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FTC just blocked FB from buying a VR app. Will be interesting to see if this gets through. Very little roomba to maneuver in this regulatory environment. I'll s

FTC just blocked FB from buying a VR app. Will be interesting to see if this gets through. Very little roomba to maneuver in this regulatory environment. I'll see myself out.

mrkramer 4y ago
- morelisp 4y ago
  Why is she wrong?
  - mrkramer 4y ago
    Because she thinks she can predict the future in a way that she believes she knows what is the best for the market in the long term.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      That sounds like a criticism of economists, not lawyers.
      - mrkramer 4y ago
        If you are a neoliberal economist that's not bad criticism because less government intervention the better for the market.
    - morelisp 4y ago
      To be clear, this is an incredibly non-specific (neither her nor the merger in question) criticism, so you are proposing that no merger should ever be blocked for any reason?
      - mrkramer 4y ago
        Scrutinize big mergers don't block smaller acquisitions because you think you know that sometime in the future the smaller company will become big healthy competitor.
        ceejayoz 4y ago
        That's not what they think they know. They think they know Facebook has the financial resources to buy out anyone with even a slight chance of becoming a competitor, and are leveraging that in an anti-competitive fashion.
        mrkramer 4y ago
        >They think they know Facebook has the financial resources to buy out anyone with even a slight chance of becoming a competitor, and are leveraging that in an anti-competitive fashion. Ofc they know it; Facebook/Meta is a public company with a huge cash pile and the pressure from investors to spend that cash is only increasing. They already spend billions for R&D just like their tech peers and the best way to spend the rest of the cash is apparently acquisitions.
    - AlexandrB 4y ago
      That's what VCs do every day by picking winners and losers. Companies like Uber would not have made it (and still might not make it) without massive cash injections. In practice, how is VCs choosing winners different than the FTC doing so?
      - mrkramer 4y ago
        VCs are private companies which invest and manage private money and they are not regulating anything. FTC is a government entity which is required by law to regulate markets. That is my layman understanding. And there are hundreds of VCs so if one VC does not believe in your mission and vision find another one but there is only one FTC.
  - nindalf 4y ago
    I'm not the other person, but in my view it's impossible to evaluate the full impact of an acquisition. What you need to do is envision futures where the acquisition does and doesn't take place. And then you have to be satisfied that in both futures, the market and customers suffer no injury. And then you have to justify that decision 10 years later to people who have the benefit of hindsight. It's in vogue to criticise the FTC approval of the Instagram merger, for instance. The critics almost take it for granted that Instagram was going to grow by 100x over the next decade no matter what Facebook did. And that the FTC should have known this very obvious fact and blocked the merger. And then this criticism-with-hindsight is used to criticise all past and future tech acquisitions.
  - pavlov 4y ago
    Blocking the Meta Within acquisition is a worrying precedent because the app in question has a miniscule user base. VR just isn't that popular. I'm guessing they probably have 100k paying users, at most. How can ownership of a product with 100,000 users (globally!) in a country of 330 million people become an antitrust question? FTC leadership's theory seems to be that VR could eventually become a giant market, and if it does, Meta might one day have a position that raises antitrust concerns. But all this is clearly many years, even decades away. By the same logic, they can block any forward-looking small acquisition by any large technology company. And that ought to be a problem for the HN crowd because getting acquired by big tech is one of the primary exits available to interesting startups.
    - morelisp 4y ago
      > getting acquired by big tech is one of the primary exits available to interesting startups. Right, but the claim wasn't that it was bad for the capitalist class, and neither is protecting their personal interests the office's remit. Letting trusts happen is always good for someone, that's not a reason to allow them.
      - pavlov 4y ago
        The startup ecosystem is one of USA's greatest economical strengths. Pragmatically, it's just completely puzzling to me what FTC intends to achieve here. Do they want less startups and less speculative R&D investment in America? Because it seems like a bad idea for FTC to create these new arbitrary rules that will chill investment in startups, and the only purpose is to punish a corporation whose founder has been spending $10 billion annually on R&D in VR with no profits in sight. Why not let Zuck spend on VR? Most of that money actually flows back into the US economy. Meta becoming a boring dividend-paying corporation would be enriching the capitalist class far worse.
        AlexandrB 4y ago
        Startups that exit into an acquisition by FAANG generally end up abandoning their products and hurting their customers. As someone who has been burned by this, I'd like to see this exit strategy become less common.
- rafram 4y ago
  That seems like a pretty arbitrary benchmark. (And I feel like you haven’t met too many econ grads if you think an econ degree is an instant ticket to knowing what you’re doing.)
snarf21 4y ago
We can only hope. The FTC and SEC have been largely absent in the 21st century. We need the CPC to start taking priority over stock price and the market.
__derek__ 4y ago
> FTC just blocked FB from buying a VR app. No, the FTC filed a lawsuit to attempt to stop the deal, despite the fact that FTC staff recommended against it.[1] The suit is a political sideshow. [1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-29/ftc-s-khan-overruled-staff-to-sue-meta-over-virtual-reality-deal https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-29/ftc-s-kha...

