Archives For Cartels

No, Mergers Are Not Like ‘The Ultimate Cartel’

Mario Zúñiga —  8 March 2023

[This is a guest post from Mario Zúñiga of EY Law in Lima, Perú. An earlier version was published in Spanish on the author’s personal blog. He gives thanks to Hugo Figari and Walter Alvarez for their comments on the initial version and special thanks to Lazar Radic for his advice and editing of the English version.]

There is a line of thinking according to which, without merger-control rules, antitrust law is “incomplete.”[1] Without such a regime, the argument goes, whenever a group of companies faces with the risk of being penalized for cartelizing, they could instead merge and thus “raise prices without any legal consequences.”[2]

A few months ago, at a symposium that INDECOPI[3] organized for the first anniversary the Peruvian Merger Control Act’s enactment,[4] Rubén Maximiano of the OECD’s Competition Division argued in support of the importance of merger-control regimes with the assessment that mergers are “like the ultimate cartel” because a merged firm could raise prices “with impunity.”

I get Maximiano’s point. Antitrust law was born, in part, to counter the rise of trusts, which had been used to evade the restriction that common law already imposed on “restraints of trade” in the United States. Let’s not forget, however, that these “trusts” were essentially a facade used to mask agreements to fix prices, and only to fix prices.[5] They were not real combinations of two or more businesses, as occurs in a merger. Therefore, even if one agree that it is important to scrutinize mergers, describing them as an alternative means of “cartelizing” is, to say the least, incomplete.

While this might seem to some to be a debate about mere semantics, I think is relevant to the broader context in which competition agencies are being pushed from various fronts toward a more aggressive application of merger-control rules.[6]

In describing mergers only as a strategy to gain more market power, or market share, or to expand profit margins, we would miss something very important: how these benefits would be obtained. Let’s not forget what the goal of antitrust law actually is. However we articulate this goal (“consumer welfare” or “the competitive process”), it is clear that antitrust law is more concerned with protecting a process than achieving any particular final result. It protects a dynamic in which, in principle, the market is trusted to be the best way to allocate resources.

In that vein, competition policy seeks to remove barriers to this dynamic, not to force a specific result. In this sense, it is not just what companies achieve in the market that matters, but how they achieve it. And there’s an enormous difference between price-fixing and buying a company. That’s why antitrust law gives a different treatment to “naked” agreements to collude while also contemplating an “ancillary agreements” doctrine.

By accepting this (“ultimate cartel”) approach to mergers, we would also be ignoring decades of economics and management literature. We would be ignoring, to start, the fundamental contributions of Ronald Coase in “The Nature of the Firm.” Acquiring other companies (or business lines or assets) allows us to reduce transaction costs and generate economies of scale in production. According to Coase:

The main reason why it is profitable to establish a firm would seem to be that there is a cost of using the price mechanism. The most obvious cost of ‘organising’ production through the price mechanism is that of discovering what the relevant prices are. This cost may be reduced but it will not be eliminated by the emergence of specialists who will sell this information. The costs of negotiating and concluding a separate contract for each exchange transaction which takes place on a market must also be taken into account.

The simple answer to that could be to enter into long-term contracts, but Coase notes that that’s not that easy. He explains that:

There are, however, other disadvantages-or costs of using the price mechanism. It may be desired to make a long-term contract for the supply of some article or service. This may be due to the fact that if one contract is made for a longer period, instead of several shorter ones, then certain costs of making each contract will be avoided. Or, owing to the risk attitude of the people concerned, they may prefer to make a long rather than a short-term contract. Now, owing to the difficulty of forecasting, the longer the period of the contract is for the supply of the commodity or service, the less possible, and indeed, the less desirable it is for the person purchasing to specify what the other contracting party is expected to do.

Coase, to be sure, makes this argument mainly with respect to vertical mergers, but I think it may be applicable to horizontal mergers, as well, to the extent that the latter generate “economies of scale.” Moreover, it’s not unusual for many acquisitions that are classified as “horizontal” to also have a “vertical” component (e.g., a consumer-goods company may buy another company in the same line of business because it wants to take advantage of the latter’s distribution network; or a computer manufacturer may buy another computer company because it has an integrated unit that produces microprocessors).

We also should not leave aside the entrepreneurship element, which frequently is ignored in the antitrust literature and in antitrust law and policy. As Israel Kirzner pointed out more than 50 years ago:

An economics that emphasizes equilibrium tends, therefore, to overlook the role of the entrepreneur. His role becomes somehow identified with movements from one equilibrium position to another, with ‘innovations,’ and with dynamic changes, but not with the dynamics of the equilibrating process itself.

Instead of the entrepreneur, the dominant theory of price has dealt with the firm, placing the emphasis heavily on its profit-maximizing aspects. In fact, this emphasis has misled many students of price theory to understand the notion of the entrepreneur as nothing more than the focus of profit-maximizing decision-making within the firm. They have completely overlooked the role of the entrepreneur in exploiting superior awareness of price discrepancies within the economic system.”

Working in mergers and acquisitions, either as an external advisor or in-house counsel, has confirmed the aforementioned for me (anecdotal evidence, to be sure, but with the advantage of allowing very in-depth observations). Firms that take control of other firms are seeking to exploit the comparative advantages they may have over whoever is giving up control. Sometimes a company has (or thinks it has) knowledge or assets (greater knowledge of the market, better sales strategies, a broader distribution network, better access to credit, among many other potential advantages) that allow it to make better use of the seller’s existing assets.

An entrepreneur is successful because he or she sees what others do not see. Beatriz Boza summarizes it well in a section of her book “Empresarios” in which she details the purchase of the Santa Isabel supermarket chain by Intercorp (one of Peru’s biggest conglomerates). The group’s main shareholder, Carlos Rodríguez-Pastor, had already decided to enter the retail business and the opportunity came in 2003 when the Dutch group Ahold put Santa Isabel up for sale. The move was risky for Intercorp, in that Santa Isabel was in debt and operating at a loss. But Rodríguez-Pastor had been studying what was happening similar markets in other countries and knew that having a stake in the supermarket business would allow him to reach more consumer-credit customers, in addition to offering other vertical-integration opportunities. In retrospect, the deal can only be described as a success. In 2014, the company reached 34.1% market share and took in revenues of more than US$1.25 billion, with an EBITDA margin of 6.2%. Rodríguez-Pastor saw the synergies that others did not see, but he also dared to take the risk. As Boza writes:

 ‘Nobody ever saw the synergies,’ concludes the businessman, reminding the businessmen and executives who warned him that he was going to go bankrupt after the acquisition of Ahold’s assets. ‘Today we have a retail circuit that no one else can have.’

Competition authorities need to recognize these sorts of synergies and efficiencies,[7] and take them into account as compensating effects even where the combination might otherwise represent some risk to competition. That is why the vast majority of proposed mergers are approved by competition authorities around the world.

There is some evidence of companies that were sanctioned in cartel cases later choose to merge,[8] but what this requires is that the competition authorities put more effort into prosecuting those mergers, not that they adopt a much more aggressive approach to reviewing all mergers.

I am not proposing, of course, that we should abolish merger control or even that it should necessarily be “permissive.” Some mergers may indeed represent a genuine risk to competition. But in analyzing them, employing technical analytic techniques and robust evidence, it is important to recognize that entrepreneurs may have countless valid business reasons to carry out a merger—reasons that are often not fully formalized or even understood by the entrepreneurs themselves, since they operate under a high degree of uncertainty and risk.[9] An entrepreneur’s primary motivation is to maximize his or her own benefit, but we cannot just assume that this will be greater after “concentrating” markets.[10]

Competition agencies must recognize this, and not simply presume anticompetitive intentions or impacts. Antitrust law—and, in particular, the concentration-control regimes throughout the world—require that any harm to competition must be proved, and this is so precisely because mergers are not like cartels.

[1] The debate prior to the enactment of Peru’s Merger Control Act became too politicized and polarized. Opponents went so far as to affirm that merger control was “unconstitutional” (highly debatable) or that it constituted an interventionist policy (something that I believe cannot be assumed but is contingent on the type of regulation that is approved or how it is applied). On the other hand, advocates of the regulation claimed an inevitable scenario of concentrated markets and monopolies if the act was not approved (without any empirical evidence of this claim). My personal position was initially skeptical, considering that the priority—from a competition policy point of view, at least in a developing economy like Peru—should continue to be deregulation to remove entry barriers and to prosecute cartels. That being said, a well-designed and well-enforced merger-control regime (i.e., one that generally does not block mergers that are not harmful to competition; is agile; and has adequate protection from political interference) does not have to be detrimental to markets and can generate benefits in terms of avoiding anti-competitive mergers.

In Peru, the Commission for the Defense of Free Competition and its Technical Secretariat have been applying the law pretty reasonably. To date, of more than 20 applications, the vast majority have been approved without conditions, and one conditionally. In addition, approval requests have been resolved in an average of 23 days, below the legal term.

[2] See, e.g., this peer-reviewed 2018 OECD report: “The adoption of a merger control regime should be a priority for Peru, since in its absence competitors can circumvent the prohibition against anticompetitive agreements by merging – with effects potentially similar to those of a cartel immune from antitrust scrutiny.”

[3] National Institute for the Defense of Competition and the Protection of Intellectual Property (INDECOPI, after its Spanish acronym), is the Peruvian competition agency. It is an administrative agency with a broad scope of tasks, including antitrust law, unfair competition law, consumer protection, and intellectual property registration, among others. It can adjudicate cases and impose fines. Its decisions can be challenged before courts.

[4] You can watch the whole symposium (which I recommend) here.

[5] See Gregory J. Werden’s “The Foundations of Antitrust.” Werden explains how the term “trust” had lost its original legal meaning and designated all kinds of agreements intended to restrict competition.

[6] Brian Albrecht, “Are All Mergers Inherently Anticompetitive?”

[7] See, e.g., the “Efficiencies” section of the U.S. Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission’s Horizontal Merger Guidelines, which are currently under review.

[8] See Stephen Davies, Peter Ormosiz, and Martin Graffenberger, “Mergers After Cartels: How Markets React to Cartel Breakdown.”

[9] It is always useful to revisit, in this regard, Judge Frank Easterbrook’s classic 1984 piece “The Limits of Antitrust.”

[10] Brian Albrecht explains here why we cannot assume that monopoly profits will always be greater than duopoly profits.

In Antitrust & Competition, Cartels, Federal Trade Commission, International, Mergers & Acquisitions, Truth on the Market, Tying, Vertical Restraints , ,
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FTC Biweekly UMC Roundup – Mountain of Puffery Edition

Daniel J. Gilman —  4 November 2022

Research still matters, so I recommend video from the Federal Trade Commission’s 15th Annual Microeconomics Conference, if you’ve not already seen it. It’s a valuable event, and it’s part of the FTC’s still important statutory-research mission. It also reminds me that the FTC’s excellent, if somewhat diminished, Bureau of Economics still has no director; Marta Woskinska concluded her very short tenure in February. Eight-plus months of hiring and appointments (and many departures) later, she’s not been replaced. Priorities.

The UMC Watch Continues: In 2015, the FTC issued a Statement of Enforcement Principles Regarding “Unfair Methods of Competition.” On July 1, 2021, the Commission withdrew the statement on a 3-2 vote, sternly rebuking its predecessors: “the 2015 Statement …abrogates the Commission’s congressionally mandated duty to use its expertise to identify and combat unfair methods of competition even if they do not violate a separate antitrust statute.”

That was surprising. First, it actually presaged a downturn in enforcement. Second, while the 2015 statement was not empty, many agreed with Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen’s 2015 dissent that it offered relatively little new guidance on UMC enforcement. In other words, stating that conduct “will be evaluated under a framework similar to the rule of reason” seemed not much of a limiting principle to some, if far too much of one to others. Eye of the beholder. 

Third, as Commissioners Noah Phillips and Christine S. Wilson noted in their dissent, given that there was no replacement, it was “[h]inting at the prospect of dramatic new liability without any guide regarding what the law permits or proscribes.” The business and antitrust communities were put on watch: winter is coming. Winter is still coming. In September, Chair Lina Khan stated that one of her top priorities “has been the preparation of a policy statement on Section 5 that reflects the statutory text, our institutional structure, the history of the statute, and the case law.” Indeed. More recently, she said she was hopeful that the statement would be released in “the coming weeks.”  Stay tuned. 

There was September success, and a little mission creep at the DOJ Antitrust Division: Congrats to the U.S. Justice Department for some uncharacteristic success, and not a little creativity. In U.S. v. Nathan Nephi Zito, the defendant pleaded guilty to illegal monopolization for proposing that he and a competitor allocate markets for highway-crack-sealing services.  

The odd part, and an FTC connection that was noted by Pallavi Guniganti and Gus Hurwitz: at issue was a single charge of monopolization in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act. There’s long been widespread agreement that the bounds of Section 5 UMC authority exceed those of the Sherman Act, along with widespread disagreement on the extent to which that’s true, but there was consensus on invitations to collude. Agreements to fix prices or allocate markets are per se violations of Section 1. Refused invitations to collude are not, or were not. But as the FTC stated in its now-withdrawn Statement of Enforcement Principles, UMC authority extends to conduct “that, if allowed to mature or complete, could violate the Sherman or Clayton Act.” But the FTC didn’t bring the case against Zito, the competitor rejected the invitation, and nobody alleged a violation of either Sherman Section 1 or FTC Section 5. 

The admitted conduct seems indefensible, under Section 5, so perhaps there’s no harm ex post, but I wonder where this is going.     

DOJ also had a Halloween win when Judge Florence Y. Pan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, sitting by designation in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, issued an order blocking the proposed merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. The opinion is still sealed. But based on the complaint, it was a relatively straightforward monopsony case, albeit one with a very narrow market definition: two market definitions, but with most of the complaint and the more convincing story about “the market for acquisition of publishing rights to anticipated top-selling books.” Steven King, Oprah Winfrey, etc. 

Maybe they got it right, although Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter’s description seems a bit of puffery, if not a mountain of it: “The proposed merger would have reduced competition, decreased author compensation, diminished the breadth, depth, and diversity of our stories and ideas, and ultimately impoverished our democracy.”

At the margin? The Division did not need to prove harm to consumers downstream, although it alleged such harm. Here’s a policy question: suppose the deal would have lowered advances paid to top-selling authors—those cited in the complaint are mostly in the millions of dollars—but suppose DOJ was wrong about the larger market and downstream effects. If publisher savings were accompanied by a slight reduction in book prices, not output, would that have been a bad result?    

And you thought entry was procompetitive? For some, Halloween fright does not abate with daylight. On Nov. 1, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) sent a letter to Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter, writing “with serious concern about emerging competition and consumer protection issues that Big Tech’s expansion into the automotive industry poses.” I gather that “emerging” is a term of art in legal French meaning “possible, maybe.” The senator writes with great imagination and not a little drama, cataloging numerous allegations about such worrisome conduct as bundling.

Of course, some tying arrangements are anticompetitive, but bundling is not necessarily or even typically anticompetitive. As an article still posted on the DOJ website explains, the “pervasiveness of tying in the economy shows that it is generally beneficial,” For instance, in the automotive industry, most consumers seem to prefer buying their cars whole rather than in parts.

