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Dead End Road: National Petroleum Refiners Association and FTC ‘Unfair Methods of Competition’ Rulemaking

Maureen K. Ohlhausen & Ben Rossen —  13 July 2022

[On Monday, June 27, Concurrences hosted a conference on the Rulemaking Authority of the Federal Trade Commission. This conference featured the work of contributors to a new book on the subject edited by Professor Dan Crane. Several of these authors have previously contributed to the Truth on the Market FTC UMC Symposium. We are pleased to be able to share with you excerpts or condensed versions of chapters from this book prepared by authors of of those chapters. Our thanks and compliments to Dan and Concurrences for bringing together an outstanding event and set of contributors and for supporting our sharing them with you here.]

[The post below was authored by former Federal Trade Commission Acting Chair Maureen K. Ohlhausen and former FTC Senior Attorney Ben Rossen.]

Introduction

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has long steered the direction of competition law by engaging in case-by-case enforcement of the FTC Act’s prohibition on unfair methods of competition (UMC). Recently, some have argued that the FTC’s exclusive reliance on case-by-case adjudication is too long and arduous a route and have urged the commission to take a shortcut by invoking its purported authority to promulgate UMC rules under Section 6(g) of the Federal Trade Commission Act.

Proponents of UMC rulemaking rely on National Petroleum Refiners Association v. FTC, a 1973 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that upheld the commission’s authority to issue broad legislative rules under the FTC Act. They argue that the case provides a clear path to UMC rules and that Congress effectively ratified the D.C. Circuit’s decision when it enacted detailed rulemaking procedures governing unfair or deceptive acts or practices (UDAP) in the Magnuson Moss Warranty-Federal Trade Commission Improvement Act of 1975 (Magnuson-Moss).

The premise of this argument is fundamentally incorrect, because modern courts reject the type of permissive statutory analysis applied in National Petroleum Refiners. Moreover, contemporaneous congressional reaction to National Petroleum Refiners was not to embrace broad FTC rulemaking, but rather to put in strong guardrails on FTC UDAP rulemaking. Further, the congressional history of the particular FTC rule at issue—the Octane Ratings Rule—also points in the direction of a lack of broad UMC rulemaking, as Congress eventually adopted the rule solely as a UDAP provision, with heightened restrictions on FTC rulemaking.

Thus, the road to UMC rulemaking, which the agency wisely never tried to travel down in the almost 50 years since National Petroleum Refiners, is essentially a dead end. If the agency tries to go that route, it will be an unfortunate detour from its clear statutory direction to engage in case-by-case enforcement of Section 5.

Broad UMC-Rulemaking Authority Contradicts the History and Evolution of the FTC’s Authority

The FTC Act grants the commission broad authority to investigate unfair methods of competition and unfair and deceptive acts or practices across much of the American economy. The FTC’s administrative adjudicative authority under “Part 3” is central to the FTC’s mission of preserving fair competition and protecting consumers, as reflected by the comprehensive adjudicative framework established in Section 5 of the FTC Act. Section 6, meanwhile, details the commission’s investigative powers to collect confidential business information and conduct industry studies.

The original FTC Act contained only one sentence describing the agency’s ability to make rules, buried inconspicuously among various other provisions. Section 6(g) provided that the FTC would have authority “[f]rom time to time [to] classify corporations and . . . to make rules and regulations for the purpose of carrying out the provisions of this [Act].”[1] Unlike the detailed administrative scheme in Section 5, the FTC Act fails to provide for any sanctions for violations of rules promulgated under Section 6 or to otherwise specify that such rules would carry the force of law. This minimal delegation of power arguably conferred the right to issue procedural but not substantive rules.

Consistent with the understanding that Congress did not authorize substantive rulemaking, the FTC made no attempt to promulgate rules with the force of law for nearly 50 years after it was created, and at various times indicated that it lacked the authority to do so.

In 1962, the agency for the first time began to promulgate consumer-protection trade-regulation rules (TRRs), citing its authority under Section 6(g). Although these early TRRs plainly addressed consumer-protection matters, the agency frequently described violations of the rule as both an unfair method of competition and an unfair or deceptive trade practice. As the commission itself has observed, “[n]early all of the rules that the Commission actually promulgated under Section 6(g) were consumer protection rules.”

In fact, in the more than 100 years of the FTC Act, the agency has only once issued a solely competition rule. In 1967, the commission promulgated the Men and Boys’ Tailored Clothing Rule pursuant to authority under the Clayton Act, which prohibited apparel suppliers from granting discriminatory-advertising allowances that limited small retailers’ ability to compete. However, the rule was never enforced or subject to challenge and was subsequently repealed.

Soon after, the FTC promulgated the octane-ratings rule at issue in National Petroleum Refiners. Proponents of UMC rulemaking, such as former FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra and current Chair Lina Khan, point to the case as evidence that the commission retains the power to promulgate substantive competition rules, governed only by the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and, with respect to interpretations of UMC, entitled to Chevron deference. They argue that UMC rulemaking would provide significant benefits by providing clear notice to market participants about what the law requires, relieving the steep expert costs and prolonged trials common to antitrust adjudications, and fostering a “transparent and participatory process” that would provide meaningful public participation.

With Khan at the helm of the FTC, the agency has already begun to pave the way for new UMC rulemakings. For example, President Joe Biden’s Executive Order on promoting competition called on the commission to promulgate UMC rules to address noncompete clauses and pay-for-delay settlements, among other issues. Further, as one of Khan’s first actions as chair, the commission rescinded—without replacing—its bipartisan Statement of Enforcement Principles Regarding “Unfair Methods of Competition” Under Section 5 of the FTC Act. More recently, the commission’s Statement of Regulatory Priorities stated that the FTC “will consider developing both unfair-methods-of-competition rulemakings as well as rulemakings to define with specificity unfair or deceptive acts or practices.” This foray into UMC rulemaking is likely to take the FTC down a dead-end road.

The Signs Are Clear: National Petroleum Refiners Does Not Comport with Modern Principles of Statutory Interpretation

The FTC’s authority to conduct rulemaking under Section 6(g) has been tested in court only once, in National Petroleum Refiners, where the D.C. Circuit upheld the commission’s authority to promulgate a UDAP and UMC rule requiring the disclosure of octane ratings on gasoline pumps. The court found that Section 6(g) “clearly states that the Commission ‘may’ make rules and regulations for the purpose of carrying out the provisions of Section 5” and liberally construed the term ‘rules and regulations’ based on the background and purpose of the FTC Act.” The court’s opinion rested, in part, on pragmatic concerns about the benefits that rulemaking provides to fulfilling the agency’s mission, emphasizing the “invaluable resource-saving flexibility” it provides and extolling the benefits of rulemaking over case-by-case adjudication when developing agency policy.

National Petroleum Refiners reads today like an anachronism. Few modern courts would agree that an ambiguous grant of rulemaking authority should be construed to give agencies the broadest possible powers so that they will have flexibility in determining how to effectuate their statutory mandates. The Supreme Court has never adopted this approach and recent decisions strongly suggest it would decline to do so if presented the opportunity.

The D.C. Circuit’s opinion is in clear tension with the “elephants-in-mouseholes” doctrine first described by the U.S. Supreme Court in Whitman v. Am. Trucking Ass’n, because it largely ignored the significance of the FTC Act’s detailed adjudicative framework. The D.C. Circuit’s reasoning—that Congress buried sweeping legislative-rulemaking authority in a vague, ancillary provision, alongside the ability to “classify corporations”—stands in direct conflict with the Supreme Court’s admonition in Whitman.

Modern courts would also look to interpret the structure of the FTC Act to produce a coherent enforcement scheme. For instance, in AMG Capital Management v. FTC, the Supreme Court struck down the FTC’s use of Section 13(b) to obtain equitable monetary relief, in part, because the FTC Act elsewhere imposes specific limitations on the commission’s authority to obtain monetary relief. Unlike National Petroleum Refiners, which lauded the benefits and efficiencies of rulemaking for the agency’s mission, the AMG court reasoned: “Our task here is not to decide whether [the FTC’s] substitution of § 13(b) for the administrative procedure contained in § 5 and the consumer redress available under § 19 is desirable. Rather, it is to answer a more purely legal question” of whether Congress granted authority or not. The same rationale applies to UMC rulemaking.

The unanimous AMG decision was no judicial detour, and the Supreme Court has routinely posted clear road signs that Congress is expected “to speak clearly when authorizing an agency to exercise powers of vast economic and political significance,” as UMC rulemaking would do. Since 2000, the Court has increasingly applied the “major questions doctrine” to limit the scope of congressional delegation to the administrative state in areas of major political or economic importance. For example, in FDA v. Brown & Williamson, the Supreme Court declined to grant Chevron deference to an FDA rule permitting the agency to regulate nicotine and cigarettes. Crucial to the Court’s analysis was that the FDA’s rule contradicted the agency’s own view of its authority dating back to 1914, while asserting jurisdiction over a significant portion of the American economy. In Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA, the Court invoked the major questions doctrine to strike down the Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse-gas emissions standards as an impermissible interpretation of the Clean Air Act, finding that “EPA’s interpretation is [] unreasonable because it would bring about an enormous and transformative expansion in [the] EPA’s regulatory authority without clear congressional authorization.”

Most recently, in West Virginia v. EPAthe Court relied on the major questions doctrine to strike down EPA emissions rules that would have imposed billions of dollars in compliance costs on power plants, concluding that Congress had not provided “clear congressional authorization” for the rules despite explicitly authorizing the agency to set emissions levels for existing plants.  Because broad UMC-rulemaking authority under Section 6(g) is similarly a question of potentially “vast economic and political significance,” and would also represent a significant departure from past agency precedent, the FTC’s efforts to promulgate such rules would likely be met by a flashing red light.

Finally, while National Petroleum Refiners lauded the benefits of rulemaking authority and emphasized its usefulness for carrying out the FTC’s mission, the Supreme Court has since clarified that “[h]owever sensible (or not)” an interpretation may be, “a reviewing court’s task is to apply the text of the statute, not to improve upon it.” Whatever benefits rulemaking authority may confer on the FTC, they cannot justify departure from the text of the FTC Act.

The Road Not Taken: Congress Did Not Ratify UMC-Rulemaking Authority and the FTC Did Not Assert It

Two years after National Petroleum Refiners, Congress enacted the Magnuson-Moss Warranty-Federal Trade Commission Improvement Act of 1975 (Magnuson-Moss). Section 202(a) of Magnuson-Moss amended the FTC Act to add a new Section 18 that, for the first time, gave the FTC express authority to issue UDAP rules, while imposing heightened procedural requirements for such rulemaking. Magnuson-Moss does not expressly address UMC rulemaking. Instead, it says only that Section 18 “shall not affect any authority of the Commission to prescribe rules (including interpretive rules), and general statements of policy, with respect to unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce.” Section 6(g) currently authorizes the FTC “(except as provided in [section 18] of this title) to make rules and regulations for the purpose of carrying out the provisions of this subchapter.”

UMC-rulemaking proponents argue Magnuson-Moss effectively ratified National Petroleum Refiners and affirmed the commission’s authority with respect to substantive UMC rules. This revisionist interpretation is incorrect. The savings provision in Section 18(a)(2) that preserves “any authority” (as opposed to “the” authority) of the commission to prescribe UMC rules reflects, at most, an agnostic view on whether the FTC, in fact, possesses such authority. Rather, it suggests that whatever authority may exist for UMC rulemaking was unchanged by Section 18 and that Congress left the question open for the courts to resolve. The FTC itself appears to have recognized this uncertainty, as evidenced by the fact that it has never even attempted to promulgate a UMC rule in the nearly 50 years following the enactment of Magnuson-Moss.

Congressional silence on UMC hardly endorses the commission’s authority and is not likely to persuade an appellate court today. To rely on congressional acquiescence to a judicial interpretation, there must be “overwhelming evidence” that Congress considered and rejected the “precise issue” before the court. Although Congress considered adopting National Petroleum Refiners, it ultimately took no action on the FTC’s UMC-rulemaking authority. Hardly the “overwhelming evidence” required to read National Petroleum Refiners into the law.

The Forgotten Journey: The History of the Octane-Ratings Rule Reinforces the FTC’s Lack of UMC Rulemaking Authority

Those who argue that National Petroleum Refiners is still good law and that Congress silently endorsed UMC rulemaking have shown no interest in how the journey of the octane-ratings rule eventually ended. The FTC’s 1971 octane-ratings rule declared the failure to post octane disclosures on gasoline pumps both an unfair method of competition and an unfair or deceptive practice. But what has remained unexplored in the debate over FTC UMC rulemaking is what happened to the rule after the D.C. Circuit’s decision upheld rulemaking under Section 6(g), and what that tells us about congressional and agency views on UMC authority.

The octane-ratings rule upheld by the D.C. Circuit never took effect and was ultimately replaced when Congress enacted the Petroleum Marketing Practices Act (PMPA), Title II of which addressed octane-disclosure requirements and directed the FTC to issue new rules under the PMPA. But despite previous claims by the FTC that the rule drew on both UDAP and UMC authority, Congress declined to provide any authority beyond UDAP. While it is impossible to say whether Congress concluded that UMC rulemaking was unwise, illegal, or simply unnecessary, the PMPA—passed just two years after Magnuson-Moss—suggests that UMC rulemaking did not survive the enactment of Section 18. A brief summary of the rule’s meandering journey follows.

After the D.C. Circuit remanded National Petroleum Refiners, the district court ordered the FTC to complete an environmental-impact statement. While that analysis was pending, Congress began consideration of the PMPA. After its enactment, the commission understood Congress to have intended the requirements of Title II of the PMPA to replace those of the original octane-ratings rule. The FTC treated the enactment of the PMPA as effectively repealing the rule.

Section 203(a) of the PMPA gave the FTC rulemaking power to enforce compliance with Title II of the PMPA. Testimony in House subcommittee hearings centered on whether the legislation should direct the FTC to enact a TRR on octane ratings under expedited procedures that would be authorized by the legislation, or whether Congress should enact its own statutory requirements. Ultimately, Congress adopted a statutory definition of octane ratings (identical to the method adopted by the FTC in its 1971 rule) and granted the FTC rulemaking authority under the APA to update definitions and prescribe different procedures for determining fuel-octane ratings. Congress also specified that certain rules—such as those requiring manufacturers to display octane requirements on motor vehicles—would have heightened rulemaking procedures, such as rulemaking on the record after a hearing.

Notably, the PMPA specifically provides that violations of the statute, or any rule promulgated under the statute, “shall be an unfair or deceptive act or practice in or affecting commerce.” Although Section 203(d)(3) of the PMPA specifically exempts the FTC from the procedural requirements under Section 18, it does not simply revert to Section 6(g) or otherwise leave open a path for UMC rulemaking.

The record makes clear, however, that Congress was aware of FTC’s desire to claim UMC authority in connection with the octane-ratings rule, as FTC officials testified in legislative hearings that UMC authority was necessary to regulate octane ratings. After Magnuson-Moss was enacted, however, neither Congress nor the FTC tried to include UMC rulemaking in the PMPA. In a written statement reflecting the FTC’s views on the PMPA incorporated in the House report, the FTC described its original octane-ratings rule as UDAP only.[2] While not dispositive, the FTC’s apparent abandonment of its request for UMC authority after Magnuson-Moss, and Congress’ decision to limit the PMPA exclusively to UDAP, certainly suggests that UMC did not survive National Petroleum Refiners and that Congress did not endorse FTC UMC rulemaking.

Conclusion

The FTC appears poised to embark on a journey of broad, legislative-style competition rulemaking under Section 6(g) of the FTC Act. This would be a dead end. UMC rulemaking, rather than advancing clarity and certainty about what types of conduct constitute unfair methods of competition, would very likely be viewed by the courts as an illegal left turn. It would also be a detour for the agency from its core mission of case-by-case expert adjudication of the FTC Act—which, given limited agency resources, could result in a years-long escapade that significantly detracts from overall enforcement. The FTC should instead seek to build on the considerable success it has seen in recent years with administrative adjudications, both in terms of winning on appeal and in shaping the development of antitrust law overall by creating citable precedent in key areas.

[1]     H. Rep. No. 95-161, at 45, Appendix II, Federal Trade Commission—Agency Views, Statement of Federal Trade Commission by Christian S. White, Asst. Director for Special Statutes (Feb. 23, 1977).

[2]     38 Stat. 722 § 6(g), codified as amended at 15 U.S.C. §  46(g).

