It seems that it’s time to wind down and that a further tit-for-tat might not be productive, so I’ll close with a final comment on the first point that Steve makes—one that may undergird much of our disagreement.  Steve asserts that “the $71 payment would fail a test of comparing the rival’s price and cost, but that it is not the test.  The test compares the monopolist’s price and cost.”  That would only be true if we were applying an unmodified predatory pricing rule to loyalty rebates—a position that I’ve never advocated in these posts are elsewhere.  If we applied the attribution test that Steve and I have been assuming, the question would be whether the rival could profitably remain in the market given the price it would have to charge to neutralize the effect of the monopolist’s rebate operating at the contestable share and scale.  And, since Steve and I have now agreed that using the rival’s rather than the monopolist’s costs is admissible if we don’t insist on an EEC component, then my statement that the $71 could fail the price-cost screen is accurate.  But if the effective price the rival would have to meet were $69 and not $71, there wouldn’t be any foreclosure—which is why the screen makes sense.

Thanks, Steve, for this impromptu exchange.  I hope that both our fair points and grievous errors have been educational to ourselves and to others.

My invitation comes with several hopefully final observations.

(1) Dan says, “There’s neither input foreclose nor output foreclosure if a rival can neutralize a loyalty discount without pricing unprofitably.”  My examples showed several reasons why an equally efficient rival may not be able to overcome a loyalty discount to get distribution, even if the monopolist does not violate the price-cost test.  Dan’s response to my #3(a) example is that “a discount structure that would require the entrant to pay rebates of $71 even while earning revenues of $70, then the rebate system would fail the price-cost screen.” That is not a good answer for three reasons.  First, the monopolist’s profits pre-entry absent the rebate are $200, and Dan uses the pre-entry situation as the base.  Second, the $71 payment would fail a test of comparing the rival’s price and cost, but that it is not the test.  The test compares the monopolist’s price and cost.   Third, if Dan now wants to use as the base the “but-for world” where the former-monopolist would earn only $70 because he would have lowered price in response to the entrant absent the loyalty discount, then he is accepting the “penalty price” scenario, which he elsewhere rejected as unlikely.  So, Dan has to make up his mind on this last point.  And the price-cost test is defective either way.

(2) Dan says, “Steve posits ‘that economic analysis is the same’ for loyalty discounts and contractual commitments not to buy from rivals.  Really?”  The short answer is “Yes.”  As Dan observes himself, “at a high level of generality one would say that in both cases the question is whether the price or contract forecloses competitors.”  By the way, a small rebate certainly will not always exclude.  But, see #3(b) in my previous post, which is a pretty general example of why the rival often would just give up rather than get involved in a bidding war for distribution.  Dan never explain what he thinks is wrong with this example.

(3) Dan says, “Steve presents four examples of how an auction for contractual exclusivity results in a single firm obtaining contractual exclusivity with anticompetitive effects due to asymmetry of incentives, all of which begs the question of how loyalty discounts without contractual exclusivity achieve the same effect.”  I assumed no contract.  Nor is a formal auction required.  The monopolist simply can unilaterally offer a high enough bid that the entrant walks away.  And in the #3(b) example, the unilateral bid does not even need to be very high.

(4) Dan says, “The monopolist is not saved from profit sacrifice, as Steve posits, merely by threatening a price of $105 that it never has to charge.”  Why not?  The monopolist never sells any units at $105 when the threat succeeds.  And, given Dan’s model, it will succeed against an equally efficient competitor.  With adequate information, it is neither expensive nor risky.  If Dan is going to rely on it being “expensive and risky,” then he is changing his story.  More importantly, he also is opining it should be permissible for a well-informed monopolist to exclude with penalty pricing threats because poorly informed monopolists may not follow the same strategy.  That does not make sense.   He also does not provide any evidence about how well informed most monopolists who engage in loyalty discounts typically are.

(5) Dan says, “Finally, let me underline as I did in my last post that I’m not claiming that “penalty pricing” is economically impossible.  Rather, …we should therefore not assume that it will be routinely deployed, and that the starting presumption should be that most loyalty discounts are true reductions from the but-for price.”  I do not have to assume penalties will be “routinely deployed.”   It was only one of my several fatal problems with the price-cost test.  But, in terms of the evidence, what is the evidence that the typical loyalty discount by a monopolist or firm with substantial market power are true reductions from the but-for price.  Reliable presumptions need to be more than simply reflections of one’s ideology.

(6) I want to conclude by observing that modern day courts do not need the defective price-cost test to protect monopolists.  Remember that the rival must prove consumer injury.  That is a high burden to carry and some of the factors Dan mentions might throw light on that bottom line issue.  Neither Josh nor I are claiming that loyalty discounts should be per se illegal.  So, Dan, come on over to the rule of reason.

I’m happy to keep going back in forth with Steve until we wear out our welcome at TOTM, or simply wear out. [Keep 'em coming! - ed.]

(1) There’s neither input foreclose nor output foreclosure if a rival can neutralize a loyalty discount without pricing unprofitably.  The rival who can profitably compete despite the loyalty discount structure will remain in the market; there is no input exclusion.  As I understand him, Steve posits that an RRC effect would arise if the guilty firm tried to use loyalty rebates to raise the effective price the rival had to pay for “distribution services” with the effect of raising general market prices.  But that theory doesn’t work.  First, why would a firm that can profitably match a loyalty discount have to increase its price in order to “pay for” the loyalty discount?  Second, the theory requires the victimized rival to simultaneously increase its “payments” to distributors in the form of discounts even while it is increasing its prices to those same distributors in equal amount in order to offset the payments.   A rival who feels “pressured” to make a $100 loyalty payment to distributors and consequently raises his price to the distributors by $100 to offset has done . . . nothing.

(2) Steve posits “that economic analysis is the same” for loyalty discounts and contractual commitments not to buy from rivals.  Really?  I suppose at a high level of generality one would say that in both cases the question is whether the price or contract forecloses competitors, but it can’t possibly be that an exclusive dealing contract that prohibits purchases from a rival has the same effect as a 0.0001% rebate if the customer purchases exclusively from the seller.  Once an exclusive dealing contract is in place, the rival can’t compete without inducing breach of contract.  With a pure loyalty discount, the rival can always compete so long as it can profitably neutralize the loyalty discount with its own pricing terms.  You see this in the real world—customers operate in environments where multiple sellers are offering loyalty discounts.  The customers freely switch between suppliers (sometimes showing loyalty and obtaining the discounts; sometimes deciding to forgo the discounts and prefer variety).  This is not true of a market locked up with exclusive dealing agreements.

(3) Steve presents four examples of how an auction for contractual exclusivity results in a single firm obtaining contractual exclusivity with anticompetitive effects due to asymmetry of incentives, all of which begs the question of how loyalty discounts without contractual exclusivity achieve the same effect.  Moreover, all Steve shows is that if you applied unmodified predatory pricing analysis to the exclusivity auction, the contracts wouldn’t be illegal since the winning bidder could show that its revenues exceeded its costs.  He doesn’t show how, in the absence of contractual exclusivity, the winning bidder would satisfy the attribution test we’ve been assuming.  For example, in Scenario (a), if there isn’t contractual exclusivity but merely a discount structure that would require the entrant to pay rebates of $71 even while earning revenues of $70, then the rebate system would fail the price-cost screen and we could proceed to all of the foreclosure/RRC analysis that Steve has so magnificently pioneered and illustrated.  The same is true in each of Steve’s examples.  None of his examples shows a circumstance where the new entrant could obtain retailer distribution services without inducing breach of contract and without pricing below its cost and yet there would be an anticompetitive effect from a loyalty discount scheme.

(4) In his first post, Steve said that “the price-cost test is premised on the erroneous idea that only equally efficient competitors are worth protecting.”  My last post disputed that claim.  Steve now says that “the price-cost test is better framed as a measure of ‘profit-sacrifice,’ and EEC is simply a misleading way to express the test.”  So I think we’re now in agreement that one could accept a version of the price-cost screen even while believing that antitrust law should not necessarily be bounded by an EEC component.  As to profit sacrifice, more in a moment.

(5) I don’t want to get pulled into defending an EEC component in this discussion, since I think we’re now in agreement that it’s not necessary to support some version of the price-cost screen.  In any event, when I said that the test has “merit,” I wasn’t saying that it should be applied categorically to all types of exclusion claims.  For example, (and I’m not committing to this), institutional context might matter to whether an EEC test should apply.  One might reasonably believe that it’s dangerous to allow less efficient rivals to seek treble damages for their exclusion from the market for all kinds of incentives and decisional reasons but that the government should be free to mount exclusion theories that do not depend on a showing that EECs were excluded.  Again, I’m not arguing that this should be the case, only explaining the non-committal nature of my “merit” comment.

(6) (I’ll collapse my response to Steve’s points 6-8 into one).  The discount penalty theory is premised on the assumption that the monopolist increases its list price above the profit-maximizing monopoly level and then offers a concession back down to the monopoly level, combined with an onerous term restricting the customer’s freedom of choice among suppliers.  I take it that Steve accepts the point from my last post that a price of x plus loyalty restriction is effectively higher than a price of x without a loyalty restriction.  Steve says that a monopolist might choose to exceed the profit-maximizing price and thereby forego profits as a predatory investment.  In that case, the loyalty discount program must be of short duration and the monopolist has to be highly confident of recoupment, just as in conventional predation cases.  Observe that the profit sacrifice is not merely the charging of the $105 “penalty” price but also the charging of the $100 plus loyalty restriction price.  Thus, the monopolist is not saved from profit sacrifice, as Steve posits, merely by threatening a price of $105 that it never has to charge.  Also, observe that the strategy is much more risky and expensive to the monopolist than to the customer.  By definition, the monopoly price the customer is paying is one where the customer will be willing to substitute to other products at just a slightly higher price, whereas the monopolist stands to lose highly profitable sales by exceeding its monopoly profit-maximizing price.  Finally, let me underline as I did in my last post that I’m not claiming that “penalty pricing” is economically impossible.  Rather, I’m making the point that “penalty pricing” is an expensive and risky strategy for monopolists, that we should therefore not assume that it will be routinely deployed, and that the starting presumption should be that most loyalty discounts are true reductions from the but-for price.

“Naked” short selling is when a trader sells stocks the trader doesn’t actually own (and doesn’t borrow in a prescribed period of time) in the hopes of buying the stocks later (before they must be delivered) at a lower price. The trader is basically betting that the stock price will decline. If it doesn’t, the trader must purchase the stock at a higher price–or breach their original sale contract.Some critics argue that such short-selling leads to market distortions and potential market manipulation, and some even pointed to short-selling as a boogey-man in the 2008 financial crisis, hence the restrictions on short-selling giving rise to the SEC’s enforcement proceedings.

Just one problem, there’s a lot of evidence that shows restrictions on short-selling make markets less efficient, not more.

This isn’t exactly news. Thom argued against short-selling restrictions seven years ago (here) and our late colleague, Larry Ribstein, followed up a couple years ago (here).  The empirical evidence just continues to pile in. Beber and Pagano, in the Journal of Finance earlier this year examine not just US restrictions on short-selling, but global restrictions. Their abstract reads:

Most regulators around the world reacted to the 2007–09 crisis by imposing bans on short selling. These were imposed and lifted at different dates in different countries, often targeted different sets of stocks, and featured varying degrees of stringency. We exploit this variation in short-sales regimes to identify their effects on liquidity, price discovery, and stock prices. Using panel and matching techniques, we find that bans (i) were detrimental for liquidity, especially for stocks with small capitalization and no listed options; (ii) slowed price discovery, especially in bear markets, and (iii) failed to support prices, except possibly for U.S. financial stocks.

So while the SEC may celebrate their prosecution victory, investors may have reason to be less enthusiastic.

(1) Dan says that price-cost test should apply to “customer foreclosure” allegations.   One of my key points was that many loyalty discount claims involve “input foreclosure” or “raising rivals’ costs” effects, not plain-vanilla customer foreclosure.   In addition, loyalty agreements with distributors often involve input foreclosure because “distribution services” are an input and a rebate might be characterized as a reward payment for the (near-) exclusivity.    From his silence on the issue, I am inclined to presume that Dan would agree that the price-cost test should not be applied to such allegations.      Dan, what do you intend?

(2) Dan says that he agrees that the price-cost test should not be required for “partial exclusivity contracts” that involve contractual commitments to limit purchases from rivals.  He says that the price-cost test should apply only where the “claimed exclusionary mechanism is the price term.”  This distinction is peculiar because the economic analysis is the same in both situations.  In addition, even such voluntary exclusivity flowing from a price term can be anticompetitive, and even if the price-cost test is passed.  There are numerous reasons for this, as I explained in my original post. (I also discuss these issues in my contribution to Robert Pitofsky’s volume, “How the Chicago School Overshot the Mark.”  See also articles by Eric Rasmussen et. al., Michael Whinston and others.)

(3) Consider the following numerical examples that concretely illustrate the economic forces at work when there is competition for distribution, even in the absence of contractual commitments.

(a) Suppose that a monopolist is earning profits of $200.  If there is successful entry by an equally efficient entrant, each of the two firms will earn duopoly profits of $70.  (The duopoly profits are less than monopoly profits because of the price competition.)  Suppose that the entrant needs to obtain just non-exclusive distribution from a particular retailer in order to be viable.  In this case, the entrant would be willing to bid up to $70 per period for the non-exclusive distribution.  (In price terms, this would be a payment that led to the entrant’s costs equaling its price.)  But the monopolist would be willing to bid up to $130 for an exclusive (i.e., the difference between its monopoly and duopoly profits), in order to prevent the entrant from surviving.   Thus, the monopolist would win the bidding, say for a price of $71.   The monopolist would easily pass the price-cost test.   Why is the monopolist systematically able to outbid the entrant? This fundamental asymmetry does not arise because the entrant is less efficient.  Instead, the answer is that the monopolist is bidding to maintain its monopoly power, whereas the entrant can only obtain duopoly price.  The monopolist is “purchasing market power” in addition to distribution, whereas the entrant is only purchasing distribution.

(b) Or, consider this interesting variant with sequential bidding for multiple distributors.   Suppose there are two retailers and the entrant needs to get non-exclusive distribution at both in order to be viable.  Suppose that the negotiations at the two stores are sequential.  In this scenario, the entrant would have no incentive even to try to outbid the monopolist.   This is easy to see.   Suppose that the entrant wins the competition to get into the first store by paying the amount $B1.   In bidding for distribution at the second retailer, the monopolist would be willing to bid up to $130, as above.   At this second store, the entrant would not be willing to pay more than $70 (or $70 – $B1, if it is ignores the fact that the $B1 was an already sunk cost).  So the monopolist will win the exclusive at the second retailer and the entry will fail.   Looking back to the negotiations at the first store, the entrant would have had no incentive to throw away money by paying any positive amount $B1 to get distribution at the first store.   This is because it rationally would anticipate that it is inevitable that it will fail to gain distribution at the second retailer.  Thus, the monopolist will be able to gain the exclusive at both stores for next to nothing.   It clearly will pass the price-cost test even as it maintains its monopoly, merely by instituting the competition for distribution.

(c) If the entrant only needs to gain non-exclusive distribution at either one of the two stores, then the situation can be reversed and the entry can succeed.   The monopolist clearly would not be willing to pay $71 each at both stores (equal to a total payment of $142) in order to deter the entry and protect its “incremental” monopoly profits (equal to only $130 in the example).  Therefore, when the entrant bids for distribution at the first store, the monopolist might as well let the entrant win, which means that the entrant can gain access to both stores for next to nothing.   The entry succeeds, but again, the price-cost test would not be relevant to the analysis.

(d) There also can be elements of a “self-fulfilling equilibrium” because of lack of coordination by the distributors.  Suppose that there are 10 retailers and the entrant only needs to get distribution at 5 of them.   Suppose that the entrant offers to pay a $14 rebate for non-exclusive distribution, and it also will offer $14 again in the next period, if its entry succeeds in the first period.   Suppose the monopolist offers a lower rebate for an exclusive that will continue into the second period.   Suppose that each of the 10 retailers anticipates that the other retailers will accept the monopolist’s lower offer out of fear that the entrant will be unable to get 4 other retailers to accept its offer.  In that situation, the entry will fail.  This is not because the entrant is less efficient.  Instead, it is because the entrant faces a classic coordination problem.  If the retailers behave independently, the retailers’ fear of the entrant’s failure can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.   Again, the monopolist will easily pass the price-cost test.

(4) Dan makes the point that the price-cost test does not require adoption of an EEC antitrust standard (i.e., whereby only harm to EECs is relevant to antitrust).  I certainly agree that the price-cost screen does not necessarily rely on the EEC standard.   The price-cost test is better framed as a measure of “profit-sacrifice,” and EEC is simply a misleading way to express the test.  For example, I expect that Dan agrees that predatory pricing law uses the price-cost test as a measure of “profit-sacrifice,” not an assumption that only EECs matter.

(5) But, I was surprised that Dan also says that the EEC theory “has merit.”  In my view, the EEC standard has no merit in rigorous antitrust analysis. The example in my previous post illustrates why that is the case.  Raising the costs and possibly deterring the entry of a less efficient rival harms consumers and reduces output.

(6) Dan says that the “disloyalty penalty” price theory has problems, “including the empirical one that it doesn’t fit the pattern of almost any of the recent loyalty discount cases.”   The validity of Dan’s empirical claim is not obvious clear to me.  To evaluate whether there is a price penalty, you would need to know more than the path of prices over time.  You also would need to know what the price would be in the “but-for world.”   For example, suppose that in the absence of the loyalty discount, the incumbent would have reduced its price to $90.  This observation has two important implications.  First, this is a reason why it is not clear that loyalty discounts are “presumptively beneficial.”  Second, this is another reason why a price-cost test is not a good “screen” in loyalty discount cases.  Implementing the screen involves evaluating what prices would be absent the conduct.  But, after the competitive effects on consumers are known, what is the value of the screen?

(7) As to the question of whether Josh’s speech on loyalty discounts (and this issue of penalty prices) is inconsistent with their joint article on bundled discounts, I will leave that one for Josh and Dan to sort out, at least for the moment.   I certainly will concede the point that Wright is not always right.

(8) Dan began to suggest that the penalty price theory has a “problem of basic economics” in that the penalty price was not short-run profit-maximizing.   Dan subsequently seemed to withdraw this criticism, noticing that one could characterize the loyalty restriction as not profit-maximizing in the same way.   In any event, it is not a “problem” with the theory.  The reason why the firm is willing to sacrifice profits is because it gains the benefit of deterring entry.  By the way, it also may not even end up sacrificing profits.  The threat of the penalty price for non-exclusivity may be sufficient.  If the distributors succumb to the threat and buy exclusively from the incumbent, it never needs to actually charge them the penalty price.

Something that Thom and I both said in our earlier posts needs to be repeated at the outset:  I don’t know of anyone who disagrees with Steve and Josh that raising rivals’ costs (“RRC”) and economic analysis drawn from exclusive dealing law belong in an analysis of loyalty discounts.  There’s also no claim on the table that a loyalty discount that fails the “contestable share”/discount attribution test that Steve mentions should be treated anything like presumptively illegal.  The current debate is solely about whether there should be a price-cost screen in loyalty discount cases.  We aren’t even talking about what the measure of cost should be or how that screen should work (although, with Steve, I’m happy to assume marginal or average variable cost and the aforementioned contestable share/discount attribution approach for the sake of argument).  Josh and Steve are well justified in pointing out how aspects of RRC theory can apply in loyalty discount cases—but that doesn’t meet the objection that a screen should also apply.

It’s also important to recognize that the argument in favor of a price-cost screen for loyalty rebates does not need to entail a general argument in favor of a “profit sacrifice” theory for all monopolization offenses.  What we’re talking about here is unilaterally determined discounts to customers—something that is presumptively procompetitive, although potentially exclusionary under some circumstances.  Such discounts could be harmful if they resulted in customer foreclosure, but they would not result in customer foreclosure if the rival could profitably match the loyalty discount.  That is the point of the price-cost screen.  You might wonder why a rival would ever complain about a loyalty discount if they could profitably match it.  The reasons are many.  The rival might be losing sales because customers don’t like its product.  It might have failed for reasons completely apart from the accused firm’s loyalty discounts. It might be attempting to use antitrust law to thwart price competition, as a large body of literature suggests.  (See work by Will Baumol and Janusz Ordover, Preston McAfee and Nicholas Vakkur, and Edward Snyder and Tom Kauper, among others).

One thing I didn’t just mention—although it could often be true—is that the complaining rival isn’t an equally efficient competitor (“EEC”).  Steve is wrong to suggest that the price-cost test depends on adopting an EEC theory.  Although there is much merit to the EEC test (heck, even the Europeans have adopted it), one could formulate a version of the price-cost screen that simply requires the rival to show that the discount foreclosed a hypothetically equally efficient competitor or even this particular rival given its actual costs, as some have suggested.  The current argument is not over the formulation of the test, but whether we should dispense with a price-cost screen altogether in loyalty discount cases.

In any event, observe that the entire structure of modern predatory pricing law is premised on an EEC assumption.  If an incumbent firm with marginal costs of $50 and a current price of $100 faces entry by a new rival with marginal costs of $75 and drops its price to $74 in order to exclude the new rival, it enjoys categorical immunity under a long line of Supreme Court cases.  In another forum, Steve suggested that the difference in those cases is that the customer is getting the benefit of a lower price, so the law is hesitant to condemn the price as predatory.  But that exposes something problematic about Steve’s starting premise—he assumes that it’s uncertain whether loyalty discounts generally lower prices.  Prima facie, that seems wrong.  Customers routinely offer to trade loyalty for lower prices precisely because the prices are . . . lower.

Steve suggests that maybe loyalty discounts aren’t really discounts at all.  Maybe the seller, who was previously charging a price of $100, raises the price to $105 and then gives a discount back down to $100 in exchange for customer loyalty.  Steve notes that Thom and I didn’t consider this scenario.  That’s because Josh didn’t raise it in his speech.  It would have been very surprising if Josh had raised it in his speech, since Josh and I co-authored a paper several years ago debunking this same theory in the bundled discount context.  I discuss the “disloyalty penalty” theory at length in a forthcoming article in the Texas Law Review, really just extending the work that Josh and I started several years ago.

There are many problems with this “disloyalty penalty” theory, including the empirical one that it doesn’t fit the pattern of almost any of the recent loyalty discount cases.  But there is also a problem of basic economics.  Unless it is engaging in limit pricing, the accused firm’s $100 price is a monopoly (or market power) profit-maximizing price.  By definition, any price increase will be unprofitable to the seller.  Obviously, the $105 price would be unprofitable.  But it’s also true that a price of $100 coupled with a new obligation to buy a certain percentage of requirements from the seller to achieve that price is unprofitable because it exceeds the profit-maximizing price.  The addition of a contractual term that restricts the buyer’s freedom is economically equivalent to a price increase if the buyer valued the prior freedom from the restriction (if the buyer didn’t value the prior freedom from the restriction there’s no effective price increase but also no anticompetitive effect, since the buyer wouldn’t have bought from the rival anyway).  Hence a price of $100 with loyalty term is effectively higher than a price of $100 without a loyalty term that restricts the buyer’s purchasing freedom.  By adding a loyalty term to obtain the $100 price, the seller exceeds its profit-maximizing monopoly price.

My claim is not that “penalty pricing” for disloyalty is impossible, but that the presumption should be that loyalty discounts are true discounts off the but-for price.  Loyalty discounts belong squarely in the “hospitability” tradition for unilaterally determined pricing structures—all those judicial decisions that talk about how important it is not to chill vigorous price competition.

Steve argues that loyalty discounts may “tie up customers” before competitors arrive on the scene.  I’m not sure what Steve means by “tie up customers.”  Suppose that a monopolist, knowing that rivals are about to enter the market, goes to all of its customers and offers  them a 5% discount if they will agree to purchase 95% of their requirements from the monopolist for the next three years.  At that point we have a partial exclusive dealing contract and the cost-price screen shouldn’t be required.  But, there, the exclusionary mechanism—the thing that keeps rivals from competing—is not the loyalty discount but rather the contractual commitment not to buy any more than 5% of requirements from rivals.  Customers would have to breach their contract in order to consider even the most advantageous offers from rivals.  The point that amici made in our Meritor v. Eaton brief was that when the claimed mechanism of exclusion is a price term and not a contractual restriction on purchasing from rivals, some version of the price-cost screen should apply.

The example I’ve just attributed to Steve (and sorry Steve if this is not what you have in mind) is not what we’re talking about in almost any of the current generation of loyalty discount cases.  In Meritor, for example, the Third Circuit acknowledged that the loyalty provisions at issue did not require customers to buy any of their requirements from Eaton.  It’s just that if the customers didn’t meet the loyalty thresholds, they would lose a possible rebate.  Meritor could compete for that business by offering its own counter-rebates so long as it wouldn’t have had to price unprofitably to do so.

Steve’s point about economies of scale is one that I covered in my post and is fully accounted for by the cost-price screen.  A rival who can profitably match a loyalty discount scheme is not foreclosed from operating at any particular scale.

The same is true of Steve’s point about loyalty discount schemes foreclosing a new seller’s ability to make incremental sales that don’t reduce the accused firm’s own sales.  Again, so long the rival can profitably match the discounts, there is no reason that output should be reduced.

Finally, Steve asserts that loyalty discounts obtained by intermediaries may not be passed onto ultimate consumers.  That’s equally true of conventional single-firm price reductions that are categorically immunized from antitrust liability under a long line of precedent.  One may not like the price-cost test in any context for that reason or others, but there’s nothing special about its application to loyalty discounts. The common denominator of all of these points is that loyalty discounts aren’t exclusionary unless they force rivals to price below cost in order to match the customer’s loss of the loyalty discounts if they fail to meet the loyalty threshold.

Steve thinks the price-cost screen exhibits “formalism”—that dreaded epithet in the post-realist world—but it’s actually just an expression of economic common sense.  Steve and Josh are excellent economists and it’s hard for me to imagine a case in which they would condemn a loyalty discount if there was undisputed evidence that the allegedly excluded rival could have completely neutralized the financial inducement of the loyalty discount by offering a counter-discount of its own without pricing below cost.  If they can offer an example of a circumstance where such a loyalty discount should be condemned, I would be very interested to hear it.  If they can’t, then they have implicitly adopted a version of the price-cost screen and, to repeat a point from my earlier post, all we’re haggling over is the price.

I want to clarify some of the key issues in Commissioner Wright’s analysis of Exclusive Dealing and Loyalty Discounts as part of the raising rivals’ costs (“RRC”) paradigm. I never thought that I would have to defend Wright against Professors Lambert and Crane. But, it appears that rigorous antitrust analysis sometimes makes what some would view as strange bedfellows.

In my view, there should not be a safe harbor price-cost test used for loyalty discounts. Nor should these discounts be treated as conclusively (per se) illegal if the defendant fails the price-cost test. Either way, the test is a formalistic and unreliable screen. To explain these conclusions, and why I think the proponents of the screen are taking too narrow approach to these issues, I want to start with some discussion of the legal and economic frameworks.

In my view, there are two overarching antitrust legal paradigms for exclusionary conduct – predatory pricing and raising rivals’ costs (RRC), and conduct that falls into the RRC paradigm generally raises greater antitrust concerns. (For further details, see my 2006 Antitrust L.J. article, “Exclusionary Conduct, Effect on Consumers, and the Flawed Profit-Sacrifice Standard.”) Commissioner Wright also takes this approach in his speech of identifying and distinguishing the two paradigms.

