Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan recently joined with FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter to file a “written submission on the public interest” in the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) Section 337 proceeding concerning imports of certain cellular-telecommunications equipment covered by standard essential patents (SEPs). SEPs are patents that “read on” technology adopted for inclusion in a standard. Regrettably, the commissioners’ filing embodies advice that, if followed, would effectively preclude Section 337 relief to SEP holders. Such a result would substantially reduce the value of U.S. SEPs and thereby discourage investments in standards that help drive American innovation.
Section 337 of the Tariff Act authorizes the ITC to issue “exclusion orders” blocking the importation of products that infringe U.S. patents, subject to certain “public interest” exceptions. Specifically, before issuing an exclusion order, the ITC must consider:
the public health and welfare;
competitive conditions in the U.S. economy;
production of like or directly competitive articles in the United States; and
U.S. consumers.
The Khan-Slaughter filing urges the ITC to consider the impact that issuing an exclusion order against a willing licensee implementing a standard would have on competition and consumers in the United States. The filing concludes that “where a complainant seeks to license and can be made whole through remedies in a different U.S. forum [a federal district court], an exclusion order barring standardized products from the United States will harm consumers and other market participants without providing commensurate benefits.”
Khan and Slaughter’s filing takes a one-dimensional view of the competitive effects of SEP rights. In short, it emphasizes that:
standardization empowers SEP owners to “hold up” licensees by demanding more for a technology than it would have been worth, absent the standard;
“hold ups” lead to higher prices and may discourage standard-setting activities and collaboration, which can delay innovation;
many standard-setting organizations require FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) licensing commitments from SEP holders to preclude hold-up and encourage standards adoption;
FRAND commitments ensure that SEP licenses will be available at rates limited to the SEP’s “true” value;
the threat of ITC exclusion orders would empower SEP holders to coerce licensees into paying “anticompetitively high” supra-FRAND licensing rates, discouraging investments in standard-compliant products;
inappropriate exclusion orders harm consumers in the short term by depriving them of desired products and, in the longer run, through reduced innovation, competition, quality, and choice;
thus, where the standard implementer is a “willing licensee,” an exclusion order would be contrary to the public interest; and
as a general matter, exclusionary relief is incongruent and against the public interest where a court has been asked to resolve FRAND terms and can make the SEP holder whole.
In essence, Khan and Slaughter recite a parade of theoretical horribles, centered on anticompetitive hold-ups, to call-for denying exclusion orders to SEP owners on public-interest grounds. Their filing’s analysis, however, fails as a matter of empirics, law, and sound economics.
First, the filing fails to note that there is a lack of empirical support for anticompetitive hold-up being a problem at all (see, for example, here, here, and here). Indeed, a far more serious threat is “hold-out,” whereby the ability of implementers to infringe SEPs without facing serious consequences leads to an inefficient undervaluation of SEP rights (see, for example, here). (At worst, implementers will have to pay at some future time a “reasonable” licensing fee if held to be infringers in court, since U.S. case law (unlike foreign case law) has essentially eliminated SEP holders’ ability to obtain an injunction.)
Second, as a legal matter, the filing’s logic would undercut the central statutory purpose of Section 337, which is to provide all U.S. patent holders a right to exclude infringing imports. Section 337 does not distinguish between SEPs and other patents—all are entitled to full statutory protection. Former ITC Chair Deanna Tanner Okun, in critiquing a draft administration policy statement that would severely curtail the rights of SEP holders, assessed the denigration of Section 337 statutory protections in a manner that is equally applicable to the Khan-Slaughter filing:
The Draft Policy Statement also circumvents Congress by upending the statutory framework and purpose of Section 337, which includes the ITC’s practice of evaluating all unfair acts equally. Although the draft disclaims any “unique set of legal rules for SEPs,” it does, in fact, create a special and unequal analysis for SEPs. The draft also implies that the ITC should focus on whether the patents asserted are SEPs when judging whether an exclusion order would adversely affect the public interest. The draft fundamentally misunderstands the ITC’s purpose, statutory mandates, and overriding consideration of safeguarding the U.S. public interest and would — again, without statutory approval — elevate SEP status of a single patent over other weighty public interest considerations. The draft also overlooks Presidential review requirements, agency consultation opportunities and the ITC’s ability to issue no remedies at all.
[Notable,] Section 337’s statutory language does not distinguish the types of relief available to patentees when SEPs are asserted.
Third, Khan and Slaughter not only assert theoretical competitive harms from hold-ups that have not been shown to exist (while ignoring the far more real threat of hold-out), they also ignore the foregone dynamic economic gains that would stem from limitations on SEP rights (see, generally, here). Denying SEP holders the right to obtain a Section 337 exclusion order, as advocated by the filing, deprives them of a key property right. It thereby establishes an SEP “liability rule” (SEP holder relegated to seeking damages), as opposed to a “property rule” (SEP holder may seek injunctive relief) as the SEP holder’s sole means to obtain recompense for patent infringement. As my colleague Andrew Mercado and I have explained, a liability-rule approach denies society the substantial economic benefits achievable through an SEP property rule:
[U]nder a property rule, as contrasted to a liability rule, innovation will rise and drive an increase in social surplus, to the benefit of innovators, implementers, and consumers.
Innovators’ welfare will rise. … First, innovators already in the market will be able to receive higher licensing fees due to their improved negotiating position. Second, new innovators enticed into the market by the “demonstration effect” of incumbent innovators’ success will in turn engage in profitable R&D (to them) that brings forth new cycles of innovation.
Implementers will experience welfare gains as the flood of new innovations enhances their commercial opportunities. New technologies will enable implementers to expand their product offerings and decrease their marginal cost of production. Additionally, new implementers will enter the market as innovation accelerates. Seeing the opportunity to earn high returns, new implementers will be willing to pay innovators a high licensing fee in order to produce novel and improved products.
Finally, consumers will benefit from expanded product offerings and lower quality-adjusted prices. Initial high prices for new goods and services entering the market will fall as companies compete for customers and scale economies are realized. As such, more consumers will have access to new and better products, raising consumers’ surplus.
In conclusion, the ITC should accord zero weight to Khan and Slaughter’s fundamentally flawed filing in determining whether ITC exclusion orders should be available to SEP holders. Denying SEP holders a statutorily provided right to exclude would tend to undermine the value of their property, diminish investment in improved standards, reduce innovation, and ultimately harm consumers—all to the detriment, not the benefit, of the public interest.
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan missed the mark once again in her May 6 speech on merger policy, delivered at the annual meeting of the International Competition Network (ICN). At a time when the FTC and U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) are presumably evaluating responses to the agencies’ “request for information” on possible merger-guideline revisions (see here, for example), Khan’s recent remarks suggest a predetermination that merger policy must be “toughened” significantly to disincentivize a larger portion of mergers than under present guidance. A brief discussion of Khan’s substantively flawed remarks follows.
Discussion
Khan’s remarks begin with a favorable reference to the tendentious statement from President Joe Biden’s executive order on competition that “broad government inaction has allowed far too many markets to become uncompetitive, with consolidation and concentration now widespread across our economy, resulting in higher prices, lower wages, declining entrepreneurship, growing inequality, and a less vibrant democracy.” The claim that “government inaction” has enabled increased market concentration and reduced competition has been shown to be inaccurate, and therefore cannot serve as a defensible justification for a substantive change in antitrust policy. Accordingly, Khan’s statement that the executive order “underscores a deep mandate for change and a commitment to creating the enabling environment for reform” rests on foundations of sand.
Khan then shifts her narrative to a consideration of merger policy, stating:
Merger investigations invite us to make a set of predictive assessments, and for decades we have relied on models that generally assumed markets are self-correcting and that erroneous enforcement is more costly than erroneous non-enforcement. Both the experience of the U.S. antitrust agencies and a growing set of empirical research is showing that these assumptions appear to have been at odds with market realities.
Digital Markets
Khan argues, without explanation, that “the guidelines must better account for certain features of digital markets—including zero-price dynamics, the competitive significance of data, and the network externalities that can swiftly lead markets to tip.” She fails to make any showing that consumer welfare has been harmed by mergers involving digital markets, or that the “zero-price” feature is somehow troublesome. Moreover, the reference to “data” as being particularly significant to antitrust analysis appears to ignore research (see here) indicating there is an insufficient basis for having an antitrust presumption involving big data, and that big data (like R&D) may be associated with innovation, which enhances competitive vibrancy.
Khan also fails to note that network externalities are beneficial; when users are added to a digital platform, the platform’s value to other users increases (see here, for example). What’s more (see here), “gateways and multihoming can dissipate any monopoly power enjoyed by large networks[,] … provid[ing] another reason” why network effects may not raise competitive problems. In addition, the implicit notion that “tipping” is a particular problem is belied by the ability of new competitors to “knock off” supposed entrenched digital monopolists (think, for example, of Yahoo being displaced by Google, and Myspace being displaced by Facebook). Finally, a bit of regulatory humility is in order. Given the huge amount of consumer surplus generated by digital platforms (see here, for example), enforcers should be particularly cautious about avoiding more aggressive merger (and antitrust in general) policies that could detract from, rather than enhance, welfare.
Labor Markets
Khan argues that guidelines drafters should “incorporate new learning” embodied in “empirical research [that] has shown that labor markets are highly concentrated” and a “U.S. Treasury [report] recently estimating that a lack of competition may be costing workers up to 20% of their wages.” Unfortunately for Khan’s argument, these claims have been convincingly debunked (see here) in a new study by former FTC economist Julie Carlson (see here). As Carlson carefully explains, labor markets are not highly concentrated and labor-market power is largely due to market frictions (such as occupational licensing), rather than concentration. In a similar vein, a recent article by Richard Epstein stresses that heightened antitrust enforcement in labor markets would involve “high administrative and compliance costs to deal with a largely nonexistent threat.” Epstein points out:
[T]raditional forms of antitrust analysis can perfectly deal with labor markets. … What is truly needed is a close examination of the other impediments to labor, including the full range of anticompetitive laws dealing with minimum wage, overtime, family leave, anti-discrimination, and the panoply of labor union protections, where the gains to deregulation should be both immediate and large.
Nonhorizontal Mergers
Khan notes:
[W]e are looking to sharpen our insights on non-horizontal mergers, including deals that might be described as ecosystem-driven, concentric, or conglomerate. While the U.S. antitrust agencies energetically grappled with some of these dynamics during the era of industrial-era conglomerates in the 1960s and 70s, we must update that thinking for the current economy. We must examine how a range of strategies and effects, including extension strategies and portfolio effects, may warrant enforcement action.
Khan’s statement on non-horizontal mergers once again is fatally flawed.
With regard to vertical mergers (not specifically mentioned by Khan), the FTC abruptly withdrew, without explanation, its approval of the carefully crafted 2020 vertical-merger guidelines. That action offends the rule of law, creating unwarranted and costly business-sector confusion. Khan’s lack of specific reference to vertical mergers does nothing to solve this problem.
With regard to other nonhorizontal mergers, there is no sound economic basis to oppose mergers involving unrelated products. Threatening to do so would have no procompetitive rationale and would threaten to reduce welfare by preventing the potential realization of efficiencies. In a 2020 OECD paper drafted principally by DOJ and FTC economists, the U.S. government meticulously assessed the case for challenging such mergers and rejected it on economic grounds. The OECD paper is noteworthy in its entirely negative assessment of 1960s and 1970s conglomerate cases which Khan implicitly praises in suggesting they merely should be “updated” to deal with the current economy (citations omitted):
Today, the United States is firmly committed to the core values that antitrust law protect competition, efficiency, and consumer welfare rather than individual competitors. During the ten-year period from 1965 to 1975, however, the Agencies challenged several mergers of unrelated products under theories that were antithetical to those values. The “entrenchment” doctrine, in particular, condemned mergers if they strengthened an already dominant firm through greater efficiencies, or gave the acquired firm access to a broader line of products or greater financial resources, thereby making life harder for smaller rivals. This approach is no longer viewed as valid under U.S. law or economic theory. …
These cases stimulated a critical examination, and ultimate rejection, of the theory by legal and economic scholars and the Agencies. In their Antitrust Law treatise, Phillip Areeda and Donald Turner showed that to condemn conglomerate mergers because they might enable the merged firm to capture cost savings and other efficiencies, thus giving it a competitive advantage over other firms, is contrary to sound antitrust policy, because cost savings are socially desirable. It is now recognized that efficiency and aggressive competition benefit consumers, even if rivals that fail to offer an equally “good deal” suffer loss of sales or market share. Mergers are one means by which firms can improve their ability to compete. It would be illogical, then, to prohibit mergers because they facilitate efficiency or innovation in production. Unless a merger creates or enhances market power or facilitates its exercise through the elimination of competition—in which case it is prohibited under Section 7—it will not harm, and more likely will benefit, consumers.
Given the well-reasoned rejection of conglomerate theories by leading antitrust scholars and modern jurisprudence, it would be highly wasteful for the FTC and DOJ to consider covering purely conglomerate (nonhorizontal and nonvertical) mergers in new guidelines. Absent new legislation, challenges of such mergers could be expected to fail in court. Regrettably, Khan appears oblivious to that reality.
Khan’s speech ends with a hat tip to internationalism and the ICN:
The U.S., of course, is far from alone in seeing the need for a course correction, and in certain regards our reforms may bring us in closer alignment with other jurisdictions. Given that we are here at ICN, it is worth considering how we, as an international community, can or should react to the shifting consensus.
Antitrust laws have been adopted worldwide, in large part at the urging of the United States (see here). They remain, however, national laws. One would hope that the United States, which in the past was the world leader in developing antitrust economics and enforcement policy, would continue to seek to retain this role, rather than merely emulate other jurisdictions to join an “international community” consensus. Regrettably, this does not appear to be the case. (Indeed, European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager made specific reference to a “coordinated approach” and convergence between U.S. and European antitrust norms in a widely heralded October 2021 speech at the annual Fordham Antitrust Conference in New York. And Vestager specifically touted European ex ante regulation as well as enforcement in a May 5 ICN speech that emphasized multinational antitrust convergence.)
Conclusion
Lina Khan’s recent ICN speech on merger policy sends all the wrong signals on merger guidelines revisions. It strongly hints that new guidelines will embody pre-conceived interventionist notions at odds with sound economics. By calling for a dramatically new direction in merger policy, it interjects uncertainty into merger planning. Due to its interventionist bent, Khan’s remarks, combined with prior statements by U.S. Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter (see here) may further serve to deter potentially welfare-enhancing consolidations. Whether the federal courts will be willing to defer to a drastically different approach to mergers by the agencies (one at odds with several decades of a careful evolutionary approach, rooted in consumer welfare-oriented economics) is, of course, another story. Stay tuned.
