Strategically, why wouldn’t the US gov’t want a US company owning ARM? Why is the FTC pilling on to block this? How would I, as a consumer, be harmed by a graphics company owning an instruction set and design specification?
Stopping two US companies from merging because it would create a monopoly and negatively impact US consumers is one thing. But this isn't even remotely the case here? Doesn't the US government get more tax revenue if Nvidia makes some extra dough charging royalties for that IP? I’m confused.
The press release directly and prominently answers this question multiple times. It suggests that under Nvidia the new Arm would be disincentived to innovate in any area that negatively affects Nvidia businesses. Given that Arm is a critical supplier for many industries, this could result in consumer harm via “reduced product quality, reduced innovation, higher prices, and less choice”
Also, I don’t believe the FTC mission is to increase US tax revenue, so that aspect seems irrelevant.
> the new Arm would be disincentived to innovate in any area that negatively affects Nvidia businesses
If the standard is "they don't compete against each other now, but would be disincentivized to compete against each other in the future," that could be used as a rationale to block literally every merger.
> that could be used as a rationale to block literally every merger
Don't you threaten me with a good time. Imagine, companies actually forced to collaborate via the ordinary mechanism of contract arrangements rather than by assimilation into a horrifying megaconglomerate.
The problem is when some companies form a cartel of sort (with our without contracts) anyway. The same way Intel was not licensing x86, but since AMD already had it they were both incentivized to keep users on x86 and keep arm out.
(Of course the nvidia-arm acquisition is more about nvidia trying to build an army, oh pardon, portfolio. As Intel and AMD already have. They acquired Mellanox, plus they have GPUs and CUDA chips. Intel and Apple kind of have everything of course. AMD has Radeon, but AMD is probably still trying to catch up financially. There's also Qualcomm with their snapdragons and modems. And there are probably others, but the important thing is that snapdragons are arm based. And while selling high-end ML and gamer/miner cards is certainly not bad, but nvidia is probably trying to expand into a different market too, let's say high-volume but older semi tech.)
Indeed, but while most contract arrangements need to be explicitly re-upped, a merger is permanent; a subsumed company cannot un-merge itself, because it no longer exists as an independent entity. This fact incentivizes both sides to remain competitive, because each side knows that they are replaceable if they don't keep costs down and quality up relative to their competitors. Furthermore, while a cartel is the worst-case scenario between two independent companies, cartel-like behavior is the only scenario for two merged companies; it's unfathomable that any subsumed company could decide not to do whatever its new owner tells it to.
How is SoftBank selling ARM? (And how did Google acquire Motorola and then sell them off to Lenovo, for instance?) Is there a difference between how they acquired ARM and how Nvidia wants to acquire ARM that makes it a merger instead of an acquisition or something? I honestly don't know and am curious and think there's an interesting point here if how I'm interpreting your comment is correct.
> that could be used as a rationale to block literally every merger.
Even though that would hurt me businesswise I would happily sign for that future. And while we're at it: make it illegal for one company to hold shares in another. Just natural persons holding shares in companies would be fine.
This is entirely impractical. Companies wouldn’t even be able own subsidiaries in other countries that can legally act as employers or tax payers there.
It would make it impossible for governments to own minority stakes in local subsidiaries of global corporations to veto some things. It would make it impossible to impose capital requirements on subsidiaries of big financial institutions. It would be impossible for larger competitors to rescue failing peers and keep them operating as a going concern.
And it would very likely create the most suffocating oligopolies on a national level as well as on an industry level as competitors would find it extremely hard to enter markets with entrenched incumbents if the only way to do it was to build from scratch.
> Companies wouldn’t even be able own subsidiaries in other countries that can legally act as employers or tax payers there.
So? That would enable local companies that occupy the same niche to do so. All these multinationals are not necessarily a good thing.
> It would make it impossible for governments to own minority stakes in local subsidiaries of global corporations to veto some things.
Only if you believe that those local subsidiaries should exist in the first place and that need not be the case.
> It would make it impossible to impose capital requirements on subsidiaries of big financial institutions.
There would be no such subsidiaries.
> It would be impossible for larger competitors to rescue failing peers and keep them operating as a going concern.
These could be structured as asset sales. And a whole lot of trickery that causes these peers to fail would go out the window.