It’s impossible to know that none of Warren’s myriad purported harms will come to pass in any market, but nobody has argued that the agencies ought to stop screening Hart-Scott-Rodino submissions. The need to act “quickly and decisively” on so many issues seems dubious. Perhaps there might be advantages to having technically sophisticated, data-rich, well-financed firms enter into product R&D and competition in new areas, including nascent product markets that might want more of such things for the technology that goes into vehicles that hurtle us down the highway.        

The Oct. 21 Roundup highlighted the FTC’s recent flood of regulatory proposals, including the “commercial surveillance” ANPR. Three new ANPRs were mentioned that week: one regarding “Junk Fees,” one regarding “Fake Reviews and Endorsements,” and one regarding potential updates to the FTC’s “Funeral Rule.” Periodic rule review is a requirement, so a potential update is not unusual. On the others, I recommend Commissioner Wilson’s dissents for an overview of legitimate concerns. In sum, the junk-ees ANPR is “sweeping in its breadth; may duplicate, or contradict, existing laws and rules; is untethered from a solid foundation of FTC enforcement; relies on flawed assumptions and vague definitions; ignores impacts on competition; and diverts scarce agency resources from important law enforcement efforts.” And if some “junk fees” are the result of deceptive or unfair practices under established standards, the ANPR also seems to refer to potentially useful and efficient unbundling. Wilson finds the “fake reviews and endorsements” ANPR clearer and better focused, but another bridge too far, contemplating a burdensome regulatory scheme while active enforcement and guidance initiatives are underway, and may adequately address material and deceptive advertising practices.

As Wilson notes, the costs of regulating are substantial, too. New proposals spring forth while overdue projects founder. For instance, the long, long overdue “10-year” review of the FTC’s Eyeglass Rule last saw an ANPR in 2015, following a 2004 decision to leave an earlier version of the rule in place. The Contact Lens Rule, implementing the Fairness to Contact Lens Consumers Act, was initially adopted in 2004 and amended 16 years later, partly because the central provision of the rule had proved unenforceable, resulting in chronic noncompliance. The chair is also considering rulemaking on noncompete clauses. Again, there are worries that some anticompetitive conduct might prompt considerably overbroad regulation, given legitimate applications, a developing and mixed body of empirical literature, and recent activity in the states. It’s another area to wonder whether the FTC has either congressional authorization or the resources, experience, and expertise to regulate the conduct at issue–potentially, every employment agreement in the United States.

In Administrative Law, Antitrust & Competition, Antitrust at the Agencies Roundup, Antitrust Division, Cartels, Federal Trade Commission, Justice Department, Section 5, Tying , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Damn the Economics, Full Speed Ahead!

Alden Abbott —  22 September 2022

A White House administration typically announces major new antitrust initiatives in the fall and spring, and this year is no exception. Senior Biden administration officials kicked off the fall season at Fordham Law School (more on that below) by shedding additional light on their plans to expand the accepted scope of antitrust enforcement.

Their aggressive enforcement statements draw headlines, but will the administration’s neo-Brandeisians actually notch enforcement successes? The prospects are cloudy, to say the least.

The U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) has lost some cartel cases in court this year (what was the last time that happened?) and, on Sept. 19, a federal judge rejected the DOJ’s attempt to enjoin United Health’s $13.8 billion bid for Change Healthcare. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently lost two merger challenges before its in-house administrative law judge. It now faces a challenge to its administrative-enforcement processes before the U.S. Supreme Court (the Axon case, to be argued in November).

(Incidentally, on the other side of the Atlantic, the European Commission has faced some obstacles itself. Despite its recent Google victory, the Commission has effectively lost two abuse of dominance cases this year—the Intel and Qualcomm matters—before the European General Court.)

So, are the U.S. antitrust agencies chastened? Will they now go back to basics? Far from it. They enthusiastically are announcing plans to charge ahead, asserting theories of antitrust violations that have not been taken seriously for decades, if ever. Whether this turns out to be wise enforcement policy remains to be seen, but color me highly skeptical. Let’s take a quick look at some of the big enforcement-policy ideas that are being floated.

Fordham Law’s Antitrust Conference

Admiral David Farragut’s order “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” was key to the Union Navy’s August 1864 victory in the Battle of Mobile Bay, a decisive Civil War clash. Perhaps inspired by this display of risk-taking, the heads of the two federal antitrust agencies—DOJ Assistant Attorney General (AAG) Jonathan Kanter and FTC Chair Lina Khan—took a “damn the economics, full speed ahead” attitude in remarks at the Sept. 16 session of Fordham Law School’s 49th Annual Conference on International Antitrust Law and Policy. Special Assistant to the President Tim Wu was also on hand and emphasized the “all of government” approach to competition policy adopted by the Biden administration.

In his remarks, AAG Kanter seemed to be endorsing a “monopoly broth” argument in decrying the current “Whac-a-Mole” approach to monopolization cases. The intent may be to lessen the burden of proof of anticompetitive effects, or to bring together a string of actions taken jointly as evidence of a Section 2 violation. In taking such an approach, however, there is a serious risk that efficiency-seeking actions may be mistaken for exclusionary tactics and incorrectly included in the broth. (Notably, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit’s 2001 Microsoft opinion avoided the monopoly-broth problem by separately discussing specific company actions and weighing them on their individual merits, not as part of a general course of conduct.)

Kanter also recommended going beyond “our horizontal and vertical framework” in merger assessments, despite the fact that vertical mergers (involving complements) are far less likely to be anticompetitive than horizontal mergers (involving substitutes).

Finally, and perhaps most problematically, Kanter endorsed the American Innovative and Choice Online Act (AICOA), citing the protection it would afford “would-be competitors” (but what about consumers?). In so doing, the AAG ignored the fact that AICOA would prohibit welfare-enhancing business conduct and could be harmfully construed to ban mere harm to rivals (see, for example, Stanford professor Doug Melamed’s trenchant critique).

Chair Khan’s presentation, which called for a far-reaching “course correction” in U.S. antitrust, was even more bold and alarming. She announced plans for a new FTC Act Section 5 “unfair methods of competition” (UMC) policy statement centered on bringing “standalone” cases not reachable under the antitrust laws. Such cases would not consider any potential efficiencies and would not be subject to the rule of reason. Endorsing that approach amounts to an admission that economic analysis will not play a serious role in future FTC UMC assessments (a posture that likely will cause FTC filings to be viewed skeptically by federal judges).

In noting the imminent release of new joint DOJ-FTC merger guidelines, Khan implied that they would be animated by an anti-merger philosophy. She cited “[l]awmakers’ skepticism of mergers” and congressional rejection “of economic debits and credits” in merger law. Khan thus asserted that prior agency merger guidance had departed from the law. I doubt, however, that many courts will be swayed by this “economics free” anti-merger revisionism.

Tim Wu’s remarks closing the Fordham conference had a “big picture” orientation. In an interview with GW Law’s Bill Kovacic, Wu briefly described the Biden administration’s “whole of government” approach, embodied in President Joe Biden’s July 2021 Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy. While the order’s notion of breaking down existing barriers to competition across the American economy is eminently sound, many of those barriers are caused by government restrictions (not business practices) that are not even alluded to in the order.

Moreover, in many respects, the order seeks to reregulate industries, misdiagnosing many phenomena as business abuses that actually represent efficient free-market practices (as explained by Howard Beales and Mark Jamison in a Sept. 12 Mercatus Center webinar that I moderated). In reality, the order may prove to be on net harmful, rather than beneficial, to competition.

Conclusion

What is one to make of the enforcement officials’ bold interventionist screeds? What seems to be missing in their presentations is a dose of humility and pragmatism, as well as appreciation for consumer welfare (scarcely mentioned in the agency heads’ presentations). It is beyond strange to see agencies that are having problems winning cases under conventional legal theories floating novel far-reaching initiatives that lack a sound economics foundation.

It is also amazing to observe the downplaying of consumer welfare by agency heads, given that, since 1979 (in Reiter v. Sonotone), the U.S. Supreme Court has described antitrust as a “consumer welfare prescription.” Unless there is fundamental change in the makeup of the federal judiciary (and, in particular, the Supreme Court) in the very near future, the new unconventional theories are likely to fail—and fail badly—when tested in court. 

Bringing new sorts of cases to test enforcement boundaries is, of course, an entirely defensible role for U.S. antitrust leadership. But can the same thing be said for bringing “non-boundary” cases based on theories that would have been deemed far beyond the pale by both Republican and Democratic officials just a few years ago? Buckle up: it looks as if we are going to find out. 

In Administrative Law, Antitrust & Competition, Cartels, European Union, Federal Trade Commission, Justice Department, Mergers & Acquisitions, Regulation, Section 5, Truth on the Market , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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The Bitter Fruits of Federal Antitrust ‘Reform’ Legislation

Alden Abbott —  25 July 2022

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

Much ink has been spilled regarding the potential harm to the economy and to the rule of law that could stem from enactment of the primary federal antitrust legislative proposal, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) (see here). AICOA proponents, of course, would beg to differ, emphasizing the purported procompetitive benefits of limiting the business freedom of “Big Tech monopolists.”

There is, however, one inescapable reality—as night follows day, passage of AICOA would usher in an extended period of costly litigation over the meaning of a host of AICOA terms. As we will see, this would generate business uncertainty and dampen innovative conduct that might be covered by new AICOA statutory terms. 

The history of antitrust illustrates the difficulties inherent in clarifying the meaning of novel federal statutory language. It was not until 21 years after passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act that the Supreme Court held that Section 1 of the act’s prohibition on contracts, combinations, and conspiracies “in restraint of trade” only covered unreasonable restraints of trade (see Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States, 221 U.S. 1 (1911)). Furthermore, courts took decades to clarify that certain types of restraints (for example, hardcore price fixing and horizontal market division) were inherently unreasonable and thus per se illegal, while others would be evaluated on a case-by-case basis under a “rule of reason.”

In addition, even far more specific terms related to exclusive dealing, tying, and price discrimination found within the Clayton Antitrust Act gave rise to uncertainty over the scope of their application. This uncertainty had to be sorted out through judicial case-law tests developed over many decades.

Even today, there is no simple, easily applicable test to determine whether conduct in the abstract constitutes illegal monopolization under Section 2 of the Sherman Act. Rather, whether Section 2 has been violated in any particular instance depends upon the application of economic analysis and certain case-law principles to matter-specific facts.

As is the case with current antitrust law, the precise meaning and scope of AICOA’s terms will have to be fleshed out over many years. Scholarly critiques of AICOA’s language underscore the seriousness of this problem.

In its April 2022 public comment on AICOA, the American Bar Association (ABA)  Antitrust Law Section explains in some detail the significant ambiguities inherent in specific AICOA language that the courts will have to address. These include “ambiguous terminology … regarding fairness, preferencing, materiality, and harm to competition on covered platforms”; and “specific language establishing affirmative defenses [that] creates significant uncertainty”. The ABA comment further stresses that AICOA’s failure to include harm to the competitive process as a prerequisite for a statutory violation departs from a broad-based consensus understanding within the antitrust community and could have the unintended consequence of disincentivizing efficient conduct. This departure would, of course, create additional interpretive difficulties for federal judges, further complicating the task of developing coherent case-law principles for the new statute.

Lending support to the ABA’s concerns, Northwestern University professor of economics Dan Spulber notes that AICOA “may have adverse effects on innovation and competition because of imprecise concepts and terminology.”

In a somewhat similar vein, Stanford Law School Professor (and former acting assistant attorney general for antitrust during the Clinton administration) Douglas Melamed complains that:

[AICOA] does not include the normal antitrust language (e.g., “competition in the market as a whole,” “market power”) that gives meaning to the idea of harm to competition, nor does it say that the imprecise language it does use is to be construed as that language is construed by the antitrust laws. … The bill could be very harmful if it is construed to require, not increased market power, but simply harm to rivals.

In sum, ambiguities inherent in AICOA’s new terminology will generate substantial uncertainty among affected businesses. This uncertainty will play out in the courts over a period of years. Moreover, the likelihood that judicial statutory constructions of AICOA language will support “efficiency-promoting” interpretations of behavior is diminished by the fact that AICOA’s structural scheme (which focuses on harm to rivals) does not harmonize with traditional antitrust concerns about promoting a vibrant competitive process.

Knowing this, the large high-tech firms covered by AICOA will become risk averse and less likely to innovate. (For example, they will be reluctant to improve algorithms in a manner that would increase efficiency and benefit consumers, but that might be seen as disadvantaging rivals.) As such, American innovation will slow, and consumers will suffer. (See here for an estimate of the enormous consumer-welfare gains generated by high tech platforms—gains of a type that AICOA’s enactment may be expected to jeopardize.) It is to be hoped that Congress will take note and consign AICOA to the rubbish heap of disastrous legislative policy proposals.

In Antitrust & Competition, Antitrust’s Uncertain Future, Cartels, Exclusive Dealing, Monopolization, Platforms, Price Discrimination, Supreme Court, Symposia, Truth on the Market, Tying, Vertical Restraints , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Hunting for Labor-Market Monopsonies (and Giffen Goods)

Eric Fruits —  11 May 2022

If you wander into an undergraduate economics class on the right day at the right time, you might catch the lecturer talking about Giffen goods: the rare case where demand curves can slope upward. The Irish potato famine is often used as an example. As the story goes, potatoes were a huge part of the Irish diet and consumed a large part of Irish family budgets. A failure of the potato crop reduced the supply of potatoes and potato prices soared. Because families had to spend so much on potatoes, they couldn’t afford much else, so spending on potatoes increased despite rising prices.

It’s a great story of injustice with a nugget of economics: Demand curves can slope upward!

Follow the students around for a few days, and they’ll be looking for Giffen goods everywhere. Surely, packaged ramen and boxed macaroni and cheese are Giffen goods. So are white bread and rice. Maybe even low-end apartments.

While it’s a fun concept to consider, the potato famine story is likely apocryphal. In truth, it’s nearly impossible to find a Giffen good in the real world. My version of Greg Mankiw’s massive “Principles of Economics” textbook devotes five paragraphs to Giffen goods, but it’s not especially relevant, which is perhaps why it’s only five paragraphs.

Wander into another economics class, and you might catch the lecturer talking about monopsony—that is, a market in which a small number of buyers control the price of inputs such as labor. I say “might” because—like Giffen goods—monopsony is an interesting concept to consider, but very hard to find a clear example of in the real world. Mankiw’s textbook devotes only four paragraphs to monopsony, explaining that the book “does not present a formal model of monopsony because, in the world, monopsonies are rare.”

Even so, monopsony is a hot topic these days. It seems that monopsonies are everywhere. Walmart and Amazon are monopsonist employers. So are poultry, pork, and beef companies. Local hospitals monopsonize the market for nurses and physicians. The National Collegiate Athletic Association is a monopsony employer of college athletes. Ultimate Fighting Championship has a monopsony over mixed-martial-arts fighters.

In 1994, David Card and Alan Krueger’s earthshaking study found a minimum wage increase had no measurable effect on fast-food employment and retail prices. They investigated monopsony power as one explanation but concluded that a monopsony model was not supported by their findings. They note:

[W]e find that prices of fast-food meals increased in New Jersey relative to Pennsylvania, suggesting that much of the burden of the minimum-wage rise was passed on to consumers. Within New Jersey, however, we find no evidence that prices increased more in stores that were most affected by the minimum-wage rise. Taken as a whole, these findings are difficult to explain with the standard competitive model or with models in which employers face supply constraints (e.g., monopsony or equilibrium search models). [Emphasis added]

Even so, the monopsony hunt was on and it intensified during President Barack Obama’s administration. During his term, the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) brought suit against several major Silicon Valley employers for anticompetitively entering into agreements not to “poach” programmers and engineers from each other. The administration also brought suit against a hospital association for an agreement to set uniform billing rates for certain nurses. Both cases settled but the Silicon Valley allegations led to a private class-action lawsuit.

