Archives For Resale Price Maintenance

Price-Parity Clauses: The Good, The Bad, and the…Anticompetitive?

Andrew Mercado —  21 October 2022

[The following is a guest post from Andrew Mercado, a research assistant at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and an adjunct professor and research assistant at George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School.]

Price-parity clauses have, until recently, been little discussed in the academic vertical-price-restraints literature. Their growing importance, however, cannot be ignored, and common misconceptions around their use and implementation need to be addressed. While similar in nature to both resale price maintenance and most-favored-nations clauses, the special vertical relationship between sellers and the platform inherent in price-parity clauses leads to distinct economic outcomes. Additionally, with a growing number of lawsuits targeting their use in online platform economies, it is critical to fully understand the economic incentives and outcomes stemming from price-parity clauses. 

Vertical price restraints—of which resale price maintenance (RPM) and most favored nation clauses (MFN) are among many—are both common in business and widely discussed in the academic literature. While there remains a healthy debate among academics as to the true competitive effects of these contractual arrangements, the state of U.S. jurisprudence is clear. Since the Supreme Court’s Leegin and State Oil decisions, the use of RPM is not presumed anticompetitive. Their procompetitive and anticompetitive effects must instead be assessed under a “rule of reason” framework in order to determine their legality under antitrust law. The competitive effects of MFN are also generally analyzed under the rule of reason.

Distinct from these two types of clauses, however, are price-parity clauses (PPCs). A PPC is an agreement between a platform and an independent seller under which the seller agrees to offer their goods on the platform for their lowest advertised price. While sometimes termed “platform MFNs,” the economic effects of PPCs on modern online-commerce platforms are distinct.

This commentary seeks to fill a hole in the PPC literature left by its current focus on producers that sell exclusively nonfungible products on various platforms. That literature generally finds that a PPC reduces price competition between platforms. This finding, however, is not universal. Notably absent from the discussion is any concept of multiple sellers of the same good on the same platform. Correctly accounting for this oversight leads to the conclusion that PPCs generally are both efficient and procompetitive.

Introduction

In a pair of lawsuits filed in California and the District of Columbia, Amazon has come under fire for its restrictions around pricing. These suits allege that Amazon’s restrictive PPCs harm consumers, arguing that sellers are penalized when the price for their good on Amazon is higher than on alternative platforms. They go on to claim that these provisions harm sellers, prevent platform competition, and ultimately force consumers to pay higher prices. The true competitive result of these provisions, however, is unclear.

That literature that does exist on the effects these provisions have on the competitive outcomes of platforms in online marketplaces falls fundamentally short. Jonathan Baker and Fiona Scott Morton (among others) fail to differentiate between PPCs and MFN clauses. This distinction is important because, while the impacts on consumers may be similar, the mechanisms by which the interaction occurs is not. An MFN provision stipulates that a supplier—when working with several distributors—must offer its goods to one particular distributor at terms that are better or equal to those offered to all other distributors.

PPCs, on the other hand, are agreements between sellers and platforms to ensure that the platform’s buyers have access to goods at better or equal terms as those offered the same buyers on other platforms. Sellers that are bound by a PPC and that intend to sell on multiple platforms will have to price uniformly across all platforms to satisfy the PPC. PPCs are contracts between sellers and platforms to define conduct between sellers and buyers. They do not determine conduct between sellers and the platform.

A common characteristic of MFN and PPC arrangements is that consumers are often unaware of the existence of either clause. What is not common, however, is the outcomes that stem from their use. An MFN clause only dictates the terms under which a good is sold to a distributor and does not constrain the interaction between distributors and consumers. While the lower prices realized by a distributor may be passed on as lower prices for the consumer, this is not universally true. A PPC clause, on the other hand, constrains the interactions between sellers and consumers, necessitating that the seller’s price on any given platform, by definition, must be as low as the price on all other platforms. This leads to the lowest prices for a given good in a market.

Intra-Platform Competition

The fundamental oversight in the literature is any discussion of intra-platform competition in the market for fungible goods, within which multiple sellers sell the same good on multiple platforms. Up to this point, all the discussion surrounding PPCs has centered on the Booking.com case in the European Union.

In Booking.com, the primary platform, Booking.com, instituted price-parity clauses with sellers of hotel rooms on its platform, mandating that they sell rooms on Booking.com for equal to or less than the price on all other platforms. This pricing restriction extended to the hotel’s first-party website as well.

In this case, it was alleged that consumers were worse off because the PPC unambiguously increased prices for hotel rooms. This is because, even if the hotel was willing to offer a lower price on its own website, it was unable to do so due to the PPC. This potential lower price would come about due to the low (possibly zero cost) commission a hotel must pay to sell on its own website. On the hotel’s own website, the room could be discounted by as much as the size of the commission that Booking.com took as a percentage of each sale. Further, if a competing platform chose to charge a lower commission than Booking.com, the discount could be the difference in commission rates.

While one other case, E-book MFN, is tangentially relevant, Booking.com is the only case where independent third-party sellers list a good or service for sale on a platform that imposes a PPC. While there is some evidence of harm in the market for the online booking of hotel rooms, however, hotel-room bookings are not analogous to platform-based sales of fungible goods. Sellers of hotel rooms are unable to compete to sell the same room; they can sell similarly situated, easily substitutable rooms, but the rooms are still non-fungible.

In online commerce, however, sellers regularly sell fungible goods. From lip balm and batteries to jeans and air filters, a seller of goods on an e-commerce site is among many similarly situated sellers selling nearly (or perfectly) identical products. These sellers not only have to compete with goods that are close substitutes to the good they are selling, but also with other sellers that offer an identical product.

Therefore, the conclusions found by critics of Booking.com’s PPC do not hold when removing the non-fungibility assumption. While there is some evidence that PPCs may reduce competition among platforms on the margin, there is no evidence that competition among sellers on a given platform is reduced. In fact, the PPC may increase competition by forcing all sellers on a platform to play by the same pricing rules.

We will delve into the competitive environment under a strict PPC—whereby sellers are banned from the platform when found to be in violation of the clause—and introduce the novel (and more realistic) implicit PPC, whereby sellers have incentive to comply with the PPC, but are not punished for deviation. First, however, we must understand the incentives of a seller not bound by a PPC.

Competition by sellers not bound by price-parity clauses

An individual seller in this market chooses to sell identical products at different prices across different platforms, given that the platforms may choose various levels of commission per sale. To sell the highest number of units possible, there is an incentive for sellers to steer customers to platforms that charge the lowest commission, and thereby offer the seller the most revenue possible.

Since the platforms understand the incentive to steer consumers toward low-commission platforms to increase the seller’s revenue, they may not allocate resources toward additional perks, such as free shipping. Platforms may instead compete vigorously to reduce costs in order offer the lowest commissions possible. In the long run, this race to the bottom might leave the market with one dominant and ultra-efficient naturally monopolistic platform that offers the lowest possible commission.

While this sounds excellent for consumers, since they get the lowest possible prices on all goods, this simple scenario does not incorporate non-price factors into the equation. Free shipping, handling, and physical processing; payment processing; and the time spent waiting for the good to arrive are all additional considerations that consumers factor into the equation. For a higher commission, often on the seller side, platforms may offer a number of these perks that increase consumer welfare by a greater amount than the price increase often associated with higher commissions.

In this scenario, because of the under-allocation of resources to platform efficiency, a unified logistics market may not emerge, where buyers are able to search and purchase a good; sellers are able to sell the good; and the platform is able to facilitate the shipping, processing, and handling. By fragmenting these markets—due to the inefficient allocation of capital—consumer welfare is not maximized. And while the raw price of a good is minimized, the total price of the transaction is not.

Competition by sellers bound by strict price-parity clauses

In this scenario, each platform will have some version of a PPC. When the strict PPC is enforced, a seller is restricted from selling on that platform when they are found to have broken parity. Sellers choose the platforms on which they want to sell based on which platform may generate the greatest return; they then set a single price for all platforms. The seller might then make higher returns on platforms with lower commissions and lower returns on platforms with higher commissions. Fundamentally, to sell on a platform, the seller must at least cover its marginal cost.

Due to the potential of being banned for breaking parity, sellers may have an incentive to price so low that, on some platforms, they do not turn a profit (due to high commissions) while compensating for those losses with profits earned on other platforms with lower commissions. Alternatively, sellers may choose to forgo sales on a given platform altogether if the marginal cost associated with selling on the platform under parity is too great.

For a seller to continue to sell on a platform, or to decide to sell on an additional platform, the marginal revenue associated with selling on that platform must outweigh the marginal cost. In effect, even if the commission is so high that the seller merely breaks even, it is still in the seller’s best interest to continue on the platform; only if the seller is losing money by selling on the platform is it economically rational to exit.

Within the boundaries of the platform, sellers bound by a PPC have a strong incentive to vigorously compete. Additionally, they have an incentive to compete vigorously across platforms to generate the highest possible revenue and offset any losses from high-commission platforms.

Platforms have an incentive to vigorously compete to attract buyers and sellers by offering various incentives and additional services to increase the quality of a sale. Examples of such “add-ons” include fulfilment and processing undertaken by the platform, expedited shipping and insured shipping, and authentication services and warranties.

Platforms also have an incentive to find the correct level of commission based on the add-on services that they provide. A platform that wants to offer the lowest possible prices might provide no or few add-ons and charge a low commission. Alternatively, the platform that wants to provide the highest possible quality may charge a high commission in exchange for many add-ons.

As the value that platforms can offer buyers and sellers increases, and as sellers lower their prices to maintain or increase sales, the quality bestowed upon consumers is likely to rise. Competition within the platform, however, may decline. Highly efficient sellers (those with the lowest marginal cost) may use strict PPCs—under which sellers are removed from the platform for breaking parity—to price less-efficient sellers out of the market. Additionally, efficient platforms may be able to price less-efficient platforms out of the market by offering better add-ons, starving the platforms of buyers and sellers in the long run.

Even with the existence of marginally higher prices and lower competition in the marketplace compared to a world without price parity, the marginal benefit for the consumer is likely higher. This is because the add-on services used by platforms to entice buyers and sellers to transact on a given platform, over time, cost less to provide than the benefit they bestow. Regardless of whether every single consumer realizes the full value of such added benefits, the likely result is a level of consumer welfare that is greater under price parity than in its absence.

Implicit price parity: The case of Amazon

Amazon’s price-parity-policy conditions access to some seller perks on the adherence to parity, guiding sellers toward a unified pricing scheme.  The term best suited for this type of policy is an “implicit price parity clause” (IPPC). Under this system, the incentive structure rewards sellers for pricing competitively on Amazon, without punishing alternative pricing measures. For example, if a seller sets prices higher on Amazon because it charges higher commissions than other platforms, that seller will not eligible for Amazon’s Buy Box. But they are still able to sell, market, and promote their own product on the platform. They still show up in the “other sellers” dropdown section of the product page, and consumers can choose that seller with little more than a scroll and an additional click.

While the remainder of this analysis focuses on the specific policies found on Amazon’s platform, IPPCs are found on other platforms, as well. Walmart’s marketplace contains a similar parity policy along with a similarly functioning “buy” box. eBay, too, offers a “best price guarantee,” through which the site offers match the price plus 10% of a qualified competitor within 48 hours. While this policy is not identical in nature, it is in result: prices that are identical for identical goods across multiple platforms.