This raises the question of which framework is better suited for addressing exclusive dealing and loyalty discounts (that is, where the conduct is not pled in the complaint as predatory pricing). Commissioner Wright’s speech articulates the view that theories of harm alleging RRC/foreclosure should be analyzed under exclusive dealing law, which is more consistent with the raising rivals’ costs approach, not under predatory pricing law (i.e., with its safe harbor for prices above cost). (Incidentally, I don’t read his speech as saying that he has abandoned Brooke Group for predatory pricing allegations. For example, it seems clear that he would support a price-cost test in a case alleging that a loyalty discount harmed competition via predatory pricing rather than RRC/foreclosure.)

To understand which legal framework – raising rivals’ costs/exclusive dealing versus predatory pricing/price-cost test – is most relevant for analyzing the relevant competitive issues, I want to begin with a primer on RRC theories of foreclosure. This will also hopefully bring everyone closer on the economics.

Input Foreclosure and Customer Foreclosure

There are two types of foreclosure theories within the RRC paradigm — “input foreclosure” and “customer foreclosure.” Both are relevant for evaluating exclusive dealing and loyalty discounts. The input foreclosure theory says that the ED literally “raises rivals’ costs” by foreclosing a rival’s access to a critical input subject to ED. The customer foreclosure theory says that ED literally “reduces rivals’ revenues” by foreclosing a rival’s access to a sufficient customer base and thereby drives the rival out of business or marginalizes it as a competitor (i.e., where it lacks the ability or incentive to move effectively beyond a niche position or to invest to grow).

Commissioner Wright’s speech tended to merge the two variants. But, it is useful to distinguish between them. (I think that this is one source of Professor Lambert being “baffled” by the speech, and more generally, is a source of confusion among commentators that leads to unnecessary disagreements.)

In the simplest presentation, one might say that customer foreclosure concerns are raised primarily by exclusive dealing with customers, while input foreclosure concerns are raised primarily by exclusive dealing with input suppliers. But, as noted below, both concerns may arise in the same case, and especially so where the “customers” are distributors rather than final consumers, and the “input” is distribution services.

Analysis of exclusive dealing (ED) often invokes the customer foreclosure theory. For example, Lorain Journal may be analyzed as customer foreclosure. However, input foreclosure is also highly relevant for analyzing ED because exclusive dealing often involves inputs. For example, Judge Posner’s famous JTC Petroleum cartel opinion can be interpreted in this way, if there were solely vertical agreements.

Cases where manufacturers have ED arrangements with wholesale or retail distributors might be thought to fall into the customer foreclosure theory because the distributors can be seen as customers of the manufacturer. However, distributors also can be seen as providing an input to the manufacturer, “distribution services.” For example, a supermarket or drug store provides shelf space to a manufacturer. If the manufacturer (say, unilaterally) sets resale prices, then the difference between this resale price and the wholesale price is the effective input price.

One reason why the input foreclosure/customer foreclosure distinction is important involves the proper roles of minimum viable scale (MVS) and minimum efficient scale (MES). The customer foreclosure theory may involve a claim that the rival likely will be driven below MVS and exit Or it may involve a claim that the rival will be driven below MES, where its costs will be so much higher or its demand so much lower that it will be marginalized as a competitor.

By contrast, and this is the key point, input foreclosure does not focus on whether the rival likely will be driven below MVS. Even if the rival remains viable, if its costs are higher, it will be led to raise the prices charged to consumers, which will cause consumer harm. And prices will not be raised only in the future. The recoupment can be simultaneous.

Another reason for the importance of the distinction is the role of the “foreclosure rate,” which often is the focus in customer foreclosure analysis. For input foreclosure, the key foreclosure issue is not the fraction of distribution input suppliers or capacity that is foreclosed, but rather whether the foreclosure will raise the rival’s distribution costs. That can occur even if a single distributor is foreclosed, if the exclusivity changes the market structure in the input market or if that distributor was otherwise critical. (For example, see Krattenmaker and Salop, “Anticompetitive Exclusion.”)

At the same time, it is important to note that the input/customer foreclosure distinction is not a totally bright line difference in many real world cases. A given case can raise both concerns. In addition, customer foreclosure sometimes can raise rivals costs, and input foreclosure sometimes (but not always) can cause exit.
While input foreclosure can succeed even if the rival remains viable in the market, in more extreme scenarios, significantly higher costs inflicted on the rival could drive the rival to fall below minimum viable scale, and thereby cause it to exit. I think that this is one way in which unnecessary disagreements have occurred. Commentators might erroneously focus only this more extreme scenario and overlook the impact of the exclusives or near-exclusives on the rival’s distribution costs.

Note also that customer foreclosure can raise a rival’s costs when there are economies of scale in variable costs. For this reason, even if the rival does not exit or is not marginalized, it nonetheless may become a weaker competitor as a result of the exclusivity or loyalty discount.

These points also help to explain why neither a price-cost test nor the foreclosure rate will provide sufficient reliable evidence for either customer foreclosure or input foreclosure, which I turn to next.

(For further discussion of the distinction between input foreclosure and customer foreclosure, see Riordan and Salop, Evaluating Vertical Mergers: A Post-Chicago Approach, 63 ANTITRUST L.R. 513(1995). See also the note on O’Neill v Coca Cola in Andrew Gavil, William Kovacic and Jonathan Baker, Antitrust Law in Perspective: Cases, Concepts and Problems in Competition Policy (2d ed.) at 868-69. For analysis of Lorain Journal as customer foreclosure, see Gavil et. al at 593-97.)

The Inappropriateness of a Dispositive Price-Cost Test

A price-cost test obviously is not relevant for evaluating input foreclosure concerns, even where the input is distribution services. Even if the foreclosure involves bidding up the price of the input, it can succeed in permitting the firm to achieve or maintain market power, despite the fact that the firm does not bid to the point that its costs exceed its price. (In this regard, Weyerhaeuser was a case of “predatory overbuying,” not “raising rivals’ cost overbuying.” The allegation was that Weyerhaeuser would gain market power in the timber input market, not the lumber output market.)

Nor is a price-cost test the critical focus for assessing customer foreclosure theories of competitive harm. (By the way, I think we all agree that the relevant price-cost test involves a comparison of the incremental revenue and incremental cost of the “contestable volume” at issue for the loyalty discount. So I will not delve into that issue.)

First, and most fundamentally, the price-cost test is premised on the erroneous idea that only equally efficient competitors are worth protecting. In other words, the price-cost requires the premise that the antitrust laws only protect consumers against competitive harm arising from conduct that could have excluded an equally efficient competitor. This premise makes absolutely no economic sense. One simple illustrative example is a monopolist raising the costs of a less efficient potential competitor to destroy its entry into the market. Suppose that monopolist has marginal cost of $50 and a monopoly price of $100. Suppose that there is the potential entrant has costs of $75. If the entry were to occur, the market price would fall. Entry of the less efficient rival imposes a competitive constraint on the monopolist. Thus, the entry clearly would benefit consumers. (And, it clearly often would raise total welfare as well.) It is hard to see why antitrust should permit this type of exclusionary conduct.

It is also unlikely that antitrust law would allow this conduct. For example, Lorain Journal is probably pretty close to this hypothetical. WEOL likely was not equally efficient. The hypothetical probably also fits Microsoft pretty well.

Second, the price-cost test does not make economic sense in the case of the equally efficient rival either. Even if the competitor is equally efficient, bidding for exclusives or near-exclusives through loyalty discounts often does not take place on a level playing field. There are several reasons for this. One reason is that the dominant firm may tie up customers or input providers before the competitors even arrive on the scene or are in a position to counterbid. A second reason is that the exclusive may be worth more to the dominant firm because it will allow it to maintain market power, whereas the entrant would only be able to obtain more competitive profits. In this sense, the dominant firm is “purchasing market power” as well as purchasing distribution. (This point is straightforward to explain with an example. Suppose that the dominant firm is earning monopoly profits of $200, which would be maintained if it deters the entry of the new competitor. Suppose that successful entry by the equally efficient competitor would lead to the dominant firm and the entrant both earning profits of $70. In this example, the entrant would be unwilling to bid more than $70 for the distribution. But, the dominant firm would be willing to bid up to $130, the difference between its monopoly profits of $200 and the duopoly profits of $70.) A third reason is that customers may not be willing to take the risk that the entry will fail, where failure can occur not because the entrant’s product is inferior but simply because other customers take the exclusive deal from the dominant firm. In this case, a fear that the entrant would fail could become a self-fulfilling prophecy because the customers cannot coordinate their responses to the dominant firms’ offer. Lorain Journal may provide an illustrative example of this self-fulfilling prophecy phenomenon. This last point highlights a more general point Commissioner Wright made in his speech — that successful and harmful RRC does not require a below-cost price (net of discounts). When distributors cannot coordinate their responses to the dominant firm’s offer, a relatively small discount might be all that is required to purchase exclusion. Thus, while large discounts might accompany RRC conduct, that need not be the case. These latter reasons also explain why there can be successful foreclosure even when contracts have short duration.

Third, as noted above, customer foreclosure may raise rivals’ costs when there are economies of scale. The higher costs of the foreclosed rivals are not well accounted for by the price-cost test.

Fourth, as stressed by Joe Farrell, the price-cost test ignores the fact that loyalty discounts triggered by market share may deter a customer’s purchases from a rival that do not even come at the expense of the dominant firm. (For example, suppose in light of the discounts, the customer is purchasing 90 units from the dominant firm and 10 from the rival in order to achieve a “reward” that comes from purchasing 90% from the dominant firm. Now suppose that entrant offers a new product that would lead the customer to wish to continue to purchase 90 units from the dominant firm but now purchase 15 units from the rival. The purchase of these additional 5 units from the rival does not come at the expense of the dominant firm. Yet, even if the entrant were to offer the 5 units at cost, these purchases would be deterred because the customer would fall below the 90% trigger for the reward.) In this way, the market share discount can directly reduce output.

Fifth, the price-cost test assumes that the price decreases will be passed on to final consumers. This may be the clear where the exclusives or loyalty discounts are true discounts given to final consumers. But, it may not be the case where the dominant firm is acquiring the loyalty from input suppliers, including distributors who then resell to final consumers. The loyalty discounts often involve lump sum payments, which raises questions about pass-on, at least in the short-run.

Finally, it is important to stress that the price-cost test for loyalty discounts assumes that price actually represents a true discount. I expect that this assumption is the starting point for commentators who give priority to the price-cost test. However, the price may not represent a true discount in fact, or the size of the discount may turn out to be smaller than it appears after the “but-for world” is evaluated. That is, the proponents of a price-cost test have the following type of scenario in mind. The dominant firm is initially charging the monopoly price of $100. In the face of competition, the dominant firm offers a lower price of (say) $95 to customers that will accept exclusivity, and the customers accept the exclusivity in order to obtain the $5 discount. (To illustrate, suppose that absent the exclusive, the customers would purchase 90 units from the dominant firm at $100 for total revenue of $9000. With the exclusive, they purchase 100 units at a price of $95 for total revenue of $9500.
Thus, the dominant firm earns incremental revenue of $500 on the 10 incremental units, or $50 per unit. If the dominant firm’s costs are $50 or less, it will pass the price-cost test.) But, consider next the following alternative scenario. The dominant firm offers the original $100 price to those customers that will accept exclusivity, and sets a higher “penalty” price of $105 to customers that purchase non-exclusively from the competitor. In this latter scenario, the $5 discount similarly may drive customers to accept the exclusive. These prices would lead to a similar outcome of the price-cost test. (To illustrate, suppose that absent the exclusive, the customers would purchase 90 units from the dominant firm at $105 for total revenue of $9450. With the exclusive, they purchase 100 units at a price of $100 for total revenue of $10,000. Thus, the dominant firm earns revenue of $550 on the 10 incremental units, or $55 per unit. Here, the dominant firm will pass the price-cost test, if its costs are $55 or less.) However, in this latter scenario, it is noteworthy that the use of the “penalty” price eliminates any benefits to consumers. This issue seems to be overlooked by Crane and Lambert. (For further details of the role of the penalty price in the context of bundled discounts, see Barry Nalebuff’s articles on Exclusionary Bundling and the articles of Greenlee, Reitman and Sibley.)

* * *

For all these reasons, treating loyalty discounts as analogous to predatory pricing and thereby placing over-reliance on a price-cost test represents a formalistic and unreliable antitrust approach. (It is ironic that Commissioner Wright was criticized by Professor Lambert for being formalistic, when the facts are the opposite.)

This analysis is not to say that the court should be indifferent to the lower prices, where there is a true discount. To the contrary, lower prices passed-on would represent procompetitive efficiency benefits. But, the potential for lower prices passed-on does not provide a sufficient basis for adopting a price-cost safe harbor test for loyalty discount allegations, even ones that can be confidently characterized as purely plain vanilla customer foreclosure with no effects on rivals’ costs.

Thus, the price-cost test should be one relevant evidentiary factor. But, it should not be the primary factor or a trump for either side. That is, above-cost pricing (measured in terms of incremental revenue less than incremental cost) should not be sufficient by itself for the defendant to escape liability. Nor should below-cost pricing (again, measured in terms of incremental revenue less than incremental cost) should not be a sufficient by itself for a finding of liability.

Such “Creeping Brookism” does not led to either rigorous or accurate antitrust analysis. It is a path to higher error rates, not a lower ones.

Nor should courts rely on simple-minded foreclosure rates. Gilbarco shows how a mechanical approach to measuring foreclosure leads to confusion. Microsoft makes it clear that a “total foreclosure” test also is deficient. Instead, a better approach is to require the plaintiff to prove under the Rule of Reason standard that the conduct harms the rival by reducing its ability to compete and also that it harms consumers.

I should add one other point for completeness. Some (but not Commissioner Wright or Professor Crane) might suggest that the price-cost test has administrability benefits relative to a full rule of reason analysis under the RRC paradigm. While courts are capable are evaluating prices and costs, that comparison may be more difficult than measuring the increase in the rivals’ distribution costs engendered by the conduct. Moreover, the price-cost comparison becomes an order of magnitude more complex in loyalty discount cases, relative to plain vanilla predatory pricing cases. This is because it also is necessary to determine a reasonable measure of the contestable volume to use to compare incremental revenue and incremental cost. For first-dollar discounts, there will always be some small region where incremental revenue is below incremental cost. Even aside from this situation, the two sides often will disagree about the magnitude of the volume that was at issue.

In summary, I think that Professor Wright’s speech forms the basis of moving the discussion forward into analysis of the actual evidence of benefits and harms, rather than continuing to fight the battles over whether the legal analysis used in the 1950s and 1960s failed to satisfy modern standards and thereby needed to be reined in with unreliable safe harbors.

A number of people on both sides of the ideological spectrum were surprised by FTC Commissioner Josh Wright’s recent speech advocating that the FTC reject the use of price-cost tests to assess the legality of loyalty discounts and instead pursue an exclusive dealing framework of analysis.  As the author of a brief (unsuccessfully) urging the Supreme Court to grant certiorari and reverse in Z.F. Meritor v. Eaton, I want respectfully to disagree with some of what Josh had to say.  But, first, two other observations.

First, I’m delighted that Josh is charting a course as Commissioner that defies some people’s expectations (even if they sometimes happen to be my own!).  Josh has long insisted on evidence-based analysis rather than simplistic theorizing or reductionist legal rules and his position on loyalty discounts is consistent with that theme.  Early in his term on the Commission, Josh is making it clear that he will exercise independent judgment, intellectual integrity, and a principled, non-ideological approach to decision-making.  That’s a nice rejoinder to those who believe that antitrust law reduces to simplistic right-left politics.  So kudos to Josh!

Second, Josh and I probably agree on 90% of what’s important about loyalty discounts.  We agree that loyalty discounts are usually competitively benign or procompetitive, but that they can sometimes be anticompetitive when they exclude rivals and create market power.  We also agree that exclusive dealing principles and analysis can be usefully deployed in loyalty discount cases (although I would only do so after a plaintiff satisfied a price-cost screen).  Finally, we also agree that unmodified predatory pricing rules—requiring the plaintiff to show that the defendant’s sales were below average variable cost—could potentially insulate some exclusionary loyalty discounts from antitrust scrutiny.

Where we differ is on the question of whether antitrust law should ever condemn a loyalty discount that the allegedly excluded rival could have met without pricing below cost.  To say that it should not is to say that there should be some sort of price-cost screen in place in loyalty discount cases.  Josh rejects the use of such screens.

One point of clarification:  Josh asserts that one of the central claims in favor of the price-cost test is its ease of administration.  Contrary to Josh’s suggestion, that is not an argument we made in our Meritor amicus brief.  As someone who has counseled clients and litigated these issues, I can attest that the discount attribution test (the variant of the price-cost test I support for loyalty discounts) is anything but easy to apply (which Josh himself recognizes with respect to the “contestable share” idea).  The virtue of the test is not its ease of administration, but that it requires plaintiffs to show that the discount scheme actually foreclosed them from competing.  Our point was about analytical discipline, not ease of administration.

This, I think, is the crucial difference between Josh and me.  Unless a rival would have to price below cost to match a loyalty discount, it is not foreclosed from competing for the business covered by the discount.  Josh wants to apply exclusive dealing analysis that looks at foreclosure without answering a question that, in my view, is necessary to discover whether there is any foreclosure at all—whether the rival could profitably match the discount.  A rival that has a profitable “predatory counterstrategy,” to quote Frank Easterbrook, isn’t foreclosed.

A thought experiment may be helpful.  Suppose that a firm with a 90% market share offered all of its customers a 0.0001% rebate if they purchased at least 80% of their requirements from the dominant firm.  No one could imagine that such a “loyalty discount” could exclude rivals, since even small rivals could easily make up the rebates foregone if customers forewent buying the 80% from the dominant firm.  We can make the rebate 0.001% with the same result.  And we can continue to pose successive iterations of the same question, increasing the discount incrementally, until we hit a point that someone could reasonably say “well now that could be exclusionary.”  Wherever we cross that Rubicon, we cross it because what was true at 0.0001%—that the small rival could laugh it off by shelling out a few dollars in a counter-discount—is no longer true.  To play this game is to conduct a competitive response sensitivity analysis of the very kind demanded by the attribution test. For present purposes, it’s unimportant where we draw the line; it’s the fact of the line-drawing that matters. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, we’ve already established what we are, now we’re just haggling over the price.

Josh is surely right that loyalty discounts can raise rivals’ costs.  That could happen in one of two ways.  First, if a small firm were prevented from reaching efficient scale, or second if a firm were forced to ramp up to an inefficiently large scale in order to meet a competitor’s loyalty discounts.  But neither of those scenarios holds if the rival is able to compete against the loyalty discounts without pricing below cost.  The small firm will not be prevented from reaching minimum efficient scale if it can increase its share by profitably competing against the loyalty discount.  And the second firm will not be rushed into increasing its scale if it can compete profitably at a smaller scale.  In either case, the RRC mechanism is forcing the firms to price below their costs.

At the end of the day, I suspect that Josh—using whatever analytical tools he associates with exclusive dealing analysis—would be highly unlikely to condemn any loyalty discount in a case where the rival could profitably match the discounts.  That gives me assurances as to Josh, but not as to all other players in the legal system, many of whom are eager to jettison the discipline of price-cost screens so that they can get onto the “real meat” of the case—like inflammatory internal e-mails employing metaphors of coercion that Judge Posner has aptly labeled “compelling evidence of predatory intent to the naïve.”  So I remain highly confident that we’re in good hands with Josh, but worry about what others may do with his words.

In a speech this past Monday evening, Commissioner Wright rejected the view that there should be a safe harbor for single-product loyalty discounts resulting in an above-cost price for the product at issue.  A number of antitrust scholars—including Herb Hovenkamp, Dan Crane, and yours truly—recently urged the Supreme Court to grant cert and overturn a Third Circuit decision refusing to recognize such a safe harbor.  Commissioner Wright thinks we’re wrong.

A single-product loyalty discount occurs when a seller conditions a price cut (either an ex ante discount or an ex post rebate) on a buyer’s purchasing some quantity of a single product from the seller.  The purchase target is often set as a percentage of the buyer’s requirements, as when a medical device manufacturer offers to pay a 20% rebate on all of a hospital’s purchases of the manufacturer’s device if the hospital buys at least 70% of its requirements of that type of device from the manufacturer.  Because a loyalty discount tends to encourage distributors to carry more of the discounting manufacturer’s brand and less of the brands of the discounter’s rivals, such a discount may tend to “foreclose” those rivals from available distribution outlets.  If the degree of foreclose is so great that rivals have to cut their output below minimum efficient scale (the minimum output level required to achieve all economies of scale), then the discount may “raise rivals’ costs” relative to those of the discounter and thereby harm consumers.

On all these points, Commissioner Wright and I are in agreement.  Where we differ is on the question of whether a loyalty discount resulting in a discounted price that is above the discounter’s own cost should give rise to antitrust liability.  I say no.  I take that position because such an “above-cost loyalty discount” could be matched by any rival that is as efficient a producer as the discounter.  If, for example, a manufacturer normally charges $1.00 for widgets it produces for $.79 each but offers a 20% loyalty discount to retailers that buy 70% of their widget requirements from the manufacturer, any competitor that could produce a widget for $.79 (i.e., any equally efficient rival) could stay in business by lowering its price to the level of its incremental cost.  Thus, any rival that loses sales because of a manufacturer’s above-cost loyalty discount must be either less efficient than the manufacturer (so it can’t match the manufacturer’s discounted price) or unwilling to lower its price to the level of its cost.  In either case, the rival is unworthy of antitrust’s protection, where that protection amounts to prohibiting price cuts that provide consumers with immediate benefits.

Commissioner Wright disputes (I think?) the view that equally efficient rivals could match all above-cost loyalty discounts.  He maintains that loyalty discounts may be structured so that

[a] distributor’s purchase of an additional unit from a rival supplier beyond the threshold level can result in a loss of rebates large enough to render rival suppliers unable to attract a distributor to purchase the marginal unit at prices at or above the marginal cost of producing the good.

While I’m not entirely certain what Commissioner Wright means by this remark, I think he’s making the point that a loyalty discounter’s equally efficient rival might not be able to attract purchases by matching the discounter’s above-cost loyalty rebate if the rival’s “regular” base of sales is substantially smaller than that of the discounter.

If that is indeed what Commissioner Wright is saying, he has a point.  Suppose, for example, that the market for tennis balls consists of two brands, Penn and Wilson, that current market shares, reflective of consumer demand, are 60% for the Penn and 40% for Wilson, and that retailers typically stock the two brands in those proportions. Assume also that it costs each manufacturer $.90 to produce a can of tennis balls, that each sells to retailers for $1 per can, and that minimum efficient scale in this market occurs at a level of production equal to 35% of market demand. Suppose, then, that Penn, the dominant manufacturer, offers retailers a 10% loyalty rebate on all purchases made within a year if they buy 70% of their requirements for the year from Penn. The $.90 per unit discounted price is not below Penn’s cost, so the loyalty discount would come within my safe harbor.

Nevertheless, the loyalty discount could have the effect of driving Wilson from the market.  After implementation of the rebate scheme, a typi­cal retailer that previously purchased sixty cans of Penn for $60 and forty cans of Wilson for $40 could save $7 on its 100-can tennis ball require­ments by spending $63 to obtain seventy Penn cans and $30 to obtain thirty Wilson cans. The retailer and others like it would thus have a strong incen­tive to shift pur­chases from Wilson to Penn. To prevent a loss of mar­ket share that would drive it below minimum efficient scale (35% of market demand), Wilson would need to lower its price to provide retailers with the same total dollar discount, but on a smaller base of sales (40% of a typical retailer’s require­ments rather than 60%). This would require it to lower its price below cost. For example, Wilson could match Penn’s $7 discount to the retailer described above only by reducing its $1 per-unit price by 17.5 cents ($7.00/40 = $.175), which would require it to price below its cost of $.90 per unit.  Viewed statically, then, it seems that even an above-cost loyalty discount could occasion competitive harm by causing rivals to be less efficient, so that they could not match the discounter’s price.

In light of dynamic effects, though, I’m not convinced that examples like this undermine the case for a safe harbor for above-cost loyalty discounts. Had the nondominant rival (Wilson) charged a price equal to its marginal cost prior to Penn’s loyalty rebate, it would have enjoyed a price advantage and likely would have grown its market share to a point at which Penn’s loyalty rebate strat­egy could not drive it below minimum effi­cient scale. Moreover, one strategy that would prevent a nondominant but equally efficient firm from being harmed by a dominant rival’s above-cost loyalty rebate would be for the non-dominant firm to give its own volume discounts from the outset, secur­ing up-front commitments from enough buy­ers (in exchange for discounted prices) to ensure that its production stayed above minimum efficient scale. Such a strategy, which would obvi­ously benefit consumers, would be encouraged by a liability rule that evaluated loy­alty discounts under straight­forward Brooke Group principles (i.e., that included a safe harbor for above-cost discounts) and thereby signaled to manufacturers that they must take steps to protect themselves from above-cost loyalty discounts.

Commissioner Wright maintains that all this discussion of price-cost comparisons is inapposite because the theoretical harm from loyalty discounts stems from market exclusion (and its ability to raise rivals’ costs), not from predation.  He says, for example:

• “[T]o the extent loyalty discounts raise competition concerns, the concerns are about anticompetitive exclusion and, as a result, the legal framework developed to evaluate exclusive dealing claims ought to be used to evaluate claims relating to loyalty discounts.” [p. 12]
• “[P]redatory pricing and raising rivals’ costs are distinct paradigms of potentially exclusionary conduct. There simply is not a stable relative relationship between price and cost in raising rivals’ cost models that form the basis of anticompetitive exclusion, and hence it does not follow that below cost pricing is a necessary condition for competitive harm.”  [pp. 19-20]
• “When plaintiffs allege that loyalty discounts … violate the antitrust laws because they deprive rivals of access to a critical input, raise their costs, and ultimately harm competition, they are articulating a raising rivals’ cost theory of harm rather than price predation.”  [p. 24]
• “Raising rivals’ costs and predation are two different economic paradigms of exclusionary conduct, and economic models within each paradigm establish the necessary conditions for each practice to harm competition and give rise to antitrust concerns. Loyalty discounts and other forms of partial exclusives … are properly analyzed under the exclusive dealing framework. Price‐cost tests in the predatory pricing tradition … simply do not comport with the underlying economics of exclusive dealing.”  [p. 33]

I must confess that I’m baffled by Commissioner Wright’s oddly formalistic pigeonholing.  Why must a practice be one or the other—either pricing too low or excluding rivals and thereby raising their costs?  That seems like a false dichotomy.  Indeed, it seems to me that a problematic loyalty discount is one in which the discounter excludes its rivals from a substantial portion of the distribution network (and thereby raises their costs) via the mechanism of conditional price cuts. It’s “both-and,” not “either-or.”  And if that’s the case, then surely it makes sense to limit which price cuts may occasion liability—i.e., only those that could not be matched by equally efficient rivals.  [It is important to note here that I don’t advocate a price-cost test as an alternative to a foreclosure-based analysis.  Rather, a plaintiff should have to establish below-cost pricing (to show that the plaintiff was deserving of antitrust’s protection via the highly disfavored prohibition of discounts) and demonstrate that the discounting at issue resulted in substantial foreclosure from distribution outlets (the latter showing is necessary to prove harm to competition rather than simply to a competitor).]

