Archives For monopolization

Hey Hey! Ho Ho! Partial De Facto Exclusive Dealing Claims Have Got to Go!

Thom Lambert —  27 March 2013

Today, a group of eighteen scholars, of which I am one, filed an amicus brief encouraging the Supreme Court to review a Court of Appeals decision involving loyalty rebates.  The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit recently upheld an antitrust judgment based on a defendant’s loyalty rebates even though the rebates resulted in above-cost prices for the defendant’s products and could have been matched by an equally efficient rival.  The court did so because it decided that the defendant’s overall selling practices, which involved no exclusivity commitments by buyers, had resulted in “partial de facto exclusive dealing” and thus were not subject to the price-cost test set forth in Brooke Group.  (For the uniniated, Brooke Group immunizes price cuts that result in above-cost prices for the discounter’s goods.)  We amici, who were assembled by Michigan Law’s Dan Crane, believe the Third Circuit’s decision threatens to chill proconsumer discounting practices and should be overruled.

The defendant in the case, Eaton, manufactures transmissions for big trucks (semis, cement trucks, etc.).  So did plaintiff Meritor.  Eaton and Meritor sold their products to the four manufacturers of big trucks.  Those “OEMs” installed the transmissions into the trucks they sold to end-user buyers, who typically customized their trucks and thus could select whatever transmissions they wanted.  Meritor claimed that Eaton drove it from the market by entering into purportedly exclusionary ”long-term agreements” (LTAs) with the four OEMs.  The agreements did not require the OEMs to purchase any particular amount of Eaton’s products, but they did provide the OEMs with rebates (resulting in above-cost prices) if they bought high percentages of their requirements from Eaton.  The agreements also provided that Eaton could terminate the agreements if the market share targets were not met. Each LTA contained a “competitiveness clause” that allowed the OEM to purchase transmissions from another supplier without counting the purchases against the share target, or to terminate the LTA altogether, if another supplier offered a lower price or better product and Eaton could not match that offering.  Following adoption of the LTAs, Eaton’s market share grew, and Meritor’s shrank.  Before withdrawing from the U.S. market altogether, Meritor filed an antitrust action against Eaton.

Eaton insisted, not surprisingly, that it had simply engaged in hard competition.  It grew its market share by offering a lower price that an equally efficient rival could have matched.  Meritor’s failure, then, resulted from either its relative inefficiency or its unwillingness to lower its price to the level of its cost.  By immunizing above-cost discounted prices from liability, the Brooke Group rule permits and encourages the sort of competition in which Eaton engaged, and it should, the company argued, control here.

The Third Circuit disagreed.  This was not, the court said, a simple case of price discounting.  Instead, Eaton had engaged in what the court called “partial de facto exclusive dealing.”  The exclusive dealing was “partial”  because OEMs could purchase some transmissions from other suppliers and still obtain Eaton’s loyalty rebates (i.e., complete exclusivity was not required).  It was “de facto” because purchasing exclusively (or nearly exclusively) from Eaton was not contractually required but was instead simply the precondition for earning a rebate.  Nonetheless, reasoned the court, the gravamen of Meritor’s complaint was some sort of exclusive dealing, which is evaluated not under Brooke Group but instead under a rule of reason that focuses on the degree to which the seller’s practices foreclose its rivals from available sales opportunities.  Under that test, the court concluded, the judgment against Eaton could be upheld.  After all, Eaton’s sales practices won lots of business from Meritor, whose sales eventually shrunk so much that the company exited the market.

As we amici point out in our brief to the Supreme Court, the Third Circuit ignored the fact that it was Eaton’s discounts that led OEMs to buy so much from the company (and forego its rival’s offerings).  Absent an actual promise to buy a high level of one’s requirements from a seller, any “exclusive dealing” resulting from a loyalty rebate scheme results from the fact that buyers voluntarily choose to patronize the seller over its competitors because the discounter’s products are cheaper.  In other words, low pricing is the very means by which any “exclusivity” — and, hence, any market foreclosure — is achieved.  Any claim alleging that an agreement not mandating a certain level of purchases but instead providing for loyalty rebates results in “partial de facto exclusive dealing” is therefore, at its heart, a complaint about price competition.  Accordingly, it should be subject to the Brooke Group screening test for discounts resulting in above-cost pricing.

The Third Circuit wrongly insisted that Eaton had done something more sinister than win business by offering above-cost loyalty rebates.  It concluded that Eaton “essentially forced” the four OEMs (who likely had a good bit of buyer market power themselves) to accept its terms by threatening “financial penalties or supply shortages.”  But these purported “penalties” and threats of “supply shortages” appear nowhere in the record.

The only “penalty” an OEM would have incurred by failing to meet a purchase target is the denial of a rebate from Eaton.  If that’s enough to make Brooke Group inapplicable, then any conditional price cut resulting in an above-cost price falls outside the decision’s safe harbor, for failure to meet the discount condition would subject buyers to a “penalty.”  Proconsumer price competition would surely be chilled by such an evisceration of Brooke Group.  As for threats of supply shortages, the only thing Meritor and the Third Circuit could point to was Eaton’s contractual right to cancel its LTAs if OEMs failed to meet purchase targets.  But if that were enough to make Brooke Group inapplicable, then the decision’s price-cost test could never apply when a dominant seller offers a conditional rebate or discount.  Because the seller could refuse in the future to supply buyers who fail to qualify for the discount, there would be, under the Third Circuit’s reasoning, not just a loyalty rebate but also an implicit threat of “supply shortages” for buyers that fail to meet the seller’s purchase targets.

This is not the first case in which a plaintiff has sought to evade a price-cost test, and thereby impose liability on a discounting scheme that would otherwise pass muster, by seeking to recharacterize the defendant’s conduct.  A few years back, a plaintiff (Masimo) sought to evade the Ninth Circuit’s PeaceHealth decision, which creates a Brooke Group-like safe harbor for certain bundled discounts that could not exclude equally efficient rivals, by construing the defendant’s conduct as “de facto exclusive dealing.”  Dan Crane and I participated as amici in that case as well.

I won’t speak for Dan, but I for one am getting tired of working on these briefs!  It’s time for the Supreme Court to clarify that prevailing price-cost safe harbors cannot be evaded simply through the use of creative labels like “partial de facto exclusive dealing.”  Hopefully, the Court will heed our recommendation that it review — and overrule — the Third Circuit’s Meritor decision.

[In case you're interested, the other scholars signing the brief urging cert in Meritor are Ken Elzinga (Virginia Econ), Richard Epstein (NYU and Chicago Law), Jerry Hausman (MIT Econ), Rebecca Haw (Vanderbilt Law), Herb Hovenkamp (Iowa Law), Glenn Hubbard (Columbia Business), Keith Hylton (Boston U Law), Bill Kovacic (GWU Law), Alan Meese (Wm & Mary Law), Tom Morgan (GWU Law), Barak Orbach (Arizona Law), Bill Page (Florida Law), Robert Pindyck (MIT Econ), Edward Snyder (Yale Mgt), Danny Sokol (Florida Law), and Robert Topel (Chicago Business).]

