Archives For

Economics is Dead. Long Live Economics! A Review of The Economists’ Hour

Ben Sperry — 13 November 2019 — Leave a comment

John Maynard Keynes wrote in his famous General Theory that “[t]he ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”

This is true even of those who wish to criticize the effect of economic thinking on society. In his new book, The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society, New York Times economics reporter Binyamin Appelbaum aims to show that economists have had a detrimental effect on public policy. But the central irony of the Economists’ Hour is that in criticizing the influence of economists over policy, Appelbaum engages in a great deal of economic speculation himself. Appelbaum would discard the opinions of economists in favor of “the lessons of history,” but all he is left with is unsupported economic reasoning.

Much of The Economists’ Hour is about the history of ideas. To his credit, Appelbaum does a fair job describing Anglo-American economic thought post-New Deal until the start of the 21st century. Part I mainly focuses on macroeconomics, detailing the demise of the Keynesian consensus and the rise of the monetarists and supply-siders. If the author were not so cynical about the influence of economists, he might have represented these changes in dominant economic paradigms as an example of how science progresses over time.

Interestingly, Appelbaum often makes the case that the insights of economists have been incredibly beneficial. For instance, in the opening chapter, he describes how Milton Friedman (one of the main protagonists/antagonists of the book, depending on your point of view) and a band of economists (including Martin Anderson and Walter Oi) fought the military establishment and ended the draft. For that, I’m sure most of us born in the past fifty years would be thankful. One suspects that group includes Appelbaum, though he tries to find objections, claiming for example that “by making war more efficient and more remote from the lives of most Americans, the end of the draft may also have made war more likely.”

Appelbaum also notes positively that economists, most prominently Alfred Kahn in the United States, led the charge in a largely beneficial deregulation of the airline and trucking industries in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Yet, overall, it is clear that Appelbaum believes the “outsized” influence of economists over policymaking itself fails the cost-benefit analysis. Appelbaum focuses on the costs of listening too much to economists on antitrust law, trade and development, interest rates and currency, the use of cost-benefit analysis in regulation, and the deregulation of the financial services industry. He sees the deregulation of airlines and trucking as the height of the economists’ hour, and its close with the financial crisis of the late-2000s. His thesis is that (his interpretation of) economists’ notions of efficiency, their (alleged) lack of concern about distributional effects, and their (alleged) myopia has harmed society as their influence over policy has grown.

In his chapter on antitrust, for instance, Appelbaum admits that even though “[w]e live in a new era of giant corporations… there is little evidence consumers are suffering.” Appelbaum argues instead that lax antitrust enforcement has resulted in market concentration harmful to workers, democracy, and innovation. In order to make those arguments, he uncritically cites the work of economists and non-economist legal scholars that make economic claims. A closer inspection of each of these (economic) arguments suggests there is more to the story.

First, recent research questions the narrative that increasing market concentration has resulted in harm to consumers, workers, or society. In their recent paper, “The Industrial Revolution in Services,” Chang-Tai Hsieh of the University of Chicago and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg of Princeton University argue that increasing concentration is primarily due to technological innovation in services, retail, and wholesale sectors. While there has been greater concentration at the national level, this has been accompanied by increased competition locally as national chains expanded to more local markets. Of note, employment has increased in the sectors where national concentration is rising.

The rise in national industry concentration in the US between 1977 and 2013 is driven by a new industrial revolution in three broad non-traded sectors: services, retail, and wholesale. Sectors where national concentration is rising have increased their share of employment, and the expansion is entirely driven by the number of local markets served by firms. Firm employment per market has either increased slightly at the MSA level, or decreased substantially at the county or establishment levels. In industries with increasing concentration, the expansion into more markets is more pronounced for the top 10% firms, but is present for the bottom 90% as well. These trends have not been accompanied by economy-wide concentration. Top U.S. firms are increasingly specialized in sectors with rising industry concentration, but their aggregate employment share has remained roughly stable. We argue that these facts are consistent with the availability of a new set of fixed-cost technologies that enable adopters to produce at lower marginal costs in all markets. We present a simple model of firm size and market entry to describe the menu of new technologies and trace its implications.

In other words, any increase in concentration has been sector-specific and primarily due to more efficient national firms expanding into local markets. This has been associated with lower prices for consumers and more employment opportunities for workers in those sectors.

Appelbaum also looks to Lina Khan’s law journal article, which attacks Amazon for allegedly engaging in predatory pricing, as an example of a new group of young scholars coming to the conclusion that there is a need for more antitrust scrutiny. But, as ICLE scholars Alec Stapp and Kristian Stout have pointed out, there is very little evidence Amazon is actually engaging in predatory pricing. Khan’s article is a challenge to the consensus on how to think about predatory pricing and consumer welfare, but her underlying economic theory is premised on Amazon having such a long time horizon that they can lose money on retail for decades (even though it has been profitable for some time), on the theory that someday down the line they can raise prices after they have run all retail competition out.

Second, Appelbaum argues that mergers and acquisitions in the technology sector, especially acquisitions by Google and Facebook of potential rivals, has decreased innovation. Appelbaum’s belief is that innovation is spurred when government forces dominant players “to make room” for future competition. Here he draws in part on claims by some economists that dominant firms sometimes engage in “killer acquisitions” — acquiring nascent competitors in order to reduce competition, to the detriment of consumer welfare. But a simple model of how that results in reduced competition must be balanced by a recognition that many companies, especially technology startups, are incentivized to innovate in part by the possibility that they will be bought out. As noted by the authors of the leading study on the welfare effects of alleged “killer acquisitions”,

“it is possible that the presence of an acquisition channel also has a positive effect on welfare if the prospect of entrepreneurial exit through acquisition (by an incumbent) spurs ex-ante innovation …. Whereas in our model entrepreneurs are born with a project and thus do not have to exert effort to come up with an idea, it is plausible that the prospect of later acquisition may motivate the origination of entrepreneurial ideas in the first place… If, on the other hand, killer acquisitions do increase ex-ante innovation, this potential welfare gain will have to be weighed against the ex-post efficiency loss due to reduced competition. Whether the former positive or the latter negative effect dominates will depend on the elasticity of the entrepreneur’s innovation response.”

This analysis suggests that a case-by-case review is necessary if antitrust plaintiffs can show evidence that harm to consumers is likely to occur due to a merger.. But shifting the burden to merging entities, as Applebaum seems to suggest, will come with its own costs. In other words, more economics is needed to understand this area, not less.

Third, Appelbaum’s few concrete examples of harm to consumers resulting from “lax antitrust enforcement” in the United States come from airline mergers and telecommunications. In both cases, he sees the increased attention from competition authorities in Europe compared to the U.S. at the explanation for better outcomes. Neither is a clear example of harm to consumers, nor can be used to show superior antitrust frameworks in Europe versus the United States.

In the case of airline mergers, Appelbaum argues the gains from deregulation of the industry have been largely given away due to poor antitrust enforcement and prices stopped falling, leading to a situation where “[f]or the first time since the dawn of aviation, it is generally cheaper to fly in Europe than in the United States.” This is hard to square with the data.

As explained in a recent blog post on Truth on the Market by ICLE’s chief economist Eric Fruits:

While the concentration and profits story fits the antitrust populist narrative, other observations run contrary to [this] conclusion. For example, airline prices, as measured by price indexes, show that changes in U.S. and EU airline prices have fairly closely tracked each other until 2014, when U.S. prices began dropping. Sure, airlines have instituted baggage fees, but the CPI includes taxes, fuel surcharges, airport, security, and baggage fees. It’s not obvious that U.S. consumers are worse off in the so-called era of rising concentration.

In fact, one recent study, titled Are legacy airline mergers pro- or anti-competitive? Evidence from recent U.S. airline mergers takes it a step further. Data from legacy U.S. airline mergers appears to show they have resulted in pro-consumer benefits once quality-adjusted fares are taken into account:

Our main conclusion is simple: The recent legacy carrier mergers have been associated with pro-competitive outcomes. We find that, on average across all three mergers combined, nonstop overlap routes (on which both merging parties were present pre-merger) experienced statistically significant output increases and statistically insignificant nominal fare decreases relative to non-overlap routes. This pattern also holds when we study each of the three mergers individually. We find that nonstop overlap routes experienced statistically significant output and capacity increases following all three legacy airline mergers, with statistically significant nominal fare decreases following Delta/Northwest and American/USAirways mergers, and statistically insignificant nominal fare decreases following the United/Continental merger…

One implication of our findings is that any fare increases that have been observed since the mergers were very unlikely to have been caused by the mergers. In particular, our results demonstrate pro-competitive output expansions on nonstop overlap routes indicating reductions in quality-adjusted fares and a lack of significant anti-competitive effects on connecting overlaps. Hence ,our results demonstrate consumer welfare gains on overlap routes, without even taking credit for the large benefits on non-overlap routes (due to new online service, improved service networks at airports, fleet reallocation, etc.). While some of our results indicate that passengers on non-overlap routes also benefited from the mergers, we leave the complete exploration of such network effects for future research.

In other words, neither part of Applebaum’s proposition, that Europe has cheaper fares and that concentration has led to worse outcomes for consumers in the United States, appears to be true. Perhaps the influence of economists over antitrust law in the United States has not been so bad after all.