Throughout his speech, Commissioner Wright emphasizes that the primary competitive concern presented by loyalty discounts is the possibility of “anticompetitive exclusion.”  He writes on page 8, for example, that “[t]he key economic point is that the antitrust concerns potentially arising from loyalty discounts involve anticompetitive exclusion rather than predatory pricing….”  On page 12, he reiterates that “to the extent loyalty discounts raise competition concerns, the concerns are about anticompetitive exclusion.”  He then apparently assumes that loyalty discount-induced exclusion is “anticompetitive” if it is sufficiently substantial—i.e., if the discounter’s rivals are foreclosed from so many distribution outlets that they are driven below minimum efficient scale so that their costs are raised relative to those of the discounter.

I would dispute the notion that discount-induced exclusion is anticompetitive simply because it’s substantial.  Rather, I’d say such exclusion is anticompetitive only if it is substantial and could not have been avoided by aggressive pricing.  Omitting the second requirement creates the possibility that antitrust will be used by a laggard rival to prevent a more aggressive rival’s consumer-friendly price competition.  (LePage’s anyone?)

Suppose, for example, that there are two producers of widgets, A and B, which both produce widgets at a marginal cost of $.79 and, given their duopoly, charge $1.00 per widget.  A, whose market share has hovered around 50%, institutes a loyalty rebate of 20% for retailers that purchase 70% of their requirements from A.  If B offers the same deal, or simply cuts its price to $.80, it should lose no market share.  But suppose B doesn’t do so, A captures 70% of the market, and B falls below minimum efficient scale.  Would we say that B’s exclusion is “anticompetitive” because A’s discount scheme resulted in such substantial foreclosure that it raised B’s costs?  Should B be able to collect treble damages for based on its “anticompetitive exclusion”?  Surely not.

Commissioner Wright, from whom I have learned more about “error costs” than anyone else, seems oddly unconcerned about the chilling effect his decidedly pro-plaintiff approach to loyalty discounts will produce.  Wouldn’t a firm considering a loyalty discount—a price cut, don’t forget!—think twice if it knew its rivals could sit on their hands, claim “exclusion” if the discount successfully moved substantial market share toward the discounter, and collect treble damages?  The safe harbor Hovenkamp, Crane, and I have advocated would provide assurance to potential discounters that they will not face liability if they charge above-cost prices, prices that could be matched by equally efficient, aggressive rivals.  Isn’t that approach more likely to minimize error costs?

Two closing points.  First, despite my disagreement with Commissioner Wright on this issue, I share the widely held view that he is one of the most brilliant antitrust thinkers out there.  He’s taught me more about antitrust than anyone (with the possible exception of the uber-prolific Herb Hovenkamp).  His questioning of my views on loyalty discounts really makes me wonder if I’m missing something.

Second, to those who think Commissioner Wright has “drifted” or “turned,” let me assure you that he’s long held his views on loyalty discounts.  As you can see here, here, and here, we’ve been going round and round on this matter for quite some time.

Perhaps one day one of us will persuade the other.

The article reports that while most minority leaders have made recommendations to reward patronage and keep party operatives happy, McConnell acts more systematically.  His adviser charged with identifying potential nominees looks at five criteria:

First, [a]re the nominees competent in the subject matter? Second, [a]re they philosophically compatible with Senator McConnell? Third, d[o] they possess high character and integrity? Fourth, [a]re they tough? Fifth, [a]re they team players?

In light of these criteria, it’s not surprising that one of the McConnell recommendations highlighted in the article is TOTM co-founder, now FTC Commissioner, Josh Wright.  As the article observes (correctly, IMHO), Wright is “widely considered his generation’s greatest mind on antitrust law.”

Of course, that doesn’t mean Wright’s always right.  More about that to come….

Much of my writing on the case has essentially addressed it as a rule of reason case, assessing the economic merits of Apple’s contract terms. And as I mention in this Reuters article from yesterday on the case, one of the key issues in this analysis (and one of the government’s key targets in the case) is the use of MFN clauses.

But as Josh pointed out in a blog post last year,

my hunch is that if the case is litigated its legacy will be as an “agreement” case rather than what it contributes to rule of reason analysis.  In other words, if Apple gets to the rule of reason, the DOJ (like most plaintiffs in rule of reason cases) are likely to lose — especially in light of at least preliminary evidence of dramatic increases in output.  The critical question — I suspect — will be about proof of an actual naked price fixing agreement among publishers and Apple, and as a legal matter, what evidence is sufficient to establish that agreement for the purposes of Section 1 of the Sherman Act.

He’s likely correct, of course, that a central question at trial will be whether or not this is a per se or rule of reason case, and that trial will focus in significant part on the sufficiency of the evidence of agreement. But because this determination will turn considerably on the purpose and function of the MFN and price cap terms in Apple’s agreements with the publishers, I don’t think there should (or will) be much difference. Nor do I think the government should (or will) win.

Before the court can apply the per se rule, it must satisfy itself that the conduct at issue “would always or almost always tend to restrict competition and decrease output.” But it is not true as a matter of economics — and certainly not true as a matter of law — that MFNs meet this standard.

After State Oil v. Kahn there can be no question about the rule of reason (if not per se legal) status of price caps. And as the Court noted in Leegin:

Resort to per se rules is confined to restraints, like those mentioned, “that would always or almost always tend to restrict competition and decrease output.” To justify a per se prohibition a restraint must have “manifestly anticompetitive” effects, and “lack any redeeming virtue.

As a consequence, the per se rule is appropriate only after courts have had considerable experience with the type of restraint at issue, and only if courts can predict with confidence that it would be invalidated in all or almost all instances under the rule of reason. It should come as no surprise, then, that “we have expressed reluctance to adopt per se rules with regard to restraints imposed in the context of business relationships where the economic impact of certain practices is not immediately obvious.” And, as we have stated, a “departure from the rule-of-reason standard must be based upon demonstrable economic effect rather than . . . upon formalistic line drawing.”

After Leegin, all vertical non-price restraints, including MFNs, are assessed under the rule of reason.  Courts neither have “considerable experience” with MFNs, nor can they remotely “predict with confidence that they would be invalidated in all or almost all instances under the rule of reason.” As a recent article in Antitrust points out,

The DOJ and FTC have brought approximately ten cases over the last two decades challenging MFNs. Most of these cases involved the health care industry and all were resolved by consent judgments.

Even if the court does take a harder look at whether a per se rule should govern, however, as a practical matter there is not likely to be much difference between a “does this merit per se treatment” analysis and analysis of the facts under the rule of reason. As the Court pointed out in California Dental Association,

The truth is that our categories of analysis of anticompetitive effect are less fixed than terms like “per se,” “quick look,” and “rule of reason” tend to make them appear. We have recognized, for example, that “there is often no bright line separating per se from Rule of Reason analysis,” since “considerable inquiry into market conditions” may be required before the application of any so-called “per se” condemnation is justified. “[W]hether the ultimate finding is the product of a presumption or actual market analysis, the essential inquiry remains the same–whether or not the challenged restraint enhances competition.”

And as my former classmate Tom Nachbar points out in a recent article,

it’s hard to identity much relative simplicity in the per se rule. Indeed, the moniker “per se” has become somewhat misleading, as cases determining whether to apply the per se or rule of reason become as long as ones actually applying the rule of reason itself.

Of course that doesn’t end the analysis, and the government’s filings do all they can to sidestep the direct antitrust treatment of MFNs and instead assert that they (and other evidence alleged) permit the court to infer Apple’s participation as the coordinator of a horizontal price-fixing conspiracy among the publishers.

But as Apple argues in its filings,

The[ relevant] cases mandate an inquiry into the possibility that the challenged contract terms and negotiation approach were in Apple’s independent economic interests. The evidence is overwhelming—not just possible—that Apple acted for its own valid business reasons and not to “raise consumer prices market-wide.”…Plaintiffs ask this Court to infer Apple’s participation in a conspiracy from (1) its MFN and price cap terms and (2) negotiations with publishers.

* * *

What is obvious, however, is that Apple has not fixed prices with its competitors. What is remarkable is that the government seeks to impose grave legal consequences on an inherently pro-competitive act—entry—accomplished via agency, an MFN, and price caps, none of which is per se unlawful.

The government’s strenuous objection to Apple’s interpretation of the controlling Supreme Court authority, Monsanto v. Spray-Rite, notwithstanding, it’s difficult to see the MFN clauses as evidence of Apple’s participation in the publishers’ alleged conspiracy.

An important point supporting Apple’s argument here is that, unlike the “hubs” in the other “hub and spoke” conspiracies on which the DOJ bases its case, Apple has no significant leverage over the alleged co-conspirators, and thus no power to coordinate — let alone enforce — a price-fixing scheme. As Apple argues in its Opposition brief,

The only “power” Apple could wield over the publishers was the attractiveness of a business opportunity—hardly the “make or break” scenarios found in Interstate Circuit and [Toys-R-Us]. Far from capitulating to Apple’s requested core business terms, the publishers fought Apple tooth and nail and negotiated intensely to the very end, and the largest, Random House, declined.

And as Will and I note in our Concurrences article,

MFNs are essentially an important way of…offering some protection against publishers striking a deal with a competitor that leaves Apple forced to price its ebooks out of the market.

There is nothing, that we know of, in the MFNs or elsewhere in the agreements that requires the publishers to impose higher resale prices elsewhere, or prevents the publishers from selling through Apple at a lower price, if necessary. Most important, for Apple’s negotiated prices to dominate in the market it would have to enjoy market power – a condition, currently at least, that is exceedingly unlikely given its 10% share of the ebook market.

The point is that, even if everything the government alleges about the publishers’ price fixing scheme were true, it’s extremely difficult to see Apple as a co-conspirator in such a scheme. The Supreme Court’s holding in Monsanto stands for nothing if not the principle that courts may not infer a vertical party’s participation in a horizontal price-fixing scheme from the existence of otherwise-legal and -defensible interactions between the vertically related parties. Because MFNs have valid purposes outside the realm of price-fixing, they may not be converted into illegal conduct on Apple’s part simply because they might also “sharpen [a publisher's] incentives” to try to raise prices elsewhere.

Remember, we are in a world where the requisite anticompetitive conduct can’t be simply the vertical restraint itself. Rather, we’re evaluating whether the vertical restraint was part of a broader anticompetitive scheme among the publishers. For the MFN clauses to be part of that alleged scheme they must have an identifiable place in the scheme.

First of all, it is unremarkable that Apple might offer terms to any individual publisher (or to all publishers independently) that might be more favorable to the publisher than terms it is getting elsewhere; that’s how a new entrant in Apple’s position attracts suppliers. It is likewise unremarkable that Apple would seek to impose terms (like the MFN) that would preserve its ability to offer a publisher’s books for the same price they are offered elsewhere (which is necessary because the agency agreements negotiated by Apple otherwise remove pricing authority from Apple and confer it on the publishers themselves). And finally it is unremarkable that each publisher would try to negotiate similarly favorable terms with other distributors (or, more accurately, continue to try: bargaining over distribution terms with other distributors hardly started only after the agreements were signed with Apple). What would be notable is if the publishers engaged in concerted action to negotiate these more-favorable terms with other publishers, and what would be problematic for Apple is if its agreement with each publisher facilitated that collusion.

But I don’t see any persuasive evidence that the terms of Apple’s deals with each publisher did any such thing. For MFNs to perform the function alleged by the DOJ it seems to me that the MFNs would have to contribute to the alleged agreement between the publishers, just as the actions of the vertical co-conspirators in Interstate Circuit and Toys-R-Us were alleged to facilitate coordination. But neither the agency agreement itself nor the MFN and price cap terms in the contracts in any way affected the publishers’ incentive to compete with each other. Nor, as noted above, did they require any individual publisher to cause its books to be sold at higher prices through other distributors.

On this latter point, the DOJ alleges that the MFNs “sharpen[ed publishers'] incentives” to raise prices:

If a retailer were allowed to remain on wholesale terms, and that retailer continued to price new release e-books at $9.99, the Publisher Defendant would be forced to lower the iBookstore price to match the $9.99 price

Not only does this say nothing about the incentives of the publishers to compete with each other on price (except that it may have increased that incentive by undermining the prevailing $9.99-for-all-books standard), it seems far-fetched to suggest that fear of having to lower prices for books sold in Apple’s relatively trivial corner of the market would have an apreciable effect on a publisher’s incentives to raise prices elsewhere. For what it’s worth, it also seems far-fetched to suggest that Apple’s motivation was to raise prices given that e-book sales generate only about .0005% of Apple’s total revenues.

Beyond this, the DOJ essentially argues that Apple coordinated agreement among the publishers to accept the terms being offered by Apple, with the intent and effect that this would lead to imposition by the publishers of similar terms (and higher prices) on other distributors. Perhaps, but it’s a stretch. And if it is true, it isn’t because of the MFN clauses. Moreover, it isn’t clear to me (maybe I’m missing some obvious controlling case law?) that agreement over the type of contract used amounts to an illegal horizontal agreement; arguably in this case, at least, it is closer to an ancillary restraint or  justified agreement (as in BMI, e.g.) than, say, a group boycott or bid rigging. In any case, if the DOJ has a case at all turning on this scenario, I think it will have to be based entirely on the alleged evidence of direct coordination (i.e., communications between Apple and publishers during dinners and phone calls) rather than the operation of the contract terms themselves.

In any case, it will be interesting to see how the trial unfolds.

The first decision I confronted after my diagnosis was when to have surgery.  Because I’m a teacher, the timing of my diagnosis—three days before fall classes were to begin—was most inconvenient.  I knew I could have surgery in early December and be recovered enough to begin the spring semester in mid-January, but that seemed like a lot of hassle.  I ultimately decided to hold off on my surgery until this summer and treat the pain with cortisone injections (of which I’ve now had seven).

In addition to having to decide when to have surgery, I’ve had to select a procedure and decide on a surgeon.  Because I’m young and active, one doctor recommended hip resurfacing, a procedure in which the femoral head is not removed but is instead shaved down and capped with chrome.  Another, stressing problems that may arise from the metal-on-metal aspect of hip resurfacing, recommended a total hip replacement.  I decided to follow his advice.

In researching physicians (which involved several costly office visits), I paid close attention to how different surgeons do things.  Most utilize the traditional posterior approach and access the hip joint from behind, cutting through the buttocks.  In recent years, a minority have switched to an anterior approach in which the incision is on the front of the pelvic area and no muscle is cut.  That approach results in a faster recovery and less risk of dislocation, but it requires a unique table and a surgeon who has received specialized training. 

Surgeons also differ on what brand of artificial joints they use (some are better than others), whether they use stems that are cemented within the femur (uncemented stems become fixed as the bone grows into them), what size femoral heads they employ (bigger heads tend to be more stable, at least to a point), the amount of time they keep patients in the hospital (some send patients home the same day of the surgery, others keep them in the hospital for a few days of rehab), and whether they will replace both hips at once.  Not surprisingly, surgeons’ views on all these matters were quite important to me as I made my choice of doctor.    

In the end, then, I’ve had to decide:

• When to have this surgery (December or June);
• How many rounds of cortisone injections to get (they become less effective);
• Which procedure to have (hip resurfacing or a total hip replacement);
• Whether to go with a posterior or anterior approach;
• Which components to utilize (cemented or uncemented stems, larger or smaller femoral heads, which manufacturer)
• How long to stay in the hospital; and
• Whether to schedule two surgeries or have both hips replaced at once.

The amazing—and disturbing—thing is that I’ve made all these decisions without ever, a single time, considering the relative cost of the options before me.  Cortisone injections (which, according to my latest insurance statement, cost $790 a pop) have been effectively “free” for me ever since I met the measly annual deductible on my health insurance.  From my perspective, the only cost of another round has been the pain and inconvenience of getting the injections.  In deciding on procedures (resurfacing vs. replacement), approaches (anterior vs. posterior), components (cemented/uncemented, larger or smaller head, brand), surgeons, hospitals, length of hospital stay, and whether to do both hips at once, the price of different options has never been mentioned.  Indeed, I’m nearly certain the doctors I saw couldn’t have quoted me any kind of a price had I requested one.  But, of course, I never requested pricing information because I didn’t care about relative prices.  I didn’t care about relative prices because I have an insurance policy that will pay for whatever I select.  And the various providers I’ve been considering—doctors, hospitals, and equipment manufacturers—know that I’m not considering price in making this decision and am thus unlikely to be swayed by a discount.  They don’t compete on price because doing so won’t win them any business.

My experience exemplifies the problem inherent in any system of third-party health insurance:  The people making consumption decisions are paying with other people’s money, so they have little incentive to shop on price, and providers, aware of that fact, have little incentive to lower their prices in an attempt to win business. 

While the problem is to some degree intractable, it’s been exacerbated by generous health insurance policies that have transformed true “insurance” (protection against catastrophic and unforeseeable risks) into what is essentially pre-paid health care (i.e., coverage for even foreseeable and minor expenses like check-ups and antibiotics for strep throat).  As an increasing number of foreseeable and cheap services and products are covered by insurance—so that the person making the consumption decision doesn’t bear the cost of her choice—prices will rise.  Why, for example, would a doctor lower or constrain her charge for an annual check-up when she knows doing so won’t win her any additional business? 

Unfortunately, the Affordable Care Act not only failed to make a simple change that could have helped mitigate this problem, it also imposed mandates that will make the situation worse.

A Sin of Omission: Failure to Fix the Tax Code’s Perverse Encouragement of Overly Generous Insurance Policies

As explained above, consumers’ incentive to ignore (and providers’ consequent disincentive to compete on) the prices of medical services grows as insurance becomes more and more generous. When everything is covered, a consumer won’t give a hoot about price, and neither will the providers competing for the consumer’s business. The system works best, then, if insurance—at least for lots of folks—is somewhat “stingy” and requires insureds to make some significant out-of-pocket expenditures. If there’s a substantial group of consumers out there whose insurance covers only unforeseeable and catastrophic events, competition for their business on foreseeable and minor expenses will end up lowering health care costs for all. It’s crucial, then, that there be a substantial number of insureds with stingy insurance (i.e., high deductibles and co-pays, significant coverage limitations) and an incentive to shop on price.

Unfortunately, the federal tax code discourages this type of health insurance. Under current law, employer contributions to an employee’s health insurance, but not individuals’ own expenditures on such insurance, are not taxed. This creates an incentive for employers to replace salary, upon which their employees are taxed, with more generous health insurance benefits (i.e., low deductibles, low copayments, lots of costly coverages), which are tax-advantaged. Those generous benefits, in turn, discourage both price competition and thoughtful decisions about health care consumption.

That the tax code perversely encourages overly generous insurance policies is hardly controversial. Indeed, a National Public Radio survey of liberal and conservative economists recently identified eliminating the deductibility of employer contributions to health insurance as one of six policy proposals “that have broad agreement, at least among economists.” As the diverse group of economists explained, the fact that “[n]either employees nor employers pay taxes on workplace health insurance benefits … encourages fancier insurance coverage, driving up usage and, therefore, health costs overall.” Even ACA architect Christina Romer (former Chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers) recently argued that overly generous insurance plans “lead families to be less vigilant consumers of health care.”

So why didn’t ACA proponents, who know the terrible damage wrought by the tax code’s treatment of employer-provided health benefits include a fix to the problem in the ACA? In a word, politics. In the 2008 campaign, John McCain proposed to eliminate the tax deductibility of employer-provided health benefits so that employer-provided and individually purchased insurance policies would receive equivalent tax treatment. He then proposed to provide refundable tax credits for health insurance purchases. By eliminating the incentive for employers to pay (and employees to demand) a greater proportion of worker compensation in the form of tax-free insurance benefits, the McCain plan would have encouraged individuals to buy cheaper but stingier insurance policies – precisely the sorts of policies that both mitigate the moral hazard problem inherent in any system of third-party health insurance and encourage health care providers to engage in price competition. Unfortunately, McCain’s plan was easy to construe as a “tax increase,” and, in a startlingly disingenuous line of attack, then-candidate Obama went there. He launched television ads accusing McCain of proposing to raise taxes, and he gave lots of speeches where he said things like this:

I can make a firm pledge: under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 will see their taxes increase – not your income taxes, not your payroll taxes, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes. My opponent can’t make that pledge, and here’s why: for the first time in American history, he wants to tax your health benefits. Apparently, Senator McCain doesn’t think it’s enough that your health premiums have doubled, he thinks you should have to pay taxes on them too. That’s a $3.6 trillion tax increase on middle class families. That will eventually leave tens of millions of you paying higher taxes. That’s his idea of change.

President Obama, of course, failed to abide by his “firm pledge.” But far more importantly, his strong and misleading rhetoric against McCain’s plan to level the playing field between employer-provided and individually purchased health insurance policies made it impossible, as a political matter, to make the change economists of all stripes believe would help lower health care costs. As Bob Woodward observed in another context, Mr. Obama’s politics carry a price. Sadly, we’re the ones who pay it.

Two Sins of Commission

In addition to squandering an opportunity to enhance price competition among health care providers, the ACA, when fully implemented, will dampen the nascent price competition that is just beginning to rein in medical inflation and destroy price competition on preventive medical services and products.

Reducing Existing Price Competition by Impairing the HSA/High-Deductible Policy Option. In recent years, the rate of medical inflation has slowed significantly, leveling off at about 3.9%, substantially below the 6.2 to 9.7% of most of the 2000s. Not surprisingly, ACA proponents attribute this decrease to the Act. But that’s implausible given that (1) the bulk of the ACA hasn’t yet been implemented, and (2) the slowdown in medical inflation began around 2002 and the rate had substantially moderated by 2005, well before the Act was passed. The sluggish economy is undoubtedly responsible for some of the slowdown in health care inflation, but macroeconomic woes can’t explain the pre-recession reduction.

So what else is going on? One thing is that a drastically increased number of health care consumers are now insured under high-deductible health plans (HDHPs), typically coupled with Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) in which insureds may sock away money tax-free for meeting deductibles and making minor health care expenditures. From 2005-2012, the number of Americans covered by these plans jumped from one million to 13.5 million. Consumers who are so insured are far more price sensitive, and providers, courting their business, are more likely to compete on price. Indeed, a recent Rand study estimates that families using these health care plans cut health care spending by a whopping 21%. It seems likely, then, that “stingier” insurance has played a significant role in reducing medical inflation. That’s the judgment of Harvard health care economist Michael Chernew, who recently wrote that “[r]ising out-of-pocket payments appear to have played a major role in this decline [in medical inflation], accounting for approximately 20% of the observed slowdown.”

Unfortunately, the ACA threatens to derail the HDHP/HSA revolution. The threat comes from two of the Act’s requirements. First, the statute requires that qualifying (“bronze” level) policies have an “actuarial value” of 60%, meaning that the policy must cover at least 60% of an insured’s medical expenses. That’s a problem for any high-deductible policy coupled with an HSA because, by definition, the portion of medical payments made out of the HSA are not made under the policy sold by the insurer. In a recent guidance bulletin, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that payments made from employer contributions to HSAs would count as insurance payments, but when consumers spend HSA money they contributed themselves, those payments won’t count toward the proportion of medical payments from insurance—even though the insureds are spending money they would have spent on insurance premiums had they purchased policies with lower deductibles. Because a significant proportion of medical payments made by an insured with a high-deductible policy and HSA won’t count toward the minimum 60% actuarial value, insurers will have to raise payments made under the policy by lowering the deductible and/or covering more services. This will both raise the price of the policy, making the HDHP/HSA option less desirable to insureds, and destroy the social value of the HDHP/HSA approach—i.e., the more thoughtful consumption decisions and enhanced price competition that result when individuals are paying for medical care with their own money.

The ACA’s “80/20 rule” also promises to impair the HDHP/HSA model. Under that rule, an insurer must spend at least 80% of collected premiums on health care reimbursements or refund the difference to its insureds. Because high-deductible health plans collect smaller premiums but face fixed administrative costs, they are particularly likely to run afoul of this rule. Consider this example from Robert Bloink and William Byrnes:

[I]f an insurance plan collects $500,000 a month in insurance premiums in Florida and the corresponding administrative costs are $100,000, then $400,000 a month—or 80 percent—of the premiums are paid in benefits and the plan remains within the limits of the 80/20 rule. A HDHP that collects monthly premiums of, say, $300,000 in Florida with the same administrative costs will violate the 80/20 rule because the administrative costs represent more than 20 percent of the $300,000 in premiums collected within the state. The insurer will then be required to refund the difference to Florida policyholders, eliminating much of the incentive for offering low premiums in the first place.

Thus, the ACA, by reducing the attractiveness of the successful HDHP/HSA model, impairs the very development that is most likely to reduce medical inflation in the long run.

Decimating Price Competition on Preventive Measures.  One of the most controversial provisions of the ACA is the requirement that insurers fully cover all preventive measures. The controversy has centered on HHS’s directive that contraception, including the so-called morning after pill, be included in employer-provided coverage. Employers who oppose contraception on religious grounds maintain that HHS’s requirement violates their constitutionally protected right to exercise their religion freely, and I agree. But there’s another huge problem with the ACA’s mandate: it will greatly dampen price competition among providers of preventive services and products, thereby driving up their cost.

If consumers pay nothing for a preventive service regardless of its price, they have little incentive to select relatively cost-effective services, and providers therefore have little incentive to compete on price. If a woman’s birth control is, from her perspective, “free,” then why would she shop around? And if no one’s shopping around, why would contraceptive manufacturers lower or constrain their prices?

ACA proponents insist that the adverse effect of eliminating price competition on preventive measures will be offset by down-the-road cost reductions resulting from better preventive care. But that seems unlikely. Insurers already have an incentive to adopt an optimal reimbursement policy that covers preventive measures when doing so lowers total expected costs. Their scads of actuaries spend all day trying to strike a cost-minimizing balance. The mere fact that a service may lower future costs, then, doesn’t mean it should be fully covered by insurance.

Automobile insurers understand this principle. As John Cochrane observes, they don’t raise premiums slightly and cover routine oil changes—even though regular oil changes prevent higher costs down the road—because they know that insurance coverage would destroy price competition among mechanics and drive up the price of oil changes. By the same token, the ACA’s mandate that insurers fully cover all preventive health services is sure to increase the price of those services in the future.

Conclusion

My recent hip saga has really opened my eyes about the way health care consumption decisions are made. If I had a little more skin the game, I probably would have made some different decisions. I almost certainly wouldn’t have incurred charges of $5,530 ($790 * 7) for nine months of pain relief. I probably would have dealt with the hassle of a “hectic” holiday season and had surgery in December, saving thousands of dollars in fees for palliative care. I might have made different decisions about procedures, doctors, hospitals, cities, components, and whether to do both hips at once—though I really don’t know, since I have absolutely no idea how the relative costs of all these options differ.

One thing I do know, though: Separating the consumer from the price signal is a sure-fire way to waste resources.  The sad thing is that policy makers were beginning to understand that problem and some practical ways to mitigate it. The HDHP/HAS revolution was generating improvements and shedding light on how to move forward.

Then the Affordable Care Act happened.

What a tragedy.

