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[TOTM: The following is part of a digital symposium by TOTM guests and authors on Antitrust’s Uncertain Future: Visions of Competition in the New Regulatory Landscape. Information on the authors and the entire series of posts is available here.]

Things are heating up in the antitrust world. There is considerable pressure to pass the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) before the congressional recess in August—a short legislative window before members of Congress shift their focus almost entirely to campaigning for the mid-term elections. While it would not be impossible to advance the bill after the August recess, it would be a steep uphill climb.

But whether it passes or not, some of the damage from AICOA may already be done. The bill has moved the antitrust dialogue that will harm innovation and consumers. In this post, I will first explain AICOA’s fundamental flaws. Next, I discuss the negative impact that the legislation is likely to have if passed, even if courts and agencies do not aggressively enforce its provisions. Finally, I show how AICOA has already provided an intellectual victory for the approach articulated in the European Union (EU)’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). It has built momentum for a dystopian regulatory framework to break up and break into U.S. superstar firms designated as “gatekeepers” at the expense of innovation and consumers.

The Unseen of AICOA

AICOA’s drafters argue that, once passed, it will deliver numerous economic benefits. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.)—the bill’s main sponsor—has stated that it will “ensure small businesses and entrepreneurs still have the opportunity to succeed in the digital marketplace. This bill will do just that while also providing consumers with the benefit of greater choice online.”

Section 3 of the bill would provide “business users” of the designated “covered platforms” with a wide range of entitlements. This includes preventing the covered platform from offering any services or products that a business user could provide (the so-called “self-preferencing” prohibition); allowing a business user access to the covered platform’s proprietary data; and an entitlement for business users to have “preferred placement” on a covered platform without having to use any of that platform’s services.

These entitlements would provide non-platform businesses what are effectively claims on the platform’s proprietary assets, notwithstanding the covered platform’s own investments to collect data, create services, and invent products—in short, the platform’s innovative efforts. As such, AICOA is redistributive legislation that creates the conditions for unfair competition in the name of “fair” and “open” competition. It treats the behavior of “covered platforms” differently than identical behavior by their competitors, without considering the deterrent effect such a framework will have on consumers and innovation. Thus, AICOA offers rent-seeking rivals a formidable avenue to reap considerable benefits at the expense of the innovators thanks to the weaponization of antitrust to subvert, not improve, competition.

In mandating that covered platforms make their data and proprietary assets freely available to “business users” and rivals, AICOA undermines the underpinning of free markets to pursue the misguided goal of “open markets.” The inevitable result will be the tragedy of the commons. Absent the covered platforms having the ability to benefit from their entrepreneurial endeavors, the law no longer encourages innovation. As Joseph Schumpeter seminally predicted: “perfect competition implies free entry into every industry … But perfectly free entry into a new field may make it impossible to enter it at all.”

To illustrate, if business users can freely access, say, a special status on the covered platforms’ ancillary services without having to use any of the covered platform’s services (as required under Section 3(a)(5)), then platforms are disincentivized from inventing zero-priced services, since they cannot cross-monetize these services with existing services. Similarly, if, under Section 3(a)(1) of the bill, business users can stop covered platforms from pre-installing or preferencing an app whenever they happen to offer a similar app, then covered platforms will be discouraged from investing in or creating new apps. Thus, the bill would generate a considerable deterrent effect for covered platforms to invest, invent, and innovate.

AICOA’s most detrimental consequences may not be immediately apparent; they could instead manifest in larger and broader downstream impacts that will be difficult to undo. As the 19th century French economist Frederic Bastiat wrote: “a law gives birth not only to an effect but to a series of effects. Of these effects, the first only is immediate; it manifests itself simultaneously with its cause—it is seen. The others unfold in succession—they are not seen it is well for, if they are foreseen … it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good, which will be followed by a great evil to come, while the true economist pursues a great good to come,—at the risk of a small present evil.”

To paraphrase Bastiat, AICOA offers ill-intentioned rivals a “small present good”–i.e., unconditional access to the platforms’ proprietary assets–while society suffers the loss of a greater good–i.e., incentives to innovate and welfare gains to consumers. The logic is akin to those who advocate the abolition of intellectual-property rights: The immediate (and seen) gain is obvious, concerning the dissemination of innovation and a reduction of the price of innovation, while the subsequent (and unseen) evil remains opaque, as the destruction of the institutional premises for innovation will generate considerable long-term innovation costs.

