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We Should Not Have Our Constitution Redesigned by Antitrust Lawyers

Kristian Stout — 30 December 2019 — Leave a comment

[TOTM: The following is the sixth in a series of posts by TOTM guests and authors on the politicization of antitrust. The entire series of posts is available here.]

This post is authored by Kristian Stout, Associate Director at the International Center for Law & Economics.

There is a push underway to punish big tech firms, both for alleged wrongdoing and in an effort to prevent future harm. But the movement to use antitrust law to punish big tech firms is far more about political expediency than it is about sound competition policy.

For a variety of reasons, there is a current of dissatisfaction in society with respect to the big tech companies, some of it earned, and some of it unearned. Between March 2019 and September 2019, polls suggested that Americans were increasingly willing to entertain breaking up or otherwise increasing regulation on the big tech firms. No doubt, some significant share of this movement in popular opinion is inspired by increasingly negative reporting from major news outlets (see, for a small example, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8). But, the fact that these companies make missteps does not require that any means at hand should be used to punish them.

Further, not only is every tool not equal in dealing with the harms these companies could cause, we must be mindful that, even when some harm occurs, these companies generate a huge amount of social welfare. Our policy approaches to dealing with misconduct, therefore, must be appropriately measured.

To listen to the media, politicians, and activists, however, one wouldn’t know that anything except extreme action — often using antitrust law — is required. Presidential hopefuls want to smash the big tech companies, while activists and academics see evidence of anticompetitive conduct in every facet of these companies’ behavior. Indeed, some claim that the firms themselves are per se a harm to democracy.

The confluence of consumer dissatisfaction and activist zeal leads to a toxic result: not wanting to let a good crisis go to waste, activists and politicians push the envelope on the antitrust theories they want to apply to the detriment of the rule of law.

Consumer concerns

Missteps by the big tech companies, both perceived and real, have led to some degree of consumer dissatisfaction. In terms of real harms data breaches and privacy scandals have gained more attention in recent years and are undoubtedly valid concerns of consumers.

In terms of perceived harms, it has, for example, become increasingly popular to blame big tech companies for tilting the communications landscape in favor of one or another political preference. Ironically, the accusations leveled against big tech are frequently at odds. Some progressives blame big tech for helping Donald Trump to be elected president, while some conservatives believe a pervasive bias in Silicon Valley in favor of progressive policies harms conservative voices.

But, at the same time, consumers are well familiar with the benefits that search engines, the smartphone revolution, and e-commerce have provided to society. The daily life of the average consumer is considerably better today than it was in past decades thanks to the digital services and low cost technology that is in reach of even the poorest among us.

So why do consumers appear to be listening to the heated rhetoric of the antitrust populists?

Paul Seabright pointed to one of the big things that I think is motivating consumer willingness to listen to populist attacks on otherwise well-regarded digital services. In his keynote speech at ICLE’s “Dynamic Competition and Online Platforms” conference earlier this month, he discussed the role of trust in the platform ecosystem. According to Seabright,

Large digital firms create anxiety in proportion to how much they meet our needs… They are strong complements to many of our talents and activities – but they also threaten to provide lots of easy substitutes for us and our talents and activities… The more we trust them the more we (rightly) fear the abuse of their trust.

Extending this insight, we imbue these platforms with a great deal of trust because they are so important to our daily lives. And we have a tendency to respond dramatically to (perceived or actual) violations of trust by these platforms because they do such a great job in nearly every respect. When a breach of that trust happens — even if its relative impact on our lives is small, and the platform continues to provide a large amount of value — we respond not in terms of its proportionate effect on our lives, but in the emotional terms of one who has been wronged by a confidant.

It is that emotional lever that populist activists and politicians are able to press. The populists can frame the failure of the firms as the sum total of their existence, and push for extreme measures that otherwise (and even a few short years ago) would have been unimaginable.

Political opportunism

The populist crusade is fueled by the underlying sentiment of consumers, but has its own separate ends. Some critics of the state of antitrust law are seeking merely a realignment of priorities within existing doctrine. The pernicious crusade of antitrust populists, however, seeks much more. These activists (and some presidential hopefuls) want nothing short of breaking up big tech and of returning the country to some ideal of “democracy” imagined as having existed in the hazy past when antitrust laws were unevenly enforced.

It is a laudable goal to ensure that the antitrust laws are being properly administered on their own terms, but it is an entirely different project to crusade to make antitrust great again based on the flawed understandings from a century ago.

In few areas of life would most of us actually yearn to reestablish the political and social order of times gone by — notwithstanding presidential rhetoric. The sepia-toned crusade to smash tech companies into pieces inherits its fervor from Louis Brandeis and his fellow travelers who took on the mustache-twisting villains of their time: Carnegie, Morgan, Mellon and the rest of the allegedly dirty crew of scoundrels.

Matt Stoller’s recent book Goliath captures this populist dynamic well. He describes the history of antitrust passionately, as a morality play between the forces of light and those of darkness. On one side are heroes like Wright Patman, a scrappy poor kid from Texas who went to a no-name law school and rose to prominence in Washington as an anti-big-business crusader. On the other side are shadowy characters like Andrew Mellon, who cynically manipulated his way into government after growing bored with administering his vast, immorally acquired economic empire.

A hundred years ago the populist antitrust quest was a response to the success of industrial titans, and their concentration of wealth in the hands of relatively few. Today, a similar set of arguments are directed at the so-called big tech companies. Stoller sees the presence of large tech firms as inimical to democracy itself — “If we don’t do something about big tech, something meaningful, we’ll just become a fascist society. It’s fairly simple.” Tim Wu has made similar claims (which my colleague Alec Stapp has ably rebutted).

In the imagination of the populists, there are good guys and bad guys and the optimal economy would approach atomistic competition. In such a world, the “little guy” can have his due and nefarious large corporations cannot become too economically powerful relative to the state.

Politicians enter this mix of consumer sentiment and populist activism with their own unique priors. On the one hand, consumer dissatisfaction makes big tech a ripe target to score easy political points. It’s a hot topic that fits easily into fundraising pitches. After all, who really cares if the billionaires lose a couple of million dollars through state intervention?

In truth, I suspect that politicians are ambivalent about what exactly to do to make good on their anti-big tech rhetoric. They will be forced to admit that these companies provide an enormous amount of social value, and if they destroy that value, fickle voters will punish them. The threat at hand is if politicians allow themselves to be seduced by the simplistic policy recommendations of the populists.

Applying the right tool to the job

Antitrust is a seductive tool to use against politically disfavored companies. It is an arcane area of law which, to the average observer, will be just so much legalese. It is, therefore, relatively easy to covertly import broader social preferences through antitrust action and pretend that the ends of the law aren’t being corrupted.

But this would be a mistake.

The complicated problem with the big tech companies is that they indeed could be part of a broader set of social ills mentioned above. Its complicated because it’s highly unlikely that these platforms cause the problems in society, or that any convenient legal tool like antitrust will do much to actually remedy the problems we struggle with.

Antitrust is a goal-focused body of law, and the goal it seeks—optimizing consumer welfare—is distinctly outside of the populist agenda. The real danger in the populist campaign is not just the social losses we will incur if they successfully smash productive firms, but the long term harm to the rule of law.

The American system of law is fundamentally predicated on an idea of promulgating rules of general applicability, and resorting to sector- or issue-specific regulations when those general bodies of law are found to be inapplicable or ineffective.

Banking regulation is a prime example. Banks are subject to general regulation from entities like the FDIC and the Federal Reserve, but, for particular issues, are subject to other agencies and laws. Requirements for deterring money laundering, customer privacy obligations, and rules mandating the separation of commercial banking from investment activities all were enacted through specific legislation aimed to tailor the regulatory regime that banks faced.

Under many of the same theories being propounded by the populists, antitrust should have been used for at least some of these ends. Couldn’t you frame the “problem” of mixing commercial banking and investment as one of impermissible integration that harms the competitive process? Wouldn’t concerns for the privacy of bank consumers sound in exactly the same manner as that proposed by advocates who claim that concentrated industries lack the incentive to properly include privacy as a dimension of product quality?

But if we hew to rigorous interpretation of competition policy, the problem for critics is that their claims that actually sound in antitrust – that Amazon predatorily prices, or Google engages in anticompetitive tying, for example – are highly speculative and not at all an easy play if pressed in litigation. So they try “new” theories of antitrust as a way to achieve preferred policy ends. Changing well accepted doctrine, such as removing the recoupement requirement from predatory pricing in order to favor small firms, or introducing broad privacy or data sharing obligations as part of competition “remedies”, is a terrible path for the stability of society and the health of the rule of law.

