Catherine Rampell

They had their big hit with Roomba.

The company is called iRobot.

They had their big hit with Roomba in the early 2000s.

And there were all of these viral videos of cats and babies riding around on these little robots.

By the 2020s, they were facing more intense competition.

from Chinese vacuum makers, and they plan to sell themselves to Amazon for like $1.4 billion.

And of course, the left was very upset about this because Amazon, big, bad company, they're not allowed to buy anything because big is bad.

There's like this whole theory of the case on the left and the neo-Brandeisians.

And there were all of these like crazy, almost conspiracy theories about, oh, well, Amazon's going to like have the map to your living room and that's going to be really bad.

Oh, you're laughing, but it's seriously true.

Like, you know, because they couldn't really come up with a traditional consumer welfare based argument for why it would be so bad of Amazon, which didn't already have a robot manufacturing.

Yes, exactly.

So the FTC in the United States wanted to take this down.

They didn't really have the legal tools to do so.

There's some evidence that they coordinated with their European counterparts who have a much broader remit.

The Europeans basically blocked this merger.

Meanwhile, iRobot was like, hey, guys, we're like maybe going to go out of business if this merger doesn't go through.

Amazon ultimately abandoned it because it was clear that it was going to get blocked.

You know, like I said, it would have been tough to win in U.S.

courts, but in the EU, it works differently.