FTC just blocked FB from buying a VR app. Will be interesting to see if this gets through. Very little roomba to maneuver in this regulatory environment. I'll see myself out.

mrkramer 4y ago

morelisp 4y ago
Why is she wrong?
- mrkramer 4y ago
  Because she thinks she can predict the future in a way that she believes she knows what is the best for the market in the long term.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    That sounds like a criticism of economists, not lawyers.
    - mrkramer 4y ago
      If you are a neoliberal economist that's not bad criticism because less government intervention the better for the market.
  - morelisp 4y ago
    To be clear, this is an incredibly non-specific (neither her nor the merger in question) criticism, so you are proposing that no merger should ever be blocked for any reason?
    - mrkramer 4y ago
      Scrutinize big mergers don't block smaller acquisitions because you think you know that sometime in the future the smaller company will become big healthy competitor.
      - ceejayoz 4y ago
        That's not what they think they know. They think they know Facebook has the financial resources to buy out anyone with even a slight chance of becoming a competitor, and are leveraging that in an anti-competitive fashion.
        mrkramer 4y ago
        >They think they know Facebook has the financial resources to buy out anyone with even a slight chance of becoming a competitor, and are leveraging that in an anti-competitive fashion. Ofc they know it; Facebook/Meta is a public company with a huge cash pile and the pressure from investors to spend that cash is only increasing. They already spend billions for R&D just like their tech peers and the best way to spend the rest of the cash is apparently acquisitions.
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    That's what VCs do every day by picking winners and losers. Companies like Uber would not have made it (and still might not make it) without massive cash injections. In practice, how is VCs choosing winners different than the FTC doing so?
    - mrkramer 4y ago
      VCs are private companies which invest and manage private money and they are not regulating anything. FTC is a government entity which is required by law to regulate markets. That is my layman understanding. And there are hundreds of VCs so if one VC does not believe in your mission and vision find another one but there is only one FTC.
- nindalf 4y ago
  I'm not the other person, but in my view it's impossible to evaluate the full impact of an acquisition. What you need to do is envision futures where the acquisition does and doesn't take place. And then you have to be satisfied that in both futures, the market and customers suffer no injury. And then you have to justify that decision 10 years later to people who have the benefit of hindsight. It's in vogue to criticise the FTC approval of the Instagram merger, for instance. The critics almost take it for granted that Instagram was going to grow by 100x over the next decade no matter what Facebook did. And that the FTC should have known this very obvious fact and blocked the merger. And then this criticism-with-hindsight is used to criticise all past and future tech acquisitions.
- pavlov 4y ago
  Blocking the Meta Within acquisition is a worrying precedent because the app in question has a miniscule user base. VR just isn't that popular. I'm guessing they probably have 100k paying users, at most. How can ownership of a product with 100,000 users (globally!) in a country of 330 million people become an antitrust question? FTC leadership's theory seems to be that VR could eventually become a giant market, and if it does, Meta might one day have a position that raises antitrust concerns. But all this is clearly many years, even decades away. By the same logic, they can block any forward-looking small acquisition by any large technology company. And that ought to be a problem for the HN crowd because getting acquired by big tech is one of the primary exits available to interesting startups.
  - morelisp 4y ago
    > getting acquired by big tech is one of the primary exits available to interesting startups. Right, but the claim wasn't that it was bad for the capitalist class, and neither is protecting their personal interests the office's remit. Letting trusts happen is always good for someone, that's not a reason to allow them.
    - pavlov 4y ago
      The startup ecosystem is one of USA's greatest economical strengths. Pragmatically, it's just completely puzzling to me what FTC intends to achieve here. Do they want less startups and less speculative R&D investment in America? Because it seems like a bad idea for FTC to create these new arbitrary rules that will chill investment in startups, and the only purpose is to punish a corporation whose founder has been spending $10 billion annually on R&D in VR with no profits in sight. Why not let Zuck spend on VR? Most of that money actually flows back into the US economy. Meta becoming a boring dividend-paying corporation would be enriching the capitalist class far worse.
      - AlexandrB 4y ago
        Startups that exit into an acquisition by FAANG generally end up abandoning their products and hurting their customers. As someone who has been burned by this, I'd like to see this exit strategy become less common.
rafram 4y ago
That seems like a pretty arbitrary benchmark. (And I feel like you haven’t met too many econ grads if you think an econ degree is an instant ticket to knowing what you’re doing.)

snarf21 4y ago

We can only hope. The FTC and SEC have been largely absent in the 21st century. We need the CPC to start taking priority over stock price and the market.

__derek__ 4y ago

> FTC just blocked FB from buying a VR app. No, the FTC filed a lawsuit to attempt to stop the deal, despite the fact that FTC staff recommended against it.[1] The suit is a political sideshow. [1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-29/ftc-s-khan-overruled-staff-to-sue-meta-over-virtual-reality-deal https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-29/ftc-s-kha...