In Administrative Law, Antitrust & Competition, Federal Trade Commission, FTC UMC Rulemaking, Regulation, Section 5, Symposia, Truth on the Market , , , , , , , , , ,
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Wrapping up Round One of the FTC UMC Symposium

Gus Hurwitz —  13 May 2022

[This post wraps the initial run of Truth on the Market‘s digital symposium “FTC Rulemaking on Unfair Methods of Competition.” You can find other posts at the symposium page here. Truth on the Market also invites academics, practitioners, and other antitrust/regulation commentators to send us 1,500-4,000 word responses for potential inclusion in the symposium.]

Over the past three weeks, we have shared contributions from more than a dozen antitrust commentators—including academics, practitioners, students, and a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission—discussing the potential for the FTC to develop substantive rules using its unfair methods of competition (UMC) authority. This post offers a recap of where we have been so far in this discussion and also discusses what comes next for this symposium and our coverage of these issues.

First, I must express a deep thank you to all who have contributed. Having helped to solicit, review, and edit many of these pieces, it has been a pleasure to engage with and learn from our authors. And second, I am happy to say to everyone: stay tuned! The big news this week is that, after a long wait, Alvaro Bedoya has been confirmed to the commission, likely creating a majority who will support Chair Lina Khan’s agenda. The ideas that we have been discussing as possibilities are likely to be translated into action over the coming weeks and months—and we will be here to continue sharing expert commentary and analysis.

The Symposium Goes On: An Open Call for Contributions

We will continue to run this symposium for the foreseeable future. We will not have daily posts, but we will have regular content: a weekly recap of relevant news, summaries of important FTC activity and new articles and scholarship, and other original content.

In addition, in the spirit of the symposium, we have an open call for contributions: if you would like to submit a piece for publication, please e-mail it to me or Keith Fierro. Submissions should be 1,500-4,000 words and may approach these issues from any perspective. They should be your original work, but may include short-form summaries of longer works published elsewhere, or expanded treatments of shorter publications (e.g., op-eds).

The Symposium So Far

We have covered a lot of ground these past three weeks. Contributors to the symposium have delved deeply into substantive areas where the FTC might try to use its UMC authority; they have engaged with one another over the scope and limits of the FTC’s authority; and they have looked at the FTC’s history, both ancient and recent, to better understand what the FTC may try to do, where it may be successful, and where it may run into a judicial wall.

Over 50,000 words of posts cannot be summarized in a few paragraphs, so I will not try to provide such a summary. The list of contributions to the symposium to date is below and each contribution is worth reading both on its own and in conjunction with others. Instead, I will pull out some themes that have come up across these posts:

Scope of FTC Authority

Unsurprisingly, several authors engaged with the potential scope of FTC UMC-rulemaking authority, with much of the discussion focused on whether the courts are likely to continue to abide the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit’s 1973 Petroleum Refiners opinion. It is fair to say that “opinions varied.” Discussion included everything from modern trends of judicial interpretation and how they differ from those used in 1973, to close readings of the Magnuson-Moss legislation (adopted in the immediate wake of the Petroleum Refiners opinion), and consideration of how more recent cases such as AMG and the D.C. Circuit’s American Library Association case affect our thinking about Petroleum Refiners.

Likely Judicial Responses

Several contributors also considered how the courts might respond to FTC rulemaking, allowing that the commission may have some level of substantive-rulemaking authority. Several authors invoked the Court’s recent “major questions” jurisprudence. Dick Pierce captures the general sentiment that any broad UMC rulemaking “would be a perfect candidate for application of the major questions doctrine.” But as with any discussion of the “major” questions doctrine, the implicit question is when a question is “major.” There seems to be some comfort with the idea that the FTC can do some rulemaking, assuming that the courts find that it has substantive-rulemaking authority under Section 6(g), but that the Commission faces an uncertain path if it tries to use that authority for more than incremental changes to antitrust law.

Virtues and Vices of Rulemaking

A couple of contributors picked up on themes of the virtues and vices of developing legal norms through rulemaking, as opposed to case-by-case adjudication. Aaron Neilson, for instance, argues that the FTC likely most needs to use rules to make bigger changes to antitrust law than are possible through adjudication, but that such big changes are the ones most likely to face resistance from the courts. And FTC Commissioner Noah Phillips looks at the Court’s move away from per se rules in antitrust cases over the past 50 years, arguing that the same logic that has pushed the courts to embrace a case-by-case approach to antitrust law is likely to create judicial resistance to any effort by the FTC to tack an opposite course.

The Substance of Substantive Rules

Several contributors addressed specific substantive issues that the FTC may seek to address with rules. In some cases, these issues formed the heart of the post; in others, they were used as examples along the way. For instance, Josh Sarnoff evaluated whether the FTC should develop rules around aftermarket parts and to address right-to-repair concerns. Dick Pierce also looked at that issue, along with several others (potential rules to address reverse-payment settlements in the pharmaceutical industry, below-cost pricing, and non-compete clauses involving low-wage workers).

Gaining Perspective

And last, but far from least, several contributors asked questions that help to put any thinking about the FTC into perspective. Jonathan Barnett, for instance, looks at the changes the FTC has made over the past year to its public statements of mission and priorities, alongside its potential rulemaking activity, to discuss the commission’s changing thinking about free markets. Ramsi Woodcock juxtaposes the FTC, the statutory framing of its regulatory authority, with the FOMC and its statutory power to directly affect the value of the dollar. And Bill MacLeod takes us back to 1935 and the National Industrial Recovery Act, reflecting on how the history of rules of “fair competition” might inform our thinking about the FTC’s authority today.

That’s a lot of ground to have covered in three weeks. Of course, the FTC will keep moving, and the ground will keep shifting. We look forward to your continued engagement with Truth on the Market and the authors who have contributed to this discussion.

In Administrative Law, Antitrust & Competition, Federal Trade Commission, FTC UMC Rulemaking, Regulation, Section 5, Symposia, Truth on the Market , , , , , , ,
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Making Rules vs Ruling

Ramsi Woodcock —  4 May 2022

[Today’s guest post—the 11th entry in our FTC UMC Rulemaking symposium—comes from Ramsi A. Woodcock of the University of Kentucky’s Rosenberg College of Law. You can find other posts at the symposium page here. Truth on the Market also invites academics, practitioners, and other antitrust/regulation commentators to send us 1,500-4,000 word responses for potential inclusion in the symposium.]

In an effort to fight inflation, the Federal Open Market Committee raised interest rates to 20% over the course of 1980 and 1981, triggering a recession that threw more than 4 million Americans, many in well-paying manufacturing jobs, out of work.

As it continues to do today, the committee met in secret and explained its rate decisions in a handful of paragraphs.

None of the millions of Americans thrown out of work—or the many businesses driven to bankruptcy—sued the FOMC. No one argued that the FOMC’s power to disrupt the American economy was an unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority. No one argued that, in adopting its rate decisions, the FOMC had failed to comply with any of the notice-and-comment procedures required by the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).

They were wise not to sue, because they would have lost.

There have been only five lawsuits against the FOMC since it was created in 1933. All have failed; none has challenged a FOMC rate decision.

As Judge Augustus Hand put it in a related case: “it would be an unthinkable burden upon any banking system if its open market sales and discount rates were to be subject to judicial review.”

Even if everything Frank Easterbrook has had to say about antitrust is correct, it is unlikely that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) could ever trigger a recession, much less one as severe as the one the FOMC created 40 years ago. And yet, no FTC commissioner can dream of the agency enjoying anything like the level of deference from the courts enjoyed by the FOMC.

The reality of FTC practice is just too depressing.

The FTC Act of 1914 is an expression of profound ambivalence about the administrative project, denying to the FTC even the authority to carry out internal deliberations other than through an adjudicative process. The FTC must bring an administrative complaint; firms have the right to a hearing; and so on. A Congress that would do that to an agency would certainly subject the agency’s final decisions to review by the federal courts—which, of course, Congress did.

Unlike their francophone peers on the European Court of Justice (ECJ), who have leveraged a culture of judicial deference to administrative action—as well as the fact that the ECJ’s language of business is their native tongue—to give the European Union’s antitrust agency something like carte blanche, American judges have delighted at using their powers to humiliate the FTC.

Take pay-for-delay. The FTC—informed by a staff of 80 PhD economists, not all Democrats—declared the practice to be bad for consumers in the late 1990s. But several courts actually decided that the practice was so good for consumers that it should be per se legal instead. It took more than a decade of litigation before the FTC was able to make a dent in the rate of accumulation of these agreements.

So whipped is the FTC by the courts that even when it dreams of a better life, the commission seems unable to imagine one without judicial review. During a period when bipartisan groups of legislators are seeking to reform the antitrust laws, one might have hoped that the FTC would ask for some of the discretion enjoyed by the FOMC.

Instead, the FTC’s current leadership appears intent to strap the FTC into the straightjacket of notice-and-comment rulemaking under the APA, which will only extend the FTC’s subjugation to the courts.

Indeed, progressives understood the passage of the APA in 1946 to be a signal defeat, clawing back power for the courts that progressives had fought for two generations to lodge in administrative agencies. The act was literally adopted over FDR’s dead body—he vetoed its forerunner in 1940 and died in 1945. It is consistent with contemporary progressives’ habit of mistaking counterproductive, middle-of-the-road policies for radical interventions (the original progressives of a century ago didn’t think much of the entire antitrust enterprise, either), that they should mistake the APA’s notice-and-comment rulemaking for a recipe for FTC invigoration.

To be sure, the issuance of competition regulations would be a new thing for the FTC. Rather than just enforce existing antitrust rules (and fantasizing that, one day, a court might read the FTC’s power to condemn “unfair methods of competition” more broadly), the FTC would be able actually to make new antitrust law.

But law is a double-edged sword for an administrative agency. It binds the public, but it also binds the agency. Any rule the FTC seeks to adopt, the FTC itself must follow; if a defendant can show that the firm complied, the FTC loses its case.

And that’s after the FTC has made it through the hell of the rulemaking process itself—the notice-and-comment periods, the court challenges to the agency’s interpretation of every point of process, along with the substantive basis for the rule—for every single rule the agency wishes to adopt. Or  to repeal.

The FOMC suffers no such indignities.

Although Congress calls the FOMC’s decisions “regulations,” they are not subject to the APA. The FOMC can make a rate decision and then change its mind whenever and however it wishes. The FOMC does not need to provide the public with notice and an opportunity to comment—indeed, the FOMC waits five years to release transcripts of its deliberations—and its decisions are never reviewed, even for caprice.

If the FTC wanted real power—if it wanted to get something done—it would want discretion. Discretion has made the FOMC nimble and being nimble has made the FOMC effective. Economists agree that the FOMC’s rate decisions slew inflation in the early 1980s; it could not have done that if, like the FTC and pay-for-delay, it had had to wait a decade for the courts’ approval.

As Judge Hand put it, “the correction of discount rates by judicial decree seems almost grotesque, when we remember that conditions in the money market often change from hour to hour, and the disease would ordinarily be over long before a judicial diagnosis could be made.”

How strange it is to read this as an antitrust scholar and reflect that the single most important attack on antitrust enforcement has always been, in Judge Hand’s words, that “the disease [is] ordinarily … over long before a judicial diagnosis [is] made.”

Is that not the lesson drawn by antitrust’s critics from the Microsoft litigation? Microsoft may well have monopolized operating systems in 1992 or 1994. But by the time the case settled in 2001, Windows’ dominance could not be rolled back. America was already used to a single operating system, a single Office suite, and so on. And mobile, which Microsoft did not dominate, was on the horizon. If there had been a time when antitrust enforcers could have done something to promote competition, it had passed.

Or AT&T. Antitrust managed to break the company up just in time for the cell-phone revolution to render its decades-old landline monopoly irrelevant.

If, as Judge Hand observed, “conditions in the money market change from hour to hour,” so too do conditions in virtually every market—including the markets that the FTC regulates. If that is the argument for FOMC discretion, it is an equally potent argument for FTC discretion.

But to get power, you have to want it, and the current leadership cries out instead only for a more varied servitude.

The case for instead making the FTC more like the FOMC is strong. (Even the name fits.)

Both institutions are charged with using indirect methods to get prices right in fluid market environments—the FOMC by using the purchase and sale of securities to get interest rates right; the FTC by tweaking market structure to get market prices to competitive levels. As has already been observed, this can be done effectively only through the unfettered exercise of administrative discretion.

Independence from all three branches of government (including the courts) is essential to both. Just as an accountable FOMC would probably not have had the will to throw millions out of work and drive many businesses into bankruptcy in order to fight inflation—even though that was ultimately best for the economy—an accountable FTC cannot embark on a campaign of economy-wide deconcentration when that is the right thing for the economy (which is not to say that it always is).

The sort of systemic regulation of the preconditions for a successful capitalism in which both the FOMC and the FTC are engaged creates too many powerful winners and losers for either institution to be able to do its job without complete and utter discretion to act as it sees fit—something the FTC lacks.

Indeed, the last time the FTC tried to flex its muscles, it was smacked down by all three branches of government—attacked by both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan from the campaign trail, threatened with defunding by Congress, and rejected by the courts.

One can distinguish the FOMC from the FTC on the grounds that the FOMC paints with a broader brush than does the FTC. To get interest rates right, the FOMC directs the purchase and sale of securities, often in great volumes, whereas the FTC may need to tell a single, identifiable company how to do a particular, identifiable thing, such as to distribute a particular input on reasonable terms or to excise a particular provision from its contracts. Because of the potential for abuse of the individual that might result from such individualized action, the argument goes, the courts must keep the FTC on a tighter leash.

There is a fictional premise here. The FTC rarely deals with individuals—flesh-and-blood humans—but instead with corporations, often so large that they have thousands of workers and managers, and still more shareholders. The potential for abuse of actual individuals, as opposed to the fictive corporate individual, is low.

But even if we accept this fiction—as, alas, the courts have done—the FTC differs from the FOMC here only because it has so far adhered to an adjudicatory model of decisionmaking. The FTC could, for example, decide instead to target competitive prices by ordering every firm in the economy having an accounting profit in excess of 15% to be broken up, along the lines of the Industrial Reorganization Act considered by Congress in the 1970s.

That would paint with a brush of FOMCian breadth. Indeed, by varying the triggering profit percentage, the FTC would be able to vary, in a rough way, the level of competition and hence the level of prices in the economy, just as, by varying its target interest rate, the FOMC varies, in a rough way, the level of inflation in the economy.

(I do not mean to suggest an equivalence between monopoly pricing and inflation; monopoly pricing is a problem of levels whereas inflation is a problem of rates of change; they are two different problems with two different causes, two different institutions to mind them, and two different fixes.)

And although such a broad approach would surely send copious “good” firms that have engaged in no monopolizing activities to their fates, the FOMC’s rate increases doubtless also send to their fates plenty of “good” firms that have not inflated their prices but cannot survive at a 20% cost of capital. The FOMC does that because it is more expedient to discipline every firm than to identify the inflators and coax them into altering their behavior on a case-by-case basis.

We tolerate this sacrifice of innocents because we believe that low inflation confers long-term gains on everyone. If we believe that competitive pricing confers long-term gains on everyone—and that is the premise of competition policy—surely we must tolerate the same from the FTC.

If anything, the case for a broad-brush FTC is stronger than that for the FOMC, because, as already noted, no matter how overzealous the deconcentration program, it is hard to imagine deconcentration plunging the economy into recession and throwing millions of Americans out of work, at least in the short run.

If anything, deconcentration should raise employment, because competition is wasteful and duplicative; all those shards of big firms need their own independent support staffs. And, of course, it is a staple of antitrust theory that when competition increases, output goes up, not down.

One might also seek to distinguish between the FOMC and the FTC on the grounds that what the FTC must do is more complicated, and hence more prone to error, than what the FOMC must do, making oversight more appropriate for the FTC. Both inflation and monopoly power are bad for growth, the argument might go, but the connection between inflation and growth is clear whereas that between monopoly power and growth—not so much.

Indeed, too much inflation prevents firms from planning and, so, from innovating. But while the adversity associated with competition is the mother of invention, many innovations—such as social networks—can be delivered only at scale, suggesting that too much competition can be as bad for growth as too little. It would seem to follow that getting monetary policy right is easy, whereas getting competition policy right is hard.

Except that the FOMC must strike a balance between too much inflation and too little, just as the FTC must strike a balance between too much competition and too little.

Deflation can be just as bad for growth—just as hard on business planning—as inflation, as any Japanese central banker of the previous generation can tell you. The FOMC must, therefore, find the interest rates that produce neither too much nor too little inflation, just as the FTC must find the level of concentration that produces neither too much nor too little competition.

Both the FOMC and the FTC have hard jobs. Why do we trust one to handle its job better than the other?

One reason might be that the FOMC is a friend to big business whereas the FTC is a natural enemy thereof. Inflation, when unexpected, levels, because it reduces the real value of debts. If firms tend to be creditors and consumers debtors, and firms’ shareholders tend to be richer than consumers, the wealth gap narrows.