Biden administration enforcers at the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have prioritized labor-market monopsony issues for antitrust scrutiny (see, for example, here and here). This heightened interest comes in light of claims that labor markets are highly concentrated and are rife with largely neglected competitive problems that depress workers’ income. Such concerns are reflected in a March 2022 U.S. Treasury Department report on “The State of Labor Market Competition.”
Monopsony is the “flip side” of monopoly and U.S. antitrust law clearly condemns agreements designed to undermine the “buyer side” competitive process (see, for example, this U.S. government submission to the OECD). But is a special new emphasis on labor markets warranted, given that antitrust enforcers ideally should seek to allocate their scarce resources to the most pressing (highest valued) areas of competitive concern?
A May 2022 Information Technology & Innovation (ITIF) study from ITIF Associate Director (and former FTC economist) Julie Carlson indicates that the degree of emphasis the administration’s antitrust enforcers are placing on labor issues may be misplaced. In particular, the ITIF study debunks the Treasury report’s findings of high levels of labor-market concentration and the claim that workers face a “decrease in wages [due to labor market power] at roughly 20 percent relative to the level in a fully competitive market.” Furthermore, while noting the importance of DOJ antitrust prosecutions of hard-core anticompetitive agreements among employers (wage-fixing and no-poach agreements), the ITIF report emphasizes policy reforms unrelated to antitrust as key to improving workers’ lot.
Key takeaways from the ITIF report include:
Labor markets are not highly concentrated. Local labor-market concentration has been declining for decades, with the most concentrated markets seeing the largest declines.
Labor-market power is largely due to labor-market frictions, such as worker preferences, search costs, bargaining, and occupational licensing, rather than concentration.
As a case study, changes in concentration in the labor market for nurses have little to no effect on wages, whereas nurses’ preferences over job location are estimated to lead to wage markdowns of 50%.
Firms are not profiting at the expense of workers. The decline in the labor share of national income is primarily due to rising home values, not increased labor-market concentration.
Policy reform should focus on reducing labor-market frictions and strengthening workers’ ability to collectively bargain. Policies targeting concentration are misguided and will be ineffective at improving outcomes for workers.
The ITIF report also throws cold water on the notion of emphasizing labor-market issues in merger reviews, which was teed up in the January 2022 joint DOJ/FTC request for information (RFI) on merger enforcement. The ITIF report explains:
Introducing the evaluation of labor market effects unnecessarily complicates merger review and needlessly ties up agency resources at a time when the agencies are facing severe resource constraints.48 As discussed previously, labor markets are not highly concentrated, nor is labor market concentration a key factor driving down wages.
A proposed merger that is reportable to the agencies under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act and likely to have an anticompetitive effect in a relevant labor market is also likely to have an anticompetitive effect in a relevant product market. … Evaluating mergers for labor market effects is unnecessary and costly for both firms and the agencies. The current merger guidelines adequately address competition concerns in input markets, so any contemplated revision to the guidelines should not incorporate a “framework to analyze mergers that may lessen competition in labor markets.” [Citation to Request for Information on Merger Enforcement omitted.]
In sum, the administration’s recent pronouncements about highly anticompetitive labor markets that have resulted in severely underpaid workers—used as the basis to justify heightened antitrust emphasis on labor issues—appear to be based on false premises. As such, they are a species of government misinformation, which, if acted upon, threatens to misallocate scarce enforcement resources and thereby undermine efficient government antitrust enforcement. What’s more, an unnecessary overemphasis on labor-market antitrust questions could impose unwarranted investigative costs on companies and chill potentially efficient business transactions. (Think of a proposed merger that would reduce production costs and benefit consumers but result in a workforce reduction by the merged firm.)
Perhaps the administration will take heed of the ITIF report and rethink its plans to ramp up labor-market antitrust-enforcement initiatives. Promoting pro-market regulatory reforms that benefit both labor and consumers (for instance, excessive occupational-licensing restrictions) would be a welfare-superior and cheaper alternative to misbegotten antitrust actions.
A new scholarly study of economic concentration sheds further light on the flawed nature of the Neo-Brandeisian claim that the United States has a serious “competition problem” due to decades of increasing concentration and ineffective antitrust enforcement (see here and here, for example). In a recent article, economist Yueran Ma—assistant professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business—found that economies of scale (an efficiency) were associated with a U.S. economy-wide rise in concentration in economic activities (not antitrust markets) and a growth in output over the last century. In particular, Ma explained (emphasis added):
New research observing 100 years of concentration in economic activities and investment in research and development shows that the dominance of large businesses has been increasing for at least a century and, as Marx conjectured, may be a feature of the increasingly stronger economies of scale that accompany industrial development. . . .
To understand the broad historical currents of concentration, we collected financial information of all US corporations by size groups for the past 100 years. . . .
To be clear, our focus is not market concentration for a particular product, which would require defining markets based on consumption activities. Instead, our focus is the business size distribution in the US, namely the extent to which larger businesses dominate in the total volume of production activities across the economy. . . .
The data reveals a persistent rise in the dominance of the top 1 percent and top 0.1 percent of businesses in the US. From 1918 to 1975, the SOI provided size groups sorted by net income (green line with circles). Starting in 1959, the SOI also provided size groups sorted by sales (red line with diamonds). The longest and most comprehensive size groups are sorted by assets, available since 1931 (blue line with triangles). No matter the measure you choose, the long-run increase in corporate concentration is clear. . . .
Just as Stigler, Marx and Lenin had predicted, the reason for increased concentration appears to be economies of scale. Among different industries, we find that the timing and the degree of rising concentration align closely with rising investment in research and development (R&D) and information technology (IT), measured using additional data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). These types of investments usually require a certain degree of scale due to upfront spending, while also producing technological changes that enhance economies of scale. Accordingly, we use investment intensity in R&D and IT as a general indicator of firms exploiting economies of scale. . . .
We also find that increases in concentration are positively associated with industry growth. In particular, over the medium term (e.g., twenty years), industries that experience higher increases in concentration are also the ones that experience higher growth in real gross output. Correspondingly, their shares of economic output expand as well. . . .
A[ ] natural question is whether regulatory policies and antitrust enforcement drive the main trends we find. For instance, regulatory restrictions on interstate banking could have a direct impact on the size of banks (and we indeed observe rising concentration in banking when these restrictions were lifted). In most other sectors, we are not aware of policies that align with the patterns of rising concentration in our data. The past century witnessed several regimes of antitrust enforcement—however, rising corporate concentration has been a secular trend throughout these different antitrust regimes. We do not observe a significant relationship between corporate concentration in our data and standard aggregate antitrust enforcement measures, such as the number of antitrust cases filed by the Department of Justice (DOJ) or the budget of the DOJ’s antitrust division. Overall, we do not find evidence that antitrust shapes the economy-wide business size distribution, although it could have a more visible impact on the market for a particular product (which is closer to the domain of antitrust analyses).
Even if higher concentration in production activities comes from economies of scale, some contemporary observers fear that economies of scale will ultimately weaken competition and cultivate monopoly power (Lenin highlighted such concerns as well). Analyzing this question requires reliable measurement of market power. So far, most studies do not find rising markups (the standard measure of market power) before the 1980s, and some argue that markups have increased since the 1980s. Combined with our findings, the evidence suggests that stronger economies of scale does not always lead to stronger market power. It is possible that such a link may exist under certain conditions, and future research could shed more light on this topic.
In broad terms, Ma’s study describes a long-term rise in economic concentration (again, something entirely different from antitrust-relevant market concentration) in tandem with substantial increases in economies of scale and output expansion—overall, a story of long-term welfare enhancement. Antitrust-enforcement levels are not portrayed as significantly related to this trend, and there is no showing that rising economies of scale inevitably enhance market power. (Even possible increases in markups, whose existence has been contested, do not necessarily reflect an increase in market power, see here and here.)
Admittedly, Ma was engaged in a positive analysis of concentration, not a normative assessment. But her research certainly lends no support to the normative neo-Brandeisian notion that a drastic interventionist-minded overhaul of antitrust is required to address major competitive ills. To the contrary, one could logically infer that a dramatic rise in antitrust interventionism is not only uncalled for, but it could threaten the beneficial nature of rising economies of scale and output that have been shown to characterize the U.S. economy. One would hope that this inference would give Congress and U.S. antitrust enforcers pause before they embark on a novel interventionist path.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is at it again, threatening new sorts of regulatory interventions in the legitimate welfare-enhancing activities of businesses—this time in the realm of data collection by firms.
Discussion
In an April 11 speech at the International Association of Privacy Professionals’ Global Privacy Summit, FTC Chair Lina Khan set forth a litany of harms associated with companies’ data-acquisition practices. Certainly, fraud and deception with respect to the use of personal data has the potential to cause serious harm to consumers and is the legitimate target of FTC enforcement activity. At the same time, the FTC should take into account the substantial benefits that private-sector data collection may bestow on the public (see, for example, here, here, and here) in order to formulate economically beneficial law-enforcement protocols.
Chair Khan’s speech, however, paid virtually no attention to the beneficial side of data collection. To the contrary, after highlighting specific harmful data practices, Khan then waxed philosophical in condemning private data-collection activities (citations omitted):
Beyond these specific harms, the data practices of today’s surveillance economy can create and exacerbate deep asymmetries of information—exacerbating, in turn, imbalances of power. As numerous scholars have noted, businesses’ access to and control over such vast troves of granular data on individuals can give those firms enormous power to predict, influence, and control human behavior. In other words, what’s at stake with these business practices is not just one’s subjective preference for privacy, but—over the long term—one’s freedom, dignity, and equal participation in our economy and society.
Even if one accepts that private-sector data practices have such transcendent social implications, are the FTC’s philosopher kings ideally equipped to devise optimal policies that promote “freedom, dignity, and equal participation in our economy and society”? Color me skeptical. (Indeed, one could argue that the true transcendent threat to society from fast-growing growing data collection comes not from businesses but, rather, from the government, which unlike private businesses holds a legal monopoly on the right to use or authorize the use of force. This question is, however, beyond the scope of my comments.)
Chair Khan turned from these highfalutin musings to a more prosaic and practical description of her plans for “adapting the commission’s existing authority to address and rectify unlawful data practices.” She stressed “focusing on firms whose business practices cause widespread harm”; “assessing data practices through both a consumer protection and competition lens”; and “designing effective remedies that are informed by the business strategies that specific markets favor and reward.” These suggestions are not inherently problematic, but they need to be fleshed out in far greater detail. For example, there are potentially major consumer-protection risks posed by applying antitrust to “big data” problems (see here, here and here, for example).
Khan ended her presentation by inviting us “to consider how we might need to update our [FTC] approach further yet.” Her suggested “updates” raise significant problems.
First, she stated that the FTC “is considering initiating a rulemaking to address commercial surveillance and lax data security practices.” Even assuming such a rulemaking could withstand legal scrutiny (its best shot would be to frame it as a consumer protection rule, not a competition rule), it would pose additional serious concerns. One-size-fits-all rules prevent consideration of possible economic efficiencies associated with specific data-security and surveillance practices. Thus, some beneficial practices would be wrongly condemned. Such rules would also likely deter firms from experimenting and innovating in ways that could have led to improved practices. In both cases, consumer welfare would suffer.
Second, Khan asserted “the need to reassess the frameworks we presently use to assess unlawful conduct. Specifically, I am concerned that present market realities may render the ‘notice and consent’ paradigm outdated and insufficient.” Accordingly, she recommended that “we should approach data privacy and security protections by considering substantive limits rather than just procedural protections, which tend to create process requirements while sidestepping more fundamental questions about whether certain types of data collection should be permitted in the first place.”
In support of this startling observation, Khan approvingly cites Daniel Solove’s article “The Myth of the Privacy Paradox,” which claims that “[t]he fact that people trade their privacy for products or services does not mean that these transactions are desirable in their current form. … [T]he mere fact that people make a tradeoff doesn’t mean that the tradeoff is fair, legitimate, or justifiable.”
Khan provides no economic justification for a data-collection ban. The implication that the FTC would consider banning certain types of otherwise legal data collection is at odds with free-market principles and would have disastrous economic consequences for both consumers and producers. It strikes at voluntary exchange, a basic principle of market economics that benefits transactors and enables markets to thrive.
Businesses monetize information provided by consumers to offer a host of goods and services that satisfy consumer interests. This is particularly true in the case of digital platforms. Preventing the voluntary transfer of data from consumers to producers based on arbitrary government concerns about “fairness” (for example) would strike at firms’ ability to monetize data and thereby generate additional consumer and producer surplus. The arbitrary destruction of such potential economic value by government fiat would be the essence of “unfairness.”
In particular, the consumer welfare benefits generated by digital platforms, which depend critically on large volumes of data, are enormous. As Erik Brynjolfsson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his student Avinash Collis explained in a December 2019 article in the Harvard Business Review, such benefits far exceed those measured by conventional GDP. Online choice experiments based on digital-survey techniques enabled the authors “to estimate the consumer surplus for a great variety of goods, including free ones that are missing from GDP statistics.” Brynjolfsson and Collis found, for example, that U.S. consumers derived $231 billion in value from Facebook since its inception in 2004. Furthermore:
[O]ur estimates indicate that the [Facebook] platform generates a median consumer surplus of about $500 per person annually in the United States, and at least that much for users in Europe. In contrast, average revenue per user is only around $140 per year in United States and $44 per year in Europe. In other words, Facebook operates one of the most advanced advertising platforms, yet its ad revenues represent only a fraction of the total consumer surplus it generates. This reinforces research by NYU Stern School’s Michael Spence and Stanford’s Bruce Owen that shows that advertising revenues and consumer surplus are not always correlated: People can get a lot of value from content that doesn’t generate much advertising, such as Wikipedia or email. So it is a mistake to use advertising revenues as a substitute for consumer surplus…
In a similar vein, the authors found that various user-fee-based digital services yield consumer surplus five to ten times what users paid to access them. What’s more:
The effect of consumer surplus is even stronger when you look at categories of digital goods. We conducted studies to measure it for the most popular categories in the United States and found that search is the most valued category (with a median valuation of more than $17,000 a year), followed by email and maps. These categories do not have comparable off-line substitutes, and many people consider them essential for work and everyday life. When we asked participants how much they would need to be compensated to give up an entire category of digital goods, we found that the amount was higher than the sum of the value of individual applications in it. That makes sense, since goods within a category are often substitutes for one another.
