I have been dragged into two court cases where the FTC sued Meta over acquiring tiny VR companies, but I didn’t realize the breadth of the issue — big tech has significantly ramped down acquisitions across the board, which is bad for startups. Founders have been pushed away from IPOs for a long time, and now acquisition exits are being curtailed. The ideological position is that the FTC wants startups to stay independent and compete with the existing big tech companies, but an awful lot of tech dynamism is due to half-decade pushes that end in acquisitions.