[TOTM: The following is part of a digital symposium by TOTM guests and authors on Antitrust’s Uncertain Future: Visions of Competition in the New Regulatory Landscape. Information on the authors and the entire series of posts is available here.]
Philip K Dick’s novella “The Minority Report” describes a futuristic world without crime. This state of the world is achieved thanks to the visions of three mutants—so-called “precogs”—who predict crimes before they occur, thereby enabling law enforcement to incarcerate people for crimes they were going to commit.
This utopia unravels when the protagonist—the head of the police Precrime division, who is himself predicted to commit a murder—learns that the precogs often produce “minority reports”: i.e., visions of the future that differ from one another. The existence of these alternate potential futures undermine the very foundations of Precrime. For every crime that is averted, an innocent person may be convicted of a crime they were not going to commit.
You might be wondering what any of this has to do with antitrust and last week’s Truth on the Marketsymposium on Antitrust’s Uncertain Future. Given the recent adoption of the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the prospect that Congress could soon vote on the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA), we asked contributors to write short pieces describing what the future might look like—for better or worse—under these digital-market regulations, or in their absence.
The resulting blog posts offer a “minority report” of sorts. Together, they dispel the myth that these regulations would necessarily give rise to a brighter future of intensified competition, innovation, and improved online services. To the contrary, our contributors cautioned—albeit with varying degrees of severity—that these regulations create risks that policymakers should not ignore.
The Majority Report
If policymakers like European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager, Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) are to be believed, a combination of tougher regulations and heightened antitrust enforcement is the only way to revitalize competition in digital markets. As Klobuchar argues on her website:
To ensure our future economic prosperity, America must confront its monopoly power problem and restore competitive markets. … [W]e must update our antitrust laws for the twenty-first century to protect the competitive markets that are the lifeblood of our economy.
Speaking of the recently passed DMA, Vestager suggested the regulation could spark an economic boom, drawing parallels with the Renaissance:
The work we put into preserving and strengthening our Single Market will equip us with the means to show the world that our path based on open trade and fair competition is truly better. After all, Bruges did not become great by conquest and ruthless occupation. It became great through commerce and industry.
Several antitrust scholars have been similarly bullish about the likely benefits of such regulations. For instance, Fiona Scott Morton, Steven Salop, and David Dinielli write that:
It is an appropriate expression of democracy for Congress to enact pro-competitive statutes to maintain the vibrancy of the online economy and allow for continued innovation that benefits non-platform businesses as well as end users.
In short, there is a widespread belief that such regulations would make the online world more competitive and innovative, to the benefit of consumers.
The Minority Reports
To varying degrees, the responses to our symposium suggest proponents of such regulations may be falling prey to what Harold Demsetz called “the nirvana fallacy.” In other words, it is wrong to assume that the resulting enforcement would be costless and painless for consumers.
Even the symposium’s pieces belonging to the literary realms of sci-fi and poetry shed a powerful light on the deep-seated problems that underlie contemporary efforts to make online industries “more contestable and fair.” As several scholars highlighted, such regulations may prevent firms from designing new and improved products, or from maintaining existing ones. Among my favorite passages was this excerpt from Daniel Crane’s fictional piece about a software engineer in Helsinki trying to integrate restaurant and hotel ratings into a vertical search engine:
“We’ve been watching how you’re coding the new walking tour search vertical. It seems that you are designing it to give preference to restaurants, cafès, and hotels that have been highly rated by the Tourism Board.”
“Yes, that’s right. Restaurants, cafès, and hotels that have been rated by the Tourism Board are cleaner, safer, and more convenient. That’s why they have been rated.”
“But you are forgetting that the Tourism Board is one of our investors. This will be considered self-preferencing.”
Even if a covered platform could establish that a challenged practice would maintain or substantially enhance the platform’s core functionality, it would also have to prove that the conduct was “narrowly tailored” and “reasonably necessary” to achieve the desired end, and, for many behaviors, the “le[ast] discriminatory means” of doing so. That is a remarkably heavy burden…. It is likely, then, that AICOA would break existing products and services and discourage future innovation.
Several of our contributors voiced fears that bans on self-preferencing would prevent platforms from acquiring startups that complement their core businesses, thus making it harder to launch new services and deterring startup investment. For instance, in my alternate history post, I argued that such bans might have prevented Google’s purchase of Android, thus reducing competition in the mobile phone industry.
A second important objection was that self-preferencing bans are hard to apply consistently. Policymakers would notably have to draw lines between the different components that make up an economic good. As Ramsi Woodcock wrote in a poem:
You: The meaning of component, We can always redefine. From batteries to molecules, We can draw most any line.
This lack of legal certainty will prove hard to resolve. Geoffrey Manne noted that regulatory guidelines were unlikely to be helpful in this regard:
Indeed, while laws are sometimes purposefully vague—operating as standards rather than prescriptive rules—to allow for more flexibility, the concepts introduced by AICOA don’t even offer any cognizable standards suitable for fine-tuning.
Alden Abbott was similarly concerned about the vague language that underpins AICOA:
There is, however, one inescapable reality—as night follows day, passage of AICOA would usher in an extended period of costly litigation over the meaning of a host of AICOA terms. … The history of antitrust illustrates the difficulties inherent in clarifying the meaning of novel federal statutory language. It was not until 21 years after passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act that the Supreme Court held that Section 1 of the act’s prohibition on contracts, combinations, and conspiracies “in restraint of trade” only covered unreasonable restraints of trade.
Our contributors also argued that bans on self-preferencing and interoperability mandates might be detrimental to users’ online experience. Lazar Radic and Friso Bostoen both wrote pieces taking readers through a typical day in worlds where self-preferencing is prohibited. Neither was particularly utopian. In his satirical piece, Lazar Radic imagined an online shopping experience where all products are given equal display:
“Time to do my part,” I sigh. My eyes—trained by years of practice—dart from left to right and from right to left, carefully scrutinizing each coffee capsule on offer for an equal number of seconds. … After 13 brands and at least as many flavors, I select the platforms own brand, “Basic”… and then answer a series of questions to make sure I have actually given competitors’ products fair consideration.
Closer to the world we live in, Friso Bostoen described how going through a succession of choice screens—a likely outcome of regulations such as AICOA and the DMA—would be tiresome for consumers:
A new fee structure… God, save me from having to tap ‘learn more’ to find out what that means. I’ve had to learn more about the app ecosystem than is good for me already.
Finally, our symposium highlighted several other ways in which poorly designed online regulations may harm consumers. Stephen Dnes concluded that mandatory data-sharing regimes will deter companies from producing valuable data in the first place. Julie Carlson argued that prohibiting platforms from preferencing their own goods would disproportionately harm low-income consumers. And Aurelien Portuese surmised that, if passed into law, AICOA would dampen firms’ incentives to invest in new services. Last, but not least, in a co-authored piece, Filip Lubinski and Lazar Radic joked that self-preferencing bans could be extended to the offline world:
The success of AICOA has opened our eyes to an even more ancient and perverse evil: self-preferencing in offline markets. It revealed to us that—for centuries, if not millennia—companies in various industries—from togas to wine, from cosmetics to insurance—had, in fact, always preferred their own initiatives over those of their rivals!
The Problems of Online Precrime
Online regulations like AICOA and the DMA mark a radical shift from existing antitrust laws. They move competition policy from a paradigm of ex post enforcement, based upon a detailed case-by-case analysis of effects, to one of ex ante prohibitions.
Despite obvious and superficial differences, there are clear parallels between this new paradigm and the world of “The Minority Report”: firms would be punished for behavior that has not yet transpired or is not proven to harm consumers.
This might be fine if we knew for certain that the prohibited conduct would harm consumers (i.e., if there were no “minority reports,” to use our previous analogy). But every entry in our symposium suggests things are not that simple. There are a wide range of outcomes and potential harms associated with the regulation of digital markets. This calls for a more calibrated approach to digital-competition policy, as opposed to the precrime of AICOA and the DMA.
[TOTM: The following is part of a digital symposium by TOTM guests and authors on Antitrust’s Uncertain Future: Visions of Competition in the New Regulatory Landscape. Information on the authors and the entire series of posts is available here.]
Things are heating up in the antitrust world. There is considerable pressure to pass the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) before the congressional recess in August—a short legislative window before members of Congress shift their focus almost entirely to campaigning for the mid-term elections. While it would not be impossible to advance the bill after the August recess, it would be a steep uphill climb.
But whether it passes or not, some of the damage from AICOA may already be done. The bill has moved the antitrust dialogue that will harm innovation and consumers. In this post, I will first explain AICOA’s fundamental flaws. Next, I discuss the negative impact that the legislation is likely to have if passed, even if courts and agencies do not aggressively enforce its provisions. Finally, I show how AICOA has already provided an intellectual victory for the approach articulated in the European Union (EU)’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). It has built momentum for a dystopian regulatory framework to break up and break into U.S. superstar firms designated as “gatekeepers” at the expense of innovation and consumers.
The Unseen of AICOA
AICOA’s drafters argue that, once passed, it will deliver numerous economic benefits. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.)—the bill’s main sponsor—has stated that it will “ensure small businesses and entrepreneurs still have the opportunity to succeed in the digital marketplace. This bill will do just that while also providing consumers with the benefit of greater choice online.”
Section 3 of the bill would provide “business users” of the designated “covered platforms” with a wide range of entitlements. This includes preventing the covered platform from offering any services or products that a business user could provide (the so-called “self-preferencing” prohibition); allowing a business user access to the covered platform’s proprietary data; and an entitlement for business users to have “preferred placement” on a covered platform without having to use any of that platform’s services.
These entitlements would provide non-platform businesses what are effectively claims on the platform’s proprietary assets, notwithstanding the covered platform’s own investments to collect data, create services, and invent products—in short, the platform’s innovative efforts. As such, AICOA is redistributive legislation that creates the conditions for unfair competition in the name of “fair” and “open” competition. It treats the behavior of “covered platforms” differently than identical behavior by their competitors, without considering the deterrent effect such a framework will have on consumers and innovation. Thus, AICOA offers rent-seeking rivals a formidable avenue to reap considerable benefits at the expense of the innovators thanks to the weaponization of antitrust to subvert, not improve, competition.