Fundamentally, AICOA weakens the benefits of scale by pursuing vertical disintegration of the covered platforms to the benefit of short-term static competition. In the long term, however, the bill would dampen dynamic competition, ultimately harming consumer welfare and the capacity for innovation. The measure’s opportunity costs will prevent covered platforms’ innovations from benefiting other business users or consumers. They personify the “unseen,” as Bastiat put it: “[they are] always in the shadow, and who, personifying what is not seen, [are] an essential element of the problem. [They make] us understand how absurd it is to see a profit in destruction.”

The costs could well amount to hundreds of billions of dollars for the U.S. economy, even before accounting for the costs of deterred innovation. The unseen is costly, the seen is cheap.

A New Robinson-Patman Act?

Most antitrust laws are terse, vague, and old: The Sherman Act of 1890, the Federal Trade Commission Act, and the Clayton Act of 1914 deal largely in generalities, with considerable deference for courts to elaborate in a common-law tradition on the specificities of what “restraints of trade,” “monopolization,” or “unfair methods of competition” mean.

In 1936, Congress passed the Robinson-Patman Act, designed to protect competitors from the then-disruptive competition of large firms who—thanks to scale and practices such as price differentiation—upended traditional incumbents to the benefit of consumers. Passed after “Congress made no factual investigation of its own, and ignored evidence that conflicted with accepted rhetoric,” the law prohibits price differentials that would benefit buyers, and ultimately consumers, in the name of less vigorous competition from more efficient, more productive firms. Indeed, under the Robinson-Patman Act, manufacturers cannot give a bigger discount to a distributor who would pass these savings onto consumers, even if the distributor performs extra services relative to others.

Former President Gerald Ford declared in 1975 that the Robinson-Patman Act “is a leading example of [a law] which restrain[s] competition and den[ies] buyers’ substantial savings…It discourages both large and small firms from cutting prices, making it harder for them to expand into new markets and pass on to customers the cost-savings on large orders.” Despite this, calls to amend or repeal the Robinson-Patman Act—supported by, among others, competition scholars like Herbert Hovenkamp and Robert Bork—have failed.

In the 1983 Abbott decision, Justice Lewis Powell wrote: “The Robinson-Patman Act has been widely criticized, both for its effects and for the policies that it seeks to promote. Although Congress is aware of these criticisms, the Act has remained in effect for almost half a century.”

Nonetheless, the act’s enforcement dwindled, thanks to wise reactions from antitrust agencies and the courts. While it is seldom enforced today, the act continues to create considerable legal uncertainty, as it raises regulatory risks for companies who engage in behavior that may conflict with its provisions. Indeed, many of the same so-called “neo-Brandeisians” who support passage of AICOA also advocate reinvigorating Robinson-Patman. More specifically, the new FTC majority has expressed that it is eager to revitalize Robinson-Patman, even as the law protects less efficient competitors. In other words, the Robinson-Patman Act is a zombie law: dead, but still moving.

Even if the antitrust agencies and courts ultimately follow the same path of regulatory and judicial restraint on AICOA that they have on Robinson-Patman, the legal uncertainty its existence will engender will act as a powerful deterrent on disruptive competition that dynamically benefits consumers and innovation. In short, like the Robinson-Patman Act, antitrust agencies and courts will either enforce AICOA–thus, generating the law’s adverse effects on consumers and innovation–or they will refrain from enforcing AICOA–but then, the legal uncertainty shall lead to unseen, harmful effects on innovation and consumers.

For instance, the bill’s prohibition on “self-preferencing” in Section 3(a)(1) will prevent covered platforms from offering consumers new products and services that happen to compete with incumbents’ products and services. Self-preferencing often is a pro-competitive, pro-efficiency practice that companies widely adopt—a reality that AICOA seems to ignore.

Would AICOA prevent, e.g., Apple from offering a bundled subscription to Apple One, which includes Apple Music, so that the company can effectively compete with incumbents like Spotify? As with Robinson-Patman, antitrust agencies and courts will have to choose whether to enforce a productivity-decreasing law, or to ignore congressional intent but, in the process, generate significant legal uncertainties.

