We need to go beyond stopping mergers. Any company which sees itself as large or powerful enough to make unveiled threats against a national economy needs to be broken up.
For ultra-large companies (e.g. any company with a market cap over $100B at the moment), default-deny should be the position for any mergers from this point - the burden of proof should be on them to show why the merge would not only be non-harmful, but actually benefit the wider economy.
Man, I came in instinctively wanting to argue the opposite point, but reading your thought in this clear way made me second guess myself. You are simply right and I have no _real_ arguments against it (maybe some ideology, but thats not useful), so I changed my mind.
Well, if a merger is proposed, that's because management has a credible argument that it's a boost for the two companies involved. Say 1%. If one of those is a >$100B company, then that's a $1B boost for the overall economy.
If you assume that a $1B boost for the economy is an argument in favour, then all big mergers are supported by credible arguments. (Which may turn out to be wrong in hindsight, of course, but that hardly affects their credibility at the time.)
This all sounds like an RAA to me: That way of looking at big mergers leads to regarding all of them as good, which is an absurd conclusion, therefore it is an absurd view.
The absurdity comes from simply ignoring the potential net-negative side-effects of a merger, a 1B boost caused by higher prices is a loss for society due to inflation, there are many externalities from a merger that won't be easily priced.
No, I'm implying that inflation caused by a diminished competitive environment (the usual with large corporate mergers) coupled with the effects of a company having less competition and more market control does definitely outweigh whatever positive comes from it.
I'd hazard a guess that a lot of America's soft power is through the giant companies it created. Big Pharma, Big Banks, Big Tech...
If CIA wants to tap a foreign dictator, I'm sure they can make a friendly call to some office software maker and ask for a one-off. Embargoes carry so much more pressure if there is no alternative to Made in USA. And so on.
Other countries are generally not in a position to wield this power but totally want to, or recognise the risk and pay through the nose to mitigate it. Look at France, which has built a complete domestic defense industry just to be independent of the USA.
You may argue this power is misused, and that's probably true, but in principle it is a nice-to-have for states, and thus societies, and probably the thing that keeps America birthing decacorns despite the costs.
Some kind of progressively increasing tax could possibly provide a disincentive. If it's based on turnover/sales rather than profit (to avoid creative accounting), then a merger would increase the tax burden compared to keeping two companies separate. It would also penalise the very biggest players, but maybe that would benefit the smaller companies and encourage greater market choice.
Is there a threat here, though? Even veiled, I don't see more here than "well we'll take our ball and go home", and the actual words are closer to "we and our friends will have to think harder about bringing in more balls".
An actual threat might be closer to "Nice independent nuclear deterrent you got there, be a pity if we stopped supplying security patches for Windows for Warships…"
(But I absolutely agree that any company "too big to fail" should be treated as a potential disaster waiting to happen, and broken apart accordingly; even when I happen to like them or their work, that big is too big).
I think "We bring tech jobs and tax revenue, which we will take elsewhere if you're not more compliant" is hard to label as anything other than a threat - particularly in the context of trying to play off the UK against the EU. UK politicians have made hay off the idea that being free of EU bureaucracy would make the UK a more appealing environment for companies; that was always bullshit anyway, but here Microsoft are trying to use it as leverage in the court of public opinion.
True in the abstract. But between also-ran countries which get obsessed with creating their own "national champion" mega-companies, and the stable of mega-donors which you need to have a meaningful political career these days, and the win-at-any-cost culture wars...
Every time this subject comes up people wheel out "the only obligation a company has is to its _shareholders_". Usually when they're complaining about DEI or social obligations being imposed on them.
Competence you can argue, but there is no guarantee that any company is more aligned with _the public as a whole_ than an elected government. It may turn out that they are in particular cases, but elections remain a real means for public to control governments that doesn't apply to companies.
Well, I'm not wheeling out any of that. Politicians are only truly obligated to their sponsors as well, but they won't say that out loud. Does this make things better?
