This is the fourth, and last, in a series of TOTM blog posts discussing the Commission’s recently published Google Android decision (the first post can be found here, and the second here, and the third here). It draws on research from a soon-to-be published ICLE white paper.
The previous parts of this series have mostly focused on the Commission’s factual and legal conclusions. However, as this blog post points out, the case’s economic underpinnings also suffer from important weaknesses.
Two problems are particularly salient: First, the economic models cited by the Commission (discussed in an official paper, but not directly in the decision) poorly match the underlying facts. Second, the Commission’s conclusions on innovation harms are out of touch with the abundant economic literature regarding the potential link between market structure and innovation.
The wrong economic models
The Commission’s Chief Economist team outlined its economic reasoning in an article published shortly after the Android decision was published. The article reveals that the Commission relied upon three economic papers to support its conclusion that Google’s tying harmed consumer welfare.
Each of these three papers attempts to address the same basic problem. Ever since the rise of the Chicago-School, it is widely accepted that a monopolist cannot automatically raise its profits by entering an adjacent market (i.e. leveraging its monopoly position), for instance through tying. This has sometimes been called the single-monopoly-profit theory. In more recent years, various scholars have refined this Chicago-School intuition, and identified instances where the theory fails.
While the single monopoly profit theory has been criticized in academic circles, it is important to note that the three papers cited by the Commission accept its basic premise. They thus attempt to show why the theory fails in the context of the Google Android case.
Unfortunately, the assumptions upon which they rely to reach this conclusion markedly differ from the case’s fact pattern. These papers thus offer little support to the Commission’s economic conclusions.
For a start, the authors of the first paper cited by the Commission concede that their own model does not apply to the Google case:
Actual antitrust cases are fact-intensive and our model does not perfectly fit with the current Google case in one important aspect.
The authors thus rely on important modifications, lifted from a paper by Frederico Etro and Cristina Caffara (the second paper cited by the Commission), to support their conclusion that Google’s tying was anticompetitive.
The second paper cited by the Commission, however, is equally problematic.
The authors’ underlying intuition is relatively straightforward: because Google bundles its suite of Google Apps (including Search) with the Play Store, a rival search engine would have to pay a premium in order to be pre-installed and placed on the home screen, because OEMs would have to entirely forgo Google’s suite of applications. The key assumption here is that OEMs cannot obtain the Google Play app and pre-install and place favorably a rival search app.
But this is simply not true of Google’s contractual terms. The best evidence is that rivals search apps have indeed concluded deals with OEMs to pre-install their search apps, without these OEMs losing access to Google’s suite of proprietary apps. Google’s contractual terms simply do not force OEMs to choose between the Google Play app and the pre-installation of a rival search app. Etro and Caffara’s model thus falls flat.
More fundamentally, even if Google’s contractual terms did prevent OEMs from pre-loading rival apps, the paper’s conclusions would still be deeply flawed. The authors essentially assume that the only way for consumers to obtain a rival app is through pre-installation. But this is a severe misreading of the prevailing market conditions.
Users remain free to independently download rival search apps. If Google did indeed purchase exclusive pre-installation, users would not have to choose between a “full Android” device and one with a rival search app but none of Google’s apps. Instead, they could download the rival app and place it alongside Google’s applications.
A more efficient rival could even provide side payments, of some sort, to encourage consumers to download its app. Exclusive pre-installation thus generates a much smaller advantage than Etro and Caffara assume, and their model fails to reflect this.
Finally, the third paper by Alexandre de Cornière and Greg Taylor, suffers from the exact same problem. The authors clearly acknowledge that their findings only hold if OEMs (and consumers) are effectively prevented from (pre-)installing applications that compete with Google’s apps. In their own words:
Upstream firms offer contracts to the downstream firm, who chooses which component(s) to use and then sells to consumers. For our theory to apply, the following three conditions need to hold: (i) substitutability between the two versions of B leads the downstream firm to install at most one version.
The upshot is that all three of the economic models cited by the Commission cease to be relevant in the specific context of the Google Android decision. The Commission is thus left with little to no economic evidence to support its finding of anticompetitive effects.