In mandating that covered platforms make their data and proprietary assets freely available to “business users” and rivals, AICOA undermines the underpinning of free markets to pursue the misguided goal of “open markets.” The inevitable result will be the tragedy of the commons. Absent the covered platforms having the ability to benefit from their entrepreneurial endeavors, the law no longer encourages innovation. As Joseph Schumpeter seminally predicted: “perfect competition implies free entry into every industry … But perfectly free entry into a new field may make it impossible to enter it at all.”
To illustrate, if business users can freely access, say, a special status on the covered platforms’ ancillary services without having to use any of the covered platform’s services (as required under Section 3(a)(5)), then platforms are disincentivized from inventing zero-priced services, since they cannot cross-monetize these services with existing services. Similarly, if, under Section 3(a)(1) of the bill, business users can stop covered platforms from pre-installing or preferencing an app whenever they happen to offer a similar app, then covered platforms will be discouraged from investing in or creating new apps. Thus, the bill would generate a considerable deterrent effect for covered platforms to invest, invent, and innovate.
AICOA’s most detrimental consequences may not be immediately apparent; they could instead manifest in larger and broader downstream impacts that will be difficult to undo. As the 19th century French economist Frederic Bastiat wrote: “a law gives birth not only to an effect but to a series of effects. Of these effects, the first only is immediate; it manifests itself simultaneously with its cause—it is seen. The others unfold in succession—they are not seen it is well for, if they are foreseen … it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good, which will be followed by a great evil to come, while the true economist pursues a great good to come,—at the risk of a small present evil.”
To paraphrase Bastiat, AICOA offers ill-intentioned rivals a “small present good”–i.e., unconditional access to the platforms’ proprietary assets–while society suffers the loss of a greater good–i.e., incentives to innovate and welfare gains to consumers. The logic is akin to those who advocate the abolition of intellectual-property rights: The immediate (and seen) gain is obvious, concerning the dissemination of innovation and a reduction of the price of innovation, while the subsequent (and unseen) evil remains opaque, as the destruction of the institutional premises for innovation will generate considerable long-term innovation costs.
Fundamentally, AICOA weakens the benefits of scale by pursuing vertical disintegration of the covered platforms to the benefit of short-term static competition. In the long term, however, the bill would dampen dynamic competition, ultimately harming consumer welfare and the capacity for innovation. Themeasure’s opportunity costs will prevent covered platforms’ innovations from benefiting other business users or consumers. They personify the “unseen,” as Bastiat put it: “[they are] always in the shadow, and who, personifying what is not seen, [are] an essential element of the problem. [They make] us understand how absurd it is to see a profit in destruction.”
The costs could well amount to hundreds of billions of dollars for the U.S. economy, even before accounting for the costs of deterred innovation. The unseen is costly, the seen is cheap.
A New Robinson-Patman Act?
Most antitrust laws are terse, vague, and old: The Sherman Act of 1890, the Federal Trade Commission Act, and the Clayton Act of 1914 deal largely in generalities, with considerable deference for courts to elaborate in a common-law tradition on the specificities of what “restraints of trade,” “monopolization,” or “unfair methods of competition” mean.
In 1936, Congress passed the Robinson-Patman Act, designed to protect competitors from the then-disruptive competition of large firms who—thanks to scale and practices such as price differentiation—upended traditional incumbents to the benefit of consumers. Passed after “Congress made no factual investigation of its own, and ignored evidence that conflicted with accepted rhetoric,” the law prohibits price differentials that would benefit buyers, and ultimately consumers, in the name of less vigorous competition from more efficient, more productive firms. Indeed, under the Robinson-Patman Act, manufacturers cannot give a bigger discount to a distributor who would pass these savings onto consumers, even if the distributor performs extra services relative to others.
Former President Gerald Ford declared in 1975 that the Robinson-Patman Act “is a leading example of [a law] which restrain[s] competition and den[ies] buyers’ substantial savings…It discourages both large and small firms from cutting prices, making it harder for them to expand into new markets and pass on to customers the cost-savings on large orders.” Despite this, calls to amend or repeal the Robinson-Patman Act—supported by, among others, competition scholars like Herbert Hovenkamp and Robert Bork—have failed.
In the 1983 Abbott decision, Justice Lewis Powell wrote: “The Robinson-Patman Act has been widely criticized, both for its effects and for the policies that it seeks to promote. Although Congress is aware of these criticisms, the Act has remained in effect for almost half a century.”
Nonetheless, the act’s enforcement dwindled, thanks to wise reactions from antitrust agencies and the courts. While it is seldom enforced today, the act continues to create considerable legal uncertainty, as it raises regulatory risks for companies who engage in behavior that may conflict with its provisions. Indeed, many of the same so-called “neo-Brandeisians” who support passage of AICOA also advocate reinvigorating Robinson-Patman. More specifically, the new FTC majority has expressed that it is eager to revitalizeRobinson-Patman, even as the law protects less efficient competitors. In other words, the Robinson-Patman Act is a zombie law: dead, but still moving.
Even if the antitrust agencies and courts ultimately follow the same path of regulatory and judicial restraint on AICOA that they have on Robinson-Patman, the legal uncertainty its existence will engender will act as a powerful deterrent on disruptive competition that dynamically benefits consumers and innovation. In short, like the Robinson-Patman Act, antitrust agencies and courts will either enforce AICOA–thus, generating the law’s adverse effects on consumers and innovation–or they will refrain from enforcing AICOA–but then, the legal uncertainty shall lead to unseen, harmful effects on innovation and consumers.
For instance, the bill’s prohibition on “self-preferencing” in Section 3(a)(1) will prevent covered platforms from offering consumers new products and services that happen to compete with incumbents’ products and services. Self-preferencing often is a pro-competitive, pro-efficiency practice that companies widely adopt—a reality that AICOA seems to ignore.
Would AICOA prevent, e.g., Apple from offering a bundled subscription to Apple One, which includes Apple Music, so that the company can effectively compete with incumbents like Spotify? As with Robinson-Patman, antitrust agencies and courts will have to choose whether to enforce a productivity-decreasing law, or to ignore congressional intent but, in the process, generate significant legal uncertainties.
Judge Bork once wrote that Robinson-Patman was “antitrust’s least glorious hour” because, rather than improving competition and innovation, it reduced competition from firms who happen to be more productive, innovative, and efficient than their rivals. The law infamously protected inefficient competitors rather than competition. But from the perspective of legislative history perspective, AICOA may be antitrust’s new “least glorious hour.” If adopted, it will adversely affect innovation and consumers, as opportunistic rivals will be able to prevent cost-saving practices by the covered platforms.
As with Robinson-Patman, calls to amend or repeal AICOA may follow its passage. But Robinson-Patman Act illustrates the path dependency of bad antitrust laws. However costly and damaging, AICOA would likely stay in place, with regular calls for either stronger or weaker enforcement, depending on whether the momentum shifts from populist antitrust or antitrust more consistent with dynamic competition.
Victory of the Brussels Effect
The future of AICOA does not bode well for markets, either from a historical perspective or from a comparative-law perspective. The EU’s DMA similarly targets a few large tech platforms but it isbroader, harsher, and swifter. In the competition between these two examples of self-inflicted techlash, AICOA will pale in comparison with the DMA. Covered platforms will be forced to align with theDMA’s obligations and prohibitions.
Consequently, AICOA is a victory of the DMA and of the Brussels effect in general. AICOA effectively crowns the DMA as the all-encompassing regulatory assault on digital gatekeepers. While members of Congress have introduced numerous antitrust bills aimed at targeting gatekeepers, the DMA is the one-stop-shop regulation that encompasses multiple antitrust bills and imposes broader prohibitions and stronger obligations on gatekeepers. In other words, the DMA outcompetes AICOA.
Commentators seldom lament the extraterritorial impact of European regulations. Regarding regulating digital gatekeepers, U.S. officials should have pushed back against the innovation-stifling, welfare-decreasing effects of the DMA on U.S. tech companies, in particular, and on U.S. technological innovation, in general. To be fair, a few U.S. officials, such as Commerce Secretary Gina Raimundo, didvoice opposition to the DMA. Indeed, well-aware of the DMA’s protectionist intent and its potential tobreak up and break into tech platforms, Raimundoexpressed concerns that antitrust should not be about protecting competitors and deterring innovation but rather about protecting the process of competition, however disruptive may be.
The influential neo-Brandeisians and radical antitrust reformers, however,lashed out at Raimundo andeffectively shamed the Biden administration into embracing the DMA (and its sister regulation, AICOA). Brussels did not have to exert its regulatory overreach; the U.S. administration happily imports and emulates European overregulation. There is no better way for European officials to see their dreams come true: a techlash against U.S. digital platforms that enjoys the support of local officials.
In that regard, AICOA has already played a significant role in shaping the intellectual mood in Washington and in altering the course of U.S. antitrust. Members of Congress designed AICOA along the linespioneered by the DMA. Sen. Klobuchar has argued that America should emulate European competition policy regarding tech platforms. Lina Khan, now chair of the FTC, co-authoredthe U.S. House Antitrust Subcommittee report, which recommended adopting the European concept of “abuse of dominant position” in U.S. antitrust. In her current position, Khan nowpraises the DMA. Tim Wu, competition counsel for the White House,has praised European competition policy and officials. Indeed, the neo-Brandeisians’ have not only praised the European Commission’s fines against U.S. tech platforms (despiteearly criticisms from former President Barack Obama) but have more dramatically called for the United States to imitate the European regulatory framework.
In this regulatory race to inefficiency, the standard is set in Brussels with the blessings of U.S. officials. Not even the precedent set by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) fully captures the effects the DMA will have. Privacy laws passed by U.S. states’ privacy have mostly reacted to the reality of the GDPR. With AICOA, Congress is proactively anticipating, emulating, and welcoming the DMA before it has even been adopted. The intellectual and policy shift is historical, and so is the policy error.
AICOA and the Boulevard of Broken Dreams
AICOA is a failure similar to the Robinson-Patman Act and a victory for the Brussels effect and the DMA. Consumers will be the collateral damages, and the unseen effects on innovation will take years before they materialize. Calls for amendments and repeals of AICOA are likely to fail, so that the inevitable costs will forever bear upon consumers and innovation dynamics.
AICOA illustrates the neo-Brandeisian opposition to large innovative companies. Joseph Schumpeter warned against such hostility and its effect on disincentivizing entrepreneurs to innovate when he wrote:
Faced by the increasing hostility of the environment and by the legislative, administrative, and judicial practice born of that hostility, entrepreneurs and capitalists—in fact the whole stratum that accepts the bourgeois scheme of life—will eventually cease to function. Their standard aims are rapidly becoming unattainable, their efforts futile.