Concerns about privacy, hate speech, and, more broadly, the integrity of the democratic process are critical issues to wrestle with. But these aren’t antitrust problems. If we lived in a different sort of society, where the rule of law meant far less than it does here, its conceivable that we could use whatever legal tool was at hand to right the wrongs of society. But this isn’t a good answer if you take seriously constitutional design; allowing antitrust law to “solve” broader social problems is to suborn Congress in giving away its power to a relatively opaque enforcement process.

We should not have our constitution redesigned by antitrust lawyers.

In antitrust, politicization-antitrust-symposium, truth on the market antitrust, blog symposium, Symposium

A New Office of Technology Assessment: The Wrong Answer to the Wrong Question at the Wrong Time

Kristian Stout — 13 December 2019

Congress needs help understanding the fast moving world of technology. That help is not going to arise by reviving the Office of Technology Assessment (“OTA”), however. The OTA is an idea for another age, while the tweaks necessary to shore up the existing technology resources available to Congress are relatively modest.

Although a new OTA is unlikely to be harmful, it would entail the expenditure of additional resources, including the political capital necessary to create a new federal agency, along with all the revolving-door implications that entails.

The real problem with revising the OTA is that it distracts Congress from considering that it needs to be more than merely well-informed. What we need is both smarter regulation as well as regulation better tailored to 21st century technology and the economy. A new OTA might help with the former problem, but may in fact only exacerbate the latter problem.

The OTA is a poor fit for the modern world

The OTA began existence in 1972, with a mission to provide science and technology advice to Congress. It was closed in 1995, following budget cuts. Lately, some well meaning folks — including even some presidential hopefuls — have sought to revive the OTA.

To the extent that something like the OTA would be salutary today, it would be as a check on incorrect technologically and scientifically based assumptions contained in proposed legislation. For example, in the 90s the OTA provided useful technical information to Congress about how encryption technologies worked as it was considering legislation such as CALEA.

Yet there is good reason to believe that a new legislative-branch agency would not outperform the alternatives to these functions available today. A recent study from the National Academy of Public Administration (“NAPA”), undertaken at the request of Congress and the Congressional Research Service, summarized the OTA’s poor fit for today’s legislative process.

A new OTA “would have similar vulnerabilities that led to the dis-establishment of the [original] OTA.” While a new OTA could provide some information and services to Congress, “such services are not essential for legislators to actually craft legislation, because Congress has multiple sources for [Science and Technology] information/analysis already and can move legislation forward without a new agency.” Moreover, according to interviewed legislative branch personnel, the original OTA’s reports “were not critical parts of the legislative deliberation and decision-making processes during its existence.”

The upshot?

A new [OTA] conducting helpful but not essential work would struggle to integrate into the day-to-day legislative activities of Congress, and thus could result in questions of relevancy and leave it potentially vulnerable to political challenges

The NAPA report found that the Congressional Research Service (“CRS”) and the Government Accountability Office (“GAO”) already contained most of the resources that Congress needed. The report recommended enhancing those existing resources, and the creation of a science and technology coordinator position in Congress in order to facilitate the hiring of appropriate personnel for committees, among other duties.

The one gap identified by the NAPA report is that Congress currently has no “horizon scanning” capability to look at emerging trends in the long term. This was an original function of OTA.

According to Peter D. Blair, in his book Congress’s Own Think Tank – Learning from the Legacy of the Office of Technology Assessment, an original intention of the OTA was to “provide an ‘early warning’ on the potential impacts of new technology.” (p. 43). But over time, the agency, facing the bureaucratic incentive to avoid political controversy, altered its behavior and became carefully “responsive[] to congressional needs” (p. 51) — which is a polite way of saying that the OTA’s staff came to see their purpose as providing justification for Congress to enact desired legislation and to avoid raising concerns that could be an impediment to that legislation. The bureaucratic pressures facing the agency forced a mission drift that would be highly likely to recur in a new OTA.

The NAPA report, however, has its own recommendation that does not involve the OTA: allow the newly created science and technology coordinator to create annual horizon-scanning reports.

A new OTA unnecessarily increases the surface area for regulatory capture

Apart from the likelihood that the OTA will be a mere redundancy, the OTA presents yet another vector for regulatory capture (or at least endless accusations of regulatory capture used to undermine its work). Andrew Yang inadvertently points to this fact on his campaign page that calls for a revival of the OTA:

This vital institution needs to be revived, with a budget large enough and rules flexible enough to draw top talent away from the very lucrative private sector.

Yang’s wishcasting aside, there is just no way that you are going to create an institution with a “budget large enough and rules flexible enough” to permanently siphon off top-tier talent from multi-multi-billion dollar firms working on creating cutting edge technologies. What you will do is create an interesting, temporary post-graduate school or mid-career stop-over point where top-tier talent can cycle in and out of those top firms. These are highly intelligent, very motivated individuals who want to spend their careers making stuff, not writing research reports for congress.

The same experts who are sufficiently high-level enough to work at the OTA will be similarly employable by large technology and scientific firms. The revolving door is all but inevitable.

The real problem to solve is a lack of modern governance

Lack of adequate information per se is not the real problem facing members of Congress today. The real problem is that, for the most part, legislators neither understand nor seem to care about how best to govern and establish regulatory frameworks for new technology. As a result, Congress passes laws that threaten to slow down the progress of technological development, thus harming consumers while protecting incumbents.

Assuming for the moment that there is some kind of horizon-scanning capability that a new OTA could provide, it necessarily fails, even on these terms. By the time Congress is sufficiently alarmed by a new or latent “problem” (or at least a politically relevant feature) of technology, the industry or product under examination has most likely already progressed far enough in its development that it’s far too late for Congress to do anything useful. Even though the NAPA report’s authors seem to believe that a “horizon scanning” capability will help, in a dynamic economy, truly predicting the technology that will impact society seems a bit like trying to predict the weather on a particular day a year hence.

Further, the limits of human cognition restrict the utility of “more information” to the legislative process. Will Rinehart discussed this quite ably, pointing to the psychological literature that indicates that, in many cases involving technical subjects, more information given to legislators only makes them overconfident. That is to say, they can cite more facts, but put less of them to good use when writing laws.

The truth is, no degree of expertise will ever again provide an adequate basis for producing prescriptive legislation meant to guide an industry or segment. The world is simply moving too fast.

It would be far more useful for Congress to explore legislation that encourages the firms involved in highly dynamic industries to develop and enforce voluntary standards that emerge as a community standards. See, for example, the observation offered by Jane K. Winn in her paper on information governance and privacy law that

[i]n an era where the ability to compete effectively in global markets increasingly depends on the advantages of extracting actionable insights from petabytes of unstructured data, the bureaucratic individual control right model puts a straightjacket on product innovation and erects barriers to fostering a culture of compliance.

Winn is thinking about what a “governance” response to privacy and crises like the Cambridge Analytica scandal should be, and posits those possibilities against the top-down response of the EU with its General Data Protection Directive (“GDPR”). She notes that preliminary research on GDPR suggests that framing privacy legislation as bureaucratic control over firms using consumer data can have the effect of removing all of the risk-management features that the private sector is good at developing.

Instead of pursuing legislative agendas that imagine the state as the all-seeing eye at the top of the of a command-and-control legislative pyramid, lawmakers should seek to enable those with relevant functional knowledge to employ that knowledge for good governance, broadly understood:

Reframing the information privacy law reform debate as the process of constructing new information governance institutions builds on decades of American experience with sector-specific, risk based information privacy laws and more than a century of American experience with voluntary, consensus standard-setting processes organized by the private sector. The turn to a broader notion of information governance reflects a shift away from command-and-control strategies and toward strategies for public-private collaboration working to protect individual, institutional and social interests in the creation and use of information.

The implications for a new OTA are clear. The model of “gather all relevant information on a technical subject to help construct a governing code” was, if ever, best applied to a world that moved at an industrial era pace. Today, governance structures need to be much more flexible, and the work of an OTA — even if Congress didn’t already have most of its advisory bases covered — has little relevance.

The engineers working at firms developing next generation technologies are the individuals with the most relevant, timely knowledge. A forward looking view of regulation would try to develop a means for the information these engineers have to surface and become an ongoing part of the governing standards.

*note – This post originally said that OTA began “operating” in 1972. I meant to say it began “existence” in 1972. I have corrected the error.

In technology, truth on the market Congress, GAO, legislation, Office of Technology Assessment, OTA, technology

Call for Papers and Proposals – Nebraska Rural Digital Divide Roundtable

Kristian Stout — 20 September 2019

On March 19-20, 2020, the University of Nebraska College of Law will be hosting its third annual roundtable on closing the digital divide. UNL is expanding its program this year to include a one-day roundtable that focuses on the work of academics and researchers who are conducting empirical studies of the rural digital divide.

