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Antitrust Populists Don’t Seem to Care About the Poor

Julie Carlson —  26 July 2022

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

When I was a kid, I trailed behind my mother in the grocery store with a notepad and a pencil adding up the cost of each item she added to our cart. This was partly my mother’s attempt to keep my math skills sharp, but it was also a necessity. As a low-income family, there was no slack in the budget for superfluous spending. The Hostess cupcakes I longed for were a luxury item that only appeared in our cart if there was an unexpected windfall. If the antitrust populists who castigate all forms of market power succeed in their crusade to radically deconcentrate the economy, life will be much harder for low-income families like the one I grew up in.

Antitrust populists like Biden White House official Tim Wu and author Matt Stoller decry the political influence of large firms. But instead of advocating for policies that tackle this political influence directly, they seek reforms to antitrust enforcement that aim to limit the economic advantages of these firms, believing that will translate into political enfeeblement. The economic advantages arising from scale benefit consumers, particularly low-income consumers, often at the expense of smaller economic rivals. But because the protection of small businesses is so paramount to their worldview, antitrust populists blithely ignore the harm that advancing their objectives would cause to low-income families.

This desire to protect small businesses, without acknowledging the economic consequences for low-income families, is plainly obvious in calls for reinvigorated Robinson-Patman Act enforcement (a law from the 1930s for which independent businesses advocated to limit the rise of chain stores) and in plans to revise the antitrust enforcement agencies’ merger guidelines. The U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently held a series of listening sessions to demonstrate the need for new guidelines. During the listening session on food and agriculture, independent grocer Anthony Pena described the difficulty he has competing with larger competitors like Walmart. He stated that:

Just months ago, I was buying a 59-ounce orange juice just north of $4 a unit, where we couldn’t get the supplier to sell it to us … Meanwhile, I go to the bigger box like a Walmart or a club store. Not only do they have it fully stocked, but they have it about half the price that I would buy it for at cost.

Half the price. Anthony Pena is complaining that competitors such as Walmart are selling the same product at half the price. To protect independent grocers like Anthony Pena, antitrust populists would have consumers, including low-income families, pay twice as much for groceries.

Walmart is an important food retailer for low-income families. Nearly a fifth of all spending through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the program formerly known as food stamps, takes place at Walmart. After housing and transportation, food is the largest expense for low-income families. The share of expenditures going toward food for low-income families (i.e., families in the lowest 20% of the income distribution) is 34% higher than for high-income families (i.e., families in the highest 20% of the income distribution). This means that higher grocery prices disproportionately burden low-income families.

In 2019, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) launched the SNAP Online Purchasing Pilot, which allows SNAP recipients to use their benefits at online food retailers. The pandemic led to an explosion in the number of SNAP recipients using their benefits online—increasing from just 35,000 households in March 2020 to nearly 770,000 households just three months later. While the pilot originally only included Walmart and Amazon, the number of eligible retailers has expanded rapidly. In order to make grocery delivery more accessible to low-income families, an important service during the pandemic, Amazon reduced its Prime membership fee (which helps pay for free delivery) by 50% for SNAP recipients.

The antitrust populists are not only targeting the advantages of large brick-and-mortar retailers, such as Walmart, but also of large online retailers like Amazon. Again, these advantages largely flow to consumers—particularly low-income ones.

The proposed American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA), which was voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee in February and may make an appearance on the Senate floor this summer, threatens those consumer benefits. AICOA would prohibit so-called “self-preferencing” by Amazon and other large technology platforms.

Should a ban on self-preferencing come to fruition, Amazon would not be able to prominently show its own products in any capacity—even when its products are a good match for a consumer’s search. In search results, Amazon will not be able to promote its private-label products, including Amazon Basics and 365 by Whole Foods, or products for which it is a first-party seller (i.e., a reseller of another company’s product). Amazon may also have to downgrade the ranking of popular products it sells, making them harder for consumers to find. Forcing Amazon to present offers that do not correspond to products consumers want to buy or are not a good value inflicts harm on all consumers but is particularly problematic for low-income consumers. All else equal, most consumers, especially low-income ones, obviously prefer cheaper products. It is important not to take that choice away from them.

Consider the case of orange juice, the product causing so much consternation for Mr. Pena. In a recent search on Amazon for a 59-ounce orange juice, as seen in the image below, the first four “organic” search results are SNAP-eligible, first-party, or private-label products sold by Amazon and ranging in price from $3.55 to $3.79. The next two results are from third-party sellers offering two 59-ounce bottles of orange juice at $38.99 and $84.54—more than five times the unit price offered by Amazon. By prohibiting self-preferencing, Amazon would be forced to promote products to consumers that are significantly more expensive and that are not SNAP-eligible. This increases costs directly for consumers who purchase more expensive products when cheaper alternatives are available but not presented. But it also increases costs indirectly by forcing consumers to search longer for better prices and SNAP-eligible products or by discouraging them from considering timesaving, online shopping altogether. Low-income families are least able to afford these increased costs.

The upshot is that antitrust populists are choosing to support (often well-off) small-business owners at the expense of vulnerable working people. Congress should not allow them to put the squeeze on low-income families. These families are already suffering due to record-high inflation—particularly for items that constitute the largest share of their expenditures, such as transportation and food. Proposed antitrust reforms such as AICOA and reinvigorated Robinson-Patman Act enforcement will only make it harder for low-income families to make ends meet.

In Amazon, Antitrust & Competition, Antitrust’s Uncertain Future, COVID-19, Exclusionary Conduct, Exclusive Dealing, Federal Trade Commission, Justice Department, Platforms, Symposia, Truth on the Market, Tying , , , , , , , , , ,
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Build Broadband Better: Focus on Competition, Not Competitors

Geoffrey Manne & Ben Sperry —  28 June 2021

President Joe Biden named his post-COVID-19 agenda “Build Back Better,” but his proposals to prioritize support for government-run broadband service “with less pressure to turn profits” and to “reduce Internet prices for all Americans” will slow broadband deployment and leave taxpayers with an enormous bill.

Policymakers should pay particular heed to this danger, amid news that the Senate is moving forward with considering a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package, and that the Federal Communications Commission, the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, and the U.S. Agriculture Department’s Rural Utilities Service will coordinate on spending broadband subsidy dollars.

In order to ensure that broadband subsidies lead to greater buildout and adoption, policymakers must correctly understand the state of competition in broadband and not assume that increasing the number of firms in a market will necessarily lead to better outcomes for consumers or the public.

A recent white paper published by us here at the International Center for Law & Economics makes the case that concentration is a poor predictor of competitiveness, while offering alternative policies for reaching Americans who don’t have access to high-speed Internet service.

The data show that the state of competition in broadband is generally healthy. ISPs routinely invest billions of dollars per year in building, maintaining, and upgrading their networks to be faster, more reliable, and more available to consumers. FCC data show that average speeds available to consumers, as well as the number of competitors providing higher-speed tiers, have increased each year. And prices for broadband, as measured by price-per-Mbps, have fallen precipitously, dropping 98% over the last 20 years. None of this makes sense if the facile narrative about the absence of competition were true.

In our paper, we argue that the real public policy issue for broadband isn’t curbing the pursuit of profits or adopting price controls, but making sure Americans have broadband access and encouraging adoption. In areas where it is very costly to build out broadband networks, like rural areas, there tend to be fewer firms in the market. But having only one or two ISPs available is far less of a problem than having none at all. Understanding the underlying market conditions and how subsidies can both help and hurt the availability and adoption of broadband is an important prerequisite to good policy.

The basic problem is that those who have decried the lack of competition in broadband often look at the number of ISPs in a given market to determine whether a market is competitive. But this is not how economists think of competition. Instead, economists look at competition as a dynamic process where changes in supply and demand factors are constantly pushing the market toward new equilibria.

In general, where a market is “contestable”—that is, where existing firms face potential competition from the threat of new entry—even just a single existing firm may have to act as if it faces vigorous competition. Such markets often have characteristics (e.g., price, quality, and level of innovation) similar or even identical to those with multiple existing competitors. This dynamic competition, driven by changes in technology or consumer preferences, ensures that such markets are regularly disrupted by innovative products and services—a process that does not always favor incumbents.

Proposals focused on increasing the number of firms providing broadband can actually reduce consumer welfare. Whether through overbuilding—by allowing new private entrants to free-ride on the initial investment by incumbent companies—or by going into the Internet business itself through municipal broadband, government subsidies can increase the number of firms providing broadband. But it can’t do so without costs―which include not just the cost of the subsidies themselves, which ultimately come from taxpayers, but also the reduced incentives for unsubsidized private firms to build out broadband in the first place.

If underlying supply and demand conditions in rural areas lead to a situation where only one provider can profitably exist, artificially adding another completely reliant on subsidies will likely just lead to the exit of the unsubsidized provider. Or, where a community already has municipal broadband, it is unlikely that a private ISP will want to enter and compete with a firm that doesn’t have to turn a profit.

A much better alternative for policymakers is to increase the demand for buildout through targeted user subsidies, while reducing regulatory barriers to entry that limit supply.

For instance, policymakers should consider offering connectivity vouchers to unserved households in order to stimulate broadband deployment and consumption. Current subsidy programs rely largely on subsidizing the supply side, but this requires the government to determine the who and where of entry. Connectivity vouchers would put the choice in the hands of consumers, while encouraging more buildout to areas that may currently be uneconomic to reach due to low population density or insufficient demand due to low adoption rates.

Local governments could also facilitate broadband buildout by reducing unnecessary regulatory barriers. Local building codes could adopt more connection-friendly standards. Local governments could also reduce the cost of access to existing poles and other infrastructure. Eligible Telecommunications Carrier (ETC) requirements could also be eliminated, because they deter potential providers from seeking funds for buildout (and don’t offer countervailing benefits).

Albert Einstein once said: “if I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem, and one minute resolving it.” When it comes to encouraging broadband buildout, policymakers should make sure they are solving the right problem. The problem is that the cost of building out broadband to unserved areas is too high or the demand too low—not that there are too few competitors.

In Administrative Law, Antitrust & Competition, Barriers to Entry, Broadband, COVID-19, Federal Communications Commission, International Center for Law & Economics, Regulation, Regulatory Reform, Telecommunications, Truth on the Market , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Guiding a Post-Brexit UK Trade Liberalization Strategy

Alden Abbott —  5 March 2021

In the wake of its departure from the European Union, the United Kingdom will have the opportunity to enter into new free trade agreements (FTAs) with its international trading partners that lower existing tariff and non-tariff barriers. Achieving major welfare-enhancing reductions in trade restrictions will not be easy. Trade negotiations pose significant political sensitivities, such as those arising from the high levels of protection historically granted certain industry sectors, particularly agriculture.

Nevertheless, the political economy of protectionism suggests that, given deepening globalization and the sudden change in U.K. trade relations wrought by Brexit, the outlook for substantial liberalization of U.K. trade has become much brighter. Below, I address some of the key challenges facing U.K. trade negotiators as they seek welfare-enhancing improvements in trade relations and offer a proposal to deal with novel trade distortions in the least protectionist manner.

Two New Challenges Affecting Trade Liberalization

In addition to traditional trade issues, such as tariff levels and industry sector-specific details, U.K, trade negotiators—indeed, trade negotiators from all nations—will have to confront two relatively new and major challenges that are creating several frictions.

First, behind-the-border anticompetitive market distortions (ACMDs) have largely replaced tariffs as the preferred means of protection in many areas. As I explained in a previous post on this site (citing an article by trade-law scholar Shanker Singham and me), existing trade and competition law have not been designed to address the ACMD problem:

[I]nternational trade agreements simply do not reach a variety of anticompetitive welfare-reducing government measures that create de facto trade barriers by favoring domestic interests over foreign competitors. Moreover, many of these restraints are not in place to discriminate against foreign entities, but rather exist to promote certain favored firms. We dub these restrictions “anticompetitive market distortions” or “ACMDs,” in that they involve government actions that empower certain private interests to obtain or retain artificial competitive advantages over their rivals, be they foreign or domestic. ACMDs are often a manifestation of cronyism, by which politically-connected enterprises successfully pressure government to shield them from effective competition, to the detriment of overall economic growth and welfare. …

As we emphasize in our article, existing international trade rules have been able to reach ACMDs, which include: (1) governmental restraints that distort markets and lessen competition; and (2) anticompetitive private arrangements that are backed by government actions, have substantial effects on trade outside the jurisdiction that imposes the restrictions, and are not readily susceptible to domestic competition law challenge. Among the most pernicious ACMDs are those that artificially alter the cost-base as between competing firms. Such cost changes will have large and immediate effects on market shares, and therefore on international trade flows.

