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by wvenable 2990 days ago
Seems somewhat ridiculous to allow companies to acquire other companies/services just to force them to spin them off.

I'm for regulation, if you can come up with sensible ones. But targeting a specific company to be split up doesn't seem like it actually solved the problem in the long run. I mean look what happened with AT&T -- we're almost back to complete consolidation again.

1 comments

> Seems somewhat ridiculous to allow companies to acquire other companies/services just to force them to spin them off.

Not really. If Facebook can answer "we're sorry, we'll change and fix it" to every problem, why can't a regulatory regime do the same? E.g. "We're sorry we allowed this acquisition to go through, but it turned out to actually be anticompetitive and our prior mistake doesn't change that..."

> I mean look what happened with AT&T -- we're almost back to complete consolidation again.

The unfortunate thing with AT&T is the regulators, over time and political changes, weren't consistent. I don't think we really want a politically lowest-common-denominator regulatory regime, but that's what we have.