Appelbaum also touts the lower prices for broadband in Europe as an example of better competition policy over telecommunications in Europe versus the United States. While prices are lower on average in Europe for broadband, this obfuscates distribution of prices depending on speed tiers. UPenn Professor Christopher Yoo’s 2014 study titled U.S. vs. European Broadband Deployment: What Do the Data Say? found:

U.S. broadband was cheaper than European broadband for all speed tiers below 12 Mbps. U.S. broadband was more expensive for higher speed tiers, although the higher cost was justified in no small part by the fact that U.S. Internet users on average consumed 50% more bandwidth than their European counterparts.

Population density also helps explain differences between Europe and the United States. The closer people are together, the easier it is to build out infrastructure like broadband Internet. The United States is considerably more rural than most European countries. As a result, consideration of prices and speed need to be adjusted to reflect those differences. For instance, the FCC’s 2018 International Broadband Data Report shows a move in position from 23rd to 14th for the United States compared to 28 (mostly European) other countries once population density and income are taken into consideration for fixed broadband prices (Model 1 to Model 2). The United States climbs even further to 6th out of the 29 countries studied if data usage is included and 7th if quality (i.e. websites available in language) is taken into consideration (Model 4).

Country	Model 1		Model 2		Model 3		Model 4
	Price	Rank	Price	Rank	Price	Rank	Price	Rank
Australia	$78.30	28	$82.81	27	$102.63	26	$84.45	23
Austria	$48.04	17	$60.59	15	$73.17	11	$74.02	17
Belgium	$46.82	16	$66.62	21	$75.29	13	$81.09	22
Canada	$69.66	27	$74.99	25	$92.73	24	$76.57	19
Chile	$33.42	8	$73.60	23	$83.81	20	$88.97	25
Czech Republic	$26.83	3	$49.18	6	$69.91	9	$60.49	6
Denmark	$43.46	14	$52.27	8	$69.37	8	$63.85	8
Estonia	$30.65	6	$56.91	12	$81.68	19	$69.06	12
Finland	$35.00	9	$37.95	1	$57.49	2	$51.61	1
France	$30.12	5	$44.04	4	$61.96	4	$54.25	3
Germany	$36.00	12	$53.62	10	$75.09	12	$66.06	11
Greece	$35.38	10	$64.51	19	$80.72	17	$78.66	21
Iceland	$65.78	25	$73.96	24	$94.85	25	$90.39	26
Ireland	$56.79	22	$62.37	16	$76.46	14	$64.83	9
Italy	$29.62	4	$48.00	5	$68.80	7	$59.00	5
Japan	$40.12	13	$53.58	9	$81.47	18	$72.12	15
Latvia	$20.29	1	$42.78	3	$63.05	5	$52.20	2
Luxembourg	$56.32	21	$54.32	11	$76.83	15	$72.51	16
Mexico	$35.58	11	$91.29	29	$120.40	29	$109.64	29
Netherlands	$44.39	15	$63.89	18	$89.51	21	$77.88	20
New Zealand	$59.51	24	$81.42	26	$90.55	22	$76.25	18
Norway	$88.41	29	$71.77	22	$103.98	27	$96.95	27
Portugal	$30.82	7	$58.27	13	$72.83	10	$71.15	14
South Korea	$25.45	2	$42.07	2	$52.01	1	$56.28	4
Spain	$54.95	20	$87.69	28	$115.51	28	$106.53	28
Sweden	$52.48	19	$52.16	7	$61.08	3	$70.41	13
Switzerland	$66.88	26	$65.01	20	$91.15	23	$84.46	24
United Kingdom	$50.77	18	$63.75	17	$79.88	16	$65.44	10
United States	$58.00	23	$59.84	14	$64.75	6	$62.94	7
Average	$46.55		$61.70		$80.24		$73.73

Model 1: Unadjusted for demographics and content quality

Model 2: Adjusted for demographics but not content quality

Model 3: Adjusted for demographics and data usage

Model 4: Adjusted for demographics and content quality

Furthermore, investment and buildout are other important indicators of how well the United States is doing compared to Europe. Appelbaum fails to consider all of these factors when comparing the European model of telecommunications to the United States’. Yoo’s conclusion is an appropriate response:

The increasing availability of high-quality data has the promise to effect a sea change in broadband policy. Debates that previously relied primarily on anecdotal evidence and personal assertions of visions for the future can increasingly take place on a firmer empirical footing.

In particular, these data can resolve the question whether the U.S. is running behind Europe in the broadband race or vice versa. The U.S. and European mapping studies are clear and definitive: These data indicate that the U.S. is ahead of Europe in terms of the availability of Next Generation Access (NGA) networks. The U.S. advantage is even starker in terms of rural NGA coverage and with respect to key technologies such as FTTP and LTE.

Empirical analysis, both in terms of top-level statistics and in terms of eight country case studies, also sheds light into the key policy debate between facilities-based competition and service-based competition. The evidence again is fairly definitive, confirming that facilities-based competition is more effective in terms of driving broadband investment than service-based competition.

In other words, Appelbaum relies on bad data to come to his conclusion that listening to economists has been wrong for American telecommunications policy. Perhaps it is his economic assumptions that need to be questioned.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, in antitrust, environmental regulation, and other areas he reviewed, Appelbaum does not believe economic efficiency should be the primary concern anyway. For instance, he repeats the common historical argument that the purpose of the Sherman Act was to protect small businesses from bigger, and often more efficient, competitors.

So applying economic analysis to Appelbaum’s claims may itself be an illustration of caring too much about economic models instead of learning “the lessons of history.” But Appelbaum inescapably assumes economic models of its own. And these models appear less grounded in empirical data than those of the economists he derides. There’s no escaping mental models to understand the world. It is just a question of whether we are willing to change our mind if a better way of understanding the world presents itself. As Keynes is purported to have said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

For all the criticism of economists, there at least appears to be a willingness among them to change their minds, as illustrated by the increasing appreciation for anti-inflationary monetary policy among macroeconomists described in The Economists’ Hour. The question which remains is whether Appelbaum and other critics of the economic way of thinking are as willing to reconsider their strongly held views when they conflict with the evidence.

In antitrust, economics, politics, regulation, technology, telecommunications, truth on the market antitrust enforcement, antitrust law, book review, economics, economists, Law and economics

Does Apple’s “Discrimination” Against Rival Apps in the App Store harm Consumers?

Ben Sperry — 16 October 2019

A spate of recent newspaper investigations and commentary have focused on Apple allegedly discriminating against rivals in the App Store. The underlying assumption is that Apple, as a vertically integrated entity that operates both a platform for third-party apps and also makes it own apps, is acting nefariously whenever it “discriminates” against rival apps through prioritization, enters into popular app markets, or charges a “tax” or “surcharge” on rival apps.

For most people, the word discrimination has a pejorative connotation of animus based upon prejudice: racism, sexism, homophobia. One of the definitions you will find in the dictionary reflects this. But another definition is a lot less charged: the act of making or perceiving a difference. (This is what people mean when they say that a person has a discriminating palate, or a discriminating taste in music, for example.)

In economics, discrimination can be a positive attribute. For instance, effective price discrimination can result in wealthier consumers paying a higher price than less well off consumers for the same product or service, and it can ensure that products and services are in fact available for less-wealthy consumers in the first place. That would seem to be a socially desirable outcome (although under some circumstances, perfect price discrimination can be socially undesirable).

Antitrust law rightly condemns conduct only when it harms competition and not simply when it harms a competitor. This is because it is competition that enhances consumer welfare, not the presence or absence of a competitor — or, indeed, the profitability of competitors. The difficult task for antitrust enforcers is to determine when a vertically integrated firm with “market power” in an upstream market is able to effectively discriminate against rivals in a downstream market in a way that harms consumers.

Even assuming the claims of critics are true, alleged discrimination by Apple against competitor apps in the App Store may harm those competitors, but it doesn’t necessarily harm either competition or consumer welfare.

The three potential antitrust issues facing Apple can be summarized as:

Prioritization – “It has been prioritizing its own apps in search, as recent investigations by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal [have] documented.”
Entry – “It regularly turns successful third-party apps into native features of its operating systems.”
Tax – “Its 30 percent cut of revenue has disadvantaged competitors like Spotify, which can artificially inflate its price over what Apple is able to charge for its equivalent service.”

There is nothing new here economically. All three issues are analogous to claims against other tech companies. But, as I detail below, the evidence to establish any of these claims at best represents harm to competitors, and fails to establish any harm to the competitive process or to consumer welfare.

Prioritization

Antitrust enforcers have rejected similar prioritization claims against Google. For instance, rivals like Microsoft and Yelp have funded attacks against Google, arguing the search engine is harming competition by prioritizing its own services in its product search results over competitors. As ICLE and affiliated scholars have pointed out, though, there is nothing inherently harmful to consumers about such prioritization. There are also numerous benefits in platforms directly answering queries, even if it ends up directing users to platform-owned products or services.

As Geoffrey Manne has observed:

there is good reason to believe that Google’s decision to favor its own content over that of other sites is procompetitive. Beyond determining and ensuring relevance, Google surely has the prerogative to vigorously compete and to decide how to design its products to keep up with a changing market. In this case, that means designing, developing, and offering its own content to partially displace the original “ten blue links” design of its search results page and offer its own answers to users’ queries in its stead.

