Đã đến lúc sửa Luật Cạnh tranh?

cần cập nhật chống độc quyền ko phải là ngăn đối thủ mua đối thủ,

mà là ngăn công ty độc quyền mua công ty non trẻ trong ngành nó định gia nhập, như khi nhìn lại rõ ra với trường hợp Google mua lại DoubleClick năm 2007, Facebook mua lại Instagram năm 2012...

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A Pyrrhic Victory for Meta Over the FTC?

by Matt Stoller,

...why does this ruling help anti-monopolists? The answer is that it opens up an entire area of law that hasn’t been used for four decades. Most antitrust cases these days are plain vanilla, a ‘rival wants to buy a rival in a market for widgets and raise prices’ type complaint. While no case is easy to litigate, those kinds of cases, like AT&T/T-Mobile or Office Depot/Staples, have recognizable theories of harm. Confining oneself to orthodox cases, however, means that all sorts of mergers go unchallenged, which is something I noted in the Conglomerate Problem. Big tech roll-ups are often not straightforward rivals buying rivals, but involve nascent markets and conglomerate or other relationships between the acquiring and acquired firms.



With Meta-Within, the FTC colored far outside of the lines and used an aggressive reading of antitrust law. The FTC didn’t argue Meta was buying a direct rival, it argued that Meta is a dominant firm buying a potential rival in an adjacent space it might otherwise enter. Meta has a monopoly over virtual reality headsets and virtual reality app distribution, while Within sold the leading fitness app for Meta’s systems. Meta could have chosen to challenge Within by building its own fitness app, argued enforcers. Instead, it sought to buy the firm. Moreover, ‘the Metaverse’ is a nascent market, so the FTC had an aggressive theory on market definition.

The strategic rationale for the case was to establish that dominant firms cannot monopolize new markets, the way that Google did when it bought DoubleClick in 2007, or Facebook did when it bought Instagram in 2012. We have no idea if the Metaverse will turn out to be as important as Mark Zuckerberg thinks it might be (or least thought it might be before his attention moved on to AI). But ensuring that a dominant firm monopolizing an adjacent space can be an antitrust violation is critical to address technological inflection points, like the one we’re seeing with Adobe-Figma or Microsoft-Activision. And the FTC, if the reporting from the Washington Post is correct, achieved that.

Tags: finance

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