Amazon’s policy may sound as if it is picking winners and losers on its platform, a system that might appear ripe for corruption and unjustified self-preferencing. But there are several reasons to believe this is not the case. Amazon has built a reputation of low prices, quick delivery, and a high level of customer service. This reputation provides the company an incentive to ensure a consistently high level of quality over time. As Amazon increases the number of products and services offered on its platform, it also needs to devise ways to ensure that its promise of low prices and outstanding service is maintained.

This is where the Buy Box comes in to play. All sellers on the platform can sell without utilizing the Buy Box. These transactions occur either on the seller’s own storefront, or by utilizing the “other sellers” portion of the purchase page for a given good. Amazon’s PPC does not affect the way that these sales occur. Additionally, the seller is free in this type of transaction to sell at whatever price it desires. This includes severely under- or overpricing the competition, as well as breaking price parity. Amazon’s policies do not directly determine prices.

The benefit of the Buy Box—and the reason that an IPPC can be so effective for buyers, sellers, and the platform—is that it both increases competition and decreases search costs. For sellers, there is a strong incentive to compete vigorously on price, since that should give them the best opportunity to sell through the Buy Box. Because the Buy Box is algorithmically driven—factoring in price parity, as well as a few other quality-centered metrics (reviews, shipping cost and speed, etc.)—the featured Buy Box seller can change multiple times per day.

Relative prices between sellers are not the only important factor in winning the Buy Box; absolute prices also play a role. For some products—where there are a limited number of sellers and none are observing parity or they are pricing far above sellers on other platforms—the Buy Box is not displayed at all. This forces consumers to make a deliberate choice to buy from a specific seller as opposed to from a preselected seller. In effect, the Buy Box’s omission removes Amazon’s endorsement of the seller’s practices, while still allowing the seller to offer goods on the platform.

For consumers, this vigorous price competition leads to significantly lower prices with a high level of service. When a consumer uses the Buy Box (as opposed to buying directly from a given seller), Amazon is offering an assurance that the price, shipping, cost, speed, and service associated with that seller and that good is the best of all possible options. Amazon is so confident with its  algorithm that the assurance is backed up with a price guarantee; Amazon will match the price of relevant competitors and, until 2021, would foot the bill for any price drops that happened within seven days of purchase.

For Amazon, this commitment to low prices, high volume, and quality service leads to a sustained strong reputation. Since Amazon has an incentive to attract as many buyers and sellers as possible, to maximize its revenue through commissions on sales and advertising, the platform needs to carefully curate an environment that is conducive to repeated interactions. Buyers and sellers come together on the platform knowing that they are going to face the lowest prices, highest revenues, and highest level of service, because Amazon’s implicit price-parity clause (among other policies) aligns incentives in just the right way to optimize competition.

Conclusion

In some ways, an implicit price-parity clause is the Goldilocks of vertical price restraints.

Without a price-parity clause, there is little incentive to invest in the platform. Yes, there are low prices, but a race to the bottom may tend to lead to a single monopolistic platform. Additionally, consumer welfare is not maximized, since there are no services provided at an efficient level to bring additional value to buyers and sellers, leading to higher quality-adjusted prices. 

Under a strict price-parity clause, there is a strong incentive to invest in the platform, but the nature of removing selling rights due to a violation can lead to reduced price competition. While the quality of service under this system may be higher, the quality-adjusted price may remain high, since there are lower levels of competition putting downward pressure on prices.

An implicit price-parity clause takes the best aspects of both no PPC and strict PPC policies but removes the worst. Sellers are free to set prices as they wish but have incentive to comply with the policy due to the additional benefits they may receive from the Buy Box. The platform has sufficient protection from free riding due to the revocation of certain services, leading to high levels of investment in efficient services that increase quality and decrease quality-adjusted prices. Finally, consumers benefit from the vigorous price competition for the Buy Box, leading to both lower prices and higher quality-adjusted prices when accounting for the efficient shipping and fulfilment undertaken by the platform.

Current attempts to find an antitrust violation associated with PPCs—both implicit and otherwise—are likely misplaced. Any evidence gathered on the market will probably show an increase in consumer welfare. The reduced search costs on the platforms alone could outweigh any alleged increase in price, not to mention the time costs associated with rapid processing and shipping.

Further, while there are many claims that PPC policies—and high commissions on sales—harm sellers, the alternative is even worse. The only credible counterfactual, given the widespread permeation of PPC policies, is that all sellers on the Internet only sell through their own website. Not only would this increase the cost for small businesses by a significant margin, but it would also likely drive many out of business. For sellers, the benefit of a platform is access to a multitude (in some cases, hundreds of millions) of potential consumers. To reach that number of consumers on its own, every single independent seller would have to employ a team of marketers that rivals a Fortune 500 company. Unfortunately, the value proposition is not on its side, and until it is, platforms are the only viable option.

Before labeling a specific contractual obligation as harmful and anticompetitive, we need to understand how it works in the real world. To this point, there has been insufficient discussion about the intra-platform competition that occurs because of price-parity clauses, and the potential consumer-welfare benefits associated with implicit price-parity clauses. Ideally, courts, regulators, and policymakers will take the time going forward to think deeply about the costs and benefits associated with the clauses and choose the least harmful approach to enforcement.

Ultimately, consumers are the ones who stand to lose the most as a result of overenforcement. As always, enforcers should keep in mind that it is the welfare of consumers, not competitors or platforms, that is the overarching concern of antitrust.

In Amazon, Antitrust & Competition, Platforms, Price Discrimination, Resale Price Maintenance , , , ,
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Rules Without Reason

Noah J. Phillips —  6 May 2022

[Closing out Week Two of our FTC UMC Rulemaking symposium is a contribution from a very special guest: Commissioner Noah J. Phillips of the Federal Trade Commission. You can find other posts at the symposium page here. Truth on the Market also invites academics, practitioners, and other antitrust/regulation commentators to send us 1,500-4,000 word responses for potential inclusion in the symposium.]

In his July Executive Order, President Joe Biden called on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to consider making a series of rules under its purported authority to regulate “unfair methods of competition.”[1] Chair Lina Khan has previously voiced her support for doing so.[2] My view is that the Commission has no such rulemaking powers, and that the scope of the authority asserted would amount to an unconstitutional delegation of power by the Congress.[3] Others have written about those issues, and we can leave them for another day.[4] Professors Richard Pierce and Gus Hurwitz have each written that, if FTC rulemaking is to survive judicial scrutiny, it must apply to conduct that is covered by the antitrust laws.[5]

That idea raises an inherent tension between the concept of rulemaking and the underlying law. Proponents of rulemaking advocate “clear” rules to, in their view, reduce ambiguity, ensure predictability, promote administrability, and conserve resources otherwise spent on ex post, case-by-case adjudication.[6] To the extent they mean administrative adoption of per se illegality standards by rulemaking, it flies in the face of contemporary antitrust jurisprudence, which has been moving from per se standards back to the historical “rule of reason.”

Recognizing that the Sherman Act could be read to bar all contracts, federal courts for over a century have interpreted the 1890 antitrust law only to apply to “unreasonable” restraints of trade.[7] The Supreme Court first adopted this concept in its landmark 1911 decision in Standard Oil, upholding the lower court’s dissolution of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company.[8] Just four years after the Federal Trade Commission Act was enacted, the Supreme Courtestablished the “the prevailing standard of analysis” for determining whether an agreement constitutes an unreasonable restraint of trade under Section 1 of the Sherman Act.[9] Justice Louis Brandeis, who as an adviser to President Woodrow Wilson was instrumental in creating the FTC, described the scope of this “rule of reason” inquiry in the Chicago Board of Trade case:

The true test of legality is whether the restraint imposed is such as merely regulates and perhaps thereby promotes competition or whether it is such as may suppress or even destroy competition. To determine that question the court must ordinarily consider the facts peculiar to the business to which the restraint is applied; its condition before and after the restraint was imposed; the nature of the restraint and its effect, actual or probable. The history of the restraint, the evil believed to exist, the reason for adopting the particular remedy, the purpose or end sought to be attained, are all relevant facts.[10]

The rule of reason was and remains today a fact-specific inquiry, but the Court also determined from early on that certain restraints invited a different analytical approach: per se prohibitions. The per se rule involves no weighing of the restraint’s procompetitive effects. Once proven, a restraint subject to the per se rule is presumed to be unreasonable and illegal.In the 1911 Dr. Miles case, the Court held that resale minimum price fixing was illegal per se under Section 1.[11] It found horizontal price-fixing agreements to be per se illegal in Socony Vacuum.[12] Since Socony Vacuum, the Court has limited the application of per se illegality to bid rigging (a form of horizontal price fixing),[13] horizontal market divisions,[14] tying,[15] and group boycotts[16].

Starting in the 1970s, especially following research demonstrating the benefits to consumers of a number of business arrangements and contracts previously condemned by courts as per se illegal, the Court began to limit the categories of conduct that received per se treatment. In 1977, in GTE Sylvania, the Courtheld that vertical customer and territorial restraints should be judged under the rule of reason.[17] In 1979, in BMI, it held that a blanket license issued by a clearinghouse of copyright owners that set a uniform price and prevented individual negotiation with licensees was a necessary precondition for the product and was thus subject to the rule of reason.[18] In 1984, in Jefferson Parish, the Court rejected automatic application of the per se rule to tying.[19] A year later, the Court held that the per se rule did not apply to all group boycotts.[20] In 1997, in State Oil Company v. Khan, it held that maximum resale price fixing is not per se illegal.[21] And, in 2007, the Court held that minimum resale price fixing should also be assessed under the rule of reason. In Leegin, the Court made clear that the per se rule is not the norm for analyzing the reasonableness of restraints; rather, the rule of reason is the “accepted standard for testing” whether a practice is unreasonable.[22]

More recent Court decisions reflect the Court’s refusal to expand the scope of “quick look” analysis, an application of the rule of reason that nonetheless truncates the necessary fact-finding for liability where “an observer with even a rudimentary understanding of economics could conclude that the arrangements in question would have an anticompetitive effect on customers and markets.”[23] In 2013, the Supreme Court rejected an FTC request to require courts to apply the “quick look” approach to reverse-payment settlement agreements.[24] The Court has also backed away from presumptive rules of legality. In American Needle, the Court stripped the National Football League of Section 1 immunity by holding that the NFL is not entitled to the single entity defense under Copperweld and instead, its conduct must be analyzed under the “flexible” rule of reason.[25] And last year, in NCAA v. Alston, the Court rejected the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s argument that it should have benefited from a “quick look”, restating that “most restraints challenged under the Sherman Act” are subject to the rule of reason.[26]

The message from the Court is clear: rules are the exception, not the norm. It “presumptively applies rule of reason analysis”[27] and applies the per se rule only to restraints that “lack any redeeming virtue.”[28] Per se rules are reserved for “conduct that is manifestly anticompetitive” and that “would always or almost always tend to restrict competition and decrease output.”[29] And that’s a short list.  What is more, the Leegin Court made clear that administrative convenience—part of the justification for administrative rules[30]—cannot in and of itself be sufficient to justify application of the per se rule.[31]

The Court’s warnings about per se rules ring just as true for rules that could be promulgated under the Commission’s purported UMC rulemaking authority, which would function just as a per se rule would. Proof of the conduct ends the inquiry. No need to demonstrate anticompetitive effects. No procompetitive justifications. No efficiencies. No balancing.

