U.S. intelligence intervened with DOJ to push HPE-Juniper merger

Impact on competition and startups

• Some commenters hope mega-mergers create space for “scrappy upstarts,” but others argue large incumbents usually just buy and dismantle them.
• In enterprise/service-provider networking, upstarts face huge barriers: required features, certifications, integration with existing IT, and heavy reliance on vendor reputation.
• Employee ownership and tighter regulation (e.g., higher corporate tax, banning stock buybacks) are suggested as structural responses to corporate concentration.

Telecom/networking market realities

• Juniper’s business has shifted toward enterprise campuses, driven by the success of Mist (originally a small company acquired by Juniper).
• Mist is cited as an atypical success: founded by highly connected industry veterans, and it only scaled once backed by a major vendor. “Normal” greenfield startups in this space are described as very rare.
• Some see Ericsson, not HPE/Juniper, as the more obvious Western counterweight to Huawei, making the national-security justification for this merger seem indirect.

National security vs crony capitalism

• One view: interventions are mainly about favoring politically connected US firms and channeling public money to “national champion” corporations (defense contractors, big telcos, cloud providers, etc.).
• Another view: Huawei’s proven IP theft and security issues make this a genuine geopolitical struggle (Pax Americana vs a China-led order), not just market-rigging.
• There’s disagreement over US vs Chinese tech capability: some say the US can’t keep up; others counter that most cutting‑edge computing tech has historically come from the US.

Trust in US networking vendors

• Several note that allies now assume US gear may be as compromised as Chinese gear.
• Snowden-era router interception is recalled, with debate over whether vendors were willing partners or victims of covert diversion.
• The broader sentiment: intelligence services will always try to infiltrate traffic; security design must assume partial compromise.

Juniper, HPE, and security history

• Juniper’s past use of Dual EC in VPN products, and later substitution of a different backdoor point by attackers, is cited as a red flag—and as a possible reason intelligence agencies value the company.
• A counterpoint claims some of this predates Juniper’s acquisition of the original product line, so blame on current management may be overstated.
• HPE is criticized for “killing” many past acquisitions and for prior ties to Chinese ventures; some speculate Juniper could be slowly weakened or neutralized post‑merger.

Antitrust, DOJ, and politicization

• The linked Bloomberg reporting about removal of top DOJ antitrust officials over the settlement is seen as evidence of heavy political/intelligence influence on merger review.
• Some commenters argue courts and regulators largely serve business interests; others broaden this into a discussion of partisan “weaponization” and projection (“every accusation is a confession”).
• The thread drifts into mutual accusations of hypocrisy between US political factions, with concern that normalized cynicism about “government is bad” makes such interventions easier to justify and harder to challenge.