In truth, a government also depends on its voters, and a company also depends on its customers. But none of this what I'm talking about. I'm talking about governments implementing FORCE on corporations because they're big enough to be heard and seen and to challenge them. Is that good? Why?
Take a country like Russia where only what Putin says matters, everyone else is his pawn, even if on paper they may be billionaires holding big companies. Is that an improvement over having genuine corporate voices making their point?
If you're convinced, for some silly reason, that you live in a legit republic, I recommend researching how a banana republic operates, or say Russia, which is also a democracy & a republic on paper, and learn how every single procedure and institution is subverted and behind the decorum, the rulers are doing whatever they want, basically.
And once you do this... look back to your country with new eyes, and you'll be shocked. It's the same thing. But with more make-up on.
> Take a country like Russia where only what Putin says matters, everyone else is his pawn, even if on paper they may be billionaires holding big companies. Is that an improvement over having genuine corporate voices making their point?
Russia is not a democracy so your premise is flawed from the start.
Oh yes it, they have elections and everything. "But it's just superficial, not real". Well, let's look at France now. People elected someone, and he flipped on them, and their protested. What's the end result, in this democracy? President 1, people 0.
Are you really comparing a representative democracy where the currently elected officials will probably be ousted in a few years with a place where protesting gets you thrown ostentatiously out of a window, to prove a point to everyone?
No he doesn't have prove anything to you. What kind of non-sequitur is that? Mergers can reduce competitiveness, and governments can be incompetent - both can be true at the same time.
It's very simple. Their argument is that no company should ever challenge a government, that if this happens, the company is too powerful and should be broken apart.
Just to make this clear, in a normal democracy, anyone can challenge a government or institution, even separate individuals, as long as they have merit, legal or moral, to their claim and they can demonstrate it.
The user proposes that by default all claims of a corporation to a country are illegal and harmful and they should be punished and split apart for it.
So... if that's a valid argument, it suggests an unchecked government, with no comparable size organization to challenge it is better somehow. Governments are better. But are they?
Two things can be true. One can think that only the state should have hundreds of billions of dollars in cash, not people, organizations or corporations. The same person can fear the government as well, and actively oppose virtually any government control over anything. (Especially if it is spectacularly dangerous and has no benefit.)
We're not discussing a "both ways" situation here. The premise was that big companies should be broken down, while countries should be kept monolithic, strictly overpowering them.
I'm asking... prove to me that governments vs corporations are a kind of conflict where governments are always correct. Because if they ARE NOT... then the idea "we must break up any company before it can even talk to us" is bullshit, isn't it?
Someone has to sit at the top of the tree, making decisions whose impact has to be accepted by the people below.
Government is far (far!) from perfect, but at least it aspires in the right direction (where "right" is defined by the zeitgeist of the population, and so by definition what government will tend towards).
Companies are beholden to no-one but the markets. Markets are demonstrably not aligned with what is best for the populace, but rather what is best for owners of capital. We can't change that property of companies easily, but we can, in theory, hold government to a higher standard than "do whatever the highest bidder says". So, I'd like government to stay at the top of the tree.
Someone has to sit near the top of the tree, making decisions whose impact has to be accepted by the shareholders, employees and customers of a company, and communicated to the governments of the world. Not all products and services can be implemented by a small mom-and-pop shop. Some things need scale. And not only that.
Corporations are far (far!) from perfect, but at least they aspire in the right direction (where "right" is defined by the zeitgeist of those people they service above, and so by definition what behavior will a corporation tend towards).
Governments are beholden to no-one but their sponsors and shallow populist trends they use to rise to power by exploiting the large distance between voter and representative, often nothing in common to discuss, so the debate is kept low-level, basic, and full of the same lies repeated over and over again to slightly different audiences every 4 years or so. Politicians are demonstrably not aligned with what is best for the populace, but rather what is best for them clinging to power and servicing their behind-the-scene sponsors (or in some countries, public lobby). We can't change that property of governments easily, but we can, in theory, hold companies to a higher standard than "do whatever the highest bidder of our party says". We can vote with our money, and vote with our speech, and boycott a product or a service much more easily than we can outvote an incumbent party or a law, when they betray us. As we see in France, protests do nothing. Big once we have aligned corporations to us, they can represent our voice in front of large, cumbersome governments, and bring balance back to us. So, I'd like corporations to stay near the top of the tree, and not make this a government autocratic monopoly of control.