Academics and researchers interested in having their work featured in this event are now invited to submit pieces for consideration. Submissions should be submitted by November 18th, 2019 using this form. The authors of papers and projects selected for inclusion will be notified by December 9, 2019. Research honoraria of up to $5,000 may be awarded for selected projects.

Example topics include cost studies of rural wireless deployments, comparative studies of the effects of ACAM funding, event studies of legislative interventions such as allowing customers unserved by carriers in their home exchange to request service from carriers in adjoining exchanges, comparative studies of the effectiveness of various federal and state funding mechanisms, and cost studies of different sorts of municipal deployments. This list is far from exhaustive.

Any questions about this event or the request for projects can be directed to Gus Hurwitz at ghurwitz@unl.edu or Elsbeth Magilton at elsbeth@unl.edu.

In announcements, telecommunications, truth on the market digital divide, telecommunications

Kochland: An Inadvertent Paean to the Glories of the Free Market

Kristian Stout — 5 September 2019

A recently published book, “Kochland – The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America” by Christopher Leonard, presents a gripping account of relentless innovation and the power of the entrepreneur to overcome adversity in pursuit of delivering superior goods and services to the market while also reaping impressive profits. It’s truly an inspirational American story.

Now, I should note that I don’t believe Mr. Leonard actually intended his book to be quite so complimentary to the Koch brothers and the vast commercial empire they built up over the past several decades. He includes plenty of material detailing, for example, their employees playing fast and loose with environmental protection rules, or their labor lawyers aggressively bargaining with unions, sometimes to the detriment of workers. And all of the stories he presents are supported by sympathetic emotional appeals through personal anecdotes.

But, even then, many of the negative claims are part of a larger theme of Koch Industries progressively improving its business practices. One prominent example is how Koch Industries learned from its environmentally unfriendly past and implemented vigorous programs to ensure “10,000% compliance” with all federal and state environmental laws.

What really stands out across most or all of the stories Leonard has to tell, however, is the deep appreciation that Charles Koch and his entrepreneurially-minded employees have for the fundamental nature of the market as an information discovery process. Indeed, Koch Industries has much in common with modern technology firms like Amazon in this respect — but decades before the information technology revolution made the full power of “Big Data” gathering and processing as obvious as it is today.

The impressive information operation of Koch Industries

Much of Kochland is devoted to stories in which Koch Industries’ ability to gather and analyze data from across its various units led to the production of superior results for the economy and consumers. For example,

Koch… discovered that the National Parks Service published data showing the snow pack in the California mountains, data that Koch could analyze to determine how much water would be flowing in future months to generate power at California’s hydroelectric plants. This helped Koch predict with great accuracy the future supply of electricity and the resulting demand for natural gas.

Koch Industries was able to use this information to anticipate the amount of power (megawatt hours) it needed to deliver to the California power grid (admittedly, in a way that was somewhat controversial because of poorly drafted legislation relating to the new regulatory regime governing power distribution and resale in the state).

And, in 2000, while many firms in the economy were still riding the natural gas boom of the 90s,

two Koch analysts and a reservoir engineer… accurately predicted a coming disaster that would contribute to blackouts along the West Coast, the bankruptcy of major utilities, and skyrocketing costs for many consumers.

This insight enabled Koch Industries to reap huge profits in derivatives trading, and it also enabled it to enter — and essentially rescue — a market segment crucial for domestic farmers: nitrogen fertilizer.

The market volatility in natural gas from the late 90s through early 00s wreaked havoc on the nitrogen fertilizer industry, for which natural gas is the primary input. Farmland — a struggling fertilizer producer — had progressively mismanaged its business over the preceding two decades by focusing on developing lines of business outside of its core competencies, including blithely exposing itself to the volatile natural gas market in pursuit of short-term profits. By the time it was staring bankruptcy in the face, there were no other companies interested in acquiring it.

Koch’s analysts, however, noticed that many of Farmland’s key fertilizer plants were located in prime locations for reaching local farmers. Once the market improved, whoever controlled those key locations would be in a superior position for selling into the nitrogen fertilizer market. So, by utilizing the data it derived from its natural gas operations (both operating pipelines and storage facilities, as well as understanding the volatility of gas prices and availability through its derivatives trading operations), Koch Industries was able to infer that it could make substantial profits by rescuing this bankrupt nitrogen fertilizer business.

Emblematic of Koch’s philosophy of only making long-term investments,

[o]ver the next ten years, [Koch Industries] spent roughly $500 million to outfit the plants with new technology while streamlining production… Koch installed a team of fertilizer traders in the office… [t]he traders bought and sold supplies around the globe, learning more about fertilizer markets each day. Within a few years, Koch Fertilizer built a global distribution network. Koch founded a new company, called Koch Energy Services, which bought and sold natural gas supplies to keep the fertilizer plants stocked.

Thus, Koch Industries not only rescued midwest farmers from shortages that would have decimated their businesses, it invested heavily to ensure that production would continue to increase to meet future demand.

As noted, this acquisition was consistent with the ethos of Koch Industries, which stressed thinking about investments as part of long-term strategies, in contrast to their “counterparties in the market [who] were obsessed with the near-term horizon.” This led Koch Industries to look at investments over a period measured in years or decades, an approach that allowed the company to execute very intricate investment strategies:

If Koch thought there was going to be an oversupply of oil in the Gulf Coast region, for example, it might snap up leases on giant oil barges, knowing that when the oversupply hit, companies would be scrambling for extra storage space and willing to pay a premium for the leases that Koch bought on the cheap. This was a much safer way to execute the trade than simply shorting the price of oil—even if Koch was wrong about the supply glut, the downside was limited because Koch could still sell or use the barge leases and almost certainly break even.

Entrepreneurs, regulators, and the problem of incentives

All of these accounts and more in Kochland brilliantly demonstrate a principal salutary role of entrepreneurs in the market, which is to discover slack or scarce resources in the system and manage them in a way that they will be available for utilization when demand increases. Guaranteeing the presence of oil barges in the face of market turbulence, or making sure that nitrogen fertilizer is available when needed, is precisely the sort of result sound public policy seeks to encourage from firms in the economy.

Government, by contrast — and despite its best intentions — is institutionally incapable of performing the same sorts of entrepreneurial activities as even very large private organizations like Koch Industries. The stories recounted in Kochland demonstrate this repeatedly.

For example, in the oil tanker episode, Koch’s analysts relied on “huge amounts of data from outside sources” – including “publicly available data…like the federal reports that tracked the volume of crude oil being stored in the United States.” Yet, because that data was “often stale” owing to a rigid, periodic publication schedule, it lacked the specificity necessary for making precise interventions in markets.

Koch’s analysts therefore built on that data using additional public sources, such as manifests from the Customs Service which kept track of the oil tanker traffic in US waters. Leveraging all of this publicly available data, Koch analysts were able to develop “a picture of oil shipments and flows that was granular in its specificity.”

Similarly, when trying to predict snowfall in the western US, and how that would affect hydroelectric power production, Koch’s analysts relied on publicly available weather data — but extended it with their own analytical insights to make it more suitable to fine-grained predictions.

By contrast, despite decades of altering the regulatory scheme around natural gas production, transport and sales, and being highly involved in regulating all aspects of the process, the federal government could not even provide the data necessary to adequately facilitate markets. Koch’s energy analysts would therefore engage in various deals that sometimes would only break even — if it meant they could develop a better overall picture of the relevant markets:

As was often the case at Koch, the company… was more interested in the real-time window that origination deals could provide into the natural gas markets. Just as in the early days of the crude oil markets, information about prices was both scarce and incredibly valuable. There were not yet electronic exchanges that showed a visible price of natural gas, and government data on sales were irregular and relatively slow to come. Every origination deal provided fresh and precise information about prices, supply, and demand.

In most, if not all, of the deals detailed in Kochland, government regulators had every opportunity to find the same trends in the publicly available data — or see the same deficiencies in the data and correct them. Given their access to the same data, government regulators could, in some imagined world, have developed policies to mitigate the effects of natural gas market collapses, handle upcoming power shortages, or develop a reliable supply of fertilizer to midwest farmers. But they did not. Indeed, because of the different sets of incentives they face (among other factors), in the real world, they cannot do so, despite their best intentions.

The incentive to innovate

This gets to the core problem that Hayek described concerning how best to facilitate efficient use of dispersed knowledge in such a way as to achieve the most efficient allocation and distribution of resources:

The various ways in which the knowledge on which people base their plans is communicated to them is the crucial problem for any theory explaining the economic process, and the problem of what is the best way of utilizing knowledge initially dispersed among all the people is at least one of the main problems of economic policy—or of designing an efficient economic system.