In 2016, Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers published an issue brief on labor-market monopsony. The brief concluded that “evidence suggest[s] that firms may have wage-setting power in a broad range of settings.”

Around the same time, the Obama administration announced that it intended to “criminally investigate naked no-poaching or wage-fixing agreements that are unrelated or unnecessary to a larger legitimate collaboration between the employers.” The DOJ argued that no-poach agreements that allocate employees between companies are per se unlawful restraints of trade that violate Section 1 of the Sherman Act.

If one believes that monopsony power is stifling workers’ wages and benefits, then this would be a good first step to build up a body of evidence and precedence. Go after the low-hanging fruit of a conspiracy that is a per se violation of the Sherman Act, secure some wins, and then start probing the more challenging cases.

After several matters that resulted in settlements, the DOJ brought its first criminal wage-fixing case in late 2020. In United States v. Jindal, the government charged two employees of a Texas health-care staffing company of colluding with another staffing company to decrease pay rates for physical therapists and physical-therapist assistants.

The defense in Jindal conceded that that price-fixing was per se illegal under the Sherman Act but argued that prices and wages are two different concepts. Therefore, the defense claimed that, even if it was engaged in wage-fixing, the conduct would not be per se illegal. That was a stretch, and the district court judge was having none of that in ruling that: “The antitrust laws fully apply to the labor markets, and price-fixing agreements among buyers … are prohibited by the Sherman Act.”

Nevertheless, the jury in Jindal found the defendants not guilty of wage-fixing in violation of the Sherman Act, and also not guilty of a related conspiracy charge.

The DOJ also brought criminal no-poach cases against three other health-care companies and their employees: United States v. Surgical Care Affiliates LLC; United States v. Hee; and United States v. DaVita Inc. Each of the indictments alleged no-poach agreements in which defendants conspired with competitors not to recruit each other’s employees. Hee also included wage-fixing allegations.

Before trial, the defense in DaVita filed a motion to dismiss, arguing that no-poach agreements did not amount to illegal market-allocation agreements. Instead, the defense claimed that no-poach agreements were something less restrictive. Rather than a flat-out refusal to hire competitors’ employees, they were more akin to agreeing not to seek out competitors’ employees. As with Jindal, this was too much of a stretch for the judge who ruled that no-poach agreements could be an illegal market-allocation agreement.

A day after the Jindal verdict, the jury in DaVita acquitted the kidney-dialysis provider and its former CEO of charges that they conspired with competitors to suppress competition for employees through no-poach agreements.

The DaVita jurors appeared to be hung up on the definition of “meaningful competition” in the relevant market. The defense presented information showing that, despite any agreements, employees frequently changed jobs among the companies. Thus, it was argued that any agreement did not amount to an allocation of the market for employees.

The prosecution called several corporate executives who testified that the non-solicitation agreements merely required DaVita employees to tell their bosses they were looking for another job before they could be considered for positions at the three alleged co-conspirator companies. Some witnesses indicated that, by informing their bosses, they were able to obtain promotions and/or increased compensation. This was supported by expert testimony concluding that DaVita salaries changed during the alleged conspiracy period at a rate higher than the health-care industry as a whole. This finding is at-odds with a theory that the non-solicitation agreement was designed to stabilize or suppress compensation.

The Jindal and DaVita cases highlight some of the enormous challenges in mounting a labor-monopsonization case. Even if agencies can “win” or get concessions on defining the relevant markets, they still face challenges in establishing that no-poach agreements amount to a “meaningful” restraint of trade. DaVita suggests that a showing of job turnover and/or increased compensation during an alleged conspiracy period may be sufficient to convince a jury that a no-poach agreement may not be anticompetitive and—under certain circumstances—may even be pro-competitive.

For now, the hunt for a monopsony labor market continues its quest, along with the hunt for the ever-elusive Giffen good.

In Antitrust & Competition, Antitrust Division, Cartels, Health Care, Justice Department, Platforms, Price Discrimination, Truth on the Market , , , , , , , ,
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Antitrust Policy and National Security Interests

Alden Abbott —  8 March 2022

U.S. antitrust policy seeks to promote vigorous marketplace competition in order to enhance consumer welfare. For more than four decades, mainstream antitrust enforcers have taken their cue from the U.S. Supreme Court’s statement in Reiter v. Sonotone (1979) that antitrust is “a consumer welfare prescription.” Recent suggestions (see here and here) by new Biden administration Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) leadership that antitrust should promote goals apart from consumer welfare have yet to be embodied in actual agency actions, and they have not been tested by the courts. (Given Supreme Court case law, judicial abandonment of the consumer welfare standard appears unlikely, unless new legislation that displaces it is enacted.)   

Assuming that the consumer welfare paradigm retains its primacy in U.S. antitrust, how do the goals of antitrust match up with those of national security? Consistent with federal government pronouncements, the “basic objective of U.S. national security policy is to preserve and enhance the security of the United States and its fundamental values and institutions.” Properly applied, antitrust can retain its consumer welfare focus in a manner consistent with national security interests. Indeed, sound antitrust and national-security policies generally go hand-in-hand. The FTC and the DOJ should keep that in mind in formulating their antitrust policies (spoiler alert: they sometimes have failed to do so).

Discussion

At first blush, it would seem odd that enlightened consumer-welfare-oriented antitrust enforcement and national-security policy would be in tension. After all, enlightened antitrust enforcement is concerned with targeting transactions that harmfully reduce output and undermine innovation, such as hard-core collusion and courses of conduct that inefficiently exclude competition and weaken marketplace competition. U.S. national security would seem to be promoted (or, at least, not harmed) by antitrust enforcement directed at supporting stronger, more vibrant American markets.

This initial instinct is correct, if antitrust-enforcement policy indeed reflects economically sound, consumer-welfare-centric principles. But are there examples where antitrust enforcement falls short and thereby is at odds with national security? An evaluation of three areas of interaction between the two American policy interests is instructive.

The degree of congruence between national security and appropriate consumer welfare-enhancing antitrust enforcement is illustrated by a brief discussion of:

  1. defense-industry mergers;
  2. the intellectual property-antitrust interface, with a focus on patent licensing; and
  3. proposed federal antitrust legislation.

The first topic presents an example of clear consistency between consumer-welfare-centric antitrust and national defense. In contrast, the second topic demonstrates that antitrust prosecutions (and policies) that inappropriately weaken intellectual-property protections are inconsistent with national defense interests. The second topic does not manifest a tension between antitrust and national security; rather, it illustrates a tension between national security and unsound antitrust enforcement. In a related vein, the third topic demonstrates how a change in the antitrust statutes that would undermine the consumer welfare paradigm would also threaten U.S. national security.

Defense-Industry Mergers

The consistency between antitrust goals and national security is relatively strong and straightforward in the field of defense-industry-related mergers and joint ventures. The FTC and DOJ traditionally have worked closely with the U.S. Defense Department (DOD) to promote competition and consumer welfare in evaluating business transactions that affect national defense needs.

The DOD has long supported policies to prevent overreliance on a single supplier for critical industrial-defense needs. Such a posture is consistent with the antitrust goal of preventing mergers to monopoly that reduce competition, raise prices, and diminish quality by creating or entrenching a dominant firm. As then-FTC Commissioner William Kovacic commented about an FTC settlement that permitted the United Launch Alliance (an American spacecraft launch service provider established in 2006 as a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing), “[i]n reviewing defense industry mergers, competition authorities and the DOD generally should apply a presumption that favors the maintenance of at least two suppliers for every weapon system or subsystem.”

Antitrust enforcers have, however, worked with DOD to allow the only two remaining suppliers of a defense-related product or service to combine their operations, subject to appropriate safeguards, when presented with scale economy and quality rationales that advanced national-security interests (see here).

Antitrust enforcers have also consulted and found common cause with DOD in opposing anticompetitive mergers that have national-security overtones. For example, antitrust enforcement actions targeting vertical defense-sector mergers that threaten anticompetitive input foreclosure or facilitate anticompetitive information exchanges are in line with the national-security goal of preserving vibrant markets that offer the federal government competitive, high-quality, innovative, and reasonably priced purchase options for its defense needs.

The FTC’s recent success in convincing Lockheed Martin to drop its proposed acquisition of Aerojet Rocketdyne holdings fits into this category. (I express no view on the merits of this matter; I merely cite it as an example of FTC-DOD cooperation in considering a merger challenge.) In its February 2022 press release announcing the abandonment of this merger, the FTC stated that “[t]he acquisition would have eliminated the country’s last independent supplier of key missile propulsion inputs and given Lockheed the ability to cut off its competitors’ access to these critical components.” The FTC also emphasized the full consistency between its enforcement action and national-security interests:

Simply put, the deal would have resulted in higher prices and diminished quality and innovation for programs that are critical to national security. The FTC’s enforcement action in this matter dovetails with the DoD report released this week recommending stronger merger oversight of the highly concentrated defense industrial base.

Intellectual-Property Licensing

Shifts in government IP-antitrust patent-licensing policy perspectives

Intellectual-property (IP) licensing, particularly involving patents, is highly important to the dynamic and efficient dissemination of new technologies throughout the economy, which, in turn, promotes innovation and increased welfare (consumers’ and producers’ surplus). See generally, for example, Daniel Spulber’s The Case for Patents and Jonathan Barnett’s Innovation, Firms, and Markets. Patents are a property right, and they do not necessarily convey market power, as the federal government has recognized (see 2017 DOJ-FTC Antitrust Guidelines for the Licensing of Intellectual Property).

Standard setting through standard setting organizations (SSOs) has been a particularly important means of spawning valuable benchmarks (standards) that have enabled new patent-backed technologies to drive innovation and enable mass distribution of new high-tech products, such as smartphones. The licensing of patents that cover and make possible valuable standards—“standard-essential patents” or SEPs—has played a crucial role in bringing to market these products and encouraging follow-on innovations that have driven fast-paced welfare-enhancing product and process quality improvements.

The DOJ and FTC have recognized specific efficiency benefits of IP licensing in their 2017 Antitrust Guidelines for the Licensing of Intellectual Property, stating (citations deleted):

Licensing, cross-licensing, or otherwise transferring intellectual property (hereinafter “licensing”) can facilitate integration of the licensed property with complementary factors of production. This integration can lead to more efficient exploitation of the intellectual property, benefiting consumers through the reduction of costs and the introduction of new products. Such arrangements increase the value of intellectual property to consumers and owners. Licensing can allow an innovator to capture returns from its investment in making and developing an invention through royalty payments from those that practice its invention, thus providing an incentive to invest in innovative efforts. …

[L]imitations on intellectual property licenses may serve procompetitive ends by allowing the licensor to exploit its property as efficiently and effectively as possible. These various forms of exclusivity can be used to give a licensee an incentive to invest in the commercialization and distribution of products embodying the licensed intellectual property and to develop additional applications for the licensed property. The restrictions may do so, for example, by protecting the licensee against free riding on the licensee’s investments by other licensees or by the licensor. They may also increase the licensor’s incentive to license, for example, by protecting the licensor from competition in the licensor’s own technology in a market niche that it prefers to keep to itself.

Unfortunately, however, FTC and DOJ antitrust policies over the last 15 years have too often belied this generally favorable view of licensing practices with respect to SEPs. (See generally here, here, and here). Notably, the antitrust agencies have at various times taken policy postures and enforcement actions indicating that SEP holders may face antitrust challenges if:

  1. they fail to license all comers, including competitors, on fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) terms; and
  2. seek to obtain injunctions against infringers.

In addition, antitrust policy officials (see 2011 FTC Report) have described FRAND price terms as cabined by the difference between the licensing rates for the first (included in the standard) and second (not included in the standard) best competing patented technologies available prior to the adoption of a standard. This pricing measure—based on the “incremental difference” between first and second-best technologies—has been described as necessary to prevent SEP holders from deriving artificial “monopoly rents” that reflect the market power conferred by a standard. (But see then FTC-Commissioner Joshua Wright’s 2013 essay to the contrary, based on the economics of incomplete contracts.)

This approach to SEPs undervalues them, harming the economy. Limitations on seeking injunctions (which are a classic property-right remedy) encourages opportunistic patent infringements and artificially disfavors SEP holders in bargaining over licensing terms with technology implementers, thereby reducing the value of SEPs. SEP holders are further disadvantaged by the presumption that they must license all comers. They also are harmed by the implication that they must be limited to a relatively low hypothetical “ex ante” licensing rate—a rate that totally fails to take into account the substantial economic welfare value that will accrue to the economy due to their contribution to the standard. Considered individually and as a whole, these negative factors discourage innovators from participating in standardization, to the detriment of standards quality. Lower-quality standards translate into inferior standardized produces and processes and reduced innovation.

Recognizing this problem, in 2018 DOJ, Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Makan Delrahim announced a “New Madison Approach” (NMA) to SEP licensing, which recognized:

  1. antitrust remedies are inappropriate for patent-licensing disputes between SEP-holders and implementers of a standard;
  2. SSOs should not allow collective actions by standard-implementers to disfavor patent holders;
  3. SSOs and courts should be hesitant to restrict SEP holders’ right to exclude implementers from access to their patents by seeking injunctions; and
  4. unilateral and unconditional decisions not to license a patent should be per se legal. (See, for example, here and here.)

Acceptance of the NMA would have counter-acted the economically harmful degradation of SEPs stemming from prior government policies.

Regrettably, antitrust-enforcement-agency statements during the last year effectively have rejected the NMA. Most recently, in December 2021, the DOJ issued for public comment a Draft Policy Statement on Licensing Negotiations and Remedies, SEPs, which displaces a 2019 statement that had been in line with the NMA. Unless the FTC and Biden DOJ rethink their new position and decide instead to support the NMA, the anti-innovation approach to SEPs will once again prevail, with unfortunate consequences for American innovation.

The “weaker patents” implications of the draft policy statement would also prove detrimental to national security, as explained in a comment on the statement by a group of leading law, economics, and business scholars (including Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith) convened by the International Center for Law & Economics:

China routinely undermines U.S. intellectual property protections through its industrial policy. The government’s stated goal is to promote “fair and reasonable” international rules, but it is clear that China stretches its power over intellectual property around the world by granting “anti-suit injunctions” on behalf of Chinese smartphone makers, designed to curtail enforcement of foreign companies’ patent rights. …

Insufficient protections for intellectual property will hasten China’s objective of dominating collaborative standard development in the medium to long term. Simultaneously, this will engender a switch to greater reliance on proprietary, closed standards rather than collaborative, open standards. These harmful consequences are magnified in the context of the global technology landscape, and in light of China’s strategic effort to shape international technology standards. Chinese companies, directed by their government authorities, will gain significant control of the technologies that will underpin tomorrow’s digital goods and services.

A Center for Security and International Studies submission on the draft policy statement (signed by a former deputy secretary of the DOD, as well as former directors of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the National Institute of Standards and Technology) also raised China-related national-security concerns:

[T]he largest short-term and long-term beneficiaries of the 2021 Draft Policy Statement are firms based in China. Currently, China is the world’s largest consumer of SEP-based technology, so weakening protection of American owned patents directly benefits Chinese manufacturers. The unintended effect of the 2021 Draft Policy Statement will be to support Chinese efforts to dominate critical technology standards and other advanced technologies, such as 5G. Put simply, devaluing U.S. patents is akin to a subsidized tech transfer to China.

