I saw a lot of progressives turning into free market libertarians as soon as social media started censoring right wing opinions. Suddenly all I could see was “They’re a private company, they can do what they want!”
It reaffirmed my belief that a healthy portion of either side doesn’t actually have any principles. They just care that their side is winning and the other is losing.
I’m a moderate that a lot of people confuse for a conservative, and I say nail big business to a wall. I think the Microsoft-Activision deal should be declined just on the nature of the size of each business, not because it meets some arbitrary standard of anti-competitive behavior. Businesses as big as Microsoft do not need even bigger market coverage through owning more production houses. The whole point of the anticompetitive corrections is to avoid these giant conglomerates that have their hands in everything.
Microsoft already owns video game production houses. They produce one of the most popular home consoles in the world. They own a lot of the ecosystem that most people use on a daily basis on their pcs, namely Windows OS, Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and more.
Why does one company need to have a bigger market share than this?
That’s kind of the point. We live in a system that is supposed to be “innocent until proven guilty”. Not because people who commit crimes should get away with them, but because the opposite system would be completely untenable. How exactly is he supposed to prove that he is innocent? I don’t care how sure anyone is that he did it. Prove it, or by our legal standard, he must be considered innocent.
If you want to live in a society where accusation is tantamount to fact, you’re going to regret it as soon as anyone says anything about you.