The question of how best to utilize dispersed knowledge in society can only be answered by considering who is best positioned to gather and deploy that knowledge. There is no fundamental objection to “planning” per se, as Hayek notes. Indeed, in a complex society filled with transaction costs, there will need to be entities capable of internalizing those costs — corporations or governments — in order to make use of the latent information in the system. The question is about what set of institutions, and what set of incentives governing those institutions, results in the best use of that latent information (and the optimal allocation and distribution of resources that follows from that).

Armen Alchian captured the different incentive structures between private firms and government agencies well:

The extent to which various costs and effects are discerned, measured and heeded depends on the institutional system of incentive-punishment for the deciders. One system of rewards-punishment may increase the extent to which some objectives are heeded, whereas another may make other goals more influential. Thus procedures for making or controlling decisions in one rewards-incentive system are not necessarily the “best” for some other system…
In the competitive, private, open-market economy, the wealth-survival prospects are not as strong for firms (or their employees) who do not heed the market’s test of cost effectiveness as for firms who do… as a result the market’s criterion is more likely to be heeded and anticipated by business people. They have personal wealth incentives to make more thorough cost-effectiveness calculations about the products they could produce …
In the government sector, two things are less effective. (1) The full cost and value consequences of decisions do not have as direct and severe a feedback impact on government employees as on people in the private sector. The costs of actions under their consideration are incomplete simply because the consequences of ignoring parts of the full span of costs are less likely to be imposed on them… (2) The effectiveness, in the sense of benefits, of their decisions has a different reward-inventive or feedback system … it is fallacious to assume that government officials are superhumans, who act solely with the national interest in mind and are never influenced by the consequences to their own personal position.

In short, incentives matter — and are a function of the institutional arrangement of the system. Given the same set of data about a scarce set of resources, over the long run, the private sector generally has stronger incentives to manage resources efficiently than does government. As Ludwig von Mises showed, moving those decisions into political hands creates a system of political preferences that is inherently inferior in terms of the production and distribution of goods and services.

Koch Industries: A model of entrepreneurial success

The market is not perfect, but no human institution is perfect. Despite its imperfections, the market provides the best system yet devised for fairly and efficiently managing the practically unlimited demands we place on our scarce resources.

Kochland provides a valuable insight into the virtues of the market and entrepreneurs, made all the stronger by Mr. Leonard’s implied project of “exposing” the dark underbelly of Koch Industries. The book tells the bad tales, which I’m willing to believe are largely true. I would, frankly, be shocked if any large entity — corporation or government — never ran into problems with rogue employees, internal corporate dynamics gone awry, or a failure to properly understand some facet of the market or society that led to bad investments or policy.

The story of Koch Industries — presented even as it is through the lens of a “secret history” — is deeply admirable. It’s the story of a firm that not only learns from its own mistakes, as all firms must do if they are to survive, but of a firm that has a drive to learn in its DNA. Koch Industries relentlessly gathers information from the market, sometimes even to the exclusion of short-term profit. It eschews complex bureaucratic structures and processes, which encourages local managers to find opportunities and nimbly respond.

Kochland is a quick read that presents a gripping account of one of America’s corporate success stories. There is, of course, a healthy amount of material in the book covering the Koch brothers’ often controversial political activities. Nonetheless, even those who hate the Koch brothers on account of politics would do well to learn from the model of entrepreneurial success that Kochland cannot help but describe in its pages.

In economic freedom, entrepreneurship, markets, truth on the market Alchian, economic freedom, efficient markets, entrepreneurship, Hayek, Markets

Municipal Revenue Extraction Should Not Stand in the Way of Next Generation Broadband

Kristian Stout — 30 July 2019

Advanced broadband networks, including 5G, fiber, and high speed cable, are hot topics, but little attention is paid to the critical investments in infrastructure necessary to make these networks a reality. Each type of network has its own unique set of challenges to solve, both technically and legally. Advanced broadband delivered over cable systems, for example, not only has to incorporate support and upgrades for the physical infrastructure that facilitates modern high-definition television signals and high-speed Internet service, but also needs to be deployed within a regulatory environment that is fragmented across the many thousands of municipalities in the US. Oftentimes, the complexity of managing such a regulatory environment can be just as difficult as managing the actual provision of service.

The FCC has taken aim at one of these hurdles with its proposed Third Report and Order on the interpretation of Section 621 of the Cable Act, which is on the agenda for the Commission’s open meeting later this week. The most salient (for purposes of this post) feature of the Order is how the FCC intends to shore up the interpretation of the Cable Act’s limitation on cable franchise fees that municipalities are permitted to levy.

The Act was passed and later amended in a way that carefully drew lines around the acceptable scope of local franchising authorities’ de facto monopoly power in granting cable franchises. The thrust of the Act was to encourage competition and build-out by discouraging franchising authorities from viewing cable providers as a captive source of unlimited revenue. It did this while also giving franchising authorities the tools necessary to support public, educational, and governmental programming and enabling them to be fairly compensated for use of the public rights of way. Unfortunately, since the 1984 Cable Act was passed, an increasing number of local and state franchising authorities (“LFAs”) have attempted to work around the Act’s careful balance. In particular, these efforts have created two main problems.

First, LFAs frequently attempt to evade the Act’s limitation on franchise fees to five percent of cable revenues by seeking a variety of in-kind contributions from cable operators that impose costs over and above the statutorily permitted five percent limit. LFAs do this despite the plain language of the statute defining franchise fees quite broadly as including any “tax, fee, or assessment of any kind imposed by a franchising authority or any other governmental entity.”

Although not nominally “fees,” such requirements are indisputably “assessments,” and the costs of such obligations are equivalent to the marginal cost of a cable operator providing those “free” services and facilities, as well as the opportunity cost (i.e., the foregone revenue) of using its fixed assets in the absence of a state or local franchise obligation. Any such costs will, to some extent, be passed on to customers as higher subscription prices, reduced quality, or both. By carefully limiting the ability of LFAs to abuse their bargaining position, Congress ensured that they could not extract disproportionate rents from cable operators (and, ultimately, their subscribers).

Second, LFAs also attempt to circumvent the franchise fee cap of five percent of gross cable revenues by seeking additional fees for non-cable services provided over mixed use networks (i.e. imposing additional franchise fees on the provision of broadband and other non-cable services over cable networks). But the statute is similarly clear that LFAs or other governmental entities cannot regulate non-cable services provided via franchised cable systems.

My colleagues and I at ICLE recently filed an ex parte letter on these issues that analyzes the law and economics of both the underlying statute and the FCC’s proposed rulemaking that would affect the interpretation of cable franchise fees. For a variety of reasons set forth in the letter, we believe that the Commission is on firm legal and economic footing to adopt its proposed Order.

It should be unavailing – and legally irrelevant – to argue, as many LFAs have, that declining cable franchise revenue leaves municipalities with an insufficient source of funds to finance their activities, and thus that recourse to these other sources is required. Congress intentionally enacted the five percent revenue cap to prevent LFAs from relying on cable franchise fees as an unlimited general revenue source. In order to maintain the proper incentives for network buildout — which are ever more-critical as our economy increasingly relies on high-speed broadband networks — the Commission should adopt the proposed Order.

In federal communications commission, telecommunications, truth on the market cable, Communications Act, franchising, telecommunications

The ICANN Board’s Important Test of Independence: .Amazon

Kristian Stout — 2 May 2019

One of the main concerns I had during the IANA transition was the extent to which the newly independent organization would be able to behave impartially, implementing its own policies and bylaws in an objective and non-discriminatory manner, and not be unduly influenced by specific “stakeholders”. Chief among my concerns at the time was the extent to which an independent ICANN would be able to resist the influence of governments: when a powerful government leaned on ICANN’s board, would it be able to adhere to its own policies and follow the process the larger multistakeholder community put in place?

It seems my concern was not unfounded. Amazon, Inc. has been in a long running struggle with the countries of the Amazonian Basin in South America over the use of the generic top-level domain (gTLD) .amazon. In 2014, the ICANN board (which was still nominally under the control of the US’s NTIA) uncritically accepted the nonbinding advice of the Government Advisory Committee (“GAC”) and denied Amazon Inc.’s application for .amazon. In 2017, an Independent Review Process panel reversed the board decision, because

[the board] failed in its duty to explain and give adequate reasons for its decision, beyond merely citing to its reliance on the GAC advice and the presumption, albeit a strong presumption, that it was based on valid and legitimate public policy concerns.

Accordingly the board was directed to reconsider the .amazon petition and

make an objective and independent judgment regarding whether there are, in fact, well-founded, merits-based public policy reasons for denying Amazon’s applications.

In the two years since that decision, a number of proposals were discussed between Amazon Inc. and the Amazonian countries as they sought to reach a mutually agreeable resolution to the dispute, none of which were successful. In March of this year, the board acknowledged the failed negotiations and announced that the parties had four more weeks to try again and if no agreement were reached in that time, permitted Amazon Inc. to submit a proposal that would handle the Amazonian countries’ cultural protection concerns.