You are making the mistake of looking at the glass 'half empty', when in fact the better way to look at it is what we would get for it in return. Capitalism, but with a much more direct link between UBO and the companies they have a hand in, far less opportunity for nation state level wealth to end up concentrated with a very small number of people and less opportunity for companies to play shell games with their income.
Capitalism, like money is a great invention. But like everything else when taken to extremes it is a net negative, in moderation it could well be uniformly good. But the whole externalization game needs to stop or it will harm us greatly.
So what you're saying is that companies should never employ people or put capital to work in more than one country or do anything else across borders that requires a legal entity that can be locally regulated, taxed and held accountable.
All failing companies should be liquidated and sold off in bits and pieces, employees fired, contracts and debts voided, pension schemes closed.
Entrenched local incumbents could only ever be disrupted by individuals starting new companies, funded exclusively by other individuals. Presumably, none of these individuals would be allowed to own a controlling stake in another company, otherwise it would effectively be one company.
You would have to convince those wealthy individuals to start companies in small countries in spite of the fact that the growth potential of their company would be far more limited than if they started a company in a big country. The only incentive would be local protectionism.
You would also have to make sure that companies don't enter into contractual relationships that effectively make them act as one (such as McDonald's franchises)
You would effectively hand absolute power to local family clans and oligarchs closely intertwined with local bureaucrats and politicians. It's a recipe for stagnation and corruption.
This is not a glass half full and it's not moderation. It's a glass smashed in an act of vandalism and blind rage. It's the sort of revolution that countries take a century to recover from.
Turning the clocks back a couple of centuries is not progressive either.
> So what you're saying is that companies should never employ people [in more than one country]
No, that's not what I'm saying, besides that could be easily covered through employment law, but we already have the concept of internationally operating free-lancers.
> or do anything else across borders that requires a legal entity that can be locally regulated, taxed and held accountable.
Not if that legal entity is going to have a company as its shareholders. But there would be no reason why it could not exist and have natural persons as its shareholders, they could even be the same shareholders as in some other company abroad.
You are still arguing about this from the perspective of everything that it can't do, which is pretty easy to deal with because most of those things it can do. What it can't do is to hide the UBOs, which is really the only big change. Everything else can easily be worked around.
>You are still arguing about this from the perspective of everything that it can't do
No, I also told you what I think it would do. Create a corrupt local oligarchy that is extremely hard to disrupt. It would create a mediocre, low productivity, stagnant economy shaped by the most extreme form of protectionism I have ever heard of.
>Everything else can easily be worked around.
Your use of the word "easy" for something that would require a root and branch redesign of company law, tax law, employment law, competition law and scores of other laws in every country on earth tells me that you really haven't thought this through. Not to speak of changing the ownership structure of tens of thousands of existing companies.
Most shares are held by companies: either pension fund, to create your ETFs, mutual funds, or holding for you in normal broker account, or financial institutions, to provide liquidity, to put to work the pension fund huge inventory (most hedge fund short-selling is done with pension funds' dormant inventory using an investment bank middle-man), or by companies needing to store money somewhere other than cash.
I don't know many individual directly handling shares with the exchange and the settlement. How do you avoid the enormous volume of trading that happen due to retirement account reuse for shorting ? Would you forbid that too, removing the incentive for company to be honest because nobody can short anymore ?
How do they stop companies from buying consumer GPUs? I have used some minor firmware tweaks to unlock full commercial capabilities out of Nvidia GPUs in the past. Perhaps that is against the tos and a large company couldn't get away with it like an individual can?
That might be what they labeled it as, but it really was to prevent companies from buying the cheaper GPU for AI training.
They need their datacenter GPU numbers to look good at the end of the Q, they can't do that when all they are selling are 3090 that are perfectly fine to train the majority of AI models.
If you're Google/Apple/etc, you don't want to be relying on some unofficial firmware tweak where the next driver update could completely brick your business and force you to never update the driver again.
> If the standard is "they don't compete against each other now, but would be disincentivized to compete against each other in the future," that could be used as a rationale to block literally every merger.
Try it this way: How many other companies are likely to compete with them in the future? If the answer is a thousand, the loss of potential competition is not very significant. If the answer is less than ten, it is.
Market power, among other things are the requirement. No one cares if mom and pop store buys its neighbour. There’s a whole specialty called competition law.
