| ▲ | amazingamazing 10 hours ago |
| How will that work - for example Y Combinator classes. They cannot be acquired? What about acquihires? Cant stop that - employees have their own agency. |
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| ▲ | palmotea 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > 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. |
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| ▲ | trollbridge 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | YC startups could just become mature businesses. Nothing wrong with providing a good service, earning a good profit, and employees maturing into stable careers. | |
| ▲ | nicce 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > I'm totally fine if it turns out a sensible antitrust policy completely destroys the acquisition exit pathway for tech startups. And it should also prevent the acquihire. | | |
| ▲ | spwa4 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | amazingamazing 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | YComb was just an example, though. Should companies be able to be bought and sold at all? My opinion is yes. Agree or disagree? | | |
| ▲ | asolove 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | amazingamazing 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is vague and not actionable. Should Microsoft and Amazon have been able to buy Anthropic and OpenAI 5 years ago? People always give these vague guidelines (and even the guidelines in the 80s were) and wonder why they are easily circumvented. | | |
| ▲ | hilariously 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is actually how anti-trust works - if you decide a company gets too big you Ma Bell it and break it up, its very actionable, just hard. | | |
| ▲ | amazingamazing 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | People keep bringing up Bell as if the situation now is not just as bad. | | |
| ▲ | nemomarx 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | hilariously 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | MSFT_Edging 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The situation now is just as bad, if not worse, which is why people keep bringing up the case of something being done about the monopolies. |
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| ▲ | 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | esseph 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > This is vague and not actionable. Should Microsoft and Amazon have been able to buy Anthropic and OpenAI 5 years ago? No, because if we had proper anti-trust they already would have both been broken up years ago. | |
| ▲ | CPLX 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There's nothing ambiguous about it at all. We had it as our public policy for generations and then bought-off politicians stopped enforcing it. 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. | |
| ▲ | miltonlost 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | How is going back to a policy that used to work "vague and unactionable"? It literally had been actionable. | | |
| ▲ | amazingamazing 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | It did not work though. Bell and Standard Oil are notable examples. What else? | | |
| ▲ | palmotea 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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). | |
| ▲ | miltonlost 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | They were LITERALLY BROKEN UP due to anti-trust policies. You are a troll. There's nothing left to say. Bye. How are you allowed to continue to post every 2 seconds? dang | | |
| ▲ | zdragnar 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. The policy in question (as stated) should have prevented Ma Bell and Standard Oil from getting to the point of being broken up. | | |
| ▲ | asolove 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | zdragnar 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | amazingamazing 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | eesmith 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Microsoft and Amazon should have been restricted, due to their monopoly power, long before 5 years ago. 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. | |
| ▲ | mschuster91 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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. | |
| ▲ | DoneWithAllThat 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | amazingamazing 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | It really was not. Go look at the success rate of enforcement. | | |
| ▲ | esseph 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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 |
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| ▲ | nancyminusone 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | But "corporations are people" and those types of markets have closed since 1865 in the united states. | |
| ▲ | brendoelfrendo 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Why do you present this as a binary to agree/disagree with? | | |
| ▲ | amazingamazing 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | Simply because that is the maximally reduced case and it inevitably will result in the same situation. | | |
| ▲ | brendoelfrendo 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | > that is the maximally reduced case It sure is. > and it inevitably will result in the same situation Why? |
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| ▲ | Ekaros 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If the acquirer has too big or dominant position already in the specific sector no. They should not be able to sweep the board of all companies doing single thing. |
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| ▲ | toomuchtodo 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If the acquirer attempts to acquire a startup (regardless of investor) for anti trust reasons, or there are anti trust concerns, the M&A activity is disallowed by regulators. A recent example is Figma and Adobe. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... |
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| ▲ | amazingamazing 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | Seems vague. What is an anti trust reason? Figma and Adobe id a great example. Both are doing very poorly. | | |
| ▲ | Bjartr 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | What definition of success are we using that having over $7 billion in net income after expenses in 2025, and nearly $2 billion so far this year, is "doing very poorly"? 2025 numbers:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/796343/0000796343250... 2026 Q1 numbers:
https://mlq.ai/stocks/ADBE/q1-2026-earnings/ | | | |
| ▲ | estearum 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's not vague. You can go look it up. | |
| ▲ | miltonlost 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Everything is vague to you. All you're doing is concern trolling for monopolists | | |
| ▲ | amazingamazing 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | It really is sad that any disagreement with “pe is bad” means i am concerned trolling. Ever consider the guidelines are actually vague which is why usa keeps failing in attempts to enforce? | | |
| ▲ | Erem 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Don’t confuse the nature of the feedback you’re receiving here. Your comments in this thread are so obstinate and so far from this forum’s standards of good faith argument that community members can’t help but perceive you as a troll. 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 | |
| ▲ | esseph 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Ever consider the guidelines are actually vague which is why usa keeps failing in attempts to enforce? 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. |
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| ▲ | toomuchtodo 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I am not an anti trust enforcer or scholar, so I'm going to defer to experts in the field: Lina Khan, Matt Stoller, etc. That is the point of experts in a domain. | | |
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| ▲ | jgalt212 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I think 5-15 person employee businesses do not concern trust busters. |
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| ▲ | amazingamazing 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | Whats the connection between the number of employees and anti trust? Also, there are plenty of YC companies with far more than 15 employees. | | |
| ▲ | estearum 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | Generally you don't hold a market dominant position in any sector that anti-trust regulators care about at 15 employees? 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. |
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