Predictably, that time elapsed and Amazon, Inc. submitted its proposal, which includes a public interest commitment that would allow the Amazonian countries access to certain second level domains under .amazon for cultural and noncommercial use. For example, Brazil could use a domain such as http://www.br.amazon to showcase the culturally relevant features of the portion of the Amazonian river that flows through its borders.

Prime facie, this seems like a reasonable way to ensure that the cultural interests of those living in the Amazonian region are adequately protected. Moreover, in its first stated objection to Amazon, Inc. having control of the gTLD, the GAC indicated that this was its concern:

[g]ranting exclusive rights to this specific gTLD to a private company would prevent the use of this domain for purposes of public interest related to the protection, promotion and awareness raising on issues related to the Amazon biome. It would also hinder the possibility of use of this domain to congregate web pages related to the population inhabiting that geographical region.

Yet Amazon, Inc.’s proposal to protect just these interests was rejected by the Amazonian countries’ governments. The counteroffer from those governments was that they be permitted to co-own and administer the gTLD, that their governance interest be constituted in a steering committee on which Amazon, Inc. be given only a 1/9th vote, that they be permitted a much broader use of the gTLD generally and, judging by the conspicuous lack of language limiting use to noncommercial purposes, that they have the ability to use the gTLD for commercial purposes.

This last point certainly must be a nonstarter. Amazon, Inc.’s use of .amazon is naturally going to be commercial in nature. If eight other “co-owners” were permitted a backdoor to using the ‘.amazon’ name in commerce, trademark dilution seems like a predictable, if not inevitable, result. Moreover, the entire point of allowing brand gTLDs is to help responsible brand managers ensure that consumers are receiving the goods and services they expect on the Internet. Commercial use by the Amazonian countries could easily lead to a situation where merchants selling goods of unknown quality are able to mislead consumers by free riding on Amazon, Inc.’s name recognition.

This is a big moment for Internet governance

Theoretically, the ICANN board could decide this matter as early as this week — but apparently it has opted to treat this meeting as merely an opportunity for more discussion. That the board would consider not following through on its statement in March that it would finally put this issue to rest is not an auspicious sign that the board intends to take its independence seriously.

An independent ICANN must be able to stand up to powerful special interests when it comes to following its own rules and bylaws. This is the very concern that most troubled me before the NTIA cut the organization loose. Introducing more delay suggests that the board lacks the courage of its convictions. The Amazonian countries may end up irritated with the ICANN board, but ICANN is either an independent organization or its not.

Amazon, Inc. followed the prescribed procedures from the beginning; there is simply no good reason to draw out this process any further. The real fear here, I suspect, is that the board knows that this is a straightforward trademark case and is holding out hope that the Amazonian countries will make the necessary concessions that will satisfy Amazon, Inc. After seven years of this process, somehow I suspect that this is not likely and the board simply needs to make a decision on the proposals as submitted.

The truth is that these countries never even applied for use of the gTLD in the first place; they only became interested in the use of the domain once Amazon, Inc. expressed interest. All along, these countries maintained that they merely wanted to protect the cultural heritage of the region — surely a fine goal. Yet, when pressed to the edge of the timeline on the process, they produce a proposal that would theoretically permit them to operate commercial domains.

This is a test for ICANN’s board. If it doesn’t want to risk offending powerful parties, it shouldn’t open up the DNS to gTLDs because, inevitably, there will exist aggrieved parties that cannot be satisfied. Amazon, Inc. has submitted a solid proposal that allows it to protect both its own valid trademark interests in its brand as well as the cultural interests of the Amazonian countries. The board should vote on the proposal this week and stop delaying this process any further.

In icann, internet Amazon, GAC, ICANN, Internet governance

Amazon is not essential

Kristian Stout — 2 April 2019

(The following is adapted from a recent ICLE Issue Brief on the flawed essential facilities arguments undergirding the EU competition investigations into Amazon’s marketplace that I wrote with Geoffrey Manne. The full brief is available here. )

Amazon has largely avoided the crosshairs of antitrust enforcers to date. The reasons seem obvious: in the US it handles a mere 5% of all retail sales (with lower shares worldwide), and it consistently provides access to a wide array of affordable goods. Yet, even with Amazon’s obvious lack of dominance in the general retail market, the EU and some of its member states are opening investigations.

Commissioner Margarethe Vestager’s probe into Amazon, which came to light in September, centers on whether Amazon is illegally using its dominant position vis-á-vis third party merchants on its platforms in order to obtain data that it then uses either to promote its own direct sales, or else to develop competing products under its private label brands. More recently, Austria and Germany have launched separate investigations of Amazon rooted in many of the same concerns as those of the European Commission. The German investigation also focuses on whether the contractual relationships that third party sellers enter into with Amazon are unfair because these sellers are “dependent” on the platform.

One of the fundamental, erroneous assumptions upon which these cases are built is the alleged “essentiality” of the underlying platform or input. In truth, these sorts of cases are more often based on stories of firms that chose to build their businesses in a way that relies on a specific platform. In other words, their own decisions — from which they substantially benefited, of course — made their investments highly “asset specific” and thus vulnerable to otherwise avoidable risks. When a platform on which these businesses rely makes a disruptive move, the third parties cry foul, even though the platform was not — nor should have been — under any obligation to preserve the status quo on behalf of third parties.

Essential or not, that is the question

All three investigations are effectively premised on a version of an “essential facilities” theory — the claim that Amazon is essential to these companies’ ability to do business.

There are good reasons that the US has tightly circumscribed the scope of permissible claims invoking the essential facilities doctrine. Such “duty to deal” claims are “at or near the outer boundary” of US antitrust law. And there are good reasons why the EU and its member states should be similarly skeptical.

Characterizing one firm as essential to the operation of other firms is tricky because “[c]ompelling [innovative] firms to share the source of their advantage… may lessen the incentive for the monopolist, the rival, or both to invest in those economically beneficial facilities.” Further, the classification requires “courts to act as central planners, identifying the proper price, quantity, and other terms of dealing—a role for which they are ill-suited.”

The key difficulty is that alleged “essentiality” actually falls on a spectrum. On one end is something like a true monopoly utility that is actually essential to all firms that use its service as a necessary input; on the other is a firm that offers highly convenient services that make it much easier for firms to operate. This latter definition of “essentiality” describes firms like Google and Amazon, but it is not accurate to characterize such highly efficient and effective firms as truly “essential.” Instead, companies that choose to take advantage of the benefits such platforms offer, and to tailor their business models around them, suffer from an asset specificity problem.

Geoffrey Manne noted this problem in the context of the EU’s Google Shopping case:

A content provider that makes itself dependent upon another company for distribution (or vice versa, of course) takes a significant risk. Although it may benefit from greater access to users, it places itself at the mercy of the other — or at least faces great difficulty (and great cost) adapting to unanticipated, crucial changes in distribution over which it has no control.

Third-party sellers that rely upon Amazon without a contingency plan are engaging in a calculated risk that, as business owners, they would typically be expected to manage. The investigations by European authorities are based on the notion that antitrust law might require Amazon to remove that risk by prohibiting it from undertaking certain conduct that might raise costs for its third-party sellers.

Implications and extensions

In the full issue brief, we consider the tensions in EU law between seeking to promote innovation and protect the competitive process, on the one hand, and the propensity of EU enforcers to rely on essential facilities-style arguments on the other. One of the fundamental errors that leads EU enforcers in this direction is that they confuse the distribution channel of the Internet with an antitrust-relevant market definition.

A claim based on some flavor of Amazon-as-essential-facility should be untenable given today’s market realities because Amazon is, in fact, just one mode of distribution among many. Commerce on the Internet is still just commerce. The only thing preventing a merchant from operating a viable business using any of a number of different mechanisms is the transaction costs it would incur adjusting to a different mode of doing business. Casting Amazon’s marketplace as an essential facility insulates third-party firms from the consequences of their own decisions — from business model selection to marketing and distribution choices. Commerce is nothing new and offline distribution channels and retail outlets — which compete perfectly capably with online — are well developed. Granting retailers access to Amazon’s platform on artificially favorable terms is no more justifiable than granting them access to a supermarket end cap, or a particular unit at a shopping mall. There is, in other words, no business or economic justification for granting retailers in the time-tested and massive retail market an entitlement to use a particular mode of marketing and distribution just because they find it more convenient.

In antitrust, essential facilities, european commission, markets, truth on the market Amazon, antitrust and platforms, antitrust populism, essential facilities, European Commission, google

Announcement, TOTM blog symposium: Is Amazon’s Appetite Bottomless? The Whole Foods Merger After One Year

Kristian Stout — 27 August 2018

Announcement

Truth on the Market is pleased to announce its next blog symposium:

Is Amazon’s Appetite Bottomless?

