Microsoft wins FTC fight to buy Activision Blizzard

narwhal@lemmy.ml to Gaming@lemmy.ml – 292 points –
Microsoft wins FTC fight to buy Activision Blizzard
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Thank the GOP for basically ridding the US of antitrust law, which is now basically no longer a thing.

contemporary democrats are not any better, they make hella frequent concessions to anti-competitive business practices under the guise of licensing or stimulus

This is why US democrats are considered center-right compared to the rest of the world.

What makes the rest of the world any better than US by using them as a metric.

The fact their Overton windows aren't so skewed that a center right party is considered "the left"?

US politics is a few hundred years old whereas European and other's are thousands of years old? The rest of the world's political perspective has a bit more precedent than ours.

Far from perfect? Yes. Bad? Very often. Not any better than Republicans when it comes to corporate interests? Absolutely not.

The guys who claim capitalism works because a free market will create better things through competition. Guess they weren't so much for the competition stuff and just became puppets for corporations. We also have it completely legal to openly bribe politicians which makes zero fucking sense, except we call it lobbying so it somehow becomes okay.

Only thing worse than free market capitalism is state sponsored. Decades of the fed flooding the big banks with capital to loan, taxes taken from everyone but the largest corps, and regulatory capture (see copy right for this topic), and we get corporations that demand difficult anti trust actions just to slow down.

That's not a black and white system, it's not one or the other. Every system will have aspects of both in them.

Thats not true there are systems that are non-market, non-capitalist, and non-statist.

Only pure liberals think leaving the free market by itself with minimal regulation is a good thing. Capital attracts capital and becomes basically a snowball.

But is the solution a market controlled by a centralized entity? You just pointed out politicians can also be corrupted. So... Giving more power to an entity that can be corrupted is the solution?

The problem is corruption. Any system you can propose can be fucked up by corruption. The justice system, politicians and government can be corrupted under any system because they are human.

If I'm wrong, just propose any system and I'll tell you how it crumbles because of corruption.

Ideally that's where democracy is supposed to kick in, to stomp out corruption when it occurs. Obviously that's not what's happening and we don't have a democracy anyways. Especially with bribing being completely legal.

I think they're still there, just haven't been trotted out in recent history. And mergers keep getting approved.

The last merger that got blocked was almost 50 years ago, I believe. So yeah...it's probably dead.

Which was that? Also, DraftKings and FanDuel got rejected about 10 years ago

I want to say it was in the telecoms industry. But I completely forgot about that merger you mentioned. Thanks for reminding me.