In antitrust, economics, exclusionary conduct, exclusive dealing, law and economics, monopolization, regulation, Supreme Court
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Meese on Bork (and the AALS)

Thom Lambert —  22 December 2012

William & Mary’s Alan Meese has posted a terrific tribute to Robert Bork, who passed away this week.  Most of the major obituaries, Alan observes, have largely ignored the key role
Bork played in rationalizing antitrust, a body of law that veered sharply off course in the middle of the last century.  Indeed, Bork began his 1978 book, The Antitrust Paradox, by comparing the then-prevailing antitrust regime to the sheriff of a frontier town:  “He did not sift the evidence, distinguish between suspects, and solve crimes, but merely walked the main street and every so often pistol-whipped a few people.”  Bork went on to explain how antitrust, if focused on consumer welfare (which equated with allocative efficiency), could be reconceived in a coherent fashion.

It is difficult to overstate the significance of Bork’s book and his earlier writings on which it was based.  Chastened by Bork’s observations, the Supreme Court began correcting its antitrust mistakes in the mid-1970s.  The trend began with the 1977 Sylvania decision, which overruled a precedent making it per se illegal for manufacturers to restrict the territories in which their dealers could operate.  (Manufacturers seeking to enhance sales of their brand may wish to give dealers exclusive sales territories to protect them against “free-riding” on their demand-enhancing customer services; pre-Sylvania precedent made it hard for manufacturers to do this.)  Sylvania was followed by:

  • Professional Engineers (1978), which helpfully clarified that antitrust’s theretofore unwieldy ”Rule of Reason” must be focused exclusively on competition;
  • Broadcast Music, Inc. (1979), which held that competitors’ price-tampering arrangements that reduce costs and enhance output may be legal;
  • NCAA (1984), which recognized that trade restraints among competitors may be necessary to create new products and services and thereby made it easier for competitors to enter into output-enhancing joint ventures;
  • Khan (1997), which abolished the ludicrous per se rule against maximum resale price maintenance;
  • Trinko (2004), which recognized that some monopoly pricing may aid consumers in the long run (by enhancing the incentive to innovate) and narrowly circumscribed the situations in which a firm has a duty to assist its rivals; and
  • Leegin (2007), which overruled a 96 year-old precedent declaring minimum resale price maintenance–a practice with numerous potential procompetitive benefits–to be per se illegal.

Bork’s fingerprints are all over these decisions.  Alan’s terrific post discusses several of them and provides further detail on Bork’s influence.

And while you’re checking out Alan’s Bork tribute, take a look at his recent post discussing my musings on the AALS hiring cartel.  Alan observes that AALS’s collusive tendencies reach beyond the lateral hiring context.  Who’d have guessed?

In antitrust, cartels, law and economics, legal scholarship, markets, monopolization, regulation, resale price maintenance, Supreme Court
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Section 5 of the FTC Act and monopolization cases: A brief primer

Geoffrey Manne —  26 November 2012

Co-authored with Berin Szoka

In the past two weeks, Members of Congress from both parties have penned scathing letters to the FTC warning of the consequences (both to consumers and the agency itself) if the Commission sues Google not under traditional antitrust law, but instead by alleging unfair competition under Section 5 of the FTC Act. The FTC is rumored to be considering such a suit, and FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz and Republican Commissioner Tom Rosch have expressed a desire to litigate such a so-called “pure” Section 5 antitrust case — one not adjoining a cause of action under the Sherman Act. Unfortunately for the Commissioners, no appellate court has upheld such an action since the 1960s.

This brewing standoff is reminiscent of a similar contest between Congress and the FTC over the Commission’s aggressive use of Section 5 in consumer protection cases in the 1970s. As Howard Beales recounts, the FTC took an expansive view of its authority and failed to produce guidelines or limiting principles to guide its growing enforcement against “unfair” practices — just as today it offers no limiting principles or guidelines for antitrust enforcement under the Act. Only under heavy pressure from Congress, including a brief shutdown of the agency (and significant public criticism for becoming the “National Nanny“), did the agency finally produce a Policy Statement on Unfairness — which Congress eventually codified by statute.

Given the attention being paid to the FTC’s antitrust authority under Section 5, we thought it would be helpful to offer a brief primer on the topic, highlighting why we share the skepticism expressed by the letter-writing members of Congress (along with many other critics).

The topic has come up, of course, in the context of the FTC’s case against Google. The scuttlebut is that the Commission believes it may not be able to bring and win a traditional, Section 2 antitrust action, and so may resort to Section 5 to make its case — or simply force a settlement, as the FTC did against Intel in late 2010. While it may be Google’s head on the block today, it could be anyone’s tomorrow. This isn’t remotely just about Google; it’s about broader concerns over the Commission’s use of Section 5 to prosecute monopolization cases without being subject to the rigorous economic standards of traditional antitrust law.

Background on Section 5

Section 5 has two “prongs.” The first, reflected in its prohibition of “unfair acts or deceptive acts or practices” (UDAP) is meant (and has previously been used—until recently, as explained) as a consumer protection statute. The other, prohibiting “unfair methods of competition” (UMC) has, indeed, been interpreted to have relevance to competition cases.

Most commonly (and commonly-accepted), the UMC language has been viewed to authorize the agency to bring cases that fill the gaps between clearly anticompetitive conduct and the language of the Sherman Act. Principally, this has been invoked in “invitation to collude” cases, which raise the spectre of price-fixing but nevertheless do not meet the literal prohibition against “agreement in restraint of trade” under Section 1 of the Sherman Act.

Over strenuous objections from dissenting Commissioners (and only in consent decrees; not before courts), the FTC has more recently sought to expand the reach of the UDAP language beyond the consumer protection realm to address antitrust concerns that would likely be non-starters under the Sherman Act.

In N-Data, the Commission brought and settled a case invoking both the UDAP and UMC prongs of Section 5 to reach (alleged) conduct that amounted to breach of a licensing agreement without the requisite (Sherman Act) Section 2 claim of exclusionary conduct (which would have required that the FTC show that N-Data’s conducted had the effect of excluding its rivals without efficiency or welfare-enhancing properties). Although the FTC’s claims fall outside the ambit of Section 2, the Commission’s invocation of Section 5’s UDAP language was so broad that it could — quite improperly — be employed to encompass traditional Section 2 claims nonetheless, but without the rigor Section 2 requires (as the vigorous dissents by Commissioners Kovacic and Majoras discuss). As Commissioner Kovacic wrote in his dissent:

[T]he framework that the [FTC's] Analysis presents for analyzing the challenged conduct as an unfair act or practice would appear to encompass all behavior that could be called a UMC or a violation of the Sherman or Clayton Acts. The Commission’s discussion of the UAP [sic] liability standard accepts the view that all business enterprises – including large companies – fall within the class of consumers whose injury is a worthy subject of unfairness scrutiny. If UAP coverage extends to the full range of business-to-business transactions, it would seem that the three-factor test prescribed for UAP analysis would capture all actionable conduct within the UMC prohibition and the proscriptions of the Sherman and Clayton Acts. Well-conceived antitrust cases (or UMC cases) typically address instances of substantial actual or likely harm to consumers. The FTC ordinarily would not prosecute behavior whose adverse effects could readily be avoided by the potential victims – either business entities or natural persons. And the balancing of harm against legitimate business justifications would encompass the assessment of procompetitive rationales that is a core element of a rule of reason analysis in cases arising under competition law.

