The Year Efficiency Became a Justification

Technology megadeals did not surge in 2025 because the industry suddenly discovered synergy. They surged because the regulatory perimeter moved. Cheap liquidity, fading geopolitical friction, and abundant private capital helped, but the inflection came from Washington. The Technology Innovation & Competition Order narrowed antitrust to a single test—“clear consumer harm”—erasing the structural doctrine that traditionally kept dominant platforms in check. With that shift, scale became not an outcome but a permission structure.

• Informatica into Salesforce.
• MeridianLink into Centerbridge.
• CoreCard into Euronet.

Different verticals, same logic: build larger stacks, deepen ecosystem control, and convert integration into pricing power. Deregulation didn’t unleash innovation; it unleashed consolidation dressed as innovation.

Choreography — Deregulation Turned Integration Into a Virtue

The deregulated stack was built through a simple choreography: call consolidation “innovation,” frame lock-in as “consumer convenience,” and treat recurring revenue as the metric of market health.

Antitrust once examined how power accumulates across layers—cloud, data, payments, enterprise software. In 2025, those layers were treated as separate universes unless a direct, immediate consumer injury could be demonstrated. That threshold was functionally impossible to meet for backend technologies.

Data integration inside Salesforce presented no obvious price spike to a household. Payments infrastructure consolidation inside Euronet produced no direct charge on a user’s bank statement. And fintech platform roll-ups under private equity ownership created no visible consumer outcry. The regulatory aperture closed around what could be seen, not what could be predicted.

Case Field — Three Deals, One Blueprint

Informatica → Salesforce strengthened the gravitational pull of the Salesforce ecosystem. Data integration, analytics, identity management, CRM, and workflow all fused into a single enterprise spine. What looks like “product synergy” on an investor deck is actually ecosystem enclosure—the deeper a company’s data sinks into Salesforce, the higher the switching costs.

MeridianLink → Centerbridge Partners tightened private equity’s grip on the fintech infrastructure that powers digital lending. With unified capital and product strategy, the merged entity becomes an invisible toll booth—extracting fees upstream in ways consumers never see directly.

CoreCard → Euronet Worldwide consolidated payments rails. Faster processing, fewer outages, stronger fraud detection—real gains, but gains that stabilize the network while preserving merchant fee stickiness. Consumers receive reliability, investors receive margin.

Consumer Lens — Convenience Without Price Relief

For consumers, tech megadeals deliver an intuitive upgrade: things work better. Payment failures fall. Fraud detection strengthens. Digital experiences become more seamless as data flows more predictably across the stack. The ecosystem feels smoother because friction has been engineered out at scale. But convenience is not affordability. The consolidation that improves infrastructure also hardens pricing structures.

Subscription costs in SaaS remain resilient. App store fees remain firm. Cloud pricing stays opaque. Merchant fees—one of the most persistent inflationary forces in digital commerce—rarely fall after backend consolidation. Consumers experience improvement as usability, not as savings. The deregulated stack is engineered for reliability, not relief.

Investor Lens — The Dawn of Recurrence as Sovereignty

For investors, 2025’s tech megadeals delivered the most prized resource in the digital economy: locked recurring revenue. When a platform owns more layers of the stack, churn collapses. When churn collapses, pricing power strengthens. When pricing strengthens, equity stories write themselves.

Enterprise software investors track ARR growth, not whether downstream consumers pay less for cloud services. Payments investors track take-rate stability, not whether merchant fees fall. Private equity tracks EBITDA expansion through operational streamlining, not whether digital lending becomes cheaper for households. The deregulated stack is not a story about innovation—it is a story about control. The more layers a firm controls, the more predictable its cash flows become and the more insulated it is from competitive pressure.

Narrative Layer — Deregulation Reframed as Innovation

What binds the deregulated stack together is narrative. By declaring innovation the north star and narrowing harm to price spikes, regulators allowed firms to redefine consolidation as advancement. Salesforce’s acquisition becomes “data democratization.” Payments consolidation becomes “network modernization.” Fintech roll-ups become “financial inclusion.” The rhetoric converts structural risk into consumer progress. In a deregulated environment, whoever controls the narrative controls the outcome.

Affordability Pass-Through — The Void at the Center of the Stack

The core failure is simple: nothing in the deregulated stack forces efficiencies to flow downstream. The architecture rewards firms for consolidating layers and penalizes them only when harm is immediate and visible. But most harm in digital markets is neither immediate nor visible—it accrues through pricing opacity, long-term switching costs, and the erosion of competitive alternatives.

Conclusion

The technology megadeals of 2025 did not create a more innovative landscape; they created a more consolidated one. They delivered smoother digital experiences but hardened the economic logic of enclosure. They improved reliability but entrenched subscription and transaction fee structures. They expanded the power of platforms while narrowing the degrees of freedom available to consumers and smaller competitors.

This is choreography—precise, engineered, and increasingly difficult to reverse. And we are not predicting where it leads. We are mapping the landscape as it shifts beneath our feet.