Emanuel describes the ACA’s adverse selection problem in what are, for this Administration and its surrogates, remarkably frank terms:

Here is the specific problem: Insurance companies worry that young people, especially young men, already think they are invincible, and they are bewildered about the health-care reform in general and exchanges in particular. They may tune out, forego purchasing health insurance and opt to pay a penalty instead when their taxes come due.

The consequence would be a disproportionate number of older and sicker people purchasing insurance, which will raise insurance premiums and, in turn, discourage more people from enrolling. This reluctance to enroll would damage a key aspect of reform.

Insurance companies are spooked by this possibility, so they are already raising premiums to protect themselves from potential losses. Yet this step can help create the very problem that they are trying to avoid. If premiums are high—or even just perceived to be high—young people will be more likely to avoid buying insurance, which could start the negative, downward spiral of exchanges full of the sick and elderly with not enough healthy people paying premiums.

Of course, Emanuel leaves out an important part of the story: the fact that the ACA itself encourages young, healthy people (the “young invincibles,” he calls them) to forego buying health insurance.  The statute does so by mandating that health insurance be sold on a “guaranteed issue” basis (meaning that insurance companies can’t deny coverage to people who waited to buy it until they became sick) and at prices based on “community rating” (meaning that those who are sick or susceptible to sickness can’t be charged more than the healthy).  Taken together, these provisions largely eliminate the adverse personal consequences of waiting to buy health insurance until you need medical treatment.  (You can’t be denied coverage or charged a higher premium reflecting your illness.)  They thereby decimate the incentive for young, healthy people to buy health insurance until they need it.  And since the law doesn’t (and can’t, according to the Supreme Court) require young, healthy people to carry insurance, many are likely to forego buying coverage in favor of paying a small “tax” — $95 in 2014, as opposed to the $2,480 out-of-pocket cost for an individual policy bought on a subsidized exchange by a 26 year-old earning $30,000.  As I have argued on this blog and elsewhere, the ACA is likely to generate a devastating spiral of adverse selection as the “young invincibles” drop out of the pool of insureds, causing premiums for the covered population to rise, encouraging even more of the marginally healthy to exit the risk pool, causing premiums to rise even further, etc., etc.

But don’t you worry.  Dr. Emanuel’s got it figured out.  He explains:

Fortunately, there are solutions [to this ACA-induced adverse selection problem]. First, young people believe in President Obama. They overwhelmingly voted for him. He won by a 23% margin among voters 18-29—just the people who need to enroll. The president connects with young people, too, so he needs to use that bond and get out there to convince them to sign up for health insurance to help this central part of his legacy. Every commencement address by an administration official should encourage young graduates to get health insurance.

Second, we need to make clear as a society that buying insurance is part of individual responsibility. If you don’t have insurance and you need to go to the emergency room or unexpectedly get diagnosed with cancer, you are free- riding on others. Insured Americans will have to pay more to hospitals and doctors to make up for your nonpayment. The social norm of individual responsibility must be equated with purchasing health insurance.

Finally, and most important, we should adopt some of Massachusetts’ practices. When state officials in 2006-2007 were rolling out their exchange—called the Massachusetts Connector—they mounted a sustained campaign to encourage enrollment by young people. One aspect of the campaign focused in particular on young men, even heavily promoting the new exchange on TV during Red Sox games and hosting an annual “Health Connector Day” at Fenway Park.

So we’re going to lick this pernicious adverse selection problem by combining President Obama’s legendary star power with a dollop of good old fashioned shaming and some targeted advertising during baseball games?  One is reminded of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge’s 2003 statement that Americans should use duct tape to protect themselves from chemical weapons attacks.  But this is really worse.  The chance of a chemical weapons attack in 2003 was pretty small.  Insurance premiums’ rising as a result of ACA-inspired adverse selection, by contrast, is a near certainty. Let’s make sure we keep the President and HHS Secretary Sebelius on that commencement address circuit!

Commissioner Josh Wright took exception to a couple of the restrictions in the consent order. In a separate statement, he set forth a principle reflecting his concerns that antitrust implementation be both evidence-based and sensitive to error costs. One hopes that the principle he articulated — a version of the Hippocratic maxim, “First, do no harm” — will influence future FTC decisions on behavioral remedies.

The defendant here was Graco, the leading manufacturer of “fast set equipment” (FSE) used by contractors to apply polyurethane foams and coatings. The two companies it purchased, Gusmer in 2005 and GlasCraft in 2008, were its two closest competitors in the North American market for FSE. Graco’s acquisitions of those companies eliminated almost all market competition. In addition, Graco allegedly coerced and threatened FSE distributors so that they would not carry competitors’ products, and it filed a questionable lawsuit against a rival, Gama/PMC, causing FSE distributors to grow leery of that supplier and drop its products.  These post-acquisition actions have helped cement Graco’s market power by denying its actual and potential rivals access to the distribution networks they need to effectively market their products.

In light of Graco’s post-acquisition conduct, the consent order agreed to Thursday prohibits Graco from threatening, coercing, or retaliating against distributors who carry its rivals’ products.  It also requires settlement of the lawsuit that was impairing Gama/PMC’s access to distributors, and it forbids Graco from bringing a similar suit in the future.

But the order then goes further.  It prohibits Graco from entering into exclusive dealing contracts with distributors, and it places limits on Graco’s freedom to give loyalty discounts to distributors.  (Specifically, it limits the purchase and inventory levels upon which Graco may condition distributor discounts.)

The problem, in Commissioner Wright’s view, was that there was no evidence that these forbidden activities – exclusive dealing arrangements and loyalty discounts – contributed to the absence of competition in the FSE market.  Because exclusive dealing arrangements and loyalty discounts are usually procompetitive, prohibiting their use by Graco in the absence of evidence that they are responsible for the lack of competition in the market or are likely to be used to effect anticompetitive harm rather than to achieve a procompetitive benefit is more likely to hurt than help consumers.

Wright notes (and the Commission acknowledges), for example, that the market for FSE is precisely the sort market in which exclusive dealing arrangements achieve the procompetitive benefit of avoiding “inter-brand free-riding.”  Manufacturers of FSE will enhance total sales if they train distributors on the proper use and various complicated features of FSE.  Consumers benefit from (and sales are increased by) such training, because the distributors pass along their learning to end-user purchasers.  But if one FSE manufacturer trains a distributor on how to use the equipment, other manufacturers whose product is carried by that distributor won’t need to do so themselves.  The possibility that they will “take a free-ride” on the manufacturer providing the training tends to dissuade all manufacturers from providing such training, to the detriment of consumers.  Exclusive dealing helps out by preventing free-riding and thereby assuring a manufacturer that it will receive the full benefit of its training efforts.  By banning exclusive dealing, then, the Commission’s consent order may cause a consumer injury, and there’s no reason to take that risk absent evidence that exclusive dealing has been used – or is likely to be used in the future – to create anticompetitive harm.  First, do no harm!

It is important to note that not including exclusive dealing and loyalty discounts on the list of behaviors prohibited by the consent order would not give Graco free rein to use those practices in a manner that causes anticompetitive foreclosure.  The Commission or a competitor could always challenge a future exclusive dealing arrangement or loyalty discount if there were evidence that the practice had caused anticompetitive harm.  The remainder of the Commission’s behavioral remedy assures that there will be a viable competitor – Gama/PMC – that is in a position to challenge any such conduct, and, in light of the consent order, the Commission and any reviewing court would take any future complaints quite seriously.  Doesn’t it make more sense, then, to limit the behavioral remedy to actions that have contributed to the anticompetitive situation at hand and not ban behaviors that may well inure to the benefit of consumers?  As Commissioner Wright put it:

A minimum safeguard to ensure [that] remedial provisions … restore competition rather than inadvertently reduce it is to require evidence that the type of conduct being restricted has been, or is likely to be, used anticompetitively to harm consumers.

I think Wright’s right on this one.

I’m especially encouraged by his comments on Section 5.  As readers of this blog know, Section 5 has been an issue near and dear to our hearts, and Josh’s intention to make it a centerpiece of his agenda at the Commission should come as no surprise. (There are too many posts on topic to link them individually here, but this link includes all our posts tagged with Section 5.  My own most recent discussion of the general topic (with Berin Szoka) is here).

Of perhaps greatest significance is this bit from Josh’s speech:

The Commission, however, has another choice available. It can and should issue a policy statement clearly setting forth its views on what constitutes an unfair method of competition as we have done with respect to our consumer protection mission…. I firmly believe this Commission is up to this important task and I look forward to working with my fellow Commissioners. In that spirit, I will soon informally and publicly distribute a proposed Section 5 Unfair Methods Policy Statement more fully articulating my views and perhaps even providing a useful starting point for a fruitful discussion among the enforcement agencies, the antitrust bar, consumer groups, and the business community.

This is great news, and I eagerly look forward to Josh’s proposed Policy Statement.  As Berin and I noted (and as others, including most notably Bill Kovacic, have noted, as well), this kind of guidance is sorely lacking and much needed:

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.”

Not surprisingly, my views line up with Josh’s, and his speech is full of important comments on the current state of Section 5 enforcement at the Commission. Of note:

(1) Objective evaluation of the historical record reveals a remarkable and unfortunate gap between the theoretical promise of Section 5 as articulated by Congress and its application in practice by the Commission;

(2) There is little hope for Section 5 to play a productive role in antitrust enforcement unless the Commission articulates in a policy statement about precisely what constitutes an unfair method, how the agency will decide whether to bring unfair method claims, and a general framework including guiding and limiting principles for evaluating Section 5 cases.

* * *

What does a frank assessment of the 100 year record of Section 5 tell us about its contribution to the competition mission? Or as I might put it, has Section 5 lived up to its promise of nudging the FTC toward evidence-based antitrust? I believe the answer to that question is a resounding “no.” There is no shortage of scholars and commentators filling the empty vessel of Section 5 with visions or further promise or purpose of, for example, creating convergence among international jurisdictions, shifting the attention of competition policy from economic welfare to consumer choice, or incorporating behavioral economics into modern antitrust. History, however, tells us that Section 5 has fallen far short of its intended promise. Section 5 has not produced more than a handful of adjudicated decisions with any durable impact on antitrust doctrine or economic welfare.

* * *

After one hundred years the balance of evidence more than suggests the Commission’s use of Section 5 has done little to influence antitrust doctrine and less to inform judicial thinking or to provide guidance to the business community. This void is not a small matter for an administrative agency whose institutional blueprint contemplated such a significant role for Section 5. In my view, it is the Commission’s duty to provide that guidance. But beyond our obligation as responsible stewards of the FTC and consumers through execution of our competition mission, there is considerable risk to the agency of continuing on its current path of putting Section 5 to use without providing guidance. I simply do not believe that path is sustainable or sound competition policy. Section 5 will not live up to its promise of offering an analytically coherent contribution to competition policy if the Commission continues not to offer guidance.

Focusing in particular on the problem of the currently unfettered Section 5 and how it might sensibly be circumscribed, Josh makes some great points:

First, Section 5 should not be used to evade existing antitrust law. Where courts have proven competent to evaluate a particular type of business conduct under the traditional antitrust laws, there is little reason for the Commission to step in under its unfair methods authority. This is especially the case when Section 5 is used to take advantage of a weakened requirement to prove consumer harm in the rigorous manner required in, for example, Section 2 cases. Evading the consumer welfare proof requirements of existing Sherman Act jurisprudence reduces the credibility of the agency, runs the risk that procompetitive conduct will be condemned under Section 5, and circumvents the healthy development of Sherman Act jurisprudence in the courts.

* * *

A second potential limiting principle is a restriction that Section 5 unfair methods cases – as is the case with invitation to collude cases – do not involve plausible efficiency claims. Not only does the lack of efficiency justification reduce any potential collateral consequences associated with false positives, but determining the presence of absence of cognizable efficiencies also plays to a core institutional strength of the Commission. The Commission’s learning and expertise in this regard has already influenced the evolution of the Merger Guidelines, and is applied on a regular basis.

I have no doubt Josh can and will deliver on his promise of working with the other Commissioners to bring some much needed sense to this problematic aspect of the FTC’s authority. This is an enormously important issue, one in great need of attention, and I can think of no one better than Josh to lead the effort to address it.

As I mentioned, Commissioner Wright emphasized two matters on which he’d like to see FTC action.  First, he hopes the Commission will help fulfill the promise of Section 5 of the FTC Act by articulating an “Unfair Methods Policy Statement” that includes both “guiding principles for Section 5 theories of liability outside the scope of the Sherman and Clayton Acts” and “limiting principles confining the scope of unfair methods claims.”  Articulation of such principles would reduce the incidence of market power-enhancing conduct that could be difficult to pursue under the Sherman and Clayton Acts (the “guiding principles” would put firms on notice that such conduct is to be avoided), but they would also avoid chilling procompetitive conduct (the “limiting principles” would create zones of safety).  Giving guidance to business planners on what the FTC is likely to pursue — and what it’s not — would thereby enhance the effectiveness of the antitrust enterprise.

Commissioner Wright also stated his intention to utilize the FTC’s powers to pursue public restraints — i.e., output-limiting conduct authorized or required by governmental entities.  Wright explained:

An agency sensitive to efficiently executing its competition mission will look for low hanging fruit—in other words, it will identify and bring enforcement actions to prevent conduct that is clearly anticompetitive and thus bring immediate and certain benefits for consumers.

Public restraints upon trade represent precisely this type of increasingly rare low hanging fruit and, thus, should be a more central concern of U.S. competition policy. The legal hurdles facing enforcement against public restraints often render policy advocacy the primary weapon for the FTC in this area; and it is a weapon the FTC has wielded effectively and consistently over time. The FTC also has brought enforcement actions to challenge public restraints in recent years in appropriate cases. I support vigorous use of both tools….

I’m heartened by Commissioner Wright’s leadership on these matters and look forward to seeing how things develop at the Commission.

Two sessions yesterday really got my blood pumping, albeit for different reasons. The first was a session on counseling clients on RPM after Leegin. Leegin, of course, was the 2007 Supreme Court decision overruling the 1911 Dr. Miles precedent that declared minimum resale price maintenance (RPM) to be per se illegal. Post-Leegin, a manufacturer’s setting of the resale price its downstream dealers may charge is evaluated under the Rule of Reason, at least for purposes of federal antitrust law.

While it was a 5-4 decision, the holding of Leegin is hardly controversial among antitrust scholars. Chicago School and neo-Chicago scholars like myself, Harvard School scholars like Herb Hovenkamp, and even post-Chicago scholars like Einer Elhauge are in agreement that RPM is not always or almost always anticompetitive and thus ought to be analyzed under the Rule of Reason. (Indeed, Elhauge queried: “The puzzle is what provoked a vigorous dissent from Justice Breyer, one of the world’s most sophisticated antitrust justices…”). There’s simply no doubt about Leegin among those who have studied RPM most closely: it was correctly decided.

It was most disheartening, then, to hear a group of esteemed panelist opine that Leegin hasn’t really changed the advice one should give clients considering RPM policies. It’s still wise, the panelists stated, to advise manufacturing clients to avoid RPM and instead to implement either (1) so-called Colgate policies where the manufacturer simply announces and follows a unilateral policy of not selling to dealers who discount, or (2) consignment arrangements where the manufacturer doesn’t sell its product to dealers but instead enlists them as its sales agents and retains title to its product until the product is sold to the end-user consumer. The former approach avoids RPM liability because there is no “agreement” concerning resale prices; the latter, because there is technically no “resale.” Both approaches, though, involve costly and cumbersome methods by which manufacturers may exert control over the resale prices of their products. (See, e.g., golf club manufacturer Ping’s now-classic discussion of the difficulties involved in implementing a Colgate policy.)  So why counsel clients to adopt Colgate policies and consignment/agency arrangements when RPM is now adjudged under the Rule of Reason?

Because of the states — a number of them, at least. Maryland has adopted an explicit Leegin-repealer; California’s Cartwright Act uses language that appears to declare RPM to be per se illegal; and the Supreme Court of Kansas recently held that RPM is per se illegal under that state’s predictably unenlightened antitrust laws.  (Sorry Kansas folk. Proud Mizzou Tiger here.) In addition, a number of states lack statutes or court decisions harmonizing state antitrust law with federal precendents, and at least six have rejected certain federal precedents –chiefly, Illinois Brick – even without statutory repealers. How those states will treat RPM post-Leegin is anybody’s guess. (For an exhaustive and regularly updated list of state law treatment of RPM, see this helpful article and chart by Michael Lindsay.)

So what’s behind states’ hostility toward RPM?  At yesterday’s RPM session, California Senior Assistant Attorney General Kathleen Foote suggested that state attorneys general tend to oppose RPM because they are particularly concerned about consumer protection and because states have had actual experience with RPM under the so-called “Fair Trade” laws that for several decades allowed states to create antitrust immunity for RPM arrangements.  The empirical evidence of conditions under Fair Trade, Ms. Foote says, establishes that RPM leads to higher consumer prices and therefore tends to be anticompetitive.

But these arguments, each of which was considered and rejected in Leegin, have been soundly refuted.  A heightened concern for consumer protection in no way supports adherence to Dr. Miles, for manufacturers generally have an incentive to impose RPM only when doing so benefits consumers.  The retail mark-up — the difference between the price the retailer pays and that which it charges to consumers — is the “price” manufacturers effectively pay for product distribution.  Like consumers, they have no incentive to raise that price (i.e., to increase the mark-up through imposition of RPM) unless doing so generates retailer services that are worth more to consumers than the incremental retail mark-up.  Only then would RPM enhance a manufacturer’s profits, but in that case, it also enhances overall consumer surplus.  In short, manufacturer and consumer interests are generally aligned when it comes to RPM.

With respect to Fair Trade, Ms. Foote was playing a little fast and loose.  The Fair Trade laws did not, like Leegin, simply declare RPM arrangements not to be per se illegal; rather, they said that such arrangements were per se legal.  Hardly anyone doubts that RPM arrangements may sometimes be harmful and should be scrutinized.  But under Leegin – unlike under Fair Trade – anticompetitive instances of RPM (those that facilitate manufacturer or retailer collusion or serve as exclusionary devices for dominant manufacturers or retailers) may be condemned.  Thus, the fact that states witnessed consumer harm under Fair Trade’s regime of per se legality says nothing about how consumers will fare under Leegin’s Rule of Reason.

Finally, Ms. Foote’s reasoning that RPM is anticompetitive because the evidence shows it tends to raise prices is fallacious.  Of course RPM raises prices.  It is, after all, the imposition of a price floor.  But that price effect is beside the point.  Each one of the procompetitive, output-enhancing justifications for RPM assumes an increase in consumer prices.  The key is that the increase in retail mark-up will induce dealer services that consumers value more than the amount of the mark-up and will thereby enhance overall sales.  The fact that RPM raises prices, then, is a red herring.

If legislators, courts, and enforcement officials in states like California, Maryland, and Kansas can’t understand these fairly simple points (yes, I realize I’m asking a lot of the Kansans), then the promise of Leegin may go unfulfilled.  It was pretty clear from yesterday’s session that legal advice — and, accordingly, manufacturer practice — will look much as it did pre-Leegin unless the states get their act together.  That’s pretty depressing.

Fortunately, the session following the RPM session was a good bit more promising.  The highlight was a speech by FTC Commissioner Wright, in which he laid out his intentions to promote a more principled understanding of Section 5 of the FTC Act and to pursue the “low-hanging fruit” (his words) of public restraints.  Both developments would be warmly welcomed.

Commissioner Wright maintains that the promise of Section 5 (which enables the FTC, but not private parties, to enjoin unfair methods of competition that do not necessarily constitute antitrust violations) will remain unfulfilled until the FTC lays out the guiding and limiting principles that will govern its use of the provision.  He’s right.  Absent such articulated principles, use of Section 5 could well end up the way Robert Bork once described mid-20th Century antitrust, which he likened to a frontier sheriff who “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.” The evidence-based principles Commissioner Wright proposes to develop would avoid the frontier sheriff problem by bringing predictability and fairness to the Commission’s implementation of its Section 5 authority.

Even more exciting were Commissioner Wright’s remarks on public restraints.  Without doubt, competition-reducing laws and regulations are responsible for the destruction of vast amounts of consumer welfare.  State action immunity and other legal hurdles, though, make it difficult to police welfare-reducing public restraints.

But litigation isn’t the only weapon in the FTC’s arsenal.  As Commissioner Wright observed, the FTC is uniquely positioned to advocate for the removal of competition-destructive public restraints.  I was heartened to learn that the Commission recently helped persuade Colorado officials not to impose regulations that would have squelched Uber, a smart phone application that is creating much-needed competition in the taxi and private car service market.  It also took the side of the angels in St. Joseph Abbey case, helping to persuade the Fifth Circuit to strike protectionist regulations that reduced competition among casket sellers in Louisiana.  Commissioner Wright also noted that the FTC’s recent victory in the Phoebe Putney case, which narrowed somewhat the scope of state action immunity, will allow it to pursue more public restraints by state and sub-state governmental entities.  This all bodes well for consumers.

So here’s an idea for the FTC: How about using some of that advocacy prowess to convince the anti-Leegin states to bring their RPM doctrine into conformity with federal law?  It might be tough — and Kansas may be beyond help — but I’m confident that Commissioner Wright and his colleagues could help the anti-Leegin states see that they’re not helping consumers by clinging to moth-eaten Dr. Miles.  Instead, they’re just guaranteeing more jobs for lawyers charged with crafting and implementing Colgate policies, consignment relationships, etc.

Today’s public policy debates frame copyright policy solely in terms of a “trade off” between the benefits of incentivizing new works and the social deadweight losses imposed by the access restrictions imposed by these (temporary) “monopolies.” I recently posted to SSRN a new research paper, called How Copyright Drives Innovation in Scholarly Publishing, explaining that this is a fundamental mistake that has distorted the policy debates about scholarly publishing.

This policy mistake is important because it has lead commentators and decision-makers to dismiss as irrelevant to copyright policy the investments by scholarly publishers of $100s of millions in creating innovative distribution mechanisms in our new digital world. These substantial sunk costs are in addition to the $100s of millions expended annually by publishers in creating, publishing and maintaining reliable, high-quality, standardized articles distributed each year in a wide-ranging variety of academic disciplines and fields of research. The articles now number in the millions themselves; in 2009, for instance, over 2,000 publishers issued almost 1.5 million articles just in the scientific, technical and medical fields, exclusive of the humanities and social sciences.

The mistaken incentive-to-invent conventional wisdom in copyright policy is further compounded by widespread misinformation today about the allegedly “zero cost” of digital publication. As a result, many people are simply unaware of the substantial investments in infrastructure, skilled labor and other resources required to create, publish and maintain scholarly articles on the Internet and in other digital platforms.

This is not merely a so-called “academic debate” about copyright policy and publishing.

The policy distortion caused by the narrow, reductionist incentive-to-create conventional wisdom, when combined with the misinformation about the economics of digital business models, has been spurring calls for “open access” mandates for scholarly research, such as at the National Institute of Health and in recently proposed legislation (FASTR Act) and in other proposed regulations. This policy distortion even influenced Justice Breyer’s opinion in the recent decision in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons (U.S. Supreme Court, March 19, 2013), as he blithely dismissed commercial incentivizes as being irrelevant to fundamental copyright policy. These legal initiatives and the Kirtsaeng decision are motivated in various ways by the incentive-to-create conventional wisdom, by the misunderstanding of the economics of scholarly publishing, and by anti-copyright rhetoric on both the left and right, all of which has become more pervasive in recent years.

But, as I explain in my paper, courts and commentators have long recognized that incentivizing authors to produce new works is not the sole justification for copyright—copyright also incentivizes intermediaries like scholarly publishers to invest in and create innovative legal and market mechanisms for publishing and distributing articles that report on scholarly research. These two policies—the incentive to create and the incentive to commercialize—are interrelated, as both are necessary in justifying how copyright law secures the dynamic innovation that makes possible the “progress of science.” In short, if the law does not secure the fruits of labors of publishers who create legal and market mechanisms for disseminating works, then authors’ labors will go unrewarded as well.

As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor famously observed in the 1984 decision in Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises: “In our haste to disseminate news, it should not be forgotten the Framers intended copyright itself to be the engine of free expression. By establishing a marketable right to the use of one’s expression, copyright supplies the economic incentive to create and disseminate ideas.” Thus, in Harper & Row, the Supreme Court reached the uncontroversial conclusion that copyright secures the fruits of productive labors “where an author and publisher have invested extensive resources in creating an original work.” (emphases added)

This concern with commercial incentives in copyright law is not just theory; in fact, it is most salient in scholarly publishing because researchers are not motivated by the pecuniary benefits offered to authors in conventional publishing contexts. As a result of the policy distortion caused by the incentive-to-create conventional wisdom, some academics and scholars now view scholarly publishing by commercial firms who own the copyrights in the articles as “a form of censorship.” Yet, as courts have observed: “It is not surprising that [scholarly] authors favor liberal photocopying . . . . But the authors have not risked their capital to achieve dissemination. The publishers have.” As economics professor Mark McCabe observed (somewhat sardonically) in a research paper released last year for the National Academy of Sciences: he and his fellow academic “economists knew the value of their journals, but not their prices.”

The widespread ignorance among the public, academics and commentators about the economics of scholarly publishing in the Internet age is quite profound relative to the actual numbers.  Based on interviews with six different scholarly publishers—Reed Elsevier, Wiley, SAGE, the New England Journal of Medicine, the American Chemical Society, and the American Institute of Physics—my research paper details for the first time ever in a publication and at great length the necessary transaction costs incurred by any successful publishing enterprise in the Internet age.  To take but one small example from my research paper: Reed Elsevier began developing its online publishing platform in 1995, a scant two years after the advent of the World Wide Web, and its sunk costs in creating this first publishing platform and then digitally archiving its previously published content was over $75 million. Other scholarly publishers report similarly high costs in both absolute and relative terms.

Given the widespread misunderstandings of the economics of Internet-based business models, it bears noting that such high costs are not unique to scholarly publishers.  Microsoft reportedly spent $10 billion developing Windows Vista before it sold a single copy, of which it ultimately did not sell many at all. Google regularly invests $100s of millions, such as $890 million in the first quarter of 2011, in upgrading its data centers.  It is somewhat surprising that such things still have to be pointed out a scant decade after the bursting of the dot.com bubble, a bubble precipitated by exactly the same mistaken view that businesses have somehow been “liberated” from the economic realities of cost by the Internet.

Just as with the extensive infrastructure and staffing costs, the actual costs incurred by publishers in operating the peer review system for their scholarly journals are also widely misunderstood.  Individual publishers now receive hundreds of thousands—the large scholarly publisher, Reed Elsevier, receives more than one million—manuscripts per year. Reed Elsevier’s annual budget for operating its peer review system is over $100 million, which reflects the full scope of staffing, infrastructure, and other transaction costs inherent in operating a quality-control system that rejects 65% of the submitted manuscripts. Reed Elsevier’s budget for its peer review system is consistent with industry-wide studies that have reported that the peer review system costs approximately $2.9 billion annually in operation costs (translating into dollars the British £1.9 billion pounds reported in the study). For those articles accepted for publication, there are additional, extensive production costs, and then there are extensive post-publication costs in updating hypertext links of citations, cyber security of the websites, and related digital issues.

