There's a neighboring comment that used almost the exact same wording that I already replied to.
In short: No.
> What if Google wanted to hire me and 3 buddies from our startup but didn’t want to hire the secretary or more realistically they only needed the backend developers. But didn’t care about hiring the web developer?
Is your startup like 10 people? Worth much less than a billion dollars? Then it's not big enough to be a problem.
But if it's the entire team, and that team is the backbone of a company, and acquiring that company would be blocked by the government, all three of those things, then your income is already being suppressed by not allowing acquisitions. Sorry about that, but the extra boost you'd get during monopoly forming would only be temporary anyway. In the long term it's better for both employees and customers to avoid too much consolidation. Extending that rule to stop team buyouts will have almost no effect on the status quo. It's allowing the team buyouts that could potentially change the status quo, and it would be a change for the worse.
So exactly how does a Google “monopoly” (which definitely doesn’t exist in AI if anywhere), harm customers? And would I as a potential employee better off or worse off?
Am I paying more for search today because of the monopoly? Am I paying more for any of the free stuff that Google has because of advertising (that I block anyway)?
In other words, you do want the government to force employees to stay at a company when they could get a better offer?
Isn’t that what we wanted to prevent with outlawing non competes?
I'm not going to try to give you the exact line.
> In other words, you do want the government to force employees to stay at a company when they could get a better offer?
> Isn’t that what we wanted to prevent with outlawing non competes?
That's way too general. You could use that same argument to say acquisitions should never be blocked.
You don’t see what kind of Kafkaesque mess these proposed laws are creating?
Who are we benefiting again?
And these rules would very rarely come into effect.
I'm not here to defend the entire edifice of the FTC having control over acquisitions. I'm here to say that when they have that control, it should also include almost-but-not-quite-acquisitions.
You specifically said that in some cases if a company hired employees it should then be prevented from licensing the technology
And still haven’t given a good reason why it shouldn’t.
The “bad” acquisition is usually considered Instagram . But who cares if a toxic social media site acquires another one? Who was harmed?
You keep making examples that are less clear-cut, but whatever I agree there are things a company can do that aren't effectively acquisitions. I'm not saying how to write the rule, I'm just saying google is on the wrong side.
> You are specifically saying that a company shouldn’t be allowed to license IP, shouldn’t be allowed to acquire the company and shouldn’t be allowed to hire the employees or some combination.
They're totally allowed to acquire the company... as long as the FTC doesn't say no. And they can do lots of those other things too.
I don't know how you got the impression that I think acquisitions should be blocked more than a fraction of a percent of the time.
Even further, google SHOULD have acquired the company instead of doing what they did.
Google had no fiduciary duty to do what’s in the best interest of WindSurf’s investors.
Google had every right to give the WindSurf employees offers to leave. The employees had every right to accept the offers. There is no world where the government should have been involved in that part.
At that point, the Windsurf equity owners had two choices - either not license or license.
Which part should have been illegal? The FTC could have said “Google you can’t both get the employees and license the IP”. Google would have said “fine, we will just hire the talent and have them create something similar”. Windsurf would have been worse off.
Alternatively, Google could license the technology. Then the employees could say I would rather just work for Google. Would you then be okay with enforcing non competes even though they are currently illegal in California?
There is no law that you can come up with that doesn’t make it worse for both the employees and Windsurf.
We actually saw something like that happen between Microsoft and OpenAI during the Altman fiasco. Microsoft had already licensed the technology and Altman was going to go to Microsoft and take OpenAI’s best people with him. Should the government have stepped in then and told Microsoft they can’t hire OpenAI employees?
Ridiculous. They intervene so rarely, even at the peak.
> Which part should have been illegal?
Not my problem to solve. Ever heard of "structuring" though? It's not unsolvable.
> There is no law that you can come up with that doesn’t make it worse for both the employees and Windsurf.
If doing an actual acquisition would have been allowed, that would have been better for them.
If it wouldn't have been allowed, then yes the hypothetical law is worse for them but it's an acceptable loss. Sorry you can't use a workaround to get the benefit of an illegal deal.
1. Google to hire the employees and force the employees to stay at the company and how?
2. Google to be able to hire the employees and then Windsurf not be allowed to license their IP to a company who is willing to give them a bunch of money?
The reason that this shit show happened in the first place is because overzealous lawmakers and regulators put policies in place without thinking through the consequences.
What exact policies and guidelines should they put in place?
Or in Figma/Adobe’s case. What if Adobe just said, Forget it, we will pay all of the developers we want a shit ton of money (less than $20 billion) to rebuild the entire application from scratch and leave the auxiliary staff behind. Would you also outlaw that?
In the current political environment, the best way to get FTC to approve a merger is to bribe the President (see Paramount). The way to make sure it doesn’t get approved is to do something the President doesn’t like. Do you really want to give this government mire power?
Perhaps telling Google they can do one or the other but not both. Or not both unless they want to treat it like an acquisition.
Again I'm taking it as a given that it's fine to restrict company actions. If you dislike that entire concept then take it up with the people that put FTC in charge of acquisitions, not me. Not every willing transaction should be legal.
> The reason that this shit show happened in the first place is because overzealous lawmakers and regulators put policies in place without thinking through the consequences.
Only if they allow this to succeed. If they slap it down then no company will attempt it again. They'll just file for acquisition.
> What exact policies and guidelines should they put in place?
I refuse. You're asking an unreasonable amount of detail from me.
> Figma/Adobe’s case
If they want to make individual job offers and not try to negotiate group things or talk to figma at all then they can go ahead and try.
I'd be surprised if they didn't already do that.
> In the current political environment, the best way to get FTC to approve a merger is to bribe the President (see Paramount). The way to make sure it doesn’t get approved is to do something the President doesn’t like. Do you really want to give this government mire power?
Even with the risk of corruption I prefer regulating acquisitions to allowing everything.
Who exactly does that benefit? Not the employees. Maybe the investors? Do you really want the government to restrict who can be hired from a company or better yet, whether employees can accept better offers from another company? That’s only the other side of the coin of restricting employee movement based on non competes.