the back, while China gets to gobble up all tech companies.
Tencent is he largest gaming company out there. They bought Riot (League of Legends), Epic (40%: Fortnite, engines for most modern games), Bluehole (11%: PUBG).
They buy the largest chip plant in the UK: https://www.bloomberg.com/news... [bloomberg.com]
And have sights on pretty much all the industries: https://www.aei.org/op-eds/chi... [aei.org]
And we'll stop mergers which are at a measly $5 billion. Do you know even the bankrupt MGM
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And we'll stop mergers which are at a measly $5 billion. Do you know even the bankrupt MGM acquistion is more than $8 billion, right? Yes, let us leave US companies to ruin, while the Chinese take up the slack.
Does not apply to "failing firms".
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That is my point.
Even failing firms are this expensive. Non failing ones would bring be even higher price tags. Especially with inflation (both real and wall street).
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You do realize that corporate mergers need to be approved in multiple jurisdictions.
If two US corporations that do business in Europe want to merge they need to get approval from both the US and European regulatory bodies.
If a Chinese corporation wants to do business in the US they also need to get US approval if they want to merge with another corporation.
Sure the corporations could still merge but they wouldn't be able to conduct business in those areas where the merger wasn't approved.
Congressional arm wrestling (Score:2)
Elections are coming.
Look tough.
It's really insanity to believe that they would do this, driving away Tech to $any_sane_jurisdiction. But they might try anyway.
Let this sink in... (Score:3)
From The Fine Summary:
Crucially, PAMA would formalize procedures for reviewing past mergers and breaking up "harmful deals" that allegedly hurt competition.
So Sen. Warren wants the ability to go back and reverse/cancel any merger that she, in her opinion, feels is a "harmful deal"?
This is a horrible idea, we have tools and mechanisms to evaluate mergers and protect the consumer already - what is the problem this bill solves, other than giving random elected officials to revisit any deal they personally don't like?
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This bill has a snowball's chance in hell of actually passing. It's a showpiece to point out how wealth has been accumulating in the hands of the biggest players, akin to the end stages of the board game Monopoly. Less startups are thriving to the point where they challenge existing players. Lately, the goal of most startups actually seems to be to get bought up by your competition and cash out. t's bad for job creation/employment stability and reduced competition is bad for consumers.
But don't worry, t
Re: Let this sink in... (Score:2)
But don't worry, the "but my stonks!" oligarchy
You do understand that there are millions of regular people who have 401k plans, retirement packages, pensions, etc. which are underpinned by stocks, right?
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But don't worry, the "but my stonks!" oligarchy
You do understand that there are millions of regular people who have 401k plans, retirement packages, pensions, etc. which are underpinned by stocks, right?
Yep. That's the bribe they hand out to keep us from interfering with the aristocracy. Bread and circuses -> pensions and big TVs.
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This bill has a snowball's chance in hell of actually passing. It's a showpiece to point out how wealth has been accumulating in the hands of the biggest players, akin to the end stages of the board game Monopoly. Less startups are thriving to the point where they challenge existing players. Lately, the goal of most startups actually seems to be to get bought up by your competition and cash out. t's bad for job creation/employment stability and reduced competition is bad for consumers.
But don't worry, the "but my stonks!" oligarchy will see to it that this and any new anti-trust regulations are swiftly swept under the rug. Can't have anyone rocking the boat, now can we?
This is a really terrible way to solve the problem, because it treats the symptom while ignoring the root cause. Want to increase competition? Make small businesses more profitable. To do this:
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Damn you and your logical thinking... this is politics!
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Reduce or eliminate the tax burden on small and medium-sized businesses by shifting the burden to larger businesses.
The canned response to that and all the rest of your suggestions is "government shouldn't be picking winners and loser! Muh profitz!" and that's the end of the matter. It's an incredibly effective soundbite at this point, despite being braindead stupid.
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Reduce or eliminate the tax burden on small and medium-sized businesses by shifting the burden to larger businesses.
The canned response to that and all the rest of your suggestions is "government shouldn't be picking winners and loser! Muh profitz!" and that's the end of the matter. It's an incredibly effective soundbite at this point, despite being braindead stupid.
The canned response to that is "Government shouldn't be picking winners and losers, but it should make sure that every company has a fighting chance."