President William Howard Taft once said, “the world is not going to be saved by legislation.” AICOA will not save antitrust, nor will consumers. To paraphrase Schumpeter, the bill’s drafters “walked into our future as we walked into the war, blindfolded.” AICOA’s intentions to deliver greater competition, a fairer marketplace, greater consumer choice, and more consumer benefits will ultimately scatter across the boulevard of broken dreams.
The Baron de Montesquieu once wrote that legislators should only change laws with a “trembling hand”:
It is sometimes necessary to change certain laws. But the case is rare, and when it happens, they should be touched only with a trembling hand: such solemnities should be observed, and such precautions are taken that the people will naturally conclude that the laws are indeed sacred since it takes so many formalities to abrogate them.
AICOA’s drafters had a clumsy hand, coupled with what Friedrich Hayek would call “a pretense of knowledge.” They were certain to do social good and incapable of thinking of doing social harm. The future will remember AICOA as the new antitrust’s least glorious hour, where consumers and innovation were sacrificed on the altar of a revitalized populist view of antitrust.
[TOTM: The following is part of a digital symposium by TOTM guests and authors on Antitrust’s Uncertain Future: Visions of Competition in the New Regulatory Landscape. Information on the authors and the entire series of posts is available here.]
Brrring! “Gee, this iPhone alarm is the worst—I should really change that sometime. Let’s see what’s in my calendar for today…”
In accordance with new regulatory requirements, Apple is providing you with a choice of app stores. Please select an option from the menu below. Going forward, iOS applications will download via the selected store by default. To read additional information about an app store, tap “learn more”; to confirm your selection, tap “install.” Beware: outside of the App Store, Apple is not responsible for the privacy and security of applications and transactions.
“Wait, didn’t I have to make this choice last year already—or did that concern browsers? What do ‘new regulatory requirements’ even mean? And how is there no ‘remind me later’ button like there is for iOS updates? They really shouldn’t push this upon people before their morning coffee. Guess I’ll just stick with the devil I know and select the App Store like last time?
“Then again, if I’m to believe those targeted ads, that’s costing me serious money. And didn’t Steve say he saves like $3 on his Tinder subscription every month with whatever store he’s using? That could add up, especially if it also applies for Spotify and Netflix. But I don’t want some dodgy app from some obscure store to brick my phone either. Well, I suppose it can’t hurt to look at the options.”
Appdroid – A wide choice of apps without Apple’s puritan content restrictions. Install now and discover *everything* the developer community has to offer.
“Why am I getting the feeling that this store’s focus might be … NSFW?”
Amazon AppStore – Your trusted partner in distribution. Lower fees guaranteed and Prime members get an additional 5% discount on every in-app purchase. Install now and receive a $25 welcome credit.
“Well, at least I know those guys. But they already handle my e-commerce, video streaming, game streaming, and have even started delivering my prescription medicine… I’m not sure I also want them taking over my phone—these ads are targeted enough as they are.”
Epic Store – The premium app-store experience without the premium price point. On average, users of the Epic Store save $20/year on app purchases. And all apps are subject to human review—just like in the App Store.
“Epic, that sounds familiar… Oh right, that’s the maker of Fortnite, isn’t it? Gosh, it’s been a while since I played that game. If they can create a virtual world like that, I guess they can run an app store.
“But do these alternatives even have all the apps I want? If not, where do I get them? And don’t tell me ‘the web’ because the last time I downloaded an app from a random website was… not great. I don’t want to have to make another trip to theGenius Bar. Although I suppose I have learned my lesson now: trust those pop-ups with security warnings and only download apps with a ‘notarized by Apple’ badge.
“And I guess there’s the opposite problem too: it’s not like the App Store has everything. Despite all sorts of announcements, I still can’t find xCloud in the App Store. Accessing that cloud-gaming service via the web has been a pain, although it’s gotten a bit better since I ditched Safari in that browser choice screen. Does selecting another app store mean I can finally download a cloud-gaming app?”
App Store – The most popular app store, designed especially for iOS. After more than a decade, the App Store continues to lead the industry in terms of privacy, security and user-friendliness—and now boasts an attractive new fee structure.
“A new fee structure… God, save me from having to tap ‘learn more’ to find out what that means. I’ve had to learn more about the app ecosystem than is good for me already.
“Oh wait, what’s that? There is actually a ‘remind me later’ button—its clever shading escaping my bleary eyes… Guess I’ll offload this app-store selection on future me!”
[TOTM: The following is part of a digital symposium by TOTM guests and authors on Antitrust’s Uncertain Future: Visions of Competition in the New Regulatory Landscape. Information on the authors and the entire series of posts is available here.]
Early Morning
I wake up grudgingly to the loud ring of my phone’s preset alarm sound (I swear I gave third-party alarms a fair shot). I slide my feet into the bedroom slippers and mechanically chaperone my body to the coffee machine in the living room.
“Great,” I think to myself, “Out of capsules, again.” Still in my bathrobe, I make a grumpy face and post an interoperable story on social media. “Don’t even talk to me before I’ve had my morning coffee! #HateMondays.”
I flick my thumb and get a warm, fuzzy feeling of satisfaction as I consent to a series of privacy-related pop-ups on the official incumbent’s online marketplace website (I place immense importance on my privacy) before getting ready to sit through the usual fairness presentations.
I reach for a chair, grab a notepad and crack my neck sideways as I try to focus my (still) groggy brain on the kaleidoscope of thumbnails before me. “Time to do my part,” I sigh. My eyes—trained by years of practice—dart from left to right and from right to left, carefully scrutinizing each coffee capsule on offer for an equal number of seconds (ever since the self-preferencing ban, all available products within a search category are displayed simultaneously on the screen to avoid any explicit or tacit bias that could be interpreted as giving the online marketplace incumbent’s own products an unfair advantage over competitors).
After 13 brands and at least as many flavors, I select the platforms own brand, “Basic” (it matches my coffee machine and I’ve found through trial and error that they’re the least prone to malfunctioning), and then answer a series of questions to make sure I have actually given competitors’ products fair consideration. Platforms—including the online marketplace incumbent—use sneaky and illegal ways to leverage the attention market and give a leg up to their own products, such as offering lower prices or better delivery conditions. But with enough practice you learn to see through it. Not on my watch!
Exhausted but pleased with myself, I put the notepad down and my feet up on the coffee table. Victory.
Noon
I curse as I stub my toe on the office chair. Still with a pen in my right hand, ink dripping, I whip out my phone and pick Whatsapp to answer (I’ve never felt the need to use any of the other, newer apps—since everything is interoperable now). “No, of course I didn’t forget to do the groceries,” I tell my girlfriend with a tinge of deliberate frustration. But, of course, she knows that I know that she knows that I did.
I grab my notepad and almost fall over as I try to slide into my jeans and produce a grocery itinerary (like a grocery list, but longer) at the same time. “Trader Pete’s for fruits and vegetables, Gracey’s for canned goods, HTS for HTS frozen pizza,” I scribble, nerves tense.
(Not every company has gone the way of the online marketplace incumbent and some have decided they would be better off if they just sold their own products. After all, you can’t be fined for self-preferencing if you’re only selling your own stuff. Of course, the strategy is only viable in those industries in which vertical integration hasn’t been banned).
I finish getting dressed and dash down the stairs. I instinctively glance at my phone before getting in the car and immediately regret it, as I dismiss a bunch of notifications about malware infections. “Another app store that I’m striking from the list,” I think to myself as I turn on the ignition.
Late Afternoon
My girlfriend has already ordered a soda as I sit down at the table. “Sorry I’m late,” I mumble. We talk about her day and I tell her about the capsules I ordered (she nods approvingly) before we finally decide to order. I wave to the waiter and ask about the specials. A lanky young man no older than 19 fumbles through his (empty) pad and lists a couple of dishes.
He blurts out “homemade” and immediately turns pale. I look at my girlfriend nervously, and she stares back blankly—dazed. “Do you mean to say that it was made here, in this restaurant?” I ask in disbelief, dizzy. He comes up with some sorry excuse but I’m having none of it. I make my way to the toilet—sickened—and pull out my phone with a shaky hand. I have the Federal Trade Commission on speed-dial. I call and select number one: self-preferencing. They immediately put me through with someone. Sweating, I explain that the Italian restaurant on the corner between the 5th and Madison avenues just recommended me a special dish made by them—and barely even mentioned any of the specialties offered by the kebab joint next door. I assure the voice at the other end of the line that I had nothing to do it, and that I have not ordered—let alone tasted—the dish.
I rush out of the bathroom with blinders on and pull my girlfriend by the elbow. Her coat is on and she’s clearly impatient to get the hell out of there. As I reach for my jacket by the exit, an older man with a moustache approaches us with a bowed head and literally begs us to take a bottle of wine (no doubt a bribe for my silence). He assures us that the wine is not “della casa” (made by the restaurant), and that it’s, in fact, a French wine made by a competitor. I’m not having any of it: I bid him good day and slam the door behind us.
[TOTM: The following is part of a digital symposium by TOTM guests and authors on Antitrust’s Uncertain Future: Visions of Competition in the New Regulatory Landscape. Information on the authors and the entire series of posts is available here.]
May 2007, Palo Alto
The California sun shone warmly on Eric Schmidt’s face as he stepped out of his car and made his way to have dinner at Madera, a chic Palo Alto restaurant.
Dining out was a welcome distraction from the endless succession of strategy meetings with the nitpickers of the law department, which had been Schmidt’s bread and butter for the last few months. The lawyers seemed to take issue with any new project that Google’s engineers came up with. “How would rivals compete with our maps?”; “Our placement should be no less favorable than rivals’’; etc. The objections were endless.
This is not how things were supposed to be. When Schmidt became Google’s chief executive officer in 2001, his mission was to take the company public and grow the firm into markets other than search. But then something unexpected happened. After campaigning on an anti-monopoly platform, a freshman senator from Minnesota managed to get her anti-discrimination bill through Congress in just her first few months in office. All companies with a market cap of more than $150 billion were now prohibited from favoring their own products. Google had recently crossed that Rubicon, putting a stop to years of carefree expansion into new markets.
But today was different. The waiter led Schmidt to his table overlooking Silicon Valley. His acquaintance was already seated.
