The 117th Congress closed out without a floor vote on either of the major pieces of antitrust legislation introduced in both chambers: the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) and the Open Apps Market Act (OAMA). But it was evident at yesterday’s hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee that at least some advocates—both in academia and among the committee leadership—hope to raise those bills from the dead.
Of the committee’s five carefully chosen witnesses, only New York University School of Law’s Daniel Francis appeared to appreciate the competitive risks posed by AICOA and OAMA—noting, among other things, that the bills’ failure to distinguish between harm to competition and harm to certain competitors was a critical defect.
Yale School of Management’s Fiona Scott Morton acknowledged that ideal antitrust reforms were not on the table, and appeared open to amendments. But she also suggested that current antitrust standards were deficient and, without much explanation or attention to the bills’ particulars, that AICOA and OAMA were both steps in the right direction.
Subcommittee Chair Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who sponsored AICOA in the last Congress, seems keen to reintroduce it without modification. In her introductory remarks, she lamented the power, wealth (if that’s different), and influence of Big Tech in helping to sink her bill last year.
Apparently, firms targeted by anticompetitive legislation would rather they weren’t. Folks outside the Beltway should sit down for this: it seems those firms hire people to help them explain, to Congress and the public, both the fact that they don’t like the bills and why. The people they hire are called “lobbyists.” It appears that, sometimes, that strategy works or is at least an input into a process that sometimes ends, more or less, as they prefer. Dirty pool, indeed.
There are, of course, other reasons why AICOA and OAMA might have stalled. Had they been enacted, it’s very likely that they would have chilled innovation, harmed consumers, and provided a level of regulatory discretion that would have been very hard, if not impossible, to dial back. If reintroduced and enacted, the bills would be more likely to “rein in” competition and innovation in the American digital sector and, specifically, targeted tech firms’ ability to deliver innovative products and services to tens of millions of (hitherto very satisfied) consumers.
Our colleagues at the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) and its affiliated scholars, among others, have explained why. For a selected bit of self-plagiarism, AICOA and OAMA received considerable attention in our symposium on Antitrust’s Uncertain Future; ICLE’s Dirk Auer had a Truth on the Market post on AICOA; and Lazar Radic wrote a piece on OAMA that’s currently up for a Concurrences award.
To revisit just a few critical points:
- AICOA and OAMA both suppose that “self-preferencing” is generally harmful. Not so. A firm might invest in developing a successful platform and ecosystem because it expects to recoup some of that investment through, among other means, preferred treatment for some of its own products. Exercising a measure of control over downstream or adjacent products might drive the platform’s development in the first place (see here and here for some potential advantages). To cite just a few examples from the empirical literature, Li and Agarwal (2017) find that Facebook’s integration of Instagram led to a significant increase in user demand, not just for Instagram, but for the entire category of photography apps; Foerderer, et al. (2018) find that Google’s 2015 entry into the market for photography apps on Android created additional user attention and demand for such apps generally; and Cennamo, et al. (2018) find that video games offered by console firms often become blockbusters and expanded the consoles’ installed base. As a result, they increase the potential for independent game developers, even in the face of competition from first-party games.
- AICOA and OAMA, in somewhat different ways, favor open systems, interoperability, and/or data portability. All of these have potential advantages but, equally, potential costs or disadvantages. Whether any is procompetitive or anticompetitive depends on particular facts and circumstances. In the abstract, each represents a business model that might well be procompetitive or benign, and that consumers might well favor or disfavor. For example, interoperability has potential benefits and costs, and, as Sam Bowman has observed, those costs sometimes exceed the benefits. For instance, interoperability can be exceedingly costly to implement or maintain, and it can generate vulnerabilities that challenge or undermine data security. Data portability can be handy, but it can also harm the interests of third parties—say, friends willing to be named, or depicted in certain photos on a certain platform, but not just anywhere. And while recent commentary suggests that the absence of “open” systems signals a competition problem, it’s hard to understand why. There are many reasons that consumers might prefer “closed” systems, even when they have to pay a premium for them.
- AICOA and OAMA both embody dubious assumptions. For example, underlying AICOA is a supposition that vertical integration is generally (or at least typically) harmful. Critics of established antitrust law can point to a few recent studies that cast doubt on the ubiquity of benefits from vertical integration. And it is, in fact, possible for vertical mergers or other vertical conduct to harm competition. But that possibility, and the findings of these few studies, are routinely overstated. The weight of the empirical evidence shows that vertical integration tends to be competitively benign. For example, widely acclaimed meta-analysis by economists Francine Lafontaine (former director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Economics under President Barack Obama) and Margaret Slade led them to conclude:
“[U]nder most circumstances, profit-maximizing vertical integration decisions are efficient, not just from the firms’ but also from the consumers’ points of view. Although there are isolated studies that contradict this claim, the vast majority support it. . . . We therefore conclude that, faced with a vertical arrangement, the burden of evidence should be placed on competition authorities to demonstrate that that arrangement is harmful before the practice is attacked.”
- Network effects and data advantages are not insurmountable, nor even necessarily harmful. Advantages of scope and scale for data sets vary according to the data at issue; the context and analytic sophistication of those with access to the data and application; and are subject to diminishing returns, in any case. Simple measures of market share or other numerical thresholds may signal very little of competitive import. See, e.g., this on the contestable platform paradox; Carl Shapiro on the putative decline of competition and irrelevance of certain metrics; and, more generally, antitrust’s well-grounded and wholesale repudiation of the Structure-Conduct-Performance paradigm.
These points are not new. As we note above, they’ve been made more carefully, and in more detail, before. What’s new is that the failure of AICOA and OAMA to reach floor votes in the last Congress leaves their sponsors, and many of their advocates, unchastened.
Conclusion
At yesterday’s hearing, Sen. Klobuchar noted that nations around the world are adopting regulatory frameworks aimed at “reining in” American digital platforms. True enough, but that’s exactly what AICOA and OAMA promise; they will not foster competition or competitiveness.
Novel industries may pose novel challenges, not least to antitrust. But it does not follow that the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), proposed policies in Australia and the United Kingdom, or AICOA and OAMA represent beneficial, much less optimal, policy reforms. As Francis noted, the central commitments of OAMA and AICOA, like the DMA and other proposals, aim to help certain firms at the expense of other firms and consumers. This is not procompetitive reform; it is rent-seeking by less-successful competitors.
AICOA and OAMA were laid to rest with the 117th Congress. They should be left to rest in peace.