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The basic problem is not companies getting too big through mergers. It is misuse of monopoly powers that is the problem. In classical economics, a monopoly means the power to charge whatever you like for your product, because there is no competition. However, if you are a company like Google, you are not actually charging the users anything, so that monopoly pricing argument does not apply. I buy quite a few specialist books from Amazon. I am very happy with the low price of good quality hardbacks. So where
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However, if you are a company like Google, you are not actually charging the users anything, so that monopoly pricing argument does not apply
I guess that depends on which users you are talking about. Google may not charge their web search engine users anything but they do charge their advertising users.
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Google may not charge their web search engine users anything but they do charge their advertising users.
I guess the consumers of Google's free services do end up paying, because the cost of the advertising is loaded on to the products they buy. The point is though, whether the market dominance of Google is actually harmful to society as a whole. The point about anti-trust regulations and the like is to prevent monopolies causing harm. A company just being big is not an evil in itself.
As far as I know UK law, major mergers and acquisitions are subject to scrutiny, in order to see whether there may be some harm
Amazon commissions; private police (Score:2)
In addition to Google charging the AdWords advertisers something, Amazon also charges a commission to third-party sellers on its platform. In theory, Amazon's competitor in this space is eBay. Payment facilitators, such as PayPal, Stripe, and Square, likewise charge merchants a fee.
A bunch of companies hire private-sector companies as an alternative or supplement to city law enforcement. This includes watchman/guard/"rent-a-cop" firms and private investigators. Pinkerton has been in the private policing bus
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So Sen. Warren wants the ability to go back and reverse/cancel any merger that she, in her opinion, feels is a "harmful deal"?
Since Senator Warren isn't part of the regulatory body that oversees mergers (i.e. FTC and DOJ) she wouldn't have the "ability to go back and reverse/cancel any merger that she, in her opinion, feels is a 'harmful deal'".
Needs inflation adjustment clauses (Score:1)
Or it's going to be ridiculously tight in 10 years, basically banning 2.5 billion dollar mergers. And 10 year after that, banning 1.25 billion dollar mergers.
It's been overlooked in many bills in the past.
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It refers to text in the current active version of the Clayton Act that it's amending, which seems hard to find:
has annual revenues exceeding $5,000,000,000 (as adjusted and published for each fiscal year beginning after September 30, 2022, in the same manner as provided in section 8(a)(5) to reflect the percentage change in the gross national product for such fiscal year compared to the gross national product for the year ending September 30, 2021);
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You mean like with the minimum wage?
Also needs to address unprofitable companies (Score:2)
There are a number of things this bill seems to have overlooked.
The first / biggest one I noticed is that mergers and acquisitions very often take place when a company isn't doing well. When it's heading toward eventual failure.
For example if Intel couldn't get their shit together, eventually they'd sell to someone who knows how to run a successful chip company - someone like AMD. If Boeing couldn't get their shit together, they'd eventually sell to someone who knows how build planes successfully. You don'
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Two different parts (Score:2)
There two substantive parts to the bill, which would make two major changes to US law.
Starting on page 18, it gives the FTC the power to reject any merger. If they don't reject a large merger, they are required publish a report justifying why they allowed it. That's the FTC stuff.
The first half of the bill defines the mergers and acquisitions described in the Slashdot summary. It calls those "prohibited mergers". It then says "Any prohibited merger shall be unlawful". It bans then, just as the summary sa
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The first / biggest one I noticed is that mergers and acquisitions very often take place when a company isn't doing well. When it's heading toward eventual failure.
This is explicitly addressed.
Does Senator Warren *know* that her bill is garbage and she's just pandering to those who aren't paying attention?
If she doesn't know it's garbage, if she has no understanding of how business works, doesn't know that being unemployed is bad, etc. that's even worse.
Is she clueless, or does she think we're clueless?
I very much doubt anyone here has taken the necessary time to understand what the bill actually does once its changes are merged into existing law.
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"Does Senator Warren *know* that her bill is garbage and she's just pandering to those who aren't paying attention?"
Absolutely she does. She's just pandering to her left-wing populist base. She knows this bill has zero chance of becoming law.
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He's kind of laws cannot have inflation adjusting (Score:2)
Why just tech? (Score:2)
Whether or not you agree with this legislation, why are big tech mergers somehow more harmful than, say, big oil or big aluminum or big auto or big whatever mergers? Did somebody in tech forget to pay off their local legislators?
Besides, what exactly is a "tech" company anyway? A company that uses computers, or sells things using web sites?
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I haven't read the actual bill but I don't think this is limited to tech companies. If you read the linked article you will see this statement:
The act isn't strictly focused on tech, but Warren made clear that industry was a target. She cautioned the FTC on Amazon's proposed buyout of MGM Studios, and challenged Lockheed Martin's since-abandoned attempt to buy Aerojet Rocketdyne.
https://www.engadget.com/senat... [engadget.com]
So the bill isn't specifically targeting tech companies.
