The way to look at the 1996 boondoggle is ask ourselves if FCC could have ever been expected to provide even a token enforcement of its terms. The answer is of course not, because FCC was created to protect Bell Telephone and that's most of what it has ever done. Given that, of course all the investments in competing telcos would fail and be gobbled by the incumbents, enriching execs and bankers in the process. Given that, what we've seen was only ever exactly what was planned. The 1996 Act has allowed Bell to shed money-losing rural exchanges, do away entirely with common carriage, pay for wireless infrastructure with money stolen from wireline investors, rearrange assets in ways that would have violated previous consent decrees, pretend that we ever tried competition in telecom, and burrow in even more tightly to its vampire-bite on the neck of USA residents. That was a pretty good con, that Bell execs ran on us, with the assistance of the corrupt in government and the credulous in media.
> By definition, non-horizontal mergers involve firms that do not operate in the same market. It necessarily follows that such mergers produce no immediate change in the level of concentration in any relevant market as defined in Section 2 of these Guidelines.
The Merger Enforcement Division's assumption may have been true in 1997 but it's difficult to argue that simply because Google and Amazon don't operate in the "same market" as their primary businesses that their combination would "produce no immediate change in the level of concentration" of the market for both online advertising and computing services. Yet, under these guidelines, if a Google + Amazon merger were proposed it wouldn't present any immediate issue for the Antitrust Division to oppose it.
[1]https://www.justice.gov/atr/non-horizontal-merger-guidelines