In Intel, the most notorious of the recent FTC Section 5 antitrust actions, the Commission brought (and settled) a straightforward (if unwinnable) Section 2 case as a Section 5 case (with Section 2 “tag along” claims), using the justification that it simply couldn’t win a Section 2 case under current jurisprudence. Intel presumably settled the case because the absence of judicial limits under Section 5 made its outcome far less certain — and presumably the FTC brought the case under Section 5 for the same reason.

In Intel, there was no effort to distinguish Section 5 grounds from those under Section 2. Rather, the FTC claimed that the limiting jurisprudence under Section 2 wasn’t meant to rein in agencies, but merely private plaintiffs. This claim falls flat, as one of us (Geoff) has noted:

[Chairman] Leibowitz’ continued claim that courts have reined in Sherman Act jurisprudence only out of concern with the incentives and procedures of private enforcement, and not out of a concern with a more substantive balancing of error costs—errors from which the FTC is not, unfortunately immune—seems ridiculous to me. To be sure (as I said before), the procedural background matters as do the incentives to bring cases that may prove to be inefficient.

But take, for example, Twombly, mentioned by Leibowitz as one of the cases that has recently reined in Sherman Act enforcement in order to constrain overzealous private enforcement (and thus not in a way that should apply to government enforcement). . . .

But the over-zealousness of private plaintiffs is not all [Twombly] was about, as the Court made clear:

The inadequacy of showing parallel conduct or interdependence, without more, mirrors the ambiguity of the behavior: consistent with conspiracy, but just as much in line with a wide swath of rational and competitive business strategy unilaterally prompted by common perceptions of the market. Accordingly, we have previously hedged against false inferences from identical behavior at a number of points in the trial sequence.

Hence, when allegations of parallel conduct are set out in order to make a §1 claim, they must be placed in a context that raises a suggestion of a preceding agreement, not merely parallel conduct that could just as well be independent action. [Citations omitted].

The Court was appropriately concerned with the ability of decision-makers to separate pro-competitive from anticompetitive conduct. Even when the FTC brings cases, it and the court deciding the case must make these determinations. And, while the FTC may bring fewer strike suits, it isn’t limited to challenging conduct that is simple to identify as anticompetitive. Quite the opposite, in fact—the government has incentives to develop and bring suits proposing novel theories of anticompetitive conduct and of enforcement (as it is doing in the Intel case, for example).

Problems with Unleashing Section 5

It would be a serious problem — as the Members of Congress who’ve written letters seem to realize — if Section 5 were used to sidestep the important jurisprudential limitations on Section 2 by focusing on such unsupported theories as “reduction in consumer choice” instead of Section 2’s well-established consumer welfare standard. As Geoff has noted:

Following Sherman Act jurisprudence, traditionally the FTC has understood (and courts have demanded) that antitrust enforcement . . . requires demonstrable consumer harm to apply. But this latest effort reveals an agency pursuing an interpretation of Section 5 that would give it unprecedented and largely-unchecked authority. In particular, the definition of “unfair” competition wouldn’t be confined to the traditional antitrust measures — reduction in output or an output-reducing increase in price — but could expand to, well, just about whatever the agency deems improper.

* * *

One of the most important shifts in antitrust over the past 30 years has been the move away from indirect and unreliable proxies of consumer harm toward a more direct, effects-based analysis. Like the now archaic focus on market concentration in the structure-conduct-performance framework at the core of “old” merger analysis, the consumer choice framework [proposed by Commissioner Rosch as a cause of action under Section 5] substitutes an indirect and deeply flawed proxy for consumer welfare for assessment of economically relevant economic effects. By focusing on the number of choices, the analysis shifts attention to the wrong question.

The fundamental question from an antitrust perspective is whether consumer choice is a better predictor of consumer outcomes than current tools allow. There doesn’t appear to be anything in economic theory to suggest that it would be. Instead, it reduces competitive analysis to a single attribute of market structure and appears susceptible to interpretations that would sacrifice a meaningful measure of consumer welfare (incorporating assessment of price, quality, variety, innovation and other amenities) on economically unsound grounds. It is also not the law.

Commissioner Kovacic echoed this in his dissent in N-Data:

More generally, it seems that the Commission’s view of unfairness would permit the FTC in the future to plead all of what would have been seen as competition-related infringements as constituting unfair acts or practices.

And the same concerns animate Kovacic’s belief (drawn from an article written with then-Attorney Advisor Mark Winerman) that courts will continue to look with disapproval on efforts by the FTC to expand its powers:

We believe that UMC should be a competition-based concept, in the modern sense of fostering improvements in economic performance rather than equating the health of the competitive process with the wellbeing of individual competitors, per se. It should not, moreover, rely on the assertion in [the Supreme Court’s 1972 Sperry & Hutchinson Trading Stamp case] that the Commission could use its UMC authority to reach practices outside both the letter and spirit of the antitrust laws. We think the early history is now problematic, and we view the relevant language in [Sperry & Hutchinson] with skepticism.

Representatives Eshoo and Lofgren were even more direct in their letter:

Expanding the FTC’s Section 5 powers to include antitrust matters could lead to overbroad authority that amplifies uncertainty and stifles growth. . . . If the FTC intends to litigate under this interpretation of Section 5, we strongly urge the FTC to reconsider.

But it isn’t only commentators and Congressmen who point to this limitation. The FTC Act itself contains such a limitation. Section 5(n) of the Act, the provision added by Congress in 1994 to codify the core principles of the FTC’s 1980 Unfairness Policy Statement, says that:

The Commission shall have no authority under this section or section 57a of this title to declare unlawful an act or practice on the grounds that such act or practice is unfair unless the act or practice causes or is likely to cause substantial injury to consumers which is not reasonably avoidable by consumers themselves and not outweighed by countervailing benefits to consumers or to competition. [Emphasis added].

In other words, Congress has already said, quite clearly, that Section 5 isn’t a blank check. Yet Chairman Leibowitz seems to be banking on the dearth of direct judicial precedent saying so to turn it into one — as do those who would cheer on a Section 5 antitrust case (against Google, Intel or anyone else). Given the unique breadth of the FTC’s jurisdiction over the entire economy, the agency would again threaten to become a second national legislature, capable of regulating nearly the entire economy.

The Commission has tried — and failed — to bring such cases before the courts in recent years. But the judiciary has not been receptive to an invigoration of Section 5 for several reasons. Chief among these is that the agency simply hasn’t defined the scope of its power over unfair competition under the Act, and the courts hesitate to let the Commission set the limits of its own authority. As Kovacic and Winerman have noted:

The first [reason for judicial reluctance in Section 5 cases] is judicial concern about the apparent absence of limiting principles. The tendency of the courts has been to endorse limiting principles that bear a strong resemblance to standards familiar to them from Sherman Act and Clayton Act cases. The cost-benefit concepts devised in rule of reason cases supply the courts with natural default rules in the absence of something better.