Judge Bork once wrote that Robinson-Patman was “antitrust’s least glorious hour” because, rather than improving competition and innovation, it reduced competition from firms who happen to be more productive, innovative, and efficient than their rivals. The law infamously protected inefficient competitors rather than competition. But from the perspective of legislative history perspective, AICOA may be antitrust’s new “least glorious hour.” If adopted, it will adversely affect innovation and consumers, as opportunistic rivals will be able to prevent cost-saving practices by the covered platforms.

As with Robinson-Patman, calls to amend or repeal AICOA may follow its passage. But Robinson-Patman Act illustrates the path dependency of bad antitrust laws. However costly and damaging, AICOA would likely stay in place, with regular calls for either stronger or weaker enforcement, depending on whether the momentum shifts from populist antitrust or antitrust more consistent with dynamic competition.

Victory of the Brussels Effect

The future of AICOA does not bode well for markets, either from a historical perspective or from a comparative-law perspective. The EU’s DMA similarly targets a few large tech platforms but it is broader, harsher, and swifter. In the competition between these two examples of self-inflicted techlash, AICOA will pale in comparison with the DMA. Covered platforms will be forced to align with the DMA’s obligations and prohibitions.

Consequently, AICOA is a victory of the DMA and of the Brussels effect in general. AICOA effectively crowns the DMA as the all-encompassing regulatory assault on digital gatekeepers. While members of Congress have introduced numerous antitrust bills aimed at targeting gatekeepers, the DMA is the one-stop-shop regulation that encompasses multiple antitrust bills and imposes broader prohibitions and stronger obligations on gatekeepers. In other words, the DMA outcompetes AICOA.

Commentators seldom lament the extraterritorial impact of European regulations. Regarding regulating digital gatekeepers, U.S. officials should have pushed back against the innovation-stifling, welfare-decreasing effects of the DMA on U.S. tech companies, in particular, and on U.S. technological innovation, in general. To be fair, a few U.S. officials, such as Commerce Secretary Gina Raimundo, did voice opposition to the DMA. Indeed, well-aware of the DMA’s protectionist intent and its potential to break up and break into tech platforms, Raimundo expressed concerns that antitrust should not be about protecting competitors and deterring innovation but rather about protecting the process of competition, however disruptive may be.

The influential neo-Brandeisians and radical antitrust reformers, however, lashed out at Raimundo and effectively shamed the Biden administration into embracing the DMA (and its sister regulation, AICOA). Brussels did not have to exert its regulatory overreach; the U.S. administration happily imports and emulates European overregulation. There is no better way for European officials to see their dreams come true: a techlash against U.S. digital platforms that enjoys the support of local officials.

In that regard, AICOA has already played a significant role in shaping the intellectual mood in Washington and in altering the course of U.S. antitrust. Members of Congress designed AICOA along the lines pioneered by the DMA. Sen. Klobuchar has argued that America should emulate European competition policy regarding tech platforms. Lina Khan, now chair of the FTC, co-authored the U.S. House Antitrust Subcommittee report, which recommended adopting the European concept of “abuse of dominant position” in U.S. antitrust. In her current position, Khan now praises the DMA. Tim Wu, competition counsel for the White House, has praised European competition policy and officials. Indeed, the neo-Brandeisians’ have not only praised the European Commission’s fines against U.S. tech platforms (despite early criticisms from former President Barack Obama) but have more dramatically called for the United States to imitate the European regulatory framework.

In this regulatory race to inefficiency, the standard is set in Brussels with the blessings of U.S. officials. Not even the precedent set by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) fully captures the effects the DMA will have. Privacy laws passed by U.S. states’ privacy have mostly reacted to the reality of the GDPR. With AICOA, Congress is proactively anticipating, emulating, and welcoming the DMA before it has even been adopted. The intellectual and policy shift is historical, and so is the policy error.

AICOA and the Boulevard of Broken Dreams

AICOA is a failure similar to the Robinson-Patman Act and a victory for the Brussels effect and the DMA. Consumers will be the collateral damages, and the unseen effects on innovation will take years before they materialize. Calls for amendments and repeals of AICOA are likely to fail, so that the inevitable costs will forever bear upon consumers and innovation dynamics.

AICOA illustrates the neo-Brandeisian opposition to large innovative companies. Joseph Schumpeter warned against such hostility and its effect on disincentivizing entrepreneurs to innovate when he wrote:

Faced by the increasing hostility of the environment and by the legislative, administrative, and judicial practice born of that hostility, entrepreneurs and capitalists—in fact the whole stratum that accepts the bourgeois scheme of life—will eventually cease to function. Their standard aims are rapidly becoming unattainable, their efforts futile.