And why is SoftBank any more positioned to be a champion of ARM quality? I just don’t see how it would not be in Nvidia’s interest to promote a healthy ARM any more or less than any other owner. Is the goal for ARM to become independent again? Are Nvidia’s competitors making ARM graphics cards and SoCs?
It does not need to be. Softbank owning ARM is the status quo, the devil we know, and they have a track record of not running ARM availability/quality into the ground. They don't seem to have motivation to do so. Also, they are invested in telecommunications, so having healthy and strong ARM position for mobile devices is in their interest.
NVIDIA, on the other hand, is suspicious. It is in their interest to use and manipulate ARM to release/restrict products in such a way that will strengthen their already strong market position with accelerators, and push down its competitors like AMD and Intel.
Or, they realized they're terrible and instead of trying to be terrible again they're trying to be not terrible this time by acquiring people that actually know what they're doing? A good ARM Tegra sounds like a product that would benefit the market and thus consumers.
It is not possible for 2 competing companies to have a monopoly. Perhaps you suspect some sort of collusion between them? Seems unlikely given the kicking Intel have had the past few years.
AMD has barely beaten Intel’s Sandy bridge, finally. Not enough for me to buy one.
They don’t need to collude, they’ll “compete” by siting on their ass like Intel did, barely being better yet jacking up the price, only “Haswell” is renamed “Zen 3”.
Zen 2 beats it for price to performance, and much faster? It’s not even twice as fast. Nothing has doubled for close to a decade, and no difference in most real world usage.
AMD decides it wants to make something like the TX1. Do you think that could happen if Big N owned ARM? Would the M1 series have progressed as quickly knowing the bad blood between Apple and Nvidia? Softbank probably isn't the best management but its neutral.
If ARM is truly too important to the economy to be owned by a “selfish” business, shouldn't we just declare it public domain and move on? Why can’t Nvidia’s competitors who they’d try to abuse and squeeze go use some other ISA? Is ARM really that good, or is it just popular?
It's not about the economy, it's about competition and consumer harm from the lack of it.
As much as it's easy to forget, the free market is supposed to be a tool for the benefit of consumers (through both price and innovation), and while it's not very common, every once in a while the government actually looks at that as important and steps in.
It hasn’t been common recently, under Obama/Trump. The Biden Admin FTC seems like it’s serious about using antitrust laws to prevent the market from being too lopsided in favor of a few big players.
More like Bush II/Obama/Trump. The FTC has been neutered for a while, particularly when the rulings about decreased competition vs consumer choice were made in the mid-2000s.
The reason for competition law is to regulate the free market to ensure that consumer choice is not limited by the uncontrolled acquisition and merger of suppliers.
The merger of NVidia and ARM is inherently non-competitive unless NVidia accepted limitations/restrictions on their licensing freedom which they are not willing to propose or accept.
That's leaving aside the international and other ramifications of a company that is involved in the entire vertical of chip production and sale through to retail having control of the licensing of the most used ISA and other IPRs that are available to its competitors throughout that vertical.
A company doesn't need to be owned by the govenrment (which I assume is what you mean) for the government to guarantee it is free from being bought out by it's competitors. Whatsapp/Instagram were great examples of this - where the leader in a sector managed to buy its primary competition. As far as I understand it no one can credibly claim Instagram's growth has been prioritized relative to Facebook - why? Becuase Facebook prioritizes facebook.
This isn't a question of "will the economy collapse if X buys Y" it's a question of "Which will yeild the best outcome, Y being acquired by X or no". The exact definition of "best outcome" is where the entire battleground though.
It is quite difficult to see who actually could acquire ARM though - because of ARM's quite unique position, any of the potential acquirers are either customers (Apple, Nvidia, Qualcomm) who would be vertically integrated to beat out competitors or direct competitors (AMD, Intel). I think almost the only people who could buy ARM at this point would be TSMC.
Mostly because Jensen Huang was willing to pay a nice premium over what the market would otherwise offer. There are some cough synergies cough that Nvidia could have instrumented for higher profits, Jensen had a clear and enthusiastic vision about how to get there.
Softbank can still sell ARM to anyone including the public market, they just won't get as much money for them that way. Presumably.
You’re right. I don’t even count the new M1 as an architecture change, they switched to mobile like how C2D came from pentium M, their software market in ARM was already mature and it would be significantly harder. At the same time, they made Rosetta and switched to x68 and ARM around the same time, only ARM won.