Furthermore, in a more general vein, leading innovation economist David Teece also noted the negative national-security implications in his submission on the draft policy statement:

The US government, in reviewing competition policy issues that might impact standards, therefore needs to be aware that the issues at hand have tremendous geopolitical consequences and cannot be looked at in isolation. … Success in this regard will promote competition and is our best chance to maintain technological leadership—and, along with it, long-term economic growth and consumer welfare and national security.

That’s not all. In its public comment warning against precipitous finalization of the draft policy statement, the Innovation Alliance noted that, in recent years, major foreign jurisdictions have rejected the notion that SEP holders should be deprived the opportunity to seek injunctions. The Innovation Alliance opined in detail on the China national-security issues (footnotes omitted):

[T]he proposed shift in policy will undermine the confidence and clarity necessary to incentivize investments in important and risky research and development while simultaneously giving foreign competitors who do not rely on patents to drive investment in key technologies, like China, a distinct advantage. …

The draft policy statement … would devalue SEPs, and undermine the ability of U.S. firms to invest in the research and development needed to maintain global leadership in 5G and other critical technologies.

Without robust American investments, China—which has clear aspirations to control and lead in critical standards and technologies that are essential to our national security—will be left without any competition. Since 2015, President Xi has declared “whoever controls the standards controls the world.” China has rolled out the “China Standards 2035” plan and has outspent the United States by approximately $24 billion in wireless communications infrastructure, while China’s five-year economic plan calls for $400 billion in 5G-related investment.

Simply put, the draft policy statement will give an edge to China in the standards race because, without injunctions, American companies will lose the incentive to invest in the research and development needed to lead in standards setting. Chinese companies, on the other hand, will continue to race forward, funded primarily not by license fees, but by the focused investment of the Chinese government. …

Public hearings are necessary to take into full account the uncertainty of issuing yet another policy on this subject in such a short time period.

A key part of those hearings and further discussions must be the national security implications of a further shift in patent enforceability policy. Our future safety depends on continued U.S. leadership in areas like 5G and artificial intelligence. Policies that undermine the enforceability of patent rights disincentivize the substantial private sector investment necessary for research and development in these areas. Without that investment, development of these key technologies will begin elsewhere—likely China. Before any policy is accepted, key national-security stakeholders in the U.S. government should be asked for their official input.

These are not the only comments that raised the negative national-security ramifications of the draft policy statement (see here and here). For example, current Republican and Democratic senators, prior International Trade Commissioners, and former top DOJ and FTC officials also noted concerns. What’s more, the Patent Protection Society of China, which represents leading Chinese corporate implementers, filed a rather nonanalytic submission in favor of the draft statement. As one leading patent-licensing lawyer explains: “UC Berkley Law Professor Mark Cohen, whose distinguished government service includes serving as the USPTO representative in China, submitted a thoughtful comment explaining how the draft Policy Statement plays into China’s industrial and strategic interests.”

Finally, by weakening patent protection, the draft policy statement is at odds with  the 2021 National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence Report, which called for the United States to “[d]evelop and implement national IP policies to incentivize, expand, and protect emerging technologies[,]” in response to Chinese “leveraging and exploiting intellectual property (IP) policies as a critical tool within its national strategies for emerging technologies.”

In sum, adoption of the draft policy statement would raise antitrust risks, weaken key property rights protections for SEPs, and undercut U.S. technological innovation efforts vis-à-vis China, thereby undermining U.S. national security.

FTC v. Qualcomm: Misguided enforcement and national security

U.S. national-security interests have been threatened by more than just the recent SEP policy pronouncements. In filing a January 2017 antitrust suit (at the very end of the Obama administration) against Qualcomm’s patent-licensing practices, the FTC (by a partisan 2-1 vote) ignored the economic efficiencies that underpinned this highly successful American technology company’s practices. Had the suit succeeded, U.S. innovation in a critically important technology area would have needlessly suffered, with China as a major beneficiary. A recent Federalist Society Regulatory Transparency Project report on the New Madison Approach underscored the broad policy implications of FTC V. Qualcomm (citations deleted):

The FTC’s Qualcomm complaint reflected the anti-SEP bias present during the Obama administration. If it had been successful, the FTC’s prosecution would have seriously undermined the freedom of the company to engage in efficient licensing of its SEPs.

Qualcomm is perhaps the world’s leading wireless technology innovator. It has developed, patented, and licensed key technologies that power smartphones and other wireless devices, and continues to do so. Many of Qualcomm’s key patents are SEPs subject to FRAND, directed to communications standards adopted by wireless devices makers. Qualcomm also makes computer processors and chips embodied in cutting edge wireless devices. Thanks in large part to Qualcomm technology, those devices have improved dramatically over the last decade, offering consumers a vast array of new services at a lower and lower price, when quality is factored in. Qualcomm thus is the epitome of a high tech American success story that has greatly benefited consumers.

Qualcomm: (1) sells its chips to “downstream” original equipment manufacturers (OEMs, such as Samsung and Apple), on the condition that the OEMs obtain licenses to Qualcomm SEPs; and (2) refuses to license its FRAND-encumbered SEPs to rival chip makers, while allowing those rivals to create and sell chips embodying Qualcomm SEP technologies to those OEMS that have entered a licensing agreement with Qualcomm.

The FTC’s 2017 antitrust complaint, filed in federal district court in San Francisco, charged that Qualcomm’s “no license, no chips” policy allegedly “forced” OEM cell phone manufacturers to pay elevated royalties on products that use a competitor’s baseband processors. The FTC deemed this an illegal “anticompetitive tax” on the use of rivals’ processors, since phone manufacturers “could not run the risk” of declining licenses and thus losing all access to Qualcomm’s processors (which would be needed to sell phones on important cellular networks). The FTC also argued that Qualcomm’s refusal to license its rivals despite its SEP FRAND commitment violated the antitrust laws. Finally, the FTC asserted that a 2011-2016 Qualcomm exclusive dealing contract with Apple (in exchange for reduced patent royalties) had excluded business opportunities for Qualcomm competitors.

The federal district court held for the FTC. It ordered that Qualcomm end these supposedly anticompetitive practices and renegotiate its many contracts. [Among the beneficiaries of new pro-implementer contract terms would have been a leading Chinese licensee of Qualcomm’s, Huawei, the huge Chinese telecommunications company that has been accused by the U.S. government of using technological “back doors” to spy on the United States.]

Qualcomm appealed, and in August 2020 a panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the district court, holding for Qualcomm. Some of the key points underlying this holding were: (1) Qualcomm had no antitrust duty to deal with competitors, consistent with established Supreme Court precedent (a very narrow exception to this precedent did not apply); (2) Qualcomm’s rates were chip supplier neutral because all OEMs paid royalties, not just rivals’ customers; (3) the lower court failed to show how the “no license, no chips” policy harmed Qualcomm’s competitors; and (4) Qualcomm’s agreements with Apple did not have the effect of substantially foreclosing the market to competitors. The Ninth Circuit as a whole rejected the FTC’s “en banc” appeal for review of the panel decision.

The appellate decision in Qualcomm largely supports pillar four of the NMA, that unilateral and unconditional decisions not to license a patent should be deemed legal under the antitrust laws. More generally, the decision evinces a refusal to find anticompetitive harm in licensing markets without hard empirical support. The FTC and the lower court’s findings of “harm” had been essentially speculative and anecdotal at best. They had ignored the “big picture” that the markets in which Qualcomm operates had seen vigorous competition and the conferral of enormous and growing welfare benefits on consumers, year-by-year. The lower court and the FTC had also turned a deaf ear to a legitimate efficiency-related business rationale that explained Qualcomm’s “no license, no chips” policy – a fully justifiable desire to obtain a fair return on Qualcomm’s patented technology.

Qualcomm is well reasoned, and in line with sound modern antitrust precedent, but it is only one holding. The extent to which this case’s reasoning proves influential in other courts may in part depend on the policies advanced by DOJ and the FTC going forward. Thus, a preliminary examination of the Biden administration’s emerging patent-antitrust policy is warranted. [Subsequent discussion shows that the Biden administration apparently has rejected pro-consumer policies embodied in the 9th U.S. Circuit’s Qualcomm decision and in the NMA.]

Although the 9th Circuit did not comment on them, national-security-policy concerns weighed powerfully against the FTC v. Qualcomm suit. In a July 2019 Statement of Interest (SOI) filed with the circuit court, DOJ cogently set forth the antitrust flaws in the district court’s decision favoring the FTC. Furthermore, the SOI also explained that “the public interest” favored a stay of the district court holding, due to national-security concerns (described in some detail in statements by the departments of Defense and Energy, appended to the SOI):

[T]he public interest also takes account of national security concerns. Winter v. NRDC, 555 U.S. 7, 23-24 (2008). This case presents such concerns. In the view of the Executive Branch, diminishment of Qualcomm’s competitiveness in 5G innovation and standard-setting would significantly impact U.S. national security. A251-54 (CFIUS); LD ¶¶10-16 (Department of Defense); ED ¶¶9-10 (Department of Energy). Qualcomm is a trusted supplier of mission-critical products and services to the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy. LD ¶¶5-8; ED ¶¶8-9. Accordingly, the Department of Defense “is seriously concerned that any detrimental impact on Qualcomm’s position as global leader would adversely affect its ability to support national security.” LD ¶16.

The [district] court’s remedy [requiring the renegotiation of Qualcomm’s licensing contracts] is intended to deprive, and risks depriving, Qualcomm of substantial licensing revenue that could otherwise fund time-sensitive R&D and that Qualcomm cannot recover later if it prevails. See, e.g., Op. 227-28. To be sure, if Qualcomm ultimately prevails, vacatur of the injunction will limit the severity of Qualcomm’s revenue loss and the consequent impairment of its ability to perform functions critical to national security. The Department of Defense “firmly believes,” however, “that any measure that inappropriately limits Qualcomm’s technological leadership, ability to invest in [R&D], and market competitiveness, even in the short term, could harm national security. The risks to national security include the disruption of [the Department’s] supply chain and unsure U.S. leadership in 5G.” LD ¶3. Consequently, the public interest necessitates a stay pending this Court’s resolution of the merits. In these rare circumstances, the interest in preventing even a risk to national security—“an urgent objective of the highest order”—presents reason enough not to enforce the remedy immediately. Int’l Refugee Assistance Project, 137 S. Ct. at 2088 (internal quotations omitted).

Not all national-security arguments against antitrust enforcement may be well-grounded, of course. The key point is that the interests of national security and consumer-welfare-centric antitrust are fully aligned when antitrust suits would inefficiently undermine the competitive vigor of a firm or firms that play a major role in supporting U.S. national-security interests. Such was the case in FTC v. Qualcomm. More generally, heightened antitrust scrutiny of efficient patent-licensing practices (as threatened by the Biden administration) would tend to diminish innovation by U.S. patentees, particularly in areas covered by standards that are key to leading global technologies. Such a diminution in innovation will tend to weaken American advantages in important industry sectors that are vital to U.S. national-security interests.

Proposed Federal Antitrust Legislation

Proposed federal antitrust legislation being considered by Congress (see here, here, and here for informed critiques) would prescriptively restrict certain large technology companies’ business transactions. If enacted, such legislation would thereby preclude case-specific analysis of potential transaction-specific efficiencies, thereby undermining the consumer welfare standard at the heart of current sound and principled antitrust enforcement. The legislation would also be at odds with our national-security interests, as a recent U.S. Chamber of Commerce paper explains:

Congress is considering new antitrust legislation which, perversely, would weaken leading U.S. technology companies by crafting special purpose regulations under the guise of antitrust to prohibit those firms from engaging in business conduct that is widely acceptable when engaged in by rival competitors.

A series of legislative proposals – some of which already have been approved by relevant Congressional committees – would, among other things: dismantle these companies; prohibit them from engaging in significant new acquisitions or investments; require them to disclose sensitive user data and sensitive IP and trade secrets to competitors, including those that are foreign-owned and controlled; facilitate foreign influence in the United States; and compromise cybersecurity.  These bills would fundamentally undermine American security interests while exempting from scrutiny Chinese and other foreign firms that do not meet arbitrary user and market capitalization thresholds specified in the legislation. …

The United States has never used legislation to punish success. In many industries, scale is important and has resulted in significant gains for the American economy, including small businesses.  U.S. competition law promotes the interests of consumers, not competitors. It should not be used to pick winners and losers in the market or to manage competitive outcomes to benefit select competitors.  Aggressive competition benefits consumers and society, for example by pushing down prices, disrupting existing business models, and introducing innovative products and services.

If enacted, the legislative proposals would drag the United States down in an unfolding global technological competition.  Companies captured by the legislation would be required to compete against integrated foreign rivals with one hand tied behind their backs.  Those firms that are the strongest drivers of U.S. innovation in AI, quantum computing, and other strategic technologies would be hamstrung or even broken apart, while foreign and state-backed producers of these same technologies would remain unscathed and seize the opportunity to increase market share, both in the U.S. and globally. …

Instead of warping antitrust law to punish a discrete group of American companies, the U.S. government should focus instead on vigorous enforcement of current law and on vocally opposing and effectively countering foreign regimes that deploy competition law and other legal and regulatory methods as industrial policy tools to unfairly target U.S. companies.  The U.S. should avoid self-inflicted wounds to our competitiveness and national security that would result from turning antitrust into a weapon against dynamic and successful U.S. firms.      

Consistent with this analysis, former Obama administration Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and former Trump administration Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats argued in a letter to U.S. House leadership (see here) that “imposing severe restrictions solely on U.S. giants will pave the way for a tech landscape dominated by China — echoing a position voiced by the Big Tech companies themselves.”

The national-security arguments against current antitrust legislative proposals, like the critiques of the unfounded FTC v. Qualcomm case, represent an alignment between sound antitrust policy and national-security analysis. Unfounded antitrust attacks on efficient business practices by large firms that help maintain U.S. technological leadership in key areas undermine both principled antitrust and national security.

Conclusion

Enlightened antitrust enforcement, centered on consumer welfare, can and should be read in a manner that is harmonious with national-security interests.

The cooperation between U.S. federal antitrust enforcers and the DOD in assessing defense-industry mergers and joint ventures is, generally speaking, an example of successful harmonization. This success reflects the fact that antitrust enforcers carry out their reviews of those transactions with an eye toward accommodating efficiencies that advance defense goals without sacrificing consumer welfare. Close antitrust-agency consultation with DOD is key to that approach.

Unfortunately, federal enforcement directed toward efficient intellectual-property licensing, as manifested in the Qualcomm case, reflects a disharmony between antitrust and national security. This disharmony could be eliminated if DOJ and the FTC adopted a dynamic view of intellectual property and the substantial economic-welfare benefits that flow from restrictive patent-licensing transactions.

In sum, a dynamic analysis reveals that consumer welfare is enhanced, not harmed, by not subjecting such licensing arrangements to antitrust threat. A more permissive approach to licensing is thus consistent with principled antitrust and with the national security interest of protecting and promoting strong American intellectual property (and, in particular, patent) protection. The DOJ and the FTC should keep this in mind and make appropriate changes to their IP-antitrust policies forthwith.