The Whole Foods Merger After One Year

August 28, 2018

One year ago tomorrow the Amazon/Whole Foods merger closed, following its approval by the FTC. The merger was something of a flashpoint in the growing populist antitrust movement, raising some interesting questions — and a host of objections from a number of scholars, advocates, journalists, antitrust experts, and others who voiced a range of possible problematic outcomes.

Under settled antitrust law — evolved over the last century-plus — the merger between Amazon and Whole Foods was largely uncontroversial. But the size and scope of Amazon’s operation and ambition has given some pause. And despite the apparent inapplicability of antitrust law to the array of populist concerns about large tech companies, advocates nonetheless contend that antitrust should be altered to deal with new threats posed by companies like Amazon.

For something of a primer on the antitrust debate surrounding Amazon, listen to ICLE’s Geoffrey Manne and Open Markets’ Lina Khan on Season 2 Episode 1 of Briefly, a podcast produced by the University of Chicago Law Review.

Beginning tomorrow, August 28, Truth on the Market and the International Center for Law & Economics will host a blog symposium discussing the impact of the merger.

One year on, we asked antitrust scholars and other experts to consider:

What has been the significance of the Amazon/Whole Foods merger?
How has the merger affected various markets and the participants within them (e.g., grocery stores, food delivery services, online retailers, workers, grocery suppliers, etc.)?
What, if anything, does the merger and its aftermath tell us about current antitrust doctrine and our understanding of platform markets?
Has a year of experience borne out any of the objections to the merger?
Have the market changes since the merger undermined or reinforced the populist antitrust arguments regarding this or other conduct?

As in the past (see examples of previous TOTM blog symposia here), we’ve lined up an outstanding and diverse group of scholars to discuss these issues.

Participants

Robert D. Atkinson, President, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
Dirk Auer, Research Fellow, Liege Competition and Innovation Institute
Jarod M. Bona, CEO & Attorney, BonaLaw PC, and The Antitrust Attorney Blog
Eric Fruits, Chief Economist, International Center for Law & Economics
Steve Horwitz, Distinguished Professor of Free Enterprise, Ball State University
Justin (Gus) Hurwitz, Associate Professor of Law & Co-Director of Space, Cyber, and Telecom Law Program, Nebraska College of Law; Director of Law & Economics Programs, International Center for Law & Economics
Steven Levitsky, Attorney, BonaLaw PC, and The Antitrust Attorney Blog
Geoffrey A. Manne, President & Founder, International Center for Law & Economics
Will Rinehart, Director of Technology and Innovation Policy, American Action Forum
Christopher L. Sagers, Distinguished Professor of Law, Cleveland-Marshall College of Law
Hal Singer, Principal, Economists Incorporated; Adjunct professor, Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business
Kristian Stout, Associate Director of Innovation Policy, International Center for Law & Economics

The symposium posts will be collected here. We hope you’ll join us!

In amazon-whole foods symposium, antitrust, mergers & acquisitions, truth on the market Amazon, antitrust, antitrust law, antitrust populism, hipster antitrust

Senator Warner’s retrogressive proposals could lead to arbitrary and capricious interventions that would harm entrepreneurs and consumers

Kristian Stout — 10 August 2018

Last week, I objected to Senator Warner relying on the flawed AOL/Time Warner merger conditions as a template for tech regulatory policy, but there is a much deeper problem contained in his proposals. Although he does not explicitly say “big is bad” when discussing competition issues, the thrust of much of what he recommends would serve to erode the power of larger firms in favor of smaller firms without offering a justification for why this would result in a superior state of affairs. And he makes these recommendations without respect to whether those firms actually engage in conduct that is harmful to consumers.

In the Data Portability section, Warner says that “As platforms grow in size and scope, network effects and lock-in effects increase; consumers face diminished incentives to contract with new providers, particularly if they have to once again provide a full set of data to access desired functions.“ Thus, he recommends a data portability mandate, which would theoretically serve to benefit startups by providing them with the data that large firms possess. The necessary implication here is that it is a per se good that small firms be benefited and large firms diminished, as the proposal is not grounded in any evaluation of the competitive behavior of the firms to which such a mandate would apply.

Warner also proposes an “interoperability” requirement on “dominant platforms” (which I criticized previously) in situations where, “data portability alone will not produce procompetitive outcomes.” Again, the necessary implication is that it is a per se good that established platforms share their services with start ups without respect to any competitive analysis of how those firms are behaving. The goal is preemptively to “blunt their ability to leverage their dominance over one market or feature into complementary or adjacent markets or products.”

Perhaps most perniciously, Warner recommends treating large platforms as essential facilities in some circumstances. To this end he states that:

Legislation could define thresholds – for instance, user base size, market share, or level of dependence of wider ecosystems – beyond which certain core functions/platforms/apps would constitute ‘essential facilities’, requiring a platform to provide third party access on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms and preventing platforms from engaging in self-dealing or preferential conduct.

But, as i’ve previously noted with respect to imposing “essential facilities” requirements on tech platforms,

[T]he essential facilities doctrine is widely criticized, by pretty much everyone. In their respected treatise, Antitrust Law, Herbert Hovenkamp and Philip Areeda have said that “the essential facility doctrine is both harmful and unnecessary and should be abandoned”; Michael Boudin has noted that the doctrine is full of “embarrassing weaknesses”; and Gregory Werden has opined that “Courts should reject the doctrine.”

Indeed, as I also noted, “the Supreme Court declined to recognize the essential facilities doctrine as a distinct rule in Trinko, where it instead characterized the exclusionary conduct in Aspen Skiing as ‘at or near the outer boundary’ of Sherman Act § 2 liability.”

In short, it’s very difficult to know when access to a firm’s internal functions might be critical to the facilitation of a market. It simply cannot be true that a firm becomes bound under onerous essential facilities requirements (or classification as a public utility) simply because other firms find it more convenient to use its services than to develop their own.

The truth of what is actually happening in these cases, however, is that third-party firms are choosing to anchor their business to the processes of another firm which generates an “asset specificity” problem that they then seek the government to remedy:

A content provider that makes itself dependent upon another company for distribution (or vice versa, of course) takes a significant risk. Although it may benefit from greater access to users, it places itself at the mercy of the other — or at least faces great difficulty (and great cost) adapting to unanticipated, crucial changes in distribution over which it has no control.

This is naturally a calculated risk that a firm may choose to make, but it is a risk. To pry open Google or Facebook for the benefit of competitors that choose to play to Google and Facebook’s user base, rather than opening markets of their own, punishes the large players for being successful while also rewarding behavior that shies away from innovation. Further, such a policy would punish the large platforms whenever they innovate with their services in any way that might frustrate third-party “integrators” (see, e.g., Foundem’s claims that Google’s algorithm updates meant to improve search quality for users harmed Foundem’s search rankings).

Rather than encouraging innovation, blessing this form of asset specificity would have the perverse result of entrenching the status quo.

In all of these recommendations from Senator Warner, there is no claim that any of the targeted firms will have behaved anticompetitively, but merely that they are above a certain size. This is to say that, in some cases, big is bad.

Senator Warner’s policies would harm competition and innovation

As Geoffrey Manne and Gus Hurwitz have recently noted these views run completely counter to the last half-century or more of economic and legal learning that has occurred in antitrust law. From its murky, politically-motivated origins through the early 60’s when the Structure-Conduct-Performance (“SCP”) interpretive framework was ascendant, antitrust law was more or less guided by the gut feeling of regulators that big business necessarily harmed the competitive process.

Thus, at its height with SCP, “big is bad” antitrust relied on presumptions that large firms over a certain arbitrary threshold were harmful and should be subjected to more searching judicial scrutiny when merging or conducting business.

A paradigmatic example of this approach can be found in Von’s Grocery where the Supreme Court prevented the merger of two relatively small grocery chains. Combined, the two chains would have constitutes a mere 9 percent of the market, yet the Supreme Court, relying on the SCP aversion to concentration in itself, prevented the merger despite any procompetitive justifications that would have allowed the combined entity to compete more effectively in a market that was coming to be dominated by large supermarkets.

As Manne and Hurwitz observe: “this decision meant breaking up a merger that did not harm consumers, on the one hand, while preventing firms from remaining competitive in an evolving market by achieving efficient scale, on the other.” And this gets to the central defect of Senator Warner’s proposals. He ties his decisions to interfere in the operations of large tech firms to their size without respect to any demonstrable harm to consumers.