Second, in recent years, the trade remit has expanded to include “nontraditional” issues such as labor, the environment, and now climate change. These concerns have generated support for novel tariffs that could help promote protectionism and harmful trade distortions. As explained in a recent article by the Special Trade Commission advisory group (former senior trade and antitrust officials who have provided independent policy advice to the U.K. government):

[The rise of nontraditional trade issues] has renewed calls for border tax adjustments or dual tariffs on an ex-ante basis. This is in sharp tension with the W[orld Trade Organization’s] long-standing principle of technological neutrality, and focus on outcomes as opposed to discriminating on the basis of the manner of production of the product. The problem is that it is too easy to hide protectionist impulses into concerns about the manner of production, and once a different tariff applies, it will be very difficult to remove. The result will be to significantly damage the liberalisation process itself leading to severe harm to the global economy at a critical time as we recover from Covid-19. The potentially damaging effects of ex ante tariffs will be visited most significantly in developing countries.

Dealing with New Trade Challenges in the Least Protectionist Manner

A broad approach to U.K. trade liberalization that also addresses the two new trade challenges is advanced in a March 2 report by the U.K. government’s Trade and Agricultural Commission (TAC, an independent advisory agency established in 2020). Although addressed primarily to agricultural trade, the TAC report enunciates principles applicable to U.K. trade policy in general, considering the impact of ACMDs and nontraditional issues. Key aspects of the TAC report are summarized in an article by Shanker Singham (the scholar who organized and convened the Special Trade Commission and who also served as a TAC commissioner):

The heart of the TAC report’s import policy contains an innovative proposal that attempts to simultaneously promote a trade liberalising agenda in agriculture, while at the same time protecting the UK’s high standards in food production and ensuring the UK fully complies with WTO rules on animal and plant health, as well as technical regulations that apply to food trade.

This proposal includes a mechanism to deal with some of the most difficult issues in agricultural trade which relate to animal welfare, environment and labour rules. The heart of this mechanism is the potential for the application of a tariff in cases where an aggrieved party can show that a trading partner is violating agreed standards in an FTA.

The result of the mechanism is a tariff based on the scale of the distortion which operates like a trade remedy. The mechanism can also be used offensively where a country is preventing market access by the UK as a result of the market distortion, or defensively where a distortion in a foreign market leads to excess exports from that market. …

[T]he tariff would be calibrated to the scale of the distortion and would apply only to the product category in which the distortion is occurring. The advantage of this over a more conventional trade remedy is that it is based on cost as opposed to price and is designed to remove the effects of the distorting activity. It would not be applied on a retaliatory basis in other unrelated sectors.

In exchange for this mechanism, the UK commits to trade liberalisation and, within a reasonable timeframe, zero tariffs and zero quotas. This in turn will make the UK’s advocacy of higher standards in international organisations much more credible, another core TAC proposal.

The TAC report also notes that behind the border barriers and anti-competitive market distortions (“ACMDs”) have the capacity to damage UK exports and therefore suggests a similar mechanism or set of disciplines could be used offensively. Certainly, where the ACMD is being used to protect a particular domestic industry, using the ACMD mechanism to apply a tariff for the exports of that industry would help, but this may not apply where the purpose is protective, and the industry does not export much.

I would argue that in this case, it would be important to ensure that UK FTAs include disciplines on these ACMDs which if breached could lead to dispute settlement and the potential for retaliatory tariffs for sectors in the UK’s FTA partner that do export. This is certainly normal WTO-sanctioned practice, and could be used here to encourage compliance. It is clear from the experience in dealing with countries that engage in ACMDs for trade or competition advantage that unless there are robust disciplines, mere hortatory language would accomplish little or nothing.

But this sort of mechanism with its concomitant commitment to freer trade has much wider potential application than just UK agricultural trade policy. It could also be used to solve a number of long standing trade disputes such as the US-China dispute, and indeed the most vexed questions in trade involving environment and climate change in ways that do not undermine the international trading system itself.

This is because the mechanism is based on an ex post tariff as opposed to an ex ante one which contains within it the potential for protectionism, and is prone to abuse. Because the tariff is actually calibrated to the cost advantage which is secured as a result of the violation of agreed international standards, it is much more likely that it will be simply limited to removing this cost advantage as opposed to becoming a punitive measure that curbs ordinary trade flows.

It is precisely this type of problem solving and innovative thinking that the international trading system needs as it faces a range of challenges that threaten liberalisation itself and the hard-won gains of the post war GATT/WTO system itself. The TAC report represents UK leadership that has been sought after since the decision to leave the EU. It has much to commend it.

Assessment and Conclusion

Even when administered by committed free traders, real-world trade liberalization is an exercise in welfare optimization, subject to constraints imposed by the actions of organized interest groups expressed through the political process. The rise of new coalitions (such as organizations committed to specified environmental goals, including limiting global warming) and the proliferation of ADMCs further complicates the trade negotiation calculus.

Fortunately, recognizing the “reform moment” created by Brexit, free trade-oriented experts (in particular, the TAC, supported by the Special Trade Commission) have recommended that the United Kingdom pursue a bold move toward zero tariffs and quotas. Narrow exceptions to this policy would involve after-the-fact tariffications to offset (1) the distortive effects of ACMDs and (2) derogation from rules embodying nontraditional concerns, such as environmental commitments. Such tariffications would be limited and cost-based, and, as such, welfare-superior to ex ante tariffs calibrated to price.

While the details need to be worked out, the general outlines of this approach represent a thoughtful and commendable market-oriented effort to secure substantial U.K. trade liberalization, subject to unavoidable constraints. More generally, one would hope that other jurisdictions (including the United States) take favorable note of this development as they generate their own trade negotiation policies. Stay tuned.

In Amazon, Antitrust & Competition, China, COVID-19, European Union, International, International Trade, Platforms, Truth on the Market, United Kingdom , , , , , , , ,
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The Virulence of Free Trade

Ramsi Woodcock —  31 March 2020

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

This post is authored by Ramsi Woodcock, (Assistant Professor of Law, University of Kentucky; Assistant Professor of Management, Gatton College of Business and Economics).]

Specialists know that the antitrust courses taught in law schools and economics departments have an alter ego in business curricula: the course on business strategy. The two courses cover the same material, but from opposite perspectives. Antitrust courses teach how to end monopolies; strategy courses teach how to construct and maintain them.

Strategy students go off and run businesses, and antitrust students go off and make government policy. That is probably the proper arrangement if the policy the antimonopolists make is domestic. We want the domestic economy to run efficiently, and so we want domestic policymakers to think about monopoly—and its allocative inefficiencies—as something to be discouraged.

The coronavirus, and the shortages it has caused, have shown us that putting the antimonopolists in charge of international policy is, by contrast, a very big mistake.

Because we do not yet have a world government. America’s position, in relation to the rest of the world, is therefore more akin to that of a business navigating a free market than it is to a government seeking to promote efficient interactions among the firms that it governs. To flourish, America must engage in international trade with a view to creating and maintaining monopoly positions for itself, rather than eschewing them in the interest of realizing efficiencies in the global economy. Which is to say: we need strategists, not antimonopolists.

For the global economy is not America, and there is no guarantee that competitive efficiencies will redound to America’s benefit, rather than to those of her competitors. Absent a world government, other countries will pursue monopoly regardless what America does, and unless America acts strategically to build and maintain economic power, America will eventually occupy a position of commercial weakness, with all of the consequences for national security that implies.

When Antimonopolists Make Trade Policy

The free traders who have run American economic policy for more than a generation are antimonopolists playing on a bigger stage. Like their counterparts in domestic policy, they are loyal in the first instance only to the efficiency of the market, not to any particular trader. They are content to establish rules of competitive trading—the antitrust laws in the domestic context, the World Trade Organization in the international context—and then to let the chips fall where they may, even if that means allowing present or future adversaries to, through legitimate means, build up competitive advantages that the United States is unable to overcome.

Strategy is consistent with competition when markets are filled with traders of atomic size, for then no amount of strategy can deliver a competitive advantage to any trader. But global markets, more even than domestic markets, are filled with traders of macroscopic size. Strategy then requires that each trader seek to gain and maintain advantages, undermining competition. The only way antimonopolists could induce the trading behemoth that is America to behave competitively, and to let the chips fall where they may, was to convince America voluntarily to give up strategy, to sacrifice self-interest on the altar of efficient markets.

And so they did.

Thus when the question arose whether to permit American corporations to move their manufacturing operations overseas, or to permit foreign companies to leverage their efficiencies to dominate a domestic industry and ensure that 90% of domestic supply would be imported from overseas, the answer the antimonopolists gave was: “yes.” Because it is efficient. Labor abroad is cheaper than labor at home, and transportation costs low, so efficiency requires that production move overseas, and our own resources be reallocated to more competitive uses.

This is the impeccable logic of static efficiency, of general equilibrium models allocating resources optimally. But it is instructive to recall that the men who perfected this model were not trying to describe a free market, much less international trade. They were trying to create a model that a central planner could use to allocate resources to a state’s subjects. What mattered to them in building the model was the good of the whole, not any particular part. And yet it is to a particular part of the global whole that the United States government is dedicated.

The Strategic Trader

Students of strategy would have taken a very different approach to international trade. Strategy teaches that markets are dynamic, and that businesses must make decisions based not only on the market signals that exist today, but on those that can be made to exist in the future. For the successful strategist, unlike the antimonopolist, identifying a product for which consumers are willing to pay the costs of production is not alone enough to justify bringing the product to market. The strategist must be able to secure a source of supply, or a distribution channel, that competitors cannot easily duplicate, before the strategist will enter.

Why? Because without an advantage in supply, or distribution, competitors will duplicate the product, compete away any markups, and leave the strategist no better off than if he had never undertaken the project at all. Indeed, he may be left bankrupt, if he has sunk costs that competition prevents him from recovering. Unlike the economist, the strategist is interested in survival, because he is a partisan of a part of the market—himself—not the market entire. The strategist understands that survival requires power, and all power rests, to a greater or lesser degree, on monopoly.

The strategist is not therefore a free trader in the international arena, at least not as a matter of principle. The strategist understands that trading from a position of strength can enrich, and trading from a position of weakness can impoverish. And to occupy that position of strength, America must, like any monopolist, control supply. Moreover, in the constantly-innovating markets that characterize industrial economies, markets in which innovation emerges from learning by doing, control over physical supply translates into control over the supply of inventions itself.

The strategist does not permit domestic corporations to offshore manufacturing in any market in which the strategist wishes to participate, because that is unsafe: foreign countries could use control over that supply to extract rents from America, to drive domestic firms to bankruptcy, and to gain control over the supply of inventions.

And, as the new trade theorists belatedly discovered, offshoring prevents the development of the dense, geographically-contiguous, supply networks that confer power over whole product categories, such as the electronics hub in Zhengzhou, where iPhone-maker Foxconn is located.

Or the pharmaceutical hub in Hubei.

Coronavirus and the Failure of Free Trade

Today, America is unprepared for the coming wave of coronavirus cases because the antimonopolists running our trade policy do not understand the importance of controlling supply. There is a shortage of masks, because China makes half of the world’s masks, and the Chinese have cut off supply, the state having forbidden even non-Chinese companies that offshored mask production from shipping home masks for which American customers have paid. Not only that, but in January China bought up most of the world’s existing supply of masks, with free-trade-obsessed governments standing idly by as the clock ticked down to their own domestic outbreaks.  