With his tall and slender figure, Andy Rubin had garnered quite a reputation among Silicon Valley’s elite. After engineering stints at Apple and Motorola, developing various handheld devices, Rubin had set up his own shop. The idea was bold: develop the first open mobile platform—based on Linux, nonetheless. Rubin had pitched the project to Google in 2005 but given the regulatory uncertainty over the future of antitrust—the same wave of populist sentiment that would carry Klobuchar to office one year later—Schmidt and his team had passed.
“There’s no money in open source,” the company’s CFO ruled. Schmidt had initially objected, but with more pressing matters to deal with, he ultimately followed his CFO’s advice.
Schmidt and Rubin were exchanging pleasantries about Microsoft and Java when the meals arrived–sublime Wagyu short ribs and charred spring onions paired with a 1986 Chateau Margaux.
Rubin finally cut to the chase. “Our mobile operating system will rely on state-of-the-art touchscreen technology. Just like the device being developed by Apple. Buying Android today might be your only way to avoid paying monopoly prices to access Apple’s mobile users tomorrow.”
Schmidt knew this all too well: The future was mobile, and few companies were taking Apple’s upcoming iPhone seriously enough. Even better, as a firm, Android was treading water. Like many other startups, it had excellent software but no business model. And with the Klobuchar bill putting the brakes on startup investment—monetizing an ecosystem had become a delicate legal proposition, deterring established firms from acquiring startups–Schmidt was in the middle of a buyer’s market. “Android we could make us a force to reckon with” Schmidt thought to himself.
But he quickly shook that thought, remembering the words of his CFO: “There is no money in open source.” In an ideal world, Google would have used Android to promote its search engine—placing a search bar on Android users to draw users to its search engine—or maybe it could have tied a proprietary app store to the operating system, thus earning money from in-app purchases. But with the Klobuchar bill, these were no longer options. Not without endless haggling with Google’s planning committee of lawyers.
And they would have a point, of course. Google risked heavy fines and court-issued injunctions that would stop the project in its tracks. Such risks were not to be taken lightly. Schmidt needed a plan to make the Android platform profitable while accommodating Google’s rivals, but he had none.
The desserts were served, Schmidt steered the conversation to other topics, and the sun slowly set over Sand Hill Road.
Present Day, Cupertino
Apple continues to dominate the smartphone industry with little signs of significant competition on the horizon. While there are continuing rumors that Google, Facebook, or even TikTok might enter the market, these have so far failed to transpire.
Google’s failed partnership with Samsung, back in 2012, still looms large over the industry. After lengthy talks to create an open mobile platform failed to materialize, Google ultimately entered into an agreement with the longstanding mobile manufacturer. Unfortunately, the deal was mired by antitrust issues and clashing visions—Samsung was believed to favor a closed ecosystem, rather than the open platform envisioned by Google.
The sense that Apple is running away with the market is only reinforced by recent developments. Last week, Tim Cook unveiled the company’s new iPhone 11—the first ever mobile device to come with three cameras. With an eye-watering price tag of $1,199 for the top-of-the-line Pro model, it certainly is not cheap. In his presentation, Cook assured consumers Apple had solved the security issues that have been an important bugbear for the iPhone and its ecosystem of competing app stores.
Analysts expect the new range of devices will help Apple cement the iPhone’s 50% market share. This is especially likely given the important challenges that Apple’s main rivals continue to face.
The Windows Phone’s reputation for buggy software continues to undermine its competitive position, despite its comparatively low price point. Andy Rubin, the head of the Windows Phone, was reassuring in a press interview, but there is little tangible evidence he will manage to successfully rescue the flailing ship. Meanwhile, Huawei has come under increased scrutiny for the threats it may pose to U.S. national security. The Chinese manufacturer may face a U.S. sales ban, unless the company’s smartphone branch is sold to a U.S. buyer. Oracle is said to be a likely candidate.
The sorry state of mobile competition has become an increasingly prominent policy issue. President Klobuchar took to Twitter and called on mobile-device companies to refrain from acting as monopolists, intimating elsewhere that failure to do so might warrant tougher regulation than her anti-discrimination bill:
[TOTM: The following is part of a digital symposium by TOTM guests and authors on Antitrust’s Uncertain Future: Visions of Competition in the New Regulatory Landscape. Information on the authors and the entire series of posts is available here.]
About earth’s creatures great and small, Devices clever as can be, I see foremost a ruthless power; You, their ingenuity.
You see the beak upon the finch; I, the beaked skeleton. You see the wonders that they are; I, the things that might have been.
You see th’included batteries I, the poor excluded ones. You, the phone that simply works; I, restrain’d competition.
’Twould be a better world, I say, Were all the options to abide— All beaks and brands of battery— From which the public to decide.
You say that man the greatest is Because he dominates today, But meteor, not caveman, drove The ancient dinosaurs away.
If they were here when we were new, We might the age not have survived; They say some species could outwit The sharpest chimps today alive.
Just so, I say, ’twould better be Replacement batteries t’allow For sales alone can prove what brands Deserve el’vation to the Dow.
Designing batt’ries switchable Makes their selection fully public; It substitutes democracy For an engineering logic.
For only buyers should decide Which components to inter; Their taste alone determines worth, Though engineers be cleverer.
You: The meaning of component, We can always redefine. From batteries to molecules, We can draw most any line.
Of cogs, thus, an infinitude; Of time a finitude to lose. You cannot interchange all parts, Or each one carefully to choose.
Product choices corporate We cannot all democratize, At least so long as consumers Wish to get on with their lives.
Exclusion therefore cannot we Universally condemn; Oft must we let the firm decide Which components to put in.
Power, then, is everywhere— What is is built on what is not— And th’elimination of it Is no cornerstone of thought.
Of components infinite We must choose which few to free; Th’criterion for doing that, Abuse-of-power cannot be.
Power and oppression are, In life and goods ubiquitous. But value differentiates— Build we antitrust on this.
Alone when letting buyers say Which part into a product goes Would make those buyers happier, Must we interchange impose.
Batt’ry brand must matter much, Else, we seriously delude, To think consumers want to hear: “We the batt’ries not include.”
The same is true for Amazon. If it knows which seller’s best, Let it cast the others out for us— Give our scrolling bars a rest.
If Apple knows which app’s a dud, Let Apple cast it out as well. Which app’s a fraud and which a scam, Smartphone users cannot tell.
If Google wants to show me how To get from A to B to C, I’d rather that she use her maps Than search for others separately.
A rule against self-preferencing No legal principle provides; For what opposes power’s role Can’t be neutrally applied.
What goes for all third-party sales Goes for Amazon’s front-end. Self-preferencing alone prevents My designing a new skin.
We cannot hire its warehouse staff; We cannot choose its motor fleet; We cannot source its cargo planes; Or its trucks route through our streets.
But this is all self-preferencing; And it cannot all be banned; Unless we choice’s value weigh, We strike with arbitrary hand.
So say you and differ I: ’Twixt dinosaur and man must choose. If one alone fits on this earth— Wilt for man our power use?
These verses are based in part on arguments summarized in this blog post and this paper.
[TOTM: The following is part of a digital symposium by TOTM guests and authors on Antitrust’s Uncertain Future: Visions of Competition in the New Regulatory Landscape. Information on the authors and the entire series of posts is available here.]
When I was a kid, I trailed behind my mother in the grocery store with a notepad and a pencil adding up the cost of each item she added to our cart. This was partly my mother’s attempt to keep my math skills sharp, but it was also a necessity. As a low-income family, there was no slack in the budget for superfluous spending. The Hostess cupcakes I longed for were a luxury item that only appeared in our cart if there was an unexpected windfall. If the antitrust populists who castigate all forms of market power succeed in their crusade to radically deconcentrate the economy, life will be much harder for low-income families like the one I grew up in.
Antitrust populists like Biden White House officialTim Wu and authorMatt Stoller decry the political influence of large firms. But instead of advocating for policies that tackle this political influence directly, they seek reforms to antitrust enforcement that aim to limit the economic advantages of these firms, believing that will translate into political enfeeblement. The economic advantages arising from scale benefit consumers, particularly low-income consumers, often at the expense of smaller economic rivals. But because the protection of small businesses is so paramount to their worldview, antitrust populists blithely ignore the harm that advancing their objectives would cause to low-income families.
This desire to protect small businesses, without acknowledging the economic consequences for low-income families, is plainly obvious in calls for reinvigorated Robinson-Patman Act enforcement (a law from the 1930s for which independent businesses advocated to limit the rise of chain stores) and in plans to revise the antitrust enforcement agencies’ merger guidelines. The U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently held a series of listening sessions to demonstrate the need for new guidelines. During the listening session on food and agriculture, independent grocer Anthony Pena described the difficulty he has competing with larger competitors like Walmart. He stated that:
Just months ago, I was buying a 59-ounce orange juice just north of $4 a unit, where we couldn’t get the supplier to sell it to us … Meanwhile, I go to the bigger box like a Walmart or a club store. Not only do they have it fully stocked, but they have it about half the price that I would buy it for at cost.
Half the price. Anthony Pena is complaining that competitors such as Walmart are selling the same product at half the price. To protect independent grocers like Anthony Pena, antitrust populists would have consumers, including low-income families, pay twice as much for groceries.
Walmart is an important food retailer for low-income families.Nearly a fifth of all spending through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the program formerly known as food stamps, takes place at Walmart. After housing and transportation, food is the largest expense for low-income families. The share of expenditures going toward food for low-income families (i.e., families in the lowest 20% of the income distribution) is34% higher than for high-income families (i.e., families in the highest 20% of the income distribution). This means that higher grocery prices disproportionately burden low-income families.
In 2019, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) launched theSNAP Online Purchasing Pilot, which allows SNAP recipients to use their benefits at online food retailers. The pandemic led to an explosion in the number ofSNAP recipients using their benefits online—increasing from just 35,000 households in March 2020 to nearly 770,000 households just three months later. While the pilot originally only included Walmart and Amazon, thenumber of eligible retailers has expanded rapidly. In order to make grocery delivery more accessible to low-income families, an important service during the pandemic, Amazon reduced itsPrime membership fee (which helps pay for free delivery) by 50% for SNAP recipients.
The antitrust populists are not only targeting the advantages of large brick-and-mortar retailers, such as Walmart, but also of large online retailers like Amazon. Again, these advantages largely flow to consumers—particularly low-income ones.
The proposedAmerican Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA), which was voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee in February and may make an appearance on the Senate floor this summer, threatens those consumer benefits. AICOA would prohibit so-called “self-preferencing” by Amazon and other large technology platforms.
