[legitster]

A bit of apples and oranges here. The goal of the FTC is not to make big companies smaller, it's to protect the market. They are not supposed to be the ones to determine if whales are natural or not to an ecosystem - so they don't generally go hunting them.

[jessaustin]

That's so 1980s. Your appeal to nature has nothing to do with the reality of the last several decades. Mergers among firms in the same market are never good for humans who must use those markets in order to live.

[jacobolus]

> That's so 1980s.

Yep, we’ve had about 50 years now of a Supreme Court shifting further and further to the right, slowly eroding every government check on corporate malfeasance and rent extraction, including antitrust law. The result has been a slow-motion train wreck, and it’s not clear that anything can be done about it for at least a generation.

[legitster]

> Mergers among firms in the same market are never good for humans who must use those markets in order to live.

I don't think this is a universal truth. Clearly there are situations where consumers prefer national brands or dealing with larger companies. If we don't like it, we can pass laws to impose our morality on the public, but the FTC has their mandate and they are sticking with it until told otherwise.

[astrange]

Dealing with large companies is often better than small businesses or family businesses, which in many industries are incompetent or run by tyrants. Landlords being the classic example.