They did block the AT&T/T-Mobile merger over a decade ago. They just opted not to attempt to block the T-Mobile/Sprint merger. Much of it depends on the administration at the time.
Depends on how much money the company has contributed to the politicians in power.
FWIW - at the time of that proposal, AT&T was the largest cell phone company and T-Mobile was the smallest of the large companies (behind Sprint), and was struggling. The AT&T merger was a means for Deutsche Telekom to unwind their investment in T-Mobile.
It isn't, but there really isn't a need for them to step in and block the deal? Is it their role to ultimately force one into bankruptcy? That is kinda what they did by blocking the deal. There were similar concern about XM Satellite Radio and Sirius. Neither was profitable on their own and they almost filed for bankruptcy after the merger. But the merger probably saved both companies. At least for a period of time. IMO there isn't a need for the government to intervene at all. The marketplace will work things out.
Or how much their competition contributed...
Low hanging fruit, after Khan had MSFT et.al. steamroller over them!
Ask the bailout banks and Detroit. Besides there is a egregious ideological concept running amouk disguised as consumer protection and anti trust, therein is the issue.
I think there are some legitimate reasons to block mergers as apex predators do indeed swallow whole minnows leaving consumers with reduced competitors and then they kill them off, but the government is unable to stop that from happening.
I'd argue that because we didn't live during the 1880s and the "golden age" of monopolies, we don't really viscerally know that the market in fact won't work it out - but history kind of implies that. The question to me is - you will always have companies wanting to create a monopoly - or get as close as they are allowed / can. This is at least partially because during the "trying to become a monopoly" economies of scale are a competitive advantage.
As for IE/MS, the market would have corrected itself. It seems to have gone that route now. There are more browser options today than any other time in history. Each OS still ships their system with their own browser but there is nothing stopping you from using something else. Just as there was nothing stopping you from using a different browser back then. The most popular browser today (Chrome) doesn't come preinstalled on very few devices. The main use for MS Edge is to download Chrome.
I would argue that there is a HUGE difference between the marketplace of today and the marketplace almost 150 years ago.
I guess you see the market very differently than I did back then - there were very many sites that you were to one extent or another required to use (either by job, government, bank or others) that only would work with IE - through like 2012 or so - it lingered on IE6 for over a decade longer than it ever should have. If your chosen web browser couldn't load a site you needed to load - then it didn't matter that you *could* choose a different browser. It's still like this now - I can use Linux primarily, but I can't run TurboTax or Adobe products or many games or Autodesk products. Sure - anyone technically could choose Linux, but for a lot of jobs or even submitting the taxes or various government forms you also must have a Windows computer.
Not really, just that Google is now the monopoly. Google is singlehandedly trying to use the chrome market share to disable ad blocking for instance. They're actually proposing worse than that with various OS attestations and such where again if you don't use the "monopoly" version you'll be blocked out of many commercial, government, bank, etc websites. I hope it fails, but they seem to have won on the adblock side.
There really aren't. There's Safari, only on Apple, which often doesn't work on a site. There's Firefox, which also weirdly fails on some sites. The reason is people only test on Chrome. Outside of those, all the known browsers are based on either Chrome or Firefox - Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, are actually Chrome engine and beholden to how google builds it. Waterfox, Palemoon etc are based on Firefox or a fork from Firefox from long ago and are even less likely to work on random sites that only test for Chrome. When Chrome has around 90% market share, that's what's built for, and it's no different from back when IE6 was 90% market share - the only improvement is that the rendering engine is open source for Chrome so people can make different UIs for you. But no one is forking chromium to keep features like manifest v2 and therefore ad blocking.
Which itself is ironic because modern MS Edge is Chrome with a different theme.
They tried to merge, but then JetBlue stepped in with a better offer. I think they are currently talking merger again, but things aren't going well and probably won't happen with this news.