New York State, which lies at the epicenter of the crisis, has agreed to pay five times the market price for foreign supply. That’s not because the cost of making masks has risen, but because sellers are rationing with price. Which is to say: using their control over supply to beggar the state. Moreover, domestic mask makers report that they cannot ramp up production because of a lack of supply of raw materials, some of which are actually made in Wuhan, China. That’s the kind of problem that does not arise when restrictions on offshoring allow manufacturing hubs to develop domestically.

But a shortage of masks is just the beginning. Once a vaccine is developed, the race will be on to manufacture it, and America controls less than 30% of the manufacturing facilities that supply pharmaceuticals to American markets. Indeed, just about the only virus-relevant industries in which we do not have a real capacity shortage today are food and toilet paper, panic buying notwithstanding. Because fortunately for us antimonopolists could not find a way to offshore California and Oregon. If they could have, they surely would have, since both agriculture and timber are labor-intensive industries.

President Trump’s failed attempt to buy a German drug company working on a coronavirus vaccine shows just how damaging free market ideology has been to national security: as Trump should have anticipated given his resistance to the antimonopolists’ approach to trade, the German government nipped the deal in the bud. When an economic agent has market power, the agent can pick its prices, or refuse to sell at all. Only in general equilibrium fantasy is everything for sale, and at a competitive price to boot.

The trouble is: American policymakers, perhaps more than those in any other part of the world, continue to act as though that fantasy were real.

Failures Left and Right

America’s coronavirus predicament is rich with intellectual irony.

Progressives resist free trade ideology, largely out of concern for the effects of trade on American workers. But they seem not to have realized that in doing so they are actually embracing strategy, at least for the benefit of labor.

As a result, progressives simultaneously reject the approach to industrial organization economics that underpins strategic thinking in business: Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction, which holds that strategic behavior by firms seeking to achieve and maintain monopolies is ultimately good for society, because it leads to a technological arms race as firms strive to improve supply, distribution, and indeed product quality, in ways that competitors cannot reproduce.

Even if progressives choose to reject Schumpeter’s argument that strategy makes society better off—a proposition that is particularly suspect at the international level, where the availability of tanks ensures that the creative destruction is not always creative—they have much to learn from his focus on the economics of survival.

By the same token, conservatives embrace Schumpeter in arguing for less antitrust enforcement in domestic markets, all the while advocating free trade at the international level and savaging governments for using dumping and tariffs—which is to say, the tools of monopoly—to strengthen their trading positions. It is deeply peculiar to watch the coronavirus expose conservative economists as pie-in-the-sky internationalists. And yet as the global market for coronavirus necessities seizes up, the ideology that urged us to dispense with producing these goods ourselves, out of faith that we might always somehow rely on the support of the rest of the world, provided through the medium of markets, looks pathetically naive.

The cynic might say that inconsistency has snuck up on both progressives and conservatives because each remains too sympathetic to a different domestic constituency.

Dodging a Bullet

America is lucky that a mere virus exposed the bankruptcy of free trade ideology. Because war could have done that instead. It is difficult to imagine how a country that cannot make medical masks—much less a Macbook—would be able to respond effectively to a sustained military attack from one of the many nations that are closing the technological gap long enjoyed by the United States.

The lesson of the coronavirus is: strategy, not antitrust.

In Antitrust & Competition, Apple, China, Corporate & Securities Law, COVID-19, Health Care, International, International Trade, Pharmaceuticals, Platforms, Symposia, The Law, Economics, and Policy of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Truth on the Market , , , , , , , ,
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What if rising concentration were an indication of more competition, not less?

Geoffrey Manne —  14 December 2019

An oft-repeated claim of conferences, media, and left-wing think tanks is that lax antitrust enforcement has led to a substantial increase in concentration in the US economy of late, strangling the economy, harming workers, and saddling consumers with greater markups in the process. But what if rising concentration (and the current level of antitrust enforcement) were an indication of more competition, not less?

By now the concentration-as-antitrust-bogeyman story is virtually conventional wisdom, echoed, of course, by political candidates such as Elizabeth Warren trying to cash in on the need for a government response to such dire circumstances:

In industry after industry — airlines, banking, health care, agriculture, tech — a handful of corporate giants control more and more. The big guys are locking out smaller, newer competitors. They are crushing innovation. Even if you don’t see the gears turning, this massive concentration means prices go up and quality goes down for everything from air travel to internet service.  

But the claim that lax antitrust enforcement has led to increased concentration in the US and that it has caused economic harm has been debunked several times (for some of our own debunking, see Eric Fruits’ posts here, here, and here). Or, more charitably to those who tirelessly repeat the claim as if it is “settled science,” it has been significantly called into question. 

Most recently, several working papers looking at the data on concentration in detail and attempting to identify the likely cause for the observed data, show precisely the opposite relationship. The reason for increased concentration appears to be technological, not anticompetitive. And, as might be expected from that cause, its effects are beneficial. Indeed, the story is both intuitive and positive.

What’s more, while national concentration does appear to be increasing in some sectors of the economy, it’s not actually so clear that the same is true for local concentration — which is often the relevant antitrust market.

The most recent — and, I believe, most significant — corrective to the conventional story comes from economists Chang-Tai Hsieh of the University of Chicago and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg of Princeton University. As they write in a recent paper titled, “The Industrial Revolution in Services”: 

We show that new technologies have enabled firms that adopt them to scale production over a large number of establishments dispersed across space. Firms that adopt this technology grow by increasing the number of local markets that they serve, but on average are smaller in the markets that they do serve. Unlike Henry Ford’s revolution in manufacturing more than a hundred years ago when manufacturing firms grew by concentrating production in a given location, the new industrial revolution in non-traded sectors takes the form of horizontal expansion across more locations. At the same time, multi-product firms are forced to exit industries where their productivity is low or where the new technology has had no effect. Empirically we see that top firms in the overall economy are more focused and have larger market shares in their chosen sectors, but their size as a share of employment in the overall economy has not changed. (pp. 42-43) (emphasis added).

This makes perfect sense. And it has the benefit of not second-guessing structural changes made in response to technological change. Rather, it points to technological change as doing what it regularly does: improving productivity.

The implementation of new technology seems to be conferring benefits — it’s just that these benefits are not evenly distributed across all firms and industries. But the assumption that larger firms are causing harm (or even that there is any harm in the first place, whatever the cause) is unmerited. 

What the authors find is that the apparent rise in national concentration doesn’t tell the relevant story, and the data certainly aren’t consistent with assumptions that anticompetitive conduct is either a cause or a result of structural changes in the economy.

Hsieh and Rossi-Hansberg point out that increased concentration is not happening everywhere, but is being driven by just three industries:

First, we show that the phenomena of rising concentration . . . is only seen in three broad sectors – services, wholesale, and retail. . . . [T]op firms have become more efficient over time, but our evidence indicates that this is only true for top firms in these three sectors. In manufacturing, for example, concentration has fallen.

Second, rising concentration in these sectors is entirely driven by an increase [in] the number of local markets served by the top firms. (p. 4) (emphasis added).

These findings are a gloss on a (then) working paper — The Fall of the Labor Share and the Rise of Superstar Firms — by David Autor, David Dorn, Lawrence F. Katz, Christina Patterson, and John Van Reenan (now forthcoming in the QJE). Autor et al. (2019) finds that concentration is rising, and that it is the result of increased productivity:

If globalization or technological changes push sales towards the most productive firms in each industry, product market concentration will rise as industries become increasingly dominated by superstar firms, which have high markups and a low labor share of value-added.

We empirically assess seven predictions of this hypothesis: (i) industry sales will increasingly concentrate in a small number of firms; (ii) industries where concentration rises most will have the largest declines in the labor share; (iii) the fall in the labor share will be driven largely by reallocation rather than a fall in the unweighted mean labor share across all firms; (iv) the between-firm reallocation component of the fall in the labor share will be greatest in the sectors with the largest increases in market concentration; (v) the industries that are becoming more concentrated will exhibit faster growth of productivity; (vi) the aggregate markup will rise more than the typical firm’s markup; and (vii) these patterns should be observed not only in U.S. firms, but also internationally. We find support for all of these predictions. (emphasis added).

This is alone is quite important (and seemingly often overlooked). Autor et al. (2019) finds that rising concentration is a result of increased productivity that weeds out less-efficient producers. This is a good thing. 

But Hsieh & Rossi-Hansberg drill down into the data to find something perhaps even more significant: the rise in concentration itself is limited to just a few sectors, and, where it is observed, it is predominantly a function of more efficient firms competing in more — and more localized — markets. This means that competition is increasing, not decreasing, whether it is accompanied by an increase in concentration or not. 

No matter how may times and under how many monikers the antitrust populists try to revive it, the Structure-Conduct-Performance paradigm remains as moribund as ever. Indeed, on this point, as one of the new antitrust agonists’ own, Fiona Scott Morton, has written (along with co-authors Martin Gaynor and Steven Berry):

In short, there is no well-defined “causal effect of concentration on price,” but rather a set of hypotheses that can explain observed correlations of the joint outcomes of price, measured markups, market share, and concentration. As Bresnahan (1989) argued three decades ago, no clear interpretation of the impact of concentration is possible without a clear focus on equilibrium oligopoly demand and “supply,” where supply includes the list of the marginal cost functions of the firms and the nature of oligopoly competition. 

Some of the recent literature on concentration, profits, and markups has simply reasserted the relevance of the old-style structure-conduct-performance correlations. For economists trained in subfields outside industrial organization, such correlations can be attractive. 

Our own view, based on the well-established mainstream wisdom in the field of industrial organization for several decades, is that regressions of market outcomes on measures of industry structure like the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index should be given little weight in policy debates. Such correlations will not produce information about the causal estimates that policy demands. It is these causal relationships that will help us understand what, if anything, may be causing markups to rise. (emphasis added).

Indeed! And one reason for the enduring irrelevance of market concentration measures is well laid out in Hsieh and Rossi-Hansberg’s paper:

This evidence is consistent with our view that increasing concentration is driven by new ICT-enabled technologies that ultimately raise aggregate industry TFP. It is not consistent with the view that concentration is due to declining competition or entry barriers . . . , as these forces will result in a decline in industry employment. (pp. 4-5) (emphasis added)

The net effect is that there is essentially no change in concentration by the top firms in the economy as a whole. The “super-star” firms of today’s economy are larger in their chosen sectors and have unleashed productivity growth in these sectors, but they are not any larger as a share of the aggregate economy. (p. 5) (emphasis added)

Thus, to begin with, the claim that increased concentration leads to monopsony in labor markets (and thus unemployment) appears to be false. Hsieh and Rossi-Hansberg again:

[W]e find that total employment rises substantially in industries with rising concentration. This is true even when we look at total employment of the smaller firms in these industries. (p. 4)

[S]ectors with more top firm concentration are the ones where total industry employment (as a share of aggregate employment) has also grown. The employment share of industries with increased top firm concentration grew from 70% in 1977 to 85% in 2013. (p. 9)

Firms throughout the size distribution increase employment in sectors with increasing concentration, not only the top 10% firms in the industry, although by definition the increase is larger among the top firms. (p. 10) (emphasis added)

Again, what actually appears to be happening is that national-level growth in concentration is actually being driven by increased competition in certain industries at the local level:

93% of the growth in concentration comes from growth in the number of cities served by top firms, and only 7% comes from increased employment per city. . . . [A]verage employment per county and per establishment of top firms falls. So necessarily more than 100% of concentration growth has to come from the increase in the number of counties and establishments served by the top firms. (p.13)

The net effect is a decrease in the power of top firms relative to the economy as a whole, as the largest firms specialize more, and are dominant in fewer industries:

Top firms produce in more industries than the average firm, but less so in 2013 compared to 1977. The number of industries of a top 0.001% firm (relative to the average firm) fell from 35 in 1977 to 17 in 2013. The corresponding number for a top 0.01% firm is 21 industries in 1977 and 9 industries in 2013. (p. 17)

Thus, summing up, technology has led to increased productivity as well as greater specialization by large firms, especially in relatively concentrated industries (exactly the opposite of the pessimistic stories):  

[T]op firms are now more specialized, are larger in the chosen industries, and these are precisely the industries that have experienced concentration growth. (p. 18)

Unsurprisingly (except to some…), the increase in concentration in certain industries does not translate into an increase in concentration in the economy as a whole. In other words, workers can shift jobs between industries, and there is enough geographic and firm mobility to prevent monopsony. (Despite rampant assumptions that increased concentration is constraining labor competition everywhere…).