Critics might argue that direct downloads by consumers are but a theoretical possibility. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Take the web browser market: The Samsung Internet Browser has more than 1 Billion downloads on Google’s Play Store. The Opera, Opera Mini and Firefox browsers each have over a 100 million downloads. The Brave browser has more than 10 million downloads, but is growing rapidly.
In short the economic papers on which the Commission relies are based on a world that does not exist. They thus fail to support the Commission’s economic findings.
An incorrect view of innovation
In its decision, the Commission repeatedly claimed that Google’s behavior stifled innovation because it prevented rivals from entering the market. However, the Commission offered no evidence to support its assumption that reduced market entry on would lead to a decrease in innovation:
(858) For the reasons set out in this Section, the Commission concludes that the tying of the Play Store and the Google Search app helps Google to maintain and strengthen its dominant position in each national market for general search services, increases barriers to entry, deters innovation and tends to harm, directly or indirectly, consumers.
(859) First, Google’s conduct makes it harder for competing general search services to gain search queries and the respective revenues and data needed to improve their services.
(861) Second, Google’s conduct increases barriers to entry by shielding Google from competition from general search services that could challenge its dominant position in the national markets for general search services:
(862) Third, by making it harder for competing general search services to gain search queries including the respective revenues and data needed to improve their services, Google’s conduct reduces the incentives of competing general search services to invest in developing innovative features, such as innovation in algorithm and user experience design.
In a nutshell, the Commission’s findings rest on the assumption that barriers to entry and more concentrated market structures necessarily reduce innovation. But this assertion is not supported by the empirical economic literature on the topic.
For example, a 2006 paper published by Richard Gilbert surveys 24 empirical studies on the topic. These studies examine the link between market structure (or firm size) and innovation. Though earlier studies tended to identify a positive relationship between concentration, as well as firm size, and innovation, more recent empirical techniques found no significant relationship. Gilbert thus suggests that:
These econometric studies suggest that whatever relationship exists at a general economy-wide level between industry structure and R&D is masked by differences across industries in technological opportunities, demand, and the appropriability of inventions.
This intuition is confirmed by another high-profile empirical paper by Aghion, Bloom, Blundell, Griffith, and Howitt. The authors identify an inverted-U relationship between competition and innovation. Perhaps more importantly, they point out that this relationship is affected by a number of sector-specific factors.
Finally, reviewing fifty years of research on innovation and market structure, Wesley Cohen concludes that:
Even before one controls for industry effects, the variance in R&D intensity explained by market concentration is small. Moreover, whatever relationship that exists in cross sections becomes imperceptible with the inclusion of controls for industry characteristics, whether expressed as industry fixed effects or in the form of survey-based and other measures of industry characteristics such as technological opportunity, appropriability conditions, and demand. In parallel to a decades-long accumulation of mixed results, theorists have also spawned an almost equally voluminous and equivocal literature on the link between market structure and innovation.[16]
The Commission’s stance is further weakened by the fact that investments in the Android operating system are likely affected by a weak appropriability regime. In other words, because of its open source nature, it is hard for Google to earn a return on investments in the Android OS (anyone can copy, modify and offer their own version of the OS).
Loosely tying Google’s proprietary applications to the OS is arguably one way to solve this appropriability problem. Unfortunately, the Commission brushed these considerations aside. It argued that Google could earn some revenue from the Google Play app, as well as other potential venues. However, the Commission did not question whether these sources of income were even comparable to the sums invested by Google in the Android OS. It is thus possible that the Commission’s decision will prevent Google from earning a positive return on some future investments in the Android OS, ultimately causing it to cut back its investments and slowing innovation.
The upshot is that the Commission was simply wrong to assume that barriers to entry and more concentrated market structures would necessarily reduce innovation. This is especially true, given that Google may struggle to earn a return on its investments, absent the contractual provisions challenged by the Commission.
Conclusion
In short, the Commission’s economic analysis was severely lacking. It relied on economic models that had little to say about the market it which Google and its rivals operated. Its decisions thus reveals the inherent risk of basing antitrust decisions upon overfitted economic models.
As if that were not enough, the Android decision also misrepresents the economic literature concerning the link (or absence thereof) between market structure and innovation. As a result, there is no reason to believe that Google’s behavior reduced innovation.