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ICLE and leading antitrust scholars urge Supreme Court to review 2nd Circuit ruling in Apple e-books case

  • Geoffrey A. Manne

    • Today the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court of the United States supporting Apple’s petition for certiorari in its e-books antitrust case. ICLE’s brief was signed by sixteen distinguished scholars of law, economics and public policy, including an Economics Nobel Laureate, a former FTC Commissioner, ten PhD economists and ten professors of law (see the complete list, below).

    Background

    Earlier this year a divided panel of the Second Circuit ruled that Apple “orchestrated a conspiracy among [five major book] publishers to raise ebook prices… in violation of § 1 of the Sherman Act.” Significantly, the court ruled that Apple’s conduct constituted a per se unlawful horizontal price-fixing conspiracy, meaning that the procompetitive benefits of Apple’s entry into the e-books market was irrelevant to the liability determination.

    Apple filed a petition for certiorari with the Supreme Court seeking review of the ruling on the question of

    Whether vertical conduct by a disruptive market entrant, aimed at securing suppliers for a new retail platform, should be condemned as per se illegal under Section 1 of the Sherman Act, rather than analyzed under the rule of reason, because such vertical activity also had the alleged effect of facilitating horizontal collusion among the suppliers.

    Summary of Amicus Brief

    The Second Circuit’s ruling is in direct conflict with the Supreme Court’s 2007 Leegin decision, and creates a circuit split with the Third Circuit based on that court’s Toledo Mack ruling. ICLE’s brief urges the Court to review the case in order to resolve the significant uncertainty created by the Second Circuit’s ruling, particularly for the multi-sided platform companies that epitomize the “New Economy.”

    As ICLE’s brief discusses, the Second Circuit committed several important errors in its ruling:

    First, As the Supreme Court held in Leegin, condemnation under the per se rule is appropriate “only for conduct that would always or almost always tend to restrict competition” and “only after courts have had considerable experience with the type of restraint at issue.” Neither is true in this case. Businesses often employ one or more forms of vertical restraints to make entry viable, and the Court has blessed such conduct, categorically holding in Leegin that “[v]ertical price restraints are to be judged according to the rule of reason.”

    Furthermore, the conduct at issue in this case — the use of “Most-Favored Nation Clauses” in Apple’s contracts with the publishers and its adoption of the so-called “agency model” for e-book pricing — have never been reviewed by the courts in a setting like this one, let alone found to “always or almost always tend to restrict competition.” There is no support in the case law or economic literature for the proposition that agency models or MFNs used to facilitate entry by new competitors in platform markets like this one are anticompetitive.

    Second, the negative consequences of the court’s ruling will be particularly acute for modern, high-technology sectors of the economy, where entrepreneurs planning to deploy new business models will now face exactly the sort of artificial deterrents that the Court condemned in Trinko: “Mistaken inferences and the resulting false condemnations are especially costly, because they chill the very conduct the antitrust laws are designed to protect.” Absent review by the Supreme Court to correct the Second Circuit’s error, the result will be less-vigorous competition and a reduction in consumer welfare.

    This case involves vertical conduct essentially indistinguishable from conduct that the Supreme Court has held to be subject to the rule of reason. But under the Second Circuit’s approach, the adoption of these sorts of efficient vertical restraints could be challenged as a per se unlawful effort to “facilitate” horizontal price fixing, significantly deterring their use. The lower court thus ignored the Supreme Court’s admonishment not to apply the antitrust laws in a way that makes the use of a particular business model “more attractive based on the per se rule” rather than on “real market conditions.”

    Third, the court based its decision that per se review was appropriate largely on the fact that e-book prices increased following Apple’s entry into the market. But, contrary to the court’s suggestion, it has long been settled that such price increases do not make conduct per se unlawful. In fact, the Supreme Court has held that the per se rule is inappropriate where, as here, “prices can be increased in the course of promoting procompetitive effects.”  

    Competition occurs on many dimensions other than just price; higher prices alone don’t necessarily suggest decreased competition or anticompetitive effects. Instead, higher prices may accompany welfare-enhancing competition on the merits, resulting in greater investment in product quality, reputation, innovation or distribution mechanisms.

    The Second Circuit presumed that Amazon’s e-book prices before Apple’s entry were competitive, and thus that the price increases were anticompetitive. But there is no support in the record for that presumption, and it is not compelled by economic reasoning. In fact, it is at least as likely that the change in Amazon’s prices reflected the fact that Amazon’s business model pre-entry resulted in artificially low prices, and that the price increases following Apple’s entry were the product of a more competitive market.

    Previous commentary on the case

    For my previous writing and commentary on the the case, see:

    Other TOTM authors have also weighed in. See, e.g.:

    Amicus Signatories