Although the employment share of top firms in an average industry has increased substantially, the employment share of the top firms in the aggregate economy has not. (p. 15)

It is also simply not clearly the case that concentration is causing prices to rise or otherwise causing any harm. As Hsieh and Rossi-Hansberg note:

[T]he magnitude of the overall trend in markups is still controversial . . . and . . . the geographic expansion of top firms leads to declines in local concentration . . . that could enhance competition. (p. 37)

Indeed, recent papers such as Traina (2018), Gutiérrez and Philippon (2017), and the IMF (2019) have found increasing markups over the last few decades but at much more moderate rates than the famous De Loecker and Eeckhout (2017) study. Other parts of the anticompetitive narrative have been challenged as well. Karabarbounis and Neiman (2018) finds that profits have increased, but are still within their historical range. Rinz (2018) shows decreased wages in concentrated markets but also points out that local concentration has been decreasing over the relevant time period.

None of this should be so surprising. Has antitrust enforcement gotten more lax, leading to greater concentration? According to Vita and Osinski (2018), not so much. And how about the stagnant rate of new firms? Are incumbent monopolists killing off new startups? The more likely — albeit mundane — explanation, according to Hopenhayn et al. (2018), is that increased average firm age is due to an aging labor force. Lastly, the paper from Hsieh and Rossi-Hansberg discussed above is only the latest in a series of papers, including Bessen (2017), Van Reenen (2018), and Autor et al. (2019), that shows a rise in fixed costs due to investments in proprietary information technology, which correlates with increased concentration. 

So what is the upshot of all this?

  • First, as noted, employment has not decreased because of increased concentration; quite the opposite. Employment has increased in the industries that have experienced the most concentration at the national level.
  • Second, this result suggests that the rise in concentrated industries has not led to increased market power over labor.
  • Third, concentration itself needs to be understood more precisely. It is not explained by a simple narrative that the economy as a whole has experienced a great deal of concentration and this has been detrimental for consumers and workers. Specific industries have experienced national level concentration, but simultaneously those same industries have become more specialized and expanded competition into local markets. 

Surprisingly (because their paper has been around for a while and yet this conclusion is rarely recited by advocates for more intervention — although they happily use the paper to support claims of rising concentration), Autor et al. (2019) finds the same thing:

Our formal model, detailed below, generates superstar effects from increases in the toughness of product market competition that raise the market share of the most productive firms in each sector at the expense of less productive competitors. . . . An alternative perspective on the rise of superstar firms is that they reflect a diminution of competition, due to a weakening of U.S. antitrust enforcement (Dottling, Gutierrez and Philippon, 2018). Our findings on the similarity of trends in the U.S. and Europe, where antitrust authorities have acted more aggressively on large firms (Gutierrez and Philippon, 2018), combined with the fact that the concentrating sectors appear to be growing more productive and innovative, suggests that this is unlikely to be the primary explanation, although it may important in some specific industries (see Cooper et al, 2019, on healthcare for example). (emphasis added).

The popular narrative among Neo-Brandeisian antitrust scholars that lax antitrust enforcement has led to concentration detrimental to society is at base an empirical one. The findings of these empirical papers severely undermine the persuasiveness of that story.

In Antitrust & Competition, Banking, Economic Theory, Financial Regulation, Mergers & Acquisitions , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Canadian Site Blocking Proposal Is a Good Experiment in Controlling Piracy

Kristian Stout —  11 June 2018

In an ideal world, it would not be necessary to block websites in order to combat piracy. But we do not live in an ideal world. We live in a world in which enormous amounts of content—from books and software to movies and music—is being distributed illegally. As a result, content creators and owners are being deprived of their rights and of the revenue that would flow from legitimate consumption of that content.

In this real world, site blocking may be both a legitimate and a necessary means of reducing piracy and protecting the rights and interests of rightsholders.

Of course, site blocking may not be perfectly effective, given that pirates will “domain hop” (moving their content from one website/IP address to another). As such, it may become a game of whack-a-mole. However, relative to other enforcement options, such as issuing millions of takedown notices, it is likely a much simpler, easier and more cost-effective strategy.

And site blocking could be abused or misapplied, just as any other legal remedy can be abused or misapplied. It is a fair concern to keep in mind with any enforcement program, and it is important to ensure that there are protections against such abuse and misapplication.

Thus, a Canadian coalition of telecom operators and rightsholders, called FairPlay Canada, have proposed a non-litigation alternative solution to piracy that employs site blocking but is designed to avoid the problems that critics have attributed to other private ordering solutions.

The FairPlay Proposal

FairPlay has sent a proposal to the CRTC (the Canadian telecom regulator) asking that it develop a process by which it can adjudicate disputes over web sites that are “blatantly, overwhelmingly, or structurally engaged in piracy.”  The proposal asks for the creation of an Independent Piracy Review Agency (“IPRA”) that would hear complaints of widespread piracy, perform investigations, and ultimately issue a report to the CRTC with a recommendation either to block or not to block sites in question. The CRTC would retain ultimate authority regarding whether to add an offending site to a list of known pirates. Once on that list, a pirate site would have its domain blocked by ISPs.

The upside seems fairly obvious: it would be a more cost-effective and efficient process for investigating allegations of piracy and removing offenders. The current regime is cumbersome and enormously costly, and the evidence suggests that site blocking is highly effective.

Under Canadian law—the so-called “Notice and Notice” regime—rightsholders send notices to ISPs, who in turn forward those notices to their own users. Once those notices have been sent, rightsholders can then move before a court to require ISPs to expose the identities of users that upload infringing content. In just one relatively large case, it was estimated that the cost of complying with these requests was 8.25M CAD.

The failure of the American equivalent of the “Notice and Notice” regime provides evidence supporting the FairPlay proposal. The graduated response system was set up in 2012 as a means of sending a series of escalating warnings to users who downloaded illegal content, much as the “Notice and Notice” regime does. But the American program has since been discontinued because it did not effectively target the real source of piracy: repeat offenders who share a large amount of material.

This, on the other hand, demonstrates one of the greatest points commending the FairPlay proposal. The focus of enforcement shifts away from casually infringing users and directly onto the  operators of sites that engage in widespread infringement. Therefore, one of the criticisms of Canada’s current “notice and notice” regime — that the notice passthrough system is misused to send abusive settlement demands — is completely bypassed.

And whichever side of the notice regime bears the burden of paying the associated research costs under “Notice and Notice”—whether ISPs eat them as a cost of doing business, or rightsholders pay ISPs for their work—the net effect is a deadweight loss. Therefore, whatever can be done to reduce these costs, while also complying with Canada’s other commitments to protecting its citizens’ property interests and civil rights, is going to be a net benefit to Canadian society.

Of course it won’t be all upside — no policy, private or public, ever is. IP and property generally represent a set of tradeoffs intended to net the greatest social welfare gains. As Richard Epstein has observed

No one can defend any system of property rights, whether for tangible or intangible objects, on the naïve view that it produces all gain and no pain. Every system of property rights necessarily creates some winners and some losers. Recognize property rights in land, and the law makes trespassers out of people who were once free to roam. We choose to bear these costs not because we believe in the divine rights of private property. Rather, we bear them because we make the strong empirical judgment that any loss of liberty is more than offset by the gains from manufacturing, agriculture and commerce that exclusive property rights foster. These gains, moreover, are not confined to some lucky few who first get to occupy land. No, the private holdings in various assets create the markets that use voluntary exchange to spread these gains across the entire population. Our defense of IP takes the same lines because the inconveniences it generates are fully justified by the greater prosperity and well-being for the population at large.

So too is the justification — and tempering principle — behind any measure meant to enforce copyrights. The relevant question when thinking about a particular enforcement regime is not whether some harms may occur because some harm will always occur. The proper questions are: (1) Does the measure to be implemented stand a chance of better giving effect to the property rights we have agreed to protect and (2) when harms do occur, is there a sufficiently open and accessible process available whereby affected parties (and interested third parties) can rightly criticize and improve the system.

On both accounts the FairPlay proposal appears to hit the mark.

FairPlay’s proposal can reduce piracy while respecting users’ rights

Although I am generally skeptical of calls for state intervention, this case seems to present a real opportunity for the CRTC to do some good. If Canada adopts this proposal it is is establishing a reasonable and effective remedy to address violations of individuals’ property, the ownership of which is considered broadly legitimate.

And, as a public institution subject to input from many different stakeholder groups — FairPlay describes the stakeholders  as comprised of “ISPs, rightsholders, consumer advocacy and citizen groups” — the CRTC can theoretically provide a fairly open process. This is distinct from, for example, the Donuts trusted notifier program that some criticized (in my view, mistakenly) as potentially leading to an unaccountable, private ordering of the DNS.

FairPlay’s proposal outlines its plan to provide affected parties with due process protections:

The system proposed seeks to maximize transparency and incorporates extensive safeguards and checks and balances, including notice and an opportunity for the website, ISPs, and other interested parties to review any application submitted to and provide evidence and argument and participate in a hearing before the IPRA; review of all IPRA decisions in a transparent Commission process; the potential for further review of all Commission decisions through the established review and vary procedure; and oversight of the entire system by the Federal Court of Appeal, including potential appeals on questions of law or jurisdiction including constitutional questions, and the right to seek judicial review of the process and merits of the decision.

In terms of its efficacy, according to even the critics of the FairPlay proposal, site blocking provides a measurably positive reduction on piracy. In its formal response to critics, FairPlay Canada noted that one of the studies the critics relied upon actually showed that previous blocks of the PirateBay domains had reduced piracy by nearly 25%:

The Poort study shows that when a single illegal peer-to-peer piracy site (The Pirate Bay) was blocked, between 8% and 9.3% of consumers who were engaged in illegal downloading (from any site, not just The Pirate Bay) at the time the block was implemented reported that they stopped their illegal downloading entirely.  A further 14.5% to 15.3% reported that they reduced their illegal downloading. This shows the power of the regime the coalition is proposing.

The proposal stands to reduce the costs of combating piracy, as well. As noted above, the costs of litigating a large case can reach well into the millions just to initiate proceedings. In its reply comments, FairPlay Canada noted the costs for even run-of-the-mill suits essentially price enforcement of copyrights out of the reach of smaller rightsholders:

[T]he existing process can be inefficient and inaccessible for rightsholders. In response to this argument raised by interveners and to ensure the Commission benefits from a complete record on the point, the coalition engaged IP and technology law firm Hayes eLaw to explain the process that would likely have to be followed to potentially obtain such an order under existing legal rules…. [T]he process involves first completing litigation against each egregious piracy site, and could take up to 765 days and cost up to $338,000 to address a single site.

Moreover, these cost estimates assume that the really bad pirates can even be served with process — which is untrue for many infringers. Unlike physical distributors of counterfeit material (e.g. CDs and DVDs), online pirates do not need to operate within Canada to affect Canadian artists — which leaves a remedy like site blocking as one of the only viable enforcement mechanisms.

Don’t we want to reduce piracy?

More generally, much of the criticism of this proposal is hard to understand. Piracy is clearly a large problem to any observer who even casually peruses the lumen database. Even defenders of the status quo  are forced to acknowledge that “the notice and takedown provisions have been used by rightsholders countless—but likely billions—of times” — a reality that shows that efforts to control piracy to date have been insufficient.

So why not try this experiment? Why not try using a neutral multistakeholder body to see if rightsholders, ISPs, and application providers can create an online environment both free from massive, obviously infringing piracy, and also free for individuals to express themselves and service providers to operate?