In sum, the authors found:
To put the economic contributions of digital goods in perspective, we find that including the consumer surplus value of just one digital good—Facebook—in GDP would have added an average of 0.11 percentage points a year to U.S. GDP growth from 2004 through 2017. During this period, GDP rose by an average of 1.83% a year. Clearly, GDP has been substantially underestimated over that time.
Although far from definitive, this research illustrates how a digital-services model, based on voluntary data transfer and accumulation, has brought about enormous economic welfare benefits. Accordingly, FTC efforts to tamper with such a success story on abstruse philosophical grounds not only would be unwarranted, but would be economically disastrous.
Conclusion
The FTC clearly plans to focus on “abuses” in private-sector data collection and usage. In so doing, it should hone in on those practices that impose clear harm to consumers, particularly in the areas of deception and fraud. It is not, however, the FTC’s role to restructure data-collection activities by regulatory fiat, through far-reaching inflexible rules and, worst of all, through efforts to ban collection of “inappropriate” information.
Such extreme actions would predictably impose substantial harm on consumers and producers. They would also slow innovation in platform practices and retard efficient welfare-generating business initiatives tied to the availability of broad collections of data. Eventually, the courts would likely strike down most harmful FTC data-related enforcement and regulatory initiatives, but substantial welfare losses (including harm due to a chilling effect on efficient business conduct) would be borne by firms and consumers in the interim. In short, the enforcement “updates” Khan recommends would reduce economic welfare—the opposite of what (one assumes) is intended.
For these reasons, the FTC should reject the chair’s overly expansive “updates.” It should instead make use of technologists, economists, and empirical research to unearth and combat economically harmful data practices. In doing so, the commission should pay attention to cost-benefit analysis and error-cost minimization. One can only hope that Khan’s fellow commissioners promptly endorse this eminently reasonable approach.
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) competition rulemakings, like spring, are in the air. But do they make policy or legal sense?
In two commentaries last summer (see here and here), I argued that FTC competition rulemaking initiatives would not pass cost-benefit muster, on both legal grounds and economic policy grounds.
As a legal matter, I stressed that they would be time-consuming and pose serious litigation risks, suggesting a significant probability that costs would be incurred in proposing rules that ultimately would fail to be upheld.
As an economic policy matter, I explained that the inherent inflexibility of rule-based norms is ill-suited to deal with dynamic evolving market conditions, compared with matter-specific antitrust litigation that flexibly applies the latest economic thinking to particular circumstances. Furthermore, new competition rules would also exacerbate costly policy inconsistencies that stem from the existence of dual federal antitrust enforcement agencies, the FTC and the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ).
My pearls of wisdom, however, failed to move the agency. In December 2021, the FTC issued a Statement of Regulatory Priorities (SRP) that stressed that it would, in the coming year, “consider developing both unfair-methods-of competition [UMC] rulemakings as well as rulemakings to define with specificity unfair or deceptive acts or practices [UDAP].”
I have addressed in greater detail the legal case against proceeding with UMC rulemakings in an article that will be included as a chapter in a special Concurrences book dealing with FTC rulemaking, scheduled for release around the end of June. The chapter abstract follows:
Under the Biden Administration, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) appears poised to launch an unprecedented effort to transform American antitrust policy through the promulgation of rules, rather than reliance on case-by-case adjudication, as in the past. The FTC has a long history of rulemaking, centered primarily on consumer protection. The legal basis for FTC competition rulemaking, however, is enormously weak and fraught with uncertainty, in at least five respects.
First, a constitutional principle known as the “non-delegation doctrine” suggests that the FTC may not, as a constitutional matter, possess the specific statutory delegation required to issue rules that address particular competitive practices. Second, principles of statutory construction strongly suggest that the FTC’s general statutory provision dealing with rulemaking refers to procedural rules of organization, not to substantive rules bearing on competition. Third, even assuming that proposed competition rules survived these initial hurdles, principles of administrative law would pose a substantial risk that competition rules would be struck down as “arbitrary and capricious.” Fourth, there is a high probability that courts would not defer to an FTC statutory construction that authorized “unfair methods of competition” rules. Fifth, any attempt by the FTC to rely on its more specific consumer protection rulemaking powers to reach anticompetitive practices would be cabined by the limited statutory scope of those powers (and the possible perception that the FTC’s procedural protections are weak), and quite probably would fail. In sum, the cumulative weight of these legal risks indicates that the probability FTC competition rulemaking would succeed is extremely low. As such, the FTC may wish to undertake a sober assessment of the legal landscape before embarking on a competition rulemaking adventure that almost certainly would be destined for failure. The Commission could better promote consumer welfare by applying its limited resources to antitrust enforcement rather than competition rulemaking.
The Biden administration finally has taken a public position on parallel House (H.R. 3816) and Senate (S. 2992) bills that would impose new welfare-reducing regulatory constraints on the ability of large digital platforms to engage in innovative business practices that benefit consumers and the economy.
The administration’s articulation of its position—set forth in a March 28 U.S. Justice Department (DOJ letter to House and Senate Judiciary Committee leadership—is a fine example of draftsmanship. With just a few very minor redline edits, which I suggest below, the letter would advance sound and enlightened procompetitive policy.
I hope the DOJ will accept my modest redlines and incorporate them into a new letter to Congress, superseding the March 28 draft. My edited redline and clean revisions of the current draft follow (redline draft is in italics, clean draft in bold italics):
Redline Version
Dear Chairman Nadler, Chairman Cicilline, Representative Jordan, and Representative Buck:
The Department of Justice (Department) appreciates the considerable attention and resources devoted by the House and Senate Committees on the Judiciary over the past several years to ensuring the competitiveness of our digital economy, and writes today to express support for oppose the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, Senate bill S. 2992, and the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, House bill H.R. 3816, which contain similar prohibitions on discriminatory conduct by dominant platforms (the “bills”). Unfortunately, the legislative efforts expended on these bills have been a waste of time.
The Department views the rise of major digitaldominant platforms as presenting a great boon tothreat to open markets and competition, with bestowing benefits onrisks for consumers, businesses, innovation, resiliency, global competitiveness, and our democracy. By enhancing value controllingtransmitted through key arteries of the nation’s commerce and communications, such platforms have promoted a more vibrant and innovative can exercise outsized market power in our modern economy. Vesting in government the power to pick winners and losers across markets through legislative regulation as found in the bills in a small number of corporations contravenes the foundations of our capitalist system, and given the increasing importance of these markets, the economic benefits flowing frompower of such platforms activity areis likely to be curtailed if the bills are passed continue to grow unless checked. Enactment of the bills wouldThis puts at risk the nation’s economic progress and prosperity, ultimately threatening the economic liberty that undergirds our democracy.
The legislation, if enacted, would emphasize causes of action prohibiting the largest digital platforms from “discriminating” in favor of their own products or services, or among third parties. In so doing, it would eliminate and disincentivize many provide important clarification from Congress on types of discriminatory conductefficient business arrangements that can materially enhanceharm competition. This would thereby undermineimprove upon the system of ex ante enforcement through which the United States maintains competitive markets with legal prohibitions on competitively harmful corporate conduct. By mistakenly characterizing confirming the illegality of as anticompetitive platform behaviors that in reality enhancereduce incentives for vigorous innovation and dynamic competition, smaller or newer firms to innovate and compete, the legislation would underminesupplement the existing antitrust laws. Specifically, the legislation would in preventing the largest digital companies from managing their business transactions in an efficient welfare-enhancing manner, abusing and exploiting their dominant positions to the detriment of competition and the competitive process. The Department is strongly concerned aboutsupportive of these harmful effects.objectives and As such, it encourages both the Committees and Congress to work to abandon all efforts to finalize this legislationfinalize this legislation[1] and pass it into law.
The Department views the legislation’s new prohibitions on discrimination as a harmful detrimenthelpful complement to, and interference withclarification of, existing antitrust authority. In our view, the most significant harmbenefits would arise where the legislation seeks to elucidates Congress’ views of anticompetitive conduct—particularly with respect to harmful types of discrimination and self-preferencing by dominant platforms. Enumerating specific “discriminatory” and “self-preferencing” conduct that Congress views as anticompetitive and therefore illegal would undermine the economically informed, fact-specific evaluation of business conduct that lies at the heart of modern antitrust analysis, centered on consumer welfare. Modern economic analysis demonstrates that a great deal of superficially “discriminatory” and “self-preferencing” conduct often represents consumer welfare-enhancing behavior that adds to economic surplus. Deciding whether such conduct is procompetitive (welfare-enhancing) or anticompetitive in a particular instance is the role of existing case-by-case antitrust enforcement. This approach vindicates competition while avoiding the wrongful condemnation of economically beneficial behavior. In contrast, by creating a new class of antitrust “wrongs,” the bills would lead to the incorrect condemnation of many business practices that enhance market efficiency and strengthen the economy.clarify the antitrust laws and supplement the available causes of action and legal frameworks to pursue that conduct. Doing so would enhance the ability of the DOJ and FTC to challenge that conduct efficiently and effectively and better enable them to promote competition in digital markets. The legislation also has the potential to effectively harmonize broad prohibitions with the particularized needs and business practices of individual platforms over time.
If enacted, we believe that this legislation has the potential to have a major negativepositive effect on dynamism in digital markets going forward. Our future global competitiveness depends on innovators and entrepreneurs having the ability to access markets, free from counterproductive inflexible government market regulationdominant incumbents that impede innovation, competition, resiliency, and widespread prosperity. “Discriminatory” conduct by majordominant platforms, properly understood, often benefits can sap the rewards from other innovators and entrepreneurs, increasingreducing the incentives for entrepreneurship and innovation. Even more importantly, the legislation may undercutsupport the creation and growth of new tech businesses adjacent to the platforms., Such an unfortunate result would reduce the welfare-enhancing initiatives of new businesses that are complementary to the economically beneficial activity (to consumers and producers) generated by the platforms. which may ultimately pose a critically needed competitive check to the covered platforms themselves. We view reduction of these new business initiatives benefitsas a significant harm that would stem from passage of the bills. For these reasons, the Department strongly supports the principles and goals animatingopposes the legislation and looks forward to working with Congress to further explain why this undoubtedly well-meaning legislative initiative is detrimental to vigorous competition and a strong American economy.ensure that the final legislation enacted meets these goals.
Thank you for the opportunity to present our views. We hope this information is helpful. Please do not hesitate to contact this office if we may be of additional assistance to you.
[1] In other words,As , the Department respectfully recommends that members of Congress stop wasting time seeking to revise and enact this legislation.members continue to revise the legislation, the Department will provide under separate cover additional assistance to ensure that the bills achieve their goals.
Clean Version (incorporating all redline edits)
Dear Chairman Nadler, Chairman Cicilline, Representative Jordan, and Representative Buck:
The Department of Justice (Department) appreciates the considerable attention and resources devoted by the House and Senate Committees on the Judiciary over the past several years to ensuring the competitiveness of our digital economy, and writes today to oppose the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, Senate bill S. 2992, and the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, House bill H.R. 3816, which contain similar prohibitions on discriminatory conduct by dominant platforms (the “bills”). Unfortunately, the legislative efforts expended on these bills have been a waste of time.
The Department views the rise of major digital platforms as presenting a great boon to open markets and competition, bestowing benefits on consumers, businesses, innovation, resiliency, global competitiveness, and our democracy. By enhancing value transmitted through key arteries of the nation’s commerce and communications, such platforms have promoted a more vibrant and innovative modern economy. Vesting in government the power to pick winners and losers across markets through legislative regulation as found in the bills contravenes the foundations of our capitalist system, and given the increasing importance of these markets, the economic benefits flowing from platform activity are likely to be curtailed if the bills are passed. Enactment of the bills would put at risk the nation’s economic progress and prosperity, ultimately threatening the economic liberty that undergirds our democracy.
The legislation, if enacted, would emphasize causes of action prohibiting the largest digital platforms from “discriminating” in favor of their own products or services, or among third parties. In so doing, it would eliminate and disincentivize many efficient business arrangements that can materially enhance competition. This would thereby undermine the system of ex ante enforcement through which the United States maintains competitive markets with legal prohibitions on competitively harmful corporate conduct. By mistakenly characterizing as anticompetitive platform behaviors that in reality enhance incentives for vigorous innovation and dynamic competition, the legislation would undermine the existing antitrust laws. Specifically, the legislation would prevent the largest digital companies from managing their business transactions in an efficient welfare-enhancing manner, to the detriment of competition and the competitive process. The Department is strongly concerned about these harmful effects. As such, it encourages both the Committees and Congress to abandon all efforts to finalize this legislation and pass it into law.[1]
The Department views the legislation’s new prohibitions on discrimination as a harmful detriment to, and interference with, existing antitrust authority. In our view, the most significant harm would arise where the legislation seeks to elucidate Congress’ views of anticompetitive conduct—particularly with respect to harmful types of discrimination and self-preferencing by dominant platforms. Enumerating specific “discriminatory” and “self-preferencing” conduct that Congress views as anticompetitive and therefore illegal would undermine the economically informed, fact-specific evaluation of business conduct that lies at the heart of modern antitrust analysis, centered on consumer welfare. Modern economic analysis demonstrates that a great deal of superficially “discriminatory” and “self-preferencing” conduct often represents consumer welfare-enhancing behavior that adds to economic surplus. Deciding whether such conduct is procompetitive (welfare-enhancing) or anticompetitive in a particular instance is the role of existing case-by-case antitrust enforcement. This approach vindicates competition while avoiding the wrongful condemnation of economically beneficial behavior. In contrast, by creating a new class of antitrust “wrongs,” the bills would lead to the incorrect condemnation of many business practices that enhance market efficiency and strengthen the economy.
If enacted, we believe that this legislation has the potential to have a major negative effect on dynamism in digital markets going forward. Our future global competitiveness depends on innovators and entrepreneurs having the ability to access markets, free from counterproductive inflexible government market regulation that impede innovation, competition, resiliency, and widespread prosperity. “Discriminatory” conduct by major platforms, properly understood, often benefits innovators and entrepreneurs, increasing the incentives for entrepreneurship and innovation. Even more importantly, the legislation may undercut the creation and growth of new tech businesses adjacent to the platforms. Such an unfortunate result would reduce the welfare-enhancing initiatives of new businesses that are complementary to the economically beneficial activity (to consumers and producers) generated by the platforms. We view reduction of these new business initiatives as a significant harm that would stem from passage of the bills. For these reasons, the Department strongly opposes the legislation and looks forward to working with Congress to further explain why this undoubtedly well-meaning legislative initiative is detrimental to vigorous competition and a strong American economy.