Should a ban on self-preferencing come to fruition, Amazon would not be able to prominently show its own products in any capacity—even when its products are a good match for a consumer’s search. In search results, Amazon will not be able to promote its private-label products, including Amazon Basics and 365 by Whole Foods, or products for which it is a first-party seller (i.e., a reseller of another company’s product). Amazon may also have to downgrade the ranking of popular products it sells, making them harder for consumers to find. Forcing Amazon to present offers that do not correspond to products consumers want to buy or are not a good value inflicts harm on all consumers but is particularly problematic for low-income consumers. All else equal, most consumers, especially low-income ones, obviously prefer cheaper products. It is important not to take that choice away from them.
Consider the case of orange juice, the product causing so much consternation for Mr. Pena. In a recent search on Amazon for a 59-ounce orange juice, as seen in the image below, the first four “organic” search results are SNAP-eligible, first-party, or private-label products sold by Amazon and ranging in price from $3.55 to $3.79. The next two results are from third-party sellers offering two 59-ounce bottles of orange juice at $38.99 and $84.54—more than five times the unit price offered by Amazon. By prohibiting self-preferencing, Amazon would be forced to promote products to consumers that are significantly more expensive and that are not SNAP-eligible. This increases costs directly for consumers who purchase more expensive products when cheaper alternatives are available but not presented. But it also increases costs indirectly by forcing consumers to search longer for better prices and SNAP-eligible products or by discouraging them from considering timesaving, online shopping altogether. Low-income families are least able to afford these increased costs.
The upshot is that antitrust populists are choosing to support (often well-off) small-business owners at the expense of vulnerable working people. Congress should not allow them to put the squeeze on low-income families. These families are already suffering due to record-high inflation—particularly for items that constitute the largest share of their expenditures, such as transportation and food. Proposed antitrust reforms such as AICOA and reinvigorated Robinson-Patman Act enforcement will only make it harder for low-income families to make ends meet.
[TOTM: The following is part of a digital symposium by TOTM guests and authors on Antitrust’s Uncertain Future: Visions of Competition in the New Regulatory Landscape. Information on the authors and the entire series of posts is available here.]
26 July, 10 A.F. (after fairness)
Dear Fellow Inquisitors,
It has been more than a decade now since the Federal Neutrality Commission, born of the ashes of the old world, ushered in the Age of Fairness.
As you all know, the FNC was created during the Online Era, when the emergence of the largest companies in human history opened our eyes to the original sin of the competitive process: unfairness.
In the course of their evolution, digital platforms—the vanity fairs of the XXI century—had created entire ecosystems that offered integrated services that were so comfortable to use together that they led to a double-sin: sloth on the part of the consumers, and the unfair exclusion of competitors, who were barred from exercising their God-given right to participate in every market and every platform—and to prosper.
Digital stores selling their own branded goods, social-media apps with their own messaging services, search engines using search statistics to generate optimally efficient tools that surpassed the (legitimate) confines of their core functions and spilled over into the dominion of job search, flight booking, or housing apps … App stores were even using their own recognizable software to guarantee that the apps they distributed met the highest standards of security and trustworthiness!
While these things might not seem entirely unreasonable (especially to the heathens: selfish and individualistic consumers who care about nothing other than satisfying their base hedonistic desires), they in fact led to unspeakable evils that flouted the common good.
For example, they made it very, very uncomfortable for someone who wanted to start their own real-estate business to compete with such strong rival companies, who could leverage their superior efficiency in their core markets to become nigh-unbeatable in offering the cheapest, most relevant housing ads. To make matters worse, the gargantuan spending of the digital platforms on research and development built additional moats of quality and innovation around their products—both core and adjacent—that made them utterly unimpregnable to rivals specializing in just one area.
By constantly leveraging their core services to offer better and improved products on adjacent markets, digital platforms had made it unfairly difficult for other companies to join the race and deliver us to “perfect competition”—the euphoric state of blissful equilibrium foretold by the high priests of the only true belief system, Economics.
But not all was lost, and we hadn’t been forsaken. In those dark and faithless days, it was revealed to us by Sen. Amy Klobuchar—praise be her name—that the loathsome practice whereby online companies favored their own products and services over their rivals had a name, “self-preferencing,” and that it was a sin. And, most importantly, that it could be eradicated.
Fortunately, and thanks to the vigilance of the FNC, legal steps were swiftly taken to make the praxis of the Digital Economy more closely resemble its theory, as passed on to us by our forefathers.
And it worked, brothers and sisters! The prohibition of self-preferencing in digital markets made online products much more homogenous, thus validating one of the main assumptions of Economics. In addition, new competition-law Acts, with mechanisms such as forced data sharing, have eliminated all the messy experimentation that had hitherto led to varied (and risky) business models and diversified approaches. By turning competition into forced collaboration, we had finally made it stable, equal, and predictable; in one word: fair.
And what of the sinner in every one of us? Before the great revelation, blasphemous “consumers”—an anachronistic and reductive term for “socially responsible citizens”—were committing the sin of laziness:sloth. Now, choice is finally mandated, and nothing can be pre-selected or even integrated. No more arbitrary safe-browsing mechanisms, integrated malware detectors and spam filters. Where digital platforms experimented and imposed results on us, we are now coercively free to experiment by ourselves—and on ourselves! Online searches today lead to thousands of indistinguishable links hiding an infinity of surprises, requiring us to be more circumspect and informed than ever before. In one word: the prohibition of self-preferencing has improved the moral character of the human stock.
It is universally known that we owe the dawn of the Age of Fairness to the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, adopted by Congress in the year 2022; and the unwavering vigilance of the FNC. What is lesser known—and what I am here to instill in you today—is that that was just the beginning. The success of AICOA has opened our eyes to an even more ancient and perverse evil: self-preferencing in offline markets. It revealed to us that—for centuries, if not millennia—companies in various industries—from togas to wine, from cosmetics to insurance—had, in fact, always preferred their own initiatives over those of their rivals!
Just as the ancient chariot constructors designed chariots to suit the build of their own thoroughbred horses (thereby foreclosing horses raised by other breeders), the XX century car producers were using spare parts delivered by a supplier organizationally related to their company.
This realization has accelerated the birth pangs of the American Innovation and Choice Offline Act, which we are here to announce today. With it, the FNC will eliminate all remnants of unfair rivalry—online and offline—so that we, as one community of faith, can finally enjoy the true benefits of competition. But we must never forget that this tenuous equilibrium hangs by a thread, and that we owe it all to the indefatigable efforts of the FNC agents patrolling the streets, supermarkets, restaurants, gyms, factories, and just about everything else every single day.
Of course, there is still a lot to be done. But every long journey must begin somewhere.
Today, I want to warn you against sin and urge you to adopt the religion of fairness[1] before the day of judgment comes.
Amen.
[1] Or any other religion that condemns self-preferencing. I want to recommend them all equally.
[TOTM: The following is part of a digital symposium by TOTM guests and authors on Antitrust’s Uncertain Future: Visions of Competition in the New Regulatory Landscape. Information on the authors and the entire series of posts is available here.]
If S.2992—the American Innovation and Choice Online Act or AICOA—were to become law, it would be, at the very least, an incomplete law. By design—and not for good reason, but for political expediency—AICOA is riddled with intentional uncertainty. In theory, the law’s glaring definitional deficiencies are meant to be rectified by “expert” agencies (i.e., the DOJ and FTC) after passage. But in actuality, no such certainty would ever emerge, and the law would stand as a testament to the crass political machinations and absence of rigor that undergird it. Among many other troubling outcomes, this is what the future under AICOA would hold.
Guidelines Cannot Substitute for the Law’s Lack of Legal Certainty
Two months ago, the American Bar Association’s (ABA) Antitrust Section published a searing critique of AICOA in which it denounced the bill for being poorly written, vague, and departing from established antitrust-law principles. As Lazar Radic and I discussed in a previous post, what made the ABA’s letter to Congress so eye-opening was that it was penned by a typically staid group with a reputation for independence, professionalism, and ideational heterogeneity.
One of the main issues the ABA flagged in its letter is that the introduction of vague new concepts—like “materially harm competition,” which does not exist anywhere in current antitrust law—into the antitrust mainstream will risk substantial legal uncertainty and produce swathes of unintended consequences.
According to some, however, the bill’s inherent uncertainty is a feature, not a bug. It leaves enough space for specialist agencies to define the precise meaning of key terms without unduly narrowing the scope of the bill ex ante.
In particular, supporters of the bill have pointed to the prospect of agency guidelines under the law to rescue it from the starkest of the fundamental issues identified by the ABA. Section 4 of AICOA requires the DOJ and FTC to issue “agency enforcement guidelines” no later than 270 days after the date of enactment:
outlining policies and practices relating to conduct that may materially harm competition under section 3(a), agency interpretations of the affirmative defenses under section 3(b), and policies for determining the appropriate amount of a civil penalty to be sought under section 3(c).
In pointing to the prospect of guidelines, however, supporters are inadvertently admitting defeat—and proving the ABA’s point: AICOA is not ready for prime time.
This thinking is misguided for at least three reasons:
Guidelines are not rules
As section 4(d) of AICOA recognizes, guidelines are emphatically nonbinding:
The joint guidelines issued under this section do not … operate to bind the Commission, Department of Justice, or any person, State, or locality to the approach recommended in the guidelines.
As such, the value of guidelines in dispelling legal uncertainty is modest, at best.
This is even more so in today’s highly politicized atmosphere, where guidelines can be withdrawn at the tip of the ballot (we’ve just seen the FTC rescind the Vertical Merger Guidelines it put in place less than a year ago). Given how politicized the issuing agencies themselves have become, it’s a virtual certainty that the guidelines produced in response to AICOA would be steeped in partisan politics and immediately changed with a change in administration, thus providing no more lasting legal certainty than speculation by a member of Congress.
Guidelines are not the appropriate tool to define novel concepts
Regardless of this political reality, however, the mixture of vagueness and novelty inherent in the key concepts that underpin the infringements and affirmative defenses under AICOA—such as “fairness,” “preferencing,” “materiality”, or the “intrinsic” value of a product—undermine the usefulness (and legitimacy) of guidelines.
Indeed, while laws are sometimes purposefully vague—operating as standards rather than prescriptive rules—to allow for more flexibility, the concepts introduced by AICOA don’t even offer any cognizable standards suitable for fine-tuning.