Here, the antitrust case against Apple for prioritization is similarly flawed. For example, as noted in a recent article in the WSJ, users often use the App Store search in order to find apps they already have installed:

“Apple customers have a very strong connection to our products and many of them use search as a way to find and open their apps,” Apple said in a statement. “This customer usage is the reason Apple has strong rankings in search, and it’s the same reason Uber, Microsoft and so many others often have high rankings as well.”

If a substantial portion of searches within the App Store are for apps already on the iPhone, then showing the Apple app near the top of the search results could easily be consumer welfare-enhancing.

Apple is also theoretically leaving money on the table by prioritizing its (already pre-loaded) apps over third party apps. If its algorithm promotes its own apps over those that may earn it a 30% fee — additional revenue — the prioritization couldn’t plausibly be characterized as a “benefit” to Apple. Apple is ultimately in the business of selling hardware. Losing customers of the iPhone or iPad by prioritizing apps consumers want less would not be a winning business strategy.

Further, it stands to reason that those who use an iPhone may have a preference for Apple apps. Such consumers would be naturally better served by seeing Apple’s apps prioritized over third-party developer apps. And if consumers do not prefer Apple’s apps, rival apps are merely seconds of scrolling away.

Moreover, all of the above assumes that Apple is engaging in sufficiently pervasive discrimination through prioritzation to have a major impact on the app ecosystem. But substantial evidence exists that the universe of searches for which Apple’s algorithm prioritizes Apple apps is small. For instance, most searches are for branded apps already known by the searcher:

Keywords: how many are brands?

Top 500: 58.4%
Top 400: 60.75%
Top 300: 68.33%
Top 200: 80.5%
Top 100: 86%
Top 50: 90%
Top 25: 92%
Top 10: 100%

This is corroborated by data from the NYT’s own study, which suggests Apple prioritized its own apps first in only roughly 1% of the overall keywords queried:

Whatever the precise extent of increase in prioritization, it seems like any claims of harm are undermined by the reality that almost 99% of App Store results don’t list Apple apps first.

The fact is, very few keyword searches are even allegedly affected by prioritization. And the algorithm is often adjusting to searches for apps already pre-loaded on the device. Under these circumstances, it is very difficult to conclude consumers are being harmed by prioritization in search results of the App Store.

Entry

The issue of Apple building apps to compete with popular apps in its marketplace is similar to complaints about Amazon creating its own brands to compete with what is sold by third parties on its platform. For instance, as reported multiple times in the Washington Post:

Clue, a popular app that women use to track their periods, recently rocketed to the top of the App Store charts. But the app’s future is now in jeopardy as Apple incorporates period and fertility tracking features into its own free Health app, which comes preinstalled on every device. Clue makes money by selling subscriptions and services in its free app.

However, there is nothing inherently anticompetitive about retailers selling their own brands. If anything, entry into the market is normally procompetitive. As Randy Picker recently noted with respect to similar claims against Amazon:

The heart of this dynamic isn’t new. Sears started its catalogue business in 1888 and then started using the Craftsman and Kenmore brands as in-house brands in 1927. Sears was acquiring inventory from third parties and obviously knew exactly which ones were selling well and presumably made decisions about which markets to enter and which to stay out of based on that information. Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer, has a number of well-known private brands and firms negotiating with Walmart know full well that Walmart can enter their markets, subject of course to otherwise applicable restraints on entry such as intellectual property laws… I think that is possible to tease out advantages that a platform has regarding inventory experimentation. It can outsource some of those costs to third parties, though sophisticated third parties should understand where they can and cannot have a sustainable advantage given Amazon’s ability to move to build-or-bought first-party inventory. We have entire bodies of law— copyright, patent, trademark and more—that limit the ability of competitors to appropriate works, inventions and symbols. Those legal systems draw very carefully considered lines regarding permitted and forbidden uses. And antitrust law generally favors entry into markets and doesn’t look to create barriers that block firms, large or small, from entering new markets.

If anything, Apple is in an even better position than Amazon. Apple invests revenue in app development, not because the apps themselves generate revenue, but because it wants people to use the hardware, i.e. the iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches. The reason Apple created an App Store in the first place is because this allows Apple to make more money from selling devices. In order to promote security on those devices, Apple institutes rules for the App Store, but it ultimately decides whether to create its own apps and provide access to other apps based upon its desire to maximize the value of the device. If Apple chooses to create free apps in order to improve iOS for users and sell more hardware, it is not a harm to competition.

Apple’s ability to enter into popular app markets should not be constrained unless it can be shown that by giving consumers another choice, consumers are harmed. As noted above, most searches in the App Store are for branded apps to begin with. If consumers already know what they want in an app, it hardly seems harmful for Apple to offer — and promote — its own, additional version as well.

In the case of Clue, if Apple creates a free health app, it may hurt sales for Clue. But it doesn’t hurt consumers who want the functionality and would prefer to get it from Apple for free. This sort of product evolution is not harming competition, but enhancing it. And, it must be noted, Apple doesn’t exclude Clue from its devices. If, indeed, Clue offers a better product, or one that some users prefer, they remain able to find it and use it.

The so-called App Store “Tax”

The argument that Apple has an unfair competitive advantage over rival apps which have to pay commissions to Apple to be on the App Store (a “tax” or “surcharge”) has similarly produced no evidence of harm to consumers.

Apple invested a lot into building the iPhone and the App Store. This infrastructure has created an incredibly lucrative marketplace for app developers to exploit. And, lest we forget a point fundamental to our legal system, Apple’s App Store is its property.

The WSJ and NYT stories give the impression that Apple uses its commissions on third party apps to reduce competition for its own apps. However, this is inconsistent with how Apple charges its commission.

For instance, Apple doesn’t charge commissions on free apps, which make up 84% of the App Store. Apple also doesn’t charge commissions for apps that are free to download but are supported by advertising — including hugely popular apps like Yelp, Buzzfeed, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook. Even apps which are “readers” where users purchase or subscribe to content outside the app but use the app to access that content are not subject to commissions, like Spotify, Netflix, Amazon Kindle, and Audible. Apps for “physical goods and services” — like Amazon, Airbnb, Lyft, Target, and Uber — are also free to download and are not subject to commissions. The class of apps which are subject to a 30% commission include:

paid apps (like many games),
free apps that then have in-app purchases (other games and services like Skype and TikTok),
and free apps with digital subscriptions (Pandora, Hulu, which have 30% commission first year and then 15% in subsequent years), and
cross-platform apps (Dropbox, Hulu, and Minecraft) which allow for digital goods and services to be purchased in-app and Apple collects commission on in-app sales, but not sales from other platforms.

Despite protestations to the contrary, these costs are hardly unreasonable: third party apps receive the benefit not only of being in Apple’s App Store (without which they wouldn’t have any opportunity to earn revenue from sales on Apple’s platform), but also of the features and other investments Apple continues to pour into its platform — investments that make the ecosystem better for consumers and app developers alike. There is enormous value to the platform Apple has invested in, and a great deal of it is willingly shared with developers and consumers. It does not make it anticompetitive to ask those who use the platform to pay for it.

In fact, these benefits are probably even more important for smaller developers rather than bigger ones who can invest in the necessary back end to reach consumers without the App Store, like Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon Kindle. For apps without brand reputation (and giant marketing budgets), the ability for consumers to trust that downloading the app will not lead to the installation of malware (as often occurs when downloading from the web) is surely essential to small developers’ ability to compete. The App Store offers this.

Despite the claims made in Spotify’s complaint against Apple, Apple doesn’t have a duty to deal with app developers. Indeed, Apple could theoretically fill the App Store with only apps that it developed itself, like Apple Music. Instead, Apple has opted for a platform business model, which entails the creation of a new outlet for others’ innovation and offerings. This is pro-consumer in that it created an entire marketplace that consumers probably didn’t even know they wanted — and certainly had no means to obtain — until it existed. Spotify, which out-competed iTunes to the point that Apple had to go back to the drawing board and create Apple Music, cannot realistically complain that Apple’s entry into music streaming is harmful to competition. Rather, it is precisely what vigorous competition looks like: the creation of more product innovation, lower prices, and arguably (at least for some) higher quality.

Interestingly, Spotify is not even subject to the App Store commission. Instead, Spotify offers a work-around to iPhone users to obtain its premium version without ads on iOS. What Spotify actually desires is the ability to sell premium subscriptions to Apple device users without paying anything above the de minimis up-front cost to Apple for the creation and maintenance of the App Store. It is unclear how many potential Spotify users are affected by the inability to directly buy the ad-free version since Spotify discontinued offering it within the App Store. But, whatever the potential harm to Spotify itself, there’s little reason to think consumers or competition bear any of it.

Conclusion

There is no evidence that Apple’s alleged “discrimination” against rival apps harms consumers. Indeed, the opposite would seem to be the case. The regulatory discrimination against successful tech platforms like Apple and the App Store is far more harmful to consumers.

In antitrust, price discrimination, truth on the market antitrust, Apple, Apple App Store, vertical restraints

What’s the Harm of Targeted Ads on Children’s Content Anyway?