In sum, many people mistakenly believe that scholarly publishers are no longer necessary because the Internet has made moot all such intermediaries of traditional brick-and-mortar economies—a viewpoint reinforced by the equally mistaken incentive-to-create conventional wisdom in the copyright policy debates today. But intermediaries like scholarly publishers face the exact same incentive problems that is universally recognized for authors by the incentive-to-create conventional wisdom: no will make the necessary investments to create a work or to distribute if the fruits of their labors are not secured to them. This basic economic fact—dynamic development of innovative distribution mechanisms require substantial investment in both people and resources—is what makes commercialization an essential feature of both copyright policy and law (and of all intellectual property doctrines).

It is for this reason that copyright law has long promoted and secured the value that academics and scholars have come to depend on in their journal articles—reliable, high-quality, standardized, networked, and accessible research that meets the differing expectations of readers in a variety of fields of scholarly research. This is the value created by the scholarly publishers. Scholarly publishers thus serve an essential function in copyright law by making the investments in and creating the innovative distribution mechanisms that fulfill the constitutional goal of copyright to advance the “progress of science.”

DISCLOSURE: The paper summarized in this blog posting was supported separately by a Leonardo Da Vinci Fellowship and by the Association of American Publishers (AAP). The author thanks Mark Schultz for very helpful comments on earlier drafts, and the AAP for providing invaluable introductions to the five scholarly publishers who shared their publishing data with him.

NOTE: Some small copy-edits were made to this blog posting.

A teleforum on Thursday, April 11, at 2pm. Hosted by George Mason Law School’s Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property Teleforum and the Federalist Society‘s Intellectual Property Practice Group.

Today, people read daily complaints about the “broken” patent system, and thus it’s unsurprising that there are numerous and wide-ranging attempts to “reform” the patent system. Legislative reform efforts include the proposed SHIELD Act, which would impose a losing-plaintiff-pays litigation system solely on patent-licensing companies and further revisions to the America Invents Act of 2011. Regulatory agencies also have skin in the patent reform game: the FTC recently reached settlements with Bosch and Google that restricted their rights to enforce their patents in standardized technology, and the FTC is currently considering whether to condemn the patent-licensing business model as “anti-competitive.” The courts are heavily involved as well: in addition to the many patent cases it has decided in recent years, the U.S. Supreme Court has four major patent cases on its docket this year, which suggests that it also agrees that the patent system is in serious need of legal reform. Yet, patents today secure innovation once imagined only as science fiction – tablet computers, smart phones, genetically modified seeds, genetic testing for cancer, personalized medical treatments for debilitating diseases, and many others – and these technological marvels are now a commonplace feature of our lives. This Teleforum with the Honorable Randall Rader, Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit – a digital “fireside chat” – will explore these and other issues in assessing whether the patent system is broken or whether it is fundamentally sound.

Featuring:

• Hon. Randall R. Rader, Chief Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals, Federal Circuit
• Moderator: Prof. Adam Mossoff, Co-Director, Academic Programs and Senior Scholar, Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property, George Mason Law School

Agenda:

Call begins at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time, Thursday, April 11, 2013.

More information here.

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).]

These words from the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment lurk behind a great many news stories these days.  For the next two days, the U.S. Supreme Court will consider whether they guarantee a right to same-sex marriage (or, more narrowly, whether they preclude a state from banning gay marriage after it’s been permitted).  The Court will also consider whether similar words in the Fifth Amendment, which applies to the federal government, preclude Congress from denying same-sex married couples the rights that are available to other married couples under federal programs.  Just today, the Court announced that it will consider whether the words preclude a state, by referendum, from eliminating the use of affirmative action in higher education.

But do the words place any meaningful restrictions on regulations of purely economic activity?  For the last two-thirds of a century, most people have assumed they don’t.  Sure, economic regulations are officially subject to Fourteenth Amendment constraints.  But the “rational basis review” courts have applied in scrutinizing economic regulations has generally amounted to  a rule of per se validity.

As Alan Meese explains, a recent Fifth Circuit decision suggests that might be changing, if ever so slightly.  Conservatives may balk (e.g., “you can’t have Lochner without Roe!”), but, as Alan discusses, the Fifth Circuit’s scrutiny was far less stringent than that engaged in by the courts that struck down economic regulations in the so-called Lochner era.  As Chip Mellor and Jeff Rowes explain, it seems the Fifth Circuit was just doing its constitutionally assigned job here.

As I and other scholars have pointed out, the “patent troll” moniker is really just a rhetorical epithet that lacks even an agreed-upon definition.  The term is used loosely enough that it sometimes covers and sometimes excludes universities, Thomas Edison, Elias Howe (the inventor of the lockstitch in 1843), Charles Goodyear (the inventor of vulcanized rubber in 1839), and even companies like IBM.  How can we be expected to have a reasonable discussion about patent policy when our basic terms of public discourse shift in meaning from blog to blog, article to article, speaker to speaker?  The same is true of the new term, “Patent Assertion Entities,” which sounds more neutral, but has the same problem in that it also lacks any objective definition or usage.

Setting aside this basic problem of terminology for the moment, the SHIELD Act is anything but a “smarter patent law” (to quote President Obama). Some patent scholars, like Michael Risch, have begun to point out some of the serious problems with the SHIELD Act, such as its selectively discriminatory treatment of certain types of patent-owners.  Moreover, as Professor Risch ably identifies, this legislation was so cleverly drafted to cover only a limited set of a specific type of patent-owner that it ended up being too clever. Unlike the previous version introduced last year, the 2013 SHIELD Act does not even apply to the flavor-of-the-day outrage over patent licensing companies—the owner of the podcast patent. (Although you wouldn’t know this if you read the supporters of the SHIELD Act like the EFF who falsely claim that this law will stop patent-owners like the podcast patent-owning company.)

There are many things wrong with the SHIELD Act, but one thing that I want to highlight here is that it based on a falsehood: the oft-repeated claim that two Boston University researchers have proven in a study that “patent troll suits cost American technology companies over $29 billion in 2011 alone.”  This is what Rep. DeFazio said when he introduced the SHIELD Act on March 1. This claim was repeated yesterday by House Members during a hearing on “Abusive Patent Litigation.” The claim that patent licensing companies cost American tech companies $29 billion in a single year (2011) has become gospel since this study, The Direct Costs from NPE Disputes, was released last summer on the Internet. (Another name of patent licensing companies is “Non Practicing Entity” or “NPE.”)  A Google search of “patent troll 29 billion” produces 191,000 hits. A Google search of “NPE 29 billion” produces 605,000 hits. Such is the making of conventional wisdom.

The problem with conventional wisdom is that it is usually incorrect, and the study that produced the claim of “$29 billion imposed by patent trolls” is no different. The $29 billion cost study is deeply and fundamentally flawed, as explained by two noted professors, David Schwartz and Jay Kesan, who are also highly regarded for their empirical and economic work in patent law.  In their essay, Analyzing the Role of Non-Practicing Entities in the Patent System, also released late last summer, they detailed at great length serious methodological and substantive flaws in The Direct Costs from NPE Disputes. Unfortunately, the Schwartz and Kesan essay has gone virtually unnoticed in the patent policy debates, while the $29 billion cost claim has through repetition become truth.

In the hope that at least a few more people might discover the Schwartz and Kesan essay, I will briefly summarize some of their concerns about the study that produced the $29 billion cost figure.  This is not merely an academic exercise.  Since Rep. DeFazio explicitly relied on the $29 billion cost claim to justify the SHIELD Act, and he and others keep repeating it, it’s important to know if it is true, because it’s being used to drive proposed legislation in the real world.  If patent legislation is supposed to secure innovation, then it behooves us to know if this legislation is based on actual facts. Yet, as Schwartz and Kesan explain in their essay, the $29 billion cost claim is based on a study that is fundamentally flawed in both substance and methodology.

In terms of its methodological flaws, the study supporting the $29 billion cost claim employs an incredibly broad definition of “patent troll” that covers almost every person, corporation or university that sues someone for infringing a patent that it is not currently being used to manufacture a product at that moment.  While the meaning of the “patent troll” epithet shifts depending on the commentator, reporter, blogger, or scholar who is using it, one would be extremely hard pressed to find anyone embracing this expansive usage in patent scholarship or similar commentary today.

There are several reasons why the extremely broad definition of “NPE” or “patent troll” in the study is unusual even compared to uses of this term in other commentary or studies. First, and most absurdly, this definition, by necessity, includes every university in the world that sues someone for infringing one of its patents, as universities don’t manufacture goods.  Second, it includes every individual and start-up company who plans to manufacture a patented invention, but is forced to sue an infringer-competitor who thwarted these business plans by its infringing sales in the marketplace.  Third, it includes commercial firms throughout the wide-ranging innovation industries—from high tech to biotech to traditional manufacturing—that have at least one patent among a portfolio of thousands that is not being used at the moment to manufacture a product because it may be “well outside the area in which they make products” and yet they sue infringers of this patent (the quoted language is from the study). So, according to this study, every manufacturer becomes an “NPE” or “patent troll” if it strays too far from what somebody subjectively defines as its rightful “area” of manufacturing. What company is not branded an “NPE” or “patent troll” under this definition, or will necessarily become one in the future given inevitable changes in one’s business plans or commercial activities? This is particularly true for every person or company whose only current opportunity to reap the benefit of their patented invention is to license the technology or to litigate against the infringers who refuse license offers.

So, when almost every possible patent-owning person, university, or corporation is defined as a “NPE” or “patent troll,” why are we surprised that a study that employs this virtually boundless definition concludes that they create $29 billion in litigation costs per year?  The only thing surprising is that the number isn’t even higher!

There are many other methodological flaws in the $29 billion cost study, such as its explicit assumption that patent litigation costs are “too high” without providing any comparative baseline for this conclusion.  What are the costs in other areas of litigation, such as standard commercial litigation, tort claims, or disputes over complex regulations?  We are not told.  What are the historical costs of patent litigation?  We are not told.  On what basis then can we conclude that $29 billion is “too high” or even “too low”?  We’re supposed to be impressed by a number that exists in a vacuum and that lacks any empirical context by which to evaluate it.

The $29 billion cost study also assumes that all litigation transaction costs are deadweight losses, which would mean that the entire U.S. court system is a deadweight loss according to the terms of this study.  Every lawsuit, whether a contract, tort, property, regulatory or constitutional dispute is, according to the assumption of the $29 billion cost study, a deadweight loss.  The entire U.S. court system is an inefficient cost imposed on everyone who uses it.  Really?  That’s an assumption that reduces itself to absurdity—it’s a self-imposed reductio ad absurdum!

In addition to the methodological problems, there are also serious concerns about the trustworthiness and quality of the actual data used to reach the $29 billion claim in the study.  All studies rely on data, and in this case, the $29 billion study used data from a secret survey done by RPX of its customers.  For those who don’t know, RPX’s business model is to defend companies against these so-called “patent trolls.”  So, a company whose business model is predicated on hyping the threat of “patent trolls” does a secret survey of its paying customers, and it is now known that RPX informed its customers in the survey that their answers would be used to lobby for changes in the patent laws.

As every reputable economist or statistician will tell you, such conditions encourage exaggeration and bias in a data sample by motivating participation among those who support changes to the patent law.  Such a problem even has a formal name in economic studies: self-selection bias.  But one doesn’t need to be an economist or statistician to be able to see the problems in relying on the RPX data to conclude that NPEs cost $29 billion per year. As the classic adage goes, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”

Even worse, as I noted above, the RPX survey was confidential.  RPX has continued to invoke “client confidences” in refusing to disclose its actual customer survey or the resulting data, which means that the data underlying the $29 billion claim is completely unknown and unverifiable for anyone who reads the study.  Don’t worry, the researchers have told us in a footnote in the study, they looked at the data and confirmed it is good.  Again, it doesn’t take economic or statistical training to know that something is not right here. Another classic cliché comes to mind at this point: “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.”

In fact, keeping data secret in a published study violates well-established and longstanding norms in all scientific research that data should always be made available for testing and verification by third parties.  No peer-reviewed medical or scientific journal would publish a study based on a secret data set in which the researchers have told us that we should simply trust them that the data is accurate.  Its use of secret data probably explains why the $29 billion study has not yet appeared in a peer-reviewed journal, and, if economics has any claim to being an actual science, this study never will.  If a study does not meet basic scientific standards for verifying data, then why are Reps. DeFazio and Chaffetz relying on it to propose national legislation that directly impacts the patent system and future innovation?  If heads-in-the-clouds academics would know to reject such a study as based on unverifiable, likely biased claptrap, then why are our elected officials embracing it to create real-world legal rules?

And, to continue our running theme of classic clichés, there’s the rub. The more one looks at the actual legal requirements of the SHIELD Act, the more, in the words of Professor Risch, one is left “scratching one’s head” in bewilderment.  The more one looks at the supporting studies and arguments in favor of the SHIELD Act, the more one is left, in the words of Professor Risch, “scratching one’s head.”  The more and more one thinks about the SHIELD Act, the more one realizes what it is—legislation that has been crafted at the behest of the politically powerful (such as an Internet company who can get the President to do a special appearance on its own social media website) to have the government eliminate a smaller, publicly reviled, and less politically-connected group.

In short, people may have legitimate complaints about the ways in which the court system in the U.S. generally has problems.  Commentators and Congresspersons could even consider revising the general legal rules governing patent ligtiation for all plaintiffs and defendants to make the ligitation system work better or more efficiently (by some established metric).   Professor Risch has done exactly this in a recent Wired op-ed.  But it’s time to call a spade a spade: the SHIELD Act is a classic example of rent-seeking, discriminatory legislation.

Things in the US today are better than Crawford claims. While Crawford claims that broadband is faster and cheaper in other developed countries, her statistics are convincingly disputed. She neglects to mention the significant subsidies used to build out those networks. Crawford’s model is Europe, but as Europeans acknowledge, “beyond 100 Mbps supply will be very difficult and expensive. Western Europe may be forced into a second fibre build out earlier than expected, or will find themselves within the slow lane in 3-5 years time.” And while “blazing fast” broadband might be important for some users, broadband speeds in the US are plenty fast enough to satisfy most users. Consumers are willing to pay for speed, but, apparently, have little interest in paying for the sort of speed Crawford deems essential. This isn’t surprising. As the LSE study cited above notes, “most new activities made possible by broadband are already possible with basic or fast broadband: higher speeds mainly allow the same things to happen faster or with higher quality, while the extra costs of providing higher speeds to everyone are very significant.”

Even if she’s right, she wildly exaggerates the costs. Using a back-of-the-envelope calculation, Crawford claims that slow downloads (compared to other countries) could cost the U.S. $3 trillion/year in lost productivity from wasted time spent “waiting for a link to load or an app to function on your wireless device.” This intentionally sensationalist claim, however, rests on a purely hypothetical average wait time in the U.S. of 30 seconds (vs. 2 seconds in Japan). Whatever the actual numbers might be, her methodology would still be shaky, not least because time spent waiting for laggy content isn’t necessarily simply wasted. And for most of us, the opportunity cost of waiting for Angry Birds to load on our phones isn’t counted in wages — it’s counted in beers or time on the golf course or other leisure activities. These are important, to be sure, but does anyone seriously believe our GDP would grow 20% if only apps were snappier? Meanwhile, actual econometric studies looking at the productivity effects of faster broadband on businesses have found that higher broadband speeds are not associated with higher productivity.

* * *

So how do we guard against the possibility of consumer harm without making things worse? For us, it’s a mix of promoting both competition and a smarter, subtler role for government.

Despite Crawford’s assertion that the DOJ should have blocked the Comcast-NBCU merger, antitrust and consumer protection laws do operate to constrain corporate conduct, not only through government enforcement but also private rights of action. Antitrust works best in the background, discouraging harmful conduct without anyone ever suing. The same is true for using consumer protection law to punish deception and truly harmful practices (e.g., misleading billing or overstating speeds).

A range of regulatory reforms would also go a long way toward promoting competition. Most importantly, reform local franchising so competitors like Google Fiber can build their own networks. That means giving them “open access” not to existing networks but to the public rights of way under streets. Instead of requiring that franchisees build out to an entire franchise area—which often makes both new entry and service upgrades unprofitable—remove build-out requirements and craft smart subsidies to encourage competition to deliver high-quality universal service, and to deliver superfast broadband to the customers who want it. Rather than controlling prices, offer broadband vouchers to those that can’t afford it. Encourage telcos to build wireline competitors to cable by transitioning their existing telephone networks to all-IP networks, as we’ve urged the FCC to do (here and here). Let wireless reach its potential by opening up spectrum and discouraging municipalities from blocking tower construction. Clear the deadwood of rules that protect incumbents in the video marketplace—a reform with broad bipartisan appeal.

In short, there’s a lot of ground between “do nothing” and “regulate broadband like electricity—or railroads.” Crawford’s arguments simply don’t justify imposing 19th century common carriage regulation on the Internet. But that doesn’t leave us powerless to correct practices that truly harm consumers, should they actually arise.

Read the whole thing here.

Unfortunately, the FTC’s enforcement action in this matter had no proper grounding in antitrust law. Under Supreme Court doctrine there is no basis for liability under Section 2 of the Sherman Act because the exercise of lawfully acquired monopoly power is not actionable under the antitrust laws. Apparently recognizing this, the Commission instead brought this action under Section 5 of the FTC Act. But Section 5 provides no basis for liability either, where, as here, there is no evidence of consumer harm. The Commission’s Order continues its recent trend of expanding its Section 5 authority without judicial oversight, charting a dangerously unprincipled course.

The standard-setting organizations (SSOs) that govern the SEPs in this case have no policies prohibiting the use of injunctions. Even if an SSO agreement (or a specific license) did disallow them, seeking an injunction would be a simple breach of contract. Reading a limitation on injunctions into the SSO agreement is in severe tension with the normal rules of contract interpretation. To turn Motorola’s effort to receive a reasonable royalty for its patents by means of an injunction into an antitrust problem seems directly to undermine the standard-setting process. It also seems to have no basis in law.

My comments rely heavily on Bruce Kobayashi and Josh Wright’s article, Federalism, Substantive Preemption, and Limits on Antitrust: An Application to Patent Holdup, published in Competition Policy and Patent Law Under Uncertainty: Regulating Innovation (Manne & Wright, eds.).

For previous posts on the topic see, e.g.:

• The Price of Closing the Google Search Antitrust Case: Questionable Precedent on Patents (January 2013)
• Europe Shouldn’t Intervene in Microsoft-Motorola Patent Dispute (April 2012)
• FTC’s Misguided Rationale for the Use of Section 5 in Sherman Act Cases (February 2010)
• The Case Against the Section 5 Case Against Intel, Redux (January 2010)

The proposed rules also establish a procedure for the automatic withdrawal of an HSR filing when filings are made with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announcing that a transaction has been terminated.

The proposed rulemaking itself isn’t enormously significant, but Josh’s statement lays down a marker that indicates (as anyone could have predicted) that he intends to do everything he can to improve the agency and its process.

The rule, as suggested above, would automatically withdraw an HSR filing whenever transacting parties filed certain notices with the SEC announcing the termination of a deal.  You may recall that the Hertz/Dollar Thrifty deal had been in the works for at least five years when it finally closed.  When Hertz withdrew its tender offer in October 2011, it did not withdraw its HSR filing.  As reported at the time, Hertz withdrew its bid over difficulty securing FTC approval, which had plagued other offers for Thrifty:

In a sign of frustration, Mr. Thompson said that the company had spent some $30 million over the last few years dealing with the barrage of takeover offers.

Obviously, given the difficulty of securing FTC approval and the costs imposed by the uncertainty it created, there was real benefit to Hertz (and perhaps Thrifty, for that matter) from receiving a decision from the FTC without meanwhile tying up the company’s resources, restraining its decision- and deal-making abilities, complicating negotiations and weakening its credit by maintaining a stalled-but-pending merger.  So the deal was withdrawn, but the HSR filing was not.

In August 2012 the parties re-initiated the merger following ongoing consultations by Hertz with the FTC, and, in November 2012 — a full year after the deal was withdrawn (and a year and a half after the HSR filing) — the FTC approved the deal.

But, understandably, FTC staff don’t want to be wasting resources reviewing hypothetical transactions, and so, following on the heels of the Hertz/Dollar Thrifty deal, wrote the proposed rule to ensure that it never happens again.

Except it didn’t happen in Hertz because, after all, the deal was eventually made. According to Josh, in fact, the situation intended to be avoided by the rule has never arisen:

The proposed rulemaking appears to be a solution in search of a problem. The Federal Register notice states that the proposed rules are necessary to prevent the FTC and DOJ from “expend[ing] scarce resources on hypothetical transactions.” Yet, I have not to date been presented with evidence that any of the over 68,000 transactions notified under the HSR rules have required Commission resources to be allocated to a truly hypothetical transaction. Indeed, it would be surprising to see firms incurring the costs and devoting the time and effort associated with antitrust review in the absence of a good faith intent to proceed with their transaction.

This isn’t to say (and Josh doesn’t say) that the proposed rule is a bad idea, just that, given the apparently negligible benefits of the rule, the costs could easily outweigh the benefits.

Which is why Josh’s Statement is important. What Josh is asking for is not that the rule be scrapped, but simply that, before adopting the rule, the FTC weigh its costs and benefits. And as Josh points out, there could indeed be some costs:

The proposed rules, if adopted, could increase the costs of corporate takeovers and thus distort the market for corporate control. Some companies that had complied with or were attempting to comply with a Second Request, for example, could be forced to restart their antitrust review, leading to significant delays and added expenses. The proposed rules could also create incentives for firms to structure their transactions less efficiently and discourage the use of tender offers. Finally, the proposed new rules will disproportionately burden U.S. public companies; the Federal Register notice acknowledges that the new rules will not apply to tender offers for many non-public and foreign companies.

Given these concerns, I hope that interested parties will avail themselves of the opportunity to submit public comments so that the Commission can make an informed decision at the conclusion of this process.

What is surprising is not that Josh suggested that there might be unanticipated costs to such a rule, nor that cost-benefit analysis be applied. Rather, what’s surprising is that the rest of the Commission didn’t sign on. Why is that surprising? Well, because cost-benefit analysis is not only sensible, it’s consistent with the Obama Administration’s stated regulatory approach. Executive Order 13563 requires that:

Each agency must, among other things:  (1) propose or adopt a regulation only upon a reasoned determination that its benefits justify its costs (recognizing that some benefits and costs are difficult to quantify) . . . In applying these principles, each agency is directed to use the best available techniques to quantify anticipated present and future benefits and costs as accurately as possible.

Unfortunately, as Berin Szoka has pointed out,

The FCC, FTC and many other regulatory agencies aren’t required to do cost-benefit analysis at all.  Because these are “independent agencies”—creatures of Congress rather than part of the Executive Branch (like the Department of Justice)—only Congress can impose cost-benefit analysis on agencies.  A bipartisan bill, the Independent Agency Regulatory Analysis Act (S. 3486), would have allowed the President to impose the same kind of cost-benefit analysis on independent regulatory agencies as on Executive Branch agencies, including review by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) for “significant” rulemakings (those with $100 million or more in economic impact, that adversely affect sectors of the economy in a material way, or that create “serious inconsistency” with other agencies’ actions). . . . yet the bill has apparently died . . . .

Legislation or not, it is the Commission’s responsibility to ensure that the rules it enacts will actually be beneficial (it is a consumer protection agency, after all). The staff, presumably, did a perfectly fine job writing the rule they were asked to write. Josh’s point is simply that it isn’t clear the rule should be adopted because it isn’t clear that the benefits of doing so would outweigh the costs.

It may have happened before, but I can’t recall an FTC Commissioner laying down the cost-benefit-analysis gauntlet and publicly calling for consistent cost-benefit review at the Commission, even of seemingly innocuous (but often not actually innocuous), technical rules.

This is exactly the sort of thing that those of us who extolled Josh’s appointment hoped for, and I’m delighted to see him pushing this kind of approach right out of the gate.  No doubt he rocked some boats and took some heat for it. Good. That means he’s on the right track.

I am genuinely puzzled when copyright discussions treat creative works if they are a pre-existing resource that the government arbitrarily allocates. They are not. They aren’t an imaginary regulatory entitlement, such as pollution credits. They aren’t leases or mineral rights on public land handed out to political cronies. Creative works are, instead, the productive intellectual labor of private parties. Real people make this stuff.

At this point in the discussion, a common rhetorical move is to reject what some scholars describe as the romantic myth of authorship. Copyright skeptics point out that authors build on the work of others and that many creative works are the work of corporations, not individuals. This argument was provoked by many decades—a couple centuries, really—of rhetoric that put the individual author on a pedestal. Even if one concedes that authors have, perhaps, been idealized, taking them for granted goes too far.

The absence of creators from the critique of copyright is one of many reasons I doubt the political (and moral) appeal of much of the case for copyright reform we have heard from a few libertarians and conservatives. At the risk of dredging up tiresome memories from the recent presidential election, the argument over “you didn’t build that” was very familiar to me as a scholar of copyright. In both instances, there is a divide between those who value (or, even, romanticize) individual achievement and those who emphasize how much that achievement depends on a social context.

This follows Mark’s earlier and equally excellent essay, Copyright Reform through Private Ordering, in which he identifies how defining and securing copyright as a property right is consistent with and advances the private-ordering regimes embraced by advocates of the free market.  Again, here’s a small taste:

Like other forms of property, copyright thus represents an invitation to a transaction and an opportunity to bargain. This opportunity for parties to transact and bargain is one of the key differences between property and regulation. A regulator has a duty to enforce the law—and if a regulator chooses not to enforce, then a court may order him to do so. Copyright owners need not enforce their rights, of course. Moreover, it is perfectly legitimate to offer a property owner money to forgo their right to enforce their copyrights; such commercial transactions are really the whole point of copyright. Make the same offer to a regulator, and you go to jail.

Read these essays in their entirety—both of them are here and here—as Mark is doing a great job in what is very brief and limited blogging space in providing both the important data and the principled arguments for how copyright is fundamentally consistent with and advances the aspirations of the free market and limited government.  This follows on his earlier, excellent blog posting at the Copyright Alliance that touched on similar themes, Copyright, Economic Freedom, and the RSC Policy Brief.

DISCLOSURE: Mark and I are both on the Academic Advisory Board of the Copyright Alliance.

Will focuses on the first of my three major points about the ACA, as interpreted by the Supreme Court.  In finding the penalty for failure to carry health insurance to be a tax, the Court emphasized its “smallness” relative to the cost of purchasing qualifying insurance.  (That was one of three factors the Court cited in explaining why this particular “penalty” is really a tax for constitutional purposes.)  Presumably, if Congress were to raise the penalty to approach the out-of-pocket cost of buying insurance, it would cross the line from a tax to, in the Supreme Court’s words, “prohibitory financial punishment” that is not a tax.  This means that the ACA’s low penalties are constitutionally locked in, at least to a significant degree.  That’s a problem, because the penalties are currently so low that it makes sense for young, healthy people to forego insurance and pay the low penalties instead.  This is because the ACA removes the natural incentive for young, healthy people to carry insurance: the risk that they will not be able to get it at affordable rates if they become sick in the future.  That risk is eliminated by the ACA’s “guaranteed issue” and “community rating” provisions.  The former requires insurance companies to sell insurance to anyone who seeks it; the latter forbids them to charge a higher premium to one who is sick or susceptible to sickness.  If you know you can get insurance at a an affordable rate the minute you need health care (which, if you’re young and healthy, you’re not likely to need anytime soon), then why buy it now?  The ACA’s penalties are theoretically designed to motivate young, healthy people to go ahead and buy insurance (thereby subsidizing premiums for the less-healthy), but they’re way too low to be effective.  And the Supreme Court’s tax reasoning suggests that they will cease to count as a “tax” if they’re raised to the point at which they would be effective.  Of course, once young, healthy people leave the pool of insureds, premiums will rise on everyone else, causing even more healthy people to drop out.  Economists call this adverse selection, and it’s wildly pernicious.