To approach antitrust this way — that is, to roll the clock back to a period before there was a well-defined and administrable standard for antitrust — is to open the door for regulation by political whim. But the value of the contemporary consumer welfare test is that it provides knowable guidance that limits both the undemocratic conduct of politically motivated enforcers as well as the opportunities for private firms to engage in regulatory capture. As Manne and Hurwitz observe:

Perhaps the greatest virtue of the consumer welfare standard is not that it is the best antitrust standard (although it is) — it’s simply that it is a standard. The story of antitrust law for most of the 20th century was one of standard-less enforcement for political ends. It was a tool by which any entrenched industry could harness the force of the state to maintain power or stifle competition.

While it is unlikely that Senator Warner intends to entrench politically powerful incumbents, or enable regulation by whim, those are the likely effects of his proposals.

Antitrust law has a rich set of tools for dealing with competitive harm. Introducing legislation to define arbitrary thresholds for limiting the potential power of firms will ultimately undermine the power of those tools and erode the welfare of consumers.

In antitrust, essential facilities, google, technology, truth on the market antitrust, antitrust populism, competition, essential facilities, facebook, google, hipster antitrust

AOL/Time Warner merger conditions are a template for disastrous tech policy

Kristian Stout — 30 July 2018

Senator Mark Warner has proposed 20 policy prescriptions for bringing “big tech” to heel. The proposals — which run the gamut from policing foreign advertising on social networks to regulating feared competitive harms — provide much interesting material for Congress to consider.

On the positive side, Senator Warner introduces the idea that online platforms may be able to function as least-cost avoiders with respect to certain tortious behavior of their users. He advocates for platforms to implement technology that would help control the spread of content that courts have found violated certain rights of third-parties.

Yet, on other accounts — specifically the imposition of an “interoperability” mandate on platforms — his proposals risk doing more harm than good.

The interoperability mandate was included by Senator Warner in order to “blunt [tech platforms’] ability to leverage their dominance over one market or feature into complementary or adjacent markets or products.” According to Senator Warner, such a measure would enable startups to offset the advantages that arise from network effects on large tech platforms by building their services more easily on the backs of successful incumbents.

Whatever you think of the moats created by network effects, the example of “successful” previous regulation on this issue that Senator Warner relies upon is perplexing:

A prominent template for [imposing interoperability requirements] was in the AOL/Time Warner merger, where the FCC identified instant messaging as the ‘killer app’ – the app so popular and dominant that it would drive consumers to continue to pay for AOL service despite the existence of more innovative and efficient email and internet connectivity services. To address this, the FCC required AOL to make its instant messaging service (AIM, which also included a social graph) interoperable with at least one rival immediately and with two other rivals within 6 months.

But the AOL/Time Warner merger and the FCC’s conditions provide an example that demonstrates the exact opposite of what Senator Warner suggests. The much-feared 2001 megamerger prompted, as the Senator notes, fears that the new company would be able to leverage its dominance in the nascent instant messaging market to extend its influence into adjacent product markets.

Except, by 2003, despite it being unclear that AOL had developed interoperable systems, two large competitors had arisen that did not run interoperable IM networks (Yahoo! and Microsoft). In that same period, AOL’s previously 100% IM market share had declined by about half. By 2009, after eight years of heavy losses, Time Warner shed AOL, and by last year AIM was completely dead.

Not only was it not clear that AOL was able to make AIM interoperable, AIM was never able to catch up once better, rival services launched. What the conditions did do, however, was prevent AOL from launching competitive video chat services as it flailed about in the wake of the deal, thus forcing it to miss out on a market opportunity available to unencumbered competitors like Microsoft and Yahoo!

And all of this of course ignores the practical impossibility entailed in interfering in highly integrated technology platforms.

The AOL/Time Warner merger conditions are no template for successful tech regulation. Congress would be ill-advised to rely upon such templates for crafting policy around tech and innovation.

In technology, truth on the market innovation, internet, platforms, tech companies, technology

Will the European Commission Reduce the Incentive to Innovate?

Kristian Stout — 18 June 2018

The EC’s Android decision is expected sometime in the next couple of weeks. Current speculation is that the EC may issue a fine exceeding last year’s huge 2.4B EU fine for Google’s alleged antitrust violations related to the display of general search results. Based on the statement of objections (“SO”), I expect the Android decision will be a muddle of legal theory that not only fails to connect to facts and marketplace realities, but also will perversely incentivize platform operators to move toward less open ecosystems.

As has been amply demonstrated (see, e.g., here and here), the Commission has made fundamental errors with its market definition analysis in this case. Chief among its failures is the EC’s incredible decision to treat the relevant market as licensable mobile operating systems, which notably excludes the largest smartphone player by revenue, Apple.

This move, though perhaps expedient for the EC, leads the Commission to view with disapproval an otherwise competitively justifiable set of licensing requirements that Google imposes on its partners. This includes anti-fragmentation and app-bundling provisions (“Provisions”) in the agreements that partners sign in order to be able to distribute Google Mobile Services (“GMS”) with their devices. Among other things, the Provisions guarantee that a basic set of Google’s apps and services will be non-exclusively featured on partners’ devices.

The Provisions — when viewed in a market in which Apple is a competitor — are clearly procompetitive. The critical mass of GMS-flavored versions of Android (as opposed to vanilla Android Open Source Project (“AOSP”) devices) supplies enough predictability to an otherwise unruly universe of disparate Android devices such that software developers will devote the sometimes considerable resources necessary for launching successful apps on Android.

Open source software like AOSP is great, but anyone with more than a passing familiarity with Linux recognizes that the open source movement often fails to produce consumer-friendly software. In order to provide a critical mass of users that attract developers to Android, Google provides a significant service to the Android market as a whole by using the Provisions to facilitate a predictable user (and developer) experience.

Generativity on platforms is a complex phenomenon

To some extent, the EC’s complaint is rooted in a bias that Android act as a more “generative” platform such that third-party developers are relatively better able to reach users of Android devices. But this effort by the EC to undermine the Provisions will be ultimately self-defeating as it will likely push mobile platform providers to converge on similar, relatively more closed business models that provide less overall consumer choice.

Even assuming that the Provisions somehow prevent third-party app installs or otherwise develop a kind of path-dependency among users such that they never seek out new apps (which the data clearly shows is not happening), focusing on third-party developers as the sole or primary source of innovation on Android is a mistake.

The control that platform operators like Apple and Google exert over their respective ecosystems does not per se create more or less generativity on the platforms. As Gus Hurwitz has noted, “literature and experience amply demonstrate that ‘open’ platforms, or general-purpose technologies generally, can promote growth and increase social welfare, but they also demonstrate that open platforms can also limit growth and decrease welfare.” Conversely, tighter vertical integration (the Apple model) can also produce more innovation than open platforms.

What is important is the balance between control and freedom, and the degree to which third-party developers are able to innovate within the context of a platform’s constraints. The existence of constraints — either Apple’s more tightly controlled terms, or Google’s more generous Provisions — themselves facilitate generativity.

In short, it is overly simplistic to view generativity as something that happens at the edges without respect to structural constraints at the core. The interplay between platform and developer is complex and complementary, and needs to be viewed as a dynamic process.

Whither platform diversity?

I love Apple’s devices and I am quite happy living within its walled garden. But I certainly do not believe that Apple’s approach is the only one that makes sense. Yet, in its SO, the EC blesses Apple’s approach as the proper way to manage a mobile ecosystem. It explicitly excluded Apple from a competitive analysis, and attacked Google on the basis that it imposed restrictions in the context of licensing its software. Thus, had Google opted instead to create a separate walled garden of its own on the Apple model, everything it had done would have otherwise been fine. This means that Google is now subject to an antitrust investigation for attempting to develop a more open platform.

With this SO, the EC is basically asserting that Google is anticompetitively bundling without being able to plausibly assert foreclosure (because, again, third-party app installs are easy to do and are easily shown to number in the billions). I’m sure Google doesn’t want to move in the direction of having a more closed system, but the lesson of this case will loom large for tomorrow’s innovators.

In the face of eager antitrust enforcers like those in the EU, the easiest path for future innovators will be to keep everything tightly controlled so as to prevent both fragmentation and misguided regulatory intervention.

In antitrust, Efficiencies, european commission, google, truth on the market Android, antitrust, bundling, foreclosure, google

Canadian Site Blocking Proposal Is a Good Experiment in Controlling Piracy

Kristian Stout — 11 June 2018

In an ideal world, it would not be necessary to block websites in order to combat piracy. But we do not live in an ideal world. We live in a world in which enormous amounts of content—from books and software to movies and music—is being distributed illegally. As a result, content creators and owners are being deprived of their rights and of the revenue that would flow from legitimate consumption of that content.

In this real world, site blocking may be both a legitimate and a necessary means of reducing piracy and protecting the rights and interests of rightsholders.

Of course, site blocking may not be perfectly effective, given that pirates will “domain hop” (moving their content from one website/IP address to another). As such, it may become a game of whack-a-mole. However, relative to other enforcement options, such as issuing millions of takedown notices, it is likely a much simpler, easier and more cost-effective strategy.