It follows that, in preventing inflation, the FOMC tilts, and so big business wants the FOMC healthy and free. The FTC, by contrast, levels, because it eliminates monopoly profits, benefiting consumers at the expense of shareholders. So, big business prefers the FTC shackled.

If that is right, then the FOMC enjoys a level of discretion that the FTC never can, because the power behind government never will give the FTC so loose a leash. Congress has authorized both the FOMC and the FTC to create regulations. But the courts would never interpret this language consistently; for the FOMC, to “adopt” a “regulation” means to do whatever you like whereas for the FTC to “make” a “regulation” means either nothing at all or, at best, notice-and-comment rulemaking under the APA.

But I rather think there is a better explanation for the divergent experiences of the FOMC and the FTC, one that does not turn on class conflict and which has been staring us in the face all along.

Just as competition policy probably cannot cause a recession or throw millions of Americans out of work, it probably cannot much increase growth or employ many more Americans either. The future of an economy may be decided by the variance of an interest rate between 0% and 20%; this is not so for the variance of a market price between the competitive level and the monopoly level. The FOMC is simply more important to the success of the capitalist system than is the FTC.

And both are probably not that important for economic inequality. While unexpected inflation does tend to make debts go away, firms rewrite contracts to account for expected inflation, so inflation’s contribution to equality is blip-like.

The contribution of monopoly profits to inequality is also likely to be small; scarcity profits, which firms generate even in competitive markets, are likely to play a more important role. At least, that’s what Thomas Piketty, the dean of inequality studies, happens to think.

And maybe also what the rich think: there is conservative support for more competition policy, but none for more tax policy, which tells us something about which is likely to have a more radical impact on the distribution of wealth.

So, it is because the FTC is not dangerous, rather than because it is dangerous, that we feel free to hobble it with process. And because the FOMC is dangerous that we want it free and maximally effective.

Just so, there is no due process in wartime because there is so much at stake, whereas in peacetime you can’t kill a statue without multiple appeals.

Which takes us back to the real deficit in progressive radicalism. Yes, rulemaking for the FTC is a cop out.

But so is the entire antitrust project.

In Administrative Law, Antitrust & Competition, Banking, Federal Trade Commission, Financial Regulation, FTC UMC Rulemaking, Regulation, Section 5, Symposia, Truth on the Market , , ,
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Chevron and Administrative Antitrust, Redux

Gus Hurwitz —  29 April 2022

[Wrapping up the first week of our FTC UMC Rulemaking symposium is a post from Truth on the Market’s own Justin (Gus) Hurwitz, director of law & economics programs at the International Center for Law & Economics and an assistant professor of law and co-director of the Space, Cyber, and Telecom Law program at the University of Nebraska College of Law. You can find other posts at the symposium page here. Truth on the Market also invites academics, practitioners, and other antitrust/regulation commentators to send us 1,500-4,000 word responses for potential inclusion in the symposium.]

Introduction

In 2014, I published a pair of articles—”Administrative Antitrust” and “Chevron and the Limits of Administrative Antitrust”—that argued that the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent antitrust and administrative-law jurisprudence was pushing antitrust law out of the judicial domain and into the domain of regulatory agencies. The first article focused on the Court’s then-recent antitrust cases, arguing that the Court, which had long since moved away from federal common law, had shown a clear preference that common-law-like antitrust law be handled on a statutory or regulatory basis where possible. The second article evaluated and rejected the FTC’s long-held belief that the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) interpretations of the FTC Act do not receive Chevron deference.

Together, these articles made the case (as a descriptive, not normative, matter) that we were moving towards a period of what I called “administrative antitrust.” From today’s perspective, it surely seems that I was right, with the FTC set to embrace Section 5’s broad ambiguities to redefine modern understandings of antitrust law. Indeed, those articles have been cited by both former FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra and current FTC Chair Lina Khan in speeches and other materials that have led up to our current moment.

This essay revisits those articles, in light of the past decade of Supreme Court precedent. It comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with recent cases that the Court is increasingly viewing the broad deference characteristic of administrative law with what, charitably, can be called skepticism. While I stand by the analysis offered in my previous articles—and, indeed, believe that the Court maintains a preference for administratively defined antitrust law over judicially defined antitrust law—I find it less likely today that the Court would defer to any agency interpretation of antitrust law that represents more than an incremental move away from extant law.

I will approach this discussion in four parts. First, I will offer some reflections on the setting of my prior articles. The piece on Chevron and the FTC, in particular, argued that the FTC had misunderstood how Chevron would apply to its interpretations of the FTC Act because it was beholden to out-of-date understandings of administrative law. I will make the point below that the same thing can be said today. I will then briefly recap the essential elements of the arguments made in both of those prior articles, to the extent needed to evaluate how administrative approaches to antitrust will be viewed by the Court today. The third part of the discussion will then summarize some key elements of administrative law that have changed over roughly the past decade. And, finally, I will bring these elements together to look at the viability of administrative antitrust today, arguing that the FTC’s broad embrace of power anticipated by many is likely to meet an ill fate at the hands of the courts on both antitrust and administrative law grounds.

In reviewing these past articles in light of the past decade’s case law, this essay reaches an important conclusion: for the same reasons that the Court seemed likely in 2013 to embrace an administrative approach to antitrust, today it is likely to view such approaches with great skepticism unless they are undertaken on an incrementalist basis. Others are currently developing arguments that sound primarily in current administrative law: the major questions doctrine and the potential turn away from National Petroleum Refiners. My conclusion is based primarily in the Court’s view that administrative antitrust would prove less indeterminate than judicially defined antitrust law. If the FTC shows that not to be the case, the Court seems likely to close the door on administrative antitrust for reasons sounding in both administrative and antitrust law.

Setting the Stage, Circa 2013

It is useful to start by visiting the stage as it was set when I wrote “Administrative Antitrust” and “Limits of Administrative Antitrust” in 2013. I wrote these articles while doing a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, prior to which I had spent several years working at the U.S. Justice Department Antitrust Division’s Telecommunications Section. This was a great time to be involved on the telecom side of antitrust, especially for someone with an interest in administrative law, as well. Recent important antitrust cases included Pacific Bell v. linkLine and Verizon v. Trinko and recent important administrative-law cases included Brand-X, Fox v. FCC, and City of Arlington v. FCC. Telecommunications law was defining the center of both fields.

I started working on “Administrative Antitrust” first, prompted by what I admit today was an overreading of the Court’s 2011 American Electric Power Co. Inc. v. Connecticut opinion, in which the Court held broadly that a decision by Congress to regulate broadly displaces judicial common law. In Trinko and Credit Suisse, the Court had held something similar: roughly, that regulation displaces antitrust law. Indeed, in linkLine,the Court had stated that regulation is preferable to antitrust, known for its vicissitudes and adherence to the extra-judicial development of economic theory. “Administrative Antitrust” tied these strands together, arguing that antitrust law, long-discussed as one of the few remaining bastions of federal common law, would—and in the Court’s eyes, should—be displaced by regulation.

Antitrust and administrative law also came together, and remain together, in the debates over net neutrality. It was this nexus that gave rise to “Limits of Administrative Antitrust,” which I started in 2013 while working on “Administrative Antitrust”and waiting for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit’s opinion in Verizon v. FCC.

Some background on the net-neutrality debate is useful. In 2007, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) attempted to put in place net-neutrality rules by adopting a policy statement on the subject. This approach was rejected by the D.C. Circuit in 2010, on grounds that a mere policy statement lacked the force of law. The FCC then adopted similar rules through a rulemaking process, finding authority to issue those rules in its interpretation of the ambiguous language of Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act. In January 2014, the D.C. Circuit again rejected the specific rules adopted by the FCC, on grounds that those rules violated the Communications Act’s prohibition on treating internet service providers (ISPs) as common carriers. But critically, the court affirmed the FCC’s interpretation of Section 706 as allowing it, in principle, to adopt rules regulating ISPs.

Unsurprisingly, whether the language of Section 706 was either ambiguous or subject to the FCC’s interpretation was a central debate within the regulatory community during 2012 and 2013. The broadest consensus, at least among my peers, was strongly of the view that it was neither: the FCC and industry had long read Section 706 as not giving the FCC authority to regulate ISP conduct and, to the extent that it did confer legislative authority, that authority was expressly deregulatory. I was the lone voice arguing that the D.C. Circuit was likely to find that Chevron applied to Section 706 and that the FCC’s reading was permissible on its own (that is, not taking into account such restrictions as the prohibition on treating non-common carriers as common carriers).

I actually had thought this conclusion quite obvious. The past decade of the Court’s Chevron case law followed a trend of increasing deference. Starting with Mead, then Brand-X, Fox v. FCC, and City of Arlington, the safe money was consistently placed on deference to the agency.

This was the setting in which I started thinking about what became “Chevron and the Limits of Administrative Antitrust.” If my argument in “Administrative Antitrust”was right—that the courts would push development of antitrust law from the courts to regulatory agencies—this would most clearly happen through the FTC’s Section 5 authority over unfair methods of competition (UMC). But there was longstanding debate about the limits of the FTC’s UMC authority. These debates included whether it was necessarily coterminous with the Sherman Act (so limited by the judicially defined federal common law of antitrust).

And there was discussion about whether the FTC would receive Chevron deference to its interpretations of its UMC authority. As with the question of the FCC receiving deference to its interpretation of Section 706, there was widespread understanding that the FTC would not receive Chevron deference to its interpretations of its Section 5 UMC authority. “Chevron and the Limits of Administrative Antitrust” explored that issue, ultimately concluding that the FTC likely would indeed be given the benefit of Chevron deference, tracing the commission’s belief to the contrary back to longstanding institutional memory of pre-Chevron judicial losses.

The Administrative Antitrust Argument

The discussion above is more than mere historical navel-gazing. The context and setting in which those prior articles were written is important to understanding both their arguments and the continual currents that propel us across antitrust’s sea of doubt. But we should also look at the specific arguments from each paper in some detail, as well.

Administrative Antitrust

The opening lines of this paper capture the curious judicial statute of antitrust law:

Antitrust is a peculiar area of law, one that has long been treated as exceptional by the courts. Antitrust cases are uniquely long, complicated, and expensive; individual cases turn on case-specific facts, giving them limited precedential value; and what precedent there is changes on a sea of economic—rather than legal—theory. The principal antitrust statutes are minimalist and have left the courts to develop their meaning. As Professor Thomas Arthur has noted, “in ‘the anti-trust field the courts have been accorded, by common consent, an authority they have in no other branch of enacted law.’” …


This Article argues that the Supreme Court is moving away from this exceptionalist treatment of antitrust law and is working to bring antitrust within a normalized administrative law jurisprudence.

Much of this argument is based in the arguments framed above: Trinko and Credit Suisse prioritize regulation over the federal common law of antitrust, and American Electric Power emphasizes the general displacement of common law by regulation. The article adds, as well, the Court’s focus, at the time, against domain-specific “exceptionalism.” Its opinion in Mayo had rejected the longstanding view that tax law was “exceptional” in some way that excluded it from the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and other standard administrative law doctrine. And thus, so too must the Court’s longstanding treatment of antitrust as exceptional also fall.

Those arguments can all be characterized as pulling antitrust law toward an administrative approach. But there was a push as well. In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts expressed substantial concern about the difficulties that antitrust law poses for courts and litigants alike. His opinion for the majority notes that “it is difficult enough for courts to identify and remedy an alleged anticompetitive practice” and laments “[h]ow is a judge or jury to determine a ‘fair price?’” And Justice Stephen Breyer writes in concurrence, that “[w]hen a regulatory structure exists [as it does in this case] to deter and remedy anticompetitive harm, the costs of antitrust enforcement are likely to be greater than the benefits.”

In other words, the argument in “Administrative Antitrust” goes, the Court is motivated both to bring antitrust law into a normalized administrative-law framework and also to remove responsibility for the messiness inherent in antitrust law from the courts’ dockets. This latter point will be of particular importance as we turn to how the Court is likely to think about the FTC’s potential use of its UMC authority to develop new antitrust rules.

Chevron and the Limits of Administrative Antitrust

The core argument in “Limits of Administrative Antitrust” is more doctrinal and institutionally focused. In its simplest statement, I merely applied Chevron as it was understood circa 2013 to the FTC’s UMC authority. There is little argument that “unfair methods of competition” is inherently ambiguous—indeed, the term was used, and the power granted to the FTC, expressly to give the agency flexibility and to avoid the limits the Court was placing on antitrust law in the early 20th century.

There are various arguments against application of Chevron to Section 5; the article goes through and rejects them all. Section 5 has long been recognized as including, but being broader than, the Sherman Act. National Petroleum Refiners has long held that the FTC has substantive-rulemaking authority—a conclusion made even more forceful by the Supreme Court’s more recent opinion in Iowa Utilities Board. Other arguments are (or were) unavailing.

The real puzzle the paper unpacks is why the FTC ever believed it wouldn’t receive the benefit of Chevron deference. The article traces it back to a series of cases the FTC lost in the 1980s, contemporaneous with the development of the Chevron doctrine. The commission had big losses in cases like E.I. Du Pont and Ethyl Corp. Perhaps most important, in its 1986 Indiana Federation of Dentists opinion (two years after Chevron was decided), the Court seemed to adopt a de novo standard for review of Section 5 cases. But, “Limits of Administrative Antitrust” argues, this is a misreading and overreading of Indiana Federation of Dentists (a close reading of which actually suggests that it is entirely in line with Chevron), and it misunderstands the case’s relationship with Chevron (the importance of which did not start to come into focus for another several years).

The curious conclusion of the argument is, in effect, that a generation of FTC lawyers, “shell-shocked by its treatment in the courts,” internalized the lesson that they would not receive the benefits of Chevron deference and that Section 5 was subject to de novo review, but also that this would start to change as a new generation of lawyers, trained in the modern Chevron era, came to practice within the halls of the FTC. Today, that prediction appears to have borne out.

Things Change

The conclusion from “Limits of Administrative Antitrust” that FTC lawyers failed to recognize that the agency would receive Chevron deference because they were half a generation behind the development of administrative-law doctrine is an important one. As much as antitrust law may be adrift in a sea of change, administrative law is even more so. From today’s perspective, it feels as though I wrote those articles at Chevron’s zenith—and watching the FTC consider aggressive use of its UMC authority feels like watching a commission that, once again, is half a generation behind the development of administrative law.

The tide against Chevron’sexpansive deference was already beginning to grow at the time I was writing. City of Arlington, though affirming application of Chevron to agencies’ interpretations of their own jurisdictional statutes in a 6-3 opinion, generated substantial controversy at the time. And a short while later, the Court decided a case that many in the telecom space view as a sea change: Utility Air Regulatory Group (UARG). In UARG, Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for a 9-0 majority, struck down an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulation related to greenhouse gasses. In doing so, he invoked language evocative of what today is being debated as the major questions doctrine—that the Court “expect[s] Congress to speak clearly if it wishes to assign to an agency decisions of vast economic and political significance.” Two years after that, the Court decided Encino Motorcars, in which the Court acted upon a limit expressed in Fox v. FCC that agencies face heightened procedural requirements when changing regulations that “may have engendered serious reliance interests.”

And just like that, the dams holding back concern over the scope of Chevron have burst. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have openly expressed their views that Chevron needs to be curtailed or eliminated. Justice Brett Kavanaugh has written extensively in favor of the major questions doctrine. Chief Justice Roberts invoked the major questions doctrine in King v. Burwell. Each term, litigants are more aggressively bringing more aggressive cases to probe and tighten the limits of the Chevron doctrine. As I write this, we await the Court’s opinion in American Hospital Association v. Becerra—which, it is widely believed could dramatically curtail the scope of the Chevron doctrine.

Administrative Antitrust, Redux

The prospects for administrative antitrust look very different today than they did a decade ago. While the basic argument continues to hold—the Court will likely encourage and welcome a transition of antitrust law to a normalized administrative jurisprudence—the Court seems likely to afford administrative agencies (viz., the FTC) much less flexibility in how they administer antitrust law than they would have a decade ago. This includes through both the administrative-law vector, with the Court reconsidering how it views delegation of congressional authority to agencies such as through the major questions doctrine and agency rulemaking authority, as well as through the Court’s thinking about how agencies develop and enforce antitrust law.

Major Questions and Major Rules

Two hotly debated areas where we see this trend: the major questions doctrine and the ongoing vitality of National Petroleum Refiners. These are only briefly recapitulated here. The major questions doctrine is an evolving doctrine, seemingly of great interest to many current justices on the Court, that requires Congress to speak clearly when delegating authority to agencies to address major questions—that is, questions of vast economic and political significance. So, while the Court may allow an agency to develop rules governing mergers when tasked by Congress to prohibit acquisitions likely to substantially lessen competition, it is unlikely to allow that agency to categorically prohibit mergers based upon a general congressional command to prevent unfair methods of competition. The first of those is a narrow rule based upon a specific grant of authority; the other is a very broad rule based upon a very general grant of authority.

