Jennifer Lee

Right.

Exactly.

You know, and at the end of the day, it depends on the Department of Justice and the analysis that they do.

This yearlong investigation that's very likely to take place no matter who ends up being the buyer and what their economists find out when they look at the market, what the documents from the companies look like when they're talking about who they think they compete with.

And I think with the Netflix situation, it very much comes down to how the market is defined.

But if the market is defined narrowly in the way I think it ultimately will, and the Department of Justice does tend to define markets narrowly in general, Netflix has a problem.

The president is correct.

It's a big market share.

It is absolutely rules-based.

There's a set of guidelines called the Horizontal Merger Guidelines that the Department of Justice will look to that actually gives it basic mathematics to understand, at least facially, whether a deal is anti-competitive.

And they start by defining a market and then summing the shares in that market.

Now, oftentimes this market definition situation can be dispositive.

because the broader the market it the filters down the shares the combined share isn't as large as it is in a narrower market at least in this situation um and they go through a pretty intensive analysis to make these determinations so it is and they do look at precedent as you suggested and it is rules-based but here's where i go with this when the agencies are looking at deals they are trying to predict the future

Right.

And this is a gray area.

There is no black and white.

Reasonable minds, intelligent minds can differ on what the impact of a deal may be.

So they're doing their best to model out that impact.

And what it means is that there's flexibility there.

There's leeway.