Ben Sperry — 12 September 2019

The FTC’s recent YouTube settlement and $170 million fine related to charges that YouTube violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) has the issue of targeted advertising back in the news. With an upcoming FTC workshop and COPPA Rule Review looming, it’s worth looking at this case in more detail and reconsidering COPPA’s 2013 amendment to the definition of personal information.

According to the complaint issued by the FTC and the New York Attorney General, YouTube violated COPPA by collecting personal information of children on its platform without obtaining parental consent. While the headlines scream that this is an egregious violation of privacy and parental rights, a closer look suggests that there is actually very little about the case that normal people would find to be all that troubling. Instead, it appears to be another in the current spate of elitist technopanics.

COPPA defines personal information to include persistent identifiers, like cookies, used for targeted advertising. These cookies allow site operators to have some idea of what kinds of websites a user may have visited previously. Having knowledge of users’ browsing history allows companies to advertise more effectively than is possible with contextual advertisements, which guess at users’ interests based upon the type of content being viewed at the time. The age old problem for advertisers is that “half the money spent on advertising is wasted; the trouble is they don’t know which half.” While this isn’t completely solved by the use of targeted advertising based on web browsing and search history, the fact that such advertising is more lucrative compared to contextual advertisements suggests that it works better for companies.

COPPA, since the 2013 update, states that persistent identifiers are personal information by themselves, even if not linked to any other information that could be used to actually identify children (i.e., anyone under 13 years old).

As a consequence of this rule, YouTube doesn’t allow children under 13 to create an account. Instead, YouTube created a separate mobile application called YouTube Kids with curated content targeted at younger users. That application serves only contextual advertisements that do not rely on cookies or other persistent identifiers, but the content available on YouTube Kids also remains available on YouTube.

YouTube’s error, in the eyes of the FTC, was that the site left it to channel owners on YouTube’s general audience site to determine whether to monetize their content through targeted advertising or to opt out and use only contextual advertisements. Turns out, many of those channels — including channels identified by the FTC as “directed to children” — made the more lucrative choice by choosing to have targeted advertisements on their channels.

Whether YouTube’s practices violate the letter of COPPA or not, a more fundamental question remains unanswered: What is the harm, exactly?

COPPA takes for granted that it is harmful for kids to receive targeted advertisements, even where, as here, the targeting is based not on any knowledge about the users as individuals, but upon the browsing and search history of the device they happen to be on. But children under 13 are extremely unlikely to have purchased the devices they use, to pay for the access to the Internet to use the devices, or to have any disposable income or means of paying for goods and services online. Which makes one wonder: To whom are these advertisements served to children actually targeted? The answer is obvious to everyone but the FTC and those who support the COPPA Rule: the children’s parents.

Television programs aimed at children have long been supported by contextual advertisements for cereal and toys. Tony the Tiger and Lucky the Leprechaun were staples of Saturday morning cartoons when I was growing up, along with all kinds of Hot Wheels commercials. As I soon discovered as a kid, I had the ability to ask my parents to buy these things, but ultimately no ability to buy them on my own. In other words: Parental oversight is essentially built-in to any type of advertisement children see, in the sense that few children can realistically make their own purchases or even view those advertisements without their parents giving them a device and internet access to do so.

When broken down like this, it is much harder to see the harm. It’s one thing to create regulatory schemes to prevent stalkers, creepers, and perverts from using online information to interact with children. It’s quite another to greatly reduce the ability of children’s content to generate revenue by use of relatively anonymous persistent identifiers like cookies — and thus, almost certainly, to greatly reduce the amount of content actually made for and offered to children.

On the one hand, COPPA thus disregards the possibility that controls that take advantage of parental oversight may be the most cost-effective form of protection in such circumstances. As Geoffrey Manne noted regarding the FTC’s analogous complaint against Amazon under the FTC Act, which ignored the possibility that Amazon’s in-app purchasing scheme was tailored to take advantage of parental oversight in order to avoid imposing excessive and needless costs:

[For the FTC], the imagined mechanism of “affirmatively seeking a customer’s authorized consent to a charge” is all benefit and no cost. Whatever design decisions may have informed the way Amazon decided to seek consent are either irrelevant, or else the user-experience benefits they confer are negligible….
Amazon is not abdicating its obligation to act fairly under the FTC Act and to ensure that users are protected from unauthorized charges. It’s just doing so in ways that also take account of the costs such protections may impose — particularly, in this case, on the majority of Amazon customers who didn’t and wouldn’t suffer such unauthorized charges….

At the same time, enforcement of COPPA against targeted advertising on kids’ content will have perverse and self-defeating consequences. As Berin Szoka notes:

This settlement will cut advertising revenue for creators of child-directed content by more than half. This will give content creators a perverse incentive to mislabel their content. COPPA was supposed to empower parents, but the FTC’s new approach actually makes life harder for parents and cripples functionality even when they want it. In short, artists, content creators, and parents will all lose, and it is not at all clear that this will do anything to meaningfully protect children.

This war against targeted advertising aimed at children has a cost. While many cheer the fine levied against YouTube (or think it wasn’t high enough) and the promised changes to its platform (though the dissenting Commissioners didn’t think those went far enough, either), the actual result will be less content — and especially less free content — available to children.

Far from being a win for parents and children, the shift in oversight responsibility from parents to the FTC will likely lead to less-effective oversight, more difficult user interfaces, less children’s programming, and higher costs for everyone — all without obviously mitigating any harm in the first place.

In federal trade commission, ftc, television, truth on the market Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, COPPA, ftc

The Unconstitutionality of the FCC’s Leased Access Rules

Ben Sperry — 24 July 2019

Monday July 22, ICLE filed a regulatory comment arguing the leased access requirements enforced by the FCC are unconstitutional compelled speech that violate the First Amendment.

When the DC Circuit Court of Appeals last reviewed the constitutionality of leased access rules in Time Warner v. FCC, cable had so-called “bottleneck power” over the marketplace for video programming and, just a few years prior, the Supreme Court had subjected other programming regulations to intermediate scrutiny in Turner v. FCC.

Intermediate scrutiny is a lower standard than the strict scrutiny usually required for First Amendment claims. Strict scrutiny requires a regulation of speech to be narrowly tailored to a compelling state interest. Intermediate scrutiny only requires a regulation to further an important or substantial governmental interest unrelated to the suppression of free expression, and the incidental restriction speech must be no greater than is essential to the furtherance of that interest.

But, since the decisions in Time Warner and Turner, there have been dramatic changes in the video marketplace (including the rise of the Internet!) and cable no longer has anything like “bottleneck power.” Independent programmers have many distribution options to get content to consumers. Since the justification for intermediate scrutiny is no longer an accurate depiction of the competitive marketplace, the leased rules should be subject to strict scrutiny.

And, if subject to strict scrutiny, the leased access rules would not survive judicial review. Even accepting that there is a compelling governmental interest, the rules are not narrowly tailored to that end. Not only are they essentially obsolete in the highly competitive video distribution marketplace, but antitrust law would be better suited to handle any anticompetitive abuses of market power by cable operators. There is no basis for compelling the cable operators to lease some of their channels to unaffiliated programmers.

Our full comments are here.

In constitutional law, First amendment, telecommunications, truth on the market antitrust law, competition, FCC, Federal Communications Commission, First Amendment, free speech, telecommunications, Telecommunications Act

There’s nothing “conservative” about Trump’s views on free speech and the regulation of social media

Ben Sperry — 12 July 2019

Yesterday was President Trump’s big “Social Media Summit” where he got together with a number of right-wing firebrands to decry the power of Big Tech to censor conservatives online. According to the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Trump attacked social-media companies he says are trying to silence individuals and groups with right-leaning views, without presenting specific evidence. He said he was directing his administration to “explore all legislative and regulatory solutions to protect free speech and the free speech of all Americans.”
“Big Tech must not censor the voices of the American people,” Mr. Trump told a crowd of more than 100 allies who cheered him on. “This new technology is so important and it has to be used fairly.”

Despite the simplistic narrative tying President Trump’s vision of the world to conservatism, there is nothing conservative about his views on the First Amendment and how it applies to social media companies.

I have noted in several places before that there is a conflict of visions when it comes to whether the First Amendment protects a negative or positive conception of free speech. For those unfamiliar with the distinction: it comes from philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who identified negative liberty as freedom from external interference, and positive liberty as freedom to do something, including having the power and resources necessary to do that thing. Discussions of the First Amendment’s protection of free speech often elide over this distinction.

With respect to speech, the negative conception of liberty recognizes that individual property owners can control what is said on their property, for example. To force property owners to allow speakers/speech on their property that they don’t desire would actually be a violation of their liberty — what the Supreme Court calls “compelled speech.” The First Amendment, consistent with this view, generally protects speech from government interference (with very few, narrow exceptions), while allowing private regulation of speech (again, with very few, narrow exceptions).

Contrary to the original meaning of the First Amendment and the weight of Supreme Court precedent, President Trump’s view of the First Amendment is that it protects a positive conception of liberty — one under which the government, in order to facilitate its conception of “free speech,” has the right and even the duty to impose restrictions on how private actors regulate speech on their property (in this case, social media companies).