In its response comments, the FairPlay coalition noted that some objectors have “insisted that the Commission should reject the proposal… because it might lead… the Commission to use a similar mechanism to address other forms of illegal content online.”

This is the same weak argument that is easily deployable against any form of collective action at all. Of course the state can be used for bad ends — anyone with even a superficial knowledge of history knows this  — but that surely can’t be an indictment against lawmaking as a whole. If allowing a form of prohibition for category A is appropriate, but the same kind of prohibition is inappropriate for category B, then either we assume lawmakers are capable of differentiating between category A and category B, or else we believe that prohibition itself is per se inappropriate. If site blocking is wrong in every circumstance, the objectors need to convincingly  make that case (which, to date, they have not).

Regardless of these criticisms, it seems unlikely that such a public process could be easily subverted for mass censorship. And any incipient censorship should be readily apparent and addressable in the IPRA process. Further, at least twenty-five countries have been experimenting with site blocking for IP infringement in different ways, and, at least so far, there haven’t been widespread allegations of massive censorship.

Maybe there is a perfect way to control piracy and protect user rights at the same time. But until we discover the perfect, I’m all for trying the good. The FairPlay coalition has a good idea, and I look forward to seeing how it progresses in Canada.

In Copyright, Intellectual Property, Telecommunications, Truth on the Market , , , ,
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Closing the Rural Digital Divide Requires Understanding the Rural Digital Divide

Gus Hurwitz —  9 May 2018

I had the pleasure last month of hosting the first of a new annual roundtable discussion series on closing the rural digital divide through the University of Nebraska’s Space, Cyber, and Telecom Law Program. The purpose of the roundtable was to convene a diverse group of stakeholders — from farmers to federal regulators; from small municipal ISPs to billion dollar app developers — for a discussion of the on-the-ground reality of closing the rural digital divide.

The impetus behind the roundtable was, quite simply, that in my five years living in Nebraska I have consistently found that the discussions that we have here about the digital divide in rural America are wholly unlike those that the federally-focused policy crowd has back in DC. Every conversation I have with rural stakeholders further reinforces my belief that those of us who approach the rural digital divide from the “DC perspective” fail to appreciate the challenges that rural America faces or the drive, innovation, and resourcefulness that rural stakeholders bring to the issue when DC isn’t looking. So I wanted to bring these disparate groups together to see what was driving this disconnect, and what to do about it.

The unfortunate reality of the rural digital divide is that it is an existential concern for much of America. At the same time, the positive news is that closing this divide has become an all-hands-on-deck effort for stakeholders in rural America, one that defies caricatured political, technological, and industry divides. I have never seen as much agreement and goodwill among stakeholders in any telecom community as when I speak to rural stakeholders about digital divides. I am far from an expert in rural broadband issues — and I don’t mean to hold myself out as one — but as I have engaged with those who are, I am increasingly convinced that there are far more and far better ideas about closing the rural digital divide to be found outside the beltway than within.

The practical reality is that most policy discussions about the rural digital divide over the past decade have been largely irrelevant to the realities on the ground: The legal and policy frameworks focus on the wrong things, and participants in these discussions at the federal level rarely understand the challenges that define the rural divide. As a result, stakeholders almost always fall back on advocating stale, entrenched, viewpoints that have little relevance to the on-the-ground needs. (To their credit, both Chairman Pai and Commissioner Carr have demonstrated a longstanding interest in understanding the rural digital divide — an interest that is recognized and appreciated by almost every rural stakeholder I speak to.)

Framing Things Wrong

It is important to begin by recognizing that contemporary discussion about the digital divide is framed in terms of, and addressed alongside, longstanding federal Universal Service policy. This policy, which has its roots in the 20th century project of ensuring that all Americans had access to basic telephone service, is enshrined in the first words of the Communications Act of 1934. It has not significantly evolved from its origins in the analog telephone system — and that’s a problem.

A brief history of Universal Service

The Communications Act established the FCC

for the purpose of regulating interstate and foreign commerce in communication by wire and radio so as to make available, so far as possible, to all the people of the United States … a rapid, efficient, Nation-wide, and world-wide wire and radio communication service ….

The historic goal of “universal service” has been to ensure that anyone in the country is able to connect to the public switched telephone network. In the telephone age, that network provided only one primary last-mile service: transmitting basic voice communications from the customer’s telephone to the carrier’s switch. Once at the switch various other services could be offered — but providing them didn’t require more than a basic analog voice circuit to the customer’s home.

For most of the 20th century, this form of universal service was ensured by fiat and cost recovery. Regulated telephone carriers (that is, primarily, the Bell operating companies under the umbrella of AT&T) were required by the FCC to provide service to all comers, at published rates, no matter the cost of providing that service. In exchange, the carriers were allowed to recover the cost of providing service to high-cost areas through the regulated rates charged to all customers. That is, the cost of ensuring universal service was spread across and subsidized by the entire rate base.

This system fell apart following the break-up of AT&T in the 1980s. The separation of long distance from local exchange service meant that the main form of cross subsidy — from long distance to local callers — could no longer be handled implicitly. Moreover, as competitive exchange services began entering the market, they tended to compete first, and most, over the high-revenue customers who had supported the rate base. To accommodate these changes, the FCC transitioned from a model of implicit cross-subsidies to one of explicit cross-subsidies, introducing long distance access charges and termination fees that were regulated to ensure money continued to flow to support local exchange carriers’ costs of providing services to high-cost users.

The 1996 Telecom Act forced even more dramatic change. The goal of the 1996 Telecom Act was to introduce competition throughout the telecom ecosystem — but the traditional cross-subsidy model doesn’t work in a competitive market. So the 1996 Telecom Act further evolved the FCC’s universal service mechanism, establishing the Universal Service Fund (USF), funded by fees charged to all telecommunications carriers, which would be apportioned to cover the costs incurred by eligible telecommunications carriers in providing high-cost (and other “universal”) services.

The problematic framing of Universal Service

For present purposes, we need not delve into these mechanisms. Rather, the very point of this post is that the interminable debates about these mechanisms — who pays into the USF and how much; who gets paid out of the fund and how much; and what services and technologies the fund covers — simply don’t match the policy challenges of closing the digital divide.

What the 1996 Telecom Act does offer is a statement of the purposes of Universal Service. In 47 USC 254(b)(3), the Act states the purpose of ensuring “Access in rural and high cost areas”:

Consumers in all regions of the Nation, including low-income consumers and those in rural, insular, and high cost areas, should have access to telecommunications and information services … that are reasonably comparable to those services provided in urban areas ….

This is a problematic framing. (I would actually call it patently offensive…). It is a framing that made sense in the telephone era, when ensuring last-mile service meant providing only basic voice telephone service. In that era, having any service meant having all service, and the primary obstacles to overcome were the high-cost of service to remote areas and the lower revenues expected from lower-income areas. But its implicit suggestion is that the goal of federal policy should be to make rural America look like urban America.

Today universal service, at least from the perspective of closing the digital divide, means something different, however. The technological needs of rural America are different than those of urban America; the technological needs of poor and lower-income America are different than those of rich America. Framing the goal in terms of making sure rural and lower-income America have access to the same services as urban and wealthy America is, by definition, not responsive to (or respectful of) the needs of those who are on the wrong side of one of this country’s many digital divides. Indeed, that goal almost certainly distracts from and misallocates resources that could be better leveraged towards closing these divides.

The Demands of Rural Broadband

Rural broadband needs are simultaneously both more and less demanding than the services we typically focus on when discussing universal service. The services that we fund, and the way that we approach how to close digital divides, needs to be based in the first instance on the actual needs of the community that connectivity is meant to serve. Take just two of the prototypical examples: precision and automated farming, and telemedicine.

Assessing rural broadband needs

Precision agriculture requires different networks than does watching Netflix, web surfing, or playing video games. Farms with hundreds or thousands of sensors and other devices per acre can put significant load on networks — but not in terms of bandwidth. The load is instead measured in terms of packets and connections per second. Provisioning networks to handle lots of small packets is very different from provisioning them to handle other, more-typical (to the DC crowd), use cases.

On the other end of the agricultural spectrum, many farms don’t own their own combines. Combines cost upwards of a million dollars. One modern combine is sufficient to tend to several hundred acres in a given farming season. It is common for many farmers to hire someone who owns a combine to service their fields. During harvest season, for instance, one combine service may operate on a dozen farms during harvest season. Prior to operation, modern precision systems need to download a great deal of GIS, mapping, weather, crop, and other data. High-speed Internet can literally mean the difference between letting a combine sit idle for many days of a harvest season while it downloads data and servicing enough fields to cover the debt payments on a million dollar piece of equipment.

Going to the other extreme, rural health care relies upon Internet connectivity — but not in the ways it is usually discussed. The stories one hears on the ground aren’t about the need for particularly high-speed connections or specialized low-latency connections to allow remote doctors to control surgical robots. While tele-surgery and access to highly specialized doctors are important applications of telemedicine, the urgent needs today are far more modest: simple video consultations with primary care physicians for routine care, requiring only a moderate-speed Internet connection capable of basic video conferencing. In reality, literally megabits per second (not even 10 mbps) can mean the difference between a remote primary care physician being able to provide basic health services to a rural community and that community going entirely unserved by a doctor.

Efforts to run gigabit connections and dedicated fiber to rural health care facilities may be a great long-term vision — but the on-the-ground need could be served by a reliable 4G wireless connection or DSL line. (Again, to their credit, this is a point that Chairman Pai and Commissioner Carr have been highlighting in their recent travels through rural parts of the country.)

Of course, rural America faces many of the same digital divides faced elsewhere. Even in the wealthiest cities in Nebraska, for instance, significant numbers of students are eligible for free or reduced price school lunches — a metric that corresponds with income — and rely on anchor institutions for Internet access. The problem is worse in much of rural Nebraska, where there may simply be no Internet access at all.

Addressing rural broadband needs

Two things in particular have struck me as I have spoken to rural stakeholders about the digital divide. The first is that this is an “all hands on deck” problem. Everyone I speak to understands the importance of the issue. Everyone is willing to work with and learn from others. Everyone is willing to commit resources and capital to improve upon the status quo, including by undertaking experiments and incurring risks.

The discussions I have in DC, however, including with and among key participants in the DC policy firmament, are fundamentally different. These discussions focus on tweaking contribution factors and cost models to protect or secure revenues; they are, in short, missing the forest for the trees. Meanwhile, the discussion on the ground focuses on how to actually deploy service and overcome obstacles. No amount of cost-model tweaking will do much at all to accomplish either of these.

The second striking, and rather counterintuitive, thing that I have often heard is that closing the rural digital divide isn’t (just) about money. I’ve heard several times the lament that we need to stop throwing more money at the problem and start thinking about where the money we already have needs to go. Another version of this is that it isn’t about the money, it’s about the business case. Money can influence a decision whether to execute upon a project for which there is a business case — but it rarely creates a business case where there isn’t one. And where it has created a business case, that case was often for building out relatively unimportant networks while increasing the opportunity costs of building out more important networks. The networks we need to build are different from those envisioned by the 1996 Telecom Act or FCC efforts to contort that Act to fund Internet build-out.

Rural Broadband Investment

There is, in fact, a third particularly striking thing I have gleaned from speaking with rural stakeholders, and rural providers in particular: They don’t really care about net neutrality, and don’t see it as helpful to closing the digital divide.  

Rural providers, it must be noted, are generally “pro net neutrality,” in the sense that they don’t think that ISPs should interfere with traffic going over their networks; in the sense that they don’t have any plans themselves to engage in “non-neutral” conduct; and also in the sense that they don’t see a business case for such conduct.

But they are also wary of Title II regulation, or of other rules that are potentially burdensome or that introduce uncertainty into their business. They are particularly concerned that Title II regulation opens the door to — and thus creates significant uncertainty about the possibility of — other forms of significant federal regulation of their businesses.