The Commission has done relatively little to inform judicial thinking, as the agency has not issued guidelines or policy statements that spell out its own view about the appropriate analytical framework. This inactivity contrasts with the FTC’s efforts to use policy statements to set boundaries for the application of its consumer protection powers under Section 5.

This concern was stressed in the letter sent by Senator DeMint and other Republican Senators to Chairman Leibowitz:

[W]e are concerned about the apparent eagerness of the Commission under your leadership to expand Section 5 actions without a clear indication of authority or a limiting principle. When a federal regulatory agency uses creative theories to expand its activities, entrepreneurs may be deterred from innovating and growing lest they be targeted by government action.

As we have explained many times (see, e.g., here, here and here), a Section 2 case against Google will be an uphill battle. As far as we have seen publicly, complainants have offered only harm to competitors — not harm to consumers — to justify such a case. It is little surprise, then, that the agency (or, more accurately, Chairman Leibowitz and Commissioner Rosch) may be seeking to use the less-limited power of Section 5 to mount such a case.

In a blog post in 2011, Geoff wrote:

Commissioner Rosch has claimed that Section Five could address conduct that has the effect of “reducing consumer choice” — an effect that a very few commentators support without requiring any evidence that the conduct actually reduces consumer welfare. Troublingly, “reducing consumer choice” seems to be a euphemism for “harm to competitors, not competition,” where the reduction in choice is the reduction of choice of competitors who may be put out of business by competitive behavior.

The U.S. has a long tradition of resisting enforcement based on harm to competitors without requiring a commensurate, strong showing of harm to consumers — an economically-sensible tradition aimed squarely at minimizing the likelihood of erroneous enforcement. The FTC’s invigorated interest in Section Five contemplates just such wrong-headed enforcement, however, to the inevitable detriment of the very consumers the agency is tasked with protecting.

In fact, the theoretical case against Google depends entirely on the ways it may have harmed certain competitors rather than on any evidence of actual harm to consumers (and in the face of ample evidence of significant consumer benefits).

* * *

In each of [the complaints against Google], the problem is that the claimed harm to competitors does not demonstrably translate into harm to consumers.

For example, Google’s integration of maps into its search results unquestionably offers users an extremely helpful presentation of these results, particularly for users of mobile phones. That this integration might be harmful to MapQuest’s bottom line is not surprising — but nor is it a cause for concern if the harm flows from a strong consumer preference for Google’s improved, innovative product. The same is true of the other claims. . . .

To the extent that the FTC brings an antitrust case against Google under Section 5, using the Act to skirt the jurisprudential limitations (and associated economic rigor) that make a Section 2 case unwinnable, it would be contravening congressional intent, judicial precedent, the plain language of the FTC Act, and the collected wisdom of the antitrust commentariat that sees such an action as inappropriate. This includes not just traditional antitrust-skeptics like us, but even antitrust-enthusiasts like Allen Grunes, who has written:

The FTC, of course, has Section 5 authority. But there is well-developed case law on monopolization under Section 2 of the Sherman Act. There are no doctrinal “gaps” that need to be filled. For that reason it would be inappropriate, in my view, to use Section 5 as a crutch if the evidence is insufficient to support a case under Section 2.

As Geoff has said:

Modern antitrust analysis, both in scholarship and in the courts, quite properly rejects the reductive and unsupported sort of theories that would undergird a Section 5 case against Google. That the FTC might have a better chance of winning a Section 5 case, unmoored from the economically sound limitations of Section 2 jurisprudence, is no reason for it to pursue such a case. Quite the opposite: When consumer welfare is disregarded for the sake of the agency’s power, it ceases to further its mandate. . . . But economic substance, not self-aggrandizement by rhetoric, should guide the agency. Competition and consumers are dramatically ill-served by the latter.

Conclusion: What To Do About Unfairness?

So, what should the FTC do with Section 5? The right answer may be “nothing” (and probably is, in our opinion). But even those who think something should be done to apply the Act more broadly to allegedly anticompetitive conduct should be able to agree that the FTC ought not bring a case under Section 5’s UDAP language without first defining with analytical rigor what its limiting principles are.

Rather than attempting to do this in the course of a single litigation, the agency ought to heed Kovacic and Winerman’s advice and do more to “inform judicial thinking” such as by “issu[ing] guidelines or policy statements that spell out its own view about the appropriate analytical framework.” The best way to start that process would be for whoever succeeds Leibowitz as chairman to convene a workshop on the topic. (As one of us (Berin) has previously suggested, the FTC is long overdue on issuing guidelines to explain how it has applied its Unfairness and Deception Policy Statements in UDAP consumer protection cases. Such a workshop would dovetail nicely with this.)

The question posed should not presume that Section 5′s UDAP language ought to be used to reach conduct actionable under the antitrust statutes at all. Rather, the fundamental question to be asked is whether the use of Section 5 in antitrust cases is a relic of a bygone era before antitrust law was given analytical rigor by economics. If the FTC cannot rigorously define an interpretation of Section 5 that will actually serve consumer welfare — which the Supreme Court has defined as the proper aim of antitrust law — Congress should explicitly circumscribe it once and for all, limiting Section 5 to protecting consumers against unfair and deceptive acts and practices and, narrowly, prohibiting unfair competition in the form of invitations to collude. The FTC (along with the DOJ and the states) would still regulate competition through the existing antitrust laws. This might be the best outcome of all.

Previous commentary by us on Section 5:

In antitrust, exclusionary conduct, federal trade commission, google, monopolization, regulation, settlements , , , , , , , , ,
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The market realities that undermine the antitrust case against Google

Geoffrey Manne —  26 November 2012

As the Google antitrust discussion heats up on its way toward some culmination at the FTC, I thought it would be helpful to address some of the major issues raised in the case by taking a look at what’s going on in the market(s) in which Google operates. To this end, I have penned a lengthy document — The Market Realities that Undermine the Antitrust Case Against Google — highlighting some of the most salient aspects of current market conditions and explaining how they fit into the putative antitrust case against Google.

While not dispositive, these “realities on the ground” do strongly challenge the logic and thus the relevance of many of the claims put forth by Google’s critics. The case against Google rests on certain assumptions about how the markets in which it operates function. But these are tech markets, constantly evolving and complex; most assumptions (and even “conclusions” based on data) are imperfect at best. In this case, the conventional wisdom with respect to Google’s alleged exclusionary conduct, the market in which it operates (and allegedly monopolizes), and the claimed market characteristics that operate to protect its position (among other things) should be questioned.

The reality is far more complex, and, properly understood, paints a picture that undermines the basic, essential elements of an antitrust case against the company.

