Comment by amazingamazing
3 hours ago
YComb was just an example, though. Should companies be able to be bought and sold at all? My opinion is yes. Agree or disagree?
3 hours ago
YComb was just an example, though. Should companies be able to be bought and sold at all? My opinion is yes. Agree or disagree?
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.
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.
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.
4 replies →
> 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.
How is going back to a policy that used to work "vague and unactionable"? It literally had been actionable.
7 replies →
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
2 replies →
But "corporations are people" and those types of markets have closed since 1865 in the united states.
Why do you present this as a binary to agree/disagree with?
Simply because that is the maximally reduced case and it inevitably will result in the same situation.