There is no "pound for pound" comparison that's relevant here though. A pound of acquisition costs you about 50 pounds of moneyhat, and that's without considering that moneyhats get cheaper the more dominant you are in a market. If a pound of acquisition and a pound of moneyhat cost remotely the same, nobody would ever moneyhat anything ever, because it would be absolutely stupid to do so.
If you wanted to talk about it in a "pound for pound" manner you would count Bethesda as a strike and then Final Fantasy as a strike... and then you'd be totalling a whole different scale of strikes for the practice of moneyhats that'd outnumber acquisitions like 50 to 1 conservatively.
My whole point is that you can't compare them pound for pound as some were, in order to conclude that moneyhats were in fact 'worse' or should raise larger anti-competitive concerns. But that if you were to do so, acquisitions still have additional qualities that raise additional regulatory concerns.
But yeah, that's my entire point - the pound of pound comparison of billions of capex being transferred over to money hats and buying up 'most' third party content or vastly more than the acquisition would, is based on a conjured premise that hasn't ever happened before and wouldn't be feasible.
That isn't to say supply deals shouldn't come under scrutiny from regulators if it's getting to a point of stifling competition, or if shady shit is going on in those deals. But imagining what 69bn could do to supply foreclosure with moneyhats, temporarily or otherwise, in order to conclude moneyhatting would be 'worse', or should trigger the same or more scrutiny from regulators, is flawed. Acquisitions play by a different financial calculus and have different potential foreclosure effects long term, and you have to loosen both those things to speculate about a moneyhat scenario that's 'worse' - or certainly, IMO, that's worse than a scenario of ongoing acquisitions and consolidation into the future vs ongoing 'moneyhatting' at the kind of levels we've seen sofar.