The operative terms of AICOA don’t have definitive meanings under antitrust law, either because they are wholly foreign to accepted antitrust law (as in the case of “self-preferencing”) or because the courts have never agreed on an accepted definition (as in the case of “fairness”). Nor are they technical standards, which are better left to specialized agencies rather than to legislators to define, such as in the case of, e.g., pollution (by contrast: what is the technical standard for “fairness”?).
Indeed, as Elyse Dorsey has noted, the only certainty that would emerge from this state of affairs is the certainty of pervasive rent-seeking by non-altruistic players seeking to define the rules in their favor.
As we’ve pointed out elsewhere, the purpose of guidelines is to reflect the state of the art in a certain area of antitrust law and not to push the accepted scope of knowledge and practice in a new direction. This not only overreaches the FTC’s and DOJ’s powers, but also risks galvanizing opposition from the courts, thereby undermining the utility of adopting guidelines in the first place.
Guidelines can’t fix a fundamentally flawed law
Expecting guidelines to provide sensible, administrable content for the bill sets the bar overly high for guidelines, and unduly low for AICOA.
The alleged harms at the heart of AICOA are foreign to antitrust law, and even to the economic underpinnings of competition policy more broadly. Indeed, as Sean Sullivan has pointed out, the law doesn’t even purport to define “harms,” but only serves to make specific conduct illegal:
Even if the conduct has no effect, it’s made illegal, unless an affirmative defense is raised. And the affirmative defense requires that it doesn’t ‘harm competition.’ But ‘harm competition’ is undefined…. You have to prove that harm doesn’t result, but it’s not really ever made clear what the harm is in the first place.”
“Self-preferencing” is not a competitive defect, and simply declaring it to be so does not make it one. As I’ve noted elsewhere:
The notion that platform entry into competition with edge providers is harmful to innovation is entirely speculative. Moreover, it is flatly contrary to a range of studies showing that the opposite is likely true…. The theory of vertical discrimination harm is at odds not only with this platform-specific empirical evidence, it is also contrary to the long-standing evidence on the welfare effects of vertical restraints more broadly …
… [M]andating openness is not without costs, most importantly in terms of the effective operation of the platform and its own incentives for innovation.
Asking agencies with an expertise in competition policy to enact economically sensible guidelines to direct enforcement against such conduct is a fool’s errand. It is a recipe for purely political legislation adopted by competition agencies that does nothing to further their competition missions.
AICOA’s Catch-22 Is Its Own Doing, and Will Be Its Downfall
AICOA’s Catch-22 is that, by making the law so vague that it needs enforcement guidelines to flesh it out, AICOA renders both itself and those same guidelines irrelevant and misses the point of both legal instruments.
Ultimately, guidelines cannot resolve the fundamental rule-of-law issues raised by the bill and highlighted by the ABA in its letter. To the contrary, they confirm the ABA’s concerns that AICOA is a poorly written and indeterminate bill. Further, the contentious elements of the bill that need clarification are inherently legislative ones that—paradoxically—shouldn’t be left to competition-agency guidelines to elucidate.
The upshot is that any future under AICOA will be one marked by endless uncertainty and the extreme politicization of both competition policy and the agencies that enforce it.
[TOTM: The following is part of a digital symposium by TOTM guests and authors on Antitrust’s Uncertain Future: Visions of Competition in the New Regulatory Landscape. Information on the authors and the entire series of posts is available here.]
Much ink has been spilled regarding the potential harm to the economy and to the rule of law that could stem from enactment of the primary federal antitrust legislative proposal, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) (see here). AICOA proponents, of course, would beg to differ, emphasizing the purported procompetitive benefits of limiting the business freedom of “Big Tech monopolists.”
There is, however, one inescapable reality—as night follows day, passage of AICOA would usher in an extended period of costly litigation over the meaning of a host of AICOA terms. As we will see, this would generate business uncertainty and dampen innovative conduct that might be covered by new AICOA statutory terms.
The history of antitrust illustrates the difficulties inherent in clarifying the meaning of novel federal statutory language. It was not until 21 years after passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act that the Supreme Court held that Section 1 of the act’s prohibition on contracts, combinations, and conspiracies “in restraint of trade” only covered unreasonable restraints of trade (see Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States, 221 U.S. 1 (1911)). Furthermore, courts took decades to clarify that certain types of restraints (for example, hardcore price fixing and horizontal market division) were inherently unreasonable and thus per se illegal, while others would be evaluated on a case-by-case basis under a “rule of reason.”
In addition, even far more specific terms related to exclusive dealing, tying, and price discrimination found within the Clayton Antitrust Act gave rise to uncertainty over the scope of their application. This uncertainty had to be sorted out through judicial case-law tests developed over many decades.
Even today, there is no simple, easily applicable test to determine whether conduct in the abstract constitutes illegal monopolization under Section 2 of the Sherman Act. Rather, whether Section 2 has been violated in any particular instance depends upon the application of economic analysis and certain case-law principles to matter-specific facts.
As is the case with current antitrust law, the precise meaning and scope of AICOA’s terms will have to be fleshed out over many years. Scholarly critiques of AICOA’s language underscore the seriousness of this problem.
In its April 2022 public comment on AICOA, the American Bar Association (ABA) Antitrust Law Section explains in some detail the significant ambiguities inherent in specific AICOA language that the courts will have to address. These include “ambiguous terminology … regarding fairness, preferencing, materiality, and harm to competition on covered platforms”; and “specific language establishing affirmative defenses [that] creates significant uncertainty”. The ABA comment further stresses that AICOA’s failure to include harm to the competitive process as a prerequisite for a statutory violation departs from a broad-based consensus understanding within the antitrust community and could have the unintended consequence of disincentivizing efficient conduct. This departure would, of course, create additional interpretive difficulties for federal judges, further complicating the task of developing coherent case-law principles for the new statute.
In a somewhat similar vein, Stanford Law School Professor (and former acting assistant attorney general for antitrust during the Clinton administration) Douglas Melamed complains that:
[AICOA] does not include the normal antitrust language (e.g., “competition in the market as a whole,” “market power”) that gives meaning to the idea of harm to competition, nor does it say that the imprecise language it does use is to be construed as that language is construed by the antitrust laws. … The bill could be very harmful if it is construed to require, not increased market power, but simply harm to rivals.
In sum, ambiguities inherent in AICOA’s new terminology will generate substantial uncertainty among affected businesses. This uncertainty will play out in the courts over a period of years. Moreover, the likelihood that judicial statutory constructions of AICOA language will support “efficiency-promoting” interpretations of behavior is diminished by the fact that AICOA’s structural scheme (which focuses on harm to rivals) does not harmonize with traditional antitrust concerns about promoting a vibrant competitive process.
Knowing this, the large high-tech firms covered by AICOA will become risk averse and less likely to innovate. (For example, they will be reluctant to improve algorithms in a manner that would increase efficiency and benefit consumers, but that might be seen as disadvantaging rivals.) As such, American innovation will slow, and consumers will suffer. (See here for an estimate of the enormous consumer-welfare gains generated by high tech platforms—gains of a type that AICOA’s enactment may be expected to jeopardize.) It is to be hoped that Congress will take note and consign AICOA to the rubbish heap of disastrous legislative policy proposals.
[TOTM: The following is part of a digital symposium by TOTM guests and authors on Antitrust’s Uncertain Future: Visions of Competition in the New Regulatory Landscape. Information on the authors and the entire series of posts is available here.]
Jouko Hiltunen gazed out the window into the midday twilight. Eight stories down, across the plaza and promenade, the Helsinki harbor was already blanketed under a dusting of snow. By Christmas, the ice would be thick enough for walking out to the castle at Suomenlinna.
Jouko turned back to his computer screen. His fingers found the keys. At once, lines of code began spilling from the keyboard.
The desk phone rang. Sanna, who occupied the adjacent cubicle, arched her eyebrows. “Legal again?”
Jouko nodded. Without answering the phone, he got up and walked down three flights of stairs. The usual group was assembled in Partanen’s office: the woman in the dour gray suit who looked like an osprey, the fat man from Brussels who made them speak in English, and Partanen, the general counsel.
By habit, Jouko entered and stood behind a chair. Partanen nodded curtly. “We have an issue, Hiltunen. Again.”
“What now?”
“We’ve been watching how you’re coding the new walking tour search vertical. It seems that you are designing it to give preference to restaurants, cafès, and hotels that have been highly rated by the Tourism Board.”
“Yes, that’s right. Restaurants, cafès, and hotels that have been rated by the Tourism Board are cleaner, safer, and more convenient. That’s why they have been rated.”
“But you are forgetting that the Tourism Board is one of our investors. This will be considered self-preferencing.”
“But . . .”
“Listen, Hiltunen. We aren’t here to argue about this. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t be considered self-preferencing, but our company won’t take that risk. Do you understand?”
“No.”
“Then let me explain it . . .”
But Jouko had already left. When he returned to his desk, Sanna was watching him. “Everything OK?” she asked.
Jouko shrugged. He started typing again, but more slowly than before. An hour later, the phone rang again. This time, Sanna only raised an eyebrow. Jouko gave half a nod and ambled downstairs.
“You are making it worse,” said Partanen. The osprey woman scowled and raked her fingernails across the desk.
“How am I making it worse? I did what you said and eliminated search results defaulting to rated establishments.”
“Yes, but you added a toggle for users to be shown only rated establishments.”
“Only if they decide to be shown only rated establishments. I’m giving them a choice.”
“Choice? What does choice have to do with it? Everyone who uses our search engine is choosing—” Partanen made rabbit ears in the air – “but we have a responsibility not to impede competition. If you give them a suggestive choice” – again, rabbit ears – “that will be considered self-preferencing?”
“Really?”
“Well, maybe it will and maybe it won’t, but the company won’t take the risk.”
When Jouko returned to his desk, Sanna averted her eyes. As he sat motionless behind his keyboard, hands folded in his lap, she occasionally shot him concerned glances.
The darkness outside was nearly complete when the phone rang again. Jouko let it go to voicemail and waited a long time before rising and walking wearily downstairs.
“What now? I haven’t done anything.”
“We’ve been talking and have a new idea. It would be better if you blocked from the search results any restaurants or hotels that have been rated by the Board of Tourism. That way, there is no chance that we will be accused of self-preferencing.”
“Or that people will end up in a safe, clean, or convenient restaurant.”
“That’s not your problem, is it?”
Jouko returned to his cubicle. He did not sit down at his desk, but started putting on his coat.
