> even former antitrust officials acknowledge that their approval of Google’s purchase of YouTube and ITA Software and Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp look naive in hindsight
Just imagine what it would be like if YouTube were independent all this time (or those others). Either we really could maintain more independent presence on these different platforms better than we do now or Google and Facebook would have figured out how to out-compete and squash them and we'd see the same result as today (except "Google Video" instead of "YouTube" as a name etc).
This is about POWER. That should be the test. Does a merge give excessive POWER. The answer is YES far more often than the Chicago-school jerks want to believe.
Yes, I think the problem here is that in antitrust decisions citizens are being abstracted into consumers but there are lots of ways we are affected by these decisions which may not, or which may only indirectly relate to our consumption.
Just imagine what it would be like if YouTube were independent all this time (or those others). Either we really could maintain more independent presence on these different platforms better than we do now or Google and Facebook would have figured out how to out-compete and squash them and we'd see the same result as today (except "Google Video" instead of "YouTube" as a name etc).
This is about POWER. That should be the test. Does a merge give excessive POWER. The answer is YES far more often than the Chicago-school jerks want to believe.