(The following is adapted from a recent ICLE Issue Brief on the flawed essential facilities arguments undergirding the EU competition investigations into Amazon’s marketplace that I wrote with Geoffrey Manne. The full brief is available here. )
Amazon has largely avoided the crosshairs of antitrust enforcers to date. The reasons seem obvious: in the US it handles a mere 5% of all retail sales (with lower shares worldwide), and it consistently provides access to a wide array of affordable goods. Yet, even with Amazon’s obvious lack of dominance in the general retail market, the EU and some of its member states are opening investigations.
Commissioner Margarethe Vestager’s probe into Amazon, which came to light in September, centers on whether Amazon is illegally using its dominant position vis-á-vis third party merchants on its platforms in order to obtain data that it then uses either to promote its own direct sales, or else to develop competing products under its private label brands. More recently, Austria and Germany have launched separate investigations of Amazon rooted in many of the same concerns as those of the European Commission. The German investigation also focuses on whether the contractual relationships that third party sellers enter into with Amazon are unfair because these sellers are “dependent” on the platform.
One of the fundamental, erroneous assumptions upon which these cases are built is the alleged “essentiality” of the underlying platform or input. In truth, these sorts of cases are more often based on stories of firms that chose to build their businesses in a way that relies on a specific platform. In other words, their own decisions — from which they substantially benefited, of course — made their investments highly “asset specific” and thus vulnerable to otherwise avoidable risks. When a platform on which these businesses rely makes a disruptive move, the third parties cry foul, even though the platform was not — nor should have been — under any obligation to preserve the status quo on behalf of third parties.
Essential or not, that is the question
All three investigations are effectively premised on a version of an “essential facilities” theory — the claim that Amazon is essential to these companies’ ability to do business.
There are good reasons that the US has tightly circumscribed the scope of permissible claims invoking the essential facilities doctrine. Such “duty to deal” claims are “at or near the outer boundary” of US antitrust law. And there are good reasons why the EU and its member states should be similarly skeptical.
Characterizing one firm as essential to the operation of other firms is tricky because “[c]ompelling [innovative] firms to share the source of their advantage… may lessen the incentive for the monopolist, the rival, or both to invest in those economically beneficial facilities.” Further, the classification requires “courts to act as central planners, identifying the proper price, quantity, and other terms of dealing—a role for which they are ill-suited.”
The key difficulty is that alleged “essentiality” actually falls on a spectrum. On one end is something like a true monopoly utility that is actually essential to all firms that use its service as a necessary input; on the other is a firm that offers highly convenient services that make it much easier for firms to operate. This latter definition of “essentiality” describes firms like Google and Amazon, but it is not accurate to characterize such highly efficient and effective firms as truly “essential.” Instead, companies that choose to take advantage of the benefits such platforms offer, and to tailor their business models around them, suffer from an asset specificity problem.
Geoffrey Manne noted this problem in the context of the EU’s Google Shopping case:
A content provider that makes itself dependent upon another company for distribution (or vice versa, of course) takes a significant risk. Although it may benefit from greater access to users, it places itself at the mercy of the other — or at least faces great difficulty (and great cost) adapting to unanticipated, crucial changes in distribution over which it has no control.
Third-party sellers that rely upon Amazon without a contingency plan are engaging in a calculated risk that, as business owners, they would typically be expected to manage. The investigations by European authorities are based on the notion that antitrust law might require Amazon to remove that risk by prohibiting it from undertaking certain conduct that might raise costs for its third-party sellers.
Implications and extensions
In the full issue brief, we consider the tensions in EU law between seeking to promote innovation and protect the competitive process, on the one hand, and the propensity of EU enforcers to rely on essential facilities-style arguments on the other. One of the fundamental errors that leads EU enforcers in this direction is that they confuse the distribution channel of the Internet with an antitrust-relevant market definition.
A claim based on some flavor of Amazon-as-essential-facility should be untenable given today’s market realities because Amazon is, in fact, just one mode of distribution among many. Commerce on the Internet is still just commerce. The only thing preventing a merchant from operating a viable business using any of a number of different mechanisms is the transaction costs it would incur adjusting to a different mode of doing business. Casting Amazon’s marketplace as an essential facility insulates third-party firms from the consequences of their own decisions — from business model selection to marketing and distribution choices. Commerce is nothing new and offline distribution channels and retail outlets — which compete perfectly capably with online — are well developed. Granting retailers access to Amazon’s platform on artificially favorable terms is no more justifiable than granting them access to a supermarket end cap, or a particular unit at a shopping mall. There is, in other words, no business or economic justification for granting retailers in the time-tested and massive retail market an entitlement to use a particular mode of marketing and distribution just because they find it more convenient.