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Microsoft wins FTC fight to buy Activision Blizzard
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this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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The title is a little misleading. This ruling is only regarding the preliminary injunction. There is still an ongoing suit with the FTC and we will need to wait for that to be resolved. However, knowing how these things go, Microsoft will make a ton of promises about creating jobs, keeping their content available to everyone, and agreeing to play fair. They will get approval and immediately turn around and terminate a ton of jobs, start making things exclusive, and backtrack on their promises. Then…nothing will happen. There will be no repercussions. Rinse and repeat.
Thank the GOP for basically ridding the US of antitrust law, which is now basically no longer a thing.
contemporary democrats are not any better, they make hella frequent concessions to anti-competitive business practices under the guise of licensing or stimulus
This is why US democrats are considered center-right compared to the rest of the world.
What makes the rest of the world any better than US by using them as a metric.
The fact their Overton windows aren't so skewed that a center right party is considered "the left"?
US politics is a few hundred years old whereas European and other's are thousands of years old? The rest of the world's political perspective has a bit more precedent than ours.
And then the moment a union starts getting buck, out come the democrats with the freshly-oiled whips...
True.
Far from perfect? Yes. Bad? Very often. Not any better than Republicans when it comes to corporate interests? Absolutely not.
The guys who claim capitalism works because a free market will create better things through competition. Guess they weren't so much for the competition stuff and just became puppets for corporations. We also have it completely legal to openly bribe politicians which makes zero fucking sense, except we call it lobbying so it somehow becomes okay.
Only pure liberals think leaving the free market by itself with minimal regulation is a good thing. Capital attracts capital and becomes basically a snowball.
But is the solution a market controlled by a centralized entity? You just pointed out politicians can also be corrupted. So... Giving more power to an entity that can be corrupted is the solution?
The problem is corruption. Any system you can propose can be fucked up by corruption. The justice system, politicians and government can be corrupted under any system because they are human.
If I'm wrong, just propose any system and I'll tell you how it crumbles because of corruption.
Ideally that's where democracy is supposed to kick in, to stomp out corruption when it occurs. Obviously that's not what's happening and we don't have a democracy anyways. Especially with bribing being completely legal.
Only thing worse than free market capitalism is state sponsored. Decades of the fed flooding the big banks with capital to loan, taxes taken from everyone but the largest corps, and regulatory capture (see copy right for this topic), and we get corporations that demand difficult anti trust actions just to slow down.
That's not a black and white system, it's not one or the other. Every system will have aspects of both in them.
Thats not true there are systems that are non-market, non-capitalist, and non-statist.
I think they're still there, just haven't been trotted out in recent history. And mergers keep getting approved.
The last merger that got blocked was almost 50 years ago, I believe. So yeah...it's probably dead.
Didn't they just block the Nvidia ARM merger a few years back?
I thought that was the UK's Competition Markets Authority that blocked the ARM deal.
FTC sued to block it
My mistake then. Thank you.
Which was that? Also, DraftKings and FanDuel got rejected about 10 years ago
I want to say it was in the telecoms industry. But I completely forgot about that merger you mentioned. Thanks for reminding me.
It's my understanding that Microsoft can now close the deal and acquire ABK before the FTC trial would even take place (as soon as July 18th, though unlikely given the new UK CMA negotiations). What happens to the suit if the merger is already complete?
Probably a fine that's simply justified as "operating costs". It's actually kinda bullshit, they shouldn't be allowed to buy up all the NA competition. Next is probably EA. Thankfully Sony saw this coming and started investing in new studios and IP.
How does one bring Teddy Roosevelt back from the grave? I'm uh...asking for a friend? Yeah. Let's go with that.
We could generate infinite energy by harnessing the force of Teddy Roosevelt rolling in his grave rn.
I'd be pretty surprised if MS is allowed to purchase another huge publisher. Zenimax was pretty small, but ABK is huge. But who knows at this point..
MSFT could purchase Congress itself and get away with it thanks to Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission