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.
And it should also prevent the acquihire.
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.
People always give these vague guidelines (and even the guidelines in the 80s were) and wonder why they are easily circumvented.
No, because if we had proper anti-trust they already would have both been broken up years ago.
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.
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).
How are you allowed to continue to post every 2 seconds? dang
The policy in question (as stated) should have prevented Ma Bell and Standard Oil from getting to the point of being broken up.
2. You don’t have to prevent every case before it happens so much as just stochastically go after the worst ones to make it less economical for people to go take on debt to have huge swaths of consolidation. Letting the market work, after pricing in that egregious monopolies will be broken up, is kinda great and better than minutely scrutinizing every tiny deal for long-term consequences.
> You are a troll. There's nothing left to say. Bye.
is a wildly disproportionate response to the post, IMHO.
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.
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.
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
It sure is.
> and it inevitably will result in the same situation
Why?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
2025 numbers: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/796343/0000796343250...
2026 Q1 numbers: https://mlq.ai/stocks/ADBE/q1-2026-earnings/
Nobody likes this state of affairs so we are asking you to stop strawmanning and start steelmanning the posts you are responding to.
You are clearly not dumb, so stop responding to the dumbest possible and easiest to dismiss interpretation of other people’s comments and instead go deeper
Your cause and effect is wrong.
The US doesn't fail to attempt to enforce, the gov representatives often get paid to not enforce by said corporations who have been allowed to put money into their campaign for election/reelection.
Lots of success during the last admin for those paying attention.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/...
https://www.economicliberties.us/press-release/lina-khans-tr...
https://www.economicliberties.us/our-work/factsheet-the-ftc-...
Frankly this stuff is impossible to talk about in the abstract. The details of every individual case matters. If you're actually curious (instead of just playing a shell game), you can go look up the types of analysis that FTC does to evaluate market dominance and whether a given transaction will excessively consolidate a market.