> 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.
YC startups could just become mature businesses. Nothing wrong with providing a good service, earning a good profit, and employees maturing into stable careers.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, breaking up things wasn't bad, it was the completely lax failure to continue this action and to regulate corporations that got us rafts of stupid ass legislation culminating in citizens united. "Too big to fail" companies are just government entities that are not regulated properly.
> 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).
1. If you are proposing something even stricter than previous antitrust rules, great. But getting back to antitrust itself is actionable is step 1.
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.
If you want to move the goalpost of the conversation that's fine, but it's different from what the previous person was talking about, and why it doesn't make sense to blow up at them for it.
> You are a troll. There's nothing left to say. Bye.
is a wildly disproportionate response to the post, IMHO.
> 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.
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
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.