The problem with this is a lot of acquisitions that become massive look like toys originally. At the time of acquisition, Instagram was a joke, people (includi

The problem with this is a lot of acquisitions that become massive look like toys originally. At the time of acquisition, Instagram was a joke, people (including myself) thought FB overpaid. There are some great comments in this NYT article (https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/04/09/facebook-buys-instagram-for-1-billion/ https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/04/09/facebook-buys-instag...) and the original Hackernews post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817840). You can see this playing out now in comments about autonomous vehicles, AR/VR and blockchain. No regulators would have blocked Facebook's Oculus acquisition because virtual reality was basically a non-existent market at the time. If in 10 years we're all wearing Facebook owned AR devices someone else will make the same claim "they have too much power we should have never let them make hardware", but there is an equal chance that we're not and no one cares. You could advocate that big tech should not make acquisitions, and also attempt to regulate internal R&D and product development, but I think then you're making the case that these companies need to be maintenance mode zombie utilities that can't adapt. Its easy to block an acquisition that has immediate anti-trust issues, and hard to block an acquisition that might have issues after 5-10 years of company funded R&D...