[palmotea]

> How will that work - for example Y Combinator classes. They cannot be acquired?

For the record: national economic policy shouldn't revolve around Y Combinator classes and similar startups.

I'm totally fine if it turns out a sensible antitrust policy completely destroys the acquisition exit pathway for tech startups. I'm not saying one will, but I'm saying that's a cost I'm willing to pay.

[trollbridge]

YC startups could just become mature businesses. Nothing wrong with providing a good service, earning a good profit, and employees maturing into stable careers.

[sleight42]

But we can't have that because then we'd be wasting potential profit. /s

[nicce]

> I'm totally fine if it turns out a sensible antitrust policy completely destroys the acquisition exit pathway for tech startups.

And it should also prevent the acquihire.

[spwa4]

I think the really important question is HOW this will happen. If you mean for the state to buy them at fair market value, nobody will object to that, not even if it closes the door to private equity.

But that's not what you're talking about, is it?

How about doing what America used to do? Provide seed funding for a new fire truck company in trade for condictions. Can we agree to do that? Fund 3 companies to make fire trucks, fast-track whatever certification and approvals they need. Create the companies we need, risking (and in fact expecting to lose) a bunch of the capital used for this.

[amazingamazing]

YComb was just an example, though. Should companies be able to be bought and sold at all? My opinion is yes. Agree or disagree?

[asolove]

The OP explicitly answers this: go back to pre-80s antitrust policy. Companies can be bought and sold but not if it creates concentrations of economic power that allow them to dictate prices to vendors or customers.

[amazingamazing]

This is vague and not actionable. Should Microsoft and Amazon have been able to buy Anthropic and OpenAI 5 years ago?

People always give these vague guidelines (and even the guidelines in the 80s were) and wonder why they are easily circumvented.

[hilariously]

This is actually how anti-trust works - if you decide a company gets too big you Ma Bell it and break it up, its very actionable, just hard.

[amazingamazing]

People keep bringing up Bell as if the situation now is not just as bad.

[nemomarx]

And they want to do it again and enforce anti trust laws? I don't see any contradiction here. Break up faang and keep a close eye on all these acquisitions the ai companies are doing and why they need to own package management and code editors and etc.

[MSFT_Edging]

The situation now is just as bad, if not worse, which is why people keep bringing up the case of something being done about the monopolies.

[CPLX]

There's nothing ambiguous about it at all. We had it as our public policy for generations and then bought-off politicians stopped enforcing it.

The information is captured the same way as most policy - via statute and precedent, and guidelines for enforcement agencies.

None of this is confusing, or even hard, except insofar as it's hard to fight against well funded opponents.

[esseph]

> This is vague and not actionable. Should Microsoft and Amazon have been able to buy Anthropic and OpenAI 5 years ago?

No, because if we had proper anti-trust they already would have both been broken up years ago.

[eesmith]

Microsoft and Amazon should have been restricted, due to their monopoly power, long before 5 years ago.

I've read enough of the pre-Borkian (ie, pre-1980s) history of antitrust law to know this was very actionable.

They were not easily circumvented in that it required decades of funding and activism to nerf the Sherman Antitrust Act and its successors.

[miltonlost]

How is going back to a policy that used to work "vague and unactionable"? It literally had been actionable.

[amazingamazing]

It did not work though. Bell and Standard Oil are notable examples. What else?

[palmotea]

> It did not work though. Bell and Standard Oil are notable examples. What else?

That's pretty unfair. IIRC, Standard Oil was on of the companies that was the impetus for antitrust law (and broken up by it), and AT&T was broken up (famously) in the 80s.

Basically, your "argument" is a troll or a deep and basic misunderstanding. Especially in the case of Standard Oil. You're basically saying the law doesn't work because it didn't work before it existed (Standard Oil became dominant in the 1870s or 1880s and the Sherman Antitrust act wasn't passed until 1890).

[mschuster91]

> Should Microsoft and Amazon have been able to buy Anthropic and OpenAI 5 years ago?

Antitrust enforcement can be done retroactively as well, if it appears that a large company abuses its financial firepower to undercut competitors or a marketshare gets too dominant.

[DoneWithAllThat]

It was absolutely actionable and implemented as policy for decades, what are you even talking about? Your phrasing pretends this isn’t exactly how antitrust enforcement worked before the much more recent approach began.

[amazingamazing]

It really was not. Go look at the success rate of enforcement.

[esseph]

You're alluding to some second order effects which are real but also able to be dealt with, and have been.

Montgomery Ward thought it was "too big to fail" and too powerful to regulate.

So, what happened?

If the US government wants to, and it has in the past, it just takes your business at gunpoint.

4 soldiers walked into the ultra-conservative owners office and made him leave. Two of them picked up his arms and legs, took him outside, and deposited him on the sidewalk.

> a major U.S. CEO being physically evicted from his own company by armed troops became one of the most famous news photos of the home-front war

[nancyminusone]

But "corporations are people" and those types of markets have closed since 1865 in the united states.

[brendoelfrendo]

Why do you present this as a binary to agree/disagree with?

[amazingamazing]

Simply because that is the maximally reduced case and it inevitably will result in the same situation.

[brendoelfrendo]

> that is the maximally reduced case

It sure is.

> and it inevitably will result in the same situation

Why?