Thank you for the opportunity to present our views. We hope this information is helpful. Please do not hesitate to contact this office if we may be of additional assistance to you.
[1] In other words, the Department respectfully recommends that members of Congress stop wasting time seeking to revise and enact this legislation.
For decades, consumer-welfare enhancement appeared to be a key enforcement goal of competition policy (antitrust, in the U.S. usage) in most jurisdictions:
The U.S. Supreme Court famously proclaimed American antitrust law to be a “consumer welfare prescription” in Reiter v. Sonotone Corp. (1979).
A study by the current adviser to the European Competition Commission’s chief economist found that that there are “many statements indicating that, seen from the European Commission, modern EU competition policy to a large extent is about protecting consumer welfare.”
A comprehensive international survey presented at the 2011 Annual International Competition Network Conference, found that a majority of competition authorities state that “their national [competition] legislation refers either directly or indirectly to consumer welfare,” and that most competition authorities “base their enforcement efforts on the premise that they enlarge consumer welfare.”
Recently, however, the notion that a consumer welfare standard (CWS) should guide antitrust enforcement has come under attack (see here). In the United States, this movement has been led by populist “neo-Brandeisians” who have “call[ed] instead for enforcement that takes into account firm size, fairness, labor rights, and the protection of smaller enterprises.” (Interestingly, there appear to be more direct and strident published attacks on the CWS from American critics than from European commentators, perhaps reflecting an unspoken European assumption that “ordoliberal” strong government oversight of markets advances the welfare of consumers and society in general.) The neo-Brandeisian critique is badly flawed and should be rejected.
Assuming that the focus on consumer welfare in U.S. antitrust enforcement survives this latest populist challenge, what considerations should inform the design and application of a CWS? Before considering this question, one must confront the context in which it arises—the claim that the U.S. economy has become far less competitive in recent decades and that antitrust enforcement has been ineffective at addressing this problem. After dispatching with this flawed claim, I advance four principles aimed at properly incorporating consumer-welfare considerations into antitrust-enforcement analysis.
Does the US Suffer from Poor Antitrust Enforcement and Declining Competition?
Antitrust interventionists assert that lax U.S. antitrust enforcement has coincided with a serious decline in competition—a claim deployed to argue that, even if one assumes that promoting consumer welfare remains an overarching goal, U.S. antitrust policy nonetheless requires a course correction. After all, basic price theory indicates that a reduction in market competition raises deadweight loss and reduces consumers’ relative share of total surplus. As such, it might seem to follow that “ramping up antitrust” would lead to more vigorously competitive markets, featuring less deadweight loss and relatively more consumer surplus.
This argument, of course, avoids error cost, rent seeking, and public choice issues that raise serious questions about the welfare effects of more aggressive “invigorated” enforcement (see here, for example). But more fundamentally, the argument is based on two incorrect premises:
That competition has declined; and
That U.S. trustbusters have applied the CWS in a narrow manner ineffective to address competitive problems.
In a recent article in the Stigler Center journal Promarket, Yale University economics professor Fiona Scott-Morton and Yale Law student Leah Samuel accepted those premises in complaining about poor antitrust enforcement and substandard competition (hyperlinks omitted and emphasis in the original):
In recent years, the [CWS] term itself has become the target of vocal criticism in light of mounting evidence that recent enforcement—and what many call the “consumer welfare standard era” of antitrust enforcement—has been a failure. …
This strategy of non-enforcement has harmed markets and consumers. Today we see the evidence of this under-enforcement in a range of macroeconomic measures, studies of markups, as well as in merger post-mortems and studies of anticompetitive behavior that agencies have not pursued. Non-economist observers– journalists, advocates, and lawyers – who have noticed the lack of enforcement and the pernicious results have learned to blame “economics” and the CWS. They are correct that using CWS, as defined and warped by Chicago-era jurists and economists, has been a failure. That kind of enforcement—namely, insufficient enforcement—does not protect competition. But we argue that the “economics” at fault are the corporate-sponsored Chicago School assumptions, which are at best outdated, generally unjustified, and usually incorrect.
While the Chicago School caused the “consumer welfare standard” to become associated with an anti-enforcement philosophy in the legal community, it has never changed its meaning among PhD-trained economists.
To an economist, consumer welfare is a well-defined concept. Price, quality, and innovation are all part of the demand curve and all form the basis for the standard academic definition of consumer welfare. CW is the area under the demand curve and above the quality-adjusted price paid. … Quality-adjusted price represents all the value consumers get from the product less the price they paid, and therefore encapsulates the role of quality of any kind, innovation, and price on the welfare of the consumer.
In my published response to Scott-Morton and Samuel, I summarized recent economic literature that contradicts the “competition is declining” claim. I also demonstrated that antitrust enforcement has been robust and successful, refuting the authors’ claim to the contrary (cross links to economic literature omitted):
There are only two problems with the [authors’] argument. First, it is not clear at all that competition has declined during the reign of this supposedly misused [CWS] concept. Second, the consumer welfare standard has not been misapplied at all. Indeed, as antitrust scholars and enforcement officials have demonstrated … modern antitrust enforcement has not adopted a narrow “Chicago School” view of the world. To the contrary, it has incorporated the more sophisticated analysis the authors advocate, and enforcement initiatives have been vigorous and largely successful. Accordingly, the authors’ call for an adjustment in antitrust enforcement is a solution in search of a non-existent problem.
In short, competitive conditions in U.S. markets are robust and have not been declining. Moreover, U.S. antitrust enforcement has been sophisticated and aggressive, fully attuned to considerations of quality and innovation.
A Suggested Framework for Consumer Welfare Analysis
Although recent claims of “weak” U.S. antitrust enforcement are baseless, they do, nevertheless, raise “front and center” the nature of the CWS. The CWS is a worthwhile concept, but it eludes a precise definition. That is as it should be. In our common law system, fact-specific analyses of particular competitive practices are key to determining whether welfare is or is not being advanced in the case at hand. There is no simple talismanic CWS formula that is readily applicable to diverse cases.
While Scott-Morton argues that the area under the demand curve (consumer surplus) is essentially coincident with the CWS, other leading commentators take account of the interests of producers as well. For example, the leading antitrust treatise writer, Herbert Hovenkamp, suggests thinking about consumer welfare in terms of “maxim[izing] output that is consistent with sustainable competition. Output includes quantity, quality, and improvements in innovation. As an aside, it is worth noting that high output favors suppliers, including labor, as well as consumers because job opportunities increase when output is higher.” (Hovenkamp, Federal Antitrust Policy 102 (6th ed. 2020).)
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Commissioner Christine Wilson (like Ken Heyer and other scholars) advocates a “total welfare standard” (consumer plus producer surplus). She stresses that it would beneficially:
Make efficiencies more broadly cognizable, capturing cost reductions not passed through in the short run;
Better enable the agencies to consider multi-market effects (whether consumer welfare gains in one market swamp consumer welfare losses in another market); and
Better capture dynamic efficiencies (such as firm-specific efficiencies that are emulated by other “copycat” firms in the market).
Hovenkamp and Wilson point to the fact that efficiency-enhancing business conduct often has positive ramifications for both consumers and producers. As such, a CWS that focuses narrowly on short-term consumer surplus may prompt antitrust challenges to conduct that, properly understood, will prove beneficial to both consumers and producers over time.
With this in mind, I will now suggest four general “framework principles” to inform a CWS analysis that properly accounts for innovation and dynamic factors. These principles are tentative and merely suggestive, intended to prompt a further dialogue on CWS among interested commentators. (Also, many practical details will need to be filled in, based on further analysis.)
Enforcers should consider all effects on consumer welfare in evaluating a transaction. Under the rule of reason, a reduction in surplus to particular defined consumers should not condemn a business practice (merger or non-merger) if other consumers are likely to enjoy accretions to surplus and if aggregate consumer surplus appears unlikely to decline, on net, due to the practice. Surplus need not be quantified—the likely direction of change in surplus is all that is required. In other words, “actual welfare balancing” is not required, consistent with the practical impossibility of quantifying new welfare effects in almost all cases (see, e.g., Hovenkamp, here). This principle is unaffected by market definition—all affected consumers should be assessed, whether they are “in” or “out” of a hypothesized market.
Vertical intellectual-property-licensing contracts should not be subject to antitrust scrutiny unless there is substantial evidence that they are being used to facilitate horizontal collusion. This principle draws on the “New Madison Approach” associated with former Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Makan Delrahim. It applies to a set of practices that further the interests of both consumers and producers. Vertical IP licensing (particularly patent licensing) “is highly important to the dynamic and efficient dissemination of new technologies throughout the economy, which, in turn, promotes innovation and increased welfare (consumer and producer surplus).” (See here, for example.) The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ refusal to condemn Qualcomm’s patent-licensing contracts (which had been challenged by the FTC) is consistent with this principle; it “evinces a refusal to find anticompetitive harm in licensing markets without hard empirical support.” (See here.)
Furthermore, enforcers should carefully assess the ability of “non-standard” commercial contracts—horizontal and vertical—to overcome market failures, as described by transaction-cost economics (see here, and here, for example). Non-standard contracts may be designed to deal with problems (for instance) of contractual incompleteness and opportunism that stymie efforts to advance new commercial opportunities. To the extent that such contracts create opportunities for transactions that expand or enhance market offerings, they generate new consumer surplus (new or “shifted out” demand curves) and enhance consumer welfare. Thus, they should enjoy a general (though rebuttable) presumption of legality.
Fourth, and most fundamentally, enforcers should take account of cost-benefit analysis, rooted in error-cost considerations, in their enforcement initiatives, in order to further consumer welfare. As I have previously written:
Assuming that one views modern antitrust enforcement as an exercise in consumer welfare maximization, what does that tell us about optimal antitrust enforcement policy design? In order to maximize welfare, enforcers must have an understanding of – and seek to maximize the difference between – the aggregate costs and benefits that are likely to flow from their policies. It therefore follows that cost-benefit analysis should be applied to antitrust enforcement design. Specifically, antitrust enforcers first should ensure that the rules they propagate create net welfare benefits. Next, they should (to the extent possible) seek to calibrate those rules so as to maximize net welfare. (Significantly, Federal Trade Commissioner Josh Wright also has highlighted the merits of utilizing cost-benefit analysis in the work of the FTC.) [Eight specific suggestions for implementing cost-beneficial antitrust evaluations are then put forth in this article.]
Conclusion
One must hope that efforts to eliminate consumer welfare as the focal point of U.S. antitrust will fail. But even if they do, market-oriented commentators should be alert to any efforts to “hijack” the CWS by interventionist market-skeptical scholars. A particular threat may involve efforts to define the CWS as merely involving short-term consumer surplus maximization in narrowly defined markets. Such efforts could, if successful, justify highly interventionist enforcement protocols deployed against a wide variety of efficient (though too often mischaracterized) business practices.
To counter interventionist antitrust proposals, it is important to demonstrate that claims of faltering competition and inadequate antitrust enforcement under current norms simply are inaccurate. Such an effort, though necessary, is not enough.
In order to win the day, it will be important for market mavens to explain that novel business practices aimed at promoting producer surplus tend to increase consumer surplus as well. That is because efficiency-enhancing stratagems (often embodied in restrictive IP-licensing agreements and non-standard contracts) that further innovation and overcome transaction-cost difficulties frequently pave the way for innovation and the dissemination of new technologies throughout the economy. Those effects, in turn, expand and create new market opportunities, yielding huge additions to consumer surplus—accretions that swamp short-term static effects.
Enlightened enforcers should apply enforcement protocols that allow such benefits to be taken into account. They should also focus on the interests of all consumers affected by a practice, not just a narrow subset of targeted potentially “harmed” consumers. Finally, public officials should view their enforcement mission through a cost-benefit lens, which is designed to promote welfare.
U.S. antitrust policy seeks to promote vigorous marketplace competition in order to enhance consumer welfare. For more than four decades, mainstream antitrust enforcers have taken their cue from the U.S. Supreme Court’s statement in Reiter v. Sonotone (1979) that antitrust is “a consumer welfare prescription.” Recent suggestions (see here and here) by new Biden administration Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) leadership that antitrust should promote goals apart from consumer welfare have yet to be embodied in actual agency actions, and they have not been tested by the courts. (Given Supreme Court case law, judicial abandonment of the consumer welfare standard appears unlikely, unless new legislation that displaces it is enacted.)
Assuming that the consumer welfare paradigm retains its primacy in U.S. antitrust, how do the goals of antitrust match up with those of national security? Consistent with federal government pronouncements, the “basic objective of U.S. national security policy is to preserve and enhance the security of the United States and its fundamental values and institutions.” Properly applied, antitrust can retain its consumer welfare focus in a manner consistent with national security interests. Indeed, sound antitrust and national-security policies generally go hand-in-hand. The FTC and the DOJ should keep that in mind in formulating their antitrust policies (spoiler alert: they sometimes have failed to do so).
Discussion
At first blush, it would seem odd that enlightened consumer-welfare-oriented antitrust enforcement and national-security policy would be in tension. After all, enlightened antitrust enforcement is concerned with targeting transactions that harmfully reduce output and undermine innovation, such as hard-core collusion and courses of conduct that inefficiently exclude competition and weaken marketplace competition. U.S. national security would seem to be promoted (or, at least, not harmed) by antitrust enforcement directed at supporting stronger, more vibrant American markets.
This initial instinct is correct, if antitrust-enforcement policy indeed reflects economically sound, consumer-welfare-centric principles. But are there examples where antitrust enforcement falls short and thereby is at odds with national security? An evaluation of three areas of interaction between the two American policy interests is instructive.
The degree of congruence between national security and appropriate consumer welfare-enhancing antitrust enforcement is illustrated by a brief discussion of:
defense-industry mergers;
the intellectual property-antitrust interface, with a focus on patent licensing; and
proposed federal antitrust legislation.
The first topic presents an example of clear consistency between consumer-welfare-centric antitrust and national defense. In contrast, the second topic demonstrates that antitrust prosecutions (and policies) that inappropriately weaken intellectual-property protections are inconsistent with national defense interests. The second topic does not manifest a tension between antitrust and national security; rather, it illustrates a tension between national security and unsound antitrust enforcement. In a related vein, the third topic demonstrates how a change in the antitrust statutes that would undermine the consumer welfare paradigm would also threaten U.S. national security.