Finally, proposed federal antitrust legislation would bring about statutory changes that would simultaneously displace consumer welfare considerations and undercut national security interests. As such, national security is supported by rejecting unsound legislation, in order to keep in place consumer-welfare-based antitrust enforcement.

In Antitrust & Competition, Cartels, China, Federal Trade Commission, Intellectual Property, International, Justice Department, Merger Guidelines, Mergers & Acquisitions, Patent, Truth on the Market , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Political Philosophy, Competition, and Competition Law: The Road to and from Neoliberalism, Part 2

Lazar Radic —  3 February 2022

This post is the second in a three-part series. The first installment can be found here and the third can be found here.

In just over a century since its dawn, liberalism had reshaped much of the world along the lines of individualism, free markets, private property, contract, trade, and competition. A modest laissez-faire political philosophy that had begun to germinate in the minds of French Physiocrats in the early 18th century had, scarcely 150 years later, inspired the constitution of the world’s nascent leading power, the United States. But it wasn’t all plain sailing, as liberalism’s expansion eventually galvanized strong social, political, cultural, economic and even spiritual opposition, which coalesced around two main ideologies: socialism and fascism.

In this post, I explore the collectivist backlash against liberalism, its deeper meaning from the perspective of political philosophy, and the main features of its two main antagonists—especially as they relate to competition and competition regulation. Ultimately, the purpose is to show that, in trying to respond to the collectivist threat, successive iterations of neoliberalism integrated some of collectivism’s key postulates in an attempt to create a synthesis between opposing philosophical currents. Yet this “mostly” liberal synthesis, which serves as the philosophical basis of many competition systems today, is afflicted with the same collectivist flaws that the synthesis purported to overthrow (as I will elaborate in subsequent posts).

The Collectivist Backlash

By the early 20th century, two deeply illiberal movements bent on exposing and demolishing the fallacies and contradictions of liberalism had succeeded in capturing the imagination and support of the masses. These collectivist ideologies were Marxian socialism/communism on the left and fascism/Nazism on the right. Although ultimately distinct, they both rejected the basic postulates of classical liberalism. 

Socially, both agreed that liberalism uprooted traditional ways of life and dissolved the bonds of solidarity that had hitherto governed social relationships. This is the view expressed, e.g., in Karl Polanyi’s influential book The Great Transformation, in which the Christian socialist Polanyi contends that “disembedded” liberal markets would inevitably come to be governed again by the principles of solidarity and reciprocity (under socialism/communism). Similarly, although not technically a work on political economy or philosophy, Knut Hamsun’s 1917 novel Growth of the Soil perfectly captures the right’s rejection of liberal progress, materialism, industrialization, and the idealization of traditional bucolic life. The Norwegian Hamsun, winner of the 1920 Nobel Prize in Literature, later became an enthusiastic supporter of the Third Reich. 

Politically and culturally, Marxist historical materialism posited that liberal democracy (individual freedoms, periodic elections, etc.) and liberal culture (literature, art, cinema) served the interests of the economically dominant class: the bourgeoisie, i.e., the owners of the means of production. Fascists and Nazis likewise deplored liberal democracy as a sign of decadence and weakness and viewed liberal culture as an oxymoron: a hotbed of degeneracy built on the dilution of national and racial identities. 

Economically, the more theoretically robust leftist critiques rallied around Marx’ scientific socialism, which held that capitalism—the economic system that served as the embodiment of a liberal social order built on private property, contract, and competition—was exploitative and doomed to consume itself. From the right, it was argued that liberalism enabled individual interest to override what was good for the collective—an unpardonable sin in the eyes of an ideology built around robust nodes of collectivist identity, such as nation, race, and history.

A Recurrent Civilizational Struggle

The rise of socialism and fascism marked the beginning of a civilizational shift that many have referred to as the lowest ebb of liberalism. By the 1930s, totalitarian regimes utterly incompatible with a liberal worldview were in place in several European countries, such as Italy, Russia, Germany, Portugal, Spain, and Romania. As Austrian economist Ludwig Von Mises lamented, liberals and liberal ideas—at least, in the classical sense—had been driven to the fringes of society and academia, subject of scorn and ridicule. Even the liberally oriented, like economist John Maynard Keynes, were declaring the “end of laissez-faire.” 

At its most basic level, I believe that the conflict can be understood, from a philosophical perspective, as an iteration of the recurrent struggle between individualism and collectivism.

For instance, the German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies has described the perennial tension between two elementary ways of conceiving the social order: Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft. Gesellschaft refers to societies made up of individuals held together by formal bonds, such as contracts, whereas Gemeinschaft refers to communities held together by organic bonds, such as kinship, which function together as parts of an integrated whole. American law professor David Gerber explains that, from the Gemeinschaft perspective, competition was seen as an enemy:

Gemeinschaft required co-operation and the accommodation of individual interests to the commonwealth, but competition, in contrast, demanded that individuals be concerned first and foremost with their own self-interest. From this communitarian perspective, competition looked suspiciously like exploitation. The combined effect of competition and of political and economic inequality was that the strong would get stronger, the weak would get weaker, and the strong would use their strength to take from the weak.

Tonnies himself thought that dominant liberal notions of Gesellschaft would inevitably give way to greater integration of a socialist Gemeinschaft. This was somewhat reminiscent of Polanyi’s distinction between embedded and disembedded markets; Karl Popper’s “open” and “closed” societies; and possibly, albeit somewhat more remotely, David Hume’s distinction between “concord” and “union.” While we should be wary of reductivism, a common theme underlying these works (at least two of which are not liberal) is the conflict between opposing views of society: one that posits the subordination of the individual to some larger community or group versus another that anoints the individual’s well-being as the ultimate measure of the value of social arrangements. That basic tension, in turn, reverberates across social and economic questions, including as they relate to markets, competition, and the functions of the state.

 Competition Under Marxism

Karl Marx argued that the course of history was determined by material relations among the social classes under any given system of production (historical materialism and dialectical materialism, respectively). Under that view, communism was not a desirable “state of affairs,” but the inevitable consequence of social forces as they then existed. As Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto:

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

Thus, following the ineluctable laws of history, which Marx claimed to have discovered, capitalism would inevitably come to be replaced by socialism and, subsequently, communism. Under socialism, the means of production would be controlled not by individuals interacting in a free market, but by the political process under the aegis of the state, with the corollary that planning would come to substitute for competition as the economy’s steering mechanism. This would then give way to communism: a stateless utopia in which everything would be owned by the community and where there would be no class divisions. This would come about as a result of the interplay of several factors inherent to capitalism, such as the exploitation of the working class and the impossibility of sustained competition.

Per Marx, under capitalism, owners of the means of production (i.e., the capitalists or the bourgeoisie) appropriate the surplus value (i.e., the difference between the sale price of a product and the cost to produce it) generated by workers. Thus, the lower the wages and the longer the working hours of the worker, the greater the profit accrued to the capitalist. This was not an unfortunate byproduct that could be reformed, Marx posited, but a central feature of the system that was solvable only through revolution. Moreover, the laws, culture, media, politics, faith, and other institutions that might ordinarily open alternative avenues to nonviolent resolution of class tensions (the “super-structure”) were themselves byproducts of the underlying material relations of production (“structure” or “base”), and thus served to justify and uphold them.

The Marxian position further held that competition—the lodestar and governing principle of the capitalist economy—was, like the system itself, unsustainable. It would inevitably end up cannibalizing itself. But the claim is a bit more subtle than critics of communism often assume. As Leon Trotsky wrote in the 1939 pamphlet Marxism in our time:

Relations between capitalists, who exploit the workers, are defined by competition, which for long endures as the mainspring of capitalist progress.

Two notions expressed seamlessly in Trotsky’s statement need to be understood about the Marxian perception of competition. The first is that, since capitalism is exploitative of workers and competition among capitalists is the engine of capitalism, competition is itself effectively a mechanism of exploitation. Capitalists compete through the cheapening of commodities and the subsequent reinvestment of the surplus appropriated from labor into the expansion of productivity. The most exploitative capitalist, therefore, generally has the advantage (this hinges, of course, largely on the validity of the labor theory of value).

At the same time, however, Marxists (including Marx himself) recognized the economic and technological progress brought about through capitalism and competition. This is what Trotsky means when he refers to competition as the “mainspring of capitalist progress” and, by extension, the “historical justification of the capitalist.” The implication is that, if competition were to cease, the entire capitalist edifice and the political philosophy undergirding it (liberalism) would crumble, as well.

Whereas liberalism and competition were intertwined, liberalism and monopoly could not coexist. Instead, monopolists demanded—and, due to their political clout, were able to obtain—an increasingly powerful central state capable of imposing protective tariffs and other measures for their benefit and protection. Trotsky again:

The elimination of competition by monopoly marks the beginning of the disintegration of capitalist society. Competition was the creative mainspring of capitalism and the historical justification of the capitalist. By the same token the elimination of competition marks the transformation of stockholders into social parasites. Competition had to have certain liberties, a liberal atmosphere, a regime of democracy, of commercial cosmopolitanism. Monopoly needs as authoritative government as possible, tariff walls, “its own” sources of raw materials and arenas of marketing (colonies). The last word in the disintegration of monopolistic capital is fascism.

Marxian theory posited that this outcome was destined to happen for two reasons. First, because:

The battle of competition is fought by cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities depends, ceteris paribus, on the productiveness of labor, and this again on the scale of production. Therefore, the larger capital beats the smaller.

In other words, competition stimulated the progressive development of productivity, which depended on the scale of production, which depended, in turn, on firm size. Ultimately, therefore, competition ended up producing a handful of large companies that would subjugate competitors and cannibalize competition. Thus, the more wealth that capitalism generated—and Marx had no doubts that capitalism was a wealth-generating machine—the more it sowed the seeds of its own destruction. Hence:

While stimulating the progressive development of technique, competition gradually consumes, not only the intermediary layers but itself as well. Over the corpses and the semi-corpses of small and middling capitalists, emerges an ever-decreasing number of ever more powerful capitalist overlords. Thus, out of “honest”, “democratic”, “progressive” competition grows irrevocably “harmful”, “parasitic”, “reactionary” monopoly.

The second reason Marxists believed the downfall of capitalism was inevitable is that the capitalists squeezed out of the market by the competitive process would become proletarians, which would create a glut of labor (“a growing reserve army of the unemployed”), which would in turn depress wages. This process of proletarianization, combined with the “revolutionary combination by association” of workers in factories would raise class consciousness and ultimately lead to the toppling of capitalism and the ushering in of socialism.

Thus, there is a clear nexus in Marxian theory between the end of competition and the end of capitalism (and therefore liberalism), whereby monopoly is deduced from the inherent tendencies of capitalism, and the end of capitalism, in turn, is deduced from the ineluctable advent of monopoly. What follows (i.e., socialism and communism) are collectivist systems that purport to be run according to the principles of solidarity and cooperation (“from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”), where there is therefore no place (and no need) for competition. Instead, the Marxian Gemeinschaft would organize the economy around rationalistic lines, substituting cut-throat competition for centralized command by the state (later, the community) that would rein in hitherto uncontrollable economic forces in a heroic victory over the chaos and unpredictability of capitalism. This would, of course, also bring about the end of liberalism, with individualism, private property, and other liberal freedoms jettisoned as mouthpieces of bourgeoisie class interests. Chairman Mao Zedong put it succinctly:

We must affirm anew the discipline of the Party, namely:

1. The individual is subordinate to the organization;

2. The minority is subordinate to the majority.

Competition Under Fascism/Nazism

Formidable as it was, the Marxian attack on liberalism was just one side of the coin. Decades after the articulation of Marxian theory in the mid-19th century, fascism—founded by former socialist Benito Mussolini in 1915—emerged as a militant alternative to both liberalism and socialism/communism.

In essence, fascism was, like communism, unapologetically collectivist. But whereas socialists considered class to be the relevant building block of society, fascists viewed the individual as part of a greater national, racial, and historical entity embodied in the state and its leadership. As Mussolini wrote in his 1932 pamphlet The Doctrine of Fascism:

Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience of the universal, will of man as a historic entity. It is opposed to classical liberalism […] liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts.

Accordingly, fascism leads to an amalgamation of state and individual that is not just a politico-economic arrangement where the latter formally submits to the former, but a conception of life. This worldview is, of course, diametrically opposed to core liberal principles, such as personal freedom, individualism, and the minimal state. And surely enough, fascists saw these liberal values as signs of civilizational decadence (as expressed most notably by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West—a book that greatly inspired Nazi ideology). Instead, they posited that the only freedom worthy of the name existed within the state; that peace and cosmopolitanism were illusory; and that man was man only by virtue of his membership and contribution to nation and race.

But fascism was also opposed to Marxian socialism. At its most basic, the schism between the two worldviews can be understood in terms of the fascist rejection of materialism, which was a centerpiece of Marxian thought. Fascists denied the equivalence of material well-being and happiness, instead viewing man as fulfilled by hardship, war, and by playing his part in the grand tapestry of history, whose real protagonists were nation-states. While admitting the importance of economic life—e.g., of efficiency and technological innovation—fascists denied that material relations unequivocally determined the course of history, insisting instead on the preponderance of spiritual and heroic acts (i.e., acts with no economic motive) as drivers of social change. “Sanctity and heroism,” Mussolini wrote, are at the root of the fascist belief system, not material self-interest.  

This belief system also extended to economic matters, including competition. The Third Reich respected private property rights to some degree—among other reasons, because Adolf Hitler believed it would encourage creative competition and innovation. The Nazis’ overarching principle, however, was that all economic activity and all private property ultimately be subordinated to the “common good,” as interpreted by the state. In the words of Hitler:

I want everyone to keep what he has earned subject to the principle that the good of the community takes priority over that of the individual. But the State should retain control; every owner should feel himself to be an agent of the State. […] The Third Reich will always retain the right to control property owners.

The solution was a totalitarian system of government control that maintained private enterprise and profit incentives as spurs to efficient management, but narrowly circumscribed the traditional freedom of entrepreneurs. Economic historians Christoph Buchheim and Jonas Scherner have characterized the Nazis’ economic system as a “state-directed private ownership economy,” a partnership in which the state was the principal and the business was the agent. Economic activity would be judged according to the criteria of “strategic necessity and social utility,” encompassing an array of social, political, practical, and ideological goals. Some have referred to this as the “primacy of politics over economics” approach.

For instance, in supervising cross-border acquisitions (today’s mergers), the state “sought to suppress purely economic motives and to substitute some rough notion of ‘racial political’ priority when supervising industrial acquisitions or controlling existing German subsidiaries.” The Reich selectively applied the 1933 Act for the Formation of Compulsory Cartels in regulating cartels that had been formed under the Weimar Republic with the Cartel Act of 1923. But the legislation also appears to have been applied to protect small and medium-sized enterprises, an important source of the party’s political support, from ruinous competition. This is reminiscent of German industrialist and Nazi supporter Gustav Krupp’s “Third Form”: 

Between “free” economy and state capitalism there is a third form: the economy that is free from obligations, but has a sense of inner duty to the state. 

