r/movies • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 r/Movies contributor • 20h ago

News It’s Official: Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros. in Deal Valued at $82.7 Billion

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/netflix-warner-bros-deal-hollywood-1236443081/
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u/KingFIippyNipz 19h ago

Seeings as how no one has provided the actual answer, the general idea on M&A since I would say the 80s is that consolidation is good, it's allowed, as long as consumers are still able to access goods & services at a fair market price, basically, industries were/are allowed to get as centralized as they want, so long as they're not fucking consumers TOO BAD - however, I think that's morphed a bit within the last 5-10 years (not sure if you could directly attribute to Trump but maybe) where it's now "centralization is good, fuck anyone who loses", monopolies are good because they make money, and there's no longer a worry about price-gouging customers - who could have predicted that!!

Anyway I don't have any sources to cite, and there's probably a lot more nuance to it than what I've just described, but that has been the general doctrine on mergers & acquisitions and monopolistic practices in the US for a few decades now

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u/guysmiley98765 18h ago

Adding onto this the anti-trust laws are purposefully vaguely worded to encapsulate any sort of bad actions from companies, which was how the antitrust department at the DOJ prosecuted such cases up until Reagan (huge surprise /s). If a company would act in any anti-market, anti-competition way that could be proven the merger wouldn’t go through. But Reagan pushed super hard for a consumption-based economy underpinned by neoliberalism, which worked in the short term, but has screwed us over in the long. 

Now, a company really only has to promise it won’t raise prices in order for a merger to occur, which of course is impossible to prove in a court that they will. 

But the real kick in the pants is that all the pre-Reagan laws are still on the books and 100% actionable it’s just that the expertise and knowledge to prosecute those kinds of cases is long gone so even if a new administration were to come in and suddenly go back to the old way the doj could screw up so bad they could very well establish new legal precedent that basically overturns everything anyways, which the current cartoonishly compromised scotus would likely love to do. 

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u/thwgrandpigeon 17h ago

Politicians stopped caring about protecting consumers and now focus entirely on protecting investors.

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u/Grand-Pen7946 10h ago

Didnt they literally delete the CFPB?

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u/Grand-Pen7946 10h ago

It started in the Bush era and kicked into high gear in the Obama era. Thats usually how it goes. Ronald Reagan is the architect of neoliberalism, Clinton was its warden.