Defense-Industry Mergers
The consistency between antitrust goals and national security is relatively strong and straightforward in the field of defense-industry-related mergers and joint ventures. The FTC and DOJ traditionally have worked closely with the U.S. Defense Department (DOD) to promote competition and consumer welfare in evaluating business transactions that affect national defense needs.
The DOD has long supported policies to prevent overreliance on a single supplier for critical industrial-defense needs. Such a posture is consistent with the antitrust goal of preventing mergers to monopoly that reduce competition, raise prices, and diminish quality by creating or entrenching a dominant firm. As then-FTC Commissioner William Kovacic commented about an FTC settlement that permitted the United Launch Alliance (an American spacecraft launch service provider established in 2006 as a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing), “[i]n reviewing defense industry mergers, competition authorities and the DOD generally should apply a presumption that favors the maintenance of at least two suppliers for every weapon system or subsystem.”
Antitrust enforcers have, however, worked with DOD to allow the only two remaining suppliers of a defense-related product or service to combine their operations, subject to appropriate safeguards, when presented with scale economy and quality rationales that advanced national-security interests (see here).
Antitrust enforcers have also consulted and found common cause with DOD in opposing anticompetitive mergers that have national-security overtones. For example, antitrust enforcement actions targeting vertical defense-sector mergers that threaten anticompetitive input foreclosure or facilitate anticompetitive information exchanges are in line with the national-security goal of preserving vibrant markets that offer the federal government competitive, high-quality, innovative, and reasonably priced purchase options for its defense needs.
The FTC’s recent success in convincing Lockheed Martin to drop its proposed acquisition of Aerojet Rocketdyne holdings fits into this category. (I express no view on the merits of this matter; I merely cite it as an example of FTC-DOD cooperation in considering a merger challenge.) In its February 2022 press release announcing the abandonment of this merger, the FTC stated that “[t]he acquisition would have eliminated the country’s last independent supplier of key missile propulsion inputs and given Lockheed the ability to cut off its competitors’ access to these critical components.” The FTC also emphasized the full consistency between its enforcement action and national-security interests:
Simply put, the deal would have resulted in higher prices and diminished quality and innovation for programs that are critical to national security. The FTC’s enforcement action in this matter dovetails with the DoD report released this week recommending stronger merger oversight of the highly concentrated defense industrial base.
Intellectual-Property Licensing
Shifts in government IP-antitrust patent-licensing policy perspectives
Intellectual-property (IP) licensing, particularly involving patents, is highly important to the dynamic and efficient dissemination of new technologies throughout the economy, which, in turn, promotes innovation and increased welfare (consumers’ and producers’ surplus). See generally, for example, Daniel Spulber’s The Case for Patents and Jonathan Barnett’s Innovation, Firms, and Markets. Patents are a property right, and they do not necessarily convey market power, as the federal government has recognized (see 2017 DOJ-FTC Antitrust Guidelines for the Licensing of Intellectual Property).
Standard setting through standard setting organizations (SSOs) has been a particularly important means of spawning valuable benchmarks (standards) that have enabled new patent-backed technologies to drive innovation and enable mass distribution of new high-tech products, such as smartphones. The licensing of patents that cover and make possible valuable standards—“standard-essential patents” or SEPs—has played a crucial role in bringing to market these products and encouraging follow-on innovations that have driven fast-paced welfare-enhancing product and process quality improvements.
Licensing, cross-licensing, or otherwise transferring intellectual property (hereinafter “licensing”) can facilitate integration of the licensed property with complementary factors of production. This integration can lead to more efficient exploitation of the intellectual property, benefiting consumers through the reduction of costs and the introduction of new products. Such arrangements increase the value of intellectual property to consumers and owners. Licensing can allow an innovator to capture returns from its investment in making and developing an invention through royalty payments from those that practice its invention, thus providing an incentive to invest in innovative efforts. …
[L]imitations on intellectual property licenses may serve procompetitive ends by allowing the licensor to exploit its property as efficiently and effectively as possible. These various forms of exclusivity can be used to give a licensee an incentive to invest in the commercialization and distribution of products embodying the licensed intellectual property and to develop additional applications for the licensed property. The restrictions may do so, for example, by protecting the licensee against free riding on the licensee’s investments by other licensees or by the licensor. They may also increase the licensor’s incentive to license, for example, by protecting the licensor from competition in the licensor’s own technology in a market niche that it prefers to keep to itself.
Unfortunately, however, FTC and DOJ antitrust policies over the last 15 years have too often belied this generally favorable view of licensing practices with respect to SEPs. (See generally here, here, and here). Notably, the antitrust agencies have at various times taken policy postures and enforcement actions indicating that SEP holders may face antitrust challenges if:
they fail to license all comers, including competitors, on fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) terms; and
seek to obtain injunctions against infringers.
In addition, antitrust policy officials (see 2011 FTC Report) have described FRAND price terms as cabined by the difference between the licensing rates for the first (included in the standard) and second (not included in the standard) best competing patented technologies available prior to the adoption of a standard. This pricing measure—based on the “incremental difference” between first and second-best technologies—has been described as necessary to prevent SEP holders from deriving artificial “monopoly rents” that reflect the market power conferred by a standard. (But see then FTC-Commissioner Joshua Wright’s 2013 essay to the contrary, based on the economics of incomplete contracts.)
This approach to SEPs undervalues them, harming the economy. Limitations on seeking injunctions (which are a classic property-right remedy) encourages opportunistic patent infringements and artificially disfavors SEP holders in bargaining over licensing terms with technology implementers, thereby reducing the value of SEPs. SEP holders are further disadvantaged by the presumption that they must license all comers. They also are harmed by the implication that they must be limited to a relatively low hypothetical “ex ante” licensing rate—a rate that totally fails to take into account the substantial economic welfare value that will accrue to the economy due to their contribution to the standard. Considered individually and as a whole, these negative factors discourage innovators from participating in standardization, to the detriment of standards quality. Lower-quality standards translate into inferior standardized produces and processes and reduced innovation.
Recognizing this problem, in 2018 DOJ, Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Makan Delrahim announced a “New Madison Approach” (NMA) to SEP licensing, which recognized:
antitrust remedies are inappropriate for patent-licensing disputes between SEP-holders and implementers of a standard;
SSOs should not allow collective actions by standard-implementers to disfavor patent holders;
SSOs and courts should be hesitant to restrict SEP holders’ right to exclude implementers from access to their patents by seeking injunctions; and
unilateral and unconditional decisions not to license a patent should be per se legal. (See, for example, here and here.)
Acceptance of the NMA would have counter-acted the economically harmful degradation of SEPs stemming from prior government policies.
Regrettably, antitrust-enforcement-agency statements during the last year effectively have rejected the NMA. Most recently, in December 2021, the DOJ issued for public comment a Draft Policy Statement on Licensing Negotiations and Remedies, SEPs, which displaces a 2019 statement that had been in line with the NMA. Unless the FTC and Biden DOJ rethink their new position and decide instead to support the NMA, the anti-innovation approach to SEPs will once again prevail, with unfortunate consequences for American innovation.
The “weaker patents” implications of the draft policy statement would also prove detrimental to national security, as explained in a comment on the statement by a group of leading law, economics, and business scholars (including Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith) convened by the International Center for Law & Economics:
China routinely undermines U.S. intellectual property protections through its industrial policy. The government’s stated goal is to promote “fair and reasonable” international rules, but it is clear that China stretches its power over intellectual property around the world by granting “anti-suit injunctions” on behalf of Chinese smartphone makers, designed to curtail enforcement of foreign companies’ patent rights. …
Insufficient protections for intellectual property will hasten China’s objective of dominating collaborative standard development in the medium to long term. Simultaneously, this will engender a switch to greater reliance on proprietary, closed standards rather than collaborative, open standards. These harmful consequences are magnified in the context of the global technology landscape, and in light of China’s strategic effort to shape international technology standards. Chinese companies, directed by their government authorities, will gain significant control of the technologies that will underpin tomorrow’s digital goods and services.
A Center for Security and International Studies submission on the draft policy statement (signed by a former deputy secretary of the DOD, as well as former directors of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the National Institute of Standards and Technology) also raised China-related national-security concerns:
[T]he largest short-term and long-term beneficiaries of the 2021 Draft Policy Statement are firms based in China. Currently, China is the world’s largest consumer of SEP-based technology, so weakening protection of American owned patents directly benefits Chinese manufacturers. The unintended effect of the 2021 Draft Policy Statement will be to support Chinese efforts to dominate critical technology standards and other advanced technologies, such as 5G. Put simply, devaluing U.S. patents is akin to a subsidized tech transfer to China.
Furthermore, in a more general vein, leading innovation economist David Teece also noted the negative national-security implications in his submission on the draft policy statement:
The US government, in reviewing competition policy issues that might impact standards, therefore needs to be aware that the issues at hand have tremendous geopolitical consequences and cannot be looked at in isolation. … Success in this regard will promote competition and is our best chance to maintain technological leadership—and, along with it, long-term economic growth and consumer welfare and national security.
That’s not all. In its public comment warning against precipitous finalization of the draft policy statement, the Innovation Alliance noted that, in recent years, major foreign jurisdictions have rejected the notion that SEP holders should be deprived the opportunity to seek injunctions. The Innovation Alliance opined in detail on the China national-security issues (footnotes omitted):
[T]he proposed shift in policy will undermine the confidence and clarity necessary to incentivize investments in important and risky research and development while simultaneously giving foreign competitors who do not rely on patents to drive investment in key technologies, like China, a distinct advantage. …
The draft policy statement … would devalue SEPs, and undermine the ability of U.S. firms to invest in the research and development needed to maintain global leadership in 5G and other critical technologies.
Without robust American investments, China—which has clear aspirations to control and lead in critical standards and technologies that are essential to our national security—will be left without any competition. Since 2015, President Xi has declared “whoever controls the standards controls the world.” China has rolled out the “China Standards 2035” plan and has outspent the United States by approximately $24 billion in wireless communications infrastructure, while China’s five-year economic plan calls for $400 billion in 5G-related investment.
Simply put, the draft policy statement will give an edge to China in the standards race because, without injunctions, American companies will lose the incentive to invest in the research and development needed to lead in standards setting. Chinese companies, on the other hand, will continue to race forward, funded primarily not by license fees, but by the focused investment of the Chinese government. …
Public hearings are necessary to take into full account the uncertainty of issuing yet another policy on this subject in such a short time period.
A key part of those hearings and further discussions must be the national security implications of a further shift in patent enforceability policy. Our future safety depends on continued U.S. leadership in areas like 5G and artificial intelligence. Policies that undermine the enforceability of patent rights disincentivize the substantial private sector investment necessary for research and development in these areas. Without that investment, development of these key technologies will begin elsewhere—likely China. Before any policy is accepted, key national-security stakeholders in the U.S. government should be asked for their official input.
These are not the only comments that raised the negative national-security ramifications of the draft policy statement (see here and here). For example, current Republican and Democratic senators, prior International Trade Commissioners, and former top DOJ and FTC officials also noted concerns. What’s more, the Patent Protection Society of China, which represents leading Chinese corporate implementers, filed a rather nonanalytic submission in favor of the draft statement. As one leading patent-licensing lawyer explains: “UC Berkley Law Professor Mark Cohen, whose distinguished government service includes serving as the USPTO representative in China, submitted a thoughtful comment explaining how the draft Policy Statement plays into China’s industrial and strategic interests.”
Finally, by weakening patent protection, the draft policy statement is at odds with the 2021 National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence Report, which called for the United States to “[d]evelop and implement national IP policies to incentivize, expand, and protect emerging technologies[,]” in response to Chinese “leveraging and exploiting intellectual property (IP) policies as a critical tool within its national strategies for emerging technologies.”
In sum, adoption of the draft policy statement would raise antitrust risks, weaken key property rights protections for SEPs, and undercut U.S. technological innovation efforts vis-à-vis China, thereby undermining U.S. national security.
FTC v. Qualcomm: Misguided enforcement and national security
U.S. national-security interests have been threatened by more than just the recent SEP policy pronouncements. In filing a January 2017 antitrust suit (at the very end of the Obama administration) against Qualcomm’s patent-licensing practices, the FTC (by a partisan 2-1 vote) ignored the economic efficiencies that underpinned this highly successful American technology company’s practices. Had the suit succeeded, U.S. innovation in a critically important technology area would have needlessly suffered, with China as a major beneficiary. A recent Federalist Society Regulatory Transparency Project report on the New Madison Approach underscored the broad policy implications of FTC V. Qualcomm (citations deleted):
The FTC’s Qualcomm complaint reflected the anti-SEP bias present during the Obama administration. If it had been successful, the FTC’s prosecution would have seriously undermined the freedom of the company to engage in efficient licensing of its SEPs.
Qualcomm is perhaps the world’s leading wireless technology innovator. It has developed, patented, and licensed key technologies that power smartphones and other wireless devices, and continues to do so. Many of Qualcomm’s key patents are SEPs subject to FRAND, directed to communications standards adopted by wireless devices makers. Qualcomm also makes computer processors and chips embodied in cutting edge wireless devices. Thanks in large part to Qualcomm technology, those devices have improved dramatically over the last decade, offering consumers a vast array of new services at a lower and lower price, when quality is factored in. Qualcomm thus is the epitome of a high tech American success story that has greatly benefited consumers.
Qualcomm: (1) sells its chips to “downstream” original equipment manufacturers (OEMs, such as Samsung and Apple), on the condition that the OEMs obtain licenses to Qualcomm SEPs; and (2) refuses to license its FRAND-encumbered SEPs to rival chip makers, while allowing those rivals to create and sell chips embodying Qualcomm SEP technologies to those OEMS that have entered a licensing agreement with Qualcomm.
The FTC’s 2017 antitrust complaint, filed in federal district court in San Francisco, charged that Qualcomm’s “no license, no chips” policy allegedly “forced” OEM cell phone manufacturers to pay elevated royalties on products that use a competitor’s baseband processors. The FTC deemed this an illegal “anticompetitive tax” on the use of rivals’ processors, since phone manufacturers “could not run the risk” of declining licenses and thus losing all access to Qualcomm’s processors (which would be needed to sell phones on important cellular networks). The FTC also argued that Qualcomm’s refusal to license its rivals despite its SEP FRAND commitment violated the antitrust laws. Finally, the FTC asserted that a 2011-2016 Qualcomm exclusive dealing contract with Apple (in exchange for reduced patent royalties) had excluded business opportunities for Qualcomm competitors.