In short, competition and individual achievement had to be balanced with cooperation, mediated by the self-appointed guardians of the “general interest.” In contrast with Marxian socialism/communism, the long-term goal of the Nazi regime was not to abolish competition, but to harness it to serve the aims of the regime. As Franz Böhm—cofounder, with Walter Eucken, of the Freiburg School and its theory of “ordoliberalism”—wrote in his advice to the Nazi government:

The state regulatory framework gives the Reich economic leadership the power to make administrative commands applying either the indirect or the direct steering competence according to need, functionality, and political intent. The leadership may go as far as it wishes in this regard, for example, by suspending competition-based economic steering and returning to it when appropriate. 

Conclusion

After a century of expansion, opposition to classical liberalism started to coalesce around two nodes: Marxism on the left, and fascism/Nazism on the right. What ensued was a civilizational crisis of material, social, and spiritual proportions that, at its most basic level, can be understood as an iteration of the perennial struggle between individualism and collectivism. On the one hand, liberals like J.S. Mill had argued forcefully that “the only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way.” In stark contrast, Mussolini wrote that “fascism stands for liberty, and for the only liberty worth having, the liberty of the state and of the individual within the state.” The former position is rooted in a humanist view that enshrines the individual at the center of the social order; the latter in a communitarian ideal that sees him as subordinate to forces that supersede him.

As I have explained in the previous post, the philosophical undercurrents of both positions are ancient. A more immediate precursor of the collectivist standpoint, however, can be found in German idealism and particularly in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In The Philosophy of Right, he wrote:

A single person, I need hardly say, is something subordinate, and as such he must dedicate himself to the ethical whole. Hence, if the state claims life, the individual must surrender it. All the worth which the human being possesses […] he possesses only through the state.

This broader clash is reflected, directly and indirectly, in notions of competition and competition regulation. Classical liberals sought to liberate competition from regulatory fetters. Marxism “predicted” its downfall and envisioned a social order without it. Fascism/Nazism sought to wrest it from the hands of greedy self-interest and mold it to serve the many and the fluctuating objectives of the state and its vision of the common good. 

In the next post, I will discuss how this has influenced the neoliberal philosophy that is still at the heart of many competition systems today. I will argue that two strands of neoliberalism emerged, which each attempted to resolve the challenge of collectivism in distinct ways. 

One strand, associated with a continental understanding of liberalism and epitomized by the Freiburg School, sought to strike a “mostly liberal” compromise between liberalism and collectivism—a “Third Way” between opposites. In doing so, however, it may have indulged in some of the same collectivist vices that it initially sought to avoid— such as vast government discretion and the imposition of myriad “higher” goals on society. 

The other strand, represented by Anglo-American liberalism of the sort espoused by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, was less conciliatory. It attempted to reform, rather than reinvent, liberalism. Their prescriptions involved creating a strong legal framework conducive to economic efficiency against a background of limited government discretion, freedom, and the rule of law.

In Antitrust & Competition, Cartels, Constitutional Law, International, Monopolization, Truth on the Market , , , , , , ,
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Crusade Against ‘Big Meat’ Is Latest Example of Misguided Effort to Use Antitrust as Anti-Inflation Tool

Alden Abbott —  5 January 2022

As a new year dawns, the Biden administration remains fixated on illogical, counterproductive “big is bad” nostrums.

Noted economist and former Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers correctly stressed recently that using antitrust to fight inflation represents “science denial,” tweeting that:

In his extended Twitter thread, Summers notes that labor shortages are the primary cause of inflation over time and that lowering tariffs, paring back import restrictions (such as the Buy America Act), and reducing regulatory delays are vital to combat inflation.

Summers’ points, of course, are right on the mark. Indeed, labor shortages, supply-chain issues, and a dramatic increase in regulatory burdens have been key to the dramatic run-up of prices during the Biden administration’s first year. Reducing the weight of government on the private sector and thereby enhancing incentives for increased investment, labor participation, and supply are the appropriate weapons to slow price rises and incentivize economic growth.

More specifically, administration policies can be pinpointed as the cause, not the potential solution to, rapid price increases in specific sectors, particularly the oil and gas industry. As I recently commented, policies that disincentivize new energy production, and fail to lift excessive regulatory burdens, have been a key factor in sparking rises in gasoline prices. Administration claims that anticompetitive activity is behind these prices increases should be discounted. New Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigations of oil and gas companies would waste resources and increase already large governmental burdens on those firms.

The administration, nevertheless, appears committed to using antitrust as an anti-inflationary “tool” against “big business” (or perhaps, really, as a symbolic hammer to shift blame to the private sector for rising prices). Recent  pronouncements about combatting “big meat” are a case in point.

The New ‘Big Meat’ Crusade

Part of the administration’s crusade against “big meat” involves providing direct government financial support for favored firms. A U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) plan to spend up to $1 billion to assist smaller meat processors is a subsidy that artificially favors one group of competitors. This misguided policy, which bears the scent of special-interest favoritism, wastes taxpayer dollars and distorts free-market outcomes. It will do nothing to cure supply and regulatory problems that affect rising meat prices. It will, however, misallocate resources.

The other key aspect of the big meat initiative smacks more of problematic, old-style, economics-free antitrust. It centers on: (1) threatening possible antitrust actions against four large meat processors based principally on their size and market share; and (2) initiating a planned rulemaking under the Packers and Stockyards Act. (That rulemaking was foreshadowed by language in the July 2021 Biden Administration Executive Order on Competition.)

The administration’s apparent focus on the “dominance” of four large meatpacking firms (which have the temerity to collectively hold greater than 50% market shares in the hog, cattle, and chicken sectors) and the 120% jump in their gross profits since the pandemic began is troubling. It echoes the structuralist “big is bad” philosophy of the 1950s and 1960s. In and of itself, large market share is not, of course, an antitrust problem, nor are large gross profits. Rather, those metrics typically signal a particular firm’s superior efficiency relative to the competition. (Gross profit “reflects the efficiency of a business in terms of making use of its labor, raw material and other supplies.”) Antitrust investigations of firms merely because they are large would inefficiently bloat those companies’ costs and discourage them from engaging in cost-reducing new capacity and production improvements. This would tend to raise, not lower, prices by major firms. It thus would lower consumer welfare, a result at odds with the guiding policy goal of antitrust, which is to promote consumer welfare.

The administration’s announcement that the USDA “will also propose rules this year to strengthen enforcement of the Packers and Stockyards Act” is troublesome. That act, dating back to 1921, uses broad terms that extend beyond antitrust law (such as a prohibition on “giv[ing] any undue or unreasonable preference or advantage to any particular person”) and threatens to penalize efficient conduct by individual competitors. “Ratcheting up” enforcement under this act also could undermine business efficiency and paradoxically raise, not lower, prices.

Obviously, the specifics of the forthcoming proposed rules have not yet been revealed. Nevertheless, the administration’s “big is bad” approach to “big meat” strongly signals that one may expect rules to generate new costly and inefficient restrictions on meat-packer conduct. Such restrictions, of course, would be at odds with vibrant competition and consumer-welfare enhancement.    

This is not to say, of course, that meat packing should be immune from antitrust attention. Such scrutiny, however, should not be transfixed by “big is bad” concerns. Rather, it should center on the core antitrust goal of combatting harmful business conduct that unreasonably restrains competition and reduces consumer welfare. A focus on ferreting out collusive agreements among meat processors, such as price-fixing schemes, should have pride of place. The U.S. Justice Department’s already successful ongoing investigation into price fixing in the broiler-chicken industry is precisely the sort of antitrust initiative on which the administration should expend its scarce enforcement resources.

Conclusion

In sum, the Biden administration could do a lot of good in antitrust land if it would only set aside its nostalgic “big is bad” philosophy. It should return to the bipartisan enlightened understanding that antitrust is a consumer-welfare prescription that is based on sound and empirically based economics and is concerned with economically inefficient conduct that softens or destroys competition.

If it wants to stray beyond mere enforcement, the administration could turn its focus toward dismantling welfare-reducing anticompetitive federal regulatory schemes, rather than adding to private-sector regulatory burdens. For more about how to do this, we recommend that the administration consult a just-released Mercatus Center policy brief that Andrew Mercado and I co-authored.

In Antitrust & Competition, Cartels, Justice Department, Monopolization, Truth on the Market , , , , , ,
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How US and EU Competition Law Differ

Sam Bowman, Dirk Auer & Geoffrey Manne —  9 August 2021

[This post adapts elements of “Should ASEAN Antitrust Laws Emulate European Competition Policy?”, published in the Singapore Economic Review (2021). Open access working paper here.]

U.S. and European competition laws diverge in numerous ways that have important real-world effects. Understanding these differences is vital, particularly as lawmakers in the United States, and the rest of the world, consider adopting a more “European” approach to competition.

In broad terms, the European approach is more centralized and political. The European Commission’s Directorate General for Competition (DG Comp) has significant de facto discretion over how the law is enforced. This contrasts with the common law approach of the United States, in which courts elaborate upon open-ended statutes through an iterative process of case law. In other words, the European system was built from the top down, while U.S. antitrust relies on a bottom-up approach, derived from arguments made by litigants (including the government antitrust agencies) and defendants (usually businesses).

This procedural divergence has significant ramifications for substantive law. European competition law includes more provisions akin to de facto regulation. This is notably the case for the “abuse of dominance” standard, in which a “dominant” business can be prosecuted for “abusing” its position by charging high prices or refusing to deal with competitors. By contrast, the U.S. system places more emphasis on actual consumer outcomes, rather than the nature or “fairness” of an underlying practice.

The American system thus affords firms more leeway to exclude their rivals, so long as this entails superior benefits for consumers. This may make the U.S. system more hospitable to innovation, since there is no built-in regulation of conduct for innovators who acquire a successful market position fairly and through normal competition.

In this post, we discuss some key differences between the two systems—including in areas like predatory pricing and refusals to deal—as well as the discretionary power the European Commission enjoys under the European model.

Exploitative Abuses

U.S. antitrust is, by and large, unconcerned with companies charging what some might consider “excessive” prices. The late Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the Supreme Court majority in the 2003 case Verizon v. Trinko, observed that:

The mere possession of monopoly power, and the concomitant charging of monopoly prices, is not only not unlawful; it is an important element of the free-market system. The opportunity to charge monopoly prices—at least for a short period—is what attracts “business acumen” in the first place; it induces risk taking that produces innovation and economic growth.

This contrasts with European competition-law cases, where firms may be found to have infringed competition law because they charged excessive prices. As the European Court of Justice (ECJ) held in 1978’s United Brands case: “In this case charging a price which is excessive because it has no reasonable relation to the economic value of the product supplied would be such an abuse.”

While United Brands was the EU’s foundational case for excessive pricing, and the European Commission reiterated that these allegedly exploitative abuses were possible when it published its guidance paper on abuse of dominance cases in 2009, the commission had for some time demonstrated apparent disinterest in bringing such cases. In recent years, however, both the European Commission and some national authorities have shown renewed interest in excessive-pricing cases, most notably in the pharmaceutical sector.

European competition law also penalizes so-called “margin squeeze” abuses, in which a dominant upstream supplier charges a price to distributors that is too high for them to compete effectively with that same dominant firm downstream:

[I]t is for the referring court to examine, in essence, whether the pricing practice introduced by TeliaSonera is unfair in so far as it squeezes the margins of its competitors on the retail market for broadband connection services to end users. (Konkurrensverket v TeliaSonera Sverige, 2011)

As Scalia observed in Trinko, forcing firms to charge prices that are below a market’s natural equilibrium affects firms’ incentives to enter markets, notably with innovative products and more efficient means of production. But the problem is not just one of market entry and innovation.  Also relevant is the degree to which competition authorities are competent to determine the “right” prices or margins.

As Friedrich Hayek demonstrated in his influential 1945 essay The Use of Knowledge in Society, economic agents use information gleaned from prices to guide their business decisions. It is this distributed activity of thousands or millions of economic actors that enables markets to put resources to their most valuable uses, thereby leading to more efficient societies. By comparison, the efforts of central regulators to set prices and margins is necessarily inferior; there is simply no reasonable way for competition regulators to make such judgments in a consistent and reliable manner.

Given the substantial risk that investigations into purportedly excessive prices will deter market entry, such investigations should be circumscribed. But the court’s precedents, with their myopic focus on ex post prices, do not impose such constraints on the commission. The temptation to “correct” high prices—especially in the politically contentious pharmaceutical industry—may thus induce economically unjustified and ultimately deleterious intervention.

Predatory Pricing

A second important area of divergence concerns predatory-pricing cases. U.S. antitrust law subjects allegations of predatory pricing to two strict conditions:

  1. Monopolists must charge prices that are below some measure of their incremental costs; and
  2. There must be a realistic prospect that they will able to recoup these initial losses.

In laying out its approach to predatory pricing, the U.S. Supreme Court has identified the risk of false positives and the clear cost of such errors to consumers. It thus has particularly stressed the importance of the recoupment requirement. As the court found in 1993’s Brooke Group Ltd. v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., without recoupment, “predatory pricing produces lower aggregate prices in the market, and consumer welfare is enhanced.”

Accordingly, U.S. authorities must prove that there are constraints that prevent rival firms from entering the market after the predation scheme, or that the scheme itself would effectively foreclose rivals from entering the market in the first place. Otherwise, the predator would be undercut by competitors as soon as it attempts to recoup its losses by charging supra-competitive prices.

Without the strong likelihood that a monopolist will be able to recoup lost revenue from underpricing, the overwhelming weight of economic evidence (to say nothing of simple logic) is that predatory pricing is not a rational business strategy. Thus, apparent cases of predatory pricing are most likely not, in fact, predatory; deterring or punishing them would actually harm consumers.

By contrast, the EU employs a more expansive legal standard to define predatory pricing, and almost certainly risks injuring consumers as a result. Authorities must prove only that a company has charged a price below its average variable cost, in which case its behavior is presumed to be predatory. Even when a firm charges prices that are between its average variable and average total cost, it can be found guilty of predatory pricing if authorities show that its behavior was part of a plan to eliminate a competitor. Most significantly, in neither case is it necessary for authorities to show that the scheme would allow the monopolist to recoup its losses.

[I]t does not follow from the case‑law of the Court that proof of the possibility of recoupment of losses suffered by the application, by an undertaking in a dominant position, of prices lower than a certain level of costs constitutes a necessary precondition to establishing that such a pricing policy is abusive. (France Télécom v Commission, 2009).

This aspect of the legal standard has no basis in economic theory or evidence—not even in the “strategic” economic theory that arguably challenges the dominant Chicago School understanding of predatory pricing. Indeed, strategic predatory pricing still requires some form of recoupment, and the refutation of any convincing business justification offered in response. For example, ​​in a 2017 piece for the Antitrust Law Journal, Steven Salop lays out the “raising rivals’ costs” analysis of predation and notes that recoupment still occurs, just at the same time as predation:

[T]he anticompetitive conditional pricing practice does not involve discrete predatory and recoupment periods, as in the case of classical predatory pricing. Instead, the recoupment occurs simultaneously with the conduct. This is because the monopolist is able to maintain its current monopoly power through the exclusionary conduct.

The case of predatory pricing illustrates a crucial distinction between European and American competition law. The recoupment requirement embodied in American antitrust law serves to differentiate aggressive pricing behavior that improves consumer welfare—because it leads to overall price decreases—from predatory pricing that reduces welfare with higher prices. It is, in other words, entirely focused on the welfare of consumers.