“Where are you going?” asked Sanna.
“I’m going to walk out towards Suomenlinna.”
Sanna’s voice rose in alarm: “But the ice has barely formed. It won’t hold you.”
Jouko shrugged. “Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. I’ll take the risk.”
[TOTM: The following is part of a digital symposium by TOTM guests and authors on Antitrust’s Uncertain Future: Visions of Competition in the New Regulatory Landscape. Information on the authors and the entire series of posts is available here.]
Earlier this month, Professors Fiona Scott Morton, Steve Salop, and David Dinielli penned a letter expressing their “strong support” for the proposed American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA). In the letter, the professors address criticisms of AICOA and urge its approval, despite possible imperfections.
“Perhaps this bill could be made better if we lived in a perfect world,” the professors write, “[b]ut we believe the perfect should not be the enemy of the good, especially when change is so urgently needed.”
The problem is that the professors and other supporters of AICOA have shown neither that “change is so urgently needed” nor that the proposed law is, in fact, “good.”
Is Change ‘Urgently Needed’?
With respect to the purported urgency that warrants passage of a concededly imperfect bill, the letter authors assert two points. First, they claim that AICOA’s targets—Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (collectively, GAFAM)—“serve as the essential gatekeepers of economic, social, and political activity on the internet.” It is thus appropriate, they say, to amend the antitrust laws to do something they have never before done: saddle a handful of identified firms with special regulatory duties.
But is this oft-repeated claim about “gatekeeper” status true? The label conjures up the oldTerminal Railroad case, where a group of firms controlled the only bridges over the Mississippi River at St. Louis. Freighters had no choice but to utilize their services. Do the GAFAM firms really play a similar role with respect to “economic, social, and political activity on the internet”? Hardly.
With respect to economic activity, Amazon may be a huge player, but it still accounts foronly 39.5% of U.S. ecommerce sales—and far less of retail sales overall. Consumers have gobs of other ecommerce options, and so do third-party merchants, which may sell their wares using Shopify, Ebay, Walmart, Etsy, numerous other ecommerce platforms, or their own websites.
For social activity on the internet, consumers need not rely on Facebook and Instagram. They can connect with others via Snapchat, Reddit, Pinterest, TikTok, Twitter, and scores of other sites. To be sure, all these services have different niches, but the letter authors’ claim that the GAFAM firms are “essential gatekeepers” of “social… activity on the internet” is spurious.
The second argument the letter authors assert in support of their claim of urgency is that “[t]he decline of antitrust enforcement in the U.S. is well known, pervasive, and has left our jurisprudence unable to protect and maintain competitive markets.” In other words, contemporary antitrust standards are anemic and have led to a lack of market competition in the United States.
The evidence for this claim, which is increasingly parroted in the press and among the punditry, is weak. Proponents primarily point to studies showing:
increasing industrial concentration;
higher markups on goods and services since 1980;
a declining share of surplus going to labor, which could indicate monopsony power in labor markets; and
a reduction in startup activity, suggesting diminished innovation.
Examined closely, however, those studies fail to establish a domestic market power crisis.
Industrial concentration has little to do with market power in actual markets. Indeed, research suggests that, while industries may be consolidating at the national level, competition at the market (local) level is increasing, as more efficient national firms open more competitive outlets in local markets. As Geoff Manne sums up this research:
Most recently, several working papers looking at the data on concentration in detail and attempting to identify the likely cause for the observed data, show precisely the opposite relationship. The reason for increased concentration appears to be technological, not anticompetitive. And, as might be expected from that cause, its effects are beneficial. Indeed, the story is both intuitive and positive.
What’s more, while national concentration does appear to be increasing in some sectors of the economy, it’s not actually so clear that the same is true for local concentration — which is often the relevant antitrust market.
With respect to the evidence on markups, the claim of a significant increase in the price-cost margin depends crucially on the measure of cost. The studies suggesting an increase in margins since 1980 use the “cost of goods sold” (COGS) metric, which excludes a firm’s management and marketing costs—both of which have become an increasingly significant portion of firms’ costs. Measuring costs using the “operating expenses” (OPEX) metric, which includes management and marketing costs,reveals that public-company markups increased only modestly since the 1980s and that the increase was within historical variation. (It is also likely that increased markups since 1980 reflect firms’ more extensive use of technology and their greater regulatory burdens, both of which raise fixed costs and require higher markups over marginal cost.)
As for the declining labor share, that dynamic is occurring globally. Indeed, the decline in the labor share in the United States has been less severe than in Japan, Canada, Italy, France, Germany, China, Mexico, and Poland, suggesting that anemic U.S. antitrust enforcement is not to blame. (A reduction in the relative productivity of labor is a more likely culprit.)
Finally, the claim of reduced startup activity is unfounded. In itsreport on competition in digital markets, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee asserted that, since the advent of the major digital platforms:
“[t]he number of new technology firms in the digital economy has declined”;
“the entrepreneurship rate—the share of startups and young firms in the [high technology] industry as a whole—has also fallen significantly”; and
“[u]nsurprisingly, there has also been a sharp reduction in early-stage funding for technology startups.” (pp. 46-47.)
Those claims, however, are based on cherry-picked evidence.
In support of the first two, the Judiciary Committee report cited astudy based on data ending in 2011. As Benedict Evans hasobserved, “standard industry data shows that startup investment rounds have actually risen at least 4x since then.”
In support of the third claim, the report cited statistics from anarticle noting that the number and aggregate size of the very smallest venture capital deals—those under $1 million—fell between 2014 and 2018 (after growing substantially from 2008 to 2014). The Judiciary Committee report failed to note, however, the cited article’s observation that small venture deals ($1 million to $5 million) had not dropped and that larger venture deals (greater than $5 million) had grown substantially during the same time period. Nor did the report acknowledge that venture-capital funding hascontinued to increase since 2018.
Finally, there is also reason to think that AICOA’s passage would harm, not help, the startup environment:
AICOA doesn’t directly restrict startup acquisitions, but the activities it would restrict most certainly do dramatically affect the incentives that drive many startup acquisitions. If a platform is prohibited from engaging in cross-platform integration of acquired technologies, or if it can’t monetize its purchase by prioritizing its own technology, it may lose the motivation to make a purchase in the first place.
Despite the letter authors’ claims, neither a paucity of avenues for “economic, social, and political activity on the internet” nor the general state of market competition in the United States establishes an “urgent need” to re-write the antitrust laws to saddle a small group of firms with unprecedented legal obligations.
Is the Vagueness of AICOA’s Primary Legal Standard a Feature?
AICOA bars covered platforms from engaging in three broad classes of conduct (self-preferencing, discrimination among business users, and limiting business users’ ability to compete) where the behavior at issue would “materially harm competition.” It then forbids several specific business practices, but allows the defendant to avoid liability by proving that their use of the practice would not cause a “material harm to competition.”
Critics have argued that “material harm to competition”—a standard that is not used elsewhere in the antitrust laws—is too indeterminate to provide business planners and adjudicators with adequate guidance. The authors of the pro-AICOA letter, however, maintain that this “different language is a feature, not a bug.”
That is so, the letter authors say, because the language effectively signals to courts and policymakers that antitrust should prohibit more conduct. They explain:
To clarify to courts and policymakers that Congress wants something different (and stronger), new terminology is required. The bill’s language would open up a new space and move beyond the standards imposed by the Sherman Act, which has not effectively policed digital platforms.
Putting aside the weakness of the letter authors’ premise (i.e., that Sherman Act standards have proven ineffective), the legislative strategy they advocate—obliquely signal that you want “change” without saying what it should consist of—is irresponsible and risky.
The letter authors assert two reasons Congress should not worry about enacting a liability standard that has no settled meaning. One is that:
[t]he same judges who are called upon to render decisions under the existing, insufficient, antitrust regime, will also be called upon to render decisions under the new law. They will be the same people with the same worldview.
It is thus unlikely that “outcomes under the new law would veer drastically away from past understandings of core concepts….”
But this claim undermines the argument that a new standard is needed to get the courts to do “something different” and “move beyond the standards imposed by the Sherman Act.” If we don’t need to worry about an adverse outcome from a novel, ill-defined standard because courts are just going to continue applying the standard they’re familiar with, then what’s the point of changing the standard?
A second reason not to worry about the lack of clarity on AICOA’s key liability standard, the letter authors say, is that federal enforcers will define it:
The new law would mandate that the [Federal Trade Commission and the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice], the two expert agencies in the area of competition, together create guidelines to help courts interpret the law. Any uncertainty about the meaning of words like ‘competition’ will be resolved in those guidelines and over time with the development of caselaw.
This is no doubt music to the ears of members of Congress, who love to get credit for “doing something” legislatively, while leaving the details to an agency so that they can avoid accountability if things turn out poorly. Indeed, the letter authors explicitly play upon legislators’ unwholesome desire for credit-sans-accountability. They emphasize that “[t]he agencies must [create and] update the guidelines periodically. Congress doesn’t have to do much of anything very specific other than approve budgets; it certainly has no obligation to enact any new laws, let alone amend them.”
AICOA does not, however, confer rulemaking authority on the agencies; it merely directs them to create and periodically update “agency enforcement guidelines” and “agency interpretations” of certain affirmative defenses. Those guidelines and interpretations would not bind courts, which would be free to interpret AICOA’s new standard differently. The letter authors presume that courts would defer to the agencies’ interpretation of the vague standard, and they probably would. But that raises other problems.
For one thing, it reduces certainty, which is likely to chill innovation. Giving the enforcement agencies de facto power to determine and redetermine what behaviors “would materially harm competition” means that the rules are never settled. Administrations differ markedly in their views about what the antitrust laws should forbid, so business planners could never be certain that a product feature or revenue model that is legal today will not be deemed to “materially harm competition” by a future administration with greater solicitude for small rivals and upstarts. Such uncertainty will hinder investment in novel products, services, and business models.
Consider, for example, Google’s investment in the Android mobile operating system. Google makes money from Android—which it licenses to device manufacturers for free—by ensuring that Google’s revenue-generating services (e.g., its search engine and browser) are strongly preferenced on Android products. One administration might believe that this is a procompetitive arrangement, as itcreates a different revenue model for mobile operating systems (as opposed to Apple’s generation of revenue from hardware sales), resulting in both increased choice and lower prices for consumers. A subsequent administration might conclude that the arrangement materially harms competition by making it harder for rival search engines and web browsers to gain market share. It would make scant sense for a covered platform to make an investment like Google did with Android if its underlying business model could be upended by a new administration with de facto power to rewrite the law.
