Is the SEC and FTC ever going to do their job? They have failed us in the 21st century. Shareholder value over everything else. It would be nice for some regulation to attack all this rent seeking.
what job do you want the FTC to do here? I assume you think there is an antitrust angle on this potential acquisition? I am an economist and that is my field. I disagree with your take, if that is what you mean. This is a vertical merger. Vertical mergers are quite different in their welfare effects to consumers than horizontal mergers. Vertical mergers can frequently be welfare-improving to consumers. Indeed, this i…
What does it mean to be "pro-consumer"? You can't reasonably use that metric to decide antitrust cases if you aren't directly querying consumers on whether they want the company to be broken up or not. When the FTC decides what is or isn't pro-consumer, that's the same as me claiming that I know how you're going to vote on issue X, and then claiming that you're "voting against your interests" when you vote the opposite way.
Anyway, there's another lens besides consumer welfare and monopoly here: diversity provides protection against the unforeseen, as well as an increased rate of innovation. We see this in natural selection where species routinely go extinct and, on the occasion, whole classes of animals are wiped off the planet but life as a whole continues because of the diversity before any event.
When we accept high concentration in our economy, we lose the safeguards that come with diversity. With enough concentration the unforeseen events become actual existential threats. I'm not going to claim we're there yet -- if Amazon failed we still have Walmart, and Azure, etc -- but I didn't see anything in your viewpoint that protects against a future where some things become "too big to fail".
tl;dr diversity is a desirable property of most systems, and an antitrust framework should consider it.