But if Trump’s view were adopted, discretion as to what is necessary to facilitate free speech would be left to future presidents and congresses, undermining the bedrock conservative principle of the Constitution as a shield against government regulation, all falsely in the name of protecting speech. This is counter to the general approach of modern conservatism (but not, of course, necessarily Republicanism) in the United States, including that of many of President Trump’s own judicial and agency appointees. Indeed, it is actually more consistent with the views of modern progressives — especially within the FCC.

For instance, the current conservative bloc on the Supreme Court (over the dissent of the four liberal Justices) recently reaffirmed the view that the First Amendment applies only to state action in Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck. The opinion, written by Trump-appointee, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, states plainly that:

Ratified in 1791, the First Amendment provides in relevant part that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.” Ratified in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment makes the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause applicable against the States: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law . . . .” §1. The text and original meaning of those Amendments, as well as this Court’s longstanding precedents, establish that the Free Speech Clause prohibits only governmental abridgment of speech. The Free Speech Clause does not prohibit private abridgment of speech… In accord with the text and structure of the Constitution, this Court’s state-action doctrine distinguishes the government from individuals and private entities. By enforcing that constitutional boundary between the governmental and the private, the state-action doctrine protects a robust sphere of individual liberty. (Emphasis added).

Former Stanford Law dean and First Amendment scholar, Kathleen Sullivan, has summed up the very different approaches to free speech pursued by conservatives and progressives (insofar as they are represented by the “conservative” and “liberal” blocs on the Supreme Court):

In the first vision…, free speech rights serve an overarching interest in political equality. Free speech as equality embraces first an antidiscrimination principle: in upholding the speech rights of anarchists, syndicalists, communists, civil rights marchers, Maoist flag burners, and other marginal, dissident, or unorthodox speakers, the Court protects members of ideological minorities who are likely to be the target of the majority’s animus or selective indifference…. By invalidating conditions on speakers’ use of public land, facilities, and funds, a long line of speech cases in the free-speech-as-equality tradition ensures public subvention of speech expressing “the poorly financed causes of little people.” On the equality-based view of free speech, it follows that the well-financed causes of big people (or big corporations) do not merit special judicial protection from political regulation. And because, in this view, the value of equality is prior to the value of speech, politically disadvantaged speech prevails over regulation but regulation promoting political equality prevails over speech.
The second vision of free speech, by contrast, sees free speech as serving the interest of political liberty. On this view…, the First Amendment is a negative check on government tyranny, and treats with skepticism all government efforts at speech suppression that might skew the private ordering of ideas. And on this view, members of the public are trusted to make their own individual evaluations of speech, and government is forbidden to intervene for paternalistic or redistributive reasons. Government intervention might be warranted to correct certain allocative inefficiencies in the way that speech transactions take place, but otherwise, ideas are best left to a freely competitive ideological market.
The outcome of Citizens United is best explained as representing a triumph of the libertarian over the egalitarian vision of free speech. Justice Kennedy’s opinion for the Court, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, articulates a robust vision of free speech as serving political liberty; the dissenting opinion by Justice Stevens, joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor, sets forth in depth the countervailing egalitarian view. (Emphasis added).

President Trump’s views on the regulation of private speech are alarmingly consistent with those embraced by the Court’s progressives to “protect[] members of ideological minorities who are likely to be the target of the majority’s animus or selective indifference” — exactly the sort of conservative “victimhood” that Trump and his online supporters have somehow concocted to describe themselves.

Trump’s views are also consistent with those of progressives who, since the Reagan FCC abolished it in 1987, have consistently angled for a resurrection of some form of fairness doctrine, as well as other policies inconsistent with the “free-speech-as-liberty” view. Thus Democratic commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel takes a far more interventionist approach to private speech:

The First Amendment does more than protect the interests of corporations. As courts have long recognized, it is a force to support individual interest in self-expression and the right of the public to receive information and ideas. As Justice Black so eloquently put it, “the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public.” Our leased access rules provide opportunity for civic participation. They enhance the marketplace of ideas by increasing the number of speakers and the variety of viewpoints. They help preserve the possibility of a diverse, pluralistic medium—just as Congress called for the Cable Communications Policy Act… The proper inquiry then, is not simply whether corporations providing channel capacity have First Amendment rights, but whether this law abridges expression that the First Amendment was meant to protect. Here, our leased access rules are not content-based and their purpose and effect is to promote free speech. Moreover, they accomplish this in a narrowly-tailored way that does not substantially burden more speech than is necessary to further important interests. In other words, they are not at odds with the First Amendment, but instead help effectuate its purpose for all of us. (Emphasis added).

Consistent with the progressive approach, this leaves discretion in the hands of “experts” (like Rosenworcel) to determine what needs to be done in order to protect the underlying value of free speech in the First Amendment through government regulation, even if it means compelling speech upon private actors.

Trump’s view of what the First Amendment’s free speech protections entail when it comes to social media companies is inconsistent with the conception of the Constitution-as-guarantor-of-negative-liberty that conservatives have long embraced.

Of course, this is not merely a “conservative” position; it is fundamental to the longstanding bipartisan approach to free speech generally and to the regulation of online platforms specifically. As a diverse group of 75 scholars and civil society groups (including ICLE) wrote yesterday in their “Principles for Lawmakers on Liability for User-Generated Content Online”:

Principle #2: Any new intermediary liability law must not target constitutionally protected speech.
The government shouldn’t require—or coerce—intermediaries to remove constitutionally protected speech that the government cannot prohibit directly. Such demands violate the First Amendment. Also, imposing broad liability for user speech incentivizes services to err on the side of taking down speech, resulting in overbroad censorship—or even avoid offering speech forums altogether.

As those principles suggest, the sort of platform regulation that Trump, et al. advocate — essentially a “fairness doctrine” for the Internet — is the opposite of free speech:

Principle #4: Section 230 does not, and should not, require “neutrality.”
Publishing third-party content online never can be “neutral.” Indeed, every publication decision will necessarily prioritize some content at the expense of other content. Even an “objective” approach, such as presenting content in reverse chronological order, isn’t neutral because it prioritizes recency over other values. By protecting the prioritization, de-prioritization, and removal of content, Section 230 provides Internet services with the legal certainty they need to do the socially beneficial work of minimizing harmful content.

The idea that social media should be subject to a nondiscrimination requirement — for which President Trump and others like Senator Josh Hawley have been arguing lately — is flatly contrary to Section 230 — as well as to the First Amendment.

Conservatives upset about “social media discrimination” need to think hard about whether they really want to adopt this sort of position out of convenience, when the tradition with which they align rejects it — rightly — in nearly all other venues. Even if you believe that Facebook, Google, and Twitter are trying to make it harder for conservative voices to be heard (despite all evidence to the contrary), it is imprudent to reject constitutional first principles for a temporary policy victory. In fact, there’s nothing at all “conservative” about an abdication of the traditional principle linking freedom to property for the sake of political expediency.

In constitutional political economy, corporate speech, google, internet, regulation, technology, truth on the market conservative, First Amendment, free speech, platforms, regulation, regulatory overreach, social media, social media summit, trump, United States Constitution

Economic Calculation in the Public Defender’s Office

Ben Sperry — 10 July 2019

After spending a few years away from ICLE and directly engaging in the day to day grind of indigent criminal defense as a public defender, I now have a new appreciation for the ways economic tools can explain behavior that I had not before studied. For instance, I think the law and economics tradition, specifically the insights of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek on the importance of price signals, can explain one of the major problems for public defenders and their clients: without price signals, there is no rational way to determine the best way to spend one’s time.

I believe the most common complaints about how public defenders represent their clients is better understood not primarily as a lack of funding, as a lack of effort or care, or even simply as a lack of time for overburdened lawyers, but as an allocation problem. In the absence of price signals, there is no rational way to determine the best way to spend one’s time as a public defender. (Note: Many jurisdictions use the model of indigent defense described here, in which lawyers are paid a salary to work for the public defender’s office. However, others use models like contracting lawyers for particular cases, appointing lawyers for a flat fee, relying on non-profit agencies, or combining approaches as some type of hybrid. These models all have their own advantages and disadvantages, but this blog post is only about the issue of price signals for lawyers who work within a public defender’s office.)

As Mises and Hayek taught us, price signals carry a great deal of information; indeed, they make economic calculation possible. Their critique of socialism was built around this idea: that the person in charge of making economic choices without prices and the profit-and-loss mechanism is “groping in the dark.”

This isn’t to say that people haven’t tried to find ways to figure out the best way to spend their time in the absence of the profit-and-loss mechanism. In such environments, bureaucratic rules often replace price signals in directing human action. For instance, lawyers have rules of professional conduct. These rules, along with concerns about reputation and other institutional checks may guide lawyers on how to best spend their time as a general matter. But even these things are no match for price signals in determining the most efficient way to allocate the scarcest resource of all: time.

Imagine two lawyers, one working for a public defender’s office who receives a salary that is not dependent on caseload or billable hours, and another private defense lawyer who charges his client for the work that is put in.

In either case the lawyer who is handed a file for a case scheduled for trial months in advance has a choice to make: do I start working on this now, or do I put it on the backburner because of cases with much closer deadlines? A cursory review of the file shows there may be a possible suppression issue that will require further investigation. A successful suppression motion would likely lead to a resolution of the case that will not result in a conviction, but it would take considerable time – time which could be spent working on numerous client files with closer trial dates. For the sake of this hypothetical, there is a strong legal basis to file suppression motion (i.e., it is not frivolous).

