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I think a majority of mergers 'just happen' because they are not challenged. To stop a merger, some regulating body needs to hear about it and take action in ti

I think a majority of mergers 'just happen' because they are not challenged. To stop a merger, some regulating body needs to hear about it and take action in time. They can also investigate and dismantle monopolies after the fact, but then we see long legal battles. Also size-based limits would be hard to create/enforce. IBM has about 350K employees wordwide. McDonalds has about 200K. Google has about 100K. Amazon 1.1M. Do you look at market cap? The industry specifically? It's a complex problem, that's why there is no simple solution.

Kalium 6y ago
A lot of large mergers and acquisitons were, in fact, reviewed and approved by bodies that exist to do precisely that. Facebook's acquisition of Instagram was reviewed. I expect their acquisition of Whatsapp was as well.
- MakersF 6y ago
  Of course it was reviewed, it's when they provided misleading information on the usage of data, and later got fined for it. "Mergers: Commission fines Facebook €110 million for providing misleading information about WhatsApp takeover" https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_17_1369 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_17_...