Exactly, last i checked the important part of free market was producing products consumers enjoy and generating revenue, not corporate scheming and strong-arming competitors
> Strategically, why wouldn’t the US gov’t want a US company owning ARM
It's worth noting ARM Ltd is a British company currently owned by a Japanese company. The U.K. and Japan are two of the closest, if not the closest, defense and industrial partners the U.S. enjoys. And unlike many U.S. allies, they're more-or-less close by choice. IOW, there's a deep reservoir of trust across the spectrum--military, legal, political. Both the U.K. and Japan tend to exercise their independence far more freely than other U.S. allies precisely because of the mutual respect afforded among the three. There's much less tension and apprehension among those three than as between, say, the U.S. and France. A critical supplier like ARM being in the hands of the U.K. and/or Japan is good enough from the perspective of the U.S., absent some extraordinary complicating context.
I think its a good decision because just being dominated by US tech companies can be demoralising, besides no one has a monopoly on ideas or innovation which all develops at different rates.
And if ARM did get bought up, would this also drive other countries towards China who are developing their own CPU's?
"How China plans to lead the computer chip industry"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50287485
From a US Military perspective, you don't want to pee off your military assets/partners do you?
Allowing nVidia to become a monopoly would bite the US in the ass strategically, as nVidia loses incentive to innovate.
That's how the US, effectively, ended up having no viable aircraft when it entered WWI, after being the country that invented the thing. (Wright and Curtiss, IIRC, locked the market with patents).
Or, more closely, how the US telecom/Internet infrastructure is atrocious, despite — and because of — the Internet and the telephone being invented here. Go figure, Ma Bell wasn't the bees knees.
Strategically, the US needs someone to keep nVidia up on their toes. Innovation cuts into profit margins when you have a monopoly.
Ma Bell made some great innovations here and started a lot of the computers tech, after it was destroyed the baby bells combined again, Cingular has exclusive rights to iPhone at a time.
Nvidia is reasltically already a monopoly with CUDA. They don’t need to innovate and they force universities to use their more expensive GPUs.
They're constantly innovating, and have monthly software releases. Don't blame NVIDIA because AMD can't offer a solid enterprise offering that is attractive to customers.
> Cingular has exclusive rights to iPhone at a time
But not the other baby bells, which is the point. Also, Apple went to Cingular after being rebuffed by Verizon. (Apple wanted no crapware. Verizon said no.) Competition working.
Natural monopolies aren’t bad, don’t last long and they fall when it’s leapfrogged, like Kodak when digital came. The USPS is an unnatural monopoly which stifles any carrier and serves mostly to distribute spam.
Anti monopoly laws are useless, x86-64 is a duopoly, and any monopoly laws aren’t able to stop Amazon and their vertical intergration, because the argument is that eBay and other sites exist. Network oligarchs collaborate to fix prices.
Last time I checked there was no official government ISP the was required to provide some baseline of service to every physical address in the country at a reasonable price. And to keep it equivalent you'd only pay for bandwidth used - no flat fee for the hookup itself. The internet is not (yet) a replacement for what the USPS actually is.
USPS doesn’t serve everywhere either. Where do you think that inefficiency is paid for? Why are taxes subsidizing spammers that you can’t even refuse? What if you only had government email that was full of spam? What if it was physical spam that taxes pays for that follows victims around the US with no way to stop it? Is that what you support?
> The agency is burdened by hundreds of billions of dollars in debt and falling revenue, and Congress and the White House have signaled an unwillingness to grant more funding without major restructuring, lawmakers say.
> The law envisioned the Postal Service as a self-sustaining agency whose revenue could cover the expenses associated with an aging workforce involved in a physical occupation: delivering packages and parcels to every address in the country.
> Not even two decades later, it can’t. The Postal Service has racked up $160.9 billion in debt from what’s owed prepaying retiree benefits. On top of that, it has many years’ worth of operating deficits, as its top revenue generators no longer covered the costs of delivering the mail.
Then why do they need bailouts? Are these bailouts self funding? What money gave them that credit when they were long unsustainable? This is an unnatural monopoly that doesn’t allow competitors and also is a failure who mostly delivers worthless physical spam you cannot escape.
