One other risk with mergers that I've been thinking about is we sometimes don't know what the 'market' is. At the time the relevant market might be one thing, but as things develop, that could change. One could wonder if a merger that was allowed to occur in the past should have been allowed to happen given what transpired later (this would be situations when companies buy another company that may seem unrelated). I've been thinking about how Google bought YouTube and whether that was merger that, in hindsight, we should have allowed.
That's a really good comparison. I think a lot of people would be surprised at the amount of companies that Amazon owns, but does that mean they should be able to participate in a market just because of how big they are in other markets.
One other risk with mergers that I've been thinking about is we sometimes don't know what the 'market' is. At the time the relevant market might be one thing, but as things develop, that could change. One could wonder if a merger that was allowed to occur in the past should have been allowed to happen given what transpired later (this would be situations when companies buy another company that may seem unrelated). I've been thinking about how Google bought YouTube and whether that was merger that, in hindsight, we should have allowed.
That's a really good comparison. I think a lot of people would be surprised at the amount of companies that Amazon owns, but does that mean they should be able to participate in a market just because of how big they are in other markets.