https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/the-ftc-is-reportedly-leaning-towards-appealing-its-microsoft-activision-loss/
A judge ruled that the FTC failed to prove that the merger could harm competition…
I'm glad their appealing. I mean the judge's son literally works for Microsoft. Talk about fair and impartial.
-https://open.substack.com/pub/mattstoller/p/will-the-biggest-tech-merger-of-all?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web -https://open.substack.com/pub/mattstoller/p/judge-rules-for-microsoft-mergers?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Yet another example of a disturbing pattern in judges with conflicts of interest not recusing themselves.
Y’all don’t want to hear this but the appeal is going nowhere. Antitrust in the US requires consolidation to harm consumer choice, and with the agreements Microsoft has committed to that’s not provable. The EU has much stricter rules about this stuff than the US and even they cleared the acquisition. This has more to do with the administration’s tech-regulation initiative needing to show some proof-of-life than anything with a chance of actually preventing a merger. Feel free to downvote me to oblivion if it makes you feel better.
Yet this shit is still pushing through and they have to appeal. And we all know whats gonna happen. Whens the last time a monopoly got broken up or stopped? Like the 50's? Maybe. Like the last time we broke up a corporation their reach was like a fifth of what corporations reach is today. But our government still thought they were too powerful. So wtf changed? Oh right everybody dirty now.
Microsoft is nowhere close to a monopoly player in the gaming market (before or after this).
Please fucking do… Companies simply cannot continue to get free passes to do as they please, consolidating the market until no future competition is ever possible.