The document first assesses the implications for Market Definition and Monopoly Power of these competitive realities. Of note:

  • Users use Google because they are looking for information — but there are lots of ways to do that, and “search” is not so distinct that a “search market” instead of, say, an “online information market” (or something similar) makes sense.
  • Google competes in the market for targeted eyeballs: a market aimed to offer up targeted ads to interested users. Search is important in this, but it is by no means alone, and there are myriad (and growing) other mechanisms to access consumers online.
  • To define the relevant market in terms of the particular mechanism that prevails to accomplish the matching of consumers and advertisers does not reflect the substitutability of other mechanisms that do the same thing but simply aren’t called “search.”
  • In a world where what prevails today won’t — not “might not,” but won’t — prevail tomorrow, it is the height of folly (and a serious threat to innovation and consumer welfare) to constrain the activities of firms competing in such an environment by pigeonholing the market.
  • In other words, in a proper market, Google looks significantly less dominant. More important, perhaps, as search itself evolves, and as Facebook, Amazon and others get into the search advertising game, Google’s strong position even in the overly narrow “search” market looks far from unassailable.

Next I address Anticompetitive Harm — how the legal standard for antitrust harm is undermined by a proper understanding of market conditions:

  • Antitrust law doesn’t require that Google or any other large firm make life easier for competitors or others seeking to access resources owned by these firms.
  • Advertisers are increasingly targeting not paid search but rather social media to reach their target audiences.
  • But even for those firms that get much or most of their traffic from “organic” search, this fact isn’t an inevitable relic of a natural condition over which only the alleged monopolist has control; it’s a business decision, and neither sensible policy nor antitrust law is set up to protect the failed or faulty competitor from himself.
  • Although it often goes unremarked, paid search’s biggest competitor is almost certainly organic search (and vice versa). Nextag may complain about spending money on paid ads when it prefers organic, but the real lesson here is that the two are substitutes — along with social sites and good old-fashioned email, too.
  • It is incumbent upon critics to accurately assess the “but for” world without the access point in question. Here, Nextag can and does use paid ads to reach its audience (and, it is important to note, did so even before it claims it was foreclosed from Google’s users). But there are innumerable other avenues of access, as well. Some may be “better” than others; some that may be “better” now won’t be next year (think how links by friends on Facebook to price comparisons on Nextag pages could come to dominate its readership).
  • This is progress — creative destruction — not regress, and such changes should not be penalized.

Next I take on the perennial issue of Error Costs and the Risks of Erroneous Enforcement arising from an incomplete and inaccurate understanding of Google’s market:

  • Microsoft’s market position was unassailable . . . until it wasn’t — and even at the time, many could have told you that its perceived dominance was fleeting (and many did).
  • Apple’s success (and the consumer value it has created), while built in no small part on its direct competition with Microsoft and the desktop PCs which run it, was primarily built on a business model that deviated from its once-dominant rival’s — and not on a business model that the DOJ’s antitrust case against the company either facilitated or anticipated.
  • Microsoft and Google’s other critic-competitors have more avenues to access users than ever before. Who cares if users get to these Google-alternatives through their devices instead of a URL? Access is access.
  • It isn’t just monopolists who prefer not to innovate: their competitors do, too. To the extent that Nextag’s difficulties arise from Google innovating, it is Nextag, not Google, that’s working to thwart innovation and fighting against dynamism.
  • Recall the furor around Google’s purchase of ITA, a powerful cautionary tale. As of September 2012, Google ranks 7th in visits among metasearch travel sites, with a paltry 1.4% of such visits. Residing at number one? FairSearch founding member, Kayak, with a whopping 61%. And how about FairSearch member Expedia? Currently, it’s the largest travel company in the world, and it has only grown in recent years.

The next section addresses the essential issue of Barriers to Entry and their absence:

  • One common refrain from Google’s critics is that Google’s access to immense amounts of data used to increase the quality of its targeting presents a barrier to competition that no one else can match, thus protecting Google’s unassailable monopoly. But scale comes in lots of ways.
  • It’s never been the case that a firm has to generate its own inputs into every product it produces — and there is no reason to suggest search/advertising is any different.
  • Meanwhile, Google’s chief competitor, Microsoft, is hardly hurting for data (even, quite creatively, culling data directly from Google itself), despite its claims to the contrary. And while regulators and critics may be looking narrowly and statically at search data, Microsoft is meanwhile sitting on top of copious data from unorthodox — and possibly even more valuable — sources.
  • To defend a claim of monopolization, it is generally required to show that the alleged monopolist enjoys protection from competition through barriers to entry. In Google’s case, the barriers alleged are illusory.

The next section takes on recent claims revolving around The Mobile Market and Google’s position (and conduct) there:

  • If obtaining or preserving dominance is simply a function of cash, Microsoft is sitting on some $58 billion of it that it can devote to that end. And JP Morgan Chase would be happy to help out if it could be guaranteed monopoly returns just by throwing its money at Bing. Like data, capital is widely available, and, also like data, it doesn’t matter if a company gets it from selling search advertising or from selling cars.
  • Advertisers don’t care whether the right (targeted) user sees their ads while playing Angry Birds or while surfing the web on their phone, and users can (and do) seek information online (and thus reveal their preferences) just as well (or perhaps better) through Wikipedia’s app as via a Google search in a mobile browser.
  • Moreover, mobile is already (and increasingly) a substitute for the desktop. Distinguishing mobile search from desktop search is meaningless when users use their tablets at home, perform activities that they would have performed at home away from home on mobile devices simply because they can, and where users sometimes search for places to go (for example) on mobile devices while out and sometimes on their computers before they leave.
  • Whatever gains Google may have made in search from its spread into the mobile world is likely to be undermined by the massive growth in social connectivity it has also wrought.
  • Mobile is part of the competitive landscape. All of the innovations in mobile present opportunities for Google and its competitors to best each other, and all present avenues of access for Google and its competitors to reach consumers.

The final section Concludes.

The lessons from all of this? There are two. First, these are dynamic markets, and it is a fool’s errand to identify the power or significance of any player in these markets based on data available today — data that is already out of date between the time it is collected and the time it is analyzed.

Second, each of these developments has presented different, novel and shifting opportunities and challenges for firms interested in attracting eyeballs, selling ad space and data, earning revenue and obtaining market share. To say that Google dominates “search” or “online advertising” misses the mark precisely because there is simply nothing especially antitrust-relevant about either search or online advertising. Because of their own unique products, innovations, data sources, business models, entrepreneurship and organizations, all of these companies have challenged and will continue to challenge the dominant company — and the dominant paradigm — in a shifting and evolving range of markets.

Perhaps most important is this:

Competition with Google may not and need not look exactly like Google itself, and some of this competition will usher in innovations that Google itself won’t be able to replicate. But this doesn’t make it any less competitive.  

Competition need not look identical to be competitive — that’s what innovation is all about. Just ask those famous buggy whip manufacturers.

In antitrust, error costs, google, law and economics, markets, monopolization, technology , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Ginsburg & Wright on Dynamic Analysis and the Limits of Antitrust Institutions

Josh Wright —  14 June 2012

Judge Douglas Ginsburg (D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals; NYU Law) and I have posted “Dynamic Antitrust and the Limits of Antitrust Institutions” to SSRN.  Our article is forthcoming in Volume 78 (2) of the Antitrust Law Journal.  We offer a cautionary note – from an institutional perspective – concerning the ever-increasing and influential calls for greater incorporation of models of dynamic competition and innovation into antitrust analysis by courts and agencies.