P.S.: BTW when you say "companies are beholden to nothing but the markets..." I hope you realize... we're the markets. Not any less than we're the voters.
You used different words, but describe two entities in a very similar situation.
Except a government is larger and essentially held hostage by the two or so major incumbent parties that have settled into every developed democracy. If people want to make the situation better, what are they supposed to do, exactly?
How did the protests in France go? Citizens destroyed some private property. And that was it. The government is fine and the president is fine.
Why is Microsoft bigger and scarier than the UK government? Be specific and don't hide behind synonyms and fragmented terminology?
UK GDP is $3.131 trillion, and Microsoft's is $200 billion. You actually think Microsoft is way too big in this situation and has to be broken down so the little-wittle government is not threatened by their displeasure? Oh, God.
I'm not even talking about the fact a government has monopoly on its territory, monopoly on using force through police etc. and it has military, what does Microsoft have here that makes it scarier than the damn government, huh?
You are using very loaded word for something that isn't even remotely true.
People choose which ever party or candidate should represent them in the government, they can at any point decide to vote for new candidates or parties.
Protests are not a legalislative form of action but a means for citizens to raise their concerns.
Microsofts value does not dictate its power, power dictate power.
They got multiple industries under their thumb and have been caught trying to subvert and or destroy competition.
You're welcome to try and create a country where violence, territory and military is democratized/privatized it doesn't change the point that we choose to live in countries where the social contract is that the government has monopoly over certain goods.
Excuse me, but can't you just at any point decide to not use Windows and Office? Well, yes, you can. As well as you can vote for new candidates or parties.
Why on the board? Are you a minister right now in your government, by any chance, to make this comparable? Are you a represented in the parliament/congress? Or maybe you don't understand shareholders, in fact, vote? That's funny.
Do you have a promising example of where normal people were shareholders and managed to push through a decision which was against the interests of the board? Sounds from your comments down this thread like you only favour influence being accessible to those with capital, which I disagree with largely based on the fact that it is the world we live in already, and things are not trending in a good direction.
"Furious attack" - Just goes to show that it was the right decision by the UK. EU should have done the same. I personally don't want all my games to be linked to a Microsoft account in a few years. There's already too many monopolies. It's bad enough they want to force you to use an online account for the operating system.
It's frightening how Microsoft, a company well known for decades of history of being anti consumer and shady managed to get a large vocal part of the internet to vocally defend them going for a monopoly in video game editing. As if them already having monopolies over so many major tech markets wasn't bad enough.
To be honest, if a company owns at least one computer and is the target of a decision made by any european country, you'll find HNers complaining about it.
Microsoft isn't even the worst company to get defended this way, the same happened when Uber started illegal services in Europe.
To me - I’m seeing this as a bit of a goading on to the EU to be sure they make the ‘correct’ choice, unlike those foolish, anti-progress, anti business Brits. Not totally sure it’ll work.
MS is blackmailing a gov. UK in that case. Proofs MS is way too big - should be a lot smaller, 5-6 times ? Thank you UK !
Edit:
Wait, I wasn't thinking there. 5-6 times ?? Let's count: os, cloud, aps, games and games hardwere - that 4 - 5 without improving competition in any of that domains ! 8 - 15 is resonable number then ;) But, for sure, cloud, os and apps should be separated.
Pretty disgusting and low attack, given the form of words used. Another reason not to buy their services, IMO. Plenty of people with budgetary authority will take note.
I was also very surprised by the language here - diplomacy seems to have gone completely out of the window and I don’t really understand what they’re trying to achieve by disparaging an entire country!