Because unlike any other company or agency, they are required to prepay retiree benefits.
Anyway, you might be surprised to hear that our Army and Navy aren't self-sustaining. Obviously, we should cut their funding and see how they manage to make their nukes pay for themselves. /s
No company has a 401k?
I’m sure we’ll be fine without forced physical spam going paperless, or using other carriers instead of turning them into amazon’s slave and spam deliverers. The USPS already uses private carriers for remote places. I don’t get the resistance to forced spam.
At what cost? What benefit is sending non refusable spam to the ends of the US to anyone besides spammers? You don’t accept spam email do you? Would you support it if it physically existed and your taxes paid for it, including costly methods like sending it to the middle of nowhere?
Well we kinda want some people to live in the middle of nowhere, because we want to eat and somewhere isn't where farmland is, apparently.
Also we kinda want to keep territories like Alaska inhabited because geopolitics.
And we kinda want the people living in those places to be able to get their official government documents (driver licenses, court notices, etc).
Then there's this idea of voting by mail, which isn't something that should be a privilege, but that's too complex for our discussion.
To translate one of the reasons for USPS into words you may understand: you know how two-factor authentication requires that second factor? The USPS provides a means for the gov to get that second factor into the hands of the people.
A third party would be a man-in-the-middle.
So consiser USPS a part of the government's 2FA infrastructure and messaging system with SLA and proof of delivery.
That, unlike your company's authentication infrastructure, happens to pay for itself.
Not having the USPS won’t affect that. I know someone who lives in Alaska and if you think the USPS delivers there or in a timely manner, you’re mistaken, it’s seasonal and not USPS. The oil payments and other incentives do fine, nobody is there because USPS can spam you. If we could have spam block, I wouldn’t be against it as much, we shouldn’t cut down trees so you can have ads forced into your home without consent.
If you think farmers are quaint small independent workers, you’re also mistaken, they’re extremely educated, very high tech, and have Internet, the idea of them being hicks that use mail is outdated by decades.
Mail in voting should be skipped over for online voting. We have all the information online and could reach more voters, cities have many more options and rural areas are more easily reached by internet than physical mail. Developing counties skipped home phones for cellular, this is a complex unnecessary step.
"Natural monopolies aren’t bad, don’t last long and they fall when it’s leapfrogged"
Natural monopolies are things like electric power grid and water supply and train and roads, they last forever precisely because they are natural and they were never leapfrogged in history. 'Natural" part stands for nessesary inveatment in infrastructure being redundant and causing zero-sum game.
Kodak wasn't much of a monopoly and certainly wasn't a natural one
Read up on how antitrust actually works, your assesment of USPS is equally inaccurate
I wish we could run experiments on this sort of thing and compare. I want to know how an alternative "no IP law" USA would have developed. Or even one that just didn't grant patents as freely.
My totally uninformed opinion is that basically the only IP law that's worth a damn is trademarks (which should absolutely be very strongly enforced. It's crucially important that consumers know who they're buying from for the market to work properly), and maybe copyright on /entertainment/ focused creative works for the life of the author and no longer.
Look at the US during the 1800s freely "borrowing" stuff from the UK, which was then the world leader in IP development.
All "developing" nations don't (and shouldn't) GAF about IPRs during that phase in their development. Notice that China didn't GAF for years, but does now, both from a control POV and from a competition POV.
Countries only worry about IPRs when they have sufficient IP development to have something to sell.
Realistically, with the cost of developing this stuff only going up, only monopolies or duopolies are really going to exist at the cutting edge. That's the trend and I don't really see a way of reversing it.
Their argument seems to largely be that ARM does not produce chips directly, but instead licenses designs to other firms using a "neutral, open licensing approach." They feel that this will stop should Nvidia acquire ARM.
The also FTC contends that ARM induces competitive behavior in Nvidia. And a merger would stifle that competition.
Additionally, and probably most importantly, the FTC contends that Nvidia's competition shares sensitive information with ARM. And part of what Nvidia is looking for with this acquisition is this information. I suspect this is the true reason behind the lawsuit; there's probably a good bit of industry support behind it.
Personally, I'd rather ARM be owned by a massive American firm. And out of all the American firms who would be interested in ARM, Nvidia is the most likely to continue to innovate, rather than merely engage in rent seeking behavior.
