| ▲ | benrutter 6 hours ago |
| Genuine question, is this legal under US anti-monipoly laws? I don't really know anything about that area, but didn't Facebook get in some trouble for purchasing Instagram in part due to them being competition. Surely buying a company out only to close their main offering is defined as anti-competitive? |
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| ▲ | WorldMaker 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| US level anti-trust laws don't touch on a lot of anti-competitive behavior, mostly specifically it almost solely concerns just trusts and monopolies. I don't think I've heard of a court case ever before simply on the death of a product. But also US anti-trust laws at the federal level have always relied on a strong FCC, FTC, and US Attorney General's Office to execute, all of which are currently neutered and/or understaffed under the current administration (and may take years to recover even in the best case scenarios). The US has decided it is a season for trusts and monopolies. (See the mergers of Paramount and WB into Skydance consolidating 200+ combined years of movie history into a single monopoly under the Oracle nepobaby and almost directly undoing/mocking one of the largest and oldest anti-trust cases which was US v. Paramount Studios which set precedents for how large a movie studio could grow that lasted almost 100 years.) (There might be something the state of California could do, but I don't know how much they want to get involved.) |
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| ▲ | bsimpson 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | US v. Paramount separated movie studios from movie theaters. Sumner Redstone came from a movie theater family and formed modern Paramount by buying Viacom (which was spun out of CBS due to antitrust), Paramount, and then later CBS itself. He was able to buy Paramount as a cinema owner because the government abandoned the rule that you couldn't own both the studio and the theater in the 80s. The corporate history of Hollywood is long and complicated. Skydance is obviously a big topic this month, but Paramount was owned by the Redstone family's National Amusements theater for as long as many of the adults on this site have been alive. | | |
| ▲ | WorldMaker 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | National Amusements wasn't considered an official breach of the Paramount decree because it was "the other around", a theater chain owning a studio rather than a studio owning the theaters. It also got a lot of weird exceptions because National Amusements was entirely private at the time. But the current issue is right now streaming services dwarf theaters today. The Paramount decree was officially suspended by this administration and its courts on this matter stating it isn't a monopolistic oversight for studios to own and entirely control their streaming services (despite doing the exact same things with "originals" and "exclusives" that led to the original Paramount decree). This administration and its courts not only said the current streaming situation is fine, but that it also means the original Paramount decree no longer applies and studios may own theater chains again, because theaters now compete with streaming. Skydance having both Paramount+ and HBO Max gives them a huge amount of leverage in the streaming space that is going to get stranger with this consolidation, and gets back to why that 200+ years of combined film history is important and relevant. |
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| ▲ | Uvix 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | California has chosen not to get involved - they threatened to then backed down. |
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| ▲ | thayne 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I'm not sure if it is legal or not, but it happens all the time, and nothing is done about it. IMHO, it shouldn't be allowed. |
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| ▲ | scottyah 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Do you think Deno was real competition for Cloudflare, and now that they've merged we don't have alternative options for goods/services that are mostly essential? I think if Cloudflare and Google merged, it still wouldn't be a monopoly because of AWS (and many others). |
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| ▲ | dml2135 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > but didn't Facebook get in some trouble for purchasing Instagram They got scrutiny over it, sure. But trouble? No, I would say that they did not get into trouble. |
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| ▲ | TSiege 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| In what sense did deno compete with cloudflare? It is a niche runtime and cloudflare is a cloud platform |
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| ▲ | tancop 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Workers against Deno Deploy? And even if you don't count Deno as a whole in the same market as Cloudflare it's still shady as hell. They had plans to buy out a company with the explicit intent to shut down their main product. You would expect them to integrate Deno with Workers, make a new official managed service that would probably become profitable in no time with Cloudflare's cost optimized infra, or at least commit to basic security fixes until the community finds new maintainers. What they pulled off instead is the most toxic form of acqui hire ever invented. | | |
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