Will lays all this out in his typical elegant fashion.  He concludes that “as the president begins his second term, the signature achievement of his first term looks remarkably rickety.”  Indeed.

For two other reasons the ACA, as construed by the Supreme Court, is destined to fail, see my recent Regulation article, How the Supreme Court Doomed the ACA to Failure.

• The Affordable Care Act (ACA) provisions mandating both ”guaranteed issue” (insurers must sell to everyone) and “community rating” (insurers can’t charge higher rates to high-risk insureds) create a perverse incentive for young, healthy people to forego purchasing costly health insurance until they need medical treatment, at which point they will be assured coverage (because of guaranteed issue) at rates not reflecting their infirmities (because of community rating).
• When young, healthy people drop out of the insurance pool, premiums — reflective of the average health care expenditures of the covered population — will rise, driving even more young, healthy people from the pool.  To prevent such “adverse selection,” the ACA needs to encourage the young and healthy into the insurance pool, and ensure that they remain covered.
• SCOTUS’s opinion upholding the ACA, however, rejected (quite properly) the Act’s mandate to carry insurance and instead read the ACA to impose a ”tax” on those who freely opt not to buy insurance.  That tax, though, is far too small to induce a great many young, healthy people to stay in the insurance pool — even after the ACA’s generous (i.e., expensive) subsidies are accounted for.  And the reasoning of SCOTUS’s majority opinion limits Congress’s ability to raise the no-insurance penalties to an effective level.  Thus, adverse selection is inevitable and will tend to drive up the cost of health insurance by “sickening” the pool of insureds and increasing the average number of claims per insured.
• Now, an increase in claims per insured would not necessarily raise health insurance premiums if the ACA actually reduced the underlying cost of medical services, the primary driver of health insurance premiums.  Sadly, though, it does no such thing.  The handful of provisions in the 1,000-page statute that are aimed at underlying medical costs, rather than health insurance, range from anemic to silly.  Some, such as the requirement that all preventive services be provided with no out-of-pocket expenditure (the requirement underlying the controversial “contraception mandate”), are sure to increase underlying medical costs.  After all, what incentive do providers have to compete on the price of preventive services if the individuals making the decision to purchase those services face no marginal cost when deciding whom to patronize?
• The fundamental problem with the ACA’s purported cost-saving provisions is that they ignore the primary driver of underlying medical costs: the near complete absence of price competition among health care providers, who know that most individuals making consumption decisions (those with a standard or better health insurance policy) have no “skin in the game,” get no benefit from selecting a cheaper provider, and thus will not tend to award business to providers who are less expensive.  This unfortunate result stems largely from the federal tax code, which perversely encourages employees to demand (and employers to provide) such generous health insurance benefits that insurance has now effectively become “pre-paid health care.”  The tax code achieves this result by making employer contributions to health plans tax free, while fully taxing any dollars paid instead as salary.  As that bastion of free-market ideology, NPR, has reported, economists across the ideological spectrum agree that tax subsidies for employer-provided health insurance drives up the underlying cost of health care.  So did President Obama and his team, as evidenced by this op-ed in which Council of Economic Advisers Chair Christina Romer explains how “[e]mployers['] … strong incentives to pay workers with more generous insurance policies” tends to “lead families to be less vigilant consumers of health care.”  Sadly, President Obama’s shamefully disingeuous 2008 attacks on John McCain’s proposed health care reforms took off the table any treatment of the perverse tax code provisions that largely underlie medical inflation.  Ah, the Price of Politics.
• So the ACA will drive up the costs of health insurance and underlying medical costs.  But isn’t its redeeming virtue the fact that it will drastically expand health insurance coverage?  Hardly.  First, SCOTUS’s opinion prevents the Feds from forcing states to expand their Medicaid rolls, one of the primary means by which the ACA was to increase health insurance coverage.  At this point, ten states (including biggies like Texas and Georgia) are not participating in the Medicaid expansion, five others (including New Jersey and Virginia) are leaning against participation, and fourteen others (including Florida, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania) are undecided.  The upshot is that in a great many populous states, individuals and families that are not Medicaid eligible but earn incomes less than 133% of federal poverty level will receive no subsidy to buy health insurance on an individual basis.  Moreover, the plain language of the ACA denies individual purchase subsidies to citizens of states that decline to set up a state insurance exchange.  As of January 4, 2013, 25 states had firmly decided not to set up their own exchanges, and several others were in limbo.
• The primary reason that the ACA will fail to expand insurance coverage, though, is that it encourages employers of low- to moderate-wage employees to drop health insurance benefits.  The media have largely lambasted employers for this move, but it’s actually in the interest of their employees.  The ACA, you see, provides generous subsidies to employees who cannot obtain qualifying health insurance from their employers at an affordable price.  Those subsidies are far, far larger than the implicit tax subsidy an employee receives for employer-provided health care (by virtue of the fact that compensation paid as health benefits is not taxed).  Employees thus have a strong incentive to demand — and employers to provide — a compensation package that consists of higher salary in exchange for no health insurance coverage.  In the Regulation article, I run the numbers to show how the ACA creates an incentive for employers to drop coverage and pay a higher salary but fails to incentivize moderately compensated employees to turn around and purchase health insurance.  The upshot is that coverage levels are likely to fall.

So this is where we are.  The grand promises of reduced health care costs and expanded coverage look ever less credible.  As the ACA implodes, watch for calls for a single-payer system.  We may start with a Public Option, but I’d be surprised if single-payer’s not where we end up at the end of the day.  On the bright side, maybe we can see something groovy like this at the next American Olympics!

I was alerted to Buchanan’s passing by my friend and collaborator, Virginia Law’s Charles Goetz, co-author of the Goetz & McChesney (now Goetz, McChesney & Lambert) antitrust casebook.  I asked Charlie if he’d pen a few words in honor of Buchanan, his dissertation director and mentor, and he heartily agreed to do so.  Here they are:

Nobel Laureate James McGill Buchanan has passed away and one less giant now walks the pathways of Economics, pathways that he extended and widened.  Jim was my dissertation director, my mentor, my sometime colleague and coauthor—and my friend. There is an old compliment that denotes a man “a gentleman and a scholar.”  Jim was certainly both, to the quintessential degree.

I often reflect on how fortunate I’ve been with many things, but certainly among the luckiest of things was to be an Economics graduate student at the University of Virginia in the early 1960’s.  It was a golden time when Jim and a handful of others were midwifing the birth of what came to be known as Public Choice economics.  I got to watch and listen as great men did great things.

I remember what an eye-opening experience it was for me to take Buchanan’s year-long course in Public Finance.  He was an incredibly effective teacher.  He was far from a classroom showman, but had the genius of asking such devilishly interesting and revelatory questions.  I have acknowledged publicly on a number of occasions that, if he could charge me for the intellectual value-added that he created in me, he would be owed a very large sum indeed.  But I am profoundly in his debt, even if not in a pecuniary sense.

In the days and weeks to come, others will write many highly complimentary things about James M. Buchanan as a scholar. Deservedly so.  I would have little new to add to that outpouring.  Still, there is a revealing anecdote about Jim as a man that can come only from me, the sole witness and participant.

Buchanan generally had a very formal relationship with students and I understandably regarded him with awe and no little bit of fear.  But, one day, he gave me a great big smile and told me a story that made me appreciate, for the first time, the lurking, devilish sense of humor that went with this proper Tennessee Gentleman.

“Goetz,” he said, “you’re a New Yorker, aren’t you?  But, . . . you’re a pretty good fellow anyway.”

“I often dislike New Yorkers because they act like obnoxious know-it-alls.  There was a New Yorker like that in my class at Navy Officer Candidate school during World War II.  This fellow didn’t have much use for a simple Tennessee boy like me and tried to lord it over us country boys.  But I fixed him.”

“At the end of our OCS course, the Navy gave us a battery of tests that it used in allocating new ensigns to their first duty assignment.  I started a rumor that this NY fellow had come out second in the whole class.  At first, he denied it since, of course, he had no basis to believe it.  Gradually, though, he began to accept congratulations and to puff up more and more about the compliments.”

“Then I started the second rumor, about our further training to battle the Japanese: the first three men in the class were being sent to One-man Submarine School.”

Somehow, I saw Jim with different eyes after that story.  Maybe you will as well.

Requiescat in pace, J. M. Buchanan, the little-known joker and man of honed wit, wit in more ways than the scholarly.  In the midst of our sadness, maybe a chuckle is good medicine.

Well-said, Charlie.

Join me this Friday, January 11, 2013 at 12:00 pm – 1:45 pm ET for an ABA Antitrust Section webinar to explore these questions, among others. I will be sharing the panel with an impressive group:

• J. Thomas Rosch (speaking, as far as I know, for the first time as a former Commissioner (Josh is supposed to be sworn in tomorrow));
• Jonathan M. Jacobson;
• Gary L. Reback; and
• Charles F. (Rick) Rule

Hill B. Welford will moderate. Registration is open to everyone here and the outlay is zero. Remember — these events are not technically free because you have to give up some of your time, but I would be delighted if you did.

In general, a FRAND commitment incentivizes innovation by allowing a SEP owner to recoup its investments and the value of its technology through licensing, while, at the same, promoting competition and avoiding patent holdup by ensuring that licensing agreements are reasonable. When the process works, and patent holders negotiate licensing rights in good faith, patents are licensed, industries advance and consumers benefit.

FRAND terms are inherently indeterminate and flexible—indeed, they often apply precisely in situations where licensors and licensees need flexibility because each licensing circumstance is nuanced and a one-size-fits-all approach isn’t workable. Superimposing process restraints from above isn’t necessarily the best thing in dealing with what amounts to a contract dispute. But few can doubt the benefits of greater clarity in this process; the question is whether the FTC’s particular approach to the problem sacrifices too much in exchange for such clarity.

The crux of the issue in the Google consent decree—and the most controversial aspect of SEP licensing negotiations—is the role of injunctions. The consent decree requires that, before Google sues to enjoin a manufacturer from using its SEPs without a license, the company must follow a prescribed path in licensing negotiations. In particular:

Under this Order, before seeking an injunction on FRAND-encumbered SEPs, Google must: (1) provide a potential licensee with a written offer containing all of the material license terms necessary to license its SEPs, and (2) provide a potential licensee with an offer of binding arbitration to determine the terms of a license that are not agreed upon. Furthermore, if a potential licensee seeks judicial relief for a FRAND determination, Google must not seek an injunction during the pendency of the proceeding, including appeals.

There are a few exceptions, summarized by Commissioner Ohlhausen:

These limitations include when the potential licensee (a) is outside the jurisdiction of the United States; (b) has stated in writing or sworn testimony that it will not license the SEP on any terms [in other words, is not a “willing licensee”]; (c) refuses to enter a license agreement on terms set in a final ruling of a court – which includes any appeals – or binding arbitration; or (d) fails to provide written confirmation to a SEP owner after receipt of a terms letter in the form specified by the Commission. They also include certain instances when a potential licensee has brought its own action seeking injunctive relief on its FRAND-encumbered SEPs.

To the extent that the settlement reinforces what Google (and other licensors) would do anyway, and even to the extent that it imposes nothing more than an obligation to inject a neutral third party into FRAND negotiations to assist the parties in resolving rate disputes, there is little to complain about. Indeed, this is the core of the agreement, and, importantly, it seems to preserve Google’s right to seek injunctions to enforce its patents, subject to the agreement’s process requirements.

Industry participants and standard-setting organizations have supported injunctions, and the seeking and obtaining of injunctions against infringers is not in conflict with SEP patentees’ obligations. Even the FTC, in its public comments, has stated that patent owners should be able to obtain injunctions on SEPs when an infringer has rejected a reasonable license offer. Thus, the long-anticipated announcement by the FTC in the Google case may help to provide some clarity to the future negotiation of SEP licenses, the possible use of binding arbitration, and the conditions under which seeking injunctive relief will be permissible (as an antitrust matter).

Nevertheless, U.S. regulators, including the FTC, have sometimes opined that seeking injunctions on products that infringe SEPs is not in the spirit of FRAND. Everyone seems to agree that more certainty is preferable; the real issue is whether and when injunctions further that aim or not (and whether and when they are anticompetitive).

In October, Renata Hesse, then Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, remarked during a patent roundtable that

[I]t would seem appropriate to limit a patent holder’s right to seek an injunction to situations where the standards implementer is unwilling to have a neutral third-party determine the appropriate F/RAND terms or is unwilling to accept the F/RAND terms approved by such a third-party.

In its own 2011 Report on the “IP Marketplace,” the FTC acknowledged the fluidity and ambiguity surrounding the meaning of “reasonable” licensing terms and the problems of patent enforcement. While noting that injunctions may confer a costly “hold-up” power on licensors that wield them, the FTC nevertheless acknowledged the important role of injunctions in preserving the value of patents and in encouraging efficient private negotiation:

Three characteristics of injunctions that affect innovation support generally granting an injunction. The first and most fundamental is an injunction’s ability to preserve the exclusivity that provides the foundation of the patent system’s incentives to innovate. Second, the credible threat of an injunction deters infringement in the first place. This results from the serious consequences of an injunction for an infringer, including the loss of sunk investment. Third, a predictable injunction threat will promote licensing by the parties. Private contracting is generally preferable to a compulsory licensing regime because the parties will have better information about the appropriate terms of a license than would a court, and more flexibility in fashioning efficient agreements.

* * *

But denying an injunction every time an infringer’s switching costs exceed the economic value of the invention would dramatically undermine the ability of a patent to deter infringement and encourage innovation. For this reason, courts should grant injunctions in the majority of cases.…

Consistent with this view, the European Commission’s Deputy Director-General for Antitrust, Cecilio Madero Villarejo, recently expressed concern that some technology companies that complain of being denied a license on FRAND terms never truly intend to acquire licenses, but rather “want[] to create conditions for a competition case to be brought.”

But with the Google case, the Commission appears to back away from its seeming support for injunctions, claiming that:

Seeking and threatening injunctions against willing licensees of FRAND-encumbered SEPs undermines the integrity and efficiency of the standard-setting process and decreases the incentives to participate in the process and implement published standards. Such conduct reduces the value of standard setting, as firms will be less likely to rely on the standard-setting process.

Reconciling the FTC’s seemingly disparate views turns on the question of what a “willing licensee” is. And while the Google settlement itself may not magnify the problems surrounding the definition of that term, it doesn’t provide any additional clarity, either.

The problem is that, even in its 2011 Report, in which FTC noted the importance of injunctions, it defines a willing licensee as one who would license at a hypothetical, ex ante rate absent the threat of an injunction and with a different risk profile than an after-the-fact infringer. In other words, the FTC’s definition of willing licensee assumes a willingness to license only at a rate determined when an injunction is not available, and under the unrealistic assumption that the true value of a SEP can be known ex ante. Not surprisingly, then, the Commission finds it easy to declare an injunction invalid when a patentee demands a (higher) royalty rate in an actual negotiation, with actual knowledge of a patent’s value and under threat of an injunction.

As Richard Epstein, Scott Kieff and Dan Spulber discuss in critiquing the FTC’s 2011 Report:

In short, there is no economic basis to equate a manufacturer that is willing to commit to license terms before the adoption and launch of a standard, with one that instead expropriates patent rights at a later time through infringement. The two bear different risks and the late infringer should not pay the same low royalty as a party that sat down at the bargaining table and may actually have contributed to the value of the patent through its early activities. There is no economically meaningful sense in which any royalty set higher than that which a “willing licensee would have paid” at the pre-standardization moment somehow “overcompensates patentees by awarding more than the economic value of the patent.”

* * *

Even with a RAND commitment, the patent owner retains the valuable right to exclude (not merely receive later compensation from) manufacturers who are unwilling to accept reasonable license terms. Indeed, the right to exclude influences how those terms should be calculated, because it is quite likely that prior licensees in at least some areas will pay less if larger numbers of parties are allowed to use the same technology. Those interactive effects are ignored in the FTC calculations.

With this circular logic, all efforts by patentees to negotiate royalty rates after infringement has occurred can be effectively rendered anticompetitive if the patentee uses an injunction or the threat of an injunction against the infringer to secure its reasonable royalty.

The idea behind FRAND is rather simple (reward inventors; protect competition), but the practice of SEP licensing is much more complicated. Circumstances differ from case to case, and, more importantly, so do the parties’ views on what may constitute an appropriate licensing rate under FRAND. As I have written elsewhere, a single company may have very different views on the meaning of FRAND depending on whether it is the licensor or licensee in a given negotiation—and depending on whether it has already implemented a standard or not. As one court looking at the very SEPs at issue in the Google case has pointed out:

[T]he court is mindful that at the time of an initial offer, it is difficult for the offeror to know what would in fact constitute RAND terms for the offeree. Thus, what may appear to be RAND terms from the offeror’s perspective may be rejected out-of-pocket as non-RAND terms by the offeree. Indeed, it would appear that at any point in the negotiation process, the parties may have a genuine disagreement as to what terms and conditions of a license constitute RAND under the parties’ unique circumstances.

The fact that many firms engaged in SEP negotiations are simultaneously and repeatedly both licensors and licensees of patents governed by multiple SSOs further complicates the process—but also helps to ensure that it will reach a conclusion that promotes innovation and ensures that consumers reap the rewards.

In fact, an important issue in assessing the propriety of injunctions is the recognition that, in most cases, firms would rather license their patents and receive royalties than exclude access to their IP and receive no compensation (and incur the costs of protracted litigation, to boot). Importantly, for firms that both license out their own patents and license in those held by other firms (the majority of IT firms and certainly the norm for firms participating in SSOs), continued interactions on both sides of such deals help to ensure that licensing—not withholding—is the norm.

Companies are waging the smartphone patent wars with very different track records on SSO participation. Apple, for example, is relatively new to the mobile communications space and has relatively few SEPs, while other firms, like Samsung, are long-time players in the space with histories of extensive licensing (in both directions). But, current posturing aside, both firms have an incentive to license their patents, as Mark Summerfield notes:

Apple’s best course of action will most likely be to enter into licensing agreements with its competitors, which will not only result in significant revenues, but also push up the prices (or reduce the margins) on competitive products.

While some commentators make it sound as if injunctions threaten to cripple smartphone makers by preventing them from licensing essential technology on viable terms, companies in this space have been perfectly capable of orchestrating large-scale patent licensing campaigns. That these may increase costs to competitors is a feature—not a bug—of the system, representing the return on innovation that patents are intended to secure. Microsoft has wielded its sizeable patent portfolio to drive up the licensing fees paid by Android device manufacturers, and some commentators have even speculated that Microsoft makes more revenue from Android than Google does. But while Microsoft might prefer to kill Android with its patents, given the unlikeliness of this, as MG Siegler notes,

[T]he next best option is to catch a free ride on the Android train. Patent licensing deals already in place with HTC, General Dynamics, and others could mean revenues of over $1 billion by next year, as Forbes reports. And if they’re able to convince Samsung to sign one as well (which could effectively force every Android partner to sign one), we could be talking multiple billions of dollars of revenue each year.

Hand-wringing about patents is the norm, but so is licensing, and your smartphone exists, despite the thousands of patents that read on it, because the firms that hold those patents—some SEPs and some not—have, in fact, agreed to license them.

The inability to seek an injunction against an infringer, however, would ensure instead that patentees operate with reduced incentives to invest in technology and to enter into standards because they are precluded from benefiting from any subsequent increase in the value of their patents once they do so. As Epstein, Kieff and Spulber write:

The simple reality is that before a standard is set, it just is not clear whether a patent might become more or less valuable. Some upward pressure on value may be created later to the extent that the patent is important to a standard that is important to the market. In addition, some downward pressure may be caused by a later RAND commitment or some other factor, such as repeat play. The FTC seems to want to give manufacturers all of the benefits of both of these dynamic effects by in effect giving the manufacturer the free option of picking different focal points for elements of the damages calculations. The patentee is forced to surrender all of the benefit of the upward pressure while the manufacturer is allowed to get all of the benefit of the downward pressure.

Thus the problem with even the limited constraints imposed by the Google settlement: To the extent that the FTC’s settlement amounts to a prohibition on Google seeking injunctions against infringers unless the company accepts the infringer’s definition of “reasonable,” the settlement will harm the industry. It will reinforce a precedent that will likely reduce the incentives for companies and individuals to innovate, to participate in SSOs, and to negotiate in good faith.

Contrary to most assumptions about the patent system, it needs stronger, not weaker, property rules. With a no-injunction rule (whether explicit or de facto (as the Google settlement’s definition of “willing licensee” unfolds)), a potential licensee has little incentive to negotiate with a patent holder and can instead refuse to license, infringe, try its hand in court, avoid royalties entirely until litigation is finished (and sometimes even longer), and, in the end, never be forced to pay a higher royalty than it would have if it had negotiated before the true value of the patents was known.

Flooding the courts and discouraging innovation and peaceful negotiations hardly seem like benefits to the patent system or the market. Unfortunately, the FTC’s approach to SEP licensing exemplified by the Google settlement may do just that.

In her dissent in Google, Comissioner Ohlhausen articulates the problems with the FTC’s settlement. First, writes Commissioner Ohlhausen,

[T]he majority says little about what “appropriate circumstances” may trigger an FTC lawsuit other than to say that a fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (“FRAND”) commitment generally prohibits seeking an injunction. By articulating only narrow circumstances when the Commission deems a licensee unwilling (limitations added since Bosch), and not addressing the ambiguity in the market about what constitutes a FRAND commitment, the Commission will leave patent owners to guess in most circumstances whether they can safely seek an injunction on a SEP.

As Commissioner Ohlhausen points out, the FTC’s treatment of Apple as a “willing licensee” betrays the complexity of such issues and the confusion this settlement may engender. While the FTC acknowledges that injunctions are appropriate when a patentee is faced with a licensee who is unwilling to license its patents at a reasonable rate, if even Apple is here considered a “willing licensee,” then such an acknowledgement is a null set. As Ohlhausen points out, in treating Apple as a willing licensee, the Commission

[D]isregard[s] a federal judge’s decision that Apple revealed itself as unwilling on the eve of trial. As the judge wrote: “[Apple’s intentions] became clear only when Apple informed the court . . . that it did not intend to be bound by any rate that the court determined.” The judge further concluded Apple was trying to use the FRAND rate litigation simply to determine “a ceiling on the potential license rate that it could use for negotiating purposes.…”

The Order allows Google to seek injunctive relief if a party “has stated in writing or in sworn testimony that it will not license the FRAND Patent on any terms”—as Apple did in federal district court. But the Complaint attempts to skirt this issue by vaguely claiming that “[a]t all times relevant to this Complaint, these implementers [including Apple] were willing licensees.… ” I believe it is quite “relevant” that Apple told a federal judge after years of negotiation and litigation with Motorola that it would only abide by the court-determined royalty rates to the extent it saw fit. I cannot endorse characterizing this conduct as that of a willing licensee.

This sort of strategic behavior by licensees is precisely why injunctions are necessary and appropriate in such cases. To turn them into antitrust violations seriously threatens to undermine the licensors’ appropriate bargaining power and the efficient functioning of SEP licensing.

Perhaps most significant, the Commission’s settlement continues the agency’s recent trend of making a hash of its Section 5 authority. As Commissioner Ohlhausen has noted once before (in dissenting from the Commission’s settlement in the Bosch case)—on the same day, as it happens, that Berin Szoka and I did—the FTC is charting a dangerously unprincipled course on Section 5, particularly with respect to its interpretation of its unfairness jurisdiction. In his Separate Statement in Google, Commissioner Rosch sounds a similar concern about the absence of “limiting principles” on the scope of the Commission’s authority to bring Section 5 cases under the Act’s unfair methods of competition prong.

In the Google case, the Commission asserts unfairness jurisdiction without even the minimal limitations the agency itself has adopted. As Commissioner Ohlhausen notes:

[T]he Commission gives no principled basis for expanding liability beyond an unfair method of competition to include an “unfair act or practice” on what is essentially the same conduct here as in Bosch. This expansion of liability sows additional seeds of confusion as to what can create liability and even the statutory basis of that liability.

* * *

The allegations in the complaint that Google and Motorola’s conduct constitutes an “unfair act or practice” fail this agency’s unfairness standard. To show an unfair act or practice, the Commission must prove that the challenged conduct “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.” In this matter, we are essentially treating sophisticated technology companies, rather than end-users, as “consumers” under our consumer protection authority.… Further, the unfairness count in the complaint alleges merely speculative consumer harm, at best, and thus fails to comply with the Commission’s Unfairness Statement.

Summing up, Commissioner Ohlhausen writes:

In sum, I disagree with my colleagues about whether the alleged conduct violates Section 5 but, more importantly, believe the Commission’s actions fail to provide meaningful limiting principles regarding what is a Section 5 violation in the standard-setting context, as evidenced by its shifting positions in N-Data, Bosch, and this matter.

Ohlhausen is correct that, with the Google settlement, the FTC continues to operate in this realm without meaningful limits—a problem that some in Congress have begun to notice, as well, as Berin and I point out.

A significant problem with the SEP settlement as configured by the FTC is that it seems to make illegal the use of injunctions even to enforce perfectly reasonable royalty rates. Motorola has, since before it was purchased by Google, sought a royalty rate of 2.25% for its SEPs—an amount well in-line with rates charged by others with SEPs that read on the same standards. In its litigation with Microsoft, it is precisely this royalty that Motorola was seeking to enforce—and Microsoft was refusing to pay. There is a legitimate dispute over how that amount is to be calculated, but this is the very definition of a contract dispute, and both Motorola’s past practice as well as overall industry practice suggest it is perfectly consistent with Motorola’s FRAND obligation to seek such royalties.

To turn Motorola’s effort to receive a reasonable royalty for its patents by means of an injunction against a willing—but not willing enough—licensee into an antitrust problem seems directly to undermine the standard-setting process. It also seems to have no basis in law.

As Bruce Kobayahsi and Josh Wright pointed out in discussing the FTC’s N-Data case (cited by the Commission in its Analysis to Aid Public Comment on the Google Complaint):

What is left is the view that the theory in N-Data could be extended to any breach of a contractual commitment that might result in increased royalties, or even a good faith modification of a FRAND commitment to the same effect, always violates the antitrust laws. Perhaps a showing of market power would be required to succeed on such a theory under Section 2, but not Section 5. But it is worth considering when such a breach or modification would not result in liability under the N-Data analysis under either statute? The breach itself is the exclusionary act and evidence of the requisite monopoly power. No evidence of consumer harm is required. An attempt to renegotiate higher royalty rates is all that is needed. This is unsound antitrust policy. A basic lesson of the holdup literature is that the very asset specificity creating the potential for ex-post opportunism also creates the incentives for parties to build flexibility into their contractual relationships, which allows them to reasonably deal with unanticipated post- contractual shocks. However, even good faith modifications of SSO contractual commitments, whether those commitments relate to pricing or other elements of the agreement, would satisfy the N-Data standard for liability.

Thus, there is no principle that would prevent the extension of the N-Data theory to the breach of any contractual commitment by a firm resulting in higher prices to some consumers.

