If she ends up losing cases to Meta, Microsoft and Amazon, how does that help? She seems to think the chilling effect of the FTC being litigious is victory, but losing every case isn't a great strategy.
FTC lost to Microsoft because the overall case was bewildering. Per Wikipedia, the merger would have made Microsoft the third largest gaming company. Which makes it clear that it faces plenty of competition.
In theory, they could abuse their market position by not selling games for the PlayStation, but you can't sue someone because they might do something. In fact, scrutiny from the FTC and the UK CMA seemed to motivate statements by Microsoft that they would not limit their titles (particularly Call of Duty) to their platforms. These statements were cited by Judge Corley when he denied an injunction against the merger. So even in this case there may have been some benefit.
As for Amazon and Facebook, the cases are ongoing; the former is very recent.
My perspective here is that to do the job was going to be near impossible. No one even knows at this point how to succeed.
And if we need to learn how to succeed, the initial heuristic of applying the law is the only starting point. Failure was the expected initial result.
She can fail for the entirety of her term. We lose nothing from the status quo. But if she can stick to it - then after she's taken enough of the initial beatings, someone else can come and succeed with the learnings she provides.
She's trying to enforce laws that don't exist but that she would prefer did. That's not going to go well, and the real solution is to get new laws passed, not to try to force tortured interpretations of the existing and relatively weak ones...
She also doesn't appear to actually understand the startup ecosystem at all, if she thinks that blindly opposing all M&A is going to help it.
megaman821|2 years ago
scythe|2 years ago
In theory, they could abuse their market position by not selling games for the PlayStation, but you can't sue someone because they might do something. In fact, scrutiny from the FTC and the UK CMA seemed to motivate statements by Microsoft that they would not limit their titles (particularly Call of Duty) to their platforms. These statements were cited by Judge Corley when he denied an injunction against the merger. So even in this case there may have been some benefit.
As for Amazon and Facebook, the cases are ongoing; the former is very recent.
closetnerd|2 years ago
And if we need to learn how to succeed, the initial heuristic of applying the law is the only starting point. Failure was the expected initial result.
She can fail for the entirety of her term. We lose nothing from the status quo. But if she can stick to it - then after she's taken enough of the initial beatings, someone else can come and succeed with the learnings she provides.
cornel_io|2 years ago
She also doesn't appear to actually understand the startup ecosystem at all, if she thinks that blindly opposing all M&A is going to help it.