President William Howard Taft once said, “the world is not going to be saved by legislation.” AICOA will not save antitrust, nor will consumers. To paraphrase Schumpeter, the bill’s drafters “walked into our future as we walked into the war, blindfolded.” AICOA’s intentions to deliver greater competition, a fairer marketplace, greater consumer choice, and more consumer benefits will ultimately scatter across the boulevard of broken dreams.

The Baron de Montesquieu once wrote that legislators should only change laws with a “trembling hand”:

It is sometimes necessary to change certain laws. But the case is rare, and when it happens, they should be touched only with a trembling hand: such solemnities should be observed, and such precautions are taken that the people will naturally conclude that the laws are indeed sacred since it takes so many formalities to abrogate them.

AICOA’s drafters had a clumsy hand, coupled with what Friedrich Hayek would call “a pretense of knowledge.” They were certain to do social good and incapable of thinking of doing social harm. The future will remember AICOA as the new antitrust’s least glorious hour, where consumers and innovation were sacrificed on the altar of a revitalized populist view of antitrust.

[TOTM: The following is part of a digital symposium by TOTM guests and authors on the law, economics, and policy of the antitrust lawsuits against Google. The entire series of posts is available here.]

It is my endeavor to scrutinize the questionable assessment articulated against default settings in the U.S. Justice Department’s lawsuit against Google. Default, I will argue, is no antitrust fault. Default in the Google case drastically differs from default referred to in the Microsoft case. In Part I, I argue the comparison is odious. Furthermore, in Part II, it will be argued that the implicit prohibition of default settings echoes, as per listings, the explicit prohibition of self-preferencing in search results. Both aspects – default’s implicit prohibition and self-preferencing’s explicit prohibition – are the two legs of a novel and integrated theory of sanctioning corporate favoritism. The coming to the fore of such theory goes against the very essence of the capitalist grain. In Part III, I note the attempt to instill some corporate selflessness is at odds with competition on the merits and the spirit of fundamental economic freedoms.

When Default is No-Fault

The recent complaint filed by the DOJ and 11 state attorneys general claims that Google has abused its dominant position on the search-engine market through several ways, notably making Google the default search engine both in Google Chrome web browser for Android OS and in Apple’s Safari web browser for iOS. Undoubtedly, default setting confers a noticeable advantage for users’ attraction – it is sought and enforced on purpose. Nevertheless, the default setting confers an unassailable position unless the product remains competitive. Furthermore, the default setting can hardly be proven to be anticompetitive in the Google case. Indeed, the DOJ puts considerable effort in the complaint to make the Google case resemble the 20-year-old Microsoft case. Former Federal Trade Commission Chairman William Kovacic commented: “I suppose the Justice Department is telling the court, ‘You do not have to be scared of this case. You’ve done it before […] This is Microsoft part 2.”[1]

However, irrespective of the merits of the Microsoft case two decades ago, the Google default setting case bears minimal resemblance to the Microsoft default setting of Internet Explorer. First, as opposed to the Microsoft case, where default by Microsoft meant pre-installed software (i.e., Internet Explorer)[2], the Google case does not relate to the pre-installment of the Google search engine (since it is just a webpage) but a simple setting. This technical difference is significant: although “sticky”[3], the default setting, can be outwitted with just one click[4]. It is dissimilar to the default setting, which can only be circumvented by uninstalling software[5], searching and installing a new one[6]. Moreover, with no certainty that consumers will effectively use Google search engine, default settings come with advertising revenue sharing agreements between Google and device manufacturers, mobile phone carriers, competing browsers and Apple[7]. These mutually beneficial deals represent a significant cost with no technical exclusivity [8]. In other words, the antitrust treatment of a tie-in between software and hardware in the Microsoft case cannot be convincingly extrapolated to the default setting of a “webware”[9] as relevant in the Google case.