The federal district court held for the FTC. It ordered that Qualcomm end these supposedly anticompetitive practices and renegotiate its many contracts. [Among the beneficiaries of new pro-implementer contract terms would have been a leading Chinese licensee of Qualcomm’s, Huawei, the huge Chinese telecommunications company that has been accused by the U.S. government of using technological “back doors” to spy on the United States.]
Qualcomm appealed, and in August 2020 a panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the district court, holding for Qualcomm. Some of the key points underlying this holding were: (1) Qualcomm had no antitrust duty to deal with competitors, consistent with established Supreme Court precedent (a very narrow exception to this precedent did not apply); (2) Qualcomm’s rates were chip supplier neutral because all OEMs paid royalties, not just rivals’ customers; (3) the lower court failed to show how the “no license, no chips” policy harmed Qualcomm’s competitors; and (4) Qualcomm’s agreements with Apple did not have the effect of substantially foreclosing the market to competitors. The Ninth Circuit as a whole rejected the FTC’s “en banc” appeal for review of the panel decision.
The appellate decision in Qualcomm largely supports pillar four of the NMA, that unilateral and unconditional decisions not to license a patent should be deemed legal under the antitrust laws. More generally, the decision evinces a refusal to find anticompetitive harm in licensing markets without hard empirical support. The FTC and the lower court’s findings of “harm” had been essentially speculative and anecdotal at best. They had ignored the “big picture” that the markets in which Qualcomm operates had seen vigorous competition and the conferral of enormous and growing welfare benefits on consumers, year-by-year. The lower court and the FTC had also turned a deaf ear to a legitimate efficiency-related business rationale that explained Qualcomm’s “no license, no chips” policy – a fully justifiable desire to obtain a fair return on Qualcomm’s patented technology.
Qualcomm is well reasoned, and in line with sound modern antitrust precedent, but it is only one holding. The extent to which this case’s reasoning proves influential in other courts may in part depend on the policies advanced by DOJ and the FTC going forward. Thus, a preliminary examination of the Biden administration’s emerging patent-antitrust policy is warranted. [Subsequent discussion shows that the Biden administration apparently has rejected pro-consumer policies embodied in the 9th U.S. Circuit’s Qualcomm decision and in the NMA.]
Although the 9th Circuit did not comment on them, national-security-policy concerns weighed powerfully against the FTC v. Qualcomm suit. In a July 2019 Statement of Interest (SOI) filed with the circuit court, DOJ cogently set forth the antitrust flaws in the district court’s decision favoring the FTC. Furthermore, the SOI also explained that “the public interest” favored a stay of the district court holding, due to national-security concerns (described in some detail in statements by the departments of Defense and Energy, appended to the SOI):
[T]he public interest also takes account of national security concerns. Winter v. NRDC, 555 U.S. 7, 23-24 (2008). This case presents such concerns. In the view of the Executive Branch, diminishment of Qualcomm’s competitiveness in 5G innovation and standard-setting would significantly impact U.S. national security. A251-54 (CFIUS); LD ¶¶10-16 (Department of Defense); ED ¶¶9-10 (Department of Energy). Qualcomm is a trusted supplier of mission-critical products and services to the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy. LD ¶¶5-8; ED ¶¶8-9. Accordingly, the Department of Defense “is seriously concerned that any detrimental impact on Qualcomm’s position as global leader would adversely affect its ability to support national security.” LD ¶16.
The [district] court’s remedy [requiring the renegotiation of Qualcomm’s licensing contracts] is intended to deprive, and risks depriving, Qualcomm of substantial licensing revenue that could otherwise fund time-sensitive R&D and that Qualcomm cannot recover later if it prevails. See, e.g., Op. 227-28. To be sure, if Qualcomm ultimately prevails, vacatur of the injunction will limit the severity of Qualcomm’s revenue loss and the consequent impairment of its ability to perform functions critical to national security. The Department of Defense “firmly believes,” however, “that any measure that inappropriately limits Qualcomm’s technological leadership, ability to invest in [R&D], and market competitiveness, even in the short term, could harm national security. The risks to national security include the disruption of [the Department’s] supply chain and unsure U.S. leadership in 5G.” LD ¶3. Consequently, the public interest necessitates a stay pending this Court’s resolution of the merits. In these rare circumstances, the interest in preventing even a risk to national security—“an urgent objective of the highest order”—presents reason enough not to enforce the remedy immediately. Int’l Refugee Assistance Project, 137 S. Ct. at 2088 (internal quotations omitted).
Not all national-security arguments against antitrust enforcement may be well-grounded, of course. The key point is that the interests of national security and consumer-welfare-centric antitrust are fully aligned when antitrust suits would inefficiently undermine the competitive vigor of a firm or firms that play a major role in supporting U.S. national-security interests. Such was the case in FTC v. Qualcomm. More generally, heightened antitrust scrutiny of efficient patent-licensing practices (as threatened by the Biden administration) would tend to diminish innovation by U.S. patentees, particularly in areas covered by standards that are key to leading global technologies. Such a diminution in innovation will tend to weaken American advantages in important industry sectors that are vital to U.S. national-security interests.
Proposed Federal Antitrust Legislation
Proposed federal antitrust legislation being considered by Congress (see here, here, and here for informed critiques) would prescriptively restrict certain large technology companies’ business transactions. If enacted, such legislation would thereby preclude case-specific analysis of potential transaction-specific efficiencies, thereby undermining the consumer welfare standard at the heart of current sound and principled antitrust enforcement. The legislation would also be at odds with our national-security interests, as a recent U.S. Chamber of Commerce paper explains:
Congress is considering new antitrust legislation which, perversely, would weaken leading U.S. technology companies by crafting special purpose regulations under the guise of antitrust to prohibit those firms from engaging in business conduct that is widely acceptable when engaged in by rival competitors.
A series of legislative proposals – some of which already have been approved by relevant Congressional committees – would, among other things: dismantle these companies; prohibit them from engaging in significant new acquisitions or investments; require them to disclose sensitive user data and sensitive IP and trade secrets to competitors, including those that are foreign-owned and controlled; facilitate foreign influence in the United States; and compromise cybersecurity. These bills would fundamentally undermine American security interests while exempting from scrutiny Chinese and other foreign firms that do not meet arbitrary user and market capitalization thresholds specified in the legislation. …
The United States has never used legislation to punish success. In many industries, scale is important and has resulted in significant gains for the American economy, including small businesses. U.S. competition law promotes the interests of consumers, not competitors. It should not be used to pick winners and losers in the market or to manage competitive outcomes to benefit select competitors. Aggressive competition benefits consumers and society, for example by pushing down prices, disrupting existing business models, and introducing innovative products and services.
If enacted, the legislative proposals would drag the United States down in an unfolding global technological competition. Companies captured by the legislation would be required to compete against integrated foreign rivals with one hand tied behind their backs. Those firms that are the strongest drivers of U.S. innovation in AI, quantum computing, and other strategic technologies would be hamstrung or even broken apart, while foreign and state-backed producers of these same technologies would remain unscathed and seize the opportunity to increase market share, both in the U.S. and globally. …
Instead of warping antitrust law to punish a discrete group of American companies, the U.S. government should focus instead on vigorous enforcement of current law and on vocally opposing and effectively countering foreign regimes that deploy competition law and other legal and regulatory methods as industrial policy tools to unfairly target U.S. companies. The U.S. should avoid self-inflicted wounds to our competitiveness and national security that would result from turning antitrust into a weapon against dynamic and successful U.S. firms.
Consistent with this analysis, former Obama administration Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and former Trump administration Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats argued in a letter to U.S. House leadership (see here) that “imposing severe restrictions solely on U.S. giants will pave the way for a tech landscape dominated by China — echoing a position voiced by the Big Tech companies themselves.”
The national-security arguments against current antitrust legislative proposals, like the critiques of the unfounded FTC v. Qualcomm case, represent an alignment between sound antitrust policy and national-security analysis. Unfounded antitrust attacks on efficient business practices by large firms that help maintain U.S. technological leadership in key areas undermine both principled antitrust and national security.
Conclusion
Enlightened antitrust enforcement, centered on consumer welfare, can and should be read in a manner that is harmonious with national-security interests.
The cooperation between U.S. federal antitrust enforcers and the DOD in assessing defense-industry mergers and joint ventures is, generally speaking, an example of successful harmonization. This success reflects the fact that antitrust enforcers carry out their reviews of those transactions with an eye toward accommodating efficiencies that advance defense goals without sacrificing consumer welfare. Close antitrust-agency consultation with DOD is key to that approach.
Unfortunately, federal enforcement directed toward efficient intellectual-property licensing, as manifested in the Qualcomm case, reflects a disharmony between antitrust and national security. This disharmony could be eliminated if DOJ and the FTC adopted a dynamic view of intellectual property and the substantial economic-welfare benefits that flow from restrictive patent-licensing transactions.
In sum, a dynamic analysis reveals that consumer welfare is enhanced, not harmed, by not subjecting such licensing arrangements to antitrust threat. A more permissive approach to licensing is thus consistent with principled antitrust and with the national security interest of protecting and promoting strong American intellectual property (and, in particular, patent) protection. The DOJ and the FTC should keep this in mind and make appropriate changes to their IP-antitrust policies forthwith.
Finally, proposed federal antitrust legislation would bring about statutory changes that would simultaneously displace consumer welfare considerations and undercut national security interests. As such, national security is supported by rejecting unsound legislation, in order to keep in place consumer-welfare-based antitrust enforcement.
The acceptance and implementation of due-process standards confer a variety of welfare benefits on society. As Christopher Yoo, Thomas Fetzer, Shan Jiang, and Yong Huang explain, strong procedural due-process protections promote: (1) compliance with basic norms of impartiality; (2) greater accuracy of decisions; (3) stronger economic growth; (4) increased respect for government; (5) better compliance with the law; (6) better control of the bureaucracy; (7) restraints on the influence of special-interest groups; and (8) reduced corruption.
Recognizing these benefits (and consistent with the long Anglo-American tradition of recognizing due-process rights that dates back to Magna Carta), the U.S. government (USG) has long been active in advancing the adoption of due-process principles by competition-law authorities around the world, working particularly through the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the International Competition Network (ICN). More generally, due process may be seen as an aspect of the rule of law, which is as important in antitrust as in other legal areas.
The USG has supported OECD Competition Committee work on due-process safeguards which began in 2010, and which culminated in the OECD ministers’ October 2021 adoption of a “Recommendation on Transparency and Procedural Fairness in Competition Law Enforcement.” This recommendation calls for: (1) competition and predictability in competition-law enforcement; (2) independence, impartiality, and professionalism of competition authorities; (3) non-discrimination, proportionality, and consistency in the treatment of parties subject to scrutiny; (4) timeliness in handling cases; (5) meaningful engagement with parties (including parties’ right to respond and be heard); (6) protection of confidential and privileged information; (7) impartial judicial review of enforcement decisions; and (8) periodic review of policies, rules, procedures, and guidelines, to ensure that they are aligned with the preceding seven principles.
The USG has also worked through the International Competition Network (ICN) to generate support for the acceptance of due-process principles by ICN member competition agencies and their governments. In describing ICN due-process initiatives, James Rill and Jana Seidl have explained that “[t]he current challenge is to determine the extent to which the ICN, as a voluntary organization, can or should establish mechanisms to evaluate implementation of … [due process] norms by its members and even non-members.”
In 2019, the ICN announced creation of a Framework for Competition Agency Procedures (CAP), open to both ICN and non-ICN national and multinational (most prominently, the EU’s Directorate General for Competition) competition agencies. The CAP essentially embodied the principles of a June 2018 U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) framework proposal. A September 2021 CAP Report (footnotes omitted) issued at an ICN steering-group meeting noted that the CAP had 73 members, and summarized the history and goals of the CAP as follows:
The ICN CAP is a non-binding, opt-in framework. It makes use of the ICN infrastructure to maximize visibility and impact while minimizing the administrative burden for participants that operate in different legal regimes and enforcement systems with different resource constraints. The ICN CAP promotes agreement among competition agencies worldwide on fundamental procedural norms. The Multilateral Framework for Procedures project, launched by the US Department of Justice in 2018, was the starting point for what is now the ICN CAP.
The ICN CAP rests on two pillars: the first pillar is a catalogue of fundamental, consensus principles for fair and effective agency procedures that reflect the broad consensus within the global competition community. The principles address: non-discrimination, transparency, notice of investigations, timely resolution, confidentiality protections, conflicts of interest, opportunity to defend, representation, written decisions, and judicial review.
The second pillar of the ICN CAP consists of two processes: the “CAP Cooperation Process,” which facilitates a dialogue between participating agencies, and the “CAP Review Process,” which enhances transparency about the rules governing participants’ investigation and enforcement procedures.
The ICN CAP template is the practical implementation tool for the CAP. Participants each submit CAP templates, outlining how their agencies adhere to each of the CAP principles. The templates allow participants to share and explain important features of their systems, including links and other references to related materials such as legislation, rules, regulations, and guidelines. The CAP templates are a useful resource for agencies to consult when they would like to gain a quick overview of other agencies’ procedures, benchmark with peer agencies, and develop new processes and procedures.
Through the two pillars and the template, the CAP provides a framework for agencies to affirm the importance of the CAP principles, to confer with other jurisdictions, and to illustrate how their regulations and guidelines adhere to those principles.
In short, the overarching goal of the ICN CAP is to give agencies a “nudge” to implement due-process principles by encouraging consultation with peer CAP members and exposing to public view agencies’ actual due-process record. The extent to which agencies will prove willing to strengthen their commitment to due process because of the CAP, or even join the CAP, remains to be seen. (China’s competition agency, the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR), has not joined the ICN CAP.)
Antitrust, Due Process, and the Rule of Law at the DOJ and the FTC
Now that the ICN CAP and OECD recommendation are in place, it is important that the DOJ and Federal Trade Commission (FTC), as long-time international promoters of due process, lead by example in adhering to all of those multinational instruments’ principles. A failure to do so would, in addition to having negative welfare consequences for affected parties (and U.S. economic welfare), undermine USG international due-process advocacy. Less effective advocacy efforts could, of course, impose additional costs on American businesses operating overseas, by subjecting them to more procedurally defective foreign antitrust prosecutions than otherwise.
With those considerations in mind, let us briefly examine the current status of due-process protections afforded by the FTC and DOJ. Although traditionally robust procedural safeguards remain strong overall, some worrisome developments during the first year of the Biden administration merit highlighting. Those developments implicate classic procedural issues and some broader rule of law concerns. (This commentary does not examine due-process and rule-of-law issues associated with U.S. antitrust enforcement at the state level, a topic that warrants scrutiny as well.)
