That said, for mergers like that a ton of countries are involved which makes things even more complicated and makes it harder to point out where we need to make things smoother.
The number of such mergers, globally every year, is countable on two hands. They involve the wealth of nations (this one’s similar to Malta’s GDP [1][2]).
It would be unreasonable to permanently staff the regulatory force that would be required to quickly review such deals in any industry.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
[2] https://news.adobe.com/news/news-details/2022/Adobe-to-Acqui...
Do they though? People often compare rich people or companies to a country GDP's, but GDP is based on a single year. The size of a company's bank account is not. A year is pretty arbitrary. In some sense it's like saying the distance between New York and Washington is 200 miles which is not that long, because a Ferrari's top speed is 200 mph.
It’s saying the distance is within a class negotiable by a Ferrari.
In the GDP to value case, we’re saying that the consideration at hand is comparable to all of the work of a small country for a year. So the care the latter gets is in the same class as the care the former should receive.
Why would you want to be hiring and firing constantly?
There are permanent staff. There are also legions of industry experts contracted on a case by case basis. Full staff on standby would mean having, on retainer, experts in every industry where a merger might happen.
These are complicated negotiations, in many complicated jurisdictions.
How quick do you think they should be? For everyone to understand the potential ramifications and consult appropriate industry experts? Let competitors et al file briefs?
I didn't truly process the damage that monopolies can do until I heard this podcast with Sean Carroll and Cory Doctorow.
There is a full transcript at this link if you prefer to read the conversation.
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/10/21/69-c...
For historical references, anti-trust filings began against Standard Oil in 1906, and it was broken up in 1911. [0]
The AT&T breakup took four years, from 1978 to 1982. [1]
The DOJ and other bodies voiced opposition early on. They signaled quickly that they were not in favor of this. The interim between those actions and today were the regulatory bodies actively making cases against it and/or negotiating with Adobe & Figma how they could proceed in a way that the regulatory bodies would want to approve of the deal.
The whole idea that this was "half-assed" in some way is misguided.
Note that I worked for Red Hat while IBM was acquiring it. It took from (IIRC) October 2018 to July 2019 without strong opposition. When you're talking about companies that have that much impact on a market, it takes a while.
And it should -- the larger market doesn't benefit from waking up to find out that a major software supplier has been gobbled up overnight. You can see the pain that VMware employees + customers are going through right now and they've had a lot of time to process the idea.
Just don't disagree with them and engage lawyers AND then complain about how long "the process" is taking.
I never understand why this is the only other option. If you're in a town and open a coffee shop, and someone else opens a coffee shop, if the town is big enough, you can both thrive. You don't have to try to take out the competition. But every big corporation decides it's the only option.