But if the Commission attempts administratively to adopt per se rules, it will run up against precedents making clear that the antitrust laws do not abide such rules. This is not simply a matter of the—already controversial[32]—historical attempts by the agency to define under Section 5 conduct that goes outside the Sherman Act. Rather, establishing per se rules about conduct covered under the rule of reason effectively overrules Supreme Court precedent. For example, the Executive Order contemplates the FTC promulgating a rule concerning pay-for-delay settlements.[33] But, to the extent it can fashion rules, the agency can only prohibit by rule that which is illegal. To adopt a per se ban on conduct covered by the rule of reason is to take out of the analysis the justifications for and benefits of the conduct in question. And while the FTC Act enables the agency some authority to prohibit conduct outside the scope of the Sherman Act,[34] it does not do away with consideration of justifications or benefits when determining whether a practice is an “unfair method of competition.” As a result, the FTC cannot condemn categorically via rulemaking conduct that the courts have refused to condemn as per se illegal, and instead have analyzed under the rule of reason.[35] Last year, the FTC docketed a petition filed by the Open Markets Institute and others to ban “exclusionary contracts” by monopolists and other “dominant firms” under the agency’s unfair methods of competition authority.[36] The precise scope is not entirely clear from the filing, but courts have held consistently that some conduct clearly covered (e.g., exclusive dealing) is properly evaluated under the rule of reason.[37]

The Supreme Court has been loath to bless per se rules by courts. Rules are blunt instruments and not appropriately applied to conduct that the effect of which is not so clearly negative. Except for the “obvious,” an analysis of whether a restraint is unreasonable is not a “simple matter” and “easy labels do not always supply ready answers.” [38] Over the decades, the Court has rebuked lower courts attempting to apply rules to conduct properly evaluated under the rule of reason.[39] Should the Commission attempt the same administratively, or if it attempts administratively to rewrite judicial precedents, it would be rewriting the antitrust law itself and tempting a similar fate.

[1] Promoting Competition in the American Economy, Exec. Order No. 14036, 86 Fed. Reg. 36987, 36993 (July 9, 2021), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2021-07-14/pdf/2021-15069.pdf (hereinafter “Biden Executive Order”).

[2]  Rohit Chopra & Lina M. Khan, The Case for “Unfair Methods of Competition” Rulemaking, 87 U. Chi. L. Rev. 357 (2020) (hereinafter “Chopra & Khan”).

[3]  Prepared Remarks of Commissioner Noah Joshua Phillips at FTC Non-Compete Clauses in the Workplace Workshop (Jan. 9, 2020, https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_statements/1561697/phillips_-_remarks_at_ftc_nca_workshop_1-9-20.pdf).

[4] See e.g., Maureen K. Ohlhausen & James Rill, Pushing the Limits? A Primer on FTC Competition Rulemaking, U.S. Chamber of Commerce (Aug. 12, 2021), https://www.uschamber.com/assets/archived/images/ftc_rulemaking_white_paper_aug12.pdf.

[5]  Richard J. Pierce Jr., Can the FTC Use Rulemaking to Change Antitrust Law?, Truth on the Market FTC UMC Rulemaking Symposium (April 28, 2022), https://truthonthemarket.com/2022/04/28/can-the-ftc-use-rulemaking-to-change-antitrust-law; Gus Hurwitz, Chevron and Administrative Antitrust, Redux, Truth on the Market FTC UMC Rulemaking Symposium (April 29, 2022), https://truthonthemarket.com/2022/04/29/chevron-and-administrative-antitrust-redux.

[6] See Chopra & Khan, supra n. 2, at 368.

[7] See e.g., Bd. of Trade v. United States, 246 U.S. 231, 238 (1918) (explaining that “the legality of an agreement . . . cannot be determined by so simple a test, as whether it restrains competition. Every agreement concerning trade … restrains. To bind, to restrain, is of their very essence”); Nat’l Soc’y of Prof’l Eng’rs v. United States, 435 U.S. 679, 687-88 (1978) (“restraint is the very essence of every contract; read literally, § 1 would outlaw the entire body of private contract law”).

[8] Standard Oil Co., v. United States, 221 U.S. 1 (1911).

[9] See Continental T.V. v. GTE Sylvania, 433 U.S. 36, 49 (1977) (“Since the early years of this century a judicial gloss on this statutory language has established the “rule of reason” as the prevailing standard of analysis…”). See also State Oil Co. v. Khan, 522 U.S. 3, 10 (1997) (“most antitrust claims are analyzed under a ‘rule of reason’ ”); Arizona v. Maricopa Cty. Med. Soc’y, 457 U.S. 332, 343 (1982) (“we have analyzed most restraints under the so-called ‘rule of reason’ ”).

[10] Chicago Board of Trade v. United States, 246 U.S. 231, 238 (1918).

[11] Dr. Miles Med. Co. v. John D. Park & Sons Co., 220 U.S. 373 (1911).

[12]  United States v. Socony-Vacuum Oil Co., 310 U.S. 150 (1940).

[13]  See e.g., United States v. Joyce, 895 F.3d 673, 677 (9th Cir. 2018); United States v. Bensinger, 430 F.2d 584, 589 (8th Cir. 1970).

[14]  United States v. Sealy, Inc., 388 U.S. 350 (1967).

[15]  Northern P. R. Co. v. United States, 356 U.S. 1 (1958).

[16]  NYNEX Corp. v. Discon, Inc., 525 U.S. 128 (1998).

[17]  Continental T.V. v. GTE Sylvania, 433 U.S. 36 (1977).

[18]  Broadcast Music, Inc. v. Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc. 441 U.S. 1 (1979).

[19] Jefferson Parish Hosp. Dist. No. 2 v. Hyde, 466 U.S. 2 (1984).

[20]  Northwest Wholesale Stationers, Inc. v. Pacific Stationery & Printing Co., 472 U.S. 284 (1985).

[21] State Oil Company v. Khan, 522 U.S. 3 (1997).

[22] Leegin Creative Leather Prods., Inc. v. PSKS, Inc. 551 U.S. 877, 885 (2007).

[23]  California Dental Association v. FTC, 526 U.S. 756, 770 (1999).

[24]  FTC v. Actavis, Inc., 570 U.S. 136 (2013).

[25] Am. Needle, Inc. v. Nat’l Football League, 560 U.S. 183, 187 (2010).

[26] Nat’l Collegiate Athletic Ass’n v. Alston, 141 S. Ct. 2141, 2155, 2021 WL 2519036 (2021).

[27] Texaco Inc. v. Dagher, 547 U.S. 1, 5 (2006).

[28]  Leegin Creative Leather Prods., Inc. v. PSKS, Inc. 551 U.S. 877, 885 (2007).

[29] Business Electronics Corp. v. Sharp Electronics Corp., 485 U.S. 717, 723 (1988).

[30]  Rohit Chopra & Lina M. Khan, The Case for “Unfair Methods of Competition” Rulemaking, 87 U. Chi. L. Rev. 357 (2020).

[31]  Leegin Creative Leather Prods., Inc. v. PSKS, Inc. 551 U.S. 877, 886-87 (2007).

[32] The FTC’s attempts to bring cases condemning conduct as a standalone Section 5 violation were not successful. See e.g., Boise Cascade Corp. v. FTC, 637 F.2d 573 (9th Cir. 1980); Airline Guides, Inc. v. FTC, 630 F.2d 920 (2d Cir. 1980); E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. v. FTC, 729 F.2d 128 (2d Cir. 1984).

[33] Biden Executive order, Section 5(h)(iii).

[34] Supreme Court precedent confirms that Section 5 of the FTC Act does not limit “unfair methods of competition” to practices that violate other antitrust laws (i.e., Sherman Act, Clayton Act). See e.g., FTC v. Ind. Fed’n of Dentists, 476 U.S. 447, 454 (1986); FTC v. Sperry & Hutchinson Co., 405 U.S. 233, 244 (1972); FTC v. Brown Shoe Co., 384 U.S. 316, 321 (1966); FTC v. Motion Picture Advert. Serv. Co., 344 U.S. 392, 394-95 (1953); FTC v. R.F. Keppel & Bros., Inc., 291 U.S. 304, 309-310 (1934).

[35] The agency also has recognized recently that such agreements are subject to the Rule of Reason under the FTC Act, which decisions was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Impax Labs., Inc. v. FTC, No. 19-60394 (5th Cir. 2021).

[36] Petition for Rulemaking to Prohibit Exclusionary Contracts by Open Market Institute et al., (July 21, 2021), https://www.regulations.gov/document/FTC-2021-0036-0002 (hereinafter “OMI Petition). 

[37] OMI Petition at 71 (“Given the real evidence of harm from certain exclusionary contracts and the specious justifications presented in their favor, the FTC should ban exclusivity with customers, distributors, or suppliers that results in substantial market foreclosure as per se illegal under the FTC Act. The present rule of reason governing exclusive dealing by all firms is infirm on multiple grounds.”) But see e.g., ZF Meritor, LLC v. Eaton Corp., 696 F.3d 254, 271 (3d Cir. 2012) (“Due to the potentially procompetitive benefits of exclusive dealing agreements, their legality is judged under the rule of reason.”).

[38]  Broadcast Music, Inc. v. Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc. 441 U.S. 1, 8-9 (1979).

[39] See e.g., Continental T.V. v. GTE Sylvania, 433 U.S. 36 (1977) (holding that nonprice vertical restraints have redeeming value and potential procompetitive justification and therefore are unsuitable for per se review); United States Steel Corp. v. Fortner Enters., Inc., 429 U.S. 610 (1977) (rejecting the assumption that tying lacked any purpose other than suppressing competition and recognized tying could be procompetitive); FTC v. Indiana Federation of Dentists, 476 U.S. 447 (1986) (declining to apply the per se rule even though the conduct at issue resembled a group boycott).

In Administrative Law, Antitrust & Competition, Federal Trade Commission, FTC UMC Rulemaking, Regulation, Resale Price Maintenance, Section 5, Symposia, Truth on the Market, Vertical Restraints , , , , , , ,
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What is the Appropriate Role for State Antitrust Enforcement?

Alden Abbott —  8 November 2021

In the U.S. system of dual federal and state sovereigns, a normative analysis reveals principles that could guide state antitrust-enforcement priorities, to promote complementarity in federal and state antitrust policy, and thereby advance consumer welfare.

Discussion

Positive analysis reveals that state antitrust enforcement is a firmly entrenched feature of American antitrust policy. The U.S. Supreme Court (1) has consistently held that federal antitrust law does not displace state antitrust law (see, for example, California v. ARC America Corp. (U.S., 1989) (“Congress intended the federal antitrust laws to supplement, not displace, state antitrust remedies”)); and (2) has upheld state antitrust laws even when they have some impact on interstate commerce (see, for example, Exxon Corp. v. Governor of Maryland (U.S., 1978)).

The normative question remains, however, as to what the appropriate relationship between federal and state antitrust enforcement should be. Should federal and state antitrust regimes be complementary, with state law enforcement enhancing the effectiveness of federal enforcement? Or should state antitrust enforcement compete with federal enforcement, providing an alternative “vision” of appropriate antitrust standards?

The generally accepted (until very recently) modern American consumer-welfare-centric antitrust paradigm (see here) points to the complementary approach as most appropriate. In other words, if antitrust is indeed the “magna carta” of American free enterprise (see United States v. Topco Associates, Inc., U.S. (U.S. 1972), and if consumer welfare is the paramount goal of antitrust (a position consistently held by the Supreme Court since Reiter v. Sonotone Corp., (U.S., 1979)), it follows that federal and state antitrust enforcement coexist best as complements, directed jointly at maximizing consumer-welfare enhancement. In recent decades it also generally has made sense for state enforcers to defer to U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) matter-specific consumer-welfare assessments. This conclusion follows from the federal agencies’ specialized resource advantage, reflected in large staffs of economic experts and attorneys with substantial industry knowledge.