The FTC
New FTC leadership has taken several actions that have unfortunate due-process and rule-of-law implications (many of them through highly partisan 3-2 commission votes featuring strong dissents).
Consider the HSR Act, a Congressional compromise that gave enforcers advance notice of deals and parties the benefit of repose. HSR review [at the FTC] now faces death by a thousand cuts. We have hit month nine of a “temporary” and “brief” suspension of early termination. Letters are sent to parties when their waiting periods expire, warning them to close at their own risk. Is the investigation ongoing? Is there a set amount of time the parties should wait? No one knows! The new prior approval policy will flip the burden of proof and capture many deals below statutory thresholds. And sprawling investigations covering non-competition concerns exceed our Clayton Act authority.
These policy changes impose a gratuitous tax on merger activity – anticompetitive and procompetitive alike. There are costs to interfering with the market for corporate control, especially as we attempt to rebound from the pandemic. If new leadership wants the HSR Act rewritten, they should persuade Congress to amend it rather than taking matters into their own hands.
Uncertainty and delay surrounding merger proposals and new merger-review processes that appear to flaunt tension with statutory commands are FTC “innovations” that are in obvious tension with due-process guarantees.
FTC rulemaking initiatives have due-process and rule-of-law problems. As Commissioner Wilson noted (footnotes omitted), “[t]he [FTC] majority changed our rules of practice to limit stakeholder input and consolidate rulemaking power in the chair’s office. In Commissioner [Noah] Phillips’ words, these changes facilitate more rules, but not better ones.” Lack of stakeholder input offends due process. Even more serious, however, is the fact that far-reaching FTC competition rules are being planned (see the December 2021 FTC Statement of Regulatory Priorities). FTC competition rulemaking is likely beyond its statutory authority and would fail a cost-benefit analysis (see here). Moreover, even if competition rules survived, they would offend the rule of law (see here) by “lead[ing] to disparate legal treatment of a firm’s business practices, depending upon whether the FTC or the U.S. Justice Department was the investigating agency.”
The FTC’s July 2021 withdrawal of its 2015 “Statement of Enforcement Principles Regarding ‘Unfair Methods of Competition’ [UMC] Under Section 5 of the FTC Act” likewise undercuts the rule of law (see here). The 2015 Statement had tended to increase predictability in enforcement by tying the FTC’s exercise of its UMC authority to well-understood antitrust rule-of-reason principles and the generally accepted consumer welfare standard. By withdrawing the statement (over the dissents of Commissioners Wilson and Phillips) without promulgating a new policy, the FTC majority reduced enforcement guidance and generated greater legal uncertainty. The notion that the FTC may apply the UMC concept in an unbounded fashion lacks legal principle and threatens to chill innovative and welfare-enhancing business conduct.
Finally, the FTC’s abrupt September 2021 withdrawal of its approval of jointly issued 2020 DOJ-FTC Vertical Merger Guidelines (again over a dissent by Commissioners Wilson and Phillips), offends the rule of law in three ways. As Commissioner Wilson explains, it engenders confusion as to FTC policies regarding vertical-merger analysis going forward; it appears to reflect flawed economic thinking regarding vertical integration (which may in turn lead to enforcement error); and it creates a potential tension between DOJ and FTC approaches to vertical acquisitions (the third concern may disappear if and when DOJ and FTC agree to new merger guidelines).
The DOJ
As of now, the Biden administration DOJ has not taken as many actions that implicate rule-of-law and due-process concerns. Two recent initiatives with significant rule-of-law implications, however, deserve mention.
First, on Dec. 6, 2021, DOJ suddenly withdrew a 2019 policy statement on “Licensing Negotiations and Remedies for Standards-Essential Patents Subject to Voluntary F/RAND Commitments.” In so doing, DOJ simultaneously released a new draft policy statement on the same topic, and requested public comments. The timing of the withdrawal was peculiar, since the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)—who had joined with DOJ in the 2019 policy statement (which itself had replaced a 2013 policy statement)—did not yet have new Senate-confirmed leadership and were apparently not involved in the withdrawal. What’s more, DOJ originally requested that public comments be filed by the beginning of January, a ridiculously short amount of time for such a complex topic. (It later relented and established an early February deadline.) More serious than these procedural irregularities, however, are two new features of the Draft Policy Statement: (1) its delineation of a suggested private-negotiation framework for patent licensing; and (2) its assertion that standard essential patent (SEP) holders essentially forfeit the right to seek an injunction. These provisions, though not binding, may have a coercive effect on some private negotiators, and they problematically insert the government into matters that are appropriately the province of private businesses and the courts. Such an involvement by government enforcers in private negotiations, which treats one category of patents (SEPs) less favorably than others, raises rule-of-law questions.
Second, in January 2018, DOJ and the FTC jointly issued a “Request for Information on Merger Enforcement” [RIF] that contemplated the issuance of new merger guidelines (see my recent analysis, here). The RIF was chock full of numerous queries to prospective commentators that generally reflected a merger-skeptical tone. This suggests a predisposition to challenge mergers that, if embodied in guidelines language, could discourage some (or perhaps many) non-problematic consolidations from being proposed. New merger guidelines that impliedly were anti-merger would be a departure from previous guidelines, which stated in neutral fashion that they would consider both the anticompetitive risks and procompetitive benefits of mergers being reviewed. A second major concern is that the enforcement agencies might produce long and detailed guidelines containing all or most of the many theories of competitive harm found in the RIF. Overly complex guidelines would not produce any true guidance to private parties, inconsistent with the principle that individuals should be informed what the law is. Such guidelines also would give enforcers greater flexibility to selectively pick and choose theories best suited to block particular mergers. As such, the guidelines might be viewed by judges as justifications for arbitrary, rather than principled, enforcement, at odds with the rule of law.
It is to be hoped that the FTC and DOJ will take into account this international dimension in assessing the merits of antitrust “reforms” now under consideration. New enforcement policies that sow delay and uncertainty undermine the rule of law and are inconsistent with due-process principles. The consumer welfare harm that may flow from such deficient policies may be substantial. The agency missteps identified above should be rectified and new polices that would weaken due-process protections and undermine the rule of law should be avoided.
The Jan. 18 Request for Information on Merger Enforcement (RFI)—issued jointly by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ)—sets forth 91 sets of questions (subsumed under 15 headings) that provide ample opportunity for public comment on a large range of topics.
Before chasing down individual analytic rabbit holes related to specific questions, it would be useful to reflect on the “big picture” policy concerns raised by this exercise (but not hinted at in the questions). Viewed from a broad policy perspective, the RFI initiative risks undermining the general respect that courts have accorded merger guidelines over the years, as well as disincentivizing economically beneficial business consolidations.
Policy concerns that flow from various features of the RFI, which could undermine effective merger enforcement, are highlighted below. These concerns counsel against producing overly detailed guidelines that adopt a merger-skeptical orientation.
The RFI Reflects the False Premise that Competition is Declining in the United States
The FTC press release that accompanied the RFI’s release made clear that a supposed weakening of competition under the current merger-guidelines regime is a key driver of the FTC and DOJ interest in new guidelines:
Today, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division launched a joint public inquiry aimed at strengthening enforcement against illegal mergers. Recent evidence indicates that many industries across the economy are becoming more concentrated and less competitive – imperiling choice and economic gains for consumers, workers, entrepreneurs, and small businesses.
This premise is not supported by the facts. Based on a detailed literature review, Chapter 6 of the 2020 Economic Report of the President concluded that “the argument that the U.S. economy is suffering from insufficient competition is built on a weak empirical foundation and questionable assumptions.” More specifically, the 2020 Economic Report explained:
Research purporting to document a pattern of increasing concentration and increasing markups uses data on segments of the economy that are far too broad to offer any insights about competition, either in specific markets or in the economy at large. Where data do accurately identify issues of concentration or supercompetitive profits, additional analysis is needed to distinguish between alternative explanations, rather than equating these market indicators with harmful market power.
Soon to-be-published quantitative research by Robert Kulick of NERA Economic Consulting and the American Enterprise Institute, presented at the Jan. 26 Mercatus Antitrust Forum, is consistent with the 2020 Economic Report’s findings. Kulick stressed that there was no general trend toward increasing industrial concentration in the U.S. economy from 2002 to 2017. In particular, industrial concentration has been declining since 2007; the Herfindahl–Hirschman index (HHI) for manufacturing has declined significantly since 2002; and the economywide four-firm concentration ratio (CR4) in 2017 was approximately the same as in 2002.
Even in industries where concentration may have risen, “the evidence does not support claims that concentration is persistent or harmful.” In that regard, Kulick’s research finds that higher-concentration industries tend to become less concentrated, while lower-concentration industries tend to become more concentrated over time; increases in industrial concentration are associated with economic growth and job creation, particularly for high-growth industries; and rising industrial concentration may be driven by increasing market competition.
In short, the strongest justification for issuing new merger guidelines is based on false premises: an alleged decline in competition within the Unites States. Given this reality, the adoption of revised guidelines designed to “ratchet up” merger enforcement would appear highly questionable.
The RFI Strikes a Merger-Skeptical Tone Out of Touch with Modern Mainstream Antitrust Scholarship
The overall tone of the RFI reflects a skeptical view of the potential benefits of mergers. It ignores overarching beneficial aspects of mergers, which include reallocating scarce resources to higher-valued uses (through the market for corporate control) and realizing standard efficiencies of various sorts (including cost-based efficiencies and incentive effects, such as the elimination of double marginalization through vertical integration). Mergers also generate benefits by bringing together complementary assets and by generating synergies of various sorts, including the promotion of innovation and scaling up the fruits of research and development. (See here, for example.)
What’s more, as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has explained, “[e]vidence suggests that vertical mergers are generally pro-competitive, as they are driven by efficiency-enhancing motives such as improving vertical co-ordination and realizing economies of scope.”
Given the manifold benefits of mergers in general, the negative and merger-skeptical tone of the RFI is regrettable. It not only ignores sound economics, but it is at odds with recent pronouncements by the FTC and DOJ. Notably, the 2010 DOJ-FTC Horizontal Merger Guidelines (issued by Obama administration enforcers) struck a neutral tone. Those guidelines recognized the duty to challenge anticompetitive mergers while noting the public interest in avoiding unnecessary interference with non-anticompetitive mergers (“[t]he Agencies seek to identify and challenge competitively harmful mergers while avoiding unnecessary interference with mergers that are either competitively beneficial or neutral”). The same neutral approach is found in the 2020 DOJ-FTC Vertical Merger Guidelines (“the Agencies use a consistent set of facts and assumptions to evaluate both the potential competitive harm from a vertical merger and the potential benefits to competition”).
The RFI, however, expresses no concern about unnecessary government interference, and strongly emphasizes the potential shortcomings of the existing guidelines in questioning whether they “adequately equip enforcers to identify and proscribe unlawful, anticompetitive mergers.” Merger-skepticism is also reflected throughout the RFI’s 91 sets of questions. A close reading reveals that they are generally phrased in ways that implicitly assume competitive problems or reject potential merger justifications.
For example, the questions addressing efficiencies, under RFI heading 14, casts efficiencies in a generally negative light. Thus, the RFI asks whether “the [existing] guidelines’ approach to efficiencies [is] consistent with the prevailing legal framework as enacted by Congress and interpreted by the courts,” citing the statement in FTC v. Procter & Gamble (1967) that “[p]ossible economies cannot be used as a defense to illegality.”
The view that antitrust disfavors mergers that enhance efficiencies (the “efficiencies offense”) has been roundly rejected by mainstream antitrust scholarship (see, for example, here, here, and here). It may be assumed that today’s Supreme Court (which has deemed consumer welfare to be the lodestone of antitrust enforcement since Reiter v. Sonotone (1979)) would give short shrift to an “efficiencies offense” justification for a merger challenge.
Another efficiencies-related question, under RFI heading 14.d, may in application fly in the face of sound market-oriented economics: “Where a merger is expected to generate cost savings via the elimination of ‘excess’ or ‘redundant’ capacity or workers, should the guidelines treat these savings as cognizable ‘efficiencies’?”
Consider a merger that generates synergies and thereby expands and/or raises the quality of goods and services produced with reduced capacity and fewer workers. This merger would allow these resources to be allocated to higher-valued uses elsewhere in the economy, yielding greater economic surplus for consumers and producers. But there is the risk that such a merger could be viewed unfavorably under new merger guidelines that were revised in light of this question. (Although heading 14.d includes a separate question regarding capacity reductions that have the potential to reduce supply resilience or product or service quality, it is not stated that this provision should be viewed as a limitation on the first sentence.)
The RFI’s discussion of topics other than efficiencies similarly sends the message that existing guidelines are too “pro-merger.” Thus, for example, under RFI heading 5 (“presumptions”), one finds the rhetorical question: “[d]o the [existing] guidelines adequately identify mergers that are presumptively unlawful under controlling case law?”
This question answers itself, by citing to the Philadelphia National Bank (1963) statement that “[w]ithout attempting to specify the smallest market share which would still be considered to threaten undue concentration, we are clear that 30% presents that threat.” This statement predates all of the merger guidelines and is out of step with the modern economic analysis of mergers, which the existing guidelines embody. It would, if taken seriously, threaten a huge number of proposed mergers that, until now, have not been subject to second-request review by the DOJ and FTC. As Judge Douglas Ginsburg and former Commissioner Joshua Wright have explained:
The practical effect of the PNB presumption is to shift the burden of proof from the plaintiff, where it rightfully resides, to the defendant, without requiring evidence – other than market shares – that the proposed merger is likely to harm competition. . . . The presumption ought to go the way of the agencies’ policy decision to drop reliance upon the discredited antitrust theories approved by the courts in such cases as Brown Shoe, Von’s Grocery, and Utah Pie. Otherwise, the agencies will ultimately have to deal with the tension between taking advantage of a favorable presumption in litigation and exerting a reformative influence on the direction of merger law.
By inviting support for PNB-style thinking, RFI heading 5’s lead question effectively rejects the economic effects-based analysis that has been central to agency merger analysis for decades. Guideline revisions that downplay effects in favor of mere concentration would likely be viewed askance by reviewing courts (and almost certainly would be rejected by the Supreme Court, as currently constituted, if the occasion arose).
These particularly striking examples are illustrative of the questioning tone regarding existing merger analysis that permeates the RFI.