Here is the abstract:

The static model of competition, which dominates modern antitrust analysis, has served antitrust law well.  Nonetheless, as commentators have observed, the static model ignores the impact that competitive (or anti-competitive) activities undertaken today will have upon future market conditions.  An increased focus upon dynamic competition surely has the potential to improve antitrust analysis and, thus, to benefit consumers.  The practical value of proposals to increase the use of dynamic analysis must, however, be evaluated with an eye to the institutional limitations that antitrust agencies and courts face when engaged in predictive fact-finding.  We explain and evaluate both the current state of dynamic antitrust analysis and some recent proposals that agencies and courts incorporate dynamic considerations more deeply into their analyses.  We show antitrust analysis is not willfully ignorant of the limitations of static analysis; on the contrary, when reasonably confident predictions can be made, they are readily incorporated into the analysis.  We also argue agencies and courts should view current proposals for a more dynamic approach with caution because the theories underpinning those proposals lie outside the agencies’ expertise in industrial organization economics, do not consistently yield determinate results, and would place significant demands upon reviewing courts to question predictions based upon those theories.  Considering the current state of economic theory and empirical knowledge, we conclude that competition agencies and courts have appropriately refrained from incorporating dynamic features into antitrust analysis to make predictions beyond what can be supported by a fact-intensive analysis.

You can download the paper here.

In antitrust, doj, economics, entrepreneurship, error costs, exclusionary conduct, federal trade commission, merger guidelines, mergers & acquisitions, monopolization, settlements, technology
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AALS Section on Antitrust and Economic Regulation Call for Papers: Google and Antitrust

Josh Wright —  7 May 2012

The AALS Section on Antitrust and Economic Regulation call for papers features a topic near and dear to my heart this year: Google and Antitrust.   Here is the announcement:

Call for Papers Announcement

AALS Section on Antitrust and Economic Regulation

Google and Antitrust

 

2013 AALS Annual Meeting

January 4-7, 2013

New Orleans, Louisiana

The AALS Section on Antitrust and Economic Regulation will hold a program on Google and Antitrust during the AALS 2013 Annual Meeting in New Orleans. The program will explore the Federal Trade Commission’s potential antitrust case against Google and the Google Book Search settlement. The program will feature a roundtable panel involving leading scholars who have addressed these issues: Dan Crane (Michigan), Marina Lao (Seton Hall), Frank Pasquale (Seton Hall), and Pam Samuelson (Berkeley). We are looking to add one additional panelist through this Call for Papers.

Submission procedure:

Anyone interested in participating is encouraged to submit a draft paper (preferred, and roughly in the range of 20-40 pages) or proposal by e-mail to Michael A. Carrier, at mcarrier@camlaw.rutgers.edu by September 4, 2012.

Eligibility:

Full-time faculty members of AALS member law schools are eligible to submit papers. Faculty at fee-paid law schools; foreign, visiting and adjunct faculty members; graduate students; fellows; and non-law school faculty are not eligible to submit. Papers may already be accepted for publication, as long as the paper will not be published before the AALS meeting.

Registration fee and expenses:

Call-for-Paper participants will be responsible for paying their annual meeting registration fee and travel expenses.

How will papers be reviewed?

Papers will be reviewed and selected by members of the Executive Committee of the AALS Section on Antirust and Economic Regulation: Darren Bush (Houston), Michael Carrier (Rutgers-Camden), Daniel Crane (Michigan), Hillary Greene (Connecticut), Scott Hemphill (Columbia), and D. Daniel Sokol (Florida).

Will the program be published in a journal?

Yes, as a symposium in the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology Digest.

Deadline date for submission:

September 4, 2012. Decisions will be announced by September 28, 2012.

Program date and time:

Saturday, January 5, 2013, 10:30am – 12:15pm.

Contact for submission and inquires:

Michael A. Carrier

Chair, AALS Section on Antitrust and Economic Regulation

Rutgers Law School – Camden
217 North Fifth Street
Camden, NJ 08102
(856) 225-6380
mcarrier@camlaw.rutgers.edu

In antitrust, copyright, economics, federal trade commission, google, monopolization, settlements
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More Misguided Derision from Critics of the Verizon-SpectrumCo Wireless Deal

Geoffrey Manne —  25 April 2012

The pending wireless spectrum deal between Verizon Wireless and a group of cable companies (the SpectrumCo deal, for short) continues to attract opprobrium from self-proclaimed consumer advocates and policy scolds.  In the latest salvo, Public Knowledge’s Harold Feld (and other critics of the deal) aren’t happy that Verizon seems to be working to appease the regulators by selling off some of its spectrum in an effort to secure approval for its deal.  Critics are surely correct that appeasement is what’s going on here—but why this merits their derision is unclear.

For starters, whatever the objections to the “divestiture,” the net effect is that Verizon will hold less spectrum than it would under the original terms of the deal and its competitors will hold more.  That this is precisely what Public Knowledge and other critics claim to want couldn’t be more clear—and thus neither is the hypocrisy of their criticism.

Note that “divestiture” is Feld’s term, and I think it’s apt, although he uses it derisively.  His derision seems to stem from his belief that it is a travesty that such a move could dare be undertaken by a party acting on its own instead of under direct diktat from the FCC (with Public Knowledge advising, of course).  Such a view—that condemns the private transfer of spectrum into the very hands Public Knowledge would most like to see holding it for the sake of securing approval for a deal that simultaneously improves Verizon’s spectrum position because it is better for the public to suffer (by Public Knowledge’s own standard) than for Verizon to benefit—seems to betray the organization’s decidedly non-public-interested motives.

But Feld amasses some more specific criticisms.  Each falls flat.

For starters, Feld claims that the spectrum licenses Verizon proposes to sell off (Lower (A and B block) 700 MHz band licenses) would just end up in AT&T’s hands—and that doesn’t further the scolds’ preferred vision of Utopia in which smaller providers end up with the spectrum (apparently “small” now includes T-Mobile and Sprint, presumably because they are fair-weather allies in this fight).  And why will the spectrum inevitably end up in AT&T’s hands?  Writes Feld:

AT&T just has too many advantages to reasonably expect someone else to get the licenses. For starters, AT&T has deeper pockets and can get more financing on better terms. But even more importantly, AT&T has a network plan based on the Lower 700 MHz A &B Block licenses it acquired in auction 2008 (and from Qualcomm more recently). It has towers, contracts for handsets, and everything else that would let it plug in Verizon’s licenses. Other providers would need to incur these expenses over and above the cost of winning the auction in the first place.

Allow me to summarize:  AT&T will win the licenses because it can make the most efficient, effective and timely use of the spectrum.  The horror!

Feld has in one paragraph seemingly undermined his whole case.  If approval of the deal turns on its effect on the public interest, stifling the deal in an explicit (and Quixotic) effort to ensure that the spectrum ends up in the hands of providers less capable of deploying it would seem manifestly to harm, not help, consumers.

And don’t forget that, whatever his preferred vision of the world, the most immediate effect of stopping the SpectrumCo deal will be that all of the spectrum that would have been transferred to—and deployed by—Verizon in the deal will instead remain in the hands of the cable companies where it now sits idly, helping no one relieve the spectrum crunch.

