phanbueyMonopolistic Mergers are not allowed to occur. Microsoft never MERGED to become a monopoly, they became one due to ultracompetitive business practices, therefore a merger could have never been prevented since one never took place. OIL companies HAVE been split. Mobil, Exxon, Chevron (and e few others) now have no ties to each other. But they used to be one big company called Standard Oil - the biggest monopoly in history of monopolies. OPEC, on the other hand, is not under US jurisdiction, otherwise they would be guilty of price fixing, and would be disbanded.

My comment before is slightly incorrect and does not take into account all the legal technicalities associated with mergers. But if nVidia wants to continue trading on the US market, they would not be allowed to buy out AMD.

You are quite right however, they can occur in certain circumstances, I am not suggesting this would be one of those circumstances but for example, if the merged company were losing money and possibly faced closure of business then it might be allowed......because, if it ceased to trade that in itself would result in a monopoly etc etc if you get my meaning, also another way to get round this could be not to sell a company but to sell a division or sub division of a company......you may notice there is a trend here that may fulfill requirements as I beleive ATi is no longer a company but a division of a company and it too is working at a loss........is this pure speculation or a clever move by AMD? :D

I dunno.. I would have liked to see NVIDIA and AMD merge. AMD has some kickass processors for the price, and when combined with NVIDIA, delivers sick performance. Althought there are nice ATI cards too.. I think AMD took a big loss, and just now starting to make some of the money back, not as profit though, but for financial loss payoffs..