No economy can be in true equilibrium when the consumers send profits to be spent in unforeseen and unrelated ways like this. Every purchase carries potentially immense future costs that are almost completely opaque.
Free market maximalists need to confront this fact before praying at the altar of complete deregulation, and every consumer should pay more attention to who they are buying from.
I mean of course I think the outcome here is bad, but I’m struggling to think of a kind of regulation that could have prevented it that isn’t completely insane.
Edit: Listen everyone, it sucks, but there's no "one weird trick" where you can have a congress, judiciary, and executive branch dominated by Republicans, that then governs like Democrats. This isn't a "regulation" problem. It's a "roughly half the country wanted this" problem. Adding more regulations is not going to suddenly make the FTC act right; we have thousands of regulations already on the books and if they wanted to do something, they could.
The FTC is responsible for enforcing regulations that would prevent mergers that negatively impact the quality of services and innovation. They aren't doing their job.