Second, the Google case cannot legitimately resort to extrapolating the Microsoft case for another technical (and commercial) aspect: the Microsoft case was a classic tie-in case where the tied product (Internet Explorer) was tied into the main product (Windows). As a traditional tie-in scenario, the tied product (Internet Explorer) was “consistently offered, promoted, and distributed […] as a stand-alone product separate from, and not as a component of, Windows […]”[10]. In contrast, Google has never sold Google Chrome or Android OS. It offered both Google Chrome and Android OS for free, necessarily conditional to Google search engine as default setting. The very fact that Google Chrome or Android OS have never been “stand-alone” products, to use the Microsoft case’s language, together with the absence of software installation, dramatically differentiates the features pertaining to the Google case from those of the Microsoft case. The Google case is not a traditional tie-in case: it is a case against default setting when both products (the primary and related products) are given for free, are not saleable, are neither tangible nor intangible goods but only popular digital services due to significant innovativeness and ease of usage. The Microsoft “complaint challenge[d] only Microsoft’s concerted attempts to maintain its monopoly in operating systems and to achieve dominance in other markets, not by innovation and other competition on the merits, but by tie-ins.” Quite noticeably, the Google case does not mention tie-in ,as per Google Chrome or Android OS.

The complaint only refers to tie-ins concerning Google’s app being pre-installed on Android OS. Therefore, concerning Google’s dominance on the search engine market, it cannot be said that the default setting of Google search in Android OS entails tie-in. Google search engine has no distribution channel (since it is only a website) other than through downstream partnerships (i.e., vertical deals with Android device manufacturers). To sanction default setting on downstream trading partners is tantamount to refusing legitimate means to secure distribution channels of proprietary and zero-priced services. To further this detrimental logic, it would mean that Apple may no longer offer its own apps in its own iPhones or, in offline markets, that a retailer may no longer offer its own (default) bags at the till since it excludes rivals’ sale bags. Products and services naked of any adjacent products and markets (i.e., an iPhone or Android OS with no app or a shopkeeper with no bundled services) would dramatically increase consumers’ search costs while destroying innovators’ essential distribution channels for innovative business models and providing few departures from the status quo as long as consumers will continue to value default products[11].

Default should not be an antitrust fault: the Google case makes default settings a new line of antitrust injury absent tie-ins. In conclusion, as a free webware, Google search’s default setting cannot be compared to default installation in the Microsoft case since minimal consumer stickiness entails (almost) no switching costs. As free software, Google’s default apps cannot be compared to Microsoft case either since pre-installation is the sine qua non condition of the highly valued services (Android OS) voluntarily chosen by device manufacturers. Default settings on downstream products can only be reasonably considered as antitrust injury when the dominant company is erroneously treated as a de facto essential facility – something evidenced by the similar prohibition of self-preferencing.

When Self-Preference is No Defense

Self-preferencing is to listings what the default setting is to operating systems. They both are ways to market one’s own products (i.e., alternative to marketing toward end-consumers). While default setting may come with both free products and financial payments (Android OS and advertising revenue sharing), self-preferencing may come with foregone advertising revenues in order to promote one’s own products. Both sides can be apprehended as the two sides of the same coin:[12] generating the ad-funded main product’s distribution channels – Google’s search engine. Both are complex advertising channels since both venues favor one’s own products regarding consumers’ attention. Absent both channels, the payments made for default agreements and the foregone advertising revenues in self-preferencing one’s own products would morph into marketing and advertising expenses of Google search engine toward end-consumers.

The DOJ complaint lambasts that “Google’s monopoly in general search services also has given the company extraordinary power as the gateway to the internet, which uses to promote its own web content and increase its profits.” This blame was at the core of the European Commission’s Google Shopping decision in 2017[13]: it essentially holds Google accountable for having, because of its ad-funded business model, promoted its own advertising products and demoted organic links in search results. According to which Google’s search results are no longer relevant and listed on the sole motivation of advertising revenue

But this argument is circular: should these search results become irrelevant, Google’s core business would become less attractive, thereby generating less advertising revenue. This self-inflicted inefficiency would deprive Google of valuable advertising streams and incentivize end-consumers to switch to search engine rivals such as Bing, DuckDuckGo, Amazon (product search), etc. Therefore, an ad-funded company such as Google needs to reasonably arbitrage between advertising objectives and the efficiency of its core activities (here, zero-priced organic search services). To downplay (the ad-funded) self-referencing in order to foster (the zero-priced) organic search quality would disregard the two-sidedness of the Google platform: it would harm advertisers and the viability of the ad-funded business model without providing consumers and innovation protection it aims at providing. The problematic and undesirable concept of “search neutrality” would mean algorithmic micro-management for the sake of an “objective” listing considered acceptable only to the eyes of the regulator.