The private defense lawyer has a mechanism beyond what is available to public defenders to determine how to handle this case: price signals. He can bring the suppression issue to his client’s attention, explain the likelihood of success, and then offer to file and argue the suppression motion for some agreed upon price. The client would then have the ability to determine with counsel whether this is worthwhile.

The public defender, on the other hand, does not have price signals to determine where to put this suppression motion among his other workload. He could spend the time necessary to develop the facts and research the law for the suppression motion, but unless there is a quickly approaching deadline for the motion to be filed, there will be many other cases in the queue with closer deadlines begging for his attention. Clients, who have no rationing principle based in personal monetary costs, would obviously prefer their public defender file any and all motions which have any chance whatsoever to help them, regardless of merit.

What this hypothetical shows is that public defenders do not face the same incentive structure as private lawyers when it comes to allocation of time. But neither do criminal defendants. Indigent defendants who qualify for public defender representation often complain about their “public pretender” for “not doing anything for them.” But the simple truth is that the public defender is making choices on how to spend his time more or less by his own determination of where he can be most useful. Deadlines often drive the review of cases, along with who sends the most letters and/or calls. The actual evaluation of which cases have the most merit can fall through the cracks. Often times, this means cases are worked on in a chronological manner, but insufficient time and effort is spent on particular cases that would have merited more investment because of quickly approaching deadlines on other cases. Sometimes this means that the most annoying clients get the most time spent on their behalf, irrespective of the merits of their case. At best, public defenders are acting like battlefield medics and attempt to perform triage by spending their time where they believe they can help the most.

Unlike private criminal defense lawyers, public defenders can’t typically reject cases because their caseload has grown too big, or charge a higher price in order to take on a particularly difficult and time-consuming case. Therefore, the public defender is stuck in a position to simply guess at the best use of their time with the heuristics described above and do the very best they can under the circumstances. Unfortunately, those heuristics simply can’t replace price signals in determining the best use of one’s time.

As criminal justice reform becomes a policy issue for both left and right, law and economics analysis should have a place in the conversation. Any reforms of indigent defense that will be part of this broader effort should take into consideration the calculation problem inherent to the public defender’s office. Other institutional arrangements, like a well-designed voucher system, which do not suffer from this particular problem may be preferable.

In law and economics, legal profession, truth on the market economics, lawyering, rationing, scarcity

The Good, Bad, and the Ugly of the EU’s Proposed Data Protection Regulation

Ben Sperry — 19 June 2015

Nearly all economists from across the political spectrum agree: free trade is good. Yet free trade agreements are not always the same thing as free trade. Whether we’re talking about the Trans-Pacific Partnership or the European Union’s Digital Single Market (DSM) initiative, the question is always whether the agreement in question is reducing barriers to trade, or actually enacting barriers to trade into law.

It’s becoming more and more clear that there should be real concerns about the direction the EU is heading with its DSM. As the EU moves forward with the 16 different action proposals that make up this ambitious strategy, we should all pay special attention to the actual rules that come out of it, such as the recent Data Protection Regulation. Are EU regulators simply trying to hogtie innovators in the the wild, wild, west, as some have suggested? Let’s break it down. Here are The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.

The Good

The Data Protection Regulation, as proposed by the Ministers of Justice Council and to be taken up in trilogue negotiations with the Parliament and Council this month, will set up a single set of rules for companies to follow throughout the EU. Rather than having to deal with the disparate rules of 28 different countries, companies will have to follow only the EU-wide Data Protection Regulation. It’s hard to determine whether the EU is right about its lofty estimate of this benefit (€2.3 billion a year), but no doubt it’s positive. This is what free trade is about: making commerce “regular” by reducing barriers to trade between states and nations.

Additionally, the Data Protection Regulation would create a “one-stop shop” for consumers and businesses alike. Regardless of where companies are located or process personal information, consumers would be able to go to their own national authority, in their own language, to help them. Similarly, companies would need to deal with only one supervisory authority.

Further, there will be benefits to smaller businesses. For instance, the Data Protection Regulation will exempt businesses smaller than a certain threshold from the obligation to appoint a data protection officer if data processing is not a part of their core business activity. On top of that, businesses will not have to notify every supervisory authority about each instance of collection and processing, and will have the ability to charge consumers fees for certain requests to access data. These changes will allow businesses, especially smaller ones, to save considerable money and human capital. Finally, smaller entities won’t have to carry out an impact assessment before engaging in processing unless there is a specific risk. These rules are designed to increase flexibility on the margin.

If this were all the rules were about, then they would be a boon to the major American tech companies that have expressed concern about the DSM. These companies would be able to deal with EU citizens under one set of rules and consumers would be able to take advantage of the many benefits of free flowing information in the digital economy.

The Bad

Unfortunately, the substance of the Data Protection Regulation isn’t limited simply to preempting 28 bad privacy rules with an economically sensible standard for Internet companies that rely on data collection and targeted advertising for their business model. Instead, the Data Protection Regulation would set up new rules that will impose significant costs on the Internet ecosphere.

For instance, giving citizens a “right to be forgotten” sounds good, but it will considerably impact companies built on providing information to the world. There are real costs to administering such a rule, and these costs will not ultimately be borne by search engines, social networks, and advertisers, but by consumers who ultimately will have to find either a different way to pay for the popular online services they want or go without them. For instance, Google has had to hire a large “team of lawyers, engineers and paralegals who have so far evaluated over half a million URLs that were requested to be delisted from search results by European citizens.”

Privacy rights need to be balanced with not only economic efficiency, but also with the right to free expression that most European countries hold (though not necessarily with a robust First Amendment like that in the United States). Stories about the right to be forgotten conflicting with the ability of journalists to report on issues of public concern make clear that there is a potential problem there. The Data Protection Regulation does attempt to balance the right to be forgotten with the right to report, but it’s not likely that a similar rule would survive First Amendment scrutiny in the United States. American companies accustomed to such protections will need to be wary operating under the EU’s standard.

Similarly, mandating rules on data minimization and data portability may sound like good design ideas in light of data security and privacy concerns, but there are real costs to consumers and innovation in forcing companies to adopt particular business models.

Mandated data minimization limits the ability of companies to innovate and lessens the opportunity for consumers to benefit from unexpected uses of information. Overly strict requirements on data minimization could slow down the incredible growth of the economy from the Big Data revolution, which has provided a plethora of benefits to consumers from new uses of information, often in ways unfathomable even a short time ago. As an article in Harvard Magazine recently noted,

The story [of data analytics] follows a similar pattern in every field… The leaders are qualitative experts in their field. Then a statistical researcher who doesn’t know the details of the field comes in and, using modern data analysis, adds tremendous insight and value.

And mandated data portability is an overbroad per se remedy for possible exclusionary conduct that could also benefit consumers greatly. The rule will apply to businesses regardless of market power, meaning that it will also impair small companies with no ability to actually hurt consumers by restricting their ability to take data elsewhere. Aside from this, multi-homing is ubiquitous in the Internet economy, anyway. This appears to be another remedy in search of a problem.

The bad news is that these rules will likely deter innovation and reduce consumer welfare for EU citizens.

The Ugly

Finally, the Data Protection Regulation suffers from an ugly defect: it may actually be ratifying a form of protectionism into the rules. Both the intent and likely effect of the rules appears to be to “level the playing field” by knocking down American Internet companies.

For instance, the EU has long allowed flexibility for US companies operating in Europe under the US-EU Safe Harbor. But EU officials are aiming at reducing this flexibility. As the Wall Street Journal has reported:

For months, European government officials and regulators have clashed with the likes of Google, Amazon.com and Facebook over everything from taxes to privacy…. “American companies come from outside and act as if it was a lawless environment to which they are coming,” [Commissioner Reding] told the Journal. “There are conflicts not only about competition rules but also simply about obeying the rules.” In many past tussles with European officialdom, American executives have countered that they bring innovation, and follow all local laws and regulations… A recent EU report found that European citizens’ personal data, sent to the U.S. under Safe Harbor, may be processed by U.S. authorities in a way incompatible with the grounds on which they were originally collected in the EU. Europeans allege this harms European tech companies, which must play by stricter rules about what they can do with citizens’ data for advertising, targeting products and searches. Ms. Reding said Safe Harbor offered a “unilateral advantage” to American companies.

Thus, while “when in Rome…” is generally good advice, the Data Protection Regulation appears to be aimed primarily at removing the “advantages” of American Internet companies—at which rent-seekers and regulators throughout the continent have taken aim. As mentioned above, supporters often name American companies outright in the reasons for why the DSM’s Data Protection Regulation are needed. But opponents have noted that new regulation aimed at American companies is not needed in order to police abuses:

Speaking at an event in London, [EU Antitrust Chief] Ms. Vestager said it would be “tricky” to design EU regulation targeting the various large Internet firms like Facebook, Amazon.com Inc. and eBay Inc. because it was hard to establish what they had in common besides “facilitating something”… New EU regulation aimed at reining in large Internet companies would take years to create and would then address historic rather than future problems, Ms. Vestager said. “We need to think about what it is we want to achieve that can’t be achieved by enforcing competition law,” Ms. Vestager said.