New Merger Guidelines, if Issued, Should Not Incorporate the Multiplicity of Issues Embodied in the RFI
The 91 sets of questions in the RFI read, in large part, like a compendium of theoretical harms to the working of markets that might be associated with mergers. While these questions may be of general academic interest, and may shed some light on particular merger investigations, most of them should not be incorporated into guidelines.
As Justice Stephen Breyer has pointed out, antitrust is a legal regime that must account for administrative practicalities. Then-Judge Breyer described the nature of the problem in his 1983 Barry Wright opinion (affirming the dismissal of a Sherman Act Section 2 complaint based on “unreasonably low” prices):
[W]hile technical economic discussion helps to inform the antitrust laws, those laws cannot precisely replicate the economists’ (sometimes conflicting) views. For, unlike economics, law is an administrative system the effects of which depend upon the content of rules and precedents only as they are applied by judges and juries in courts and by lawyers advising their clients. Rules that seek to embody every economic complexity and qualification may well, through the vagaries of administration, prove counter-productive, undercutting the very economic ends they seek to serve.
It follows that any effort to include every theoretical merger-related concern in new merger guidelines would undercut their (presumed) overarching purpose, which is providing useful guidance to the private sector. All-inclusive “guidelines” in reality provide no guidance at all. Faced with a laundry list of possible problems that might prompt the FTC or DOJ to oppose a merger, private parties would face enormous uncertainty, which could deter them from proposing a large number of procompetitive, welfare-enhancing or welfare-neutral consolidations. This would “undercut the very economic ends” of promoting competition that is served by Section 7 enforcement.
Furthermore, all-inclusive merger guidelines could be seen by judges as undermining the rule of law (see here, for example). If DOJ and FTC were able to “pick and choose” at will from an enormously wide array of considerations to justify opposing a proposed merger, they could be seen as engaged in arbitrary enforcement, rather than in a careful weighing of evidence aimed at condemning only anticompetitive transactions. This would be at odds with the promise of fair and dispassionate enforcement found in the 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines, namely, to “seek to identify and challenge competitively harmful mergers while avoiding unnecessary interference with mergers that are either competitively beneficial or neutral.”
Up until now, federal courts have virtually always implicitly deferred to (and not questioned) the application of merger-guideline principles by the DOJ and FTC. The agencies have won or lost cases based on courts’ weighing of particular factual and economic evidence, not on whether guideline principles should have been applied by the enforcers.
One would expect courts to react very differently, however, to cases brought in light of ridiculously detailed “guidelines” that did not provide true guidance (particularly if they were heavy on competitive harm possibilities and discounted efficiencies). The agencies’ selective reliance on particular anticompetitive theories could be seen as exercises in arbitrary “pre-cooked” condemnations, not dispassionate enforcement. As such, the courts would tend to be far more inclined to reject (or accord far less deference to) the new guidelines in evaluating agency merger challenges. Even transactions that would have been particularly compelling candidates for condemnation under prior guidelines could be harder to challenge successfully, due to the taint of the new guidelines.
In short, the adoption of highly detailed guidelines that emphasize numerous theories of harm would likely undermine the effectiveness of DOJ and FTC merger enforcement, the precise opposite of what the agencies would have intended.
New Merger Guidelines, if Issued, Should Avoid Relying on Outdated Case Law and Novel Section 7 Theories, and Should Give Due Credit to Economic Efficiencies
The DOJ and FTC could, of course, acknowledge the problem of administrability and issue more straightforward guideline revisions, of comparable length and detail to prior guidelines. If they choose to do so, they would be well-advised to eschew relying on dated precedents and novel Section 7 theories. They should also give due credit to efficiencies. Seemingly biased guidelines would undermine merger enforcement, not strengthen it.
As discussed above, the RFI’s implicitly favorable references to Philadelphia National Bank and Procter & Gamble are at odds with contemporary economics-based antitrust thinking, which has been accepted by the federal courts. The favorable treatment of those antediluvian holdings, and Brown Shoe Co. v. United States (1962) (another horribly dated case cited multiple times in the RFI), would do much to discredit new guidelines.
In that regard, the suggestion in RFI heading 1 that existing merger guidelines may not “faithfully track the statutory text, legislative history, and established case law around merger enforcement” touts the Brown Shoe and PNB concerns with a “trend toward concentration” and “the danger of subverting congressional intent by permitting a too-broad economic investigation.”
New guidelines that focus on (or even give lip service to) a “trend” toward concentration and eschew overly detailed economic analyses (as opposed, perhaps, to purely concentration-based negative rules of thumb?) would predictably come in for judicial scorn as economically unfounded. Such references would do as much (if not more) to ensure judicial rejection of enforcement-agency guidelines as endless lists of theoretically possible sources of competitive harm, discussed previously.
Of particular concern are those references that implicitly reject the need to consider efficiencies, which is key to modern enlightened merger evaluations. It is ludicrous to believe that a majority of the current Supreme Court would have a merger-analysis epiphany and decide that the RFI’s preferred interventionist reading of Section 7 statutory language and legislative history trumps decades of economically centered consumer-welfare scholarship and agency guidelines.
Herbert Hovenkamp, author of the leading American antitrust treatise and a scholar who has been cited countless times by the Supreme Court, recently put it well (in an article coauthored with Carl Shapiro):
When the FTC investigates vertical and horizontal mergers will it now take the position that efficiencies are irrelevant, even if they are proven? If so, the FTC will face embarrassing losses in court.
Reviewing courts wound no doubt take heed of this statement in assessing any future merger guidelines that rely on dated and discredited cases or that minimize efficiencies.
New Guidelines, if Issued, Should Give Due Credit to Efficiencies
Heading 14 of the RFI—listing seven sets of questions that deal with efficiencies—is in line with the document’s implicitly negative portrayal of mergers. The heading begins inauspiciously, with a question that cites Procter & Gamble in suggesting that the current guidelines’ approach to efficiencies is “[in]consistent with the prevailing legal framework as enacted by Congress and interpreted by the courts.” As explained above, such an anti-efficiencies reference would be viewed askance by most, if not all, reviewing judges.
Other queries in heading 14 also view efficiencies as problematic. They suggest that efficiency claims should be treated negatively because efficiency claims are not always realized after the fact. But merger activity is a private-sector search process, and the ability to predict ex post effects with perfect accuracy is an inevitable part of market activity. Using such a natural aspect of markets as an excuse to ignore efficiencies would prevent many economically desirable consolidations from being achieved.
Furthermore, the suggestion under heading 14 that parties should have to show with certainty that cognizable efficiencies could not have been achieved through alternative means asks the impossible. Theoreticians may be able to dream up alternative means by which efficiencies might have been achieved (say, through convoluted contracts), but such constructs may not be practical in real-world settings. Requiring businesses to follow dubious theoretical approaches to achieve legitimate business ends, rather than allowing them to enter into arrangements they favor that appear efficient, would manifest inappropriate government interference in markets. (It would be just another example of the “pretense of knowledge” that Friedrich Hayek brilliantly described in his 1974 Nobel Prize lecture.)
Other questions under heading 14 raise concerns about the lack of discussion of possible “inefficiencies” in current guidelines, and speculate about possible losses of “product or service quality” due to otherwise efficient reductions in physical capacity and employment. Such theoretical musings offer little guidance to the private sector, and further cast in a negative light potential real resource savings.
Rather than incorporate the unhelpful theoretical efficiencies critiques under heading 14, the agencies should consider a more helpful approach to clarifying the evaluation of efficiencies in new guidelines. Such a clarification could be based on Commissioner Christine Wilson’s helpful discussion of merger efficiencies in recent writings (see, for example, here and here). Wilson has appropriately called for the symmetric treatment of both the potential harms and benefits arising from mergers, explaining that “the agencies readily credit harms but consistently approach potential benefits with extreme skepticism.”
She and Joshua Wright have also explained (see here, here, and here) that overly narrow product-market definitions may sometimes preclude consideration of substantial “out-of-market” efficiencies that arise from certain mergers. The consideration of offsetting “out-of-market” efficiencies that greatly outweigh competitive harms might warrant inclusion in new guidelines.
The FTC and DOJ could be heading for a merger-enforcement train wreck if they adopt new guidelines that incorporate the merger-skeptical tone and excruciating level of detail found in the RFI. This approach would yield a lengthy and uninformative laundry list of potential competitive problems that would allow the agencies to selectively pick competitive harm “stories” best adapted to oppose particular mergers, in tension with the rule of law.
Far from “strengthening” merger enforcement, such new guidelines would lead to economically harmful business uncertainty and would severely undermine judicial respect for the federal merger-enforcement process. The end result would be a “lose-lose” for businesses, for enforcers, and for the American economy.
Conclusion
If the agencies enact new guidelines, they should be relatively short and straightforward, designed to give private parties the clearest possible picture of general agency enforcement intentions. In particular, new guidelines should:
Eschew references to dated and discredited case law;
Adopt a neutral tone that acknowledges the beneficial aspects of mergers;
Recognize the duty to challenge anticompetitive mergers, while at the same time noting the public interest in avoiding unnecessary interference with non-anticompetitive mergers (consistent with the 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines); and
Acknowledge the importance of efficiencies, treating them symmetrically with competitive harm and according appropriate weight to countervailing out-of-market efficiencies (a distinct improvement over existing enforcement policy).
Merger enforcement should continue to be based on fact-based case-specific evaluations, informed by sound economics. Populist nostrums that treat mergers with suspicion and that ignore their beneficial aspects should be rejected. Such ideas are at odds with current scholarly thinking and judicial analysis, and should be relegated to the scrap heap of outmoded and bad public policies.
As a new year dawns, the Biden administration remains fixated on illogical, counterproductive “big is bad” nostrums.
Noted economist and former Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers correctly stressed recently that using antitrust to fight inflation represents “science denial,” tweeting that:
There is no basis in economics for expecting increases in demand to systematically larger price increases for monopolies or oligopolies than competitive industries. ,
In his extended Twitter thread, Summers notes that labor shortages are the primary cause of inflation over time and that lowering tariffs, paring back import restrictions (such as the Buy America Act), and reducing regulatory delays are vital to combat inflation.
Summers’ points, of course, are right on the mark. Indeed, labor shortages, supply-chain issues, and a dramatic increase in regulatory burdens have been key to the dramatic run-up of prices during the Biden administration’s first year. Reducing the weight of government on the private sector and thereby enhancing incentives for increased investment, labor participation, and supply are the appropriate weapons to slow price rises and incentivize economic growth.
More specifically, administration policies can be pinpointed as the cause, not the potential solution to, rapid price increases in specific sectors, particularly the oil and gas industry. As I recently commented, policies that disincentivize new energy production, and fail to lift excessive regulatory burdens, have been a key factor in sparking rises in gasoline prices. Administration claims that anticompetitive activity is behind these prices increases should be discounted. New Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigations of oil and gas companies would waste resources and increase already large governmental burdens on those firms.
The administration, nevertheless, appears committed to using antitrust as an anti-inflationary “tool” against “big business” (or perhaps, really, as a symbolic hammer to shift blame to the private sector for rising prices). Recent pronouncements about combatting “big meat” are a case in point.
The New ‘Big Meat’ Crusade
Part of the administration’s crusade against “big meat” involves providing direct government financial support for favored firms. A U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) plan to spend up to $1 billion to assist smaller meat processors is a subsidy that artificially favors one group of competitors. This misguided policy, which bears the scent of special-interest favoritism, wastes taxpayer dollars and distorts free-market outcomes. It will do nothing to cure supply and regulatory problems that affect rising meat prices. It will, however, misallocate resources.
The other key aspect of the big meat initiative smacks more of problematic, old-style, economics-free antitrust. It centers on: (1) threatening possible antitrust actions against four large meat processors based principally on their size and market share; and (2) initiating a planned rulemaking under the Packers and Stockyards Act. (That rulemaking was foreshadowed by language in the July 2021 Biden Administration Executive Order on Competition.)
The administration’s apparent focus on the “dominance” of four large meatpacking firms (which have the temerity to collectively hold greater than 50% market shares in the hog, cattle, and chicken sectors) and the 120% jump in their gross profits since the pandemic began is troubling. It echoes the structuralist “big is bad” philosophy of the 1950s and 1960s. In and of itself, large market share is not, of course, an antitrust problem, nor are large gross profits. Rather, those metrics typically signal a particular firm’s superior efficiency relative to the competition. (Gross profit “reflects the efficiency of a business in terms of making use of its labor, raw material and other supplies.”) Antitrust investigations of firms merely because they are large would inefficiently bloat those companies’ costs and discourage them from engaging in cost-reducing new capacity and production improvements. This would tend to raise, not lower, prices by major firms. It thus would lower consumer welfare, a result at odds with the guiding policy goal of antitrust, which is to promote consumer welfare.
The administration’s announcement that the USDA “will also propose rules this year to strengthen enforcement of the Packers and Stockyards Act” is troublesome. That act, dating back to 1921, uses broad terms that extend beyond antitrust law (such as a prohibition on “giv[ing] any undue or unreasonable preference or advantage to any particular person”) and threatens to penalize efficient conduct by individual competitors. “Ratcheting up” enforcement under this act also could undermine business efficiency and paradoxically raise, not lower, prices.
Obviously, the specifics of the forthcoming proposed rules have not yet been revealed. Nevertheless, the administration’s “big is bad” approach to “big meat” strongly signals that one may expect rules to generate new costly and inefficient restrictions on meat-packer conduct. Such restrictions, of course, would be at odds with vibrant competition and consumer-welfare enhancement.
This is not to say, of course, that meat packing should be immune from antitrust attention. Such scrutiny, however, should not be transfixed by “big is bad” concerns. Rather, it should center on the core antitrust goal of combatting harmful business conduct that unreasonably restrains competition and reduces consumer welfare. A focus on ferreting out collusive agreements among meat processors, such as price-fixing schemes, should have pride of place. The U.S. Justice Department’s already successful ongoing investigation into price fixing in the broiler-chicken industry is precisely the sort of antitrust initiative on which the administration should expend its scarce enforcement resources.
Conclusion
In sum, the Biden administration could do a lot of good in antitrust land if it would only set aside its nostalgic “big is bad” philosophy. It should return to the bipartisan enlightened understanding that antitrust is a consumer-welfare prescription that is based on sound and empirically based economics and is concerned with economically inefficient conduct that softens or destroys competition.
If it wants to stray beyond mere enforcement, the administration could turn its focus toward dismantling welfare-reducing anticompetitive federal regulatory schemes, rather than adding to private-sector regulatory burdens. For more about how to do this, we recommend that the administration consult a just-released Mercatus Center policy brief that Andrew Mercado and I co-authored.
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