Because if there is harm the companies pay so little it's just written off as cost of doing business. Yet the harms too often continue.

Companies with more resources than small countries are often too big to regulate because they capture the regulators and/or the judiciary.

Prevention is cheaper than treatment, especially when treatments have proven so ineffective.

> Companies with more resources than small countries are often too big to regulate because they capture the regulators and/or the judiciary.

Regulatory capture is entirely the fault of the regulator. They don't have to be captured. They choose to be. A government body, funded by taxes, that decides to be captured, is a complete disgrace. People work hard to pay taxes, and they shouldn't be spent on employing people who choose to align with those they should be regulating.

> Prevention is cheaper than treatment, especially when treatments have proven so ineffective.

The same state that has the power to prevent has the power to treat. It chooses not to. Switching approach won't help. Getting regulators to do their jobs will.

I wish it were that simple. Sadly a large portion of US voters seem to think a revolving door with "industry experts" (i.e. insiders) is desirable. And that courts should defer to business interests above all else.

‘Running the government like a business’ is and was the biggest crock of shit ever sold.

Anyone who has worked at large corporate bureaucracies knows they are just as slow and rule bound as government departments and in many ways worse. At least there are some well motivated people in government.

Government is us. The people. We’ve delegated it to an elite class that gets more and more cut off from the common politik as time goes by.

I see no easy solution . Power does not willingly give up power.

I don't think any solution here we've mentioned is simple. I don't think you should be characterising only the ones I'm mentioning as being not simple.

> What about this: allow the merger, and if the harm is done, the company must pay, but if the harm is not done, the state must pay?

The FTC identified not having CoD on multiple platforms as a large issue. What payment is justified if Microsoft doesn't allow CoD on multiple platforms?

It's easy to say "if harm is done, the company must pay" but look how long we've know leaded gasoline was harmful, look how long we've know abestoes was harmful, look how long we've know pfas was harmful, look how long we've know cigarettes are harmful. And then look how long it took for any company to pay after fighting tooth and nail saying it wasn't harmful despite their _own_ internal research saying the contrary.

Sure, CoD is not in the same scope as leaded gasoline. The point still remains, a harm has been identified and I don't think they should be allowed to merge so long as the punishment for that harm occurring isn't pre-determined.

>The FTC identified not having CoD on multiple platforms as a large issue.

What perspective has been applied to this?

toy soldiers gotta be trained

The state blocking freely agreed transactions because it would allow someone to create something larger and more coercive than the state seems like a good minimum.

We don't have to debate past and future hypotheticals - that's an invention of the "consumer welfare" theory of antitrust. The one that said it's entirely fine for, say, Apple to have a monopoly on iOS software as long as they have a prosocial justification for it. Apple's specific argument is that their monopoly protects from malware... or, in other words, they're big enough that they can make and enforce their own laws.

A better and simpler rule is this: being big is illegal, period. That's how antitrust used to work. If a business deal would give you the capability of becoming your own sovereign state, you don't get to execute that deal. If you knock out all your competition, we break you up into competing companies.

This is the sort of thing that triggers free market types, I know. My argument is specifically that large businesses get to write their own rules, and the only way to prevent them from doing that is to make them small enough that they cannot execute political power equivalent to that of a monarch. Right now, we live in this comedic parody of free market liberalism where the business owners have centralized power to themselves, turning themselves into de-facto states, and gotten the de-jure state drunk on surveillance tech to avoid scrutiny.