Furthermore, self-preferencing entails a sort of positive discrimination toward one’s own products[14]. If discrimination has traditionally been antitrust lines of injuries, self-preferencing is an “epithet”[15] outside antitrust remits for good reasons[16]. Indeed, should self-interested (i.e., rationally minded) companies and individuals are legally complied to self-demote their own products and services? If only big (how big?) companies are legally complied to self-demote their products and services, to what extent will exempted companies involved in self-preferencing become liable to do so?

Indeed, many uncertainties, legal and economic ones, may spawn from the emerging prohibition of self-preferencing. More fundamentally, antitrust liability may clash with basic corporate governance principles where self-interestedness allows self-preferencing and command such self-promotion. The limits of antitrust have been reached when two sets of legal regimes, both applicable to companies, suggest contradictory commercial conducts. To what extent may Amazon no longer promote its own series on Amazon Video in a similar manner Netflix does? To what extent can Microsoft no longer promote Bing’s search engine to compete with Google’s search engine effectively? To what extent Uber may no longer promote UberEATS in order to compete with delivery services effectively? Not only the business of business is doing business[17], but also it is its duty for which shareholders may hold managers to account.

The self is moral; there is a corporate morality of business self-interest. In other words, corporate selflessness runs counter to business ethics since corporate self-interest yields the self’s rivalrous positioning within a competitive order. Absent a corporate self-interest, self-sacrifice may generate value destruction for the sake of some unjustified and ungrounded claims. The emerging prohibition of self-preferencing, similar to the established ban on the default setting on one’s own products into other proprietary products, materializes the corporate self’s losing. Both directions coalesce to instill the legally embedded duty of self-sacrifice for the competitor’s welfare instead of the traditional consumer welfare and the dynamics of innovation, which never unleash absent appropriabilities. In conclusion, to expect firms, however big or small, to act irrespective of their identities (i.e., corporate selflessness) would constitute an antitrust error and would be at odds with capitalism.

Toward an Integrated Theory of Disintegrating Favoritism

The Google lawsuit primarily blames Google for default settings enforced via several deals. The lawsuit also makes self-preferencing anticompetitive conduct under antitrust rules. These two charges are novel and dubious in their remits. They nevertheless represent a fundamental catalyst for the development of a new and problematic unified antitrust theory prohibiting favoritism:  companies may no longer favor their products and services, both vertically and horizontally, irrespective of consumer benefits, irrespective of superior efficiency arguments, and irrespective of dynamic capabilities enhancement. Indeed, via an unreasonably expanded vision of leveraging, antitrust enforcement is furtively banning a company to favor its own products and services based on greater consumer choice as a substitute to consumer welfare, based on the protection of the opportunities of rivals to innovate and compete as a substitute to the essence of competition and innovation, and based on limiting the outreach and size of companies as a substitute to the capabilities and efficiencies of these companies. Leveraging becomes suspicious and corporate self-favoritism under accusation. The Google lawsuit materializes this impractical trend, which further enshrines the precautionary approach to antitrust enforcement[18].


[1] Jessica Guynn, Google Justice Department antitrust lawsuit explained: this is what it means for you. USA Today, October 20, 2020.

[2] The software (Internet Explorer) was tied in the hardware (Windows PC).

[3] U.S. v Google LLC, Case A:20, October 20, 2020, 3 (referring to default settings as “especially sticky” with respect to consumers’ willingness to change).

[4] While the DOJ affirms that “being the preset default general search engine is particularly valuable because consumers rarely change the preset default”, it nevertheless provides no evidence of the breadth of such consumer stickiness. To be sure, search engine’s default status does not necessarily lead to usage as evidenced by the case of South Korea. In this country, despite Google’s preset default settings, the search engine Naver remains dominant in the national search market with over 70% of market shares. The rivalry exerted by Naver on Google demonstrates that limits of consumer stickiness to default settings. See Alesia Krush, Google vs. Naver: Why Can’t Google Dominate Search in Korea? Link-Assistant.Com, available at: https://www.link-assistant.com/blog/google-vs-naver-why-cant-google-dominate-search-in-korea/ . As dominant search engine in Korea, Naver is subject to antitrust investigations with similar leveraging practices as Google in other countries, see Shin Ji-hye, FTC sets up special to probe Naver, Google, The Korea Herald, November 19, 2019, available at :  http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20191119000798 ; Kim Byung-wook, Complaint against Google to be filed with FTC, The Investor, December 14, 2020, available at : https://www.theinvestor.co.kr/view.php?ud=20201123000984  (reporting a complaint by Naver and other Korean IT companies against Google’s 30% commission policy on Google Play Store’s apps).

