> How is reducing competition good for competition?
I am not familiar with the telecom market. But blocking mergers doesn’t necessarily increase competition. (For example, breaking up Walmart would reduce competitive pressure on Amazon.)
HN has a diverse set of viewpoints. For any assertion one might make, there will be someone with the opposite viewpoint.
In addition to out-and-out opposition or agreement that sounds vaguely oppositional, a comment might call for a pedantic annotation, a tangential aside or book recommendation.
That's to be expected. A typical conversation starts with someone taking a high-dimensional problem, projecting it to their favorite dimension, and saying "the solution is obviously on my side on the number line". Of course you'll get multiple "contrarian" replies ranging from "hey, what about my preferred dimension" to "you know the problem has more than one of them?".
What? Verizon's clear benefit died long before the acquisition, even if their market share did not. The best thing to do would be to foster competition, not actively bless its destruction.
You don't fix a monopoly by creating more monopolies.