How is market competition or the public served by companies whose only strategy is to fail and be bought by the ever shrinking number of ultra rich mega corporations?
T-Mobile was cleared to buy Sprint because Sprint was not able to be a going concern. The end result is the same, with 3 national cell carriers.
One outcome is Spirit goes into bankruptcy reorganization and still operates, which is hardly unprecedented for an American airline. Nearly every major airline has filed for Chapter 11 since 2002, the lone exception being Southwest.
It’s always interesting that Chapter 11 is a way out of pension promises. That someone can take employment at a certain wage, and then the company can renege on the back half of the compensation once the person retires.
Philip Greenspun has a good writeup about why that is: https://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines
this seems like the important part of that doctrine, and a perfect justification for why an amazon acquisition shouldn't be allowed.
letting a company fail really just means letting it sink far enough that some other acquirer will pick it up.
If yes, it sounds rough!
> On 19th October 2023, Convoy ceased operations and laid off remaining staff. Remaining staff were given no severance and were told their stock options were worthless.[9] In a memo sent that day to employees, Lewis points to "a massive freight recession and a contraction in the capital markets" as major factors resulting in the company's failure.[10]
"We have no idea who owns this IP in order to ask for permission, because the company went bankrupt" comes up fairly often in discussions about copyright duration and video games.
A lot of the time - especially with failing companies where the sale might happen at rock bottom prices, but otherwise too - the acquirer and seller may have very different ideas about which part of the transaction matters.
E.g. one company I co-founded sold off a business unit after we pivoted, and where to me at least the technology was the most worthwhile part - far better than the platform the buyer had. But to them the 6% of the userbase they were able to convert to paying users of their own service was what justified the sale price. And as much as I think the tech we sold them with the userbase was better, I get that to them - even if they agreed with my assessment, and maybe they didn't - it wasn't sufficiently better to them to justify replacing what they had and knew how to develop and knew how to operate (we sold the system, not the company, so none of our staff went with them).
Acquired IP gets used when it is the focus of the purchase, and the acquirer knows exactly what they want or need that IP for, but even then more so if it's e.g. patents rather than software. A lot of software acquirers thought they needed still end up languishing and eventually dying.
But I've seen so much IP "fade into oblivion" over the years. I'd say, I don't even know who currently owns the rights to the majority of the software I've personally developed in my career. Some would be easy to track down. Others near impossible.
IMO, probably never. I think this would open too many shenanigans of running a possible acquisition into the ground or attempt to lobby whatever government agency would regulate this.
At some point, to make rules easy to enforce, you have to absorb some collateral damage.