The reality, nevertheless, is that while state enforcers often have cooperated with their federal colleagues on joint enforcement, state enforcement approaches historically have been imperfectly aligned with federal policy. That imperfect alignment has been at odds with consumer welfare in key instances. Certain state antitrust schemes, for example, continue to treat resale price maintenance (RPM)  as per se illegal (see, for example, here), a position inconsistent with the federal consumer welfare-centric rule of reason approach (see Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc. v. PSKS, Inc. (U.S., 2007)). The disparate treatment of RPM has a substantial national impact on business conduct, because commercially important states such as California and New York are among those that continue to flatly condemn RPM.

State enforcers also have from time to time sought to oppose major transactions that received federal antitrust clearance, such as several states’ unsuccessful opposition to the merger of Sprint and T-Mobile merger (see here). Although the states failed to block the merger, they did extract settlement concessions that imposed burdens on the merging parties, in addition to the divestiture requirements impose by the DOJ in settling the matter (see here). Inconsistencies between federal and state antitrust-enforcement decisions on cases of nationwide significance generate litigation waste and may detract from final resolutions that optimize consumer welfare.

If consumer-welfare optimization is their goal (which I believe it should be in an ideal world), state attorneys general should seek to direct their limited antitrust resources to their highest valued uses, rather than seeking to second guess federal antitrust policy and enforcement decisions.

An optimal approach might focus first and foremost on allocating state resources to combat primarily intrastate competitive harms that are clear and unequivocal (such as intrastate bid rigging, hard core price fixing, and horizontal market division). This could free up federal resources to focus on matters that are primarily interstate in nature, consistent with federalism. (In this regard, see a thoughtful proposal by D. Bruce Johnsen and Moin A. Yaha.)

Second, state enforcers could also devote some resources to assist federal enforcers in developing state-specific evidence in support of major national cases. (This would allow state attorneys general to publicize their “big case” involvement in a productive manner.)

Third, but not least, competition advocacy directed at the removal of anticompetitive state laws and regulations could prove an effective means of seeking to improve the competitive climate within individual states (see, for example, here). State antitrust enforcers could advance advocacy through amicus curiae briefs, and (where politically feasible) through interventions (perhaps informal) with peer officials who oversee regulation. Subject to this general guidance, the nature of state antitrust resource allocations would depend upon the specific competitive problems particular to each state.

Of course, in the real world, public choice considerations and rent seeking may at times influence antitrust enforcement decision-making by state (and federal) officials. Nonetheless, the capsule idealized normative summary of a suggested ideal state antitrust-enforcement protocol is useful in that it highlights how state enforcers could usefully complement (assumed) sound federal antitrust initiatives.

Great minds think alike. A well-crafted and much more detailed normative exploration of ideal state antitrust enforcement is found in a recently released Pelican Institute policy brief by Ted Bolema and Eric Peterson. Entitled The Proper Role for States in Antitrust Lawsuits, the brief concludes (in a manner consistent with my observations):

This review of cases and leading commentaries shows that states should focus their involvement in antitrust cases on instances where:

· they have unique interests, such as local price-fixing

· play a unique role, such as where they can develop evidence about how alleged anticompetitive behavior uniquely affects local markets

· they can bring additional resources to bear on existing federal litigation.

States can also provide a useful check on overly aggressive federal enforcement by providing courts with a traditional perspective on antitrust law — a role that could become even more important as federal agencies aggressively seek to expand their powers. All of these are important roles for states to play in antitrust enforcement, and translate into positive outcomes that directly benefit consumers.

Conversely, when states bring significant, novel antitrust lawsuits on their own, they don’t tend to benefit either consumers or constituents. These novel cases often move resources away from where they might be used more effectively, and states usually lose (as with the recent dismissal with prejudice of a state case against Facebook). Through more strategic antitrust engagement, with a focus on what states can do well and where they can make a positive difference antitrust enforcement, states would best serve the interests of their consumers, constituents, and taxpayers.

Conclusion

Under a consumer-welfare-centric regime, an appropriate role can be identified for state antitrust enforcement that would helpfully complement federal efforts in an optimal fashion. Unfortunately, in this tumultuous period of federal antitrust policy shifts, in which the central role of the consumer welfare standard has been called into question, it might appear fatuous to speculate on the ideal melding of federal and state approaches to antitrust administration. One should, however, prepare for the time when a more enlightened, economically informed approach will be reinstituted. In anticipation of that day, serious thinking about antitrust federalism should not be neglected.

In Antitrust & Competition, Federal Trade Commission, Federalism, Justice Department, Merger Guidelines, Resale Price Maintenance, Truth on the Market, Wireless , , , , , , , , , , ,
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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 European Commission’s Google Android decision takes a mistaken, ahistorical view of the smartphone market

Julian Morris —  23 July 2018

What to make of Wednesday’s decision by the European Commission alleging that Google has engaged in anticompetitive behavior? In this post, I contrast the European Commission’s (EC) approach to competition policy with US antitrust, briefly explore the history of smartphones and then discuss the ruling.

Asked about the EC’s decision the day it was announced, FTC Chairman Joseph Simons noted that, while the market is concentrated, Apple and Google “compete pretty heavily against each other” with their mobile operating systems, in stark contrast to the way the EC defined the market. Simons also stressed that for the FTC what matters is not the structure of the market per se but whether or not there is harm to the consumer. This again contrasts with the European Commission’s approach, which does not require harm to consumers. As Simons put it:

Once they [the European Commission] find that a company is dominant… that imposes upon the company kind of like a fairness obligation irrespective of what the effect is on the consumer. Our regulatory… our antitrust regime requires that there be a harm to consumer welfare — so the consumer has to be injured — so the two tests are a little bit different.

Indeed, and as the history below shows, the popularity of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating systems arose because they were superior products — not because of anticompetitive conduct on the part of either Apple or Google. On the face of it, the conduct of both Apple and Google has led to consumer benefits, not harms. So, from the perspective of U.S. antitrust authorities, there is no reason to take action.

Moreover, there is a danger that by taking action as the EU has done, competition and innovation will be undermined — which would be a perverse outcome indeed. These concerns were reflected in a statement by Senator Mike Lee (R-UT):

Today’s decision by the European Commission to fine Google over $5 billion and require significant changes to its business model to satisfy EC bureaucrats has the potential to undermine competition and innovation in the United States,” Sen. Lee said. “Moreover, the decision further demonstrates the different approaches to competition policy between U.S. and EC antitrust enforcers. As discussed at the hearing held last December before the Senate’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy & Consumer Rights, U.S. antitrust agencies analyze business practices based on the consumer welfare standard. This analytical framework seeks to protect consumers rather than competitors. A competitive marketplace requires strong antitrust enforcement. However, appropriate competition policy should serve the interests of consumers and not be used as a vehicle by competitors to punish their successful rivals.

Ironically, the fundamental basis for the Commission’s decision is an analytical framework developed by economists at Harvard in the 1950s, which presumes that the structure of a market determines the conduct of the participants, which in turn presumptively affects outcomes for consumers. This “structure-conduct-performance” paradigm has been challenged both theoretically and empirically (and by “challenged,” I mean “demolished”).

Maintaining, as EC Commissioner Vestager has, that “What would serve competition is to have more players,” is to adopt a presumption regarding competition rooted in the structure of the market, without sufficient attention to the facts on the ground. As French economist Jean Tirole noted in his Nobel Prize lecture:

Economists accordingly have advocated a case-by-case or “rule of reason” approach to antitrust, away from rigid “per se” rules (which mechanically either allow or prohibit certain behaviors, ranging from price-fixing agreements to resale price maintenance). The economists’ pragmatic message however comes with a double social responsibility. First, economists must offer a rigorous analysis of how markets work, taking into account both the specificities of particular industries and what regulators do and do not know….

Second, economists must participate in the policy debate…. But of course, the responsibility here goes both ways. Policymakers and the media must also be willing to listen to economists.

In good Tirolean fashion, we begin with an analysis of how the market for smartphones developed. What quickly emerges is that the structure of the market is a function of intense competition, not its absence. And, by extension, mandating a different structure will likely impede competition, or, at the very least, will not likely contribute to it.

A brief history of smartphone competition

In 2006, Nokia’s N70 became the first smartphone to sell more than a million units. It was a beautiful device, with a simple touch screen interface and real push buttons for numbers. The following year, Apple released its first iPhone. It sold 7 million units — about the same as Nokia’s N95 and slightly less than LG’s Shine. Not bad, but paltry compared to the sales of Nokia’s 1200 series phones, which had combined sales of over 250 million that year — about twice the total of all smartphone sales in 2007.

By 2017, smartphones had come to dominate the market, with total sales of over 1.5 billion. At the same time, the structure of the market has changed dramatically. In the first quarter of 2018, Apple’s iPhone X and iPhone 8 were the two best-selling smartphones in the world. In total, Apple shipped just over 52 million phones, accounting for 14.5% of the global market. Samsung, which has a wider range of devices, sold even more: 78 million phones, or 21.7% of the market. At third and fourth place were Huawei (11%) and Xiaomi (7.5%). Nokia and LG didn’t even make it into the top 10, with market shares of only 3% and 1% respectively.

Several factors have driven this highly dynamic market. Dramatic improvements in cellular data networks have played a role. But arguably of greater importance has been the development of software that offers consumers an intuitive and rewarding experience.

Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating systems have proven to be enormously popular among both users and app developers. This has generated synergies — or what economists call network externalities — as more apps have been developed, so more people are attracted to the ecosystem and vice versa, leading to a virtuous circle that benefits both users and app developers.

By contrast, Nokia’s early smartphones, including the N70 and N95, ran Symbian, the operating system developed for Psion’s handheld devices, which had a clunkier user interface and was more difficult to code — so it was less attractive to both users and developers. In addition, Symbian lacked an effective means of solving the problem of fragmentation of the operating system across different devices, which made it difficult for developers to create apps that ran across the ecosystem — something both Apple (through its closed system) and Google (through agreements with carriers) were able to address. Meanwhile, Java’s MIDP used in LG’s Shine, and its successor J2ME imposed restrictions on developers (such as prohibiting access to files, hardware, and network connections) that seem to have made it less attractive than Android.

The relative superiority of their operating systems enabled Apple and the manufacturers of Android-based phones to steal a march on the early leaders in the smartphone revolution.

The fact that Google allows smartphone manufacturers to install Android for free, distributes Google Play and other apps in a free bundle, and pays such manufacturers for preferential treatment for Google Search, has also kept the cost of Android-based smartphones down. As a result, Android phones are the cheapest on the market, providing a powerful experience for as little as $50. It is reasonable to conclude from this that innovation, driven by fierce competition, has led to devices, operating systems, and apps that provide enormous benefits to consumers.

The Commission decision would harm device manufacturers, app developers and consumers

The EC’s decision seems to disregard the history of smartphone innovation and competition and their ongoing consequences. As Dirk Auer explains, the Open Handset Alliance (OHA) was created specifically to offer an effective alternative to Apple’s iPhone — and it worked. Indeed, it worked so spectacularly that Android is installed on about 80% of all new phones. This success was the result of several factors that the Commission now seeks to undermine:

First, in order to maintain order within the Android universe, and thereby ensure that apps developed for Android would function on the vast majority of Android devices, Google and the OHA sought to limit the extent to which Android “forks” could be created. (Apple didn’t face this problem because its source code is proprietary, so cannot be modified by third-party developers.) One way Google does this is by imposing restrictions on the licensing of its proprietary apps, such as the Google Play store (a repository of apps, similar to Apple’s App Store).