The European approach, by contrast, reflects structuralist considerations far removed from a concern for consumer welfare. Its underlying fear is that dominant companies could use aggressive pricing to engender more concentrated markets. It is simply presumed that these more concentrated markets are invariably detrimental to consumers. Both the Tetra Pak and France Télécom cases offer clear illustrations of the ECJ’s reasoning on this point:

[I]t would not be appropriate, in the circumstances of the present case, to require in addition proof that Tetra Pak had a realistic chance of recouping its losses. It must be possible to penalize predatory pricing whenever there is a risk that competitors will be eliminated… The aim pursued, which is to maintain undistorted competition, rules out waiting until such a strategy leads to the actual elimination of competitors. (Tetra Pak v Commission, 1996).

Similarly:

[T]he lack of any possibility of recoupment of losses is not sufficient to prevent the undertaking concerned reinforcing its dominant position, in particular, following the withdrawal from the market of one or a number of its competitors, so that the degree of competition existing on the market, already weakened precisely because of the presence of the undertaking concerned, is further reduced and customers suffer loss as a result of the limitation of the choices available to them.  (France Télécom v Commission, 2009).

In short, the European approach leaves less room to analyze the concrete effects of a given pricing scheme, leaving it more prone to false positives than the U.S. standard explicated in the Brooke Group decision. Worse still, the European approach ignores not only the benefits that consumers may derive from lower prices, but also the chilling effect that broad predatory pricing standards may exert on firms that would otherwise seek to use aggressive pricing schemes to attract consumers.

Refusals to Deal

U.S. and EU antitrust law also differ greatly when it comes to refusals to deal. While the United States has limited the ability of either enforcement authorities or rivals to bring such cases, EU competition law sets a far lower threshold for liability.

As Justice Scalia wrote in Trinko:

Aspen Skiing is at or near the outer boundary of §2 liability. The Court there found significance in the defendant’s decision to cease participation in a cooperative venture. The unilateral termination of a voluntary (and thus presumably profitable) course of dealing suggested a willingness to forsake short-term profits to achieve an anticompetitive end. (Verizon v Trinko, 2003.)

This highlights two key features of American antitrust law with regard to refusals to deal. To start, U.S. antitrust law generally does not apply the “essential facilities” doctrine. Accordingly, in the absence of exceptional facts, upstream monopolists are rarely required to supply their product to downstream rivals, even if that supply is “essential” for effective competition in the downstream market. Moreover, as Justice Scalia observed in Trinko, the Aspen Skiing case appears to concern only those limited instances where a firm’s refusal to deal stems from the termination of a preexisting and profitable business relationship.

While even this is not likely the economically appropriate limitation on liability, its impetus—ensuring that liability is found only in situations where procompetitive explanations for the challenged conduct are unlikely—is completely appropriate for a regime concerned with minimizing the cost to consumers of erroneous enforcement decisions.

As in most areas of antitrust policy, EU competition law is much more interventionist. Refusals to deal are a central theme of EU enforcement efforts, and there is a relatively low threshold for liability.

In theory, for a refusal to deal to infringe EU competition law, it must meet a set of fairly stringent conditions: the input must be indispensable, the refusal must eliminate all competition in the downstream market, and there must not be objective reasons that justify the refusal. Moreover, if the refusal to deal involves intellectual property, it must also prevent the appearance of a new good.

In practice, however, all of these conditions have been relaxed significantly by EU courts and the commission’s decisional practice. This is best evidenced by the lower court’s Microsoft ruling where, as John Vickers notes:

[T]he Court found easily in favor of the Commission on the IMS Health criteria, which it interpreted surprisingly elastically, and without relying on the special factors emphasized by the Commission. For example, to meet the “new product” condition it was unnecessary to identify a particular new product… thwarted by the refusal to supply but sufficient merely to show limitation of technical development in terms of less incentive for competitors to innovate.

EU competition law thus shows far less concern for its potential chilling effect on firms’ investments than does U.S. antitrust law.

Vertical Restraints

There are vast differences between U.S. and EU competition law relating to vertical restraints—that is, contractual restraints between firms that operate at different levels of the production process.

On the one hand, since the Supreme Court’s Leegin ruling in 2006, even price-related vertical restraints (such as resale price maintenance (RPM), under which a manufacturer can stipulate the prices at which retailers must sell its products) are assessed under the rule of reason in the United States. Some commentators have gone so far as to say that, in practice, U.S. case law on RPM almost amounts to per se legality.

Conversely, EU competition law treats RPM as severely as it treats cartels. Both RPM and cartels are considered to be restrictions of competition “by object”—the EU’s equivalent of a per se prohibition. This severe treatment also applies to non-price vertical restraints that tend to partition the European internal market.

Furthermore, in the Consten and Grundig ruling, the ECJ rejected the consequentialist, and economically grounded, principle that inter-brand competition is the appropriate framework to assess vertical restraints:

Although competition between producers is generally more noticeable than that between distributors of products of the same make, it does not thereby follow that an agreement tending to restrict the latter kind of competition should escape the prohibition of Article 85(1) merely because it might increase the former. (Consten SARL & Grundig-Verkaufs-GMBH v. Commission of the European Economic Community, 1966).

This treatment of vertical restrictions flies in the face of longstanding mainstream economic analysis of the subject. As Patrick Rey and Jean Tirole conclude:

Another major contribution of the earlier literature on vertical restraints is to have shown that per se illegality of such restraints has no economic foundations.

Unlike the EU, the U.S. Supreme Court in Leegin took account of the weight of the economic literature, and changed its approach to RPM to ensure that the law no longer simply precluded its arguable consumer benefits, writing: “Though each side of the debate can find sources to support its position, it suffices to say here that economics literature is replete with procompetitive justifications for a manufacturer’s use of resale price maintenance.” Further, the court found that the prior approach to resale price maintenance restraints “hinders competition and consumer welfare because manufacturers are forced to engage in second-best alternatives and because consumers are required to shoulder the increased expense of the inferior practices.”

The EU’s continued per se treatment of RPM, by contrast, strongly reflects its “precautionary principle” approach to antitrust. European regulators and courts readily condemn conduct that could conceivably injure consumers, even where such injury is, according to the best economic understanding, exceedingly unlikely. The U.S. approach, which rests on likelihood rather than mere possibility, is far less likely to condemn beneficial conduct erroneously.

Political Discretion in European Competition Law

EU competition law lacks a coherent analytical framework like that found in U.S. law’s reliance on the consumer welfare standard. The EU process is driven by a number of laterally equivalent—and sometimes mutually exclusive—goals, including industrial policy and the perceived need to counteract foreign state ownership and subsidies. Such a wide array of conflicting aims produces lack of clarity for firms seeking to conduct business. Moreover, the discretion that attends this fluid arrangement of goals yields an even larger problem.

The Microsoft case illustrates this problem well. In Microsoft, the commission could have chosen to base its decision on various potential objectives. It notably chose to base its findings on the fact that Microsoft’s behavior reduced “consumer choice.”

The commission, in fact, discounted arguments that economic efficiency may lead to consumer welfare gains, because it determined “consumer choice” among media players was more important:

Another argument relating to reduced transaction costs consists in saying that the economies made by a tied sale of two products saves resources otherwise spent for maintaining a separate distribution system for the second product. These economies would then be passed on to customers who could save costs related to a second purchasing act, including selection and installation of the product. Irrespective of the accuracy of the assumption that distributive efficiency gains are necessarily passed on to consumers, such savings cannot possibly outweigh the distortion of competition in this case. This is because distribution costs in software licensing are insignificant; a copy of a software programme can be duplicated and distributed at no substantial effort. In contrast, the importance of consumer choice and innovation regarding applications such as media players is high. (Commission Decision No. COMP. 37792 (Microsoft)).

It may be true that tying the products in question was unnecessary. But merely dismissing this decision because distribution costs are near-zero is hardly an analytically satisfactory response. There are many more costs involved in creating and distributing complementary software than those associated with hosting and downloading. The commission also simply asserts that consumer choice among some arbitrary number of competing products is necessarily a benefit. This, too, is not necessarily true, and the decision’s implication that any marginal increase in choice is more valuable than any gains from product design or innovation is analytically incoherent.

The Court of First Instance was only too happy to give the commission a pass in its breezy analysis; it saw no objection to these findings. With little substantive reasoning to support its findings, the court fully endorsed the commission’s assessment:

As the Commission correctly observes (see paragraph 1130 above), by such an argument Microsoft is in fact claiming that the integration of Windows Media Player in Windows and the marketing of Windows in that form alone lead to the de facto standardisation of the Windows Media Player platform, which has beneficial effects on the market. Although, generally, standardisation may effectively present certain advantages, it cannot be allowed to be imposed unilaterally by an undertaking in a dominant position by means of tying.

The Court further notes that it cannot be ruled out that third parties will not want the de facto standardisation advocated by Microsoft but will prefer it if different platforms continue to compete, on the ground that that will stimulate innovation between the various platforms. (Microsoft Corp. v Commission, 2007)

Pointing to these conflicting effects of Microsoft’s bundling decision, without weighing either, is a weak basis to uphold the commission’s decision that consumer choice outweighs the benefits of standardization. Moreover, actions undertaken by other firms to enhance consumer choice at the expense of standardization are, on these terms, potentially just as problematic. The dividing line becomes solely which theory the commission prefers to pursue.

What such a practice does is vest the commission with immense discretionary power. Any given case sets up a “heads, I win; tails, you lose” situation in which defendants are easily outflanked by a commission that can change the rules of its analysis as it sees fit. Defendants can play only the cards that they are dealt. Accordingly, Microsoft could not successfully challenge a conclusion that its behavior harmed consumers’ choice by arguing that it improved consumer welfare, on net.

By selecting, in this instance, “consumer choice” as the standard to be judged, the commission was able to evade the constraints that might have been imposed by a more robust welfare standard. Thus, the commission can essentially pick and choose the objectives that best serve its interests in each case. This vastly enlarges the scope of potential antitrust liability, while also substantially decreasing the ability of firms to predict when their behavior may be viewed as problematic. It leads to what, in U.S. courts, would be regarded as an untenable risk of false positives that chill innovative behavior and create nearly unwinnable battles for targeted firms.

In Antitrust & Competition, Broadband, Cartels, Constitutional Law, Economic Theory, European Union, Exclusionary Conduct, Exclusive Dealing, Health Care, Intellectual Property, International, International Trade, Pharmaceuticals, Platforms, Price Discrimination, Resale Price Maintenance, Supreme Court, Telecommunications, Truth on the Market, Tying, Vertical Restraints , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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The Globalization of Antitrust: A Cost-Benefit Appraisal

Alden Abbott —  27 May 2021

Overview

Virtually all countries in the world have adopted competition laws over the last three decades. In a recent Mercatus Foundation Research Paper, I argue that the spread of these laws has benefits and risks. The abstract of my Paper states:

The United States stood virtually alone when it enacted its first antitrust statute in 1890. Today, almost all nations have adopted competition laws (the term used in most other nations), and US antitrust agencies interact with foreign enforcers on a daily basis. This globalization of antitrust is becoming increasingly important to the economic welfare of many nations, because major businesses (in particular, massive digital platforms like Google and Facebook) face growing antitrust scrutiny by multiple enforcement regimes worldwide. As such, the United States should take the lead in encouraging adoption of antitrust policies, here and abroad, that are conducive to economic growth and innovation. Antitrust policies centered on promoting consumer welfare would be best suited to advancing these desirable aims. Thus, the United States should oppose recent efforts (here and abroad) to turn antitrust into a regulatory system that seeks to advance many objectives beyond consumer welfare. American antitrust enforcers should also work with like-minded agencies—and within multilateral organizations such as the International Competition Network and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development—to promote procedural fairness and the rule of law in antitrust enforcement.

A brief summary of my Paper follows.

Discussion

Widespread calls for “reform” of the American antitrust laws are based on the false premises that (1) U.S. economic concentration has increased excessively and competition has diminished in recent decades; and (2) U.S. antitrust enforcers have failed to effectively enforce the antitrust laws (the consumer welfare standard is sometimes cited as the culprit to blame for “ineffective” antitrust enforcement). In fact, sound economic scholarship, some of it cited in chapter 6 of the 2020 Economic Report of the President, debunks these claims. In reality, modern U.S. antitrust enforcement under the economics-based consumer welfare standard (despite being imperfect and subject to error costs) has done a good job overall of promoting competitive and efficient markets.

The adoption of competition laws by foreign nations was promoted by the U.S. Government. The development of European competition law in the 1950s, and its incorporation into treaties that laid the foundation for the European Union (EU), was particularly significant. The EU administrative approach to antitrust, based on civil law (as compared to the U.S. common law approach), has greatly influenced the contours of most new competition laws. The EU, like the U.S., focuses on anticompetitive joint conduct, single firm conduct, and mergers. EU enforcement (carried out through the European Commission’s Directorate General for Competition) initially relied more on formal agency guidance than American antitrust law, but it began to incorporate an economic effects-based consumer welfare-centric approach over the last 20 years. Nevertheless, EU enforcers still pay greater attention to the welfare of competitors than their American counterparts.

In recent years, the EU prosecutions of digital platforms have begun to adopt a “precautionary antitrust” perspective, which seeks to prevent potential monopoly abuses in their incipiency by sanctioning business conduct without showing that it is causing any actual or likely consumer harm. What’s more, the EU’s recently adopted “Digital Markets Act” for the first time imposes ex ante competition regulation of platforms. These developments reflect a move away from a consumer welfare approach. On the plus side, the EU (unlike the U.S.) subjects state-owned or controlled monopolies to liability for anticompetitive conduct and forbids anticompetitive government subsidies that seriously distort competition (“state aids”).

Developing and former communist bloc countries rapidly enacted and implemented competition laws over the last three decades. Many newly minted competition agencies suffer from poor institutional capacity. The U.S. Government and the EU have worked to enhance the quality and consistency of competition enforcement in these jurisdictions by supporting technical support and training.

Various institutions support efforts to improve competition law enforcement and develop support for a “competition culture.” The International Competition Network (ICN), established in 2001, is a “virtual network” comprised of almost all competition agencies. The ICN focuses on discrete projects aimed at procedural and substantive competition law convergence through the development of consensual, nonbinding “best practices” recommendations and reports. It also provides a significant role for nongovernmental advisers from the business, legal, economic, consumer, and academic communities, as well as for experts from other international organizations. ICN member agency staff are encouraged to communicate with each other about the fundamentals of investigations and evaluations and to use ICN-generated documents and podcasts to support training. The application of economic analysis to case-specific facts has been highlighted in ICN work product. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank (both of which carry out economics-based competition policy research) have joined with the ICN in providing national competition agencies (both new and well established) with the means to advocate effectively for procompetitive, economically beneficial government policies. ICN and OECD “toolkits” provide strategies for identifying and working to dislodge (or not enact) anticompetitive laws and regulations that harm the economy.

While a fair degree of convergence has been realized, substantive uniformity among competition law regimes has not been achieved. This is not surprising, given differences among jurisdictions in economic development, political organization, economic philosophy, history, and cultural heritage—all of which may help generate a multiplicity of policy goals. In addition to consumer welfare, different jurisdictions’ competition laws seek to advance support for small and medium sized businesses, fairness and equality, public interest factors, and empowerment of historically disadvantaged persons, among other outcomes. These many goals may not take center stage in the evaluation of most proposed mergers or restrictive business arrangements, but they may affect the handling of particular matters that raise national sensitivities tied to the goals.

The spread of competition law worldwide has generated various tangible benefits. These include consensus support for combating hard core welfare-reducing cartels, fruitful international cooperation among officials dedicated to a pro-competition mission, and support for competition advocacy aimed at dismantling harmful government barriers to competition.