Why would you want ARM owned by a "massive" American firm. Is there one that you would trust to keep the evolution of ARM IP at the same rate, while also offering IPRs (ie licensing etc) in a way that continues to encourage innovation in the use and evolution of that IP?
Massive firms are not an inherent Good Thing. There are some benefits due to their ability to invest, but there are also multiple downsides to conglomerates, particularly in strategically vital industries and areas.
Well, it's not that I want it owned by a massive firm, but the fact is that only an extremely large company would be in a position to buy it. I was primarily pointing out that, I'd personally favor it being owned by an American company, because the most obvious alternative is a Chinese one. I can't think of many British/European technology companies who could afford ARM and could justify the price premium.
The alternative would be to go public again. But I think the temptation is too great, and some massive company would take it over. ARM is the kind of company which is much more valuable as a part of a conglomerate than it is as an independent company.
That was my exact reaction. I'm not sure how much I like Nvidia acquiring Arm, but on some level as an American my instinct is to encourage it.
If it is the FTC's actual position that the deal would harm consumers or the industry as a whole, it's certainly admirable that they would ostensibly prioritize that over US strategic interests.
This makes me wonder if their analysis shows that the merger would do sufficient harm within the industry as to actually run counter to US interests. If ARM is shaping up to become a pillar of the Western world/economy while China and its sphere of influence consolidate around RISC-V, then anything that harms Arm's market position is also a geopolitical risk to the West. The US government pushing for such a merger, at a time when China is investing heavily in semiconductor manufacturing capabilities while eyeing a conquest of Taiwan/TSMC, would therefore be shooting itself in the foot. Better to grow the pie than risk blowing it up for a slightly larger slice.
I don't think it's the US strategic interest for Nvidia to own ARM. International corporations don't have any particular loyalty to the country where their corporate HQ is located, and fewer semiconductor companies just mean higher prices and fewer choices. Also the acquisition would accelerate movement by Nvidia's competitors away from ARM. The only pie that is grown by merging two successful companies is the wealth of the stockholders, everyone else is worse off.
Looking at this from the perspective of a US citizen I see it as a very bad merger and I'm glad they're suing to stop it. We need more competition not less. Nvidia doesn't exactly have the best record in serving the public.
"then anything that harms Arm's market position is also a geopolitical risk to the West"
This is some seriously flawed thinking extremely convenient for corporate interests. Mixing up marlets with national security leads to the kind of atrocities that make totalitarian states proud.
"Coca-Cola Co.'s Colombian bottlers are working with death squads to kill, threaten and intimidate plant workers,"
You're not paying attention if you think Nvidia is just a "graphics company". As a chip supplier they are known to be aggressive to the point of bullying and their negotiations tend towards the extortion end of the business spectrum.
I like Nvidia (because I don't have to work with them), but I don't think they are the right steward for ARM in any way.
So the headline should read: Nvidia too much of an asshole to own ARM? Let’s update our laws too. I’m serious, if we don’t want companies to be assholes then we’d need to regulate how they negotiate and a lot of other things.
Caring only about laws and not about reputation of being a good ecosystem partner to others is a recipe for others to look elsewhere. NVIDIA has a really bad rep due to its arrogant behaviour towards customers and other companies (Linux project, Apple). Maybe this ARM drawn out saga is just karma coming back from that.
Nvidia has burned its bridges with a lot of companies over the years (Microsoft comes to mind, i'm pretty sure they will never use an nvidia chip inside an xbox ever again)
For many different reasons too ! Some were a bit petty/misguided :
- Microsoft was mostly contractual on the Xbox, Nvidia didn't want to lower the price of the chips over the lifespan of the 1st Xbox which was a huge no-no. And some technical people also had a terrible experience (some people in the DirectX team had strong thoughts about working with Nvidia).
- Sony was mostly about terrible tech support and not wanting to share enough technical details which hampered AAA devs a whole lot, to the point most ended up using the SPUs in very creative (and technically fascinating) ways to compensate (the GTA V engine on PS3 was truly impressive in that regard).
- There were some minor (but acrimonious) back and forth with Apple over a failing gen of GPUs (G80s if memory serves), but the large fallout came for the same reason as for the rest of the mobile industry : the Kepler licensing initiative.