But let’s unpack the claims further.  First, a few factual matters.  AT&T holds no 700 MHz block A spectrum.  It bought block B spectrum in the 2008 auction and acquired spectrum in blocks D and E from Qualcomm.

Second, the claim that this spectrum is essentially worthless, especially  to any carrier except AT&T, is betrayed by reality.  First, despite the claimed interference problems from TV broadcasters for A block spectrum, carriers are in fact deploying on the A block and have obtained devices to facilitate doing so effectively.

Meanwhile, Verizon had already announced in November of last year that it planned to transfer 12 MHz of A block spectrum in Chicago to Leap (note for those keeping score at home: Leap is notAT&T) in exchange for other spectrum around the country, and Cox recently announced that it is selling its own A and B block 700 MHz licenses (yes, eight B block licenses would go to AT&T, but four A block licenses would go to US Cellular).

Pretty clearly these A and B block 700 MHz licenses have value, and not just to AT&T.

Feld does actually realize that his preferred course of action is harmful.  According to Feld, even though the transfer would increase spectrum holdings by companies that aren’t AT&T or Verizon, the fact that it might also facilitate the SpectrumCo deal and thus increase Verizon’s spectrum holdings is reason enough to object.  For Feld and other critics of the deal the concern is over concentrationin spectrum holdings, and thus Verizon’s proposed divestiture is insufficient because the net effect of the deal, even with the divestiture, would be to increase Verizon’s spectrum holdings.  Feld writes:

Verizon takes a giant leap forward in its spectrum holding and overall spectrum efficiency, whereas the competitors improve only marginally in absolute terms. Yes, compared to their current level of spectrum constraint, it would improve the ability of competitors [to compete] . . . [b]ut in absolute terms . . . the difference is so marginal it is not helpful.

Verizon has already said that they have no plans (assuming they get the AWS spectrum) to actually use the Lower MHz 700 A & B licenses, so selling those off does not reduce Verizon’s lead in the spectrum gap. So if we care about the spectrum gap, we need to take into account that this divestiture still does not alleviate the overall problem of spectrum concentration, even if it does improve spectrum efficiency.

But Feld is using a fantasy denominator to establish his concentration ratio.  The divestiture only increases concentration when compared to a hypothetical world in which self-proclaimed protectors of the public interest get to distribute spectrum according to their idealized notions of a preferred market structure.  But the relevant baseline for assessing the divestiture, even on Feld’s own concentration-centric terms, is the distribution of licenses under the deal without the divestiture—against which the divestiture manifestly reduces concentration, even if only “marginally.”

Moreover, critics commit the same inappropriate fantasizing when criticizing the SpectrumCo deal itself.  Again, even if Feld’s imaginary world would be preferable to the post-deal world (more on which below), that imaginary world simply isn’t on the table.  What is on the table if the deal falls through is the status quo—that is, the world in which Verizon is stuck with spectrum it is willing to sell and foreclosed from access to spectrum it wants to buy; US Cellular, AT&T and other carriers are left without access to Verizon’s lower-block 700 MHz spectrum; and the cable companies are saddled with spectrum they won’t use.

Perhaps, compared to this world, the deal does increase concentration.  More importantly, compared to this world the deal increases spectrum deployment.  Significantly.  But never mind:  The benefits of actual and immediate deployment of spectrum can never match up in the scolds’ minds to the speculative and theoretical harms from increased concentration, especially when judged against a hypothetical world that does not and will not ever exist.

But what is most appalling about critics’ efforts to withhold valuable spectrum from consumers for the sake of avoiding increased concentration is the reality that increased concentration doesn’t actually cause any harm.

In fact, it is simply inappropriate to assess the likely competitive effects of this or any other transaction in this industry by assessing concentration based on spectrum holdings.  Of key importance here is the reality that spectrum alone—though essential to effective competitiveness—is not enough to amass customers, let alone confer market power.  In this regard it is well worth noting that the very spectrum holdings at issue in the SpectrumCo deal, although significant in size, produce precisely zero market share for their current owners.

Even the FCC recognizes the weakness of reliance upon market structure as an indicator of market competitiveness in its most recent Wireless Competition Report, where the agency notes that highly concentrated markets may nevertheless be intensely competitive.

And the DOJ, in assessing “Economic Issues in Broadband Competition,” has likewise concluded both that these markets are likely to be concentrated and that such concentration does not raisecompetitive concerns.  In large-scale networks “with differentiated products subject to large economies of scale (relative to the size of the market), the Department does not expect to see a large number of suppliers.”  Rather, the DOJ cautions against “striving for broadband markets that look like textbook markets of perfect competition, with many price-taking firms.  That market structure is unsuitable for the provision of broadband services.”

Although commonly trotted out as a conclusion in support of monopolization, the fact that a market may be concentrated is simply not a reliable indicator of anticompetitive effect, and naked reliance on such conclusions is inconsistent with modern understandings of markets and competition.

As it happens, there is detailed evidence in the Fifteenth Wireless Competition Report on actual competitive dynamics; market share analysis is unlikely to provide any additional insight.  And the available evidence suggests that the tide toward concentration has resulted in considerable benefits and certainly doesn’t warrant a presumption of harm in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary specific to this license transfer.  Instead, there is considerable evidence of rapidly falling prices, quality expansion, capital investment, and a host of other characteristics inconsistent with a monopoly assumption that might otherwise be erroneously inferred from a structural analysis like that employed by Feld and other critics.

In fact, as economists Gerald Faulhaber, Robert Hahn & Hal Singer point out, a simple plotting of cellular prices against market concentration shows a strong inverse relationship inconsistent with an inference of monopoly power from market shares:

Today’s wireless market is an arguably concentrated but remarkably competitive market.  Concentration of resources in the hands of the largest wireless providers has not slowed the growth of the market; rather the central problem is one of spectrum scarcity.  According to the Fifteenth Report, “mobile broadband growth is likely to outpace the ability of technology and network improvements to keep up by an estimated factor of three, leading to a spectrum deficit that is likely to approach 300 megahertz within the next five years.”

Feld and his friends can fret about the phantom problem of concentration all they like—it doesn’t change the reality that the real problem is the lack of available spectrum to meet consumer demand.  It’s bad enough that they are doing whatever they can to stop the SpectrumCo deal itself which would ensure that spectrum moves from the cable companies, where it sits unused, to Verizon, where it would be speedily deployed.  But when they contort themselves to criticize even the re-allocation of spectrum under the so-called divestiture, which would directly address the very issue they hold so dear, it is clear that these “protectors of consumer rights” are not really protecting consumers at all.

[Cross-posted at Forbes]

In antitrust, business, doj, federal communications commission, law and economics, markets, monopolization, politics, technology, telecommunications , , , , , , , , ,
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Summary Judgment Granted in Mayer Laboratories v. Church & Dwight

Josh Wright —  25 April 2012

Judge Edward Chen in the Northern District of California granted Church & Dwight’s motion for summary judgment as to Mayer Laboratories antitrust claims involving Church & Dwight’s shelf space agreements with retailers in the condom market.  Church & Dwight is the manufacturer of Trojan brand condoms.  Specifically, Mayer argued that Church & Dwight’s shelf space share discounts with retailers — all units discounts triggered upon the retailer committing a specified percentage of its condom shelf space to Trojan products — prevented Mayer from competing by denying it access to retailer shelf space and thus allowed Church & Dwight to unlawfully monopolize the condom market.