$5 Billion isn't very big (Score:3)
According to Forbes, this law would cover nearly all of the 1,000 biggest companies in the US.
https://www.forbes.com/lists/g... [forbes.com]
Electronic Arts, AutoDesk, Arrow Electronics, Agilent Technologies, Wayfair, to name a few.
Are these companies really threatening competition if they considered mergers?
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Autodesk should be regulated and barred from acquisitions for sure, can't speak to the others. The whole concept is flawed though; many acquisitions are really acqu-hiring.
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Don't confuse "value" with "revenue." The so-called "value" of a company is meaningless, just multiply the price per share by the number of shares. That number has no more meaning than the "value" of 1 Bitcoin.
Revenue numbers reflect actual gross income. The largest company by that measure is Walmart, at $559 billion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I personally agree that really big mergers should be stopped. But $5 billion is a ridiculously low threshold. Any numeric threshold, by itself, is overly simpl
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You are right that it's hard to judge the definition of a "market" or "market share." This is why we can't rely on a simplistic law that draws some arbitrary dollar threshold. Instead, we probably should define a set of unwanted behaviors that are common in monopolies to guide regulators. It's OK for the law to be messy, there is no alternative. That's what courts are for.
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Well, this won't ever pass, but broadly speaking, are we really benefiting by allowing those companies to merge? As it stands any company that *might* drive a change in status quo that people clamor for gets slurped up by a big established player and squashed as it stands today.
The attempt at criteria may be severely flawed, but it would be nice to see something to address the problems.
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are we really benefiting by allowing those companies to merge?
This is a backwards way to look at the question. It is not the role of government to decide whether a type of business activity is beneficial, and allow it to continue only if it determines that it is. It is the role of government to protect us from business activity that is harmful. So the real question is, is there harm in companies merging? The answer is, it depends, and it's messy.
I recently worked for a company that was in the records retrieval business. Part of their growth strategy was to look for sm
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Yeah, if this bill somehow gets passed (I doubt it), it's just going to cause companies to move their HQs to a more merger-friendly country.
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Such a proposal is unconstitutional on its face. Government is expressly prohibited from interfering with the execution of private contracts. The commerce clause, as interpreted by SCOTUS, allows intervention in the event of a clear and compelling public interest, but the burden of proof is on government to show that a clear and compelling public interest exists.
Well, that's easy. Monopolies are always bad for public interests and the purpose of these large mergers is to establish monopolies by eliminating competition. There's basically nothing to show; the single purpose is to harm public interests and boost private ones instead.
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This isn't just big companies, there are over 2400 publicly traded companies worth more than $5 billion - and thousands more that are privately held that are worth more than $5 billion. How does, preventing Silicon Labs ($5.72B) and National Instruments ($5B) create a monopoly, when you have Analog Devices ($183B) already there? It doesn't. What you've done is lock-in market leaders (big companies) from ever being challenged by small guys (who almost always grow via acquisition).
This is the problem with trying to fix something after it's already broken. The logical answer is to break up Analog. The practical answer is: you can't and your "free market" is already fucked and dependant on blind luck to fix it. Which is the problem with the whole idea of the free market, it's luck-based and rewards the big players who can roll with the downturns and surprises better than the fresh, new faces trying to get established. At it's core it's pretty well a Nazi conception of social Darwinism
so much... (Score:2)
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so much for a free market. 5 billion isn't a lot of money these days.
How about trying to come up with legislation that prevents misuse of 'monopoly' positions instead of preventing companies from growing.
It's easier to keep the door bolted than to get the horse back in once it's run roughshod over the public.
Absolute size, no. Relative size, maybe... (Score:2)
The real problem with current Big Tech is that it can defend itself from upstart competitors by buying them out. Facebook/Meta is the worst offender here (as in most things), but Google is a serious contender with its acquisitions of things like DoubleClick and YouTube.
Maybe what we need is relative size restrictions - company A can't buy company B unless B's market cap is at least ... 1% of A's? 10%?
5 billion isn't what it used to be. (Score:2)
As I read it, this bill would prevent most of the Fortune 500 from M&A activities. Is that right?
Capitalism (Score:2)
https://archive.is/xwvjz [archive.is]
The goal of Capitalism is Innovation not Greed/Monopoly;
"If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it" --Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)
https://archive.is/Sltpn [archive.is]