The major questions doctrine has been a major topic of discussion in administrative-law circles for the past several years. Interest in the National Petroleum Refiners question has been more muted, mostly confined to those focused on the FTC and FCC. National Petroleum Refiners is a 1973 D.C. Circuit case that found that the FTC Act’s grant of power to make rules to implement the act confers broad rulemaking power relating to the act’s substantive provisions. In 1999, the Supreme Court reached a similar conclusion in Iowa Utilities Board, finding that a provision in Section 202 of the Communications Act allowing the FCC to create rules seemingly for the implementation of that section conferred substantive rulemaking power running throughout the Communications Act.

Both National Petroleum Refiners and Iowa Utilities Board reflect previous generations’ understanding of administrative law—and, in particular, the relationship between the courts and Congress in empowering and policing agency conduct. That understanding is best captured in the evolution of the non-delegation doctrine, and the courts’ broad acceptance of broad delegations of congressional power to agencies in the latter half of the 20th century. National Petroleum Refiners and Iowa Utilities Board are not non-delegation cases-—but, similar to the major questions doctrine, they go to similar issues of how specific Congress must be when delegating broad authority to an agency.

In theory, there is little difference between an agency that can develop legal norms through case-by-case adjudications that are backstopped by substantive and procedural judicial review, on the one hand, and authority to develop substantive rules backstopped by procedural judicial review and by Congress as a check on substantive errors. In practice, there is a world of difference between these approaches. As with the Court’s concerns about the major questions doctrine, were the Court to review National Petroleum Refiners Association or Iowa Utilities Board today, it seems at least possible, if not simply unlikely, that most of the Justices would not so readily find agencies to have such broad rulemaking authority without clear congressional intent supporting such a finding.

Both of these ideas—the major question doctrine and limits on broad rules made using thin grants of rulemaking authority—present potential limits on the potential scope of rules the FTC might make using its UMC authority.

Limits on the Antitrust Side of Administrative Antitrust

The potential limits on FTC UMC rulemaking discussed above sound in administrative-law concerns. But administrative antitrust may also find a tepid judicial reception on antitrust concerns, as well.

Many of the arguments advanced in “Administrative Antitrust” and the Court’s opinions on the antitrust-regulation interface echo traditional administrative-law ideas. For instance, much of the Court’s preference that agencies granted authority to engage in antitrust or antitrust-adjacent regulation take precedence over the application of judicially defined antitrust law track the same separation of powers and expertise concerns that are central to the Chevron doctrine itself.

But the antitrust-focused cases—linkLine, Trinko, Credit Suisse—also express concerns specific to antitrust law. Chief Justice Roberts notes that the justices “have repeatedly emphasized the importance of clear rules in antitrust law,” and the need for antitrust rules to “be clear enough for lawyers to explain them to clients.” And the Court and antitrust scholars have long noted the curiosity that antitrust law has evolved over time following developments in economic theory. This extra-judicial development of the law runs contrary to basic principles of due process and the stability of the law.

The Court’s cases in this area express hope that an administrative approach to antitrust could give a clarity and stability to the law that is currently lacking. These are rules of vast economic significance: they are “the Magna Carta of free enterprise”; our economy organizes itself around them; substantial changes to these rules could have a destabilizing effect that runs far deeper than Congress is likely to have anticipated when tasking an agency with enforcing antitrust law. Empowering agencies to develop these rules could, the Court’s opinions suggest, allow for a more thoughtful, expert, and deliberative approach to incorporating incremental developments in economic knowledge into the law.

If an agency’s administrative implementation of antitrust law does not follow this path—and especially if the agency takes a disruptive approach to antitrust law that deviates substantially from established antitrust norms—this defining rationale for an administrative approach to antitrust would not hold.

The courts could respond to such overreach in several ways. They could invoke the major questions or similar doctrines, as above. They could raise due-process concerns, tracking Fox v. FCC and Encino Motorcars, to argue that any change to antitrust law must not be unduly disruptive to engendered reliance interests. They could argue that the FTC’s UMC authority, while broader than the Sherman Act, must be compatible with the Sherman Act. That is, while the FTC has authority for the larger circle in the antitrust Venn diagram, the courts continue to define the inner core of conduct regulated by the Sherman Act.

A final aspect to the Court’s likely approach to administrative antitrust falls from the Roberts Court’s decision-theoretic approach to antitrust law. First articulated in Judge Frank Easterbrook’s “The Limits of Antitrust,” the decision-theoretic approach to antitrust law focuses on the error costs of incorrect judicial decisions and the likelihood that those decisions will be corrected. The Roberts Court has strongly adhered to this framework in its antitrust decisions. This can be seen, for instance, in Justice Breyer’s statement that: “When a regulatory structure exists to deter and remedy anticompetitive harm, the costs of antitrust enforcement are likely to be greater than the benefits.”

The error-costs framework described by Judge Easterbrook focuses on the relative costs of errors, and correcting those errors, between judicial and market mechanisms. In the administrative-antitrust setting, the relevant comparison is between judicial and administrative error costs. The question on this front is whether an administrative agency, should it get things wrong, is likely to correct. Here there are two models, both of concern. The first is that in which law is policy or political preference. Here, the FCC’s approach to net neutrality and the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) approach to labor law loom large; there have been dramatic swing between binary policy preferences held by different political parties as control of agencies shifts between administrations. The second model is one in which Congress responds to agency rules by refining, rejecting, or replacing them through statute. Here, again, net neutrality and the FCC loom large, with nearly two decades of calls for Congress to clarify the FCC’s authority and statutory mandate, while the agency swings between policies with changing administrations.

Both of these models reflect poorly on the prospects for administrative antitrust and suggest a strong likelihood that the Court would reject any ambitious use of administrative authority to remake antitrust law. The stability of these rules is simply too important to leave to change with changing political wills. And, indeed, concern that Congress no longer does its job of providing agencies with clear direction—that Congress has abdicated its job of making important policy decisions and let them fall instead to agency heads—is one of the animating concerns behind the major questions doctrine.

Conclusion

Writing in 2013, it seemed clear that the Court was pushing antitrust law in an administrative direction, as well as that the FTC would likely receive broad Chevron deference in its interpretations of its UMC authority to shape and implement antitrust law. Roughly a decade later, the sands have shifted and continue to shift. Administrative law is in the midst of a retrenchment, with skepticism of broad deference and agency claims of authority.

Many of the underlying rationales behind the ideas of administrative antitrust remain sound. Indeed, I expect the FTC will play an increasingly large role in defining the contours of antitrust law and that the Court and courts will welcome this role. But that role will be limited. Administrative antitrust is a preferred vehicle for administering antitrust law, not for changing it. Should the FTC use its power aggressively, in ways that disrupt longstanding antitrust principles or seem more grounded in policy better created by Congress, it is likely to find itself on the losing side of the judicial opinion.

In Administrative Law, Antitrust & Competition, Antitrust Division, Error Costs, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, Justice Department, Net Neutrality, Regulation, Section 5, Supreme Court, Telecommunications, Truth on the Market , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Can the FTC Use Rulemaking to Change Antitrust Law?

Richard J. Pierce Jr. —  28 April 2022

[Continuing our FTC UMC Rulemaking symposium, today’s first guest post is from Richard J. Pierce Jr., the Lyle T. Alverson Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School. We are also publishing a related post today from Andrew K. Magloughlin and Randolph J. May of the Free State Foundation. You can find other posts at the symposium page here. Truth on the Market also invites academics, practitioners, and other antitrust/regulation commentators to send us 1,500-4,000 word responses for potential inclusion in the symposium.]

FTC Rulemaking Power

In 2021, President Joe Biden appointed a prolific young scholar, Lina Khan, to chair the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Khan strongly dislikes almost every element of antitrust law. She has stated her intention to use notice and comment rulemaking to change antitrust law in many ways. She was unable to begin this process for almost a year because the FTC was evenly divided between Democratic and Republican appointees, and she has not been able to elicit any support for her agenda from the Republican members. She will finally get the majority she needs to act in the next few days, as the U.S. Senate appears set to confirm Alvaro Bedoya to the fifth spot on the commission.   

Chair Khan has argued that the FTC has the power to use notice-and-comment rulemaking to define the term “unfair methods of competition” as that term is used in Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act. Section 5 authorizes the FTC to define and to prohibit both “unfair acts” and “unfair methods of competition.” For more than 50 years after the 1914 enactment of the statute, the FTC, Congress, courts, and scholars interpreted it to empower the FTC to use adjudication to implement Section 5, but not to use rulemaking for that purpose.

In 1973, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held that the FTC has the power to use notice-and-comment rulemaking to implement Section 5. Congress responded by amending the statute in 1975 and 1980 to add many time-consuming and burdensome procedures to the notice-and-comment process. Those added procedures had the effect of making the rulemaking process so long that the FTC gave up on its attempts to use rulemaking to implement Section 5.

Khan claims that the FTC has the power to use notice-and-comment rulemaking to define “unfair methods of competition,” even though it must use the extremely burdensome procedures that Congress added in 1975 and 1980 to define “unfair acts.” Her claim is based on a combination of her belief that the current U.S. Supreme Court would uphold the 1973 D.C. Circuit decision that held that the FTC has the power to use notice-and-comment rulemaking to implement Section 5 and her belief that a peculiarly worded provision of the 1975 amendment to the FTC Act allows the FTC to use notice-and-comment rulemaking to define “unfair methods of competition,” even though it requires the FTC to use the extremely burdensome procedure to issue rules that define “unfair acts.” The FTC has not attempted to use notice-and-comment rulemaking to define “unfair methods of competition” since Congress amended the statute in 1975. 

I am skeptical of Khan’s argument. I doubt that the Supreme Court would uphold the 1973 D.C. Circuit opinion, because the D.C. Circuit used a method of statutory interpretation that no modern court uses and that is inconsistent with the methods of statutory interpretation that the Supreme Court uses today. I also doubt that the Supreme Court would interpret the 1975 statutory amendment to distinguish between “unfair acts” and “unfair methods of competition” for purposes of the procedures that the FTC is required to use to issue rules to implement Section 5.

Even if the FTC has the power to use notice-and-comment rulemaking to define “unfair methods of competition,” I am confident that the Supreme Court would not uphold an exercise of that power that has the effect of making a significant change in antitrust law. That would be a perfect candidate for application of the major questions doctrine. The court will not uphold an “unprecedented” action of “vast economic or political significance” unless it has “unmistakable legislative support.” I will now describe four hypothetical exercises of the rulemaking power that Khan believes that the FTC possesses to illustrate my point.

Hypothetical Exercises of FTC Rulemaking Power

Creation of a Right to Repair

President Biden has urged the FTC to create a right for an owner of any product to repair the product or to have it repaired by an independent service organization (ISO). The Supreme Court’s 1992 opinion in Eastman Kodak v. Image Technical Services tells us all we need to know about the likelihood that it would uphold a rule that confers a right to repair. When Kodak took actions that made it impossible for ISOs to repair Kodak photocopiers, the ISOs argued that Kodak’s action violated both Section 1 and Section 2 of the Sherman Act. The Court held that Kodak could prevail only if it could persuade a jury that its view of the facts was accurate. The Court remanded the case for a jury trial to address three contested issues of fact.

The Court’s reasoning in Kodak is inconsistent with any version of a right to repair that the FTC might attempt to create through rulemaking. The Court expressed its view that allowing an ISO to repair a product sometimes has good effects and sometimes has bad effects. It concluded that it could not decide whether Kodak’s new policy was good or bad without first resolving the three issues of fact on which the parties disagreed. In a 2021 report to Congress, the FTC agreed with the Supreme Court. It identified seven factual contingencies that can cause a prohibition on repair of a product by an ISO to have good effects or bad effects. It is naïve to expect the Supreme Court to change its approach to repair rights in response to a rule in which the FTC attempts to create a right to repair, particularly when the FTC told Congress that it agrees with the Court’s approach immediately prior to Khan’s arrival at the agency.

Prohibition of Reverse-Payment Settlements of Patent Disputes Involving Prescription Drugs

Some people believe that settlements of patent-infringement disputes in which the manufacturer of a generic drug agrees not to market the drug in return for a cash payment from the manufacturer of the brand-name drug are thinly disguised agreements to create a monopoly and to share the monopoly rents. Khan has argued that the FTC could issue a rule that prohibits such reverse-payment settlements. Her belief that a court would uphold such a rule is contradicted by the Supreme Court’s 2013 opinion in FTC v. Actavis. The Court unanimously rejected the FTC’s argument in support of a rebuttable presumption that reverse payments are illegal. Four justices argued that reverse-payment settlements can never be illegal if they are within the scope of the patent. The five-justice majority held that a court can determine that a reverse-payment settlement is illegal only after a hearing in which it applies the rule of reason to determine whether the payment was reasonable.

A Prohibition on Below-Cost Pricing When the Firm Cannot Recoup Its Losses

Khan believes that illegal predatory pricing by dominant firms is widespread and extremely harmful to competition. She particularly dislikes the Supreme Court’s test for identifying predatory pricing. That test requires proof that a firm that engages in below-cost pricing has a reasonable prospect of recouping its losses. She wants the FTC to issue a rule in which it defines predatory pricing as below-cost pricing without any prospect that the firm will be able to recoup its losses.

The history of the Court’s predatory-pricing test shows how unrealistic it is to expect the Court to uphold such a rule. The Court first announced the test in a Sherman Act case in 1986. Plaintiffs attempted to avoid the precedential effect of that decision by filing complaints based on predatory pricing under the Robinson-Patman Act. The Court rejected that attempt in a 1993 opinion. The Court made it clear that the test for determining whether a firm is engaged in illegal predatory pricing is the same no matter whether the case arises under the Sherman Act or the Robinson-Patman Act. The Court undoubtedly would reject the FTC’s effort to change the definition of predatory pricing by relying on the FTC Act instead of the Sherman Act or the Robinson-Patman Act.

A Prohibition of Noncompete Clauses in Contracts to Employ Low-Wage Employees

President Biden has expressed concern about the increasing prevalence of noncompete clauses in employment contracts applicable to low wage employees. He wants the FTC to issue a rule that prohibits inclusion of noncompete clauses in contracts to employ low-wage employees. The Supreme Court would be likely to uphold such a rule.

A rule that prohibits inclusion of noncompete clauses in employment contracts applicable to low-wage employees would differ from the other three rules I discussed in many respects. First, it has long been the law that noncompete clauses can be included in employment contracts only in narrow circumstances, none of which have any conceivable application to low-wage contracts. The only reason that competition authorities did not bring actions against firms that include noncompete clauses in low-wage employment contracts was their belief that state labor law would be effective in deterring firms from engaging in that practice. Thus, the rule would be entirely consistent with existing antitrust law.

Second, there are many studies that have found that state labor law has not been effective in deterring firms from including noncompete clauses in low-wage employment contracts and many studies that have found that the increasing use of noncompete clauses in low-wage contracts is causing a lot of damage to the performance of labor markets. Thus, the FTC would be able to support its rule with high-quality evidence.

Third, the Supreme Court’s unanimous 2021 opinion in NCAA v. Alstom indicates that the Court is receptive to claims that a practice that harms the performance of labor markets is illegal. Thus, I predict that the Court would uphold a rule that prohibits noncompete clauses in employment contracts applicable to low-wage employees if it holds that the FTC can use notice-and-comment rulemaking to define “unfair methods of competition,” as that term is used in Section 5 of the FTC Act. That caveat is important, however. As I indicated at the beginning of this essay, I doubt that the FTC has that power.

I would urge the FTC not to use notice-and comment rulemaking to address the problems that are caused by the increasing use of noncompete clauses in low-wage contracts. There is no reason for the FTC to put a lot of time and effort into a notice-and-comment rulemaking in the hope that the Court will conclude that the FTC has the power to use notice-and-comment rulemaking to implement Section 5. The FTC can implement an effective prohibition on the inclusion of noncompete clauses in employment contracts applicable to low-wage employees by using a combination of legal tools that it has long used and that it clearly has the power to use—issuance of interpretive rules and policy statements coupled with a few well-chosen enforcement actions.

Alternative Ways to Improve Antitrust Law       

There are many other ways in which Khan can move antitrust law in the directions that she prefers. She can make common cause with the many mainstream antitrust scholars who have urged incremental changes in antitrust law and who have conducted the studies needed to support those proposed changes. Thus, for instance, she can move aggressively against other practices that harm the performance of labor markets, change the criteria that the FTC uses to decide whether to challenge proposed mergers and acquisitions, and initiate actions against large platform firms that favor their products over the products of third parties that they sell on their platforms.     