Judge Chen’s opinion is available here (and at 2012 WL 1231801).  Judge Chen’s opinion is lengthy and correspondingly thorough; summary judgment was granted on a number of independent grounds, including lack of antitrust injury, failure to demonstrate substantial foreclosure, and insufficient evidence of monopoly power.  I was the economic expert witness for Church & Dwight in the case (along with my colleague at Charles River Associates, Serge Moresi, who filed a rebuttal report) and am obviously quite pleased with the outcome and that Judge Chen relied upon my analysis in reaching these conclusions.

Notwithstanding my private interest in the case, I suspect our readers will find the opinion interesting both respect to the handling of economic evidence, but also with respect to the analysis of shelf space share discounts, which have been the focus of some recent speeches by agency economists.  Judge Chen’s opinion also directly addresses both traditional foreclosure based analysis of allegedly exclusionary agreements as well as the more novel “tax effect” theories.  While I cannot comment on the case directly, I thought some of our readers might be interested in seeing the opinion.

Professor Wright, a recognized authority on vertical contractual arrangements at the George Mason University School of Law, filed expert and rebuttal reports in anticipation of trial. Serge Moresi, CRA’s Director of Competition Modeling, filed a rebuttal report in response to the claims of Mayer Laboratories’ economic experts. Professor Wright and Dr. Moresi explained why, both factually and conceptually, the opposing experts’ claims were substantially flawed. Relying extensively on the evidence and analysis presented by CRA’s economic experts, the Court granted summary judgment in Church & Dwight’s favor with regard to each of the antitrust claims raised in this case.

In antitrust, economics, exclusionary conduct, exclusive dealing, monopolization
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Wright v. Rule at Columbia Law on Google and Antitrust

Josh Wright —  1 February 2012

Charles (“Rick”) Rule, who represents Microsoft and is the head of the antitrust practice at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP, and I had an opportunity to debate the various antitrust issues involving Google and its search engine on last week.  I didn’t have much of a chance to report here on the blog over the past week, but the Columbia Law School has done the work for me.  Here’s a recent report:

Joshua Wright, professor of law at George Mason University School of Law, took the position that there is no significant evidence that Google is guilty of antitrust violations. Even if Google, like other search engines, favors its own content when producing the results of a search request, he argued, dissatisfied customers can easily switch search engines. In other words, the competition is just a click away.
On the other side of the debate was Charles F. Rule, head of the antitrust practice at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP. Rule, who has defended Microsoft in antitrust litigation, argued that ample anecdotal evidence exists that implicates Google in a mix of practices that have had the cumulative effect of excluding competitors’ content from appearing in a Google search, as well as monopolizing advertisers. He stressed that his opinions were his own.
…
Wright discussed the evolution of search engines in the last ten years. He conceded that the allegation of search bias, in which a search engine favors its own content at the expense of rivals, is a possible violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. But Wright noted that leading case law indicates that the behavior in question must harm the competitive process and thereby harm consumers, to be dubbed “exclusionary.”
“We demand evidence of real harm to competition before we break out the antitrust hammer,” he said, “and I don’t think there’s significant evidence of that here. It’s not hard to switch to get what you are looking for.”
Rule dismissed the “just-a-click-away” argument at the beginning of his talk.
“It’s not quite that simple,” he said. “The fact is that because of some of Google’s practices, the company has made it difficult for other search engines like Bing to achieve the same level of performance.”
Rule explained that search engines make their money by selling eyeballs to advertisers, and cited statistics that establish Google’s long-time share of the search-engine advertising market at 90 percent and up. He offered detailed descriptions of specific Google practices that have had the alleged effect of excluding competitive search engines—not just by blocking their content, but also by denying them opportunities to reach advertisers.
“With respect to bias, you can see specific anecdotes where it appears that Google has allegedly blacklisted certain companies intentionally and, in a very focused way, degraded their results so they appear lower on the page,” he said. “But also on the advertising side, there are anecdotes that when Google perceived a potential competitive threat, it automatically dramatically increases the price competitors have to pay, sometimes five to ten thousand percent overnight.”
I would add one addendum to the description of my argument.  Rule focused more intently upon some of the issues on the advertising side with his limited time.  I focused more extensively upon on search bias.  Indeed, much of my time was allocated not to whether or not “competition is one click away” for users in some theoretical sense but rather on the empirical evidence on what has been described as search bias (including my own evidence, here, which is also discussed on the blog here, here, here and here) by both Google and Microsoft, what sort of evidence would be sufficient to satisfy the Section 2 standard for allegedly exclusionary conduct, and why I believe the apparent lack of evidence concerning harm to competition rather than merely harm to competitors remains a fatal flaw in the allegations against Google concerning search evaluated from a consumer-welfare perspective.
In antitrust, economics, federal trade commission, google, monopolization, technology
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Competition for the Field on the Internet

Josh Wright —  1 February 2012

Keith Woolcock (Time Business) offers an interesting perspective on what economists would describe as “competition for the field” between Apple, Facebook, Google, and Facebook.  It gives a good sense of the many dimensions of competition upon which these firms compete.

The upcoming IPO of Facebook, the flak surrounding Twitter’s decision to censor some tweets, and Google’s weaker-than-expected 4th-quarter earnings all point to one of the big events of our times: The crazy, chaotic, idealistic days of the Internet are ending. Once, the Prairies were open and shared by everyone. Then the farmers arrived and fenced them in. The same is happening to the Internet: Apple, Amazon and Facebook are putting up fences — and Google is increasingly being left outside.

The old Internet on which Google has thrived is still there, of course, but like the wilderness it is shrinking. Often these days, we sign up for Facebook or Amazon’s private version of the Internet. At other times, we use a smartphone and download an App instead of using Google search.

…

The danger to Google, in other words, is that as social networking, smartphones and tablets increasingly come to dominate the Internet, Google’s chance to earn advertising revenues from searching will shrink along with its influence.

Yes, Google has the Android and Google+, but these may not be enough to fight the shift to the closed Internet. Google+, of course, has just a tiny fraction of Facebook’s scale and there’s currently little reason to think it can catch up. The Android operating system, also an attempt by Google to build its own internet eco-system, is a more conspicuous success. Most commentators focus on the rapid growth of Android and the fact that it has greater market share than the iPhone.

But this analysis misses the point: The Android may have market share, but more than half of mobile searches come from iPhone users. Google may have developed Android but, unlike Apple’s iPhone, it does not really control it. Licensees like Samsung and HTC are able to adapt Android software to their own ends. And smart companies like Amazon are getting a free ride on Android while sharing little of the spoils with Google.

Don’t get me wrong: Google is still a force, just as Microsoft, Intel and IBM are. But they are no longer at the epicentre of the zeitgeist. Like Microsoft before it, Google can fight the good fight on many different fronts. Whether it can ever find an engine of growth capable of supplanting its core business is another question.

Check out the whole thing.

 

 

In antitrust, business, economics, google, monopolization, technology
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