It's literally the FTC's job to block most mergers (they are required by law to block bad mergers, see https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui... for details)

Their leadership isn't "awful", their leaders are finally doing their job, for the first time in decades.

Blocking Meta's acquisition of that VR company was braindead. Absolutely pointless.

So you're upset about that decision. Fair enough! I can't think of any regulatory agency that hasn't made a decision I thought was terrible at some point or another.

But that doesn't mean that what they do, big picture, is pointless.

Fact of the matter is acquisitions are a corner stone of the tech economic model. If they actually cared about consumers and competition they would go after MS for bundling Teams. Or MS for round-tripping cash with OpenAI.

Doing their job by losing everything in court like the Activision/Microsoft case just last week? Great use of government resources.

I'd rather they bring cases and lose some instead of never bringing cases and letting the corporations do whatever they want with no fear of consequences.

If they bring cases and lose them corporations will continue doing whatever they want since there will be no consequences. It's important for the FTC to know what fights are worth fighting, and they will be taken seriously.

So a technical note I’m posting here mostly because I dug into this only for a comment I was responding to to be deleted:

What they lost in the case they filed in June was an enjoinment to prevent the merger and acquisition of Activision/Blizzard until their own FTC judge (read: an administrative law judge that exists outside of Article III and is within the chain of command of the Executive branch) could hear the case on August 2nd. The merger had a termination date of July 18th, so they needed that to continue their administrative review. Discovery was finished, it was just the trial, but without being able to enjoin the trial because in the opinion of Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley they were unlikely to prove the merits of their assertions, the trial before the FTC judge would have been moot by the time it occurred. It’s been formally cancelled by the FTC by the way.

I’m not disagreeing with you by the way, I just wanted a place to park this information in the discussion. They started this action in December and failed to win even an enjoinment against Microsoft and Activision temporarily stopping the merger until their own guy could hear the case.

That is a defeatist attitude; writing to them couldn't be worth less than shouting into the abyss with our comments on Github issues and on HN, etc.

One thing that I’ve heard before is if one person complains a politician knows there’s 9 more.

FTC is actually the most active it's been in decades. Blocking mergers is one of its core functions. Not to mention the stance against NDAs, etc. Where have they been lacking?

Isn’t blocking mergers one of the founding goals of the FTC?

Protecting consumers is the goal. If that means blocking mergers to protect consumers, then so be it.