By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
NintendoPie on 11 July 2023
Edit Thread
JWeinCom said:
NintendoPie said:

i've seen people make the argument that it's ridiculous for the FTC to be focusing on the gaming industry now when they didn't care about the aforementioned. though, to me, it's never too little, too late. i think this should be a legal case and should have been in the case of Disney/NBC as well. isn't that the whole point of the FTC and the original anti-trust act? the FTC clearly needs a fire lit under their ass as they are not and have not been doing their job very well, for awhile.

While it may not be the case anymore considering the current supreme court, there is a concept of law called stare decisis, meaning, it has been decided. Meaning that, once a ruling has been made, that ruling should apply to all other cases in that jurisdiction with the same facts. This is important because the law needs to be consistent for people to be able to conduct their business and lives. The same thing can't be legal one day and illegal the next (unless there are actually new laws passed). 

So, if a federal court decided that the Disney/NBC/Marvel/Lucas, whatever thing was not a violation of the antitrust act, then Microsoft should be able to rely on that when planning their deal. Then it would be upon the FTC to explain why this situation is different and the prior ruling should not apply. 

As for the point of the anti-trust act, I'm far from an expert, but I know a little bit. It doesn't simply mean that a company cannot become too big. It means a company cannot abuse their size to stifle competition, or to take unfair advantage of customers. In cases like this, it's really hard to make that case, because the value of the transaction is in intellectual property. There is theoretically an infinite supply of intellectual property. However big Microsoft is, there is still plenty of money around and plenty of brains. In theory, tons of companies can create the next Call of Duty, the next Spider-man, the next Star Wars, etc. I don't know if that is quite the case in reality though.

In my very humble opinion, the problem with the anti-trust act is that it was designed for a different world. It works somewhat well when you're dealing with physical commodities, or things that take up real space, or with some kind of resource with limited supply and demand. It just wasn't designed for massive media companies or digital companies and the like. I'm really not sure if the FTC has the power to deal with this kind of problem, if it is indeed a problem. We would really need new laws, and that's not likely if politicians like their funding.

thanks for this post, it was enlightening and also explains basically what i feared in the sense of stare decisis. 

i agree the anti-trust act is incredibly old. it definitely doesn't fit into how things work nowadays, which i guess is, in part, how so many of these massive acquisitions were able to happen.

unfortunately, lobbying is still the law of the land and i agree, nothing is going to change that. this lead me to being disappointed with this decision as i was hoping, possibly in vein, that the FTC would bring a good case and at least not let what happen in the movie industry happen to the gaming one.