In Administrative Law, Antitrust & Competition, Federal Trade Commission, FTC UMC Rulemaking, Intellectual Property, Monopolization, Patent, Pharmaceuticals, Regulation, Section 5, Supreme Court, Symposia, Truth on the Market, Vertical Restraints , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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UMC Rulemaking After Magnuson-Moss: A Textualist Approach

Leah Samuel —  27 April 2022

[This guest post from Yale Law School student Leah Samuel—the third post in our FTC UMC Rulemaking symposium—is a condensed version of a full-length paper. Please reach out to Leah at leah.samuel@yale.edu if you would like a copy of the full draft. It is the first of two contributions to the symposium posted today, along with this related post from Corbin K. Barthold of TechFreedom. You can find other posts at the symposium page here. Truth on the Market also invites academics, practitioners, and other antitrust/regulation commentators to send us 1,500-4,000 word responses for potential inclusion in the symposium.]

Introduction

The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) ability to conduct substantive rulemaking under both its “unfair methods of competition” (UMC) and “unfair and deceptive practices” (UDAP) mandates was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 1973’s National Petroleum Refiners Association v. FTC. Nonetheless, the FTC has seldom exercised this authority with respect to UMC—its antitrust authority. And various scholars and commentators have suggested that such an attempt would quickly be rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court.

I argue that the plain text and procedural history of the 1975 Magnuson–Moss Warranty Act demonstrate that Congress implicitly ratified the National Petroleum decision as it applied to UMC rulemaking. The scholarly focus on the intentions of the framers of the 1914 Federal Trade Commission Act with respect to substantive rulemaking is therefore misplaced—whether the FTC has exercised its UMC rulemaking powers in recent decades, its ability to do so was affirmed by Congress in 1974.

When the FTC first began to promulgate substantive rules under Section 5, neither the agency nor reviewing courts readily distinguished between UMC and UDAP authority. In 1973, the D.C. Circuit determined that the FTC was empowered to promulgate a legally binding trade regulation rule that required the posting of octane numbers at gas stations as a valid legislative rule under both UMC and UDAP. The given trade regulation rule was not clearly categorized as consumer protection or antitrust by the court. In 1975, Congress passed the Magnuson-Moss Act, which added procedural requirements to UDAP rulemaking without changing the processes applicable to UMC rulemaking as it stood after National Petroleum. In 1980, Congress added additional cumbersome procedural hurdles, as well as certain outright prohibitions to so-called Magnuson-Moss rulemaking with the Federal Trade Commission Improvements Act (FTCIA), still leaving UMC untouched.

Interpretative Method

A textualist reading of the Magnuson-Moss Act should lead to the conclusion that the FTC has the power to conduct substantive UMC rulemaking. Because Congress was actively aware of and responding to the National Petroleum decision and the FTC’s Octane Rule, the Magnuson-Moss Act should be read to leave UMC rulemaking intact under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).

Interpreting Magnuson-Moss to acknowledge the existence of, and therefore validate, UMC rulemaking does the least violence to the text, in keeping with the supremacy-of-text principle, as described by Justice Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner in “Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts.” Absent any express statement eliminating or bracketing that authority, the contextual meaning of Magnuson-Moss § 202(a)(2)—“[t]he preceding sentence shall not affect any authority of the Commission to prescribe rules…with respect to unfair methods of competition”—is most clearly understood as protecting the existence of UMC rulemaking as it existed in law at the moment of the bill’s passage. In his famous concurrence in Green v. Bock Laundry Machine Co., Justice Scalia explained that:

The meaning of terms on the statute books ought to be determined, not on the basis of which meaning can be shown to have been understood by a larger handful of the Members of Congress; but rather on the basis of which meaning is . . . most compatible with the surrounding body of law into which the provision must be integrated—a compatibility which, by a benign fiction, we assume Congress always has in mind.

In Branch v. Smith, Scalia applied this method to the Voting Rights Act, reasoning that Congress has a constructive awareness of lower-court decisions when it amends a statute. While that constructive awareness, and the statutory meaning that it implies, cannot trump the plain text of the amended statute, it is an important aid to interpretation. Here, the benign fiction of constructive awareness is actually a demonstrable fact: Congress was aware of National Petroleum and took it to be the legal default. Where the lower court decision-making process and the legislative process were closely intertwined, the presumption that Congress knew and adopted the D.C. Circuit’s reasoning is more defensible from a textualist perspective than any other reading of Section 202.

This is not an argument derived from legislative silence or inaction, canons disfavored by today’s textualists. Here, Congress definitively acted, amending the FTC Act multiple times over the decade. To read into the text of the Magnuson-Moss Act a provision stripping the FTC of its UMC rulemaking authority and overturning National Petroleum would be to violate the omitted case canon, as Scalia and Garner put it: “The absent provision cannot be supplied by the courts. What the legislature ‘would have wanted’ it did not provide, and that is the end of the matter.” In sum, the Congresses of 1974 and 1980 affirmed the existence of UMC rulemaking under APA procedures.

FTC Rulemaking Before the Octane Rule

During its first 50 years, the FTC carried out its mandate exclusively through nonbinding recommendations called “trade practice rules” (TPRs), alongside case-by-case adjudications. TPRs emerged from FTC-facilitated “trade practice conferences,” where industry participants formulated rules around what constituted unfair practices within their industry. In the early 1960s, Kennedy-appointed FTC Chair Phil Elman began to push the agency to shift away from a reactive “mailbag approach” based on individual complaints and toward a systematic approach based on binding agency rules. The result was the promulgation of “trade regulation rules” (TRRs) through notice-and-comment rulemaking, which the FTC initiated by amending its procedural rules to permit binding rulemaking in 1962. The FTC’s first TRR, promulgated in 1964, explicitly relied upon the agency’s UDAP authority. However, its statement of basis and purpose contained a full-throated defense of FTC rulemaking in general, including UMC rulemaking. The history of these early rulemaking efforts has been documented comprehensively by Luke Herrine.

Of the TRRs that the FTC promulgated before the Octane Rule, only one appears to have been explicitly identified as an exercise of antitrust rulemaking under Section 6(g) of the FTC Act. That rule, promulgated in 1968, identified its authority as sections 2(d) and 2(e) of the Clayton Act, rather than UMC under Section 5 of the FTC Act. The agency itself, upon repealing the rule, found that no enforcement actions were ever brought under it. Given the existence, however underutilized, of the 1968 rule—alongside the 1971 Octane Rule described below—it is clear that FTC personnel during the 1960s and 1970s did not understand TRRs to mean only consumer protection rules under UDAP. Furthermore, the Congress that enacted the Magnuson-Moss Act was aware of and legislating against the background fact that the FTC had already promulgated two final rules drawing on antitrust authority.

The National Petroleum Decision

In December 1971, the FTC promulgated a TRR through APA notice-and-comment rulemaking declaring that the failure to post octane ratings on gas pumps constituted a violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act, citing both UMC and UDAP as its authorizing provisions. Quoting from the statement of base and purpose of the 1964 Cigarette Rule, the FTC declared that it was empowered to promulgate the TRR under the “general grant of rulemaking authority in section 6(g) (of the Federal Trade Commission Act), and authority to promulgate it is in any event, implicit in section 5(a) (6) (of the Act) and in the purpose and design of the Trade Commission Act as a whole.”

Like the Octane Rule itself, Judge J. Skelly Wright’s 1973 National Petroleum decision affirming the FTC’s authority to promulgate the rule did not distinguish between UMC and UDAP rulemaking and did not limit its holding to one or the other.

Wright’s opinion rested first on a plain language reading of 15 U.S.C. § 46(g), which provides that the FTC may “[f]rom time to time … classify corporations and … make rules and regulations for the purpose of carrying out the provisions of sections 41 to 46 and 47 to 58 of this title.” He rejected appellees’ claim that the placement of § 6(g) in the section of the FTC Act that empowers the commission to systematically investigate and collect industry reports (colloquially referred to as 6(b) orders) manifests Congress’s intent to limit 6(g) rulemaking to the FTC’s “nonadjudicatory, investigative and informative functions.” As he pointed out, the text of 6(g) as adopted applied to section 45, which corresponds to § 5 of the FTC Act.

Wright acknowledged, however, that in theory 6(g) could be limited to rules of procedure and practice—such was the holding of the district court. Wright declined to follow the district court, holding instead that, “while the legislative history of Section 5 and Section 6(g) is ambiguous, it certainly does not compel the conclusion that the Commission was not meant to exercise the power to make substantive rules with binding effect in Section 5(a) adjudications. We also believe that the plain language of Section 6(g)…confirms the framers’ intent to allow exercise of the power claimed here.”Finding the legislative history “cryptic” and inconclusive, Wright argued that “the need to rely on the section’s language is obvious.”

He resolved the matter in the FTC’s favor by focusing on the agency’s need for effective tools to carry out its mandate; to force the agency to proceed solely by adjudication “would render the Commission ineffective to do the job assigned it by Congress. Such a result is not required by the legislative history of the Act.”

While contemporary skeptics of the administrative state might take issue with Wright’s statutory interpretation, it is difficult to argue with his textualist premise: nothing in the text of 6(g) limits the provision to procedural rulemaking.

More importantly, the Magnuson-Moss Act was passed Dec. 19, 1974, only a year and a half after the National Petroleum decision. The text and history of the Magnuson-Moss Act evinces an awareness of and attentiveness to the National Petroleum decision—the proposed legislation and the National Petroleum case were both pending during the early 1970s. The text of Magnuson-Moss canonizes Wright’s authorization of FTC rulemaking powers under both UMC and UDAP, while specifying a more rigorous set of procedural hurdles for UDAP rulemaking.

Legislative History of the Magnuson-Moss Act

Some commentators have suggested that the general purpose of Magnuson-Moss with respect to FTC rulemaking must have been to bog down the rule-promulgation process, because the act added procedural requirements like cross-examination to UDAP rulemaking. From that premise, it may be argued that a Congress hostile to FTC rulemaking would not have simultaneously sandbagged UDAP rulemaking while validating UMC rulemaking under the APA. That logical jump oversimplifies the process of negotiation and compromise that typifies any legislative process, and here it leads to the wrong conclusion. Magnuson-Moss was the result of consumer-protection advocates’ painstaking efforts to strengthen the FTC across many dimensions. The addition of trial-type procedures was a concession that they ultimately offered to business interests to move the bill out of the hostile U.S. House Commerce and Finance Subcommittee. However, the bill moved out of conference committee and to the President Gerald Ford’s desk only after its champions were assured that, in the immediate aftermath of National Petroleum, UMC rulemaking would be unimpaired.

Sen. Warren Magnuson’s (D-Wash.) strategy from the beginning was to marry together the popular and relatively easy-to-understand warranty provisions with a revitalization of the FTC. As early as 1971, President Richard Nixon publicized his support for a watered-down version of a warranty-FTC bill. Notwithstanding the political cover from Nixon, House Republicans were reluctant to move any bill forward. Michael Lemov, counsel to Rep. John E. Moss (D-Calif.) during this period, wrote that the House Commerce Committee in the early 70s was increasingly attentive to business interests and hostile to consumer-protection legislation. It ultimately took Moss’ deal-brokering to make Magnuson’s consumer-protection legacy a reality by unsticking multiple consumer-protection bills from the House “graveyard of consumer bills.” While Magnuson succeeded in passing the Magnuson-Moss draft to a full Senate vote three times in between 1970 and 1974, Moss spent years (and 12 full days of hearings) trying to get the bill out of his Commerce and Finance Subcommittee.

What finally unstuck the bill on the House side, according to Lemov, was the participation of the Nixon-appointed but surprisingly vigorous FTC Chair Lewis Engman. Engman testified before the subcommittee on March 19, 1973, that if the cross-examination provisions couldn’t be cut out of the bill, then all of the rulemaking provisions of the bill should be stripped out. By this time, the National Petroleum Refiners decision was pending, and Engman evidently felt that the FTC could do better with the rulemaking authority that might be left to it by Wright’s decision, rather than the burdensome procedure set out in the House draft. The National Petroleum decision came down June 28, 1973, and by Feb. 25, 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court had denied certiorari, such that Congress could and did consider Wright’s decision to be the state of the law. According to Lemov, Moss was upset that Engman blindsided him with his demand to leave the entirety of Section 5 rulemaking under the National Petroleum standard. In response, he doubled down and brokered a deal with key Republican committee member Rep. Jim Broyhill (R-N.C.), which would keep cross-examination but limit it to material issues of fact, not policy or minutia. After being further weakened in the full House Commerce Committee, the bill made it to a floor vote and along to the conference committee on Sept. 19, 1974, to be reconciled with the stronger Senate version.

In conference, the bill was somewhat resuscitated. It made it out of the House and Senate in December 1974 and was signed by Ford in January 1975. The House’s industry-influenced version of cross-examination made it into law, since the Senate version would have left the entirety of FTC rulemaking power under the National Petroleum holding. In short, the burdensome procedures included in the Magnuson-Moss Act, particularly cross-examination, were either devised by or advocated for by industry-friendly interests intending to tie the FTC’s hands. However, at the urging of Engman, both the Senate and House were attentive to the progress of the National Petroleum decision, and ultimately conferred on a bill that deliberately left UMC rulemaking under the simpler APA process permitted by that decision’s precedent.

The Plain Meaning of Magnuson-Moss

The text of the critical passage of the Magnuson-Moss Act, as codified at 15 U.S.C. § 57a, has not been substantially changed since 1975, though two modifications appear in italics:

(a) Authority of Commission to prescribe rules and general statements of policy

(1) Except as provided in subsection (h), the Commission may prescribe–

(A) interpretive rules and general statements of policy with respect to unfair or deceptive acts or practices […] and

(B) rules which define with specificity acts or practices which are unfair or deceptive acts or practices […], except that the Commission shall not develop or promulgate any trade rule or regulation with regard to the regulation of the development and utilization of the standards and certification activities pursuant to this section.Rules under this subparagraph may include requirements prescribed for the purpose of preventing such acts or practices.

(2) The Commission shall have no authority under this subchapter, other than its authority under this section, to prescribe any rule with respect to unfair or deceptive acts or practices […]. The preceding sentence shall not affect any authority of the Commission to prescribe rules (including interpretive rules), and general statements of policy, with respect to unfair methods of competition…

Both of the two changes in italics were the result of the 1980 FTCIA, which is discussed in more depth below. An uncodified section of the bill, labeled “15 USC 57a Note,” reads as follows:

(C)(1) The amendment made by subsections (a) and (b) of this section shall not affect the validity of any rule which was promulgated under section 6(g) of the Federal Trade Commission act prior to the date of enactment of this section. Any proposed rule under section 6(g) of such act with respect to which presentation of data, views, and arguments was substantially completed before such date may be promulgated in the same manner and with the same validity as such rule could have been promulgated had this section not been enacted.

Taken together, the language of Section 202 and 202(c) display a consciousness of the FTC’s prior norms of rulemaking authorized by Section 6(g), and an intent to bifurcate the treatment of UDAP and UMC rulemaking. Section 202 (a)(2) limits UDAP rulemaking, whether interpretive or legislative, to the new boundaries established in the bill, while explicitly leaving UMC rulemaking, including, but not limited to, interpretative rules and statements of policy, outside the new constraints and tethered to Section 6(g).

Clearly UMC is subject to the residual of FTC rulemaking authority—but the interpreter is left to determine whether that residual:

  1. eliminates UMC rulemaking altogether;
  2. leaves UMC rulemaking viable under 6(g) and the APA procedures as established in National Petroleum; or
  3. is agnostic to UMC rulemaking but repudiates National Petroleum, thereby leaving UMC rulemaking open to interpretation based on the meaning of the 1914 FTCA.

Without reference to legislative history, a textualist approach to determining which of the three possibilities is most plausible is to ask what an enacting Congress with a clear preference would have done (see, e.g., Scalia’s majority opinion in Edmond v. United States). Congress could, with even greater parsimony and clarity in drafting, have limited all rulemaking to the Magnuson-Moss procedures by simply referencing Section 5 in the first sentence of (a)(2), or in the first sentences of (a)(1)(A) and (B). Alternately, if the objective was to prohibit UMC rulemaking while allowing a more procedurally limited form of UDAP rulemaking, Congress could have written the second sentence of (a)(2) as: “The preceding sentence shall not authorize the Commission to prescribe rules (including interpretive rules), and general statements of policy, with respect to unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce” or “The preceding sentence shall not authorize the Commission to prescribe rules, except interpretive rules and general statements of policy, with respect to unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce.”