This seems to be precisely the case here—made all the more poignant by the fact that, arguably unlike N-Data, Motorola was seeking not an increase from previously agreed-to royalty rates, but rather the enforcement of royalty rates perfectly consistent with its past practice.

As I have noted before in discussing this issue:

One of the clearest statements of the need for antitrust restraint in the standard setting context comes from a June 2011 comment filed with the FTC:

[T]he existence of a RAND commitment to offer patent licenses should not preclude a patent holder from seeking preliminary injunctive relief.… Any uniform declaration that such relief would not be available if the patent holder has made a commitment to offer a RAND license for its essential patent claims in connection with a standard may reduce any incentives that implementers might have to engage in good faith negotiations with the patent holder.

Most of the SSOs and their stakeholders that have considered these proposals over the years have determined that there are only a limited number of situations where patent hold-up takes place in the context of standards-setting. The industry has determined that those situations generally are best addressed through bi-lateral negotiation (and, in rare cases, litigation) as opposed to modifying the SSO’s IPR policy [by precluding injunctions or mandating a particular negotiation process].

The statement’s author? Why, Microsoft, of course.

Patents are an important tool for encouraging the development and commercialization of advanced technology, as are standard setting organizations. Antitrust authorities should exercise great restraint before intervening in the complex commercial negotiations over technology patents and standards. In Motorola’s case, the evidence of conduct that might harm competition is absent, and all that remains are, in essence, allegations that Motorola is bargaining hard and enforcing its property rights.

But the Commission actually explicitly adopts this interventionist posture in defending itself against Commissioner Ohlhausen’s criticism. Writes the Commission:

We also disagree with Commissioner Ohlhausen’s claim that the proposed settlement with Google creates uncertainty for market participants. In our view, it does just the opposite. By taking action that may deter the owners of standard-essential patents from unilaterally defining the terms of FRAND agreements through the exercise of leverage acquired solely through the standard-setting process, we protect the integrity of that process. [Emphasis added].

As Kobayashi and Wright make clear in discussing the N-Data case and its relationship to Supreme Court precedent set by the NYNEX case (and Trinko):

[In NYNEX] the Court distinguished the attempt to evade the pricing constraint from the unlawful acquisition or exercise of monopoly power by pointing out that “consumer injury flowed…from the exercise of market power that is lawfully in the hands of a monopolist.”

This is a fatal problem for the “evasion of a pricing constraint” monopolization theory of patent holdup based on renegotiation or modification of ex-ante contractual commitments made in good faith and in the absence of deception.…

Consider the application of NYNEX to the theory of patent holdup without deception in N-Data. The Commission’s theory of antitrust liability was not that N-Data acquired monopoly power when [its technology was adopted into the standard]. Rather, the theory was that N-Data unlawfully acquired monopoly power at the moment that it violated [a] contractual pricing constraint with its attempt to renegotiate those prior $1,000 licensing commitments. The proponents of this theory cannot argue that monopoly power was acquired at the time the technology was incorporated into the standard because Trinko clearly allows the setting of monopoly prices after monopoly power was lawfully obtained. The alternative is to rely on the evasion of pricing constraint theory, which asserts that the exclusionary conduct and acquisition of monopoly power occur at the moment N-Data attempts to evade its licensing commitments. However, the Court’s reasoning in NYNEX indicates that it would have concluded that N-Data lawfully obtained monopoly power at the time its technology was included in the standard and would characterize the renegotiation as the exercise of that power. Indeed, NYNEX concludes that regulatory fraud by a monopolist, conduct far less economically meritorious than breach of contract, which can be efficient, is not exclusionary even when it generates actual harm to consumers. In sum, there should be little doubt that the Court’s decision in NYNEX compels the conclusion that ex-post opportunism without deception is not exclusionary conduct and not actionable under Section 2.

And thus we come back, full circle, to the problem of Section 5. While Section 2 does not permit a case based on “the exercise of leverage acquired solely through the standard-setting process,” the FTC interprets Section 5 to operate without the sensible economic constraints imposed by the Court on Section 2 cases. As Kobayashi and Wright note:

The truth is that there was little chance the FTC could have prevailed [in N-Data] under the more rigorous Section 2 standard that anchors the liability rule to a demanding standard requiring proof of both exclusionary conduct and competitive harm. One must either accept the proposition that the FTC sought Section 5 liability precisely because there was no evidence of consumer harm or that the FTC believed there was evidence of consumer harm but elected to file the Complaint based only upon the Section 5 theory to encourage an expansive application of that Section, a position several Commissioners joining the Majority Statement have taken in recent years. Neither of these interpretations offers much evidence that N-Data is sound as a matter of prosecutorial discretion or antitrust policy.

Precisely the same could be said of the Google settlement. Whatever its merits in bringing clarity to the licensing of SEPs, the case (and others like it, including Bosch), it really is Time for Congress to Cancel the FTC’s Section 5 Antitrust Blank Check.

While it took the Commission more than a year and a half to finally come to the same conclusion, ultimately the FTC had no choice but to close the case that was a “square peg, round hole” problem from the start.

Now that the FTC’s investigation has concluded, an examination of the nature of the markets in which Google operates illustrates why this crusade was ill-conceived from the start. In short, the “realities on the ground” strongly challenged the logic and relevance of many of the claims put forth by Google’s critics. Nevertheless, the politics are such that their nonsensical claims continue, in different forums, with competitors continuing to hope that they can wrangle a regulatory solution to their competitive problem.

The case against Google rested on certain assumptions about the functioning of the markets in which Google operates. Because these are tech markets, constantly evolving and complex, most assumptions about the scope of these markets and competitive effects within them are imperfect at best. But there are some attributes of Google’s markets—conveniently left out of the critics’ complaints— that, properly understood, painted a picture for the FTC that undermined the basic, essential elements of an antitrust case against the company.

That case was seriously undermined by the nature and extent of competition in the markets the FTC was investigating. Most importantly, casual references to a “search market” and “search advertising market” aside, Google actually competes in the market for targeted eyeballs: a market aimed to offer up targeted ads to interested users. Search offers a valuable opportunity for targeting an advertiser’s message, but it is by no means alone: there are myriad (and growing) other mechanisms to access consumers online.

Consumers use Google because they are looking for information — but there are lots of ways to do that. There are plenty of apps that circumvent Google, and consumers are increasingly going to specialized sites to find what they are looking for. The search market, if a distinct one ever existed, has evolved into an online information market that includes far more players than those who just operate traditional search engines.

We live in a world where what prevails today won’t prevail tomorrow. The tech industry is constantly changing, and 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” is far from unassailable.

This is progress — creative destruction — not regress, and such changes should not be penalized.

Another common refrain from Google’s critics was that Google’s access to immense amounts of data used to increase the quality of its targeting presented a barrier to competition that no one else could match, thus protecting Google’s unassailable monopoly. But scale comes in lots of ways.

Even if scale doesn’t come cheaply, the fact that challenging firms might have to spend the same (or, in this case, almost certainly less) Google did in order to replicate its success is not a “barrier to entry” that requires an antitrust remedy. Data about consumer interests is widely available (despite efforts to reduce the availability of such data in the name of protecting “privacy”—which might actually create barriers to entry). It’s never been the case that a firm has to generate its own inputs for every product it produces — and there’s no reason to suggest search or advertising is any different.

Additionally, 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 were illusory. Bing and other recent entrants in the general search business have enjoyed success precisely because they were able to obtain the inputs (in this case, data) necessary to develop competitive offerings.

Meanwhile unanticipated competitors like Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and others continue to knock at Google’s metaphorical door, all of them entering into competition with Google using data sourced from creative sources, and all of them potentially besting Google in the process. Consider, for example, Amazon’s recent move into the targeted advertising market, competing with Google to place ads on websites across the Internet, but with the considerable advantage of being able to target ads based on searches, or purchases, a user has made on Amazon—the world’s largest product search engine.

Now that the investigation has concluded, we come away with two major findings. First, the online information market is dynamic, 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 development in the market – whether offered by Google or its competitors and whether facilitated by technological change or shifting consumer preferences – has presented different, novel and shifting opportunities and challenges for companies interested in attracting eyeballs, selling ad space and data, earning revenue and obtaining market share. To say that Google dominates “search” or “online advertising” missed the mark precisely because there was 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.

It would be churlish not to give credit where credit is due—and credit is due the FTC. I continue to think the investigation should have ended before it began, of course, but the FTC is to be commended for reaching this result amidst an overwhelming barrage of pressure to “do something.”

But there are others in this sadly politicized mess for whom neither the facts nor the FTC’s extensive investigation process (nor the finer points of antitrust law) are enough. Like my four-year-old daughter, they just “want what they want,” and they will stamp their feet until they get it.

While competitors will be competitors—using the regulatory system to accomplish what they can’t in the market—they do a great disservice to the very customers they purport to be protecting in doing so. As Milton Friedman famously said, in decrying “The Business Community’s Suicidal Impulse“:

As a believer in the pursuit of self-interest in a competitive capitalist system, I can’t blame a businessman who goes to Washington and tries to get special privileges for his company.… Blame the rest of us for being so foolish as to let him get away with it.

I do blame businessmen when, in their political activities, individual businessmen and their organizations take positions that are not in their own self-interest and that have the effect of undermining support for free private enterprise. In that respect, businessmen tend to be schizophrenic. When it comes to their own businesses, they look a long time ahead, thinking of what the business is going to be like 5 to 10 years from now. But when they get into the public sphere and start going into the problems of politics, they tend to be very shortsighted.

Ironically, Friedman was writing about the antitrust persecution of Microsoft by its rivals back in 1999:

Is it really in the self-interest of Silicon Valley to set the government on Microsoft? Your industry, the computer industry, moves so much more rapidly than the legal process, that by the time this suit is over, who knows what the shape of the industry will be.… [Y]ou will rue the day when you called in the government.

Among Microsoft’s chief tormentors was Gary Reback. He’s spent the last few years beating the drum against Google—but singing from the same song book. Reback recently told the Washington Post, “if a settlement were to be proposed that didn’t include search, the institutional integrity of the FTC would be at issue.” Actually, no it wouldn’t. As a matter of fact, the opposite is true. It’s hard to imagine an agency under more pressure, from more quarters (including the Hill), to bring a case around search. Doing so would at least raise the possibility that it were doing so because of pressure and not the merits of the case. But not doing so in the face of such pressure? That can almost only be a function of institutional integrity.

As another of Google’s most-outspoken critics, Tom Barnett, noted:

[The FTC has] really put [itself] in the position where they are better positioned now than any other agency in the U.S. is likely to be in the immediate future to address these issues. I would encourage them to take the issues as seriously as they can. To the extent that they concur that Google has violated the law, there are very good reasons to try to address the concerns as quickly as possible.

As Barnett acknowledges, there is no question that the FTC investigated these issues more fully than anyone. The agency’s institutional culture and its committed personnel, together with political pressure, media publicity and endless competitor entreaties, virtually ensured that the FTC took the issues “as seriously as they [could]” – in fact, as seriously as anyone else in the world. There is simply no reasonable way to criticize the FTC for being insufficiently thorough in its investigation and conclusions.

Nor is there a basis for claiming that the FTC is “standing in the way” of the courts’ ability to review the issue, as Scott Cleland contends in an op-ed in the Hill. Frankly, this is absurd. Google’s competitors have spent millions pressuring the FTC to bring a case. But the FTC isn’t remotely the only path to the courts. As Commissioner Rosch admonished,

They can darn well bring [a case] as a private antitrust action if they think their ox is being gored instead of free-riding on the government to achieve the same result.

Competitors have already beaten a path to the DOJ’s door, and investigations are still pending in the EU, Argentina, several US states, and elsewhere. That the agency that has leveled the fullest and best-informed investigation has concluded that there is no “there” there should give these authorities pause, but, sadly for consumers who would benefit from an end to competitors’ rent seeking, nothing the FTC has done actually prevents courts or other regulators from having a crack at Google.

The case against Google has received more attention from the FTC than the merits of the case ever warranted. It is time for Google’s critics and competitors to move on.

[Crossposted at Forbes.com]

Happy New Year!

For those attending and interested, I’ll be speaking at the Fed Soc on privacy and antitrust, and at AALS on Google and antitrust.  Details below.  I hope to see you there!

Federalist Society:

Seven-Minute Presentations of Works in Progress – Part I
Friday, January 4, 5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Location: Bacchus Room, Wyndham Riverfront Hotel

• Prof. Geoffrey Manne, Lewis & Clark School of Law, “Is There a Place for Privacy in Antitrust?”
• Prof. Zvi Rosen, New York University School of Law, “Discharging Fiduciary Debts in Bankruptcy”
• Prof. Erin Sheley, George Washington University School of Law, “The Body, the Self, and the Legal Account of Harm”
• Prof. Scott Shepard, John Marshall Law School, “A Negative Externality by Any Other Name: Using Emissions Caps as Models for Constraining Dead-Weight Costs of Regulation”
• Moderator: Prof. David Olson, Boston College Law School

AALS:

Google and Antitrust
Saturday, January 5, 10:30 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.
Location: Newberry, Third Floor, Hilton New Orleans Riverside

• Moderator: Michael A. Carrier, Rutgers School of Law – Camden
• Marina L. Lao, Seton Hall University School of Law
• Geoffrey A. Manne, Lewis & Clark Law School
• Frank A. Pasquale, Seton Hall University School of Law
• Mark R. Patterson, Fordham University School of Law
• Pamela Samuelson, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law

As I wrote upon Josh’s nomination:

Josh is widely regarded as the top antitrust scholar of his generation. He is the author of more than 50 scholarly articles and book chapters, including several that were released as ICLE White Papers. He is a co-author of the most widely-used antitrust casebook, and co-editor of three books on topics ranging from Competition Policy and Intellectual Property Law to the Intellectual History of Law and Economics. And he is the most prolific blogger on the preeminent antitrust and corporate law and economics blog, Truth on the Market.

The FTC will benefit enormously from Josh’s expertise and his error cost approach to antitrust and consumer protection law will be a tremendous asset to the Commission — particularly as it delves further into the regulation of data and privacy . His work is rigorous, empirically grounded, and ever-mindful of the complexities of both business and regulation.

I am honored to have co-authored several articles with Josh, and I have learned an incredible amount about antitrust law and economics from him. The Commissioners and staff at the FTC will surely similarly profit from his time there.

We’ll miss him around these parts, but presumably he’ll provide us with plenty of good fodder for the blog.

I won’t commit the fallacy of hasty generalization by inferring any conclusions from this single comparison, but it does provide interesting food for thought, especially for anyone claiming that historical uses of “encouragement” mean the exact same thing as “incentive.” 

Encouragement vs. Incentive 

I’ll leave it to full-time copyright scholars like Chris to determine if this data point fits into a bigger explanatory framework on historical copyright policy. As the Coffee Talk lady would say: I’m feeling a little verklempt, and so talk amongst yourselves.

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?

As Democrats insist that income taxes on the 1% must go up in the name of fairness, one Democratic Senator wants to make sure that the 1% of heaviest Internet users pay the same price as the rest of us. It’s ironic how confused social justice gets when the Internet’s involved.

Senator Ron Wyden is beloved by defenders of Internet freedom, most notably for blocking the Protect IP bill—sister to the more infamous SOPA—in the Senate. He’s widely celebrated as one of the most tech-savvy members of Congress. But his latest bill, the “Data Cap Integrity Act,” is a bizarre, reverse-Robin Hood form of price control for broadband. It should offend those who defend Internet freedom just as much as SOPA did.

Wyden worries that “data caps” will discourage Internet use and allow “Internet providers to extract monopoly rents,” quoting a New York Times editorial from July that stirred up a tempest in a teapot. But his fears are straw men, based on four false premises.

First, US ISPs aren’t “capping” anyone’s broadband; they’re experimenting with usage-based pricing—service tiers. If you want more than the basic tier, your usage isn’t capped: you can always pay more for more bandwidth. But few users will actually exceed that basic tier. For example, Comcast’s basic tier, 300 GB/month, is so generous that 98.5% of users will not exceed it. That’s enough for 130 hours of HD video each month (two full-length movies a day) or between 300 and 1000 hours of standard (compressed) video streaming.

Second, Wyden sets up a false dichotomy: Caps (or tiers, more accurately) are, according to Wyden, “appropriate if they are carefully constructed to manage network congestion,” but apparently for Wyden the only alternative explanation for usage-based pricing is extraction of monopoly rents. This simply isn’t the case, and propagating that fallacy risks chilling investment in network infrastructure. In fact, usage-based pricing allows networks to charge heavy users more, thereby recovering more costs and actually reducing prices for the majority of us who don’t need more bandwidth than the basic tier permits—and whose usage is effectively subsidized by those few who do. Unfortunately, Wyden’s bill wouldn’t allow pricing structures based on cost recovery—only network congestion. So, for example, an ISP might be allowed to price usage during times of peak congestion, but couldn’t simply offer a lower price for the basic tier to light users.

That’s nuts—from the perspective of social justice as well as basic economic rationality. Even as the FCC was issuing its famous Net Neutrality regulations, the agency rejected proposals to ban usage-based pricing, explaining:

prohibiting tiered or usage-based pricing and requiring all subscribers to pay the same amount for broadband service, regardless of the performance or usage of the service, would force lighter end users of the network to subsidize heavier end users. It would also foreclose practices that may appropriately align incentives to encourage efficient use of networks.

It is unclear why Senator Wyden thinks the FCC—no friend of broadband “monopolists”—has this wrong.

Third, charging heavy users more isn’t just more equitable, it’s actually a solution to the very problem Wyden worries about: ensuring that ISPs have an incentive to encourage Internet use. Tiered pricing means they actually benefit from heavy use. So rather than try to slow use or discriminate against bandwidth-heavy applications—which is how the Net Neutrality fight started—ISPs will continue to build out faster networks.

Now, it’s certainly possible that, if the basic tier were set low enough or if additional data were expensive enough, cable companies could discourage their subscribers from canceling a cable subscription and switching to a competing service like Netflix. But it’s hard to see how a 300 GB basic tier deters anyone, especially when users can buy additional blocks of 50 GB for just $10/month—enough for nearly two more hours a day of streamed video. If there actually were a problem here, antitrust law could address it far better than blunt pricing restrictions. Indeed, such an investigation is already ongoing.

Finally, Wyden would require that broadband providers count content download from them against your usage—fearing that a “discriminatory cap” would harm competing video providers. But if the “cap” is high enough, who cares? Under antitrust law, such “discrimination” is illegal only if it harms consumers—and it’s hard to see how consumers suffer from being able to download more video. Would they really be better off if every hour of video they streamed from their cable company meant an hour less they could stream from Netflix? That’s what Wyden’s bill would require.

The recent kerfuffle over Comcast’s decision in October to make some of its television (pay per view) content available through Xbox without counting against Internet usage limits brought this point into stark relief. While activists like Public Knowledge decried the decision for the same reasons Wyden does now, they missed the fact that by removing some of its content from usage limits Comcast was actually freeing up users to access more content at lower prices.

If Wyden’s concern is that usage-based pricing would allow ISPs to extract “monopoly profits” from users who bump up against tiers, then “preferencing” some of their own content will reduce, not increase, that risk: Users would be able to access, say, bandwidth-heavy video content just as they do television content now—without it counting against Internet usage limits. That this might “discriminate” against other Internet-based content providers does not mean that it harms consumers—quite the opposite, in fact. Again, to the extent that it might, antitrust rules are more than sufficient to discourage such practices in the first place or punish them if they arise—without restricting firms’ ability to price their content and manage their networks to ensure a reasonable return on their investments.

Pricing structures for broadband are still evolving. Just this year, Comcast moved from its original 250 GB cap—which it never enforced—to today’s 300 GB basic tier, and other broadband providers will likely follow suit. Those plans will probably continue to evolve towards pricing structures that minimize network congestion—like offering periods of unmetered use in the middle of the night, when network use plummets. That would go a long way to allaying concerns about the effect of tiered plans on competition, since Netflix could send your favorite shows and the next movies in your queue to the device of your choice while you sleep. But pricing structures also have to allow sensible, fair recovery of costs—which the Wyden bill would simply ban.

So much for not blithely regulating the Internet, Senator!

Is the Patent System Working or Broken?

A Discussion with Judges Posner and Michel

 Today, people read almost daily reports about the “broken patent system” in newspaper articles, blogs and at social media websites.  Is this true?  On the one hand, the high-tech and biotech industries seem awash in patent litigation, and Congress, regulatory agencies, and courts are considering adopting a variety of reform measures.  On the other hand, patents are securing property rights in technological innovation once imagined only as science fiction — tablet computers, smart phones, genetic testing for cancer, personalized medical treatments for debilitating diseases, and many others — and these technological marvels are now a commonplace feature of our lives.

To discuss these two conflicting stories about whether the patent system promotes or hampers innovation, we will host two distinguished jurists: Paul Michel, former Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and Judge Richard Posner of the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.  Both judges have unparalleled depth in knowledge about patent policy and the working details of the patent system.  This Teleforum brings them together for the first time to discuss their respective views on whether the patent system today is properly securing property rights in new innovation.

Featuring: 

Hon. Paul R. Michel, United States Court of Appeals, Federal Circuit (ret.)

Hon. Richard A. Posner,United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit

Professor Adam Mossoff, George Mason University Law School (Moderator)

A debate is brewing in Congress over whether to allow the Federal Trade Commission to sidestep decades of antitrust case law and economic theory to define, on its own, when competition becomes “unfair.” Unless Congress cancels the FTC’s blank check, uncertainty about the breadth of the agency’s power will chill innovation, especially in the tech sector. And sadly, there’s no reason to believe that such expansive power will serve consumers.

Last month, Senators and Congressmen of both parties sent a flurry of letters to the FTC warning against overstepping the authority Congress granted the agency in 1914 when it enacted Section 5 of the FTC Act. FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz has long expressed a desire to stake out new antitrust authority under Section 5 over unfair methods of competition that would otherwise be legal under the Sherman and Clayton antitrust acts. He seems to have had Google in mind as a test case.

On Monday, Congressmen John Conyers and Mel Watt, the top two Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, issued their own letter telling us not to worry about the larger principle at stake. The two insist that “concerns about the use of Section 5 are unfounded” because “[w]ell established legal principles set forth by the Supreme Court provide ample authority for the FTC to address potential competitive concerns in the relevant market, including search.” The second half of that sentence is certainly true: the FTC doesn’t need a “standalone” Section 5 case to protect consumers from real harms to competition. But that doesn’t mean the FTC won’t claim such authority—and, unfortunately, there’s little by way of “established legal principles” stop the agency from overreaching.

The Conyers-Watt letter cites four Supreme Court cases (Aspen Skiing, Otter Tail Power, Lorrain Journal and Indiana Federation of Dentists), the latest decided in 1986, that deal only with the Sherman Act or that reference Section 5 only as the statutory basis by which the FTC enforces, indirectly, the Sherman Act. But what conduct does Section 5 allow the FTC to prosecute beyond the Sherman Act? The fifth case cited, Sperry & Hutchinson, from 1972, was the last time the Supreme Court directly addressed this critical question, holding that the FTC “does not arrogate excessive power to itself if, in measuring a practice against the elusive, but congressionally mandated standard of fairness, it, like a court of equity, considers public values beyond simply those enshrined in the letter or encompassed in the spirit of the antitrust laws.” Yet, even there, the Court concluded the FTC would have prevailed under the Sherman Act—thus leaving unresolved what a standalone Section 5 case could cover. Fourteen years later, the Court dodged the question again in Indiana Federation of Dentists, noting that, although Section 5 covers something more than the Sherman and Clayton acts, the Sherman Act provided the sole basis for liability in that case. Of Section 5, the Court in Indiana Federation of Dentists said merely that “the standard of ‘unfairness’ under the FTC Act is, by necessity, an elusive one.”

Elusive. Try telling that to your shareholders—or investors looking for The Next Big Thing—when asked how the FTC might regulate innovative business methods!

The FTC has been down this road before—starting with the same Sperry & Hutchinson decision cited by Conyers and Watt. The FTC interpreted that 1972 decision as a blank check to use its authority over unfair trade practices (distinct from, but related to, its authority over unfair methods of competition) to regulate everything from funeral parlors to children’s advertising. But the FTC’s overreach provoked widespread outcry, causing the Washington Post to blast the agency as the “National Nanny.” The Democratic Congress briefly closed the agency, slashed its budget and, in 1980, ordered the Commission to establish legal limiting principles in the form of a formal policy statement on unfairness (followed in 1983 by one on deception). That statement bars the FTC from banning a practice as unfair simply because a majority of Commissioners decide it is “immoral” or in violation of public policy; instead the Commission must show that it violates public policy that is “widely-shared” and “clear and well-established” in law or that causes a substantial injury to consumers without countervailing benefits and which consumers cannot reasonably avoid. Congress enshrined this doctrine into law in 1994.

But the Commission has never issued any such policy statement about Section 5′s unfair competition language—and Congress has never bothered to intervene, even though the FTC has begun exploiting this uncertainty as additional leverage in “convincing” companies to settle shaky antitrust cases. That’s precisely what happened in the Intel case where, as we’ve explained, Intel settled a questionable complaint, probably because it concluded that that settling the case was less costly than litigating it. While such outcomes may bolster the agency’s power, they do nothing to protect consumers and serve instead to chill business conduct that would benefit consumers.

That dynamic is a major reason why the FTC gets away with pushing the boundaries of its authority. Litigation in court is costly enough, but the agency can always threaten companies with an administrative “Part III” litigation—meaning the company would have to spend upwards of a year litigating before the FTC’s Administrative Law Judge and then the full Commission, almost certainly suffering two losses, both PR disasters, before ever getting to an independent, neutral tribunal. So it’s not surprising that most companies settle. Sure, they might win in court eventually, but if the FTC is talking to you about a standalone Section 5 case while pressuring you to settle a case in a consent decree… well, “you’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”

High-tech companies are particularly likely to find themselves the targets of Section 5 sabre-rattling. Cutting-edge companies are often antitrust test-cases because technological innovation goes hand-in-hand with innovations in business practices, from consumer pricing to “coopetition” partnerships between rivals. They’re more likely to settle rather than litigate because they’re terrified of squandering money, investor goodwill and management time on litigation—lest, like Microsoft, they fall behind their rivals even as they are demonized as rapacious monopolists in the press. At the same time, Internet-related cases tend to attract a unique degree of popular attention, driving antitrust regulators to show they’re “doing something” about a perceived problem. Even the best regulators all too easily fall prey to the costly tendency described by Nobel economist Ronald Coase: “if an economist finds something—a business practice of one sort or another—that he does not understand, he looks for a monopoly explanation.”

We can’t wait for the courts to fix this problem—not least because the tendency for these cases to settle out of court means it may be a long while before any court gets the chance. At a minimum, Congress should insist that the FTC convene a public workshop aimed at identifying what a valid standalone Section 5 case could cover—followed by formal guidelines, as we’ve urged. 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 expressly limit Section 5′s prohibition of unfair competition only to invitations to collude (which aren’t cognizable under the Sherman Act).

As the FTC’s policy statement on unfairness puts it, “[t]he Supreme Court has stated on many occasions that the definition of ‘unfairness’ is ultimately one for judicial determination.” But for the courts to play that vital role in defining the “elusive,” Congress may need to reassess how the FTC operates. That might start with requiring the agency to bring suit directly in federal court, just as the Department of Justice does. But it also means much more careful Congressional oversight of what the FTC does across the board. Otherwise, the Commission may once again, as it did in the 1970s, become a second national legislature—with three political appointees deciding what’s “fair” for the entire economy, especially the high-tech sector.

