[spacebanana7]

> This argument makes absolutely no sense to me.

There are some business models where acquisition is the only viable way to make money.

Deepmind, Shazam, and Giphy were largely valuable because they create value for other big tech companies with respect to customer acquisition, market positioning and intellectual property. These companies had limited ability to make profits on their own.

One can still argue though that such acquisitions are still against the public interest even if they’re helpful to a class of startups.

[fauigerzigerk]

>There are some business models where acquisition is the only viable way to make money.

Maybe so, but blocking a dominant company from buying out its closest competitor is not quite the same thing as banning all acquisitions.

[manderley]

Seems like companies that could have made money through licensing their product instead of being bought out?

[spacebanana7]

The licensing would need to be exclusive and long term, otherwise the big tech companies would've (and should've) feared the risks of being deeply integrated and dependent on a third party.

Google would never have allowed a third party to use search results as training data, for example. Shazam might've had more flexibility unless Apple wanted to link it with customer data.

Exclusive long term licensing is effectively acquisition by another name.