We presume that Congress enacted the Magnuson-Moss Act with, as Scalia put it in Bock Laundry, a meaning “most compatible with the surrounding body of law into which the provision must be integrated—a compatibility which, by a benign fiction, we assume Congress always has in mind.” Therefore, while a textualist would not admit the legislative history and administrative history of the FTC to this interpretation, the history is relevant inasmuch as we presume that Congress legislates against the existing state of the law as it understands it. The foregoing history demonstrates conclusively that Congress was aware of and accounting for the National Petroleum decision at multiple stages of the legislative process. The FTC’s UMC rulemaking history further lends support to the fact that Congress and the agency understood UMC rulemaking power to exist before and after the enactment of Magnuson-Moss.

Rulemaking After the Magnuson-Moss Act and the 1980 FTCIA

Returning to the current statutory text, both of the changes in italics were the result of the 1980 FTCIA, which was designed to rein in perceived FTC overreach in the consumer-protection space. The reference to Subsection (h) incorporates an explicit halt to the FTC’s then-pending consumer-protection rulemaking relating to advertising directed at children. The exception codified at (a)(1)(B) targeted the FTC’s ongoing rulemaking in standards and certification.

The Standards and Certifications Rule was the most significant attempt at competition rulemaking after the Octane Rule, although it was never finalized. Two staff reports indicate that FTC staff in both 1978 and 1983 believed that the agency’s authority to make rules under UMC authority was not abrogated by Magnuson-Moss, nor by the FTCIA. The proposed rule would have authorized the FTC to define situations in which the process of developing standards and certifications for a wide variety of industries may give rise to competitive injuries in violation of Section 5. The 1978 proposed rule and staff teport drew on both UMC and UDAP authority, noting that, in the years since National Petroleum, Magnuson-Moss had codified the FTC’s rulemaking authority and added procedural requirements, but that the act, by its own terms, applied only to UDAP rulemaking. Accordingly, the FTC’s “authority to promulgate rules relating to unfair methods of competition was expressly left unchanged by the Act.” Because of the bifurcation in UMC and UDAP rulemaking procedures, Bureau of Consumer Protection (BCP) staff opted to proceed with the standards and certification rulemaking under the new Magnuson-Moss procedures, on the understanding that meeting the higher procedural bar of Magnuson-Moss would also satisfy the requirements of § 553 of the APA.

By 1983, however, BCP staff had shifted gears. The standards and certification final staff report of April 1983, which would have been delivered to the FTC commissioners for a vote on whether to promulgate the rule or not, recommended UMC rulemaking under 6(g). In drawing on its 6(g) authority, BCP staff acknowledged that the 1980 FTCIA had explicitly removed commission authority to promulgate a standards and certification rule under Section 18 of the FTC Act, referring to the new UDAP section.

Clearly, the 1980 FTCIA was intended as a rebuke to the FTC’s efforts at consumer-protection rulemaking. However, the fact that earlier House and Senate drafts contemplated removing all FTC rulemaking authority, or removing standards and certification rulemaking authority for both UMC and UDAP, strongly suggests that Congress understood that the two rulemaking powers existed, had been affirmed by Magnuson-Moss, and continued to be legally viable, even as their exercise became politically infeasible.

BCP staff was bolstered in this interpretation by the D.C. District Court, which granted summary judgment in February 1982 against the American National Standards Institute, which brought suit against the commission claiming that the proposed Standards and Certification Rule proceeding under 6(g) violated the FTCIA of 1980.In an unpublished opinion, the court held that “the text and legislative history of the FTCIA belie Plaintiffs’ claims,” while also defending the continuing dispositivity of National Petroleum on the question of § 6(g) rulemaking. ANSI did not appeal the district court’s decision.

BCP staff forged ahead with the final report in April 1983, acknowledging that, to the extent that certain substantive requirements around disclosures from the 1978 proposed rule were directed at preventing “deception,” the FTC was no longer able to proceed with such rules. To the extent that such disclosures “would have alleviated unfair methods of competition,” the final rule could “provide similar relief.” The Standards and Certifications Rule was never adopted, however, because by 1983, FTC leadership was actively hostile to regulation. The only mentions of “unfair methods of competition” in the rulemaking context in the Federal Register after the Standards and Certification Rule appears to be in the context of repeals.

Conclusion

The Magnuson-Moss Act explicitly left UMC rulemaking unchanged when establishing an additional set of procedural hurdles for UDAP rulemaking. Congress in 1974 both constructively and demonstrably knew that the legal default against which these changes were made was Judge Wright’s National Petroleum decision, as well as the final agency action embodied in the Octane Rule. A textualist reading of the Magnuson-Moss Act must begin with this background legal context to avoid doing violence to the text of the statute. This interpretation is further reinforced by the FTCIA, which also left UMC rulemaking intact, while banning specific instances of UDAP rulemaking. In short, the FTC has substantive UMC rulemaking authority under FTC Act Section 5.

In Administrative Law, Antitrust & Competition, Federal Trade Commission, FTC UMC Rulemaking, Regulation, Section 5, Supreme Court, Symposia, Truth on the Market , , , , , , , , ,
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Welcome to the TOTM Symposium on FTC UMC Rulemaking

Gus Hurwitz —  25 April 2022

[This post is the first in our FTC UMC Rulemaking symposium. You can find other posts at the symposium page here. Truth on the Market also invites academics, practitioners, and other antitrust/regulation commentators to send us 1500-4000 word responses for potential inclusion in the symposium.]

There is widespread interest in the potential tools that the Biden administration’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) may use to address a range of competition-related and competition-adjacent concerns. A focal point for this interest is the potential that the FTC may use its broad authority to regulate unfair methods of competition (UMC) under Section 5 of the FTC Act to make rules that address a wide range of conduct. This “potential” is expected to become a “likelihood” with confirmation of Alvaro Bedoya, a third Democratic commissioner, expected to occur any day.

This post marks the start of a Truth on the Market symposium that brings together academics, practitioners, and other commentators to discuss issues relating to potential UMC-related rulemaking. Contributions to this symposium will cover a range of topics, including:

  • Constitutional and administrative-law limits on UMC rulemaking: does such rulemaking potentially present “major question” or delegation issues, or other issues under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA)? If so, what is the scope of permissible rulemaking?
  • Substantive issues in UMC rulemaking: costs and benefits to be considered in developing rules, prudential concerns, and similar concerns.
  • Using UMC to address competition-adjacent issues: consideration of how or whether the FTC can use its UMC authority to address firm conduct that is governed by other statutory or regulatory regimes. For instance, firms using copyright law and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to limit competitors’ ability to alter or repair products, or labor or entry issues that might be governed by licensure or similar laws.

Timing and Structure of the Symposium

Starting tomorrow, one or two contributions to this symposium will be posted each morning. During the first two weeks of the symposium, we will generally try to group posts on similar topics together. When multiple contributions are posted on the same day, they will generally be implicitly or explicitly in dialogue with each other. The first week’s contributions will generally focus on constitutional and administrative law issues relating to UMC rulemaking, while the second week’s contributions will focus on more specific substantive topics. 

Readers are encouraged to engage with these posts through comments. In addition, academics, practitioners, and other antitrust and regulatory commentators are invited to submit additional contributions for inclusion in this symposium. Such contributions may include responses to posts published by others or newly developed ideas. Interested authors should submit pieces for consideration to Gus Hurwitz and Keith Fierro Benson.

This symposium will run through at least Friday, May 6. We do not, however, anticipate, ending or closing it at that time. To the contrary, it is very likely that topics relating to FTC UMC rulemaking will continue to be timely and of interest to our community—we anticipate keeping the symposium running for the foreseeable future, and welcome submissions on an ongoing basis. Readers interested in these topics are encouraged to check in regularly for new posts, including by following the symposium page, the FTC UMC Rulemaking tag, or by subscribing to Truth on the Market for notifications of new posts.

In Administrative Law, Antitrust & Competition, Copyright, Federal Trade Commission, FTC UMC Rulemaking, Regulation, Section 5, Symposia, Truth on the Market , , , , , ,
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The BIF Offers a Good First Step for Broadband, but the Devil Will Be in the Details

Ben Sperry & Kristian Stout —  17 November 2021

Capping months of inter-chamber legislative wrangling, President Joe Biden on Nov. 15 signed the $1 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (also known as the bipartisan infrastructure framework, or BIF), which sets aside $65 billion of federal funding for broadband projects. While there is much to praise about the package’s focus on broadband deployment and adoption, whether that money will be well-spent  depends substantially on how the law is implemented and whether the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) adopts adequate safeguards to avoid waste, fraud, and abuse. 

The primary aim of the bill’s broadband provisions is to connect the truly unconnected—what the bill refers to as the “unserved” (those lacking a connection of at least 25/3 Mbps) and “underserved” (lacking a connection of at least 100/20 Mbps). In seeking to realize this goal, it’s important to bear in mind that dynamic analysis demonstrates that the broadband market is overwhelmingly healthy, even in locales with relatively few market participants. According to the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) latest Broadband Progress Report, approximately 5% of U.S. consumers have no options for at least 25/3 Mbps broadband, and slightly more than 8% have no options for at least 100/10 Mbps).  

Reaching the truly unserved portions of the country will require targeting subsidies toward areas that are currently uneconomic to reach. Without properly targeted subsidies, there is a risk of dampening incentives for private investment and slowing broadband buildout. These tradeoffs must be considered. As we wrote previously in our Broadband Principles issue brief:

  • To move forward successfully on broadband infrastructure spending, Congress must take seriously the roles of both the government and the private sector in reaching the unserved.
  • Current U.S. broadband infrastructure is robust, as demonstrated by the way it met the unprecedented surge in demand for bandwidth during the recent COVID-19 pandemic.
  • To the extent it is necessary at all, public investment in broadband infrastructure should focus on providing Internet access to those who don’t have it, rather than subsidizing competition in areas that already do.
  • Highly prescriptive mandates—like requiring a particular technology or requiring symmetrical speeds— will be costly and likely to skew infrastructure spending away from those in unserved areas.
  • There may be very limited cases where municipal broadband is an effective and efficient solution to a complete absence of broadband infrastructure, but policymakers must narrowly tailor any such proposals to avoid displacing private investment or undermining competition.
  • Consumer-directed subsidies should incentivize broadband buildout and, where necessary, guarantee the availability of minimum levels of service reasonably comparable to those in competitive markets.
  • Firms that take government funding should be subject to reasonable obligations. Competitive markets should be subject to lighter-touch obligations.

The Good

The BIF’s broadband provisions ended up in a largely positive place, at least as written. There are two primary ways it seeks to achieve its goals of promoting adoption and deploying broadband to unserved/underserved areas. First, it makes permanent the Emergency Broadband Benefit program that had been created to provide temporary aid to households who struggled to afford Internet service during the COVID-19 pandemic, though it does lower the monthly user subsidy from $50 to $30. The renamed Affordable Connectivity Program can be used to pay for broadband on its own, or as part of a bundle of other services (e.g., a package that includes telephone, texting, and the rental fee on equipment).

Relatedly, the bill also subsidizes the cost of equipment by extending a one-time reimbursement of up to $100 to broadband providers when a consumer takes advantage of the provider’s discounted sale of connected devices, such as laptops, desktops, or tablet computers capable of Wi-Fi and video conferencing. 

The decision to make the emergency broadband benefit a permanent program broadly comports with recommendations we have made to employ user subsidies (such as connectivity vouchers) to encourage broadband adoption.

The second and arguably more important of the bill’s broadband provisions is its creation of the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program. Under the direction of the NTIA, BEAD will direct grants to state governments to help the states expand access to and use of high-speed broadband.  

On the bright side, BEAD does appear to be designed to connect the country’s truly unserved regions—which, as noted above, account for about 8% of the nation’s households. The law explicitly requires prioritizing unserved areas before underserved areas. Even where the text references underserved areas as an additional priority, it does so in a way that won’t necessarily distort private investment.  The bill also creates preferences for projects in persistent and high-poverty areas. Thus, the targeted areas are very likely to fall on the “have-not” side of the digital divide.

On its face, the subsidy and grant approach taken in the bill is, all things considered, commendable. As we note in our broadband report, care must be taken to avoid interventions that distort private investment incentives, particularly in a successful industry like broadband. The goal, after all, is more broadband deployment. If policy interventions only replicate private options (usually at higher cost) or, worse, drive private providers from a market, broadband deployment will be slowed or reversed. The approach taken in this bill attempts to line up private incentives with regulatory goals.

As we discuss below, however, the devil is in the details. In particular, BEAD’s structure could theoretically allow enough discretion in execution that a large amount of waste, fraud, and abuse could end up frustrating the program’s goals.

The Bad

While the bill largely keeps the right focus of building out broadband in unserved areas, there are reasons to question some of its preferences and solutions. For instance, the state subgrant process puts for-profit and government-run broadband solutions on an equal playing field for the purposes of receiving funds, even though the two types of entities exist in very different institutional environments with very different incentives. 

There is also a requirement that projects provide broadband of at least 100/20 Mbps speed, even though the bill defines “unserved”as lacking at least 25/3 Mbps. While this is not terribly objectionable, the preference for 100/20 could have downstream effects on the hardest-to-connect areas. It may only be economically feasible to connect some very remote areas with a 25/3 Mbps connection. Requiring higher speeds in such areas may, despite the best intentions, slow deployment and push providers to prioritize areas that are relatively easier to connect.

For comparison, the FCC’s Connect America Fund and Rural Digital Opportunity Fund programs do place greater weight in bidding for providers that can deploy higher-speed connections. But in areas where a lower speed tier is cost-justified, a provider can still bid and win. This sort of approach would have been preferable in the infrastructure bill. 

But the bill’s largest infirmity is not in its terms or aims, but in the potential for mischief in its implementation. In particular, the BEAD grant program lacks the safeguards that have traditionally been applied to this sort of funding at the FCC. 

Typically, an aid program of this sort would be administered by the FCC under rulemaking bound by the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). As cumbersome as that process may sometimes be, APA rulemaking provides a high degree of transparency that results in fairly reliable public accountability. BEAD, by contrast, eschews this process, and instead permits NTIA to work directly with governors and other relevant state officials to dole out the money.  The funds will almost certainly be distributed more quickly, but with significantly less accountability and oversight. 

A large amount of the implementation detail will be driven at the state level. By definition, this will make it more difficult to monitor how well the program’s aims are being met. It also creates a process with far more opportunities for highly interested parties to lobby state officials to direct funding to their individual pet projects. None of this is to say that BEAD funding will necessarily be misdirected, but NTIA will need to be very careful in how it proceeds.

Conclusion: The Opportunity

Although the BIF’s broadband funds are slated to be distributed next year, we may soon be able to see whether there are warning signs that the legitimate goal of broadband deployment is being derailed for political favoritism. BEAD initially grants a flat $100 million to each state; it is only additional monies over that initial amount that need to be sought through the grant program. Thus, it is highly likely that some states will begin to enact legislation and related regulations in the coming year based on that guaranteed money. This early regulatory and legislative activity could provide insight into the pitfalls the full BEAD grantmaking program will face.

The larger point, however, is that the program needs safeguards. Where Congress declined to adopt them, NTIA would do well to implement them. Obviously, this will be something short of full APA rulemaking, but the NTIA will need to make accountability and reliability a top priority to ensure that the digital divide is substantially closed.

In Administrative Law, Broadband, Federal Communications Commission, Telecommunications, Truth on the Market , , , , , , , , ,
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Broad-Based FTC Data-Privacy and Security Rulemaking Would Flunk a Cost-Benefit Test

Alden Abbott —  13 October 2021

A debate has broken out among the four sitting members of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in connection with the recently submitted FTC Report to Congress on Privacy and Security. Chair Lina Khan argues that the commission “must explore using its rulemaking tools to codify baseline protections,” while Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter has urged the FTC to initiate a broad-based rulemaking proceeding on data privacy and security. By contrast, Commissioners Noah Joshua Phillips and Christine Wilson counsel against a broad-based regulatory initiative on privacy.

Decisions to initiate a rulemaking should be viewed through a cost-benefit lens (See summaries of Thom Lambert’s masterful treatment of regulation, of which rulemaking is a subset, here and here). Unless there is a market failure, rulemaking is not called for. Even in the face of market failure, regulation should not be adopted unless it is more cost-beneficial than reliance on markets (including the ability of public and private litigation to address market-failure problems, such as data theft). For a variety of reasons, it is unlikely that FTC rulemaking directed at privacy and data security would pass a cost-benefit test.