Moreover, of the 15 largest Internet companies, 11 are American and 4 are Chinese. None is European. So any rules applying to the Internet ecosphere are inevitably going to disproportionately affect these important, US companies most of all. But if Europe wants to compete more effectively, it should foster a regulatory regime friendly to Internet business, rather than extend inefficient privacy rules to American companies under the guise of free trade.

Conclusion

Near the end of the The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Blondie and Tuco have this exchange that seems apropos to the situation we’re in:

Blondie: [watching the soldiers fighting on the bridge] I have a feeling it’s really gonna be a good, long battle.
Tuco: Blondie, the money’s on the other side of the river.
Blondie: Oh? Where?
Tuco: Amigo, I said on the other side, and that’s enough. But while the Confederates are there we can’t get across.
Blondie: What would happen if somebody were to blow up that bridge?

The EU’s DSM proposals are going to be a good, long battle. But key players in the EU recognize that the tech money — along with the services and ongoing innovation that benefit EU citizens — is really on the other side of the river. If they blow up the bridge of trade between the EU and the US, though, we will all be worse off — but Europeans most of all.

In barriers to entry, international competition, international politics, international trade, internet, privacy, technology, truth on the market Competition law, Data Protection Regulation, Digital Single Market, EU, European Commission, European Union, innovation, privacy, regulation, rent seeking

Don’t wanna brag or nothin, but critics have been right about net neutrality so far: TWC complaint and the Consumer Watchdog petition show it

Ben Sperry — 18 June 2015

Remember when net neutrality wasn’t going to involve rate regulation and it was crazy to say that it would? Or that it wouldn’t lead to regulation of edge providers? Or that it was only about the last mile and not interconnection? Well, if the early petitions and complaints are a preview of more to come, the Open Internet Order may end up having the FCC regulating rates for interconnection and extending the reach of its privacy rules to edge providers.

On Monday, Consumer Watchdog petitioned the FCC to not only apply Customer Proprietary Network Information (CPNI) rules originally meant for telephone companies to ISPs, but to also start a rulemaking to require edge providers to honor Do Not Track requests in order to “promote broadband deployment” under Section 706. Of course, we warned of this possibility in our joint ICLE-TechFreedom legal comments:

For instance, it is not clear why the FCC could not, through Section 706, mandate “network level” copyright enforcement schemes or the DNS blocking that was at the heart of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). . . Thus, it would appear that Section 706, as re-interpreted by the FCC, would, under the D.C. Circuit’s Verizon decision, allow the FCC sweeping power to regulate the Internet up to and including (but not beyond) the process of “communications” on end-user devices. This could include not only copyright regulation but everything from cybersecurity to privacy to technical standards. (emphasis added).

While the merits of Do Not Track are debatable, it is worth noting that privacy regulation can go too far and actually drastically change the Internet ecosystem. In fact, it is actually a plausible scenario that overregulating data collection online could lead to the greater use of paywalls to access content. This may actually be a greater threat to Internet Openness than anything ISPs have done.

And then yesterday, the first complaint under the new Open Internet rule was brought against Time Warner Cable by a small streaming video company called Commercial Network Services. According to several news stories, CNS “plans to file a peering complaint against Time Warner Cable under the Federal Communications Commission’s new network-neutrality rules unless the company strikes a free peering deal ASAP.” In other words, CNS is asking for rate regulation for interconnection. Under the Open Internet Order, the FCC can rule on such complaints, but it can only rule on a case-by-case basis. Either TWC assents to free peering, or the FCC intervenes and sets the rate for them, or the FCC dismisses the complaint altogether and pushes such decisions down the road.

This was another predictable development that many critics of the Open Internet Order warned about: there was no way to really avoid rate regulation once the FCC reclassified ISPs. While the FCC could reject this complaint, it is clear that they have the ability to impose de facto rate regulation through case-by-case adjudication. Whether it is rate regulation according to Title II (which the FCC ostensibly didn’t do through forbearance) is beside the point. This will have the same practical economic effects and will be functionally indistinguishable if/when it occurs.

In sum, while neither of these actions were contemplated by the FCC (they claim), such abstract rules are going to lead to random complaints like these, and companies are going to have to use the “ask FCC permission” process to try to figure out beforehand whether they should be investing or whether they’re going to be slammed. As Geoff Manne said in Wired:

That’s right—this new regime, which credits itself with preserving “permissionless innovation,” just put a bullet in its head. It puts innovators on notice, and ensures that the FCC has the authority (if it holds up in court) to enforce its vague rule against whatever it finds objectionable.

I mean, I don’t wanna brag or nothin, but it seems to me that we critics have been right so far. The reclassification of broadband Internet service as Title II has had the (supposedly) unintended consequence of sweeping in far more (both in scope of application and rules) than was supposedly bargained for. Hopefully the FCC rejects the petition and the complaint and reverses this course before it breaks the Internet.

In administrative, federal communications commission, international center for law & economics, internet, net neutrality, political economy, politics, regulation, technology, telecommunications FCC, Federal Communications Commission, internet, net neutrality, Open Internet Order, politics, Time Warner Cable

New Paper: The Problems and Perils of Bootstrapping Privacy and Data into an Antitrust Framework

Ben Sperry — 12 June 2015

The CPI Antitrust Chronicle published Geoffrey Manne’s and my recent paper, The Problems and Perils of Bootstrapping Privacy and Data into an Antitrust Framework as part of a symposium on Big Data in the May 2015 issue. All of the papers are worth reading and pondering, but of course ours is the best ;).

In it, we analyze two of the most prominent theories of antitrust harm arising from data collection: privacy as a factor of non-price competition, and price discrimination facilitated by data collection. We also analyze whether data is serving as a barrier to entry and effectively preventing competition. We argue that, in the current marketplace, there are no plausible harms to competition arising from either non-price effects or price discrimination due to data collection online and that there is no data barrier to entry preventing effective competition.

The issues of how to regulate privacy issues and what role competition authorities should in that, are only likely to increase in importance as the Internet marketplace continues to grow and evolve. The European Commission and the FTC have been called on by scholars and advocates to take greater consideration of privacy concerns during merger review and encouraged to even bring monopolization claims based upon data dominance. These calls should be rejected unless these theories can satisfy the rigorous economic review of antitrust law. In our humble opinion, they cannot do so at this time.

Excerpts:

PRIVACY AS AN ELEMENT OF NON-PRICE COMPETITION

The Horizontal Merger Guidelines have long recognized that anticompetitive effects may “be manifested in non-price terms and conditions that adversely affect customers.” But this notion, while largely unobjectionable in the abstract, still presents significant problems in actual application.

First, product quality effects can be extremely difficult to distinguish from price effects. Quality-adjusted price is usually the touchstone by which antitrust regulators assess prices for competitive effects analysis. Disentangling (allegedly) anticompetitive quality effects from simultaneous (neutral or pro-competitive) price effects is an imprecise exercise, at best. For this reason, proving a product-quality case alone is very difficult and requires connecting the degradation of a particular element of product quality to a net gain in advantage for the monopolist.

Second, invariably product quality can be measured on more than one dimension. For instance, product quality could include both function and aesthetics: A watch’s quality lies in both its ability to tell time as well as how nice it looks on your wrist. A non-price effects analysis involving product quality across multiple dimensions becomes exceedingly difficult if there is a tradeoff in consumer welfare between the dimensions. Thus, for example, a smaller watch battery may improve its aesthetics, but also reduce its reliability. Any such analysis would necessarily involve a complex and imprecise comparison of the relative magnitudes of harm/benefit to consumers who prefer one type of quality to another.

PRICE DISCRIMINATION AS A PRIVACY HARM

If non-price effects cannot be relied upon to establish competitive injury (as explained above), then what can be the basis for incorporating privacy concerns into antitrust? One argument is that major data collectors (e.g., Google and Facebook) facilitate price discrimination.

The argument can be summed up as follows: Price discrimination could be a harm to consumers that antitrust law takes into consideration. Because companies like Google and Facebook are able to collect a great deal of data about their users for analysis, businesses could segment groups based on certain characteristics and offer them different deals. The resulting price discrimination could lead to many consumers paying more than they would in the absence of the data collection. Therefore, the data collection by these major online companies facilitates price discrimination that harms consumer welfare.

This argument misses a large part of the story, however. The flip side is that price discrimination could have benefits to those who receive lower prices from the scheme than they would have in the absence of the data collection, a possibility explored by the recent White House Report on Big Data and Differential Pricing.

While privacy advocates have focused on the possible negative effects of price discrimination to one subset of consumers, they generally ignore the positive effects of businesses being able to expand output by serving previously underserved consumers. It is inconsistent with basic economic logic to suggest that a business relying on metrics would want to serve only those who can pay more by charging them a lower price, while charging those who cannot afford it a larger one. If anything, price discrimination would likely promote more egalitarian outcomes by allowing companies to offer lower prices to poorer segments of the population—segments that can be identified by data collection and analysis.

If this group favored by “personalized pricing” is as big as—or bigger than—the group that pays higher prices, then it is difficult to state that the practice leads to a reduction in consumer welfare, even if this can be divorced from total welfare. Again, the question becomes one of magnitudes that has yet to be considered in detail by privacy advocates.

