Take for example Comcast buying up all the local ISPs, Disney buying up every media company, and FB acquiring Instagram to eliminate potential competition. These were all very successful acquisitions and the right business decision.
However I'm not convinced they were in the public interest.
Are they making customer experience worse? Sure, Comcast sucks, but when I was dealing with local small isp, I had much much worse experience. Or with fragmentation of streaming, does having more and more content in one streaming service makes my experience worse? Would Instagram be better if they didn’t have power of FB behind them, for things like abuse, spam fighting or infinite deep pockets?
It’s very complex topic, just “big=bad” doesn’t capture it.
I had great experiences with the local small ISP. Faster connection, no need for expensive installers to come try to upsell on a modem.
With Instagram and FB, I wonder what FB would have done to compete with Instagram, they would have had to compete on features or privacy, it would be interesting to see what they came up with, same if they had to compete with rather than just purchase Oculus.
However I'm not convinced they were in the public interest.