Comment by Arainach
7 hours ago
Nothing was skipped - the point is that this is directly analagous to unscrambling an omelet. Separating mixed things is significantly more difficult than mixing them.
"The laws says X" doesn't change whether X is possible or not.
It’s quite literally not analogous as breaking up companies has happened a bunch but no one has ever unscrambled an omelet
fwiw I thought it was a good analogy. Sure splitting a company is possible and scrambling an omelette is not, but it sure takes a lot more effort to effectively undo entropy.
In a merger you can take as long as you want to go from
1. Two separate companies except at the end of the quarter we add their revenue and expenses together in a spreadsheet to transition to
2. One fully integrated organization
And usually you are becoming more efficient and saving time and money as you integrate.
Splitting a company needs to happen quickly or you'd get all sorts of weird effects where coworkers are ostensibly competitors whilst sharing resources during the transition. And you have to expend a huge amount of effort. Just a couple random complex systems that need to be untangled off the top of my head: physical property and leases, IP space for every IT service you run, multi-year contracts with every vendor from janitorial to SaaS, multi year contracts with customers depending on how the split goes, and of course all the intermingled finances and HR and spreadsheets every company in the world lives on. I'm sure there's thousands more considerations.
I agree antitrust is a big problem that needs to be solved. But "it should be the same amount of effort to merge and split a company" is just fantasy.
Do you really think it's impossible to pass legislation that makes something that's currently easy hard without making the reverse any harder as well?
Yes, because the difficulties in separating integrated pieces have nothing to do with a merger.
What makes splitting a company out difficult isn't (directly) a financial or paperwork burden - it's that tightly integrated systems are very difficult to untangle. There is nothing analagous that could be introduced in the merger process. You could add a mandatory delay, but that's not making it "as hard", it's just making it slower.
I don't understand why you think the only possible ways to make mergers harder need to be "analogous". If they put a hard cap on the size of companies allowed to merge, that would make it harder, without making it harder to break them up. It's hard to take seriously the idea that you think there's literally no possible legislation that could end up changing the relative difficulty in the way the parent comment describes when I was able to come up with an insanely trivial example without needing to think about it for more than a couple minutes.
The law could make mergers executed provisionally for up to X years, with a binding plan to "unmerge" that must be updated every Y months. The FTC already half-does this with post-merge divestiture requirements.
2 replies →