Discussion

As I have previously explained (see here and here), FTC rulemaking pursuant to Section 6(g) of the FTC Act (which authorizes the FTC “to make rules and regulations for the purpose of carrying out the provisions of this subchapter”) is properly read as authorizing mere procedural, not substantive, rules. As such, efforts to enact substantive competition rules would not pass a cost-benefit test. Such rules could well be struck down as beyond the FTC’s authority on constitutional law grounds, and as “arbitrary and capricious” on administrative law grounds. What’s more, they would represent retrograde policy. Competition rules would generate higher error costs than adjudications; could be deemed to undermine the rule of law, because the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) could not apply such rules; and innovative efficiency-seeking business arrangements would be chilled.

Accordingly, the FTC likely would not pursue 6(g) rulemaking should it decide to address data security and privacy, a topic which best fits under the “consumer protection” category. Rather, the FTC presumably would most likely initiate a “Magnuson-Moss” rulemaking (MMR) under Section 18 of the FTC Act, which authorizes the commission to prescribe “rules which define with specificity acts or practices which are unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce within the meaning of Section 5(a)(1) of the Act.” Among other things, Section 18 requires that the commission’s rulemaking proceedings provide an opportunity for informal hearings at which interested parties are accorded limited rights of cross-examination. Also, before commencing an MMR proceeding, the FTC must have reason to believe the practices addressed by the rulemaking are “prevalent.” 15 U.S.C. Sec. 57a(b)(3).

MMR proceedings, which are not governed under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), do not present the same degree of legal problems as Section 6(g) rulemakings (see here). The question of legal authority to adopt a substantive rule is not raised; “rule of law” problems are far less serious (the DOJ is not a parallel enforcer of consumer-protection law); and APA issues of “arbitrariness” and “capriciousness” are not directly presented. Indeed, MMR proceedings include a variety of procedures aimed at promoting fairness (see here, for example). An MMR proceeding directed at data privacy predictably would be based on the claim that the failure to adhere to certain data-protection norms is an “unfair act or practice.”

Nevertheless, MMR rules would be subject to two substantial sources of legal risk.

The first of these arises out of federalism. Three states (California, Colorado, and Virginia) recently have enacted comprehensive data-privacy laws, and a large number of other state legislatures are considering data-privacy bills (see here). The proliferation of state data-privacy statutes would raise the risk of inconsistent and duplicative regulatory norms, potentially chilling business innovations addressed at data protection (a severe problem in the Internet Age, when business data-protection programs typically will have interstate effects).

An FTC MMR data-protection regulation that successfully “occupied the field” and preempted such state provisions could eliminate that source of costs. The Magnuson–Moss Warranty Act, however, does not contain an explicit preemption clause, leaving in serious doubt the ability of an FTC rule to displace state regulations (see here for a summary of the murky state of preemption law, including the skepticism of textualist Supreme Court justices toward implied “obstacle preemption”). In particular, the long history of state consumer-protection and antitrust laws that coexist with federal laws suggests that the case for FTC rule-based displacement of state data protection is a weak one. The upshot, then, of a Section 18 FTC data-protection rule enactment could be “the worst of all possible worlds,” with drawn-out litigation leading to competing federal and state norms that multiplied business costs.

The second source of risk arises out of the statutory definition of “unfair practices,” found in Section 5(n) of the FTC Act. Section 5(n) codifies the meaning of unfair practices, and thereby constrains the FTC’s application of rulemakings covering such practices. Section 5(n) states:

The Commission shall have no authority . . . to declare unlawful an act or practice on the grounds that such an act or practice is unfair unless the act or practice causes or is likely to cause substantial injury to consumers which is not reasonably avoidable by consumers themselves and not outweighed by countervailing benefits to consumers or to competition. In determining whether an act or practice is unfair, the Commission may consider established public policies as evidence to be considered with all other evidence. Such public policy considerations may not serve as a primary basis for such determination.

In effect, Section 5(n) implicitly subjects unfair practices to a well-defined cost-benefit framework. Thus, in promulgating a data-privacy MMR, the FTC first would have to demonstrate that specific disfavored data-protection practices caused or were likely to cause substantial harm. What’s more, the commission would have to show that any actual or likely harm would not be outweighed by countervailing benefits to consumers or competition. One would expect that a data-privacy rulemaking record would include submissions that pointed to the efficiencies of existing data-protection policies that would be displaced by a rule.

Moreover, subsequent federal court challenges to a final FTC rule likely would put forth the consumer and competitive benefits sacrificed by rule requirements. For example, rule challengers might point to the added business costs passed on to consumers that would arise from particular rule mandates, and the diminution in competition among data-protection systems generated by specific rule provisions. Litigation uncertainties surrounding these issues could be substantial and would cast into further doubt the legal viability of any final FTC data protection rule.

Apart from these legal risk-based costs, an MMR data privacy predictably would generate error-based costs. Given imperfect information in the hands of government and the impossibility of achieving welfare-maximizing nirvana through regulation (see, for example, here), any MMR data-privacy rule would erroneously condemn some economically inefficient business protocols and disincentivize some efficiency-seeking behavior. The Section 5(n) cost-benefit framework, though helpful, would not eliminate such error. (For example, even bureaucratic efforts to accommodate some business suggestions during the rulemaking process might tilt the post-rule market in favor of certain business models, thereby distorting competition.) In the abstract, it is difficult to say whether the welfare benefits of a final MMA data-privacy rule (measured by reductions in data-privacy-related consumer harm) would outweigh the costs, even before taking legal costs into account.

Conclusion

At least two FTC commissioners (and likely a third, assuming that President Joe Biden’s highly credentialed nominee Alvaro Bedoya will be confirmed by the U.S. Senate) appear to support FTC data-privacy regulation, even in the absence of new federal legislation. Such regulation, which presumably would be adopted as an MMR pursuant to Section 18 of the FTC Act, would probably not prove cost-beneficial. Not only would adoption of a final data-privacy rule generate substantial litigation costs and uncertainty, it would quite possibly add an additional layer of regulatory burdens above and beyond the requirements of proliferating state privacy rules. Furthermore, it is impossible to say whether the consumer-privacy benefits stemming from such an FTC rule would outweigh the error costs (manifested through competitive distortions and consumer harm) stemming from the inevitable imperfections of the rule’s requirements. All told, these considerations counsel against the allocation of scarce FTC resources to a Section 18 data-privacy rulemaking initiative.

But what about legislation? New federal privacy legislation that explicitly preempted state law would eliminate costs arising from inconsistencies among state privacy rules. Ideally, if such legislation were to be pursued, it should to the extent possible embody a cost-benefit framework designed to minimize the sum of administrative (including litigation) and error costs. The nature of such a possible law, and the role the FTC might play in administering it, however, is a topic for another day.

In Administrative Law, Antitrust & Competition, Constitutional Law, Data Privacy & Security, Error Costs, Federal Trade Commission, Federalism, Jurisdictional Competition, Justice Department, Regulation, Section 5, Truth on the Market , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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FTC Competition Rulemaking Flunks a Cost-Benefit Test

Alden Abbott —  29 June 2021

There is little doubt that Federal Trade Commission (FTC) unfair methods of competition rulemaking proceedings are in the offing. Newly named FTC Chair Lina Khan and Commissioner Rohit Chopra both have extolled the benefits of competition rulemaking in a major law review article. What’s more, in May, Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter (during her stint as acting chair) established a rulemaking unit in the commission’s Office of General Counsel empowered to “explore new rulemakings to prohibit unfair or deceptive practices and unfair methods of competition” (emphasis added).

In short, a majority of sitting FTC commissioners apparently endorse competition rulemaking proceedings. As such, it is timely to ask whether FTC competition rules would promote consumer welfare, the paramount goal of competition policy.

In a recently published Mercatus Center research paper, I assess the case for competition rulemaking from a competition perspective and find it wanting. I conclude that, before proceeding, the FTC should carefully consider whether such rulemakings would be cost-beneficial. I explain that any cost-benefit appraisal should weigh both the legal risks and the potential economic policy concerns (error costs and “rule of law” harms). Based on these considerations, competition rulemaking is inappropriate. The FTC should stick with antitrust enforcement as its primary tool for strengthening the competitive process and thereby promoting consumer welfare.

A summary of my paper follows.

Section 6(g) of the original Federal Trade Commission Act authorizes the FTC “to make rules and regulations for the purpose of carrying out the provisions of this subchapter.” Section 6(g) rules are enacted pursuant to the “informal rulemaking” requirements of Section 553 of the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), which apply to the vast majority of federal agency rulemaking proceedings.

Before launching Section 6(g) competition rulemakings, however, the FTC would be well-advised first to weigh the legal risks and policy concerns associated with such an endeavor. Rulemakings are resource-intensive proceedings and should not lightly be undertaken without an eye to their feasibility and implications for FTC enforcement policy.

Only one appeals court decision addresses the scope of Section 6(g) rulemaking. In 1971, the FTC enacted a Section 6(g) rule stating that it was both an “unfair method of competition” and an “unfair act or practice” for refiners or others who sell to gasoline retailers “to fail to disclose clearly and conspicuously in a permanent manner on the pumps the minimum octane number or numbers of the motor gasoline being dispensed.” In 1973, in the National Petroleum Refiners case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld the FTC’s authority to promulgate this and other binding substantive rules. The court rejected the argument that Section 6(g) authorized only non-substantive regulations concerning regarding the FTC’s non-adjudicatory, investigative, and informative functions, spelled out elsewhere in Section 6.

In 1975, two years after National Petroleum Refiners was decided, Congress granted the FTC specific consumer-protection rulemaking authority (authorizing enactment of trade regulation rules dealing with unfair or deceptive acts or practices) through Section 202 of the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, which added Section 18 to the FTC Act. Magnuson-Moss rulemakings impose adjudicatory-type hearings and other specific requirements on the FTC, unlike more flexible section 6(g) APA informal rulemakings. However, the FTC can obtain civil penalties for violation of Magnuson-Moss rules, something it cannot do if 6(g) rules are violated.

In a recent set of public comments filed with the FTC, the Antitrust Section of the American Bar Association stated:

[T]he Commission’s [6(g)] rulemaking authority is buried in within an enumerated list of investigative powers, such as the power to require reports from corporations and partnerships, for example. Furthermore, the [FTC] Act fails to provide any sanctions for violating any rule adopted pursuant to Section 6(g). These two features strongly suggest that Congress did not intend to give the agency substantive rulemaking powers when it passed the Federal Trade Commission Act.

Rephrased, this argument suggests that the structure of the FTC Act indicates that the rulemaking referenced in Section 6(g) is best understood as an aid to FTC processes and investigations, not a source of substantive policymaking. Although the National Petroleum Refiners decision rejected such a reading, that ruling came at a time of significant judicial deference to federal agency activism, and may be dated.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s April 2021 decision in AMG Capital Management v. FTC further bolsters the “statutory structure” argument that Section 6(g) does not authorize substantive rulemaking. In AMG, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously held that Section 13(b) of the FTC Act, which empowers the FTC to seek a “permanent injunction” to restrain an FTC Act violation, does not authorize the FTC to seek monetary relief from wrongdoers. The court’s opinion rejected the FTC’s argument that the term “permanent injunction” had historically been understood to include monetary relief. The court explained that the injunctive language was “buried” in a lengthy provision that focuses on injunctive, not monetary relief (note that the term “rules” is similarly “buried” within 6(g) language dealing with unrelated issues). The court also pointed to the structure of the FTC Act, with detailed and specific monetary-relief provisions found in Sections 5(l) and 19, as “confirm[ing] the conclusion” that Section 13(b) does not grant monetary relief.

By analogy, a court could point to Congress’ detailed enumeration of substantive rulemaking provisions in Section 18 (a mere two years after National Petroleum Refiners) as cutting against the claim that Section 6(g) can also be invoked to support substantive rulemaking. Finally, the Supreme Court in AMG flatly rejected several relatively recent appeals court decisions that upheld Section 13(b) monetary-relief authority. It follows that the FTC cannot confidently rely on judicial precedent (stemming from one arguably dated court decision, National Petroleum Refiners) to uphold its competition rulemaking authority.

In sum, the FTC will have to overcome serious fundamental legal challenges to its section 6(g) competition rulemaking authority if it seeks to promulgate competition rules.

Even if the FTC’s 6(g) authority is upheld, it faces three other types of litigation-related risks.

First, applying the nondelegation doctrine, courts might hold that the broad term “unfair methods of competition” does not provide the FTC “an intelligible principle” to guide the FTC’s exercise of discretion in rulemaking. Such a judicial holding would mean the FTC could not issue competition rules.

Second, a reviewing court might strike down individual proposed rules as “arbitrary and capricious” if, say, the court found that the FTC rulemaking record did not sufficiently take into account potentially procompetitive manifestations of a condemned practice.

Third, even if a final competition rule passes initial legal muster, applying its terms to individual businesses charged with rule violations may prove difficult. Individual businesses may seek to structure their conduct to evade the particular strictures of a rule, and changes in commercial practices may render less common the specific acts targeted by a rule’s language.

Economic Policy Concerns Raised by Competition Rulemaking

In addition to legal risks, any cost-benefit appraisal of FTC competition rulemaking should consider the economic policy concerns raised by competition rulemaking. These fall into two broad categories.

First, competition rules would generate higher error costs than adjudications. Adjudications cabin error costs by allowing for case-specific analysis of likely competitive harms and procompetitive benefits. In contrast, competition rules inherently would be overbroad and would suffer from a very high rate of false positives. By characterizing certain practices as inherently anticompetitive without allowing for consideration of case-specific facts bearing on actual competitive effects, findings of rule violations inevitably would condemn some (perhaps many) efficient arrangements.

Second, competition rules would undermine the rule of law and thereby reduce economic welfare. FTC-only competition rules could lead to disparate legal treatment of a firm’s business practices, depending upon whether the FTC or the U.S. Justice Department was the investigating agency. Also, economic efficiency gains could be lost due to the chilling of aggressive efficiency-seeking business arrangements in those sectors subject to rules.

Conclusion

A combination of legal risks and economic policy harms strongly counsels against the FTC’s promulgation of substantive competition rules.

First, litigation issues would consume FTC resources and add to the costly delays inherent in developing competition rules in the first place. The compounding of separate serious litigation risks suggests a significant probability that costs would be incurred in support of rules that ultimately would fail to be applied.

Second, even assuming competition rules were to be upheld, their application would raise serious economic policy questions. The inherent inflexibility of rule-based norms is ill-suited to deal with dynamic evolving market conditions, compared with matter-specific antitrust litigation that flexibly applies the latest economic thinking to particular circumstances. New competition rules would also exacerbate costly policy inconsistencies stemming from the existence of dual federal antitrust enforcement agencies, the FTC and the Justice Department.

In conclusion, an evaluation of rule-related legal risks and economic policy concerns demonstrates that a reallocation of some FTC enforcement resources to the development of competition rules would not be cost-effective. Continued sole reliance on case-by-case antitrust litigation would generate greater economic welfare than a mixture of litigation and competition rules.

In Administrative Law, Antitrust & Competition, Antitrust Division, Corporate & Securities Law, Error Costs, Federal Trade Commission, Justice Department, Section 5, Truth on the Market , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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The Future of FTC Equitable Monetary Relief after AMG Capital Management

Alden Abbott —  22 April 2021

The U.S. Supreme Court’s just-published unanimous decision in AMG Capital Management LLC v. FTC—holding that Section 13(b) of the Federal Trade Commission Act does not authorize the commission to obtain court-ordered equitable monetary relief (such as restitution or disgorgement)—is not surprising. Moreover, by dissipating the cloud of litigation uncertainty that has surrounded the FTC’s recent efforts to seek such relief, the court cleared the way for consideration of targeted congressional legislation to address the issue.

But what should such legislation provide? After briefly summarizing the court’s holding, I will turn to the appropriate standards for optimal FTC consumer redress actions, which inform a welfare-enhancing legislative fix.

The Court’s Opinion

Justice Stephen Breyer’s opinion for the court is straightforward, centering on the structure and history of the FTC Act. Section 13(b) makes no direct reference to monetary relief. Its plain language merely authorizes the FTC to seek a “permanent injunction” in federal court against “any person, partnership, or corporation” that it believes “is violating, or is about to violate, any provision of law” that the commission enforces. In addition, by its terms, Section 13(b) is forward-looking, focusing on relief that is prospective, not retrospective (this cuts against the argument that payments for prior harm may be recouped from wrongdoers).

Furthermore, the FTC Act provisions that specifically authorize conditioned and limited forms of monetary relief (Section 5(l) and Section 19) are in the context of commission cease and desist orders, involving FTC administrative proceedings, unlike Section 13(b) actions that avoid the administrative route. In sum, the court concludes that:

[T]o read §13(b) to mean what it says, as authorizing injunctive but not monetary relief, produces a coherent enforcement scheme: The Commission may obtain monetary relief by first invoking its administrative procedures and then §19’s redress provisions (which include limitations). And the Commission may use §13(b) to obtain injunctive relief while administrative proceedings are foreseen or in progress, or when it seeks only injunctive relief. By contrast, the Commission’s broad reading would allow it to use §13(b) as a substitute for §5 and §19. For the reasons we have just stated, that could not have been Congress’ intent.