Device manufacturers that don’t conform to these restrictions may still build devices with their forked version of Android — but without those Google apps. Indeed, Amazon chooses to develop a non-conforming version of Android and built its own app repository for its Fire devices (though it is still possible to add the Google Play Store). That strategy seems to be working for Amazon in the tablet market; in 2017 it rose past Samsung to become the second biggest manufacturer of tablets worldwide, after Apple.

Second, in order to be able to offer Android for free to smartphone manufacturers, Google sought to develop unique revenue streams (because, although the software is offered for free, it turns out that software developers generally don’t work for free). The main way Google did this was by requiring manufacturers that choose to install Google Play also to install its browser (Chrome) and search tools, which generate revenue from advertising. At the same time, Google kept its platform open by permitting preloads of rivals’ apps and creating a marketplace where rivals can also reach scale. Mozilla’s Firefox browser, for example, has been downloaded over 100 million times on Android.

The importance of these factors to the success of Android is acknowledged by the EC. But instead of treating them as legitimate business practices that enabled the development of high-quality, low-cost smartphones and a universe of apps that benefits billions of people, the Commission simply asserts that they are harmful, anticompetitive practices.

For example, the Commission asserts that

In order to be able to pre-install on their devices Google’s proprietary apps, including the Play Store and Google Search, manufacturers had to commit not to develop or sell even a single device running on an Android fork. The Commission found that this conduct was abusive as of 2011, which is the date Google became dominant in the market for app stores for the Android mobile operating system.

This is simply absurd, to say nothing of ahistorical. As noted, the restrictions on Android forks plays an important role in maintaining the coherency of the Android ecosystem. If device manufacturers were able to freely install Google apps (and other apps via the Play Store) on devices running problematic Android forks that were unable to run the apps properly, consumers — and app developers — would be frustrated, Google’s brand would suffer, and the value of the ecosystem would be diminished. Extending this restriction to all devices produced by a specific manufacturer, regardless of whether they come with Google apps preinstalled, reinforces the importance of the prohibition to maintaining the coherency of the ecosystem.

It is ridiculous to say that something (efforts to rein in Android forking) that made perfect sense until 2011 and that was central to the eventual success of Android suddenly becomes “abusive” precisely because of that success — particularly when the pre-2011 efforts were often viewed as insufficient and unsuccessful (a January 2012 Guardian Technology Blog post, “How Google has lost control of Android,” sums it up nicely).

Meanwhile, if Google is unable to tie pre-installation of its search and browser apps to the installation of its app store, then it will have less financial incentive to continue to maintain the Android ecosystem. Or, more likely, it will have to find other ways to generate revenue from the sale of devices in the EU — such as charging device manufacturers for Android or Google Play. The result is that consumers will be harmed, either because the ecosystem will be degraded, or because smartphones will become more expensive.

The troubling absence of Apple from the Commission’s decision

In addition, the EC’s decision is troublesome in other ways. First, for its definition of the market. The ruling asserts that “Through its control over Android, Google is dominant in the worldwide market (excluding China) for licensable smart mobile operating systems, with a market share of more than 95%.” But “licensable smart mobile operating systems” is a very narrow definition, as it necessarily precludes operating systems that are not licensable — such as Apple’s iOS and RIM’s Blackberry OS. Since Apple has nearly 25% of the market share of smartphones in Europe, the European Commission has — through its definition of the market — presumed away the primary source of effective competition. As Pinar Akman has noted:

How can Apple compete with Google in the market as defined by the Commission when Apple allows only itself to use its operating system only on devices that Apple itself manufactures?

The EU then invents a series of claims regarding the lack of competition with Apple:

  • end user purchasing decisions are influenced by a variety of factors (such as hardware features or device brand), which are independent from the mobile operating system;

It is not obvious that this is evidence of a lack of competition. A better explanation is that the EU’s narrow definition of the market is defective. In fact, one could easily draw the opposite conclusion of that drawn by the Commission: the fact that purchasing decisions are driven by various factors suggests that there is substantial competition, with phone manufacturers seeking to design phones that offer a range of features, on a number of dimensions, to best capture diverse consumer preferences. They are able to do this in large part precisely because consumers are able to rely upon a generally similar operating system and continued access to the apps that they have downloaded. As Tim Cook likes to remind his investors, Apple is quite successful at targeting “Android switchers” to switch to iOS.

 

  • Apple devices are typically priced higher than Android devices and may therefore not be accessible to a large part of the Android device user base;

 

And yet, in the first quarter of 2018, Apple phones accounted for five of the top ten selling smartphones worldwide. Meanwhile, several competing phones, including the fifth and sixth best-sellers, Samsung’s Galaxy S9 and S9+, sell for similar prices to the most expensive iPhones. And a refurbished iPhone 6 can be had for less than $150.

 

  • Android device users face switching costs when switching to Apple devices, such as losing their apps, data and contacts, and having to learn how to use a new operating system;

 

This is, of course, true for any system switch. And yet the growing market share of Apple phones suggests that some users are willing to part with those sunk costs. Moreover, the increasing predominance of cloud-based and cross-platform apps, as well as Apple’s own “Move to iOS” Android app (which facilitates the transfer of users’ data from Android to iOS), means that the costs of switching border on trivial. As mentioned above, Tim Cook certainly believes in “Android switchers.”

 

  • even if end users were to switch from Android to Apple devices, this would have limited impact on Google’s core business. That’s because Google Search is set as the default search engine on Apple devices and Apple users are therefore likely to continue using Google Search for their queries.

 

This is perhaps the most bizarre objection of them all. The fact that Apple chooses to install Google search as the default demonstrates that consumers prefer that system over others. Indeed, this highlights a fundamental problem with the Commission’s own rationale, As Akman notes:

It is interesting that the case appears to concern a dominant undertaking leveraging its dominance from a market in which it is dominant (Google Play Store) into another market in which it is also dominant (internet search). As far as this author is aware, most (if not all?) cases of tying in the EU to date concerned tying where the dominant undertaking leveraged its dominance in one market to distort or eliminate competition in an otherwise competitive market.

Conclusion

As the foregoing demonstrates, the EC’s decision is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature and evolution of the market for smartphones and associated applications. The statement by Commissioner Vestager quoted above — that “What would serve competition is to have more players” — belies this misunderstanding and highlights the erroneous assumptions underpinning the Commission’s analysis, which is wedded to a theory of market competition that was long ago thrown out by economists.

And, thankfully, it appears that the FTC Chairman is aware of at least some of the flaws in the EC’s conclusions.

Google will undoubtedly appeal the Commission’s decision. For the sakes of the millions of European consumers who rely on Android-based phones and the millions of software developers who provide Android apps, let’s hope that they succeed.

In Amazon, Antitrust & Competition, Apple, China, Economic Theory, European Union, Google, International, Platforms, Resale Price Maintenance, Truth on the Market, Tying , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Global Antitrust Institute Points the Way Toward Sounder Japanese Antitrust Guidelines

Alden Abbott —  4 May 2017

The indefatigable (and highly talented) scriveners at the Scalia Law School’s Global Antitrust Institute (GAI) once again have offered a trenchant law and economics assessment that, if followed, would greatly improve a foreign jurisdiction’s competition law guidance. This latest assessment, which is compelling and highly persuasive, is embodied in a May 4 GAI Commentary on the Japan Fair Trade Commission’s (JFTC’s) consultation on its Draft Guidelines Concerning Distribution Systems and Business Practices Under the Antimonopoly Act (Draft Guidelines). In particular, the Commentary highlights four major concerns with the Draft Guidelines’ antitrust analysis dealing with conduct involving multi-sided platforms, resale price maintenance (RPM), refusals to deal, tying, and other vertical restraints. It also offers guidance on the appropriate analysis of network effects in multi-sided platforms. After summarizing these five key points, I offer some concluding observations on the potential benefit for competition policy worldwide offered by the GAI’s commentaries on foreign jurisdictions’ antitrust guidance.

  1. Resale price maintenance. Though the Draft Guidelines appear to apply a “rule of reason” or effects-based approach to most vertical restraints, Part I.3 and Part I, Chapter 1 carve out resale price maintenance (RPM) practices on the ground that they “usually have significant anticompetitive effects and, as a general rule, they tend to impede fair competition.” Given the economic theory and empirical evidence showing that vertical restraints, including RPM, rarely harm competition and often benefit consumers, the Commentary urges the JFTC to reconsider its approach and instead apply a rule of reason or effects-based analysis to all vertical restraints, including RPM, under which restraints are condemned only if any anticompetitive harm they cause outweighs any procompetitive benefits they create.
  2. Effects of vertical restraints. The Draft Guidelines identify two types of effects of vertical non-price restraints, “foreclosures effects” and “price maintenance effects.” The Commentary urges the JFTC to require proof of actual anticompetitive effects for both competition and unfair trade practice violations, just as it requires proof of procompetitive effects. It also recommends that the agency take cognizance only of substantial foreclosure effects, that is, “foreclosure of a sufficient share of distribution so that a manufacturer’s rivals are forced to operate at a significant cost disadvantage for a significant period of time.” The Commentary explains that a “consensus has emerged that a necessary condition for anticompetitive harm arising from allegedly exclusionary agreements is that the contracts foreclose rivals from a share of distribution sufficient to achieve minimum efficient scale.” The Commentary notes that “the critical market share foreclosure rate should depend upon the minimum efficient scale of production. Unless there are very large economies of scale in manufacturing, the minimum foreclosure of distribution necessary for an anticompetitive effect in most cases would be substantially greater than 40 percent. Therefore, 40 percent should be thought of as a useful screening device or ‘safe harbor,’ not an indication that anticompetitive effects are likely to exist above this level.”

The Commentary also strongly urges the JFTC to include an analysis of the counterfactual world, i.e., to identify “the difference between the percentage share of distribution foreclosed by the allegedly exclusionary agreements or conduct and the share of distribution in the absence of such an agreement.” It explains that such an approach to assessing foreclosure isolates any true competitive effect of the allegedly exclusionary agreement from other factors.

The Commentary also recommends that the JFTC explicitly recognize that evidence of new or expanded entry during the period of the alleged abuse can be a strong indication that the restraint at issue did not foreclose competition or have an anticompetitive effect. It stresses that, with respect to price increases, it is important to recognize and consider other factors (including changes in the product and changes in demand) that may explain higher prices.

  1. Unilateral refusals to deal and forced sharing. Part II, Chapter 3 of the Draft Guidelines would impose unfair trade practice liability for unilateral refusals to deal that “tend to make it difficult for the refused competitor to carry on normal business activities.” The Commentary strongly urges the JFTC to reconsider this vague and unclear approach and instead recognize the numerous significant concerns with forced sharing.

For example, while a firm’s competitors may want to use a particular good or technology in their own products, there are few situations, if any, in which access to a particular good is necessary to compete in a market. Indeed, one of the main reasons not to impose liability for unilateral, unconditional refusals to deal is “pragmatic in nature and concerns the limited abilities of competition authorities and courts to decide whether a facility is truly non-replicable or merely a competitive advantage.” For one thing, there are “no reliable economic or evidential techniques for testing whether a facility can be duplicated,” and it is often “difficult to distinguish situations in which customers simply have a strong preference for one facility from situations in which objective considerations render their choice unavoidable.”