More than anything else, they want to stop thinking, talking, and worrying about net neutrality regulations. Ultimately, the past decade of fights about net neutrality has meant little other than regulatory cost and uncertainty for them, which makes planning and investment difficult — hardly a boon to closing the digital divide.

The basic theory of the Wheeler-era FCC’s net neutrality regulations was the virtuous cycle — that net neutrality rules gave edge providers the certainty they needed in order to invest in developing new applications that, in turn, would drive demand for, and thus buildout of, new networks. But carriers need certainty, too, if they are going to invest capital in building these networks. Rural ISPs are looking for the business case to justify new builds. Increasing uncertainty has only negative effects on the business case for closing the rural digital divide.

Most crucially, the logic of the virtuous cycle is virtually irrelevant to driving demand for closing the digital divide. Edge innovation isn’t going to create so much more value that users will suddenly demand that networks be built; rather, the applications justifying this demand already exist, and most have existed for many years. What stands in the way of the build-out required to service under- or un-served rural areas is the business case for building these (expensive) networks. And the uncertainty and cost associated with net neutrality only exacerbate this problem.

Indeed, rural markets are an area where the virtuous cycle very likely turns in the other direction. Rural communities are actually hotbeds of innovation. And they know their needs far better than Silicon Valley edge companies, so they are likely to build apps and services that better cater to the unique needs of rural America. But these apps and services aren’t going to be built unless their developers have access to the broadband connections needed to build and maintain them, and, most important of all, unless users have access to the broadband connections needed to actually make use of them. The upshot is that, in rural markets, connectivity precedes and drives the supply of edge services not, as the Wheeler-era virtuous cycle would have it, the other way around.

The effect of Washington’s obsession with net neutrality these past many years has been to increase uncertainty and reduce the business case for building new networks. And its detrimental effects continue today with politicized and showboating efforts to to invoke the Congressional Review Act in order to make a political display of the 2017 Restoring Internet Freedom Order. Back in the real world, however, none of this helps to provide rural communities with the type of broadband services they actually need, and the effect is only to worsen the rural digital divide, both politically and technologically.

The Road Ahead …?

The story told above is not a happy one. Closing digital divides, and especially closing the rural digital divide, is one of the most important legal, social, and policy challenges this country faces. Yet the discussion about these issues in DC reflects little of the on-the-ground reality. Rather advocates in DC attack a strawman of the rural digital divide, using it as a foil to protect and advocate for their pet agendas. If anything, the discussion in DC distracts attention and diverts resources from productive ideas.

To end on a more positive note, some are beginning to recognize the importance and direness of the situation. I have noted several times the work of Chairman Pai and Commissioner Carr. Indeed, the first time I met Chairman Pai was when I had the opportunity to accompany him, back when he was Commissioner Pai, on a visit through Diller, Nebraska (pop. 287). More recently, there has been bipartisan recognition of the need for new thinking about the rural digital divide. In February, for instance, a group of Democratic senators asked President Trump to prioritize rural broadband in his infrastructure plans. And the following month Congress enacted, and the President signed, legislation that among other things funded a $600 million pilot program to award grants and loans for rural broadband built out through the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service. But both of these efforts rely too heavily on throwing money at the rural divide (speaking of the recent legislation, the head of one Nebraska-based carrier building out service in rural areas lamented that it’s just another effort to give carriers cheap money, which doesn’t do much to help close the divide!). It is, nonetheless, good to see urgent calls for and an interest in experimenting with new ways to deliver assistance in closing the rural digital divide. We need more of this sort of bipartisan thinking and willingness to experiment with new modes of meeting this challenge — and less advocacy for stale, entrenched, viewpoints that have little relevance to the on-the-ground reality of rural America.

In Broadband, Facebook, Intellectual Property, Net Neutrality, Patent, Platforms, Telecommunications, Truth on the Market, Twitter, Wireless , , , , , ,
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A Pro-Free Market Approach to Brexit Negotiations Is Key

Alden Abbott —  15 December 2017

The terms of the United Kingdom’s (UK) exit from the European Union (EU) – “Brexit” – are of great significance not just to UK and EU citizens, but for those in the United States and around the world who value economic liberty (see my Heritage Foundation memorandum giving the reasons why, here).

If Brexit is to promote economic freedom and enhanced economic welfare, Brexit negotiations between the UK and the EU must not limit the ability of the United Kingdom to pursue (1) efficiency-enhancing regulatory reform and (2) trade liberalizing agreements with non-EU nations.  These points are expounded upon in a recent economic study (The Brexit Inflection Point) by the non-profit UK think tank the Legatum Institute, which has produced an impressive body of research on the benefits of Brexit, if implemented in a procompetitive, economically desirable fashion.  (As a matter of full disclosure, I am a member of Legatum’s “Special Trade Commission,” which “seeks to re-focus the public discussion on Brexit to a positive conversation on opportunities, rather than challenges, while presenting empirical evidence of the dangers of not following an expansive trade negotiating path.”  Members of the Special Trade Commission are unpaid – they serve on a voluntary pro bono basis.)

Unfortunately, however, leading UK press commentators have urged the UK Government to accede to a full harmonization of UK domestic regulations and trade policy with the EU.  Such a deal would be disastrous.  It would prevent the UK from entering into mutually beneficial trade liberalization pacts with other nations or groups of nations (e.g., with the U.S. and with the members of the Transpacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement), because such arrangements by necessity would lead to a divergence with EU trade strictures.  It would also preclude the UK from unilaterally reducing harmful regulatory burdens that are a byproduct of economically inefficient and excessive EU rules.  In short, it would be antithetical to economic freedom and economic welfare.

Notably, in a November 30 article (Six Impossible Notions About “Global Britain”), a well-known business journalist, Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, sharply criticized The Brexit Inflection Point’s recommendation that the UK should pursue trade and regulatory policies that would diverge from EU standards.  Notably, Wolf characterized as an “impossible thing” Legatum’s point that the UK should not “’allow itself to be bound by the EU’s negotiating mandate.’  We all now know this is infeasible.  The EU holds the cards and it knows it holds the cards. The Legatum authors still do not.”

Shanker Singham, Director of Economic Policy and Prosperity Studies at Legatum, brilliantly responded to Wolf’s critique in a December 4 article (published online by CAPX) entitled A Narrow-Minded Brexit Is Doomed to Fail.  Singham’s trenchant analysis merits being set forth in its entirety (by permission of the author):

“Last week, the Financial Times’s chief economics commentator, Martin Wolf, dedicated his column to criticising The Brexit Inflection Point, a report for the Legatum Institute in which Victoria Hewson, Radomir Tylecote and I discuss what would constitute a good end state for the UK as it seeks to exercise an independent trade and regulatory policy post Brexit, and how we get from here to there.

We write these reports to advance ideas that we think will help policymakers as they tackle the single biggest challenge this country has faced since the Second World War. We believe in a market place of ideas, and we welcome challenge. . . .

[W]e are thankful that Martin Wolf, an eminent economist, has chosen to engage with the substance of our arguments. However, his article misunderstands the nature of modern international trade negotiations, as well as the reality of the European Union’s regulatory system – and so his claim that, like the White Queen, we “believe in impossible things” simply doesn’t stack up.

Mr Wolf claims there are six impossible things that we argue. We will address his rebuttals in turn.

But first, in discussions about the UK’s trade policy, it is important to bear in mind that the British government is currently discussing the manner in which it will retake its independent WTO membership. This includes agricultural import quotas, and its WTO rectification processes with other WTO members.

If other countries believe that the UK will adopt the position of maintaining regulatory alignment with the EU, as advocated by Mr Wolf and others, the UK’s negotiating strategy would be substantially weaker. It would quite wrongly suggest that the UK will be unable to lower trade barriers and offer the kind of liberalisation that our trading partners seek and that would work best for the UK economy. This could negatively impact both the UK and the EU’s ongoing discussions in the WTO.

Has the EU’s trading system constrained growth in the World?

The first impossible thing Mr Wolf claims we argue is that the EU system of protectionism and harmonised regulation has constrained economic growth for Britain and the world. He is right to point out that the volume of world trade has increased, and the UK has, of course, experienced GDP growth while a member of the EU.

However, as our report points out, the EU’s prescriptive approach to regulation, especially in the recent past (for example, its approach on data protection, audio-visual regulation, the restrictive application of the precautionary principle, REACH chemicals regulation, and financial services regulations to name just a few) has led to an increase in anti-competitive regulation and market distortions that are wealth destructive.

As the OECD notes in various reports on regulatory reform, regulation can act as a behind-the-border barrier to trade and impede market openness for trade and investment. Inefficient regulation imposes unnecessary burdens on firms, increases barriers to entry, impacts on competition and incentives for innovation, and ultimately hurts productivity. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is an example of regulation that is disproportionate to its objectives; it is highly prescriptive and imposes substantial compliance costs for business that want to use data to innovate.

Rapid growth during the post-war period is in part thanks to the progressive elimination of border trade barriers. But, in terms of wealth creation, we are no longer growing at that rate. Since before the financial crisis, measures of actual wealth creation (not GDP which includes consumer and government spending) such as industrial output have stalled, and the number of behind-the-border regulatory barriers has been increasing.

The global trading system is in difficulty. The lack of negotiation of a global trade round since the Uruguay Round, the lack of serious services liberalisation in either the built-in agenda of the WTO or sectorally following on from the Basic Telecoms Agreement and its Reference Paper on Competition Safeguards in 1997 has led to an increase in behind-the-border barriers and anti-competitive distortions and regulation all over the world. This stasis in international trade negotiations is an important contributory factor to what many economists have talked about as a “new normal” of limited growth, and a global decline in innovation.

Meanwhile the EU has sought to force its regulatory system on the rest of the world (the GDPR is an example of this). If it succeeds, the result would be the kind of wealth destruction that pushes more people into poverty. It is against this backdrop that the UK is negotiating with both the EU and the rest of the world.

The question is whether an independent UK, the world’s sixth biggest economy and second biggest exporter of services, is able to contribute to improving the dynamics of the global economic architecture, which means further trade liberalisation. The EU is protectionist against outside countries, which is antithetical to the overall objectives of the WTO. This is true in agriculture and beyond. For example, the EU imposes tariffs on cars at four times the rate applied by the US, while another large auto manufacturing country, Japan, has unilaterally removed its auto tariffs.

In addition, the EU27 represents a declining share of UK exports, which is rather counter-intuitive for a Customs Union and single market. In 1999, the EU represented 55 per cent of UK exports, and by 2016, this was 43 per cent. That said, the EU will remain an important, albeit declining, market for the UK, which is why we advocate a comprehensive free trade agreement with it.

Can the UK secure meaningful regulatory recognition from the EU without being identical to it?

Second, Mr Wolf suggests that regulatory recognition between the UK and EU is possible only if there is harmonisation or identical regulation between the UK and EU.

This is at odds with WTO practice, stretching back to its rules on domestic laws and regulation as encapsulated in Article III of the GATT and Article VI of the GATS, and as expressed in the Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) and Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) agreements.

This is the critical issue. The direction of travel of international trade thinking is towards countries recognising each other’s regulatory systems if they achieve the same ultimate goal of regulation, even if the underlying regulation differs, and to regulate in ways that are least distortive to international trade and competition. There will be areas where this level of recognition will not be possible, in which case UK exports into the EU will of course have to satisfy the standards of the EU. But even here we can mitigate the trade costs to some extent by Mutual Recognition Agreements on conformity assessment and market surveillance.

Had the US taken the view that it would not receive regulatory recognition unless their regulatory systems were the same, the recent agreement on prudential measures in insurance and reinsurance services between the EU and US would not exist. In fact this point highlights the crucial issue which the UK must successfully negotiate, and one in which its interests are aligned with other countries and with the direction of travel of the WTO itself. The TBT and SPS agreements broadly provide that mutual recognition should not be denied where regulatory goals are aligned but technical regulation differs.

