> "Number of acquisitions" seems like a weird metric, without accounting for their significance (in purchase price, impact on the business, or any other real-wo

> "Number of acquisitions" seems like a weird metric, without accounting for their significance (in purchase price, impact on the business, or any other real-world metric). This comment sounds like the nirvana fallacy striking again. There is no perfect metric for measuring something like overall market dominance. Thanks to a series of supreme court rulings, the traditional approach has been to look at consumer harms. But that metric alone fails to account for the way modern large conglomerates make money: not by gouging the consumer, but by dominating entire industries. So how else can you look at it? Acquisition are just another lens. Is it an imperfect lens? Yes, of course. I challenge you to find an analysis that isn't. But is it still meaningful? Yes, I absolutely think so! It is undeniably the case that these tech giants have used acquisitions as a way to protect their market position. So it absolutely makes sense to analyze their behaviour from that perspective. Furthermore, this is a news article not a whitepaper. Yes, there is an enormous amount of nuance in this kind of argument, and if you were prosecuting these guys for antitrust violations in a court of law, you'd probably do a deeper dive. > facebook buying Instagram was probably more significant than all the other acquisitions combined. How do you know that? There's simply no way to know how some of these companies would've fared because these anti-competitive practices have ensured that promising startups are smothered before they become a threat.