DATA BARRIER TO ENTRY

Either of these theories of harm is predicated on the inability or difficulty of competitors to develop alternative products in the marketplace—the so-called “data barrier to entry.” The argument is that upstarts do not have sufficient data to compete with established players like Google and Facebook, which in turn employ their data to both attract online advertisers as well as foreclose their competitors from this crucial source of revenue. There are at least four reasons to be dubious of such arguments:

Data is useful to all industries, not just online companies;
It’s not the amount of data, but how you use it;
Competition online is one click or swipe away; and
Access to data is not exclusive

CONCLUSION

Privacy advocates have thus far failed to make their case. Even in their most plausible forms, the arguments for incorporating privacy and data concerns into antitrust analysis do not survive legal and economic scrutiny. In the absence of strong arguments suggesting likely anticompetitive effects, and in the face of enormous analytical problems (and thus a high risk of error cost), privacy should remain a matter of consumer protection, not of antitrust.

Interesting Upcoming Law and Economics Center Privacy Event

Ben Sperry — 5 March 2015

On Wednesday, March 18, our fellow law-and-economics-focused brethren at George Mason’s Law and Economics Center will host a very interesting morning briefing on the intersection of privacy, big data, consumer protection, and antitrust. FTC Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen will keynote and she will be followed by what looks like will be a lively panel discussion. If you are in DC you can join in person, but you can also watch online. More details below.

Please join the LEC in person or online for a morning of lively discussion on this topic. FTC Commissioner Maureen K. Ohlhausen will set the stage by discussing her Antitrust Law Journal article, “Competition, Consumer Protection and The Right [Approach] To Privacy“. A panel discussion on big data and antitrust, which includes some of the leading thinkers on the subject, will follow.

Other featured speakers include:

Allen P. Grunes
Founder, The Konkurrenz Group and Data Competition Institute

Andres Lerner
Executive Vice President, Compass Lexecon

Darren S. Tucker
Partner, Morgan Lewis

Nathan Newman
Director, Economic and Technology Strategies LLC

Moderator: James C. Cooper
Director, Research and Policy, Law & Economics Center

A full agenda is available click here.

In announcements, antitrust, consumer protection, privacy, truth on the market antitrust, big data, consumer protection, Federal Trade Commission, ftc, George Mason University School of Law, Law and Economics Center

A New Kingsbury Commitment: Universal Service through Competition?

Ben Sperry — 13 December 2013

For those in the DC area interested in telecom regulation, there is another great event opportunity coming up next week.

Join TechFreedom on Thursday, December 19, the 100th anniversary of the Kingsbury Commitment, AT&T’s negotiated settlement of antitrust charges brought by the Department of Justice that gave AT&T a legal monopoly in most of the U.S. in exchange for a commitment to provide universal service.

The Commitment is hailed by many not just as a milestone in the public interest but as the bedrock of U.S. communications policy. Others see the settlement as the cynical exploitation of lofty rhetoric to establish a tightly regulated monopoly — and the beginning of decades of cozy regulatory capture that stifled competition and strangled innovation.

So which was it? More importantly, what can we learn from the seventy year period before the 1984 break-up of AT&T, and the last three decades of efforts to unleash competition? With fewer than a third of Americans relying on traditional telephony and Internet-based competitors increasingly driving competition, what does universal service mean in the digital era? As Congress contemplates overhauling the Communications Act, how can policymakers promote universal service through competition, by promoting innovation and investment? What should a new Kingsbury Commitment look like?

Following a luncheon keynote address by FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai, a diverse panel of experts moderated by TechFreedom President Berin Szoka will explore these issues and more. The panel includes:

Harold Feld, Public Knowledge
Rob Atkinson, Information Technology & Innovation Foundation
Hance Haney, Discovery Institute
Jeff Eisenach, American Enterprise Institute
Fred Campbell, Former FCC Commissioner

Space is limited so RSVP now if you plan to attend in person. A live stream of the event will be available on this page. You can follow the conversation on Twitter on the #Kingsbury100 hashtag.

When:
Thursday, December 19, 2013
11:30 – 12:00 Registration & lunch
12:00 – 1:45 Event & live stream

The live stream will begin on this page at noon Eastern.

Where:
The Methodist Building
100 Maryland Ave NE
Washington D.C. 20002

Questions?
Email contact@techfreedom.org.

In federal communications commission, net neutrality, regulation, technology, telecommunications, wireless at&t, Berin Szoka, Commissioner Pai, Federal Communications Commission, Fred Campbell, Hance Haney, Harold Feld, Jeff Eisenach, Kingsbury Commitment, Rob Atkinson, techfreedom

“FTC: Technology & Reform” Agenda Available for 12/16 Event with Current/Former FTC Commissioners Wright, Muris & Kovacic

Ben Sperry — 12 December 2013

As it begins its hundredth year, the FTC is increasingly becoming the Federal Technology Commission. The agency’s role in regulating data security, privacy, the Internet of Things, high-tech antitrust and patents, among other things, has once again brought to the forefront the question of the agency’s discretion and the sources of the limits on its power.Please join us this Monday, December 16th, for a half-day conference launching the year-long “FTC: Technology & Reform Project,” which will assess both process and substance at the FTC and recommend concrete reforms to help ensure that the FTC continues to make consumers better off.

FTC Commissioner Josh Wright will give a keynote luncheon address titled, “The Need for Limits on Agency Discretion and the Case for Section 5 UMC Guidelines.” Project members will discuss the themes raised in our inaugural report and how they might inform some of the most pressing issues of FTC process and substance confronting the FTC, Congress and the courts. The afternoon will conclude with a Fireside Chat with former FTC Chairmen Tim Muris and Bill Kovacic, followed by a cocktail reception.

Full Agenda:

Lunch and Keynote Address (12:00-1:00)
- FTC Commissioner Joshua Wright
Introduction to the Project and the “Questions & Frameworks” Report (1:00-1:15)
- Gus Hurwitz, Geoffrey Manne and Berin Szoka
Panel 1: Limits on FTC Discretion: Institutional Structure & Economics (1:15-2:30)
- Jeffrey Eisenach (AEI | Former Economist, BE)
- Todd Zywicki (GMU Law | Former Director, OPP)
- Tad Lipsky (Latham & Watkins)
- Geoffrey Manne (ICLE) (moderator)
Panel 2: Section 5 and the Future of the FTC (2:45-4:00)
- Paul Rubin (Emory University Law and Economics | Former Director of Advertising Economics, BE)
- James Cooper (GMU Law | Former Acting Director, OPP)
- Gus Hurwitz (University of Nebraska Law)
- Berin Szoka (TechFreedom) (moderator)
A Fireside Chat with Former FTC Chairmen (4:15-5:30)
- Tim Muris (Former FTC Chairman | George Mason University) & Bill Kovacic (Former FTC Chairman | George Washington University)
Reception (5:30-6:30)

Our conference is a “widely-attended event.” Registration is $75 but free for nonprofit, media and government attendees. Space is limited, so RSVP today!

Working Group Members:
Howard Beales
Terry Calvani
James Cooper
Jeffrey Eisenach
Gus Hurwitz
Thom Lambert
Tad Lipsky
Geoffrey Manne
Timothy Muris
Paul Rubin
Joanna Shepherd-Bailey
Joe Sims
Berin Szoka
Sasha Volokh
Todd Zywicki

In antitrust, consumer protection, federal trade commission, international center for law & economics, law and economics, scholarship Bill Kovacic, ftc, FTC Commissioner, FTC Technology & Reform Project, geoffrey manne, Josh Wright, Keynote, Law and economics, Technology & Reform Project, Tim Muris, todd zywicki

Truth on the Market

Archives For

Economics is Dead. Long Live Economics! A Review of The Economists’ Hour

Conclusion

Like this:

Does Apple’s “Discrimination” Against Rival Apps in the App Store harm Consumers?

Prioritization

Entry

The so-called App Store “Tax”

Conclusion

Like this:

What’s the Harm of Targeted Ads on Children’s Content Anyway?

Like this:

The Unconstitutionality of the FCC’s Leased Access Rules

Like this:

Economic Calculation in the Public Defender’s Office

Like this:

The Good, Bad, and the Ugly of the EU’s Proposed Data Protection Regulation

Like this:

Don’t wanna brag or nothin, but critics have been right about net neutrality so far: TWC complaint and the Consumer Watchdog petition show it

Like this:

New Paper: The Problems and Perils of Bootstrapping Privacy and Data into an Antitrust Framework

Like this:

Interesting Upcoming Law and Economics Center Privacy Event

Like this:

A New Kingsbury Commitment: Universal Service through Competition?

Like this:

“FTC: Technology & Reform” Agenda Available for 12/16 Event with Current/Former FTC Commissioners Wright, Muris & Kovacic

Like this:

Search TOTM

A Top 100 Economics Blog

Recent Posts

Authors

Posts by Author

Bloggers Emeriti

Posts by Past Authors & Guests

TOTM Archives

Subscribe by Email

Subscribe by RSS

Archives For

Conclusion

Share this:

Like this:

Prioritization

Entry

The so-called App Store “Tax”

Conclusion

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Search TOTM

A Top 100 Economics Blog

Recent Posts

Authors

Posts by Author

Bloggers Emeriti

Posts by Past Authors & Guests

Categories

TOTM Archives

Subscribe by Email

Subscribe by RSS

Follow Us