Comment Re:"Why should we ever let them do this?" (Score 1) 54
It's their job! Their job is to prevent monopolies
IANAL but no, I don't think that's the FTCs charter. Up until the Kahn era, their goal was to promote consumer welfare. If a merger was likely to reduce prices through efficiencies, that is supposed to be approved. Monopolies are not, in fact, illegal or prohibited by any regulation.
(Side note: monopolies are also extremely rare in a free market. Even rarer is a company being able to use market power to charge "excessive" prices, however you might define that. There's economic research and theory explaining why this isn't actually possible. The gist is even the possibility of competition is enough to prevent monopolists from raising prices. Monopolies protected by legislation, e.g. cable companies and labor unions, are another story.)
In practice, that's very hard to determine a priori. I think antitrust regulation and enforcement is doomed to turn into allowing mergers for politically influential companies and denying them for companies who are out of favor. TBH, I think that's how antitrust regulation has behaved when the ink was still drying on the Sherman Anti-trust Act
The FTC's charter pretty much nails down all of that as their purview. Shit if you click into the competition link in their charter, they have an extensive set of explanations and prior court cases explaining why the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and the Clayton Act would apply in a situation like this.
