"Trust Busting" bill would ban companies worth $100 billion from buying/merging other companies

If there is disagreement by the courts, congress will just have to make a constitutional amendment to stop monopoly corporations. The forefathers never could have expected these types of businesses to exist they way they do today. They were worried about monopolies but never really dealt with it fully.

 

My apologies, I misread your post.

 

There are a great many things the forefathers never could have expected, such as 300 million people in this country or that party would come before country for our elected officials.

 

Twitter is worth about half of what the cap in this bill is

Don't forget about the millions and billions they dump into political campaigns.

 

I think you mean a $100 Billion in your first line. These guys will just buy the FTC members, give those passing out of office beautiful cushy jobs, the guys in office catch on pretty quick.

We need anti-revolving door legislation that ends this sweet turnstile between regulators and those they regulate.

We have adequate anti-trust laws on the books now, why not just enforce them?

Further, Congress extended sweetheart deals to these now behemoth monsters, when they were in their infancy, on the understanding that they would be neutral platforms, not unlike a trucking firm that delivers a newspaper, but, they aren't satisfied with that, they want to exert editorial control, which is their right, but, they clearly no longer need the sweetheart deal from Congress, and it should be ended, with them being treated just like everyone else.

Quite frankly, their size isn't the problem, their actions are. I'd prefer to see a more effective regulatory effort that dealt with what they are doing, not how big they are.

 

Seeing this sponsored by seditionist Trump rat f boy Hawley I think I'll just pass.

It's unclear to me if you got the right in the title of this thread, which would make more sense, or if the National Review got it right: is the proposed cap $100B or $100M market cap limit? $100M market cap companies don't even make into small caps. So that makes no sense...

 

Thread title says billion, article text says million, which is it? Better be billion because $100 million market cap is sub-microcap status, aka practically nothing and if a law maker is trying to crack down on companies of such small status they have no understanding of what a market cap is. Has to be a typo.

 

His website says 100 billion. Must be a typo in the original article

 

I noticed the one thing the politicians aren’t doing is banning corporate contributions from those “mega corporations” to themselves. The real problem is that the corporations run this country VIA the legal system that allows them to do those things. The Legal system is heavily weighted in their favor via their ability to literally buy legislation.

Hawley and the rest of the republicans are just mad because they think Facebook and Twitter etc are “silencing them”, when in reality they don't want to actually say out-loud that these companies aren’t allowing politicians to lie anymore. If Twitter said today that they will allow them to say anything, and they will not censor them, this issue would be gone tomorrow.

The ultimate irony here is that the Republican Party openly admitted and publicly pushed for Citizens United. But they wont say publicly that they think that law, the one that actually gives corporations that power, is wrong, they just blame it on “dominant digital companies”. This bill it nothing more than republicans punishing Facebook, Twitter, and the other SM giants for actually wanting the truth.

We DO need to do something about Big corporations, but this is not what they are doing. They are building public support for “stopping big corporations” while literally legislating to do that to only a handful of social media conglomerates.

 

Really no need to go any further into it seeing that it is being sponsored by this seditionist.

 

I think it's stupid. Here's why.

No company will get that large. As they approach, they will simply split into smaller ancillary companies.

Also, how can the governement assume that a merger these large companies creates a monopoly?

 

A market requires some regulation to remain free. Monopolies are the absent of competition and choice. It's not "free" at that point I any regard.

 

What is Amazon's market cap?

 

No company starts off as a monopoly, they get there from the choices the consumers make. But once they become "too successful" they are punished for the very thing they were lauded over previously. Seems un-American

 

A good bit over a trillion.

 

I wasn't asking you. You didn't make the apparently ignorant assertion that @jcarlilesiu did in his post.

 

I assume $100 billion is the correct number and the posted $100 million is a typo. I have mixed feelings. Mainly I am generally against government interference in business because that is often like the fan club telling the team how to play. Secondly I am against laws that address hypothetical problems and are made for show. There are already anti-monopollistic laws on the books that offer protection, and the feds can currently block mergers because of them being anti-competative. On the other hand I can see where in some egregious cases certain mergers and acquisitions can be seriously threatening. However, as
@Kal'Stang.says the devil is in the details. What is the rationale for the $100 billion limit? Would it apply to all or just one of the involved companies? I can see where a $300 billion company buying up a $200 billion competitor could be troublesome (and probably be blocked under current law), but a $250 billion buying a $1 billion company that has a new great technology that would fit in would be no problem. So, what is the bill's criteria and purpose beyond arm waving and showing off?

Unless there is clear evident concrete possible economic harm that is precisely defined, I oppose.

 

Sounds like a tariff and I would say we need a lot more American businesses to step up in the tech industry. China's slave labor is so much cheaper now that it's almost impossible to get some products from anywhere but China.

 

LOL Twitter is the arbitrator of truth now. Good god lefties have gone off the cliff. I mean where does this stop, we were told the lie that Trump was a Russian traitor for 4 years, should we ban all those media outlets from the airwaves?

 

INALB my understanding is that is something of a misconception. You can't bust up a company just because they are the only ones offering something IF they became the only ones by offering the best product for the best price, and are continuing to do so. You have to find them doing things that are "in restraint of trade", like being a cartel, fixing prices, refusing to deal with people who deal with your competitors etc.

This was Microsoft's argument when Antitrust was employed against them. Unfortunately, they were rather blatantly bundling Windows at lower prices with all new computers, (and they didn't really have to as things turned out.)

 

I wouldn't oppose it but the problem is or I guess I should say will be if enacted is that it encourages such companies to remove themselves from the public exchanges which will make it harder to monitor them, value them, or give people the opportunity to buy into them.

 

AOC is far from an idiot, as you would know if you saw her on TV making Republican reps look like little kids who've not studied and just had the teacher call on them. The 10 years refers to the amount of time we have left with many things until we reach a "tipping point" and the ongoing harm will come much faster and be very much more difficult to reverse.

 

I think another consideration in play these days is allowing US corporations to dominate markets because if they don't then China and India will. This of course is flawed since we allow these same corporations to offshore as much work as they can to lower labor costs. Lucrative perhaps for the quarter or the year or maybe even for a decade, and then it's game over man....

 

Well, so much for Biden's 30% increase......

 

Or that there would even BE parties, Washington in particular but many others warned against the "factions" as they were called back then.