It's not "reducing competition", it's "___substantially___ reducing competition". The difference matters.

I have been thinking about this the other day, and I think buyouts and mergers should be illegal.

Did they use the Consumer Welfare Standard to block Visa's acquisition of Plaid? Seems like the main reasoning they used was because it was a strategic buy rather than a financially sound one. (and the finances of this deal pretty much mirror Plaids)

That's what they have used in the past, and are not bound to it. If you read any of Lina Khan's work, it's clear that they'll take a more holistic view of the impact of lack of competition.

Why did you elide the “substantially” clause?

Consumer welfare standard is not a law enacted by Congress its just something a lawyer named Robert Bork that was rejected from the Supreme Court popularized in the 70s. It was pre-internet and couldn’t comprehend platform firms like Amazon that price below cost for years to win a market and kill competition

Consumer welfare is stupid, but all these SAAS rent-seeking makes me feel like you could actually make a case.

Not at all close to the design tool—features like autolayout and performance are significantly better than anyone else on the market.

Both of those are pretty close to FigJam, Figma's. whiteboarding tool. It's a nice tool, but that's not why anyone uses Figma.

Not really, no. Miro is a giant whiteboard/brainstorming tool. Canva is a presentation tool, like Powerpoint. To say they can be used for design is saying that MS Paint or Photoshop can be used to design mockups... sure, but that's not really what they're made for, and it would be a painful experience (even Adobe learned that, eventually, and tried to copy Figma by making the separate Adobe XD tool)

You can try to coerce those other apps to make wireframes & mockups, but Figma is much better for both designers (the layout tools are phenomenal and CSS-like) and devs (the exports are good, there's CSS code to copy, a bunch of plugins, etc.).

I've had various product people try to make mockups in Miro because they didn't want to learn Figma, and it usually ends up being a bunch of screenshots clobbered together. That's a lot harder to work with than being able to click on a particular component in Figma and see its exact color, border radiuses, flexbox layouts, etc., and then to have entire widgets, dashboards, screens, and apps composed out of these components and built into a functional interactive prototype that stakeholders can review and comment on and devs can inspect for technical details. Figma is really really good at that.

If someone tried to send me one in Canva, well, I think I'd just quit right then and there lol. (Don't get me wrong, Canva is a great tool for presentations, but not for sharing designs)

Not... really. Sketch is what is most analogous.

The FTC blocks mergers all the time. Here’s some in the news:

https://khn.org/news/article/biden-ftc-block-hospital-merger...

https://www.airandspaceforces.com/ftc-blocks-merger-of-lockh...

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/nvidia-and-arm-merger-deal-b...

https://www.housingwire.com/articles/50114-ftc-moves-to-bloc...

https://www.legalbettingonline.com/news/daily-fantasy-sports...

Mostly the FTC’s work happens quietly and unnoticed, but there are annual reports here:

https://www.ftc.gov/policy/reports/annual-competition-report...

And you can search merger actions here:

https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/merger-review

Ya the last big case was Microsoft. Antitrust is being revived after being mostly dormant for 40 years but Congress has never changed the laws executives and the judiciary have just chosen not to enforce them

The rule of thumb is if there are still at least 3 competitors left in a market, it is not "substantially" lessening competition

There may be "plenty" of other competitors, but I think it's pretty undeniable that Figma is the "up-and-coming" (or maybe it already got there) market leader among "design tools for web design". I also think it's pretty apparent that Adobe knows this and that's why they want to buy them.

This is the exact same pattern as Facebook buying Instagram, and heck the same as some of Adobe's previous acquisitions, where large corporations buy out competitors that could potentially overtake them.

If antitrust means anything it should block these types of acquisitions.

The argument "but there are competitors" – that the very existence of other players in a market should preclude the blocking of acquisitions – is flawed and misleading.

For competition to strengthen a space, it needs to be meaningful competition. The goal for regulators should not be "more than one player in every category." It should be diverse product expression, improved customer utility, and most of all ZERO winner-take-all effects.

That last item (winner-take-all) is crucial to understand, and I'm sad that it is no longer a major part of economic discourse (as it once was when systems-thinking was more common). Winner-take-all effects often occur without an explicit monopoly, yet devastate the category and its adjacent categories.

For sure not triple digit legitimate competitors. To be legitimate competitor means some very mature software / service. I can think of Sketch and Adobe XD, maybe Balsamiq but not quite the same. What are these 100 extra well formed alternatives?