There are, however, six other factors that raise questions regarding whether competition law globalization has been cost-beneficial overall: (1) effective welfare-enhancing antitrust enforcement is stymied in jurisdictions where the rule of law is weak and private property is poorly protected; (2) high enforcement error costs (particularly in jurisdictions that consider factors other than consumer welfare) may undermine the procompetitive features of antitrust enforcement efforts; (3) enforcement demands by multiple competition authorities substantially increase the costs imposed on firms that are engaging in multinational transactions; (4) differences among national competition law rules create complications for national agencies as they seek to have their laws vindicated while maintaining good cooperative relationships with peer enforcers; (5) anticompetitive rent-seeking by less efficient rivals may generate counterproductive prosecutions of successful companies, thereby disincentivizing welfare-inducing business behavior; and (6) recent developments around the world suggest that antitrust policy directed at large digital platforms (and perhaps other dominant companies as well) may be morphing into welfare-inimical regulation. These factors are discussed at greater length in my paper.

One cannot readily quantify the positive and negative welfare effects of the consequences of competition law globalization. Accordingly, one cannot state with any degree of confidence whether globalization has been “good” or “bad” overall in terms of economic welfare.

Conclusion

The extent to which globalized competition law will be a boon to consumers and the global economy will depend entirely on the soundness of public policy decision-making.  The U.S. Government should take the lead in advancing a consumer welfare-centric competition policy at home and abroad. It should work with multilateral institutions and engage in bilateral and regional cooperation to support the rule of law, due process, and antitrust enforcement centered on the consumer welfare standard.

In Antitrust & Competition, Cartels, Error Costs, European Union, Facebook, Google, International, Platforms, Truth on the Market , , , , , ,
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Congress Should Not Legalize a News Media Cartel

Alden Abbott —  16 March 2021

Amazingly enough, at a time when legislative proposals for new antitrust restrictions are rapidly multiplying—see the Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act (CALERA), for example—Congress simultaneously is seriously considering granting antitrust immunity to a price-fixing cartel among members of the newsmedia. This would thereby authorize what the late Justice Antonin Scalia termed “the supreme evil of antitrust: collusion.” What accounts for this bizarre development?

Discussion

The antitrust exemption in question, embodied in the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act of 2021, was introduced March 10 simultaneously in the U.S. House and Senate. The press release announcing the bill’s introduction portrayed it as a “good government” effort to help struggling newspapers in their negotiations with large digital platforms, and thereby strengthen American democracy:

We must enable news organizations to negotiate on a level playing field with the big tech companies if we want to preserve a strong and independent press[.] …

A strong, diverse, free press is critical for any successful democracy. …

Nearly 90 percent of Americans now get news while on a smartphone, computer, or tablet, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted last year, dwarfing the number of Americans who get news via television, radio, or print media. Facebook and Google now account for the vast majority of online referrals to news sources, with the two companies also enjoying control of a majority of the online advertising market. This digital ad duopoly has directly contributed to layoffs and consolidation in the news industry, particularly for local news.

This legislation would address this imbalance by providing a safe harbor from antitrust laws so publishers can band together to negotiate with large platforms. It provides a 48-month window for companies to negotiate fair terms that would flow subscription and advertising dollars back to publishers, while protecting and preserving Americans’ right to access quality news. These negotiations would strictly benefit Americans and news publishers at-large; not just one or a few publishers.

The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act only allows coordination by news publishers if it (1) directly relates to the quality, accuracy, attribution or branding, and interoperability of news; (2) benefits the entire industry, rather than just a few publishers, and are non-discriminatory to other news publishers; and (3) is directly related to and reasonably necessary for these negotiations.

Lurking behind this public-spirited rhetoric, however, is the specter of special interest rent seeking by powerful media groups, as discussed in an insightful article by Thom Lambert. The newspaper industry is indeed struggling, but that is true overseas as well as in the United States. Competition from internet websites has greatly reduced revenues from classified and non-classified advertising. As Lambert notes, in “light of the challenges the internet has created for their advertising-focused funding model, newspapers have sought to employ the government’s coercive power to increase their revenues.”

In particular, media groups have successfully lobbied various foreign governments to impose rules requiring that Google and Facebook pay newspapers licensing fees to display content. The Australian government went even further by mandating that digital platforms share their advertising revenue with news publishers and give the publishers advance notice of any algorithm changes that could affect page rankings and displays. Media rent-seeking efforts took a different form in the United States, as Lambert explains (citations omitted):

In the United States, news publishers have sought to extract rents from digital platforms by lobbying for an exemption from the antitrust laws. Their efforts culminated in the introduction of the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act of 2018. According to a press release announcing the bill, it would allow “small publishers to band together to negotiate with dominant online platforms to improve the access to and the quality of news online.” In reality, the bill would create a four-year safe harbor for “any print or digital news organization” to jointly negotiate terms of trade with Google and Facebook. It would not apply merely to “small publishers” but would instead immunize collusive conduct by such major conglomerates as Murdoch’s News Corporation, the Walt Disney Corporation, the New York Times, Gannet Company, Bloomberg, Viacom, AT&T, and the Fox Corporation. The bill would permit news organizations to fix prices charged to digital platforms as long as negotiations with the platforms were not limited to price, were not discriminatory toward similarly situated news organizations, and somehow related to “the quality, accuracy, attribution or branding, and interoperability of news.” Given the ease of meeting that test—since news organizations could always claim that higher payments were necessary to ensure journalistic quality—the bill would enable news publishers in the United States to extract rents via collusion rather than via direct government coercion, as in Australia.

The 2021 version of the JCPA is nearly identical to the 2018 version discussed by Thom. The only substantive change is that the 2021 version strengthens the pro-cartel coalition by adding broadcasters (it applies to “any print, broadcast, or news organization”). While the JCPA plainly targets Facebook and Google (“online content distributors” with “not fewer than 1,000,000,000 monthly active users, in the aggregate, on its website”), Microsoft President Brad Smith noted in a March 12 House Antitrust Subcommittee Hearing on the bill that his company would also come under its collective-bargaining terms. Other online distributors could eventually become subject to the proposed law as well.

Purported justifications for the proposal were skillfully skewered by John Yun in a 2019 article on the substantively identical 2018 JCPA. Yun makes several salient points. First, the bill clearly shields price fixing. Second, the claim that all news organizations (in particular, small newspapers) would receive the same benefit from the bill rings hollow. The bill’s requirement that negotiations be “nondiscriminatory as to similarly situated news content creators” (emphasis added) would allow the cartel to negotiate different terms of trade for different “tiers” of organizations. Thus The New York Times and The Washington Post, say, might be part of a top tier getting the most favorable terms of trade. Third, the evidence does not support the assertion that Facebook and Google are monopolistic gateways for news outlets.

Yun concludes by summarizing the case against this legislation (citations omitted):

Put simply, the impact of the bill is to legalize a media cartel. The bill expressly allows the cartel to fix the price and set the terms of trade for all market participants. The clear goal is to transfer surplus from online platforms to news organizations, which will likely result in higher content costs for these platforms, as well as provisions that will stifle the ability to innovate. In turn, this could negatively impact quality for the users of these platforms.

Furthermore, a stated goal of the bill is to promote “quality” news and to “highlight trusted brands.” These are usually antitrust code words for favoring one group, e.g., those that are part of the News Media Alliance, while foreclosing others who are not “similarly situated.” What about the non-discrimination clause? Will it protect non-members from foreclosure? Again, a careful reading of the bill raises serious questions as to whether it will actually offer protection. The bill only ensures that the terms of the negotiations are available to all “similarly situated” news organizations. It is very easy to carve out provisions that would favor top tier members of the media cartel.

Additionally, an unintended consequence of antitrust exemptions can be that it makes the beneficiaries lax by insulating them from market competition and, ultimately, can harm the industry by delaying inevitable and difficult, but necessary, choices. There is evidence that this is what occurred with the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970, which provided antitrust exemption to geographically proximate newspapers for joint operations.

There are very good reasons why antitrust jurisprudence reserves per se condemnation to the most egregious anticompetitive acts including the formation of cartels. Legislative attempts to circumvent the federal antitrust laws should be reserved solely for the most compelling justifications. There is little evidence that this level of justification has been met in this present circumstance.

Conclusion

Statutory exemptions to the antitrust laws have long been disfavored, and with good reason. As I explained in my 2005 testimony before the Antitrust Modernization Commission, such exemptions tend to foster welfare-reducing output restrictions. Also, empirical research suggests that industries sheltered from competition perform less well than those subject to competitive forces. In short, both economic theory and real-world data support a standard that requires proponents of an exemption to bear the burden of demonstrating that the exemption will benefit consumers.

This conclusion applies most strongly when an exemption would specifically authorize hard-core price fixing, as in the case with the JCPA. What’s more, the bill’s proponents have not borne the burden of justifying their pro-cartel proposal in economic welfare terms—quite the opposite. Lambert’s analysis exposes this legislation as the product of special interest rent seeking that has nothing to do with consumer welfare. And Yun’s evaluation of the bill clarifies that, not only would the JCPA foster harmful collusive pricing, but it would also harm its beneficiaries by allowing them to avoid taking steps to modernize and render themselves more efficient competitors.

In sum, though the JCPA claims to fly a “public interest” flag, it is just another private interest bill promoted by well-organized rent seekers would harm consumer welfare and undermine innovation.

In Antitrust & Competition, Cartels, Constitutional Law, Economic Theory, Exemptions, Facebook, Google, International, Platforms, Supreme Court, Truth on the Market , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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There is No Cure for Government Incompetence

Corbin K. Barthold —  23 March 2020

[TOTM: The following is part of a blog series by TOTM guests and authors on the law, economics, and policy of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The entire series of posts is available here.

This post is authored by Corbin Barthold, (Senior Litigation Counsel, Washington Legal Foundation).]

The pandemic is serious. COVID-19 will overwhelm our hospitals. It might break our entire healthcare system. To keep the number of deaths in the low hundreds of thousands, a study from Imperial College London finds, we will have to shutter much of our economy for months. Small wonder the markets have lost a third of their value in a relentless three-week plunge. Grievous and cruel will be the struggle to come.

“All men of sense will agree,” Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 70, “in the necessity of an energetic Executive.” In an emergency, certainly, that is largely true. In the midst of this crisis even a staunch libertarian can applaud the government’s efforts to maintain liquidity, and can understand its urge to start dispersing helicopter money. By at least acting like it knows what it’s doing, the state can lessen many citizens’ sense of panic. Some of the emergency measures might even work.

Of course, many of them won’t. Even a trillion-dollar stimulus package might be too small, and too slowly dispersed, to do much good. What’s worse, that pernicious line, “Don’t let a crisis go to waste,” is in the air. Much as price gougers are trying to arbitrage Purell, political gougers, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren, are trying to cram woke diktats into disaster-relief bills. Even now, especially now, it is well to remember that government is not very good at what it does.

But dreams of dirigisme die hard, especially at the New York Times. “During the Great Depression,” Farhad Manjoo writes, “Franklin D. Roosevelt assembled a mighty apparatus to rebuild a broken economy.” Government was great at what it does, in Manjoo’s view, until neoliberalism arrived in the 1980s and ruined everything. “The incompetence we see now is by design. Over the last 40 years, America has been deliberately stripped of governmental expertise.” Manjoo implores us to restore the expansive state of yesteryear—“the sort of government that promised unprecedented achievement, and delivered.”

This is nonsense. Our government is not incompetent because Grover Norquist tried (and mostly failed) to strangle it. Our government is incompetent because, generally speaking, government is incompetent. The keystone of the New Deal, the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, was an incoherent mess. Its stated goals were at once to “reduce and relieve unemployment,” “improve standards of labor,” “avoid undue restriction of production,” “induce and maintain united action of labor and management,” “organiz[e] . . . co-operative action among trade groups,” and “otherwise rehabilitate industry.” The law empowered trade groups to create their own “codes of unfair competition,” a privilege they quite predictably used to form anticompetitive cartels.

At no point in American history has the state, with all its “governmental expertise,” been adept at spending money, stimulus or otherwise. A law supplying funds for the Transcontinental Railroad offered to pay builders more for track laid in the mountains, but failed to specify where those mountains begin. Leland Stanford commissioned a study finding that, lo and behold, the Sierra Nevada begins deep in the Sacramento Valley. When “the federal Interior Department initially challenged [his] innovative geology,” reports the historian H.W. Brands, Stanford sent an agent directly to President Lincoln, a politician who “didn’t know much geology” but “preferred to keep his allies happy.” “My pertinacity and Abraham’s faith moved mountains,” the triumphant lobbyist quipped after the meeting.

The supposed golden age of expert government, the time between the rise of FDR and the fall of LBJ, was no better. At the height of the Apollo program, it occurred to a physics professor at Princeton that if there were a small glass reflector on the Moon, scientists could use lasers to calculate the distance between it and Earth with great accuracy. The professor built the reflector for $5,000 and approached the government. NASA loved the idea, but insisted on building the reflector itself. This it proceeded to do, through its standard contracting process, for $3 million.

When the pandemic at last subsides, the government will still be incapable of setting prices, predicting industry trends, or adjusting to changed circumstances. What F.A. Hayek called the knowledge problem—the fact that useful information is dispersed throughout society—will be as entrenched and insurmountable as ever. Innovation will still have to come, if it is to come at all, overwhelmingly from extensive, vigorous, undirected trial and error in the private sector.

When New York Times columnists are not pining for the great government of the past, they are surmising that widespread trauma will bring about the great government of the future. “The outbreak,” Jamelle Bouie proposes in an article entitled “The Era of Small Government is Over,” has “made our mutual interdependence clear. This, in turn, has made it a powerful, real-life argument for the broadest forms of social insurance.” The pandemic is “an opportunity,” Bouie declares, to “embrace direct state action as a powerful tool.”

It’s a bit rich for someone to write about the coming sense of “mutual interdependence” in the pages of a publication so devoted to sowing grievance and discord. The New York Times is a totem of our divisions. When one of its progressive columnists uses the word “unity,” what he means is “submission to my goals.”

In any event, disunity in America is not a new, or even necessarily a bad, thing. We are a fractious, almost ungovernable people. The colonists rebelled against the British government because they didn’t want to pay it back for defending them from the French during the Seven Years’ War. When Hamilton, champion of the “energetic Executive,” pushed through a duty on liquor, the frontier settlers of western Pennsylvania tarred and feathered the tax collectors. In the Astor Place Riot of 1849, dozens of New Yorkers died in a brawl over which of two men was the better Shakespearean actor. Americans are not housetrained.

True enough, if the virus takes us to the kind of depths not seen in these parts since the Great Depression, all bets are off. Short of that, however, no one should lightly assume that Americans will long tolerate a statist revolution imposed on their fears. And thank goodness for that. Our unruliness, our unwillingness to do what we’re told, is part of what makes our society so dynamic and prosperous.

COVID-19 will shake the world. When it has gone, a new scene will open. We can say very little now about what is going to change. But we can hope that Americans will remain a creative, opinionated, fiercely independent lot. And we can be confident that, come what may, planned administration will remain a source of problems, while unplanned free enterprise will remain the surest source of solutions.


In Antitrust & Competition, Cartels, COVID-19, The Law, Economics, and Policy of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Truth on the Market , , , , , , ,
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