Global trade and regulatory policy increasingly looks for regulation that promotes competition. The EU is on a different track, as the GDPR demonstrates. This is the reason that both the Canada-EU agreement (CETA) and the EU offer in the Trade in Services agreement (TiSA) does not include new services. If GDPR were to become the global standard, trade in data would be severely constrained, slowing the development of big data solutions, the fourth industrial revolution, and new services trade generally.

As many firms recognise, this would be extremely damaging to global prosperity. In arguing that regulatory recognition is only available if the UK is fully harmonised with the EU, Mr Wolf may be in harmony with the EU approach to regulation. But that is exactly the approach that is damaging the global trading environment.

Can the UK exercise trade policy leadership?

Third, Mr Wolf suggests that other countries do not, and will not, look to the UK for trade leadership. He cites the US’s withdrawal from the trade negotiating space as an example. But surely the absence of the world’s biggest services exporter means that the world’s second biggest exporter of services will be expected to advocate for its own interests, and argue for greater services liberalisation.

Mr Wolf believes that the UK is a second-rank power in decline. We take a different view of the world’s sixth biggest economy, the financial capital of the world and the second biggest exporter of services. As former New Zealand High Commissioner, Sir Lockwood Smith, has said, the rest of the world does not see the UK as the UK too often seems to see itself.

The global companies that have their headquarters in the UK do not see things the same way as Mr Wolf. In fact, the lack of trade leadership since 1997 means that a country with significant services exports would be expected to show some leadership.

Mr Wolf’s point is that far from seeking to grandiosely lead global trade negotiations, the UK should stick to its current knitting, which consists of its WTO rectification, and includes the negotiation of its agricultural import quotas and production subsidies in agriculture. This is perhaps the most concerning part of his argument. Yes, the UK must rectify its tariff schedules, but for that process to be successful, especially on agricultural import quotas, it must be able to demonstrate to its partners that it will be able to grant further liberalisation in the near term future. If it can’t, then its trading partners will have no choice but to demand as much liberalisation as they can secure right now in the rectification process.

This will complicate that process, and cause damage to the UK as it takes up its independent WTO membership. Those WTO partners who see the UK as vulnerable on this point will no doubt see validation in Mr Wolf’s article and assume it means that no real liberalisation will be possible from the UK. The EU should note that complicating this process for the UK will not help the EU in its own WTO processes, where it is vulnerable.

Trade negotiations are dynamic not static and the UK must act quickly

Fourth, Mr Wolf suggests that the UK is not under time pressure to “escape from the EU”.  This statement does not account for how international trade negotiations work in practice. In order for countries to cooperate with the UK on its WTO rectification, and its TRQ negotiations, as well to seriously negotiate with it, they have to believe that the UK will have control over tariff schedules and regulatory autonomy from day one of Brexit (even if we may choose not to make changes to it for an implementation period).

If non-EU countries think that the UK will not be able to exercise its freedom for several years, they will simply demand their pound of flesh in the negotiations now, and get on with the rest of their trade policy agenda. Trade negotiations are not static. The US executive could lose trade-negotiating authority in the summer of next year if the NAFTA renegotiation is not going well. Other countries will seek to accede to the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). China is moving forward with its Regional Cooperation and Economic Partnership, which does not meaningfully touch on domestic regulatory barriers. Much as we might criticise Donald Trump, his administration has expressed strong political will for a UK-US agreement, and in that regard has broken with traditional US trade policy thinking. The UK has an opportunity to strike and must take it.

The UK should prevail on the EU to allow Customs Agencies to be inter-operable from day one

Fifth, with respect to the challenges raised on customs agencies working together, our report argued that UK customs and the customs agencies of the EU member states should discuss customs arrangements at a practical and technical level now. What stands in the way of this is the EU’s stubbornness. Customs agencies are in regular contact on a business-as-usual basis, so the inability of UK and member-state customs agencies to talk to each other about the critical issue of new arrangements would seem to border on negligence. Of course, the EU should allow member states to have these critical conversations now.  Given the importance of customs agencies interoperating smoothly from day one, the UK Government must press its case with the European Commission to allow such conversations to start happening as a matter of urgency.

Does the EU hold all the cards?

Sixth, Mr Wolf argues that the EU holds all the cards and knows it holds all the cards, and therefore disagrees with our claim that the the UK should “not allow itself to be bound by the EU’s negotiating mandate”. As with his other claims, Mr Wolf finds himself agreeing with the EU’s negotiators. But that does not make him right.

While absence of a trade deal will of course damage UK industries, the cost to EU industries is also very significant. Beef and dairy in Ireland, cars and dairy in Bavaria, cars in Catalonia, textiles and dairy in Northern Italy – all over Europe (and in politically sensitive areas), industries stands to lose billions of Euros and thousands of jobs. This is without considering the impact of no financial services deal, which would increase the cost of capital in the EU, aborting corporate transactions and raising the cost of the supply chain. The EU has chosen a mandate that risks neither party getting what it wants.

The notion that the EU is a masterful negotiator, while the UK’s negotiators are hopeless is not the global view of the EU and the UK. Far from it. The EU in international trade negotiations has a reputation for being slow moving, lacking in creative vision, and unable to conclude agreements. Indeed, others have generally gone to the UK when they have been met with intransigence in Brussels.

What do we do now?

Mr Wolf’s argument amounts to a claim that the UK is not capable of the kind of further and deeper liberalisation that its economy would suggest is both possible and highly desirable both for the UK and the rest of the world. According to Mr Wolf, the UK can only consign itself to a highly aligned regulatory orbit around the EU, unable to realise any other agreements, and unable to influence the regulatory system around which it revolves, even as that system becomes ever more prescriptive and anti-competitive. Such a position is at odds with the facts and would guarantee a poor result for the UK and also cause opportunities to be lost for the rest of the world.

In all of our [Legatum Brexit-related] papers, we have started from the assumption that the British people have voted to leave the EU, and the government is implementing that outcome. We have then sought to produce policy recommendations based on what would constitute a good outcome as a result of that decision. This can be achieved only if we maximise the opportunities and minimise the disruptions.

We all recognise that the UK has embarked on a very difficult process. But there is a difference between difficult and impossible. There is also a difference between tasks that must be done and take time, and genuine negotiation points. We welcome the debate that comes from constructive challenge of our proposals; and we ask in turn that those who criticise us suggest alternative plans that might achieve positive outcomes. We look forward to the opportunity of a broader debate so that collectively the country can find the best path forward.”

 

In Antitrust & Competition, Barriers to Entry, China, European Union, International, International Trade, Regulation, Regulatory Reform, Telecommunications, Truth on the Market, United Kingdom , , , , ,
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A Brief Assessment of the Procompetitive Effects of Organizational Restructuring in the Ag-Biotech Industry

Geoffrey Manne —  9 May 2017

Today the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) Antitrust and Consumer Protection Research Program released a new white paper by Geoffrey A. Manne and Allen Gibby entitled:

A Brief Assessment of the Procompetitive Effects of Organizational Restructuring in the Ag-Biotech Industry

Over the past two decades, rapid technological innovation has transformed the industrial organization of the ag-biotech industry. These developments have contributed to an impressive increase in crop yields, a dramatic reduction in chemical pesticide use, and a substantial increase in farm profitability.

One of the most striking characteristics of this organizational shift has been a steady increase in consolidation. The recent announcements of mergers between Dow and DuPont, ChemChina and Syngenta, and Bayer and Monsanto suggest that these trends are continuing in response to new market conditions and a marked uptick in scientific and technological advances.

Regulators and industry watchers are often concerned that increased consolidation will lead to reduced innovation, and a greater incentive and ability for the largest firms to foreclose competition and raise prices. But ICLE’s examination of the underlying competitive dynamics in the ag-biotech industry suggests that such concerns are likely unfounded.

In fact, R&D spending within the seeds and traits industry increased nearly 773% between 1995 and 2015 (from roughly $507 million to $4.4 billion), while the combined market share of the six largest companies in the segment increased by more than 550% (from about 10% to over 65%) during the same period.

Firms today are consolidating in order to innovate and remain competitive in an industry replete with new entrants and rapidly evolving technological and scientific developments.

According to ICLE’s analysis, critics have unduly focused on the potential harms from increased integration, without properly accounting for the potential procompetitive effects. Our brief white paper highlights these benefits and suggests that a more nuanced and restrained approach to enforcement is warranted.

Our analysis suggests that, as in past periods of consolidation, the industry is well positioned to see an increase in innovation as these new firms unite complementary expertise to pursue more efficient and effective research and development. They should also be better able to help finance, integrate, and coordinate development of the latest scientific and technological developments — particularly in rapidly growing, data-driven “digital farming” —  throughout the industry.

Download the paper here.

And for more on the topic, revisit TOTM’s recent blog symposium, “Agricultural and Biotech Mergers: Implications for Antitrust Law and Economics in Innovative Industries,” here.

In Agricultural and Biotech Mergers Symposium, Announcements, Antitrust & Competition, China, Intellectual Property, International Center for Law & Economics, Law & Economics, Merger Guidelines, Patent, Symposia, Vertical Restraints , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Ag-biotech merger symposium wrap-up [Ag-Biotech Symposium]

Geoffrey Manne —  5 April 2017

On Thursday, March 30, Friday March 31, and Monday April 3, Truth on the Market and the International Center for Law and Economics presented a blog symposium — Agricultural and Biotech Mergers: Implications for Antitrust Law and Economics in Innovative Industries — discussing three proposed agricultural/biotech industry mergers awaiting judgment by antitrust authorities around the globe. These proposed mergers — Bayer/Monsanto, Dow/DuPont and ChemChina/Syngenta — present a host of fascinating issues, many of which go to the core of merger enforcement in innovative industries — and antitrust law and economics more broadly.

The big issue for the symposium participants was innovation (as it was for the European Commission, which cleared the Dow/DuPont merger last week, subject to conditions, one of which related to the firms’ R&D activities).

Critics of the mergers, as currently proposed, asserted that the increased concentration arising from the “Big 6” Ag-biotech firms consolidating into the Big 4 could reduce innovation competition by (1) eliminating parallel paths of research and development (Moss); (2) creating highly integrated technology/traits/seeds/chemicals platforms that erect barriers to new entry platforms (Moss); (3) exploiting eventual network effects that may result from the shift towards data-driven agriculture to block new entry in input markets (Lianos); or (4) increasing incentives to refuse to license, impose discriminatory restrictions in technology licensing agreements, or tacitly “agree” not to compete (Moss).

Rather than fixating on horizontal market share, proponents of the mergers argued that innovative industries are often marked by disruptions and that investment in innovation is an important signal of competition (Manne). An evaluation of the overall level of innovation should include not only the additional economies of scale and scope of the merged firms, but also advancements made by more nimble, less risk-averse biotech companies and smaller firms, whose innovations the larger firms can incentivize through licensing or M&A (Shepherd). In fact, increased efficiency created by economies of scale and scope can make funds available to source innovation outside of the large firms (Shepherd).

In addition, innovation analysis must also account for the intricately interwoven nature of agricultural technology across seeds and traits, crop protection, and, now, digital farming (Sykuta). Combined product portfolios generate more data to analyze, resulting in increased data-driven value for farmers and more efficiently targeted R&D resources (Sykuta).

While critics voiced concerns over such platforms erecting barriers to entry, markets are contestable to the extent that incumbents are incentivized to compete (Russell). It is worth noting that certain industries with high barriers to entry or exit, significant sunk costs, and significant costs disadvantages for new entrants (including automobiles, wireless service, and cable networks) have seen their prices decrease substantially relative to inflation over the last 20 years — even as concentration has increased (Russell). Not coincidentally, product innovation in these industries, as in ag-biotech, has been high.

Ultimately, assessing the likely effects of each merger using static measures of market structure is arguably unreliable or irrelevant in dynamic markets with high levels of innovation (Manne).