A second problem with having the enforcement agencies determine and redetermine what covered platforms may do is that it effectively transforms the agencies from law enforcers into sectoral regulators. Indeed, the letter authors agree that “the ability of expert agencies to incorporate additional protections in the guidelines” means that “the bill is not a pure antitrust law but also safeguards other benefits to consumers.” They tout that “the complementarity between consumer protection and competition can be addressed in the guidelines.”
Of course, to the extent that the enforcement guidelines address concerns besides competition, they will be less useful for interpreting AICOA’s “material harm to competition” standard; they might deem a practice suspect on non-competition grounds. Moreover, it is questionable whether creating a sectoral regulator for five widely diverse firms is a good idea. The history of sectoral regulation is littered with examples of agency capture, rent-seeking, and other public-choice concerns. At a minimum, Congress should carefully examine the potential downsides of sectoral regulation, install protections to mitigate those downsides, and explicitly establish the sectoral regulator.
Will AICOA Break Popular Products and Services?
Many popular offerings by the platforms covered by AICOA involve self-preferencing, discrimination among business users, or one of the other behaviors the bill presumptively bans.Pre-installation of iPhone apps and services like Siri, for example, involves self-preferencing or discrimination among business users of Apple’s iOS platform. But iPhone consumers value having a mobile device that offers extensive services right out of the box. Consumers love that Google’s search result for an establishment offers directions to the place, which involves the preferencing of Google Maps. And consumers positively adore Amazon Prime, which can provide free expedited delivery because Amazon conditions Prime designation on a third-party seller’s use of Amazon’s efficient, reliable “Fulfillment by Amazon” service—somethingAmazon could not do under AICOA.
The authors of the pro-AICOA letter insist that the law will not ban attractive product features like these. AICOA, they say:
provides a powerful defense that forecloses any thoughtful concern of this sort: conduct otherwise banned under the bill is permitted if it would ‘maintain or substantially enhance the core functionality of the covered platform.’
But the authors’ confidence that this affirmative defense will adequately protect popular offerings is misplaced. The defense is narrow and difficult to mount.
First, it immunizes only those behaviors that maintain or substantially enhance the “core” functionality of the covered platform. Courts would rightly interpret AICOA to give effect to that otherwise unnecessary word, which dictionariesdefine as “the central or most important part of something.” Accordingly, any self-preferencing, discrimination, or other presumptively illicit behavior that enhances a covered platform’s service but not its “central or most important” functions is not even a candidate for the defense.
Even if a covered platform could establish that a challenged practice would maintain or substantially enhance the platform’s core functionality, it would also have to prove that the conduct was “narrowly tailored” and “reasonably necessary” to achieve the desired end, and, for many behaviors, the “le[ast] discriminatory means” of doing so. That is a remarkably heavy burden, and it beggars belief to suppose that business planners considering novel offerings involving self-preferencing, discrimination, or some other presumptively illicit conduct would feel confident that they could make the required showing. It is likely, then, that AICOA would break existing products and services and discourage future innovation.
Of course, Congress could mitigate this concern by specifying that AICOA does not preclude certain things, such as pre-installed apps or consumer-friendly search results. But the legislation would then lose the support of the many interest groups who want the law to preclude various popular offerings that its text would now forbid. Unlike consumers, who are widely dispersed and difficult to organize, the groups and competitors that would benefit from things like stripped-down smartphones, map-free search results, and Prime-less Amazon are effective lobbyists.
Should the US Follow Europe?
Having responded to criticisms of AICOA, the authors of the pro-AICOA letter go on offense. They assert that enactment of the bill is needed to ensure that the United States doesn’t lose ground to Europe, both in regulatory leadership and in innovation. Observing that the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) has just become law, the authors write that:
[w]ithout [AICOA], the role of protecting competition and innovation in the digital sector outside China will be left primarily to the European Union, abrogating U.S. leadership in this sector.
Moreover, if Europe implements its DMA and the United States does not adopt AICOA, the authors claim:
the center of gravity for innovation and entrepreneurship [could] shift from the U.S. to Europe, where the DMA would offer greater protections to start ups and app developers, and even makers and artisans, against exclusionary conduct by the gatekeeper platforms.
Implicit in the argument that AICOA is needed to maintain America’s regulatory leadership is the assumption that to lead in regulatory policy is to have the most restrictive rules. The most restrictive regulator will necessarily be the “leader” in the sense that it will be the one with the most control over regulated firms. But leading in the sense of optimizing outcomes and thereby serving as a model for other jurisdictions entails crafting the best policies—those that minimize the aggregate social losses from wrongly permitting bad behavior, wrongly condemning good behavior, and determining whether conduct is allowed or forbidden (i.e., those that “minimize the sum of error and decision costs”). Rarely is the most restrictive regulatory regime the one that optimizes outcomes, and as I have elsewhereexplained, the rules set forth in the DMA hardly seem calibrated to do so.
As for “innovation and entrepreneurship” in the technological arena, it would be a seismic shift indeed if the center of gravity were to migrate to Europe, which is currently home tozero of the top 20 global tech companies. (The United States hosts 12; China, eight.)
It seems implausible, though, that imposing a bunch of restrictions on large tech companies that have significant resources for innovation and arescrambling to enter each other’s markets will enhance, rather than retard, innovation. The self-preferencing bans in AICOA and DMA, for example, would prevent Apple from developing its own search engine to compete with Google, as it has apparentlycontemplated. Why would Apple develop its own search engine if it couldn’t preference it on iPhones and iPads? And why would Google have started its shopping service to compete with Amazon if it couldn’t preference Google Shopping in search results? And why would any platform continually improve to gain more users as it neared the thresholds for enhanced duties under DMA or AICOA? It seems more likely that the DMA/AICOA approach will hinder, rather than spur, innovation.
At the very least, wouldn’t it be prudent to wait and see whether DMA leads to a flourishing of innovation and entrepreneurship in Europe before jumping on the European bandwagon? After all, technological innovations that occur in Europe won’t be available only to Europeans. Just as Europeans benefit from innovation by U.S. firms, American consumers will be able to reap the benefits of any DMA-inspired innovation occurring in Europe. Moreover, if DMA indeed furthers innovation by making it easier for entrants to gain footing, even American technology firms could benefit from the law by launching their products in Europe. There’s no reason for the tech sector to move to Europe to take advantage of a small-business-protective European law.
In fact, the optimal outcome might be to have one jurisdiction in which major tech platforms are free to innovate, enter each other’s markets via self-preferencing, etc. (the United States, under current law) and another that is more protective of upstart businesses that use the platforms (Europe under DMA). The former jurisdiction would create favorable conditions for platform innovation and inter-platform competition; the latter might enhance innovation among businesses that rely on the platforms. Consumers in each jurisdiction, however, would benefit from innovation facilitated by the other.
It makes little sense, then, for the United States to rush to adopt European-style regulation. DMA is a radical experiment. Regulatory history suggests that the sort of restrictiveness it imposes retards, rather than furthers, innovation. But in the unlikely event that things turn out differently this time, little harm would result from waiting to see DMA’s benefits before implementing its restrictive approach.
Does AICOA Threaten Platforms’ Ability to Moderate Content and Police Disinformation?
The authors of the pro-AICOA letter conclude by addressing the concern that AICOA “will inadvertently make content moderation difficult because some of the prohibitions could be read… to cover and therefore prohibit some varieties of content moderation” by covered platforms.
The letter authors say that a reading of AICOA to prohibit content moderation is “strained.” They maintain that the act’s requirement of “competitive harm” would prevent imposition of liability based on content moderation and that the act is “plainly not intended to cover” instances of “purported censorship.” They further contend that the risk of judicial misconstrual exists with all proposed laws and therefore should not be a sufficient reason to oppose AICOA.
Each of these points is weak. Section 3(a)(3) of AICOA makes it unlawful for a covered platform to “discriminate in the application or enforcement of the terms of service of the covered platform among similarly situated business users in a manner that would materially harm competition.” It ishardly “strained” to reason that this provision is violated when, say, Google’s YouTube selectively demonetizes a business user for content that Google deems harmful or misleading. Or when Apple removes Parler, but not every other violator of service terms, from its App Store. Such conduct could “materially harm competition” by impeding the de-platformed business’ ability to compete with its rivals.
And it is hard to say that AICOA is “plainly not intended” to forbid these acts when a key supporting senatortouted the bill as a means of policing content moderation andobserved during markup that it would “make some positive improvement on the problem of censorship” (i.e., content moderation) because “it would provide protections to content providers, to businesses that are discriminated against because of the content of what they produce.”
At a minimum, we should expect some state attorneys general to try to use the law to police content moderation they disfavor, and the mere prospect of such legal action could chill anti-disinformation efforts and other forms of content moderation.
Of course, there’s a simple way for Congress to eliminate the risk of what the letter authors deem judicial misconstrual: It could clarify that AICOA’s prohibitions do not cover good-faith efforts to moderate content or police disinformation. Such clarification, however, would kill the bill, asseveral Republican legislators are supporting the act because it restricts content moderation.
The risk of judicial misconstrual with AICOA, then, is not the sort that exists with “any law, new or old,” as the letter authors contend. “Normal” misconstrual risk exists when legislators try to be clear about their intentions but, because language has its limits, some vagueness or ambiguity persists. AICOA’s architects have deliberately obscured their intentions in order to cobble together enough supporters to get the bill across the finish line.
The one thing that all AICOA supporters can agree on is that they deserve credit for “doing something” about Big Tech. If the law is construed in a way they disfavor, they can always act shocked and blame rogue courts. That’s shoddy, cynical lawmaking.
Conclusion
So, I respectfully disagree with Professors Scott Morton, Salop, and Dinielli on AICOA. There is no urgent need to pass the bill right now, especially as we are on the cusp of seeing an AICOA-like regime put to the test. The bill’s central liability standard is overly vague, and its plain terms would break popular products and services and thwart future innovation. The United States should equate regulatory leadership with the best, not the most restrictive, policies. And Congress should thoroughly debate and clarify its intentions on content moderation before enacting legislation that could upend the status quo on that important matter.
For all these reasons, Congress should reject AICOA. And for the same reasons, a future in which AICOA is adopted is extremely unlikely to resemble the Utopian world that Professors Scott Morton, Salop, and Dinielli imagine.
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