Furthermore, the Commentary notes that forced competition based on several firms using the same inputs may actually preserve monopolies by removing the requesting party’s incentive to develop its own inputs. Consumer welfare is not enhanced only by price competition; it may be significantly improved by the development of new products for which there is an unsatisfied demand. If all competitors share the same facilities this will occur much less quickly if at all. In addition, if competitors can anticipate that they will be allowed to share the same facilities and technologies, the incentives to develop new products is diminished. Also, sharing of a monopoly among several competitors does not in itself increase competition unless it leads to improvements in price and output, i.e., nothing is achieved in terms of enhancing consumer welfare. Competition would be improved only if the terms upon which access is offered allow the requesting party to effectively compete with the dominant firm on the relevant downstream market. This raises the issue of whether the dominant firm is entitled to charge a monopoly rate or whether, in addition to granting access, there is a duty to offer terms that allow efficient rivals to make a profit.

  1. Fair and free competition. The Draft JFTC Guidelines refer throughout to the goal of promoting “fair and free competition.” Part I.3 in particular provides that “[i]f a vertical restraint tends to impede fair competition, such restraint is prohibited as an unfair trade practice.” The Commentary urges the JFTC to adopt an effects-based approach similar to that adopted by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission in its 2015 Policy Statement on Unfair Methods of Competition. Tying unfairness to antitrust principles ensures the alignment of unfairness with the economic principles underlying competition laws. Enforcement of unfair methods of competition statutes should focus on harm to competition, while taking into account possible efficiencies and business justifications. In short, while unfairness can be a useful tool in reaching conduct that harms competition but is not within the scope of the antitrust laws, it is imperative that unfairness be linked to the fundamental goals of the antitrust laws.
  2. Network effects in multi-sided platforms. With respect to multi-sided platforms in particular, the Commentary urges that the JFTC avoid any presumption that network effects create either market power or barriers to entry. In lieu of such a presumption, the Commentary recommends a fact-specific case-by-case analysis with empirical backing on the presence and effect of any network effects. Network effects occur when the value of a good or service increases as the number of people who use it grows. Network effects are generally beneficial. While there is some dispute over whether and under what conditions they might also raise exclusionary concerns, the Commentary notes that “transactions involving complementary products (indirect network effects) fully internalize the benefits of consuming complementary goods and do not present an exclusionary concern.” The Commentary explains that, “[a]s in all analysis of network effects, the standard assumption that quantity alone determines the strength of the effect is likely mistaken.” Rather, to the extent that advertisers, for example, care about end users, they care about many of their characteristics. An increase in the number of users who are looking only for information and never to purchase goods may be of little value to advertisers. “Assessing network or scale effects is extremely difficult in search engine advertising [for example], and scale may not even correlate with increased value over some ranges of size.”
  3. Concluding thoughts. Implicit in the overall approach of this latest GAI Commentary, and in many other GAI assessments of foreign jurisdictions’ proposed antitrust guidance, is the need for regulatory humility, sound empiricism, and a focus on consumer welfare. Antitrust enforcement policies that blandly accept esoteric theories of anticompetitive behavior and ignore actual economic effects are welfare reducing, not welfare enhancing. The very good analytical work carried out by GAI helps competition authorities keep this reality in mind, and merits close attention.
In Antitrust & Competition, Barriers to Entry, Economic Theory, Federal Trade Commission, International, Platforms, Resale Price Maintenance, Truth on the Market, Tying, Vertical Restraints , , ,
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Global Antitrust Institute Propounds Recommendations for Reform of Japan’s Administrative Surcharge System

Alden Abbott —  8 August 2016

On August 6, the Global Antitrust Institute (the GAI, a division of the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University) submitted a filing (GAI filing or filing) in response to the Japan Fair Trade Commission’s (JFTC’s) consultation on reforms to the Japanese system of administrative surcharges assessed for competition law violations (see here for a link to the GAI’s filing).  The GAI’s outstanding filing was authored by GAI Director Koren Wong Ervin and Professors Douglas Ginsburg, Joshua Wright, and Bruce Kobayashi of the Scalia Law School.

The GAI filing’s three sets of major recommendations, set forth in italics, are as follows:

(1)   Due Process

 While the filing recognizes that the process may vary depending on the jurisdiction, the filing strongly urges the JFTC to adopt the core features of a fair and transparent process, including:   

(a)        Legal representation for parties under investigation, allowing the participation of local and foreign counsel of the parties’ choosing;

(b)        Notifying the parties of the legal and factual bases of an investigation and sharing the evidence on which the agency relies, including any exculpatory evidence and excluding only confidential business information;

(c)        Direct and meaningful engagement between the parties and the agency’s investigative staff and decision-makers;

(d)        Allowing the parties to present their defense to the ultimate decision-makers; and

(e)        Ensuring checks and balances on agency decision-making, including meaningful access to independent courts.

(2)   Calculation of Surcharges

The filing agrees with the JFTC that Japan’s current inflexible system of surcharges is unlikely to accurately reflect the degree of economic harm caused by anticompetitive practices.  As a general matter, the filing recommends that under Japan’s new surcharge system, surcharges imposed should rely upon economic analysis, rather than using sales volume as a proxy, to determine the harm caused by violations of Japan’s Antimonopoly Act.   

In that light, and more specifically, the filing therefore recommends that the JFTC limit punitive surcharges to matters in which:

(a)          the antitrust violation is clear (i.e., if considered at the time the conduct is undertaken, and based on existing laws, rules, and regulations, a reasonable party should expect the conduct at issue would likely be illegal) and is without any plausible efficiency justification;

(b)          it is feasible to articulate and calculate the harm caused by the violation;

(c)           the measure of harm calculated is the basis for any fines or penalties imposed; and

(d)          there are no alternative remedies that would adequately deter future violations of the law. 

In the alternative, and at the very least, the filing urges the JFTC to expand the circumstances under which it will not seek punitive surcharges to include two types of conduct that are widely recognized as having efficiency justifications:

  • unilateral conduct, such as refusals to deal and discriminatory dealing; and
  • vertical restraints, such as exclusive dealing, tying and bundling, and resale price maintenance.

(3)   Settlement Process

The filing recommends that the JFTC consider incorporating safeguards that prevent settlement provisions unrelated to the violation and limit the use of extended monitoring programs.  The filing notes that consent decrees and commitments extracted to settle a case too often end up imposing abusive remedies that undermine the welfare-enhancing goals of competition policy.  An agency’s ability to obtain in terrorem concessions reflects a party’s weighing of the costs and benefits of litigating versus the costs and benefits of acquiescing in the terms sought by the agency.  When firms settle merely to avoid the high relative costs of litigation and regulatory procedures, an agency may be able to extract more restrictive terms on firm behavior by entering into an agreement than by litigating its accusations in a court.  In addition, while settlements may be a more efficient use of scarce agency resources, the savings may come at the cost of potentially stunting the development of the common law arising through adjudication.

In sum, the latest filing maintains the GAI’s practice of employing law and economics analysis to recommend reforms in the imposition of competition law remedies (see here, here, and here for summaries of prior GAI filings that are in the same vein).  The GAI’s dispassionate analysis highlights principles of universal application – principles that may someday point the way toward greater economically-sensible convergence among national antitrust remedial systems.

In Antitrust & Competition, Constitutional Law, Exclusive Dealing, Intellectual Property, Patent, Resale Price Maintenance, Supreme Court, Truth on the Market, Tying, Vertical Restraints , , , ,
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Global Antitrust Institute Comments on Chinese Draft Antitrust Guidelines Regarding Disgorgement and Fines Have Broader Implications for Sound Antitrust Enforcement Policy

Alden Abbott —  12 July 2016

The Global Antitrust Institute (GAI) at George Mason University Law School (officially the “Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University” as of July 1st) is doing an outstanding job at providing sound law and economics-centered advice to foreign governments regarding their proposed antitrust laws and guidelines.

The GAI’s latest inspired filing, released on July 9 (July 9 Comment), concerns guidelines on the disgorgement of illegal gains and punitive fines for antitrust violations proposed by China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) – a powerful agency that has broad planning and administrative authority over the Chinese economy.  With respect to antitrust, the NDRC is charged with investigating price-related anticompetitive behavior and abuses of dominance.  (China has two other antitrust agencies, the State Administration of Industry and Commerce (SAIC) that investigates non-price-related monopolistic behavior, and the Ministry of Foreign Commerce (MOFCOM) that reviews mergers.)  The July 9 Comment stresses that the NDRC’s proposed Guidelines call for Chinese antitrust enforcers to impose punitive financial sanctions on conduct that is not necessarily anticompetitive and may be efficiency-enhancing – an approach that is contrary to sound economics.  In so doing, the July 9 Comment summarizes the economics of penalties, recommends that the NDRD employ economic analysis in considering sanctions, and provides specific suggested changes to the NDRC’s draft.  The July 9 Comment provides a helpful summary of its analysis:

We respectfully recommend that the Draft Guidelines be revised to limit the application of disgorgement (or the confiscating of illegal gain) and punitive fines to matters in which: (1) the antitrust violation is clear (i.e., if measured at the time the conduct is undertaken, and based on existing laws, rules, and regulations, a reasonable party should expect that the conduct at issue would likely be found to be illegal) and without any plausible efficiency justifications; (2) it is feasible to articulate and calculate the harm caused by the violation; (3) the measure of harm calculated is the basis for any fines or penalties imposed; and (4) there are no alternative remedies that would adequately deter future violations of the law.  In the alternative, and at the very least, we strongly urge the NDRC to expand the circumstances under which the Anti-Monopoly Enforcement Agencies (AMEAs) will not seek punitive sanctions such as disgorgement or fines to include two conduct categories that are widely recognized as having efficiency justifications: unilateral conduct such as refusals to deal and discriminatory dealing and vertical restraints such as exclusive dealing, tying and bundling, and resale price maintenance.

We also urge the NDRC to clarify how the total penalty, including disgorgement and fines, relate to the specific harm at issue and the theoretical optimal penalty.  As explained below, the economic analysis determines the total optimal penalties, which includes any disgorgement and fines.  When fines are calculated consistent with the optimal penalty framework, disgorgement should be a component of the total fine as opposed to an additional penalty on top of an optimal fine.  If disgorgement is an additional penalty, then any fines should be reduced relative to the optimal penalty.

Lastly, we respectfully recommend that the AMEAs rely on economic analysis to determine the harm caused by any violation.  When using proxies for the harm caused by the violation, such as using the illegal gains from the violations as the basis for fines or disgorgement, such calculations should be limited to those costs and revenues that are directly attributable to a clear violation.  This should be done in order to ensure that the resulting fines or disgorgement track the harms caused by the violation.  To that end, we recommend that the Draft Guidelines explicitly state that the AMEAs will use economic analysis to determine the but-for world, and will rely wherever possible on relevant market data.  When the calculation of illegal gain is unclear due to a lack of relevant information, we strongly recommend that the AMEAs refrain from seeking disgorgement.

The lack of careful economic analysis of the implications of disgorgement (which is really a financial penalty, viewed through an economic lens) is not confined to Chinese antitrust enforcers.  In recent years, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has shown an interest in more broadly employing disgorgement as an antitrust remedy, without fully weighing considerations of error costs and the deterrence of efficient business practices (see, for example, here and here).  Relatedly, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division has determined that disgorgement may be invoked as a remedy for a Sherman Antitrust Act violation, a position confirmed by a lower court (see, for example, here).  The general principles informing the thoughtful analysis delineated in the July 9 Comment could profitably be consulted by FTC and DOJ policy officials should they choose to reexamine their approach to disgorgement and other financial penalties.