Long story short, Nvidia tried to assert patents on mobile GPU (ala Microsoft on Android, as a way to "sell" their exit of the mobile market to investors). They then sued Samsung and Qualcomm [1]. Samsung countersued Nvidia, which had to settle as Samsung was close to winning a ban on imports from some Nvidia products [2]. Many of the patents Nvidia tried to assert were thrown out and they had a terrible legal time.
The damage that ill thought strategy did to Nvidia is hard to measure but there's not a single mobile company that wanted that acquisition to go forward and many are probably quite relieved after this.
Companies are sociopaths by definition. You can't stop them being assholes, what you can do is regulate their asshole-ness so that it minimizes that effect on consumers and markets in general.
"Free trade" and "Free markets" has never meant "totally unregulated".
That's completely flawed reasoning that ignores the actual purpose of those things, which is to encourage increased/better supply of products and services to consumers at the best possible price.
Politically, 'big tech' is on the defensive and this is one way for FTC to show some teeth.
That being said, nVidia is currently not playing in ARM's space, so it's hard to argue that this acquisition will harm US consumers or raise prices for them. Hence my feeling is that this is politically motivated, at least to some extent.
Also, we (the US) are entering a period of intense competition with China that may last decades and may even include acts of war. Semiconductors are a key area of competition. More US control of key semiconductor assets is in the US interest. However to be totally fair that doesn't typically concern anti-trust law. But it should concern the current administration and drive some of these decisions about where to focus. It would be very different if this was about social networks and funny cat gifs.
> That being said, nVidia is currently not playing in ARM's space, so it's hard to argue that this acquisition will harm US consumers or raise prices for them. Hence my feeling is that this is politically motivated, at least to some extent.
Huh? They currently use arm designs in the Nintendo switch and their own shield line. They also utilize them in their mellanox Ethernet adapters and network switches. What makes you believe that won't give them a reason to increase prices for competitors that also use ARM chips, if not outright refuse to grant them a license?
The risk is that Nvidia could produce ARM chips themselves without having to pay money while raising the rates on other companies. This could create an unfair advantage for Nvidia and allow them to charge consumers above-current-market rates on ARM chips.
Because it has an extremely HIGH probability of Nvidia being hostile and blocking other companies from getting new or relicensing old licenses. Nvidia is big enough and powerful enough as it is whatever country it is based out of. ARM is much better placed as being independent in the market and not owned by an 800lb gorilla like nvidia.
Maybe they recognize global nature of this issue since Earth has just one Arm, and if it is damaged all people on Earth will be disadvantaged, including Americans, who, even though some of them don't recognize that, live on Earth not planet America.
As a frequently observed phenomenon, no.
The intellectual property and brand which generate revenue for ARM will be held in some other country, so profits can be directed there and no tax payable in the USA.
anything that would improve the US this admin does the opposite 90% of the time. look at the remain in mexico thing which was done away with and now after the epic border fail is going to be stood up again.
People have gotten really into the idea of antitrust without really thinking about what problems "trust-busting" was meant to address or whether it's relevant to the ones they have now. Well, I guess half-baked nostalgia is all the rage these days.
Looking at your other replies your argument seems to boil down to “reasearch needs all the money in the world, consolidation helps with money”, but don’t really address where you think that money will come from, and for what value delivered.
The main concern voiced here is that Nvidia-Arm could get away will less research while earning more money.
That’s basically what happened when Wintel was at peak and there was no viable alternative to Intel chips. They didn’t bring incredible innovation from the ungodly amount of money they gained; they just crushed all their other competitors through various means, got sued, and still made the field plateau for a decade or so before we saw real innovation.
Isn’t it the actual state of play though? At more and more levels there are only one or two players — e.g., ASML, Samsung/TSMC, AMD/Intel, etc. There are lots of others around but they’ve written off cutting-edge business. That’s even though there are a number of exciting developments in hardware going on. I just think the barrier to entry has grown so large that it’s difficult to avoid.
Or others have bought into lassezfaire capitalism to such an extent that they think large companies are amoral entities and therefore get a free pass to do whatever the want and grow larger and larger engulfing and eliminating competition.
Stopping two US companies from merging because it would create a monopoly and negatively impact US consumers is one thing. But this isn't even remotely the case here? Doesn't the US government get more tax revenue if Nvidia makes some extra dough charging royalties for that IP? I’m confused.