The court’s opinion concludes by succinctly rejecting the FTC’s arguments to the contrary.

What Comes Next

The Supreme Court’s decision has been anticipated by informed observers. All four sitting FTC Commissioners have already called for a Section 13(b) “legislative fix,” and in an April 20 hearing of Senate Commerce Committee, Chairwoman Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) emphasized that, “[w]e have to do everything we can to protect this authority and, if necessary, pass new legislation to do so.”

What, however, should be the contours of such legislation? In considering alternative statutory rules, legislators should keep in mind not only the possible consumer benefits of monetary relief, but the costs of error, as well. Error costs are a ubiquitous element of public law enforcement, and this is particularly true in the case of FTC actions. Ideally, enforcers should seek to minimize the sum of the costs attributable to false positives (type I error), false negatives (type II error), administrative costs, and disincentive costs imposed on third parties, which may also be viewed as a subset of false positives. (See my 2014 piece “A Cost-Benefit Framework for Antitrust Enforcement Policy.”

Monetary relief is most appropriate in cases where error costs are minimal, and the quantum of harm is relatively easy to measure. This suggests a spectrum of FTC enforcement actions that may be candidates for monetary relief. Ideally, selection of targets for FTC consumer redress actions should be calibrated to yield the highest return to scarce enforcement resources, with an eye to optimal enforcement criteria.

Consider consumer protection enforcement. The strongest cases involve hardcore consumer fraud (where fraudulent purpose is clear and error is almost nil); they best satisfy accuracy in measurement and error-cost criteria. Next along the spectrum are cases of non-fraudulent but unfair or deceptive acts or practices that potentially involve some degree of error. In this category, situations involving easily measurable consumer losses (e.g., systematic failure to deliver particular goods requested or poor quality control yielding shipments of ruined goods) would appear to be the best candidates for monetary relief.

Moving along the spectrum, matters involving a higher likelihood of error and severe measurement problems should be the weakest candidates for consumer redress in the consumer protection sphere. For example, cases involve allegedly misleading advertising regarding the nature of goods, or allegedly insufficient advertising substantiation, may generate high false positives and intractable difficulties in estimating consumer harm. As a matter of judgment, given resource constraints, seeking financial recoveries solely in cases of fraud or clear deception where consumer losses are apparent and readily measurable makes the most sense from a cost-benefit perspective.

Consumer redress actions are problematic for a large proportion of FTC antitrust enforcement (“unfair methods of competition”) initiatives. Many of these antitrust cases are “cutting edge” matters involving novel theories and complex fact patterns that pose a significant threat of type I error. (In comparison, type I error is low in hardcore collusion cases brought by the U.S. Justice Department where the existence, nature, and effects of cartel activity are plain). What’s more, they generally raise extremely difficult if not impossible problems in estimating the degree of consumer harm. (Even DOJ price-fixing cases raise non-trivial measurement difficulties.)

For example, consider assigning a consumer welfare loss number to a patent antitrust settlement that may or may not have delayed entry of a generic drug by some length of time (depending upon the strength of the patent) or to a decision by a drug company to modify a drug slightly just before patent expiration in order to obtain a new patent period (raising questions of valuing potential product improvements). These and other examples suggest that only rarely should the FTC pursue requests for disgorgement or restitution in antitrust cases, if error-cost-centric enforcement criteria are to be honored.

Unfortunately, the FTC currently has nothing to say about when it will seek monetary relief in antitrust matters. Commendably, in 2003, the commission issued a Policy Statement on Monetary Equitable Remedies in Competition Cases specifying that it would only seek monetary relief in “exceptional cases” involving a “[c]lear [v]iolation” of the antitrust laws. Regrettably, in 2012, a majority of the FTC (with Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen dissenting) withdrew that policy statement and the limitations it imposed. As I concluded in a 2012 article:

This action, which was taken without the benefit of advance notice and public comment, raises troubling questions. By increasing business uncertainty, the withdrawal may substantially chill efficient business practices that are not well understood by enforcers. In addition, it raises the specter of substantial error costs in the FTC’s pursuit of monetary sanctions. In short, it appears to represent a move away from, rather than towards, an economically enlightened antitrust enforcement policy.

In a 2013 speech, then-FTC Commissioner Josh Wright also lamented the withdrawal of the 2003 Statement, and stated that he would limit:

… the FTC’s ability to pursue disgorgement only against naked price fixing agreements among competitors or, in the case of single firm conduct, only if the monopolist’s conduct has no plausible efficiency justification. This latter category would include fraudulent or deceptive conduct, or tortious activity such as burning down a competitor’s plant.

As a practical matter, the FTC does not bring cases of this sort. The DOJ brings naked price-fixing cases and the unilateral conduct cases noted are as scarce as unicorns. Given that fact, Wright’s recommendation may rightly be seen as a rejection of monetary relief in FTC antitrust cases. Based on the previously discussed serious error-cost and measurement problems associated with monetary remedies in FTC antitrust cases, one may also conclude that the Wright approach is right on the money.

Finally, a recent article by former FTC Chairman Tim Muris, Howard Beales, and Benjamin Mundel opined that Section 13(b) should be construed to “limit[] the FTC’s ability to obtain monetary relief to conduct that a reasonable person would know was dishonest or fraudulent.” Although such a statutory reading is now precluded by the Supreme Court’s decision, its incorporation in a new statutory “fix” would appear ideal. It would allow for consumer redress in appropriate cases, while avoiding the likely net welfare losses arising from a more expansive approach to monetary remedies.

 Conclusion

The AMG Capital decision is sure to generate legislative proposals to restore the FTC’s ability to secure monetary relief in federal court. If Congress adopts a cost-beneficial error-cost framework in shaping targeted legislation, it should limit FTC monetary relief authority (recoupment and disgorgement) to situations of consumer fraud or dishonesty arising under the FTC’s authority to pursue unfair or deceptive acts or practices. Giving the FTC carte blanche to obtain financial recoveries in the full spectrum of antitrust and consumer protection cases would spawn uncertainty and could chill a great deal of innovative business behavior, to the ultimate detriment of consumer welfare.


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In Antitrust & Competition, Antitrust Division, Error Costs, Federal Trade Commission, Intellectual Property, Justice Department, Patent, Section 5, Supreme Court, Truth on the Market , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Ajit Pai Brought the FCC’s Media Ownership Rules into the Modern Age

Geoffrey Manne —  26 January 2021

[TOTM: The following is part of a digital symposium by TOTM guests and authors on the legal and regulatory issues that arose during Ajit Pai’s tenure as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. The entire series of posts is available here.

Geoffrey A. Manne is the president and founder of the International Center for Law and Economics.]

I’m delighted to add my comments to the chorus of voices honoring Ajit Pai’s remarkable tenure at the Federal Communications Commission. I’ve known Ajit longer than most. We were classmates in law school … let’s just say “many” years ago. Among the other symposium contributors I know of only one—fellow classmate, Tom Nachbar—who can make a similar claim. I wish I could say this gives me special insight into his motivations, his actions, and the significance of his accomplishments, but really it means only that I have endured his dad jokes and interminable pop-culture references longer than most. 

But I can say this: Ajit has always stood out as a genuinely humble, unfailingly gregarious, relentlessly curious, and remarkably intelligent human being, and he deployed these characteristics to great success at the FCC.   

Ajit’s tenure at the FCC was marked by an abiding appreciation for the importance of competition, both as a guiding principle for new regulations and as a touchstone to determine when to challenge existing ones. As others have noted (and as we have written elsewhere), that approach was reflected significantly in the commission’s Restoring Internet Freedom Order, which made competition—and competition enforcement by the antitrust agencies—the centerpiece of the agency’s approach to net neutrality. But I would argue that perhaps Chairman Pai’s greatest contribution to bringing competition to the forefront of the FCC’s mandate came in his work on media modernization.

Fairly early in his tenure at the commission, Ajit raised concerns with the FCC’s failure to modernize its media-ownership rules. In response to the FCC’s belated effort to initiate the required 2010 and 2014 Quadrennial Reviews of those rules, then-Commissioner Pai noted that the commission had abdicated its responsibility under the statute to promote competition. Not only was the FCC proposing to maintain a host of outdated existing rules, but it was also moving to impose further constraints (through new limitations on the use of Joint Sales Agreements (JSAs)). As Ajit noted, such an approach was antithetical to competition:

In smaller markets, the choice is not between two stations entering into a JSA and those same two stations flourishing while operating completely independently. Rather, the choice is between two stations entering into a JSA and at least one of those stations’ viability being threatened. If stations in these smaller markets are to survive and provide many of the same services as television stations in larger markets, they must cut costs. And JSAs are a vital mechanism for doing that.

The efficiencies created by JSAs are not a luxury in today’s digital age. They are necessary, as local broadcasters face fierce competition for viewers and advertisers.

Under then-Chairman Tom Wheeler, the commission voted to adopt the Quadrennial Review in 2016, issuing rules that largely maintained the status quo and, at best, paid tepid lip service to the massive changes in the competitive landscape. As Ajit wrote in dissent:

The changes to the media marketplace since the FCC adopted the Newspaper-Broadcast Cross-Ownership Rule in 1975 have been revolutionary…. Yet, instead of repealing the Newspaper-Broadcast Cross-Ownership Rule to account for the massive changes in how Americans receive news and information, we cling to it.

And over the near-decade since the FCC last finished a “quadrennial” review, the video marketplace has transformed dramatically…. Yet, instead of loosening the Local Television Ownership Rule to account for the increasing competition to broadcast television stations, we actually tighten that regulation.

And instead of updating the Local Radio Ownership Rule, the Radio-Television Cross-Ownership Rule, and the Dual Network Rule, we merely rubber-stamp them.

The more the media marketplace changes, the more the FCC’s media regulations stay the same.

As Ajit also accurately noted at the time:

Soon, I expect outside parties to deliver us to the denouement: a decisive round of judicial review. I hope that the court that reviews this sad and total abdication of the administrative function finds, once and for all, that our media ownership rules can no longer stay stuck in the 1970s consistent with the Administrative Procedure Act, the Communications Act, and common sense. The regulations discussed above are as timely as “rabbit ears,” and it’s about time they go the way of those relics of the broadcast world. I am hopeful that the intervention of the judicial branch will bring us into the digital age.

And, indeed, just this week the case was argued before the Supreme Court.

In the interim, however, Ajit became Chairman of the FCC. And in his first year in that capacity, he took up a reconsideration of the 2016 Order. This 2017 Order on Reconsideration is the one that finally came before the Supreme Court. 

Consistent with his unwavering commitment to promote media competition—and no longer a minority commissioner shouting into the wind—Chairman Pai put forward a proposal substantially updating the media-ownership rules to reflect the dramatically changed market realities facing traditional broadcasters and newspapers:

Today we end the 2010/2014 Quadrennial Review proceeding. In doing so, the Commission not only acknowledges the dynamic nature of the media marketplace, but takes concrete steps to update its broadcast ownership rules to reflect reality…. In this Order on Reconsideration, we refuse to ignore the changed landscape and the mandates of Section 202(h), and we deliver on the Commission’s promise to adopt broadcast ownership rules that reflect the present, not the past. Because of our actions today to relax and eliminate outdated rules, broadcasters and local newspapers will at last be given a greater opportunity to compete and thrive in the vibrant and fast-changing media marketplace. And in the end, it is consumers that will benefit, as broadcast stations and newspapers—those media outlets most committed to serving their local communities—will be better able to invest in local news and public interest programming and improve their overall service to those communities.

Ajit’s approach was certainly deregulatory. But more importantly, it was realistic, well-reasoned, and responsive to changing economic circumstances. Unlike most of his predecessors, Ajit was unwilling to accede to the torpor of repeated judicial remands (on dubious legal grounds, as we noted in our amicus brief urging the Court to grant certiorari in the case), permitting facially and wildly outdated rules to persist in the face of massive and obvious economic change. 

Like Ajit, I am not one to advocate regulatory action lightly, especially in the (all-too-rare) face of judicial review that suggests an agency has exceeded its discretion. But in this case, the need for dramatic rule change—here, to deregulate—was undeniable. The only abuse of discretion was on the part of the court, not the agency. As we put it in our amicus brief:

[T]he panel vacated these vital reforms based on mere speculation that they would hinder minority and female ownership, rather than grounding its action on any record evidence of such an effect. In fact, the 2017 Reconsideration Order makes clear that the FCC found no evidence in the record supporting the court’s speculative concern.

…In rejecting the FCC’s stated reasons for repealing or modifying the rules, absent any evidence in the record to the contrary, the panel substituted its own speculative concerns for the judgment of the FCC, notwithstanding the FCC’s decades of experience regulating the broadcast and newspaper industries. By so doing, the panel exceeded the bounds of its judicial review powers under the APA.

Key to Ajit’s conclusion that competition in local media markets could be furthered by permitting more concentration was his awareness that the relevant market for analysis couldn’t be limited to traditional media outlets like broadcasters and newspapers; it must include the likes of cable networks, streaming video providers, and social-media platforms, as well. As Ajit put it in a recent speech:

The problem is a fundamental refusal to grapple with today’s marketplace: what the service market is, who the competitors are, and the like. When assessing competition, some in Washington are so obsessed with the numerator, so to speak—the size of a particular company, for instance—that they’ve completely ignored the explosion of the denominator—the full range of alternatives in media today, many of which didn’t exist a few years ago.

When determining a particular company’s market share, a candid assessment of the denominator should include far more than just broadcast networks or cable channels. From any perspective (economic, legal, or policy), it should include any kinds of media consumption that consumers consider to be substitutes. That could be TV. It could be radio. It could be cable. It could be streaming. It could be social media. It could be gaming. It could be still something else. The touchstone of that denominator should be “what content do people choose today?”, not “what content did people choose in 1975 or 1992, and how can we artificially constrict our inquiry today to match that?”

For some reason, this simple and seemingly undeniable conception of the market escapes virtually all critics of Ajit’s media-modernization agenda. Indeed, even Justice Stephen Breyer in this week’s oral argument seemed baffled by the notion that more concentration could entail more competition:

JUSTICE BREYER: I’m thinking of it solely as a — the anti-merger part, in — in anti-merger law, merger law generally, I think, has a theory, and the theory is, beyond a certain point and other things being equal, you have fewer companies in a market, the harder it is to enter, and it’s particularly harder for smaller firms. And, here, smaller firms are heavily correlated or more likely to be correlated with women and minorities. All right?

The opposite view, which is what the FCC has now chosen, is — is they want to move or allow to be moved towards more concentration. So what’s the theory that that wouldn’t hurt the minorities and women or smaller businesses? What’s the theory the opposite way, in other words? I’m not asking for data. I’m asking for a theory.

Of course, as Justice Breyer should surely know—and as I know Ajit Pai knows—counting the number of firms in a market is a horrible way to determine its competitiveness. In this case, the competition from internet media platforms, particularly for advertising dollars, is immense. A regulatory regime that prohibits traditional local-media outlets from forging efficient joint ventures or from obtaining the scale necessary to compete with those platforms does not further competition. Even if such a rule might temporarily result in more media outlets, eventually it would result in no media outlets, other than the large online platforms. The basic theory behind the Reconsideration Order—to answer Justice Breyer—is that outdated government regulation imposes artificial constraints on the ability of local media to adopt the organizational structures necessary to compete. Removing those constraints may not prove a magic bullet that saves local broadcasters and newspapers, but allowing the rules to remain absolutely ensures their demise. 

Ajit’s commitment to furthering competition in telecommunications markets remained steadfast throughout his tenure at the FCC. From opposing restrictive revisions to the agency’s spectrum screen to dissenting from the effort to impose a poorly conceived and retrograde regulatory regime on set-top boxes, to challenging the agency’s abuse of its merger review authority to impose ultra vires regulations, to, of course, rolling back his predecessor’s unsupportable Title II approach to net neutrality—and on virtually every issue in between—Ajit sought at every turn to create a regulatory backdrop conducive to competition.

Tom Wheeler, Pai’s predecessor at the FCC, claimed that his personal mantra was “competition, competition, competition.” His greatest legacy, in that regard, was in turning over the agency to Ajit.

In Administrative Law, Apple, Federal Communications Commission, International Center for Law & Economics, Mergers & Acquisitions, Net Neutrality, Platforms, Regulation, Regulatory Reform, Retrospective on Ajit Pai’s Tenure as FCC Chairman, Supreme Court, Symposia, Telecommunications, Truth on the Market , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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