[Crossposted at Forbes.com]

Although the public hears the mantra almost daily that “the patent system is broken,” what we really need is a thorough evaluation of the historic impact the patent system has had on innovation without the negative hype and misinformation that is perpetuated in news headlines or blogs. On December 10, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) held the first of a series of workshops on the patent system and innovation. This first workshop dived into the workings of what some people call “patent assertion entities” (PAE), which are firms that acquire and license patents. The FTC and DOJ, as well as most of the invited participants at the workshop, adopted the “PAE” label as the subject of their critical scrutiny.

 Of course, identifying these firms by their business model of patent licensing denies the patent system naysayers the pejorative rhetorical force of their “PAE” label.  In fact, patent licensing firms have come under attack in newspaper reports, in blogs, and in academic commentary, prompting the FTC and DOJ to consider whether to sanction patent licensing firms for allegedly undermining the innovation made possible by the patent system through some nebulous notion that patent licensing is somehow “anti-competitive.” If anything, this reveals the power of rhetoric.

The truth is that these patent licensing firms maximize value in patented innovation, proving once again Adam Smith’s classic economic insight that specialization and division of labor is key to the success of a commercial economy. There has always existed since the early nineteenth century a secondary market in the sale and purchase of patents, but these firms make use of modern developments in corporate law, finance, and technology to reap new value for inventors or other firms who lack either the knowledge or resources to monetize their innovation assets. In short, patent licensing firms reflect the exact same value-maximizing aggregation and specialization that other firms have long employed in our successful invention economy, such as when 3M or Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park Laboratory aggregated inventors for research and development itself. Patent licensing firms, by better enabling inventors to sell and exchange their ideas, bring the same efficiencies to our invention economy as did the invention of R&D departments over one hundred years ago.

As the blogging master (Instapundit) likes to say: Read the whole thing!

Now that the election is over, the Federal Communications Commission is returning to the important but painfully slow business of updating its spectrum management policies for the 21st century. That includes a process the agency started in September to formalize its dangerously unstructured role in reviewing mergers and other large transactions in the communications industry.

This followed growing concern about “mission creep” at the FCC, which, in deals such as those between Comcast and NBCUniversal, AT&T and T-Mobile USA, and Verizon Wireless and SpectrumCo, has repeatedly been caught with its thumb on the scales of what is supposed to be a balance between private markets and what the Communications Act refers to as the “public interest.”

Commission reviews of private transactions are only growing more common—and more problematic. The mobile revolution is severely testing the FCC’s increasingly anachronistic approach to assigning licenses for radio frequencies in the first place, putting pressure on carriers to use mergers and other secondary market deals to obtain the bandwidth needed to satisfy exploding customer demand.

While the Department of Justice reviews these transactions under antitrust law, the FCC has the final say on the transfer of any and all spectrum licenses. Increasingly, the agency is using that limited authority to restructure communications markets, beltway-style, elevating the appearance of increased competition over the substance of an increasingly dynamic, consumer-driven mobile market.

Given the very different speeds at which Silicon Valley and Washington operate, the expanding scope of FCC intervention is increasingly doing more harm than good.

Deteriorating Track Record

We’re trapped in a vicious cycle: the commission’s mismanagement of the public airwaves is creating more opportunities for the agency to insert itself into the internet ecosystem, largely to fix problems caused by the FCC in the first place. That is happening despite the fact that Congress clearly and precisely circumscribed the agency’s authority here, a key reason the internet has blossomed while heavily regulated over-the-air broadcasting and wireline telephone fade into history.

Desperate for continued relevance, the FCC can’t resist the temptation to tinker with one of the only segments of the economy that is still growing and investing. The agency, for example, fretted over Comcast’s merger with NBCUniversal for 10 months, approving it only after imposing a 30-page list of conditions, including details about which channels had to be offered in which cable packages.

Regulating-by-merger-condition has become a popular sport at the FCC, one with dangerous consequences. While it conveniently allows the agency to get around the problem of intervening where it has no authority, the result is a regulatory crazy quilt with different rules applying to different companies in different markets. Consumers, the supposed beneficiaries of this micromanagement, cannot be expected to understand the resulting chaos.

For example, Comcast also agreed to abide by an enhanced set of “net neutrality” rules even if, as appears likely, a federal appeals court throws out the FCC’s 2010 industry-wide rulemaking for exceeding the agency’s jurisdiction. As with all voluntary concessions, Comcast’s acquiescence isn’t reviewable in court.

The FCC made an even bigger hash in its review of AT&T’s proposed merger with T-Mobile. Once it became clear that the FCC was bowing to political pressure to reject the deal, the companies pulled their applications for license transfers to focus on winning over the Department of Justice first. But FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, determined to have his say, simply released an uncirculated draft of the agency’s analysis of the deal anyway.

The report found that the combination, as initially proposed, would control too much spectrum in too many local markets. But that was only after the formula, known as the “spectrum screen,” was manipulated to reduce substantially the amount of frequency included in the denominator. Hidden in a footnote, the report noted cryptically that the reduction was being made (and explained) in an unrelated order yet to be published.

When the other order was released months later, however, it made no mention of the change. It never actually happened. With the T-Mobile deal off the table, apparently, the chairman found it more expedient to leave the screen as it was, at least until further gerrymandering proved useful. Unwittingly, Genachowski had exposed his hand in rigging a supposedly objective test applied by a supposedly independent agency.

Leave it to the Experts

This amateurish behavior, unfortunately, is increasingly the norm at the FCC. Politics aside, part of the problem is that while federal antitrust regulators enforce statutes under a long line of interpretive case law, the FCC’s review of license transfers is governed by an undefined and largely untested public interest standard.

Now the commission is asking interested parties how, if at all, it needs to formalize its transaction review process, particularly the spectrum screen calculation it blatantly manipulated in the AT&T/T-Mobile review. It’s even asking whether it should re-impose a rigid cap on the amount of spectrum any one carrier can license, a bludgeon of a regulatory tool the agency wisely abandoned in 2003.

We have a better idea. Do away with easily forged formulae and proxies with no scientific relevance. Instead, review transactions in the broader context of a dynamic broadband ecosystem that is disciplined not only by inter-carrier competition, but increasingly by device makers, operating system providers, app makers and ultimately by consumers.

Every user with an iPhone 5 knows perfectly well how complex and competitive the mobile marketplace has become. It’s now time for the government to abandon its 19th century toolkit and look at actual data—data that the FCC already collects and dutifully reports, then ignores when political expediency beckons.

Thanks to the FCC’s endemic misadventures in spectrum management, we can expect more, not fewer, mergers—necessitating more, not fewer, commission reviews. Rather than expanding the agency’s unstructured approach to transaction reviews, we should be reining it in. As the FCC embarks on its analysis of T-Mobile’s takeover of MetroPCS and Sprint’s acquisition by SoftBank, it’s time to put an end to dangerous mission creep at the FCC.

That, at least, would better serve the public interest.

(Crossposted from Tech Liberation Front. Reprinted, with permission, from Bloomberg BNA Daily Report for Executives, Dec. 6, 2012.  Our recent paper on FCC transaction review can be found at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2163169.)

The Federalist Society’s Intellectual Property Practice Group and The George Mason University Law School Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property
Present a Teleforum Call 

Is the Patent System Working or Broken?

A Discussion with Judges Posner and Michel

 Today, people read almost daily reports about the “broken patent system” in newspaper articles, blogs and at social media websites.  Is this true?  On the one hand, the high-tech and biotech industries seem awash in patent litigation, and Congress, regulatory agencies, and courts are considering adopting a variety of reform measures.  On the other hand, patents are securing property rights in technological innovation once imagined only as science fiction — tablet computers, smart phones, genetic testing for cancer, personalized medical treatments for debilitating diseases, and many others — and these technological marvels are now a commonplace feature of our lives.

To discuss these two conflicting stories about whether the patent system promotes or hampers innovation, we will host two distinguished jurists: Paul Michel, former Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and Judge Richard Posner of the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.  Both judges have unparalleled depth in knowledge about patent policy and the working details of the patent system.  This Teleforum brings them together for the first time to discuss their respective views on whether the patent system today is properly securing property rights in new innovation.

Featuring: 

Hon. Paul R. Michel, United States Court of Appeals, Federal Circuit (ret.)

Hon. Richard A. Posner,United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit

Professor Adam Mossoff, George Mason University Law School (Moderator)

Wednesday, Decemeber 19th, 2012

at 2:00 p.m. (ET)

The session will be on Saturday, January 5, from 10:30 to 12:15 in the Hilton New Orleans Riverside (Newberry, Third Floor).

 Google and Antitrust

(Papers to be published in Harvard Journal of Law & Technology Digest)

Moderator:

Michael A. Carrier, Rutgers School of Law – Camden

Speakers:

Marina L. Lao, Seton Hall University School of Law

Geoffrey A. Manne, Lewis & Clark Law School

Frank A. Pasquale, Seton Hall University School of Law

Mark R. Patterson, Fordham University School of Law

Pamela Samuelson, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law

How should the antitrust laws apply to Google? Though the question is simple, the answer implicates an array of far-reaching issues related to how we access information and how we interact with others. This program will feature a distinguished panel engaging in a fastpaced discussion (no PowerPoints!) about these topics.

The panel will explore the Federal Trade Commission’s potential case against Google. It will discuss Google’s position in the search market and potential effects of its conduct on rivals. The panel also will explore the nuances of the Google Book Search settlement. What would – and should – antitrust law do about the project? How should the procompetitive justifications of the increased availability of books be weighed against the effects of the project on rivals?

Antitrust’s role in a 21st-century economy is frequently debated. Google provides a fruitful setting in which to discuss these important issues.

I like Tom, but, as I detailed in Part One, he’s just wrong in his contrast here between the “customary” “common law” court decisions creating property versus the  “legislative process” creating IP rights. This is myth masquerading as history. As all first-year property students learn each year, the foundation of Anglo-American property law is based in a statute, and many property rights in land were created by statutes enacted by Parliament or early American state legislatures.  In fact, the first statute — the Statute Quai Empotores of 1290 — was enacted by Parliament to overrule feudal “custom” enforced by the “common law” decisions at that time, creating by statutory fiat the basic foundational rule of the Anglo-American property right that property rights are alieanable.

As an aside, Geoff Manne asked an excellent question in the comments to Part One: Who cares? My response is that in part it’s important to call out the use of a descriptive historical claim to bootstrap a normative argument. The question is not who cares, but rather the question is why does Tom, Jerry Brito and other libertarians care so much about creating this historical myth, and repeatedly asserting it in their writings and in their presentations? The reason is because this triggers a normative context for many libertarians steeped in Hayek’s theories about the virtues of disaggregated decision-making given dispersed or localized knowledge, as contrasted with the vices of centralized, top-down planning. Thus, by expressly contrasting as an alleged historical fact that property arises from “customary” “common law” court decisions versus the top-down “legislative processes” creating IP, this provides normative traction against IP rights without having to do the heavy lifting of actually proving this as a normative conclusion. Such is the rhetorical value of historical myths generally — they provide normative framings in the guise of a neutral, objective statement of historical fact — and this is why they are a common feature of policy debates, especially in patent law.

What’s even more interesting is that this is not just a historical myth about the source of property rights in land, which were created by both statutes and court decisions, but it’s also an historical myth about IP rights, which are also created by both statutes and court decisions. The institutional and doctrinal interplay between Parliament’s statutes and the application and extension of these statutes by English courts in creating and enforcing property rights in land was repeated in the creation and extension of the modern Anglo-American IP system.  Who would have thunk?

Although there are lots of historical nuances to the actual legal developments, a blog posting is ideal to point out the general institutional and systemic development that occurred with IP rights. It’s often remarked, for instance, that the birth of Anglo-American patent law is in Parliament’s Statute of Monopolies (1624).  Although it’s true (at least in a generalized sense), the actual development of modern patent law — the legal regime that secures a property right in a novel and useful invention — occurred entirely at the hands of the English common law courts in the eighteenth century, who (re)interpreted this statute and extended it far beyond its original text.  (I have extensively detailed this historical development here.)  Albeit with some differences, a similar institutional pattern occurred with Parliament enacting the first modern copyright statute in 1709, the Statute of Anne, which was then interpreted, applied and extended by the English common law courts.

This institutional and doctrinal pattern repeated in America. From the very first enactment of copyright and patent statutes by the states under the Articles of Confederation, and then by Congress enacting the first federal patent and copyright statutes in 1790, courts then interpreted, applied and extended these statutes in common law fashion.  In fact, it is a cliché in patent law that many patent doctrines today were created, not by Congress, but by two judges – Justice Joseph Story and Judge Learned Hand.  Famous patent law historian, Frank Prager, writes that it is “often said that Story was one of the architects of American patent law.”  There’s an entire book published of Judge Learned Hand’s decisions in patent law. That’s how important these two judges have been in creating patent law doctrines.

So, the pattern has been that Congress passes broadly framed statutes, and the federal courts then create doctrines within these statutory frameworks.  In patent law, for instance, courts created the exhaustion doctrine, secondary liability, the experimental use defense, the infringement doctrine of equivalents, and many others.  Beyond this “common law” creation of patent doctrines, courts have further created and defined the actual requirements set forth in the patent statutes for utility, written description, enablement, etc., creating legal phrases and tests that one would search in vain for in the text of the actual patent statutes. Interestingly, Congress sometimes has subsequently codified these judicially created doctrines and sometimes it has left them alone.  Sometimes, Congress even repeals the judicially created tests, as it did in expressly abrogating the judicially created “flash of genius” test in § 103 of the 1952 Patent Act.  All of this goes to show that, just as it’s wrong to say that property rights in land are based solely in custom and common law court decision, it’s equally wrong to say that IP rights are based solely in legislation.

Admittedly, the modern copyright statutes are far more specific and complex than the patent statutes, at least before Congress passed the American Invents Act of 2011 (AIA).  In comparison to the pre-AIA patent statutes, the copyright statutes appear to be excessively complicated with industry and work-specific regimes, such as licensing for cable (§ 111), licensing for satellite transmissions (§ 119), exemptions from liability for libraries (§ 108), and licensing of “phonorecords” (§ 109), among others.  These and other provisions have been cobbled together by repeated amendments and other statutory enactments over the past century or so.  This stands in stark contrast to the invention- and industry-neutral provisions that comprised much of the pre-AIA patent statutes.

So, this is a valid point of differentiation between patents and copyrights, at least as these respective IP rights have developed in the twentieth century.  And there’s certainly a valid argument that complexity in the copyright statutes arising from such attempts to legislate for very specific works and industries increases uncertainties, which in turn unnecessarily increases administration and other transaction costs in the operation of the legal system.

Yet, it bears emphasizing again that, before there arose heavy emphasis on legislation in copyright law, many primary copyright doctrines were in fact first created by courts.  This includes, for instance, fair use and exhaustion doctrines, which were later codified by Congress. Moreover, some very important copyright doctrines remain entirely in the domain of the courts, such as secondary liability. 

The judicially created doctrine of secondary liability in copyright is perhaps the most ironic, if only because it is the use of this doctrine on the Internet against P2P services, like Napster, Aimster, Grokster, and BitTorrent operators, that sends many libertarian IP skeptics and copyleft advocates into paroxysms of outrage about how rent-seeking owners of statutory entitlements are “forcing” companies out of business, shutting down technology and violating the right to liberty on the Internet. But secondary liability is a “customary” “common law” doctrine that developed out of similarly traditional “customary” doctrines in tort law, as further extended by courts to patent and copyright!

As with the historical myth about the origins of property rights in land, the actual facts about the source and nature of IP rights belies the claims by some libertarians that IP rights are congressional “welfare grants” or congressional subsidies for crony corporations. IP rights have developed in the same way as property rights in land with both legislatures and courts creating, repealing, and extending doctrines in an important institutional and doctrinal evolution of these property rights securing technological innovation and creative works.

As I said in Part One, I enjoy a good policy argument about the value of securing property rights in patented innovation or copyrighted works.  I often discuss on panels and in debates how IP rights make possible the private-ordering mechanisms necessary to convert inventions and creative works into real-world innovation and creative products sold to consumers in the marketplace. Economically speaking, as Henry Manne pointed out in a comment to Part One, defining a property right in an asset is what makes possible value-maximizing transactions, and, I would add, morally speaking, it is what secures to the creator of that asset the right to the fruits of his or her productive labors. Thus, I would be happy to debate Tom Bell, Jerry Brito or any other similarly-minded libertarian on these issues in innovation policy, but before we can do so, we must first agree to abandon historical myths and base our normative arguments on actual facts.

Debates on Patent System Should Focus on Facts, Not Rhetoric

When the Coca-Cola Company decided to release New Coke in 1985, it failed to heed the classic adage, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Coke abandoned a product that had produced exceptional results for it, and much happiness for consumers, only to revert back after the mistake was made and millions of dollars were needlessly wasted.  The venerable patent system in the United   States is in danger of succumbing to the same fate.

Our patent system has long ensured that inventors are rewarded for their productive labors, and that investors and firms are rewarded for their labors in taking inventions from the laboratory or garage and converting them into innovative products and services used by consumers. The patent system has thus provided the basic framework for a culture of scientific advancement and commercial innovation that cuts across all industries, making our “invention economy” the most formidable in the world. We led the world in the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century, and we lead the world again in computer and biotech revolutions. Today, we all use patented products and services imagined as only science fiction just twenty years ago.

Yet some people are calling for substantial changes to the U.S. patent system. That would be a grave mistake.

Although the public hears the mantra almost daily that “the patent system is broken,” what we really need is a thorough evaluation of the historic impact the patent system has had on innovation without the negative hype and misinformation that is perpetuated in news headlines or blogs. On December 10, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) will host a workshop that will dive into the workings of what some are calling “patent assertion entities” (PAE), which are firms that acquire and license patents. The FTC and DOJ, as well as most of the invited participants at the workshop, have adopted the “PAE” label as the subject of their critical scrutiny.

The truth is that these firms maximize value in patented innovation, proving again Adam Smith’s classic economic insight that the division of labor is key to the success of a commercial economy. The firms that acquire patents from inventors and license these patents in the market reflect the exact same value-maximizing specialization and aggregation that other firms have long employed in our successful invention economy, such as when firms like 3M or Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park Laboratory aggregated inventors for research and development itself. Patent licensing firms, by better enabling inventors to sell and exchange their ideas, bring the same efficiencies to innovation as the division of labor has done in all areas of a flourishing free market.

Of course, identifying these firms by their business model of patent licensing denies the patent system naysayers the pejorative rhetorical force of their “PAE” label. In fact, patent licensing firms have come under attack in newspaper reports, in blogs, and in academic commentary, prompting the FTC and DOJ to consider whether these patent licensing firms are allegedly undermining the innovation made possible by the patent system. If anything, this reveals the power of rhetoric.

It is important not to rush to judgment based on emotionally-charged headlines about patent lawsuits or misleading articles and blog postings that get wrong even basic facts about the patent system. The prudent approach is to research the issues fully. For instance, few people realize that “patent wars” have been occurring since the invention and patenting of the sewing machine in early nineteenth century, and occurred again with the invention of the telephone, the automobile, the radio, the airplane, medical stents, and even disposable diapers. Many of these patent wars were accompanied by the same end-of-days proclamations that we now hear about the “smart phone wars.” Yet, through it all, the patent system has produced innovation, and we all live incredible lives as a result of today’s patented high-tech and medical marvels.

Weakening intellectual property laws due to negative policy rhetoric, hyperbolic internet commentary, and even extensive lobbying by firms who choose to infringe patents because they don’t want to pay the licenses offered to them by patent licensing firms is irresponsible. The FTC/DOJ workshop on December 10 should be an opportunity to reflect on and evaluate the patent system in better understanding how it produces dynamic innovation, not just in products and services, but also in the many innovative business models that arise from patented innovation itself.

 For those who may think that this is an improper characterization of this widespread claim about IP rights need only have attended the “Copyright Unbalanced” event at the Cato Institute on December 6, in which copyright was attacked in precisely these terms.

This oft-made contrast by libertarians between so-called “common law property in land” versus “statutory IP” is a myth that has no basis in the reality of how common law property rights in land evolved in England and then in the United States of America. 

This is important, because history is very informative and provides importance evidence for inducing principles in both ethical and political theory, but when myth is passed off as history, these ersatz “historical” claims undermine clear thinking and perpetuate falsehoods.  This is especially important when these mythical claims are advanced in the policy debates, as this misleads commentators and decision-makers about the true nature of our property rights and the true foundations of our political and legal institutions. 

With respect to IP rights as property rights, I and others have been explaining in our academic law journal articles for years that these “historical” claims are a myth, but we have focused only on the IP side of the myth.  For instance, I have shown with my substantial research into primary historical documents how the history of patents evolved under the guiding hand of natural rights philosophy, both in America and in England.  I have also explained, contrary to claims by Tom Bell, Jerry Brito and other libertarians, how John Locke expressly endorsed copyright in his writings and positively referred to “inventions and arts” in his natural rights justification of property in the Second Treatise (you can read my article here). Professor Justin Hughes has uncovered similar historical evidence on the side of copyright law (you can read his article here).

But I have never addressed why the libertarian argument advanced by Tom Bell, Jerry Brito and others is entirely a myth even in its claims about the historical legal development of common-law property rights in land (at least not in public, as I have done this in private email exchanges.)

First and foremost, I know it’s a myth because I teach the Anglo-American evolution of property rights in land every year in my Property class (what we call the 1L year in law school).  But I’m not unusual, as this information is in all of the Property textbooks used by property professors in every law school.  As all law students learn each year in their Property classes, the foundation of the “fee simple” in land is not court decisions, but rather a statute passed by Parliament: the Statute Quai Emptores of 1290.  This statute is explicitly identified in all Property textbooks as the foundation of the entire Anglo-American property system in land; as the most famous and widely used property textbook states, “By the end of the thirteenth century, Quia Emptores settled that the fee was freely alieneable,” and thus it explains that it was this statute that first established that “the [originally feudal] relationship between tenant and lord was basically an economic one.”

What followed in the ensuing decades and centuries were more and more statutes enacted by Parliament, further defining the scope and boundaries of many of the rights that constitute property rights in land. Here are just a few of the prominent statutes (there are far too many to effectively list all of them in a blog posting):

 Statute of Gloucester (1278) (creating rights against life estate owners by the owner of the follow-on future interest or broader estate)

 Statute of Uses (1535) (creating many future interests in land)

 Statute of Wills (1540) (securing and creating conveyance rights in land in wills)

 Tenures Abolition Act (1660) (eliminating feudal services associated with property rights in land)

Of course, the common law courts extended and applied these statutes, and developed in classic common-law fashion more legal doctrines that defined and further secured property rights in land, but it is simply an historical myth that common law property rights in land were entirely fashioned by courts, contrary to the legislatively created IP rights in patents and copyrights.  (In fact, the English common law system was heavily influenced by the Roman Law and the natural law philosophers working within the Roman Law, and of course all property rights in Roman Law were based in statutes as well.)

This same pattern in the creation and enforcement of property rights in land continued in the early American Republic. For example, early American state legislatures enacted statutes defining and securing the rights of adverse possessors, creating title recordation requirements, defining and securing property conveyance rights, defining and securing wills and the creation of future interests in land, as well as adopting statutes eliminating English common law property rights, such as the fee tail, among many others.  This pattern has continued today; for instance, most states have adopted statutes eliminating the famous property doctrine of the Rule Against Perpetuities (creating much happiness among property lawyers and law students alike), replacing it with a doctrine that goes by the acronym of USRAP (Uniform Statutory Rule Against Perpetuities). Of course, these statutes have all been interpreted, applied and extended in common law fashion by American state courts in the same way that the English common law courts did so with Parliament’s statutes. 

In short, the libertarians advancing the false distinction between “common law property in land” versus “statutory IP rights” are misstating what it means when we all say that the Anglo-American property system is rooted in the “common law.”  In the technical sense of this term, the Anglo-American property system is a common law system insofar as courts have developed the law and the rationale for their decisions without having to validate these decisions by reference to a particular statute.  This is in contrast to the “civil law” system in Europe, in which all judicial decisions must ultimately refer back to a statute as the validating source of the judicial decision itself. But to say that the Anglo-American property system is a “common law system” does not mean, of course, that there weren’t statutes that were interpreted, applied and extended by courts, and as a straightforward historical fact there were many statutes enacted by Parliament that defined the foundational rights in Anglo-American property law.  The fact that statutes weren’t mandated by the Anglo-American legal system as an institutional requirement for valid court decisions does not mean that statutes did not play a substantial historical role in the creation and enforcement of property rights in land.

In sum, it’s a complete myth for libertarians to argue that IP rights are “different” from property rights in land because property rights in land developed in “common law” as opposed to “statutory” IP rights.  But it’s even worse than a myth, because this is not a false claim made in the ivory tower in a dispute between academic historians. Rather, this false historical claim is asserted in the policy debates today to advance an anti-IP agenda. Thus, it’s important to call out this misleading historical myth, as it’s being used to leverage misleading attacks on copyright and patents.  I don’t mind engaging in bracing public policy debates about whether IP rights are right or wrong — I love these debates, especially with people who share my own commitment to free market principles — but let’s at least get the basic historical facts correct in these debates.  These are facts that are not in dispute and are well known, including even to the libertarians who survived their 1L Property classes in law school and are now speaking on these issues in the academy and in think tanks.

(In my next blog posting on this topic, I’ll address how there was the exact same interplay between statutes and common law decision-making in the courts in the development of patent and copyright law.)

UPDATE: For Part 2, see here.

UPDATE: I made a few, minor copy-edits to this posting.

The letter, which is addressed to Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV and Ranking Member Kay Bailey Hutchison of the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, strongly urges confirmation of Josh, praising him for his knoweldge and his many accomplishments.  Here’s just a small snippet:

As a young professor, Josh has a well-deserved reputation for producing rigorous, high-quality scholarship that explores important issues in competition and consumer protection policy.  His scholarly work reflects that rare professor who possesses impeccable academic and intellectual integrity in combination with thoroughgoing knowledge in economic theory, econometric and empirical skill, and knowledge of relevant legal institutions. The rigor of his scholarly work is second to none, because it is truly bottom-up, data-driven in its conclusions. As a result, his scholarly output at this early stage in his academic career, in terms of its quantity, quality, and impact, is unsurpassed within his field.

. . . .

As a result of his rigorous and scrupulous analysis of data according to well-established empirical and economic methodologies, Professor Wright is widely regarded as a top antitrust law scholar of his generation, and his scholarly efforts have had a significant impact in the academic and public policy debates.  Top antitrust and law and economics scholars, moreover, consistently cite his scholarship, and Professor Herbert Hovenkamp, the author of the leading antitrust treatise, has described Josh as a “top scholar of competition policy and intellectual property.”

I can attest that this is all well-deserved praise, as I have learned much from Josh in the years that we have been colleagues at George Mason.  I will be very sorry to lose him as a colleague, but I can think of no other better person for this position.  I wish him all the luck in his confirmation hearing tomorrow, but he doesn’t need it, because as the letter rightly concludes, his is “an easy case for the Senate’s approval of his nomination.”

Read the whole letter here.