#281: Should companies be allowed to acquire their start-up competitors?

Tech Policy Podcast

TechFreedom

Technology

4.8 • 45 Ratings

🗓️ 8 December 2020

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Policymakers across the political spectrum are using antitrust law to attack established companies’ acquisitions of smaller competitors. But are these “nascent acquisitions” inherently harmful? Asheesh Agarwal, TechFreedom’s deputy general counsel and competition counsel, and Andy Jung, a law clerk at TechFreedom, join the show to provide some historical context. They argue that nascent acquisitions often benefit both entrepreneurs and consumers. For more, see their new paper, The Long and Successful History of Nascent Acquisitions Suggests Caution in Rethinking Antitrust Enforcement.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast.
0:09.0	I'm Corbyn Barthold, Internet Policy Council at Tech Freedom.
0:14.0	Happy to be hosting today.
0:16.0	We'll be talking about a very important area of antitrust law, nascent acquisitions, and the insipiency doctrine.
0:25.2	I'm joined by Ashish Agarwal, Tech Freedom's Deputy General Counsel, and more to the point
0:31.3	today, our Competition Council. He is a veteran of the FTC and former general counsel of the Social Security Administration,
0:40.1	among other posts.
0:42.0	I'm also joined by Andy Young.
0:44.0	He's a law clerk here at Tech Freedom and a 3L at George Mason's Antonin Scalia Law School.
0:51.2	Ashish and Andy have a great new paper out.
1:03.0	It's called The Long and Successful History of Nason Acquisitions suggests caution in rethinking antitrust enforcement. You can find their paper at Tech Freedom's website on SSRN, the Social Science Research Network.
1:11.6	I bet we will also get a copy of it into the show notes.
1:15.6	Thanks for coming on, guys.
1:18.6	It's a great paper.
1:21.6	What led you to write it now?
1:25.6	Well, first of all, Corbin, thank you so much for hosting this. But let us to
1:30.2	write the paper was a desire to provide some historical perspective on this nascent competition
1:37.1	concept that has been in the news quite a bit that's been talking, talked about by policymakers.
1:45.5	And with the growth of big tech in particular in recent years,
1:51.0	there seems to be the sense that what big technology companies are doing in terms of acquiring,
1:58.6	you know, smaller companies is somehow, you know, a brand new business
2:03.5	practice that deserves new scrutiny and perhaps even might require new, you know,
	...

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