More broadly, emphasizing the importantance of optimal sanctions and the economic analysis of business conduct, the July 9 Comment is in line with a cost-benefit framework for antitrust enforcement policy, rooted in decision theory – an approach that all antitrust agencies (including United States enforcers) should seek to adopt (see also here for an evaluation of the implicit decision-theoretic approach to antitrust employed by the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts).  Let us hope that DOJ, the FTC, and other government antitrust authorities around the world take to heart the benefits of decision-theoretic antitrust policy in evaluating (and, as appropriate, reforming) their enforcement norms.  Doing so would promote beneficial international convergence toward better enforcement policy and redound to the economic benefit of both producers and consumers.

In Antitrust & Competition, Antitrust Division, China, Constitutional Law, Economic Theory, Error Costs, Exclusive Dealing, Federal Trade Commission, International, Justice Department, Resale Price Maintenance, Supreme Court, Truth on the Market, Tying, Vertical Restraints , , , , , , ,
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Reed on the Apple e-books case: “We can remember it for you wholesale” – why the model matters in Apple e-books

totmauthor —  16 February 2016

By Morgan Reed

In Philip K. Dick’s famous short story that inspired the Total Recall movies, a company called REKAL could implant “extra-factual memories” into the minds of anyone. That technology may be fictional, but the Apple eBooks case suggests that the ability to insert extra-factual memories into the courts already exists.

The Department of Justice, the Second Circuit majority, and even the Solicitor General’s most recent filing opposing cert. all assert that the large publishing houses invented a new “agency” business model as a way to provide leverage to raise prices, and then pushed it on Apple.

The basis of the government’s claim is that Apple had “just two months to develop a business model” once Steve Jobs had approved the “iBookstore” ebook marketplace. The government implies that Apple was a company so obviously old, inept, and out-of-ideas that it had to rely on the big publishers for an innovative business model to help it enter the market. And the court bought it “wholesale,” as it were. (Describing Apple’s “a-ha” moment when it decided to try the agency model, the court notes, “[n]otably, the possibility of an agency arrangement was first mentioned by Hachette and HarperCollins as a way ‘to fix Amazon pricing.'”)

The claim has no basis in reality, of course. Apple had embraced the agency model long before, as it sought to disrupt the way software was distributed. In just the year prior, Apple had successfully launched the app store, a ground-breaking example of the agency model that started with only 500 apps but had grown to more than 100,000 in 12 months. This was an explosion of competition — remember, nearly all of those apps represented a new publisher: 100,000 new potential competitors.

So why would the government create such an absurd fiction?

Because without that fiction, Apple moves from “conspirator” to “competitor.” Instead of anticompetitive scourge, it becomes a disruptor, bringing new competition to an existing market with a single dominant player (Amazon Kindle), and shattering the control held by the existing publishing industry.

More than a decade before the App Store, software developers had observed that the wholesale model for distribution created tremendous barriers for entry, increased expense, and incredible delays in getting to market. Developers were beholden to a tiny number of physical stores that sold shelf space and required kickbacks (known as spiffs). Today, there are legions of developers producing App content, and developers have earned more than $10 billion in sales through Apple’s App Store. Anyone with an App idea or, moreover, an idea for a book, can take it straight to consumers rather than having to convince a publisher, wholesaler or retailer that it is worth purchasing and marketing.

This disintermediation is of critical benefit to consumers — and yet the Second Circuit missed it. The court chose instead to focus on the claim that if the horizontal competitors conspired, then Apple, which had approached the publishers to ensure initial content would exist at time of launch, was complicit. Somehow Apple could be a horizontal competitor even through it wasn’t part of the publishing industry!

There was another significant consumer and competitive benefit from Apple’s entry into the market and the shift to the agency model. Prior to the Apple iPad, truly interactive books were mostly science fiction, and the few pilot projects that existed had little consumer traction. Amazon, which held 90% of the electronic books market, chose to focus on creating technology that mirrored the characteristics of reading on paper: a black and white screen and the barest of annotation capabilities.

When the iPad was released, Apple sent up a signal flag that interactivity would be a focal point of the technology by rolling out tools that would allow developers to access the iPad’s accelerometer and touch sensitive screen to create an immersive experience. The result? Products that help children with learning disabilities, and competitors fighting back with improved products.

Finally, Apple’s impact on consumers and competition was profound. Amazon switched, as well, and the nascent world of self publishing exploded. Books like Hugh Howey’s Wool series (soon to be a major motion picture) were released as smaller chunks for only 99 cents. And “the Martian,” which is up for several Academy Awards found a home and an audience long before any major publisher came calling.

We all need to avoid the trip to REKAL and remember what life was like before the advent of the agency model. Because if the Second Circuit decision is allowed to stand, the implication for any outside competitor looking to disrupt a market is as grim and barren as the surface of Mars.

In Amazon, Antitrust & Competition, Apple, Monopolization, Platforms, Resale Price Maintenance, Supreme Court, Symposium on the Apple E-Books Antitrust Case: Implications for Antitrust and for the Economy, Telecommunications, Vertical Restraints, Wireless , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Hazlett on the Apple e-books case: The Apple case is a throwback to Dr. Miles, and that’s not a good thing

totmauthor —  16 February 2016

By Thomas Hazlett

The Apple e-books case is throwback to Dr. Miles, the 1911 Supreme Court decision that managed to misinterpret the economics of competition and so thwart productive activity for over a century. The active debate here at TOTM reveals why.

The District Court and Second Circuit have employed a per se rule to find that the Apple e-books agreement with five major publishers constituted a violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act. Citing the active cooperation in contract negotiations involving multiple horizontal competitors (publishers) and the Apple offer, which appears to have raised prices paid for e-books, the conclusion that this is a case of horizontal collusion appears a slam dunk to some. “Try as one may,” writes Jonathan Jacobson, “it is hard to find an easier antitrust case than United States v. Apple.”

I’m guessing that that is what Charles Evans Hughes thought about the Dr. Miles case in 1911.

Upon scrutiny, the apparent simplicity in either instance evaporates. Dr. Miles has been revised as per GTE Sylvania, Leegin, and (thanks, Keith Hylton) Business Electronics v. Sharp Electronics. Let’s here look at the pending Apple dispute.

First, the Second Circuit verdict was not only a split decision on application of the per se rule, the dissent ably stated a case for why the Apple e-books deal should be regarded as pro-competitive and, thus, legal.

Second, the price increase cited as determinative occurred in a two-sided market; the fact asserted does not establish a monopolistic restriction of output. Further analysis, as called for under the rule of reason, is needed to flesh out the totality of the circumstances and the net impact of the Apple-publisher agreement on consumer welfare. That includes evidence regarding what happens to total revenues as market structure and prices change.

Third, a new entrant emerged as per the actions undertaken — the agreements pointedly did not “lack…. any redeeming virtue” (Northwest Wholesale Stationers, 1985), the justification for per se illegality. The fact that a new platform — Apple challenging Amazon’s e-book dominance — was both cause and effect of the alleged anti-competitive behavior is a textbook example of ancillarity. The “naked restraints” that publishers might have imposed had Apple not brought new products and alternative content distribution channels into the mix thus dressed up. It is argued by some that the clothes were skimpy. But that fashion statement is what a rule of reason analysis is needed to determine.

Fourth, the successful market foray that came about in the two-sided e-book market is a competitive victory not to be trifled. As the Supreme Court determined in Leegin: A “per se rule cannot be justified by the possibility of higher prices absent a further showing of anticompetitive conduct. The antitrust laws are designed to protect interbrand competition from which lower prices can later result.” The Supreme Court need here overturn U.S. v. Apple as decided by the Second Circuit in order that the “later result” be reasonably examined.

Fifth, lock-in is avoided with a rule of reason. As the Supreme Court said in Leegin:

As courts gain experience considering the effects of these restraints by applying the rule of reason… they can establish the litigation structure to ensure the rule operates to eliminate anticompetitive restraints….

The lock-in, conversely, comes with per se rules that nip the analysis in the bud, assuming simplicity where complexity obtains.

Sixth, Judge Denise Cote, who issued the District Court ruling against Apple, shows why the rule of reason is needed to counter her per se approach:

Here we have every necessary component: with Apple’s active encouragement and assistance, the Publisher Defendants agreed to work together to eliminate retail price competition and raise e-book prices, and again with Apple’s knowing and active participation, they brought their scheme to fruition.

But that cannot be “every necessary component.” It is not in Apple’s interest to raise prices, but to lower prices paid. Something more has to be going on. Indeed, in raising prices the judge unwittingly cites an unarguable pro-competitive aspect of Apple’s foray: It is competing with Amazon and bidding resources from a rival. Indeed, the rival is, arguably, an incumbent with market power. This cannot be the end of the analysis. That it is constitutes a throwback to the anti-competitive per se rule of Dr. Miles.

Seventh, in oral arguments at the Second Circuit, Judge Raymond J. Lohier, Jr. directed a question to Justice Department counsel, asking how Apple and the publishers “could have broken Amazon’s monopoly of the e-book market without violating antitrust laws.” The DOJ attorney responded, according to an article in The New Yorker, by advising that

Apple could have let the competition among companies play out naturally without pursuing explicit strategies to push prices higher—or it could have sued, or complained to the Justice Department and to federal regulatory authorities.

But the DOJ itself brought no complaint against Amazon — it, instead, sued Apple. And the admonition that an aggressive innovator should sit back and let things “play out naturally” is exactly what will kill efficiency enhancing “creative destruction.” Moreover, the government’s view that Apple “pursued an explicit strategy to push prices higher” fails to acknowledge that Apple was the buyer. Such as it was, Apple’s effort was to compete, luring content suppliers from a rival. The response of the government is to recommend, on the one hand, litigation it will not itself pursue and, on the other, passive acceptance that avoids market disruption. It displays the error, as Judge Jacobs’ Second Circuit dissent puts it, “That antitrust law is offended by gloves off competition.” Why might innovation not be well served by this policy?

Eighth, the choice of rule of reason does not let Apple escape scrutiny, but applies it to both sides of the argument. It adds important policy symmetry. Dr. Miles impeded efficient market activity for nearly a century. The creation of new platforms in Internet markets ought not to have such handicaps. It should be recalled that, in introducing its iTunes platform and its vertically linked iPod music players, circa 2002, the innovative Apple likewise faced attack from competition policy makers (more in Europe, indeed, than the U.S.). Happily, progress in the law had loosened barriers to business model innovation, and the revolutionary ecosystem was allowed to launch. Key to that progressive step was the bulk bargain struck with music labels. Richard Epstein thinks that such industry-wide dealing now endangers Apple’s more recent platform launch. Perhaps. But there is no reason to jump to that conclusion, and much to find out before we embrace it.

In Amazon, Antitrust & Competition, Apple, Justice Department, Law & Economics, Monopolization, Platforms, Resale Price Maintenance, Symposium on the Apple E-Books Antitrust Case: Implications for Antitrust and for the Economy, Vertical Restraints , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Kolasky on the Apple e-books case: Another reminder that “easy labels do not always supply ready answers”

William J. Kolasky —  15 February 2016

By William Kolasky

In my view, the Second Circuit’s decision in Apple e-Books, if not reversed by the Supreme Court, threatens to undo a half century of progress in reforming antitrust doctrine. In decision after decision, from White Motors through Leegin and Actavis, the Supreme Court has repeatedly held—in cases involving both horizontal and vertical restraints—that the only test for whether an agreement can be found per se unlawful under Section 1 is whether it is “a naked [restraint] of trade with no purpose except stifling competition,” or whether it is instead “ancillary to the legitimate and competitive purposes” of a business association. Dagher. The cases in which the Court has consistently applied this test read like a litany of antitrust decisions we all now study in law school: White Motors, Topco, GTE Sylvania, Professional Engineers, BMI, Maricopa, NCAA, Business Electronics, ARCO, California Dental, Dagher, Leegin, American Needle, and, most recently, Actavis. Significantly, more than two-thirds of these cases involved horizontal, not vertical restraints.