This is far worse than you’d read from a Ryanair press release - the CEO of which isn’t exactly afraid to make his true feelings known, and doesn’t have a lot of love for the UK government.
I don’t play games and don’t really have knowledge of what’s going on here, but this seems to have convinced me that the CMAs choice was correct.
This is likely a good thing. If a company is annoyed by a regulator it either means the regulator accidentally held back passionate progress the populous begged for, or that Microsoft was set to make a load of money off it.
And there's a general lack of articles lamenting this.
Content aside, this is terrible editing on BBC’s part:
> However, the regulator hit back, saying: "It is the CMA's job to do what is best for the people, businesses and economy of the UK, not merging firms with commercial interests."
> But the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said its job was not to serve the interests of merging firms.
> Mr Smith said the CMA's decision market "probably the darkest day in our four decades in Britain".
I assume they meant to say "marked" rather than "market". The editorial standards are frankly a disgrace at the BBC these days, these errors are common.
I applaud the CMA for taking a leadership role and standing up to Microsoft. Well done! The post-decision commentary by Microsoft is uncalled for and shows how truly evil and manipulative this company has become. Sore loser.
I mean, I'm not exactly a fan of brexit, but my God, playing on EU vs UK sentiments is worse than bad taste. It's exactly what is wrong with society: fuels hate for commercial reasons.
Couldn’t agree more. And I think they may have misread the room on this anyway. The impression I get from (living in) the EU is that they would rather take the more ‘pro-consumer’ side, or at least be seen to. So ‘banned in the UK’ is a low bar.
I am not in favour of monopolies and large acquisitions, as I think those are ultimately detrimental to the economy.
Regulators should take a closer look at Tencent, they have been on an acquisition spree during the last few years, with little resistance, including in the UK.
I am not sure the UK is making the best move here, strategically.
Cry moar MS. If they think the EU is a more business friendly area than the UK, then feel free to move over there. I think they'll find that the EU is less tolerant of Their monopolistic behaviour than the UK would be.
Well, if msft wants to restore confidence: day one, ALL games from ALL their studios with top notch elf/linux builds (not a few games here and there, day 42389, hardly working and supported).
Well, this is exactly the same for Sony though.
Hard truth: what sells to the people the need of current powerful hardware is nearly only video games... Namely, if you want sell powerful hardware "en masse", you want beautiful 3D games.
Roughly speaking, most people not playing video games will be fine with a risc-v mini-computer. Ok, maybe with some vector instruction or video decoding hardware.
Or their builds for non-msft platforms would be just trash... or slowly but surely become trash.
There is only one way out of this toxic environment: minimal, ultra-stable in time OS to run beautiful 3D game binaries (basically, the only thing selling powerful hw to people). Current elf/linux would not even fit since there is no static ABI stability (for instance a game executable linked with a glibc 2.34 won't run on system with any previous glibc). So if elf/linux, it has to be without the glibc (or game binaries must be pure ELF64 binaries, not elf C runtime binaries). That said, the runtime part of elf is actually the core of the issue... we need a wayland/json of a "runtime elf" which will slash away some expensive features then will require significant work on many software components (static TLS will go away). I wrote such specs (they are excrutiating simple)but my experience tells me to actually make it work with a "real" system first, because in such complex system we always fail to see something important, _always_.
I can definitely see their point. Asking the government to gain and mantain such a deep insight into market dynamics is bound to fail time and time again. Private monopolies never persist for very long, any attempt to fix that non-problem via governmental interference is bound to produce opposite results.
This isn't a free market, though. Microsoft grew as big as it is by exploiting government-granted monopolies (copyright, patent). It seems entirely reasonable to me that governments should be able to rein it back in.
For ultra-large companies (e.g. any company with a market cap over $100B at the moment), default-deny should be the position for any mergers from this point - the burden of proof should be on them to show why the merge would not only be non-harmful, but actually benefit the wider economy.