[5] For instance, the then complaint acknowledged that “Microsoft designed Windows 98 so that removal of Internet Explorer by OEMs or end users is operationally more difficult than it was in Windows 95”, in U.S. v Microsoft Corp., Civil Action No 98-1232, May 18, 1998, para.20.

[6] The DOJ complaint itself quotes “one search competitor who is reported to have noted consumer stickiness “despite the simplicity of changing a default setting to enable customer choice […]” (para.47). Therefore, default setting for search engine is remarkably simple to bypass but consumers do not often do so, either due to satisfaction with Google search engine and/or due to search and opportunity costs.

[7] See para.56 of the DOJ complaint.

[8] Competing browsers can always welcome rival search engines and competing search engine apps can always be downloaded despite revenue sharing agreements. See paras.78-87 of the DOJ complaint.

[9] Google search engine is nothing but a “webware” – a complex set of algorithms that work via online access of a webpage with no prior download. For a discussion on the definition of webware, see https://www.techopedia.com/definition/4933/webware .

[10] Id. para.21.

[11] Such outcome would frustrate traditional ways of offering computers and mobile devices as acknowledged by the DOJ itself in the Google complaint: “new computers and new mobile devices generally come with a number of preinstalled apps and out-of-the-box setting. […] Each of these search access points can and almost always does have a preset default general search engine”, at para. 41. Also, it appears that present default general search engine is common commercial practices since, as the DOJ complaint itself notes when discussing Google’s rivals (Microsoft’s Bing and Amazon’s Fire OS), “Amazon preinstalled its own proprietary apps and agreed to make Microsoft’s Bing the preset default general search engine”, in para.130. The complaint fails to identify alternative search engines which are not preset defaults, thus implicitly recognizing this practice as a widespread practice.

[12] To use Vesterdof’s language, see Bo Vesterdorf, Theories of Self-Preferencing and Duty to Deal – Two Sides of the Same Coin, Competition Law & Policy Debate 1(1) 4, (2015). See also Nicolas Petit, Theories of Self-Preferencing under Article 102 TFEU: A Reply to Bo Vesterdorf, 5-7 (2015).

[13] Case 39740 Google Search (Shopping). Here the foreclosure effects of self-preferencing are only speculated: « the Commission is not required to prove that the Conduct has the actual effect of decreasing traffic to competing comparison shopping services and increasing traffic to Google’s comparison-shopping service. Rather, it is sufficient for the Commission to demonstrate that the Conduct is capable of having, or likely to have, such effects.” (para.601 of the Decision). See P. Ibáñez Colomo, Indispensability and Abuse of Dominance: From Commercial Solvents to Slovak Telekom and Google Shopping, 10 Journal of European Competition Law & Practice 532 (2019); Aurelien Portuese, When Demotion is Competition: Algorithmic Antitrust Illustrated, Concurrences, no 2, May 2018, 25-37; Aurelien Portuese, Fine is Only One Click Away, Symposium on the Google Shopping Decision, Case Note, 3 Competition and Regulatory Law Review, (2017).

[14] For a general discussion on law and economics of self-preferencing, see Michael A. Salinger, Self-Preferencing, Global Antitrust Institute Report, 329-368 (2020).

[15]Pablo Ibanez Colomo, Self-Preferencing: Yet Another Epithet in Need of Limiting Principles, 43 World Competition (2020) (concluding that self-preferencing is « misleading as a legal category »).

[16] See, for instances, Pedro Caro de Sousa, What Shall We Do About Self-Preferencing? Competition Policy International, June 2020.

[17] Milton Friedman, The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits, New York Times, September 13, 1970. This echoes Adam Smith’s famous statement that « It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard for their own self-interest » from the 1776 Wealth of Nations. In Ayn Rand’s philosophy, the only alternative to rational self-interest is to sacrifice one’s own interests either for fellowmen (altruism) or for supernatural forces (mysticism). See Ayn Rand, The Objectivist Ethics, in The Virtue of Selfishness, Signet, (1964).

[18] Aurelien Portuese, European Competition Enforcement and the Digital Economy : The Birthplace of Precautionary Antitrust, Global Antitrust Institute’s Report on the Digital Economy, 597-651.