In these decisions, the Court has also repeatedly warned that this test cannot be applied by simply asking whether the defendants “have literally ‘fixed’ a ‘price,” or otherwise agreed not to compete. Warning that “[l]iteralness is overly simplistic and often overbroad,” the Court insisted in BMI that courts instead focus on “the effect and, because it tends to show effect…, on the purpose of the practice” to determine whether “the practice facially appears to be one that would always or almost always tend to restrict competition and decrease output… or instead one designed to ‘increase economic efficiency and render markets more, rather than less, competitive.”

In applying this test the Court has also repeatedly emphasized that a court should classify an alleged restraint—whether horizontal or vertical—as per se unlawful “only after considerable experience” with the particular restraint at issue. In addition, the Court has repeatedly emphasized that all that is necessary for a restraint to escape per se illegality is that there be a “plausible” procompetitive purpose behind it. See, e.g., Cal Dental; Business Electronics; Northwest Wholesale Stationers.

By focusing so much attention in their cert. papers on whether the agreements between Apple and the publishers should be characterized as “vertical” or “horizontal,” both Apple and the DOJ seem to have lost sight of the fundamental teachings of this long line of Supreme Court decisions—namely, that even if an agreement is horizontal, it can be found to be per se unlawful only if it is a naked agreement that, on its face, serves no purpose other than to restrict competition and restrain output. This is particularly important where, as in this case, the alleged agreements have both horizontal and vertical elements. In such cases, the right question is not whether the agreements can be labeled a “hub-and-spoke conspiracy,” but instead what the nature and purpose of those agreements were.

In this case, the nature of the arrangement between Apple and the publishers by which they all appointed Apple as their common sales agent is not fundamentally different from the an agreement among a group of competitors to appoint a joint sales agent. While such an arrangement can, in some circumstances, be used to facilitate cartel behavior, it can also serve legitimate pro-competitive purposes by enabling those competitors to market their goods or services more efficiently. The courts and antitrust enforcement agencies have, therefore, recognized—ever since the Supreme Court’s decision in Appalachian Coals—that these joint sales arrangements must generally be evaluated under the rule of reason and cannot in all instances be condemned as per se unlawful. See, e.g., FTC/DOJ, Competitor Collaboration Guidelines. (For those of you who remember the criticisms that used to be directed at that decision by your antitrust professor in law school, I urge you to read Sheldon Kimmel’s excellent revisionist article, How and Why the Per Se Rule Against Price Fixing Went Wrong, showing that the Court’s holding was perfectly consistent with its more recent rulings in BMI and its progeny.

Viewing this as an agreement among the publishers to appoint Apple as their common sales agent might have helped the lower courts to have focused on what should have been the key issues in the case. The first is whether the agency arrangement was a “naked” agreement to “restrict competition and decrease output,” or could “plausibly” have been intended to serve other legitimate pro-competitive business purposes. The second is whether, if so, the restraints that were part of this arrangement—such as price caps and most-favored nation clauses—were ancillary to those legitimate purposes.

Based on the record as I read it, it appears to me that the answers to these two questions are obvious, and that they compel the conclusion that this common sales agent arrangement could not be classified as per se unlawful, but would need to be evaluated under a full-blown rule of reason analysis. Let me address each issue in turn.

Was the common sales agent arrangement between Apple and the five publishers a naked agreement to fix prices and restrict output?

Neither the lower courts nor the parties in their cert papers address this key issue in any detail, choosing instead to spend page after page debating whether the agreement between Apple and the publishers was horizontal or vertical. Fortunately, the amicus briefs that were filed in support of Apple’s cert. petition by ICLE and by a group of antitrust economists do address the issue at considerable length.

Those briefs make a convincing argument that the common sale agent arrangements between the publishers and Apple were designed to serve at least two pro-competitive purposes. The first was to introduce greater competition into the downstream market for the distribution of e-books by ending Amazon’s below-cost pricing of e-books at the retail level. The second was to give the publishers greater control over the downstream pricing of their e-books in order to prevent below-cost pricing of e-books from cannibalizing the sales of their print books.

The common sale agent arrangement served to introduce more competition into the downstream market for the distribution of e-books

This one is easy. No one disputes that before Apple entered, Amazon dominated the downstream market for e-books with a 90% market share, giving it a virtual monopoly. Hopefully, few, if any, would dispute that Amazon’s loss-leader strategy of selling e-books at well below cost served to entrench its near monopoly position in that market. It is easy to understand why publishers of e-books would not want to allow Amazon’s monopoly to continue, leaving them with only a sole distributor for their products.

The record below makes it clear that Apple did not believe it could profitably enter the e-book market so long as Amazon continued to maintain its first-mover advantage by selling e-books below cost. Apple and the publishers therefore had a common interest in moving from the existing wholesale model of e-book distribution to a new agency model under which the publishers, not Amazon, would control the retail pricing of e-books and could set those prices at a level that would enable other competitors, such as Apple, to enter. That seems pro-competitive to me.

The record also makes it clear that this objective could not be accomplished through a simple vertical agency agreement between Apple and one or two individual publishers. In order to enter successfully, Apple needed a critical mass of titles, which it could have only by securing the agreement of most of the leading publishers to appoint it as their common sale agent. Apple, therefore, had a legitimate pro-competitive business reason to facilitate—or, as the Second Circuit charged, “orchestrate” —agreements among the publishers to switch to an agency model and to appoint Apple as their common non-exclusive agent for the sale of their e-books.

The common sales agent arrangement gave the publishers control over the retail prices of e-books, protecting them from harms to their businesses that could otherwise be caused by below-cost pricing by a single dominant retailer.

The Second Circuit and DOJ both make much of the fact that the publishers wanted to control the retail prices of e-books in order to raise those prices above the level set by Amazon’s loss-leader pricing strategy. They both seem to believe that this alone is enough to characterize their conduct as a “naked price fixing scheme.” But it is not. As the Supreme Court held in Leegin, resale price maintenance can be pro-competitive even if it leads to higher prices if it is designed promote competition by creating a more efficient and competitive distribution system.

As Areeda and Hovenkamp teach in their treatise, Fundamentals of Antitrust Law, the same principle applies to agreements among a group of horizontal competitors to appoint a single sales agent. Those competitors will frequently “have to agree with each other that they will not accept less than a certain minimum price, or sometimes may even have to agree on the entire price schedule,” and these prices may sometimes be higher than the prices at which they were previously selling the products individually. See Areeda & Hovenkamp (2015 Supp.), at 19:31-32. But even if these agreements result in an increase in price, they argue that it should not be found illegal if the effect on output is positive. Their argument is supported by the language in BMI, in which the Court focused on the effect of a restraint on output, not price, in describing what was necessary to classify an alleged restraint as a per se illegal naked price-fixing agreement.

Here, although the district court found that prices went up and output went down in the short run after the publishers switched from their wholesale model to an agency model, these immediate, short-term effects do not necessarily show that the switch to the new agency model might not, over the long-term, have resulted in an increase in output. DOJ concedes that since Apple’s entry, e-book sales have grown exponentially, but speculates that this growth might have occurred even if Amazon had continued to maintain its monopoly position in the retail sale of e-books. As someone who reads e-books on my iPad, I doubt that, but this is the type of issue that can only be resolved through a full rule-of-reason analysis, not through the application of a conclusive presumption of illegality under the per se doctrine.

Here, as the amicus briefs argue, there are several ways Amazon’s loss-leader pricing strategy could have depressed the output of both e-book and print books long-term. First, of course, once its monopoly was fully entrenched, Amazon could have sought to recoup its losses by raising its e-book prices above a competitive level. Second, if instead Amazon continued to cannibalize print sales through below-cost e-book pricing, publishers might have been forced to reduce the royalties they pay authors, giving those authors less reason to continue writing, thus reducing the output of all books. Again, these are the types of issues that require a full rule of reason analysis, not summary condemnation under the per se doctrine.

Were the price caps and most-favored nation clauses ancillary restraints that may have been reasonably necessary to the legitimate pro-competitive purposes of the common sales agent arrangement?

The ancillary nature of the terms that were included in Apple’s agency agreements with the publishers, and which the publishers may have agreed among themselves to accept, is equally easy to show.

The price caps on which Apple insisted were obviously designed to protect it from opportunistic behavior by the publishers in charging higher prices for their e-books than what Apple felt the market would accept, thereby preventing it from selling a sufficient volume of e-books to make its entry successful. Such opportunistic behavior by the publishers could also have made it harder to convince consumers to buy Apple’s new iPad, the success of which was critical to its future.

The most favored nation clauses on which Apple insisted, and which the publishers may also have agreed among themselves to accept, were likewise arguably necessary to protect Apple from the risk of having to compete against an established competitor offering lower prices than it could, thereby impeding its successful entry and damaging its goodwill with consumers.

In both cases, these are classic and legitimate reasons for ancillary restraints. Whether or not these particular restraints were reasonably necessary to Apple’s successful entry is a question that could only be decided on the basis of a full rule of reason analysis. All that is needed to avoid per se condemnation is that there be a plausible argument that they were, and that, again, should be something that no one could dispute.

* * *

Given the way the case was litigated, I recognize that it may be difficult to introduce at the Supreme Court level a whole new way of looking at the facts of the case. But if the Court does grant cert., I would hope that Apple and the amici supporting it would try to refocus the Court’s attention away from a sterile argument over whether the restraints in question were vertical or horizontal, and to focus it instead on whether they were a “naked” attempt to fix prices and restrict output or were instead ancillary to a pro-competitive business relationship.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Amazon, Antitrust & Competition, Apple, Justice Department, Monopolization, Platforms, Resale Price Maintenance, Supreme Court, Symposium on the Apple E-Books Antitrust Case: Implications for Antitrust and for the Economy, Vertical Restraints , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Blog symposium on the Apple e-books antitrust case: Implications for antitrust law and for the economy

Geoffrey Manne —  13 February 2016

The Apple E-Books Antitrust Case: Implications for Antitrust Law and for the Economy

February 15, 2016

truthonthemarket.com

The appellate court’s 2015 decision affirming the district court’s finding of per se liability in United States v. Apple provoked controversy over the legal and economic merits of the case, its significance for antitrust jurisprudence, and its implications for entrepreneurs, startups, and other economic actors throughout the economy. Apple has filed a cert petition with the Supreme Court, which will decide on February 19th whether to hear the case.

On Monday, February 15 and Tuesday February 16, Truth on the Market and the International Center for Law and Economics will present a blog symposium discussing the case and its implications.

We’ve lined up an outstanding and diverse group of scholars, practitioners and other experts to participate in the symposium. The full archive of symposium posts can be found at this link, and individual posts can be accessed by clicking on the author’s name below.

Also see our previous posts at Truth on the Market discussing the Apple e-books case for a preview of many of the issues to be discussed.

In Announcements, Antitrust & Competition, Apple, International Center for Law & Economics, Law & Economics, Monopolization, Platforms, Resale Price Maintenance, Supreme Court, Symposium on the Apple E-Books Antitrust Case: Implications for Antitrust and for the Economy, Vertical Restraints , , , , , , , , , ,
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