And site blocking could be abused or misapplied, just as any other legal remedy can be abused or misapplied. It is a fair concern to keep in mind with any enforcement program, and it is important to ensure that there are protections against such abuse and misapplication.

Thus, a Canadian coalition of telecom operators and rightsholders, called FairPlay Canada, have proposed a non-litigation alternative solution to piracy that employs site blocking but is designed to avoid the problems that critics have attributed to other private ordering solutions.

The FairPlay Proposal

FairPlay has sent a proposal to the CRTC (the Canadian telecom regulator) asking that it develop a process by which it can adjudicate disputes over web sites that are “blatantly, overwhelmingly, or structurally engaged in piracy.” The proposal asks for the creation of an Independent Piracy Review Agency (“IPRA”) that would hear complaints of widespread piracy, perform investigations, and ultimately issue a report to the CRTC with a recommendation either to block or not to block sites in question. The CRTC would retain ultimate authority regarding whether to add an offending site to a list of known pirates. Once on that list, a pirate site would have its domain blocked by ISPs.

The upside seems fairly obvious: it would be a more cost-effective and efficient process for investigating allegations of piracy and removing offenders. The current regime is cumbersome and enormously costly, and the evidence suggests that site blocking is highly effective.

Under Canadian law—the so-called “Notice and Notice” regime—rightsholders send notices to ISPs, who in turn forward those notices to their own users. Once those notices have been sent, rightsholders can then move before a court to require ISPs to expose the identities of users that upload infringing content. In just one relatively large case, it was estimated that the cost of complying with these requests was 8.25M CAD.

The failure of the American equivalent of the “Notice and Notice” regime provides evidence supporting the FairPlay proposal. The graduated response system was set up in 2012 as a means of sending a series of escalating warnings to users who downloaded illegal content, much as the “Notice and Notice” regime does. But the American program has since been discontinued because it did not effectively target the real source of piracy: repeat offenders who share a large amount of material.

This, on the other hand, demonstrates one of the greatest points commending the FairPlay proposal. The focus of enforcement shifts away from casually infringing users and directly onto the operators of sites that engage in widespread infringement. Therefore, one of the criticisms of Canada’s current “notice and notice” regime — that the notice passthrough system is misused to send abusive settlement demands — is completely bypassed.

And whichever side of the notice regime bears the burden of paying the associated research costs under “Notice and Notice”—whether ISPs eat them as a cost of doing business, or rightsholders pay ISPs for their work—the net effect is a deadweight loss. Therefore, whatever can be done to reduce these costs, while also complying with Canada’s other commitments to protecting its citizens’ property interests and civil rights, is going to be a net benefit to Canadian society.

Of course it won’t be all upside — no policy, private or public, ever is. IP and property generally represent a set of tradeoffs intended to net the greatest social welfare gains. As Richard Epstein has observed

No one can defend any system of property rights, whether for tangible or intangible objects, on the naïve view that it produces all gain and no pain. Every system of property rights necessarily creates some winners and some losers. Recognize property rights in land, and the law makes trespassers out of people who were once free to roam. We choose to bear these costs not because we believe in the divine rights of private property. Rather, we bear them because we make the strong empirical judgment that any loss of liberty is more than offset by the gains from manufacturing, agriculture and commerce that exclusive property rights foster. These gains, moreover, are not confined to some lucky few who first get to occupy land. No, the private holdings in various assets create the markets that use voluntary exchange to spread these gains across the entire population. Our defense of IP takes the same lines because the inconveniences it generates are fully justified by the greater prosperity and well-being for the population at large.

So too is the justification — and tempering principle — behind any measure meant to enforce copyrights. The relevant question when thinking about a particular enforcement regime is not whether some harms may occur because some harm will always occur. The proper questions are: (1) Does the measure to be implemented stand a chance of better giving effect to the property rights we have agreed to protect and (2) when harms do occur, is there a sufficiently open and accessible process available whereby affected parties (and interested third parties) can rightly criticize and improve the system.

On both accounts the FairPlay proposal appears to hit the mark.

FairPlay’s proposal can reduce piracy while respecting users’ rights

Although I am generally skeptical of calls for state intervention, this case seems to present a real opportunity for the CRTC to do some good. If Canada adopts this proposal it is is establishing a reasonable and effective remedy to address violations of individuals’ property, the ownership of which is considered broadly legitimate.

And, as a public institution subject to input from many different stakeholder groups — FairPlay describes the stakeholders as comprised of “ISPs, rightsholders, consumer advocacy and citizen groups” — the CRTC can theoretically provide a fairly open process. This is distinct from, for example, the Donuts trusted notifier program that some criticized (in my view, mistakenly) as potentially leading to an unaccountable, private ordering of the DNS.

FairPlay’s proposal outlines its plan to provide affected parties with due process protections:

The system proposed seeks to maximize transparency and incorporates extensive safeguards and checks and balances, including notice and an opportunity for the website, ISPs, and other interested parties to review any application submitted to and provide evidence and argument and participate in a hearing before the IPRA; review of all IPRA decisions in a transparent Commission process; the potential for further review of all Commission decisions through the established review and vary procedure; and oversight of the entire system by the Federal Court of Appeal, including potential appeals on questions of law or jurisdiction including constitutional questions, and the right to seek judicial review of the process and merits of the decision.

In terms of its efficacy, according to even the critics of the FairPlay proposal, site blocking provides a measurably positive reduction on piracy. In its formal response to critics, FairPlay Canada noted that one of the studies the critics relied upon actually showed that previous blocks of the PirateBay domains had reduced piracy by nearly 25%:

The Poort study shows that when a single illegal peer-to-peer piracy site (The Pirate Bay) was blocked, between 8% and 9.3% of consumers who were engaged in illegal downloading (from any site, not just The Pirate Bay) at the time the block was implemented reported that they stopped their illegal downloading entirely. A further 14.5% to 15.3% reported that they reduced their illegal downloading. This shows the power of the regime the coalition is proposing.

The proposal stands to reduce the costs of combating piracy, as well. As noted above, the costs of litigating a large case can reach well into the millions just to initiate proceedings. In its reply comments, FairPlay Canada noted the costs for even run-of-the-mill suits essentially price enforcement of copyrights out of the reach of smaller rightsholders:

[T]he existing process can be inefficient and inaccessible for rightsholders. In response to this argument raised by interveners and to ensure the Commission benefits from a complete record on the point, the coalition engaged IP and technology law firm Hayes eLaw to explain the process that would likely have to be followed to potentially obtain such an order under existing legal rules…. [T]he process involves first completing litigation against each egregious piracy site, and could take up to 765 days and cost up to $338,000 to address a single site.

Moreover, these cost estimates assume that the really bad pirates can even be served with process — which is untrue for many infringers. Unlike physical distributors of counterfeit material (e.g. CDs and DVDs), online pirates do not need to operate within Canada to affect Canadian artists — which leaves a remedy like site blocking as one of the only viable enforcement mechanisms.

Don’t we want to reduce piracy?

More generally, much of the criticism of this proposal is hard to understand. Piracy is clearly a large problem to any observer who even casually peruses the lumen database. Even defenders of the status quo are forced to acknowledge that “the notice and takedown provisions have been used by rightsholders countless—but likely billions—of times” — a reality that shows that efforts to control piracy to date have been insufficient.

So why not try this experiment? Why not try using a neutral multistakeholder body to see if rightsholders, ISPs, and application providers can create an online environment both free from massive, obviously infringing piracy, and also free for individuals to express themselves and service providers to operate?

In its response comments, the FairPlay coalition noted that some objectors have “insisted that the Commission should reject the proposal… because it might lead… the Commission to use a similar mechanism to address other forms of illegal content online.”

This is the same weak argument that is easily deployable against any form of collective action at all. Of course the state can be used for bad ends — anyone with even a superficial knowledge of history knows this — but that surely can’t be an indictment against lawmaking as a whole. If allowing a form of prohibition for category A is appropriate, but the same kind of prohibition is inappropriate for category B, then either we assume lawmakers are capable of differentiating between category A and category B, or else we believe that prohibition itself is per se inappropriate. If site blocking is wrong in every circumstance, the objectors need to convincingly make that case (which, to date, they have not).

Regardless of these criticisms, it seems unlikely that such a public process could be easily subverted for mass censorship. And any incipient censorship should be readily apparent and addressable in the IPRA process. Further, at least twenty-five countries have been experimenting with site blocking for IP infringement in different ways, and, at least so far, there haven’t been widespread allegations of massive censorship.

Maybe there is a perfect way to control piracy and protect user rights at the same time. But until we discover the perfect, I’m all for trying the good. The FairPlay coalition has a good idea, and I look forward to seeing how it progresses in Canada.

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