Yeah, I'm still amazed that when AT&T was split up, there wasn't anything in the ruling preventing them from just joining the parts back together again.
It's a major deficiency of TFA that telecom was unmentioned. The Daughters Bell are a far larger drag on our economy and society than Amazon ever dreamed of being, and have been since before Bell Telephone wrote the Communications Act of 1934. I'd have more faith in Warren if she had led with telecom, but since she didn't I frankly expect her proposal to include a big fat "loophole" for ATTVZN.
The way to look at the 1996 boondoggle is ask ourselves if FCC could have ever been expected to provide even a token enforcement of its terms. The answer is of course not, because FCC was created to protect Bell Telephone and that's most of what it has ever done. Given that, of course all the investments in competing telcos would fail and be gobbled by the incumbents, enriching execs and bankers in the process. Given that, what we've seen was only ever exactly what was planned. The 1996 Act has allowed Bell to shed money-losing rural exchanges, do away entirely with common carriage, pay for wireless infrastructure with money stolen from wireline investors, rearrange assets in ways that would have violated previous consent decrees, pretend that we ever tried competition in telecom, and burrow in even more tightly to its vampire-bite on the neck of USA residents. That was a pretty good con, that Bell execs ran on us, with the assistance of the corrupt in government and the credulous in media.
Yeah it seems ridiculous in hindsight. I think what enabled the mergers though was less someone with a brilliant idea that they could just recombine, and more the drastic change in the government's conception and enforcement of antcompetitiveness laws. That is, they wouldn't have tried to merge back together if the they didn't think the government might let them. The government can and does does block mergers, still, and it makes sense that that they wouldn't just want to ban a specific company from a specific market share for all eternity.
This is the exact issue. The DOJ's Antitrust Criminal Enforcement Division breaks up the companies by making an argument that's then directly contradicted by the DOJ's Merger Enforcement Division's (very outdated) policy on approving mergers. From the Merger Enforcement Guidelines[1] (last updated in 1997):
> By definition, non-horizontal mergers involve firms that do not operate in the same market. It necessarily follows that such mergers produce no immediate change in the level of concentration in any relevant market as defined in Section 2 of these Guidelines.
The Merger Enforcement Division's assumption may have been true in 1997 but it's difficult to argue that simply because Google and Amazon don't operate in the "same market" as their primary businesses that their combination would "produce no immediate change in the level of concentration" of the market for both online advertising and computing services. Yet, under these guidelines, if a Google + Amazon merger were proposed it wouldn't present any immediate issue for the Antitrust Division to oppose it.
Amazon and Google do operate in several of the same markets. Amazon sells Kindle/Fire devices. Google sells Android phones. Amazon does product search. Google has a product search engine.
Antitrust enforcement focuses on the "primary market" of the entities. Google's primary market is advertising and Amazon's primary market is retail products. The DOJ does consider the potential anti-competitive impact on tertiary markets the two entities operate in but it wouldn't be a barrier to the hypothetical merger because those markets have plenty of other competitors.
And the way Warren is describing splits, it sounds like GCP, Azure, and AWS would be spun out. Could you imagine if any combination of those three were allowed in the future to merge!