Regarding patents, critics were skeptical that combining the patent portfolios of the merging companies would offer benefits beyond those arising from cross-licensing, and would serve to raise rivals’ costs (Ghosh). While this may be true in some cases, IP rights are probabilistic, especially in dynamic markets, as Nicolas Petit noted:

There is no certainty that R&D investments will lead to commercially successful applications; (ii) no guarantee that IP rights will resist to invalidity proceedings in court; (iii) little safety to competition by other product applications which do not practice the IP but provide substitute functionality; and (iv) no inevitability that the environmental, toxicological and regulatory authorization rights that (often) accompany IP rights will not be cancelled when legal requirements change.

In spite of these uncertainties, deals such as the pending ag-biotech mergers provide managers the opportunity to evaluate and reorganize assets to maximize innovation and return on investment in such a way that would not be possible absent a merger (Sykuta). Neither party would fully place its IP and innovation pipeline on the table otherwise.

For a complete rundown of the arguments both for and against, the full archive of symposium posts from our outstanding and diverse group of scholars, practitioners and other experts is available at this link, and individual posts can be easily accessed by clicking on the authors’ names below.

We’d like to thank all of the participants for their excellent contributions!

In Agricultural and Biotech Mergers Symposium, Antitrust & Competition, Barriers to Entry, China, European Union, Intellectual Property, International, International Center for Law & Economics, Law & Economics, Market Definition, Merger Guidelines, Mergers & Acquisitions, Patent, Platforms, Symposia, Telecommunications, Truth on the Market, Wireless , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Innovation as a shield and a club in the agribusiness mergers [Ag-Biotech Symposium]

John Lopatka —  3 April 2017

John E. Lopatka is A. Robert Noll Distinguished Professor of Law at Penn State Law School

People need to eat. All else equal, the more food that can be produced from an acre of land, the better off they’ll be. Of course, people want to pay as little as possible for their food to boot. At heart, the antitrust analysis of the pending agribusiness mergers requires a simple assessment of their effects on food production and price. But making that assessment raises difficult questions about institutional competence.

Each of the three mergers – Dow/DuPont, ChemChina/Syngenta, and Bayer/Monsanto – involves agricultural products, such as different kinds of seeds, pesticides, and fertilizers. All of these products are inputs in the production of food – the better and cheaper are these products, the more food is produced. The array of products these firms produce invites potentially controversial market definition determinations, but these determinations are standard fare in antitrust law and economics, and conventional analysis handles them tolerably well. Each merger appears to pose overlaps in some product markets, though they seem to be relatively small parts of the firms’ businesses. Traditional merger analysis would examine these markets in properly defined geographic markets, some of which are likely international. The concern in these markets seems to be coordinated interaction, and the analysis of potential anticompetitive coordination would thus focus on concentration and entry barriers. Much could be said about the assumption that product markets perform less competitively as concentration increases, but that is an issue for others or at least another day.

More importantly for my purposes here, to the extent that any of these mergers creates concentration in a market that is competitively problematic and not likely to be cured by new entry, a fix is fairly easy. These are mergers in which asset divestiture is feasible, in which the parties seem willing to divest assets, and in which interested and qualified asset buyers are emerging. To be sure, firms may be willing to divest assets at substantial cost to appease regulators even when competitive problems are illusory, and the cost of a cure in search of an illness is a real social cost. But my concern lies elsewhere.

The parties in each of these mergers have touted innovation as a beneficial byproduct of the deal if not its raison d’être. Innovation effects have made their way into merger analysis, but not smoothly. Innovation can be a kind of efficiency, distinguished from most other efficiencies by its dynamic nature. The benefits of using a plant to its capacity are immediate: costs and prices decrease now. Any benefits of innovation will necessarily be experienced in the future, and the passage of time makes benefits both less certain and less valuable, as people prefer consumption now rather than later. The parties to these mergers in their public statements, to the extent they intend to address antitrust concerns, are implicitly asserting innovation as a defense, a kind of efficiency defense. They do not concede, of course, that their deals will be anticompetitive in any product market. But for antitrust purposes, an accelerated pace of innovation is irrelevant unless the merger appears to threaten competition.

Recognizing increased innovation as a merger defense raises all of the issues that any efficiencies defense raises, and then some. First, can efficiencies be identified?  For instance, patent portfolios can be combined, and the integration of patent rights can lower transaction costs relative to a contractual allocation of rights just as any integration can. In theory, avenues of productive research may not even be recognized until the firms’ intellectual property is combined. A merger may eliminate redundant research efforts, but identifying that which is truly duplicative is often not easy. In all, identifying efficiencies related to research and development is likely to be more difficult than identifying many other kinds of efficiencies. Second, are the efficiencies merger-specific?  The less clearly research and development efficiencies can be identified, the weaker is the claim that they cannot be achieved absent the merger. But in this respect, innovation efficiencies can be more important than most other kinds of efficiencies, because intellectual property sometimes cannot be duplicated as easily as physical property can. Third, can innovation efficiencies be quantified?  If innovation is expected to take the form of an entirely new product, such as a new pesticide, estimating its value is inherently speculative. Fourth, when will efficiencies save a merger that would otherwise be condemned?  An efficiencies defense implies a comparison between the expected harm a merger will cause and the expected benefits it will produce. Arguably those benefits have to be realized by consumers to count at all, but, in any event, a comparison between expected immediate losses of customers in an input market and expected future gains from innovation may be nearly impossible to make. The Merger Guidelines acknowledge that innovation efficiencies can be considered and note many of the concerns just listed. The takeaway is a healthy skepticism of an innovation defense. The defense should generally fail unless the model of anticompetitive harm in product (or service) markets is dubious or the efficiency claim is unusually specific and the likely benefits substantial.

Innovation can enter merger analysis in an even more troublesome way, however: as a club rather than a shield. The Merger Guidelines contemplate that a merger may have unilateral anticompetitive effects if it results in a “reduced incentive to continue with an existing product-development effort or reduced incentive to initiate development of new products.”  The stark case is one in which a merger poses no competitive problem in a product market but would allegedly reduce innovation competition. The best evidence that the elimination of innovation competition might be a reason to oppose one or more of the agribusiness mergers is the recent decision of the European Commission approving the Dow/DuPont merger, subject to various asset divestitures. The Commission, echoing the Guidelines, concluded that the merger would significantly reduce “innovation competition for pesticides” by “[r]emoving the parties’ incentives to continue to pursue ongoing parallel innovation efforts” and by “[r]emoving the parties’ incentives to develop and bring to market new pesticides.”  The agreed upon fix requires DuPont to divest most of its research and development organization.

Enforcement claims that a merger will restrict innovation competition should be met with every bit the skepticism due defense claims that innovation efficiencies save a merger. There is nothing inconsistent in this symmetry. The benefits of innovation, though potentially immense – large enough to dwarf the immediate allocative harm from a lessening of competition in product markets – is speculative. In discounted utility terms, the expected harm will usually exceed the expected benefits, given our limited ability to predict the future. But the potential gains from innovation are immense, and unless we are confident that a merger will reduce innovation, antitrust law should not intervene. We rarely are, at least we rarely should be.

As Geoffrey Manne points out, we still do not know a great deal about the optimal market structure for innovation. Evidence suggests that moderate concentration is most conducive to innovation, but it is not overwhelming, and more importantly no one is suggesting a merger policy that single-mindedly pursues a particular market structure. An examination of incentives to continue existing product development projects or to initiate projects to develop new products is superficially appealing, but its practical utility is elusive. Any firm has an incentive to develop products that increase demand. The Merger Guidelines suggest that a merger will reduce incentives to innovate if the introduction of a new product by one merging firm will capture substantial revenues from the other. The E.C. likely had this effect in mind in concluding that the merged entity would have “lower incentives . . . to innovate than Dow and DuPont separately.”  The Commission also observed that the merged firm would have “a lower ability to innovate” than the two firms separately, but just how a combination of research assets could reduce capability is utterly obscure.

In any event, whether a merger reduces incentives depends not only on the welfare of the merging parties but also on the development activities of actual and would-be competitors. A merged firm cannot afford to have its revenue captured by a new product introduced by a competitor. Of course, innovation by competitors will not spur a firm to develop new products if those competitors do not have the resources needed to innovate. One can imagine circumstances in which resources necessary to innovate in a product market are highly specialized; more realistically, the lack of specialized resources will decrease the pace of innovation. But the concept of specialized resources cannot mean resources a firm has developed that are conducive to innovate and that could be, but have not yet been, developed by other firms. It cannot simply mean a head start, unless it is very long indeed. If the first two firms in an industry build a plant, the fact that a new entrant would have to build a plant is not a sufficient reason to prevent the first two from merging. In any event, what resources are essential to innovation in an area can be difficult to determine.

Assuming essential resources can be identified, how many firms need to have them to create a competitive environment? The Guidelines place the number at “very small” plus one. Elsewhere, the federal antitrust agencies suggest that four firms other than the merged firm are sufficient to maintain innovation competition. We have models, whatever their limitations, that predict price effects in oligopolies. The Guidelines are based on them. But determining the number of firms necessary for competitive innovation is another matter. Maybe two is enough. We know for sure that innovation competition is non-existent if only one firm has the capacity to innovate, but not much else. We know that duplicative research efforts can be wasteful. If two firms would each spend $1 million to arrive at the same place, a merged firm might be able to invest $2 million and go twice as far or reach the first place at half the total cost. This is only to say that a merger can increase innovation efficiency, a possibility that is not likely to justify an otherwise anticompetitive merger but should usually protect from condemnation a merger that is not otherwise anticompetitive.

In the Dow/DuPont merger, the Commission found “specific evidence that the merged entity would have cut back on the amount they spent on developing innovative products.”  Executives of the two firms stated that they expected to reduce research and development spending by around $300 million. But a reduction in spending does not tell us whether innovation will suffer. The issue is innovation efficiency. If the two firms spent, say, $1 billion each on research, $300 million of which was duplicative of the other firm’s research, the merged firm could invest $1.7 billion without reducing productive effort. The Commission complained that the merger would reduce from five to four the number of firms that are “globally active throughout the entire R&D process.”  As noted above, maybe four firms competing are enough. We don’t know. But the Commission also discounts firms with “more limited R&D capabilities,” and the importance to successful innovation of multi-level integration in this industry is not clear.

When a merger is challenged because of an adverse effect on innovation competition, a fix can be difficult. Forced licensing might work, but that assumes that the relevant resource necessary to carry on research and development is intellectual property. More may be required. If tangible assets related to research and development are required, a divestiture might cripple the merged firm. The Commission remedy was to require the merged firm to divest “DuPont’s global R&D organization” that is related to the product operations that must be divested. The firm is permitted to retain “a few limited [R&D] assets that support the part of DuPont’s pesticide business” that is not being divested. In this case, such a divestiture may or may not hobble the merged firm, depending on whether the divested assets would have contributed to the research and development efforts that it will continue to pursue. That the merged firm was willing to accept the research and development divestiture to secure Commission approval does not mean that the divestiture will do no harm to the firm’s continuing research and development activities. Moreover, some product markets at issue in this merger are geographically limited, whereas the likely benefits of innovation are largely international. The implication is that increased concentration in product markets can be avoided by divesting assets to other large agribusinesses that do not operate in the relevant geographic market. But if the Commission insists on preserving five integrated firms active in global research and development activities, DuPont’s research and development activities cannot be divested to one of the other major players, which the Commission identifies as BASF, Bayer, and Syngenta, or firms with which any of them are attempting to merge, namely Monsanto and ChemChina. These are the five firms, of course, that are particularly likely to be interested buyers.

Innovation is important. No one disagrees. But the role of competition in stimulating innovation is not well understood. Except in unusual cases, antitrust institutions are ill-equipped either to recognize innovation efficiencies that save a merger threatening competition in product markets or to condemn mergers that threaten only innovation competition. Indeed, despite maintaining their prerogative to challenge mergers solely on the ground of a reduction in innovation competition, the federal agencies have in fact complained about an adverse effect on innovation in cases that also raise competitive issues in product markets. Innovation is at the heart of the pending agribusiness mergers. How regulators and courts analyze innovation in these cases will say something about whether they perceive their limitations.

In Agricultural and Biotech Mergers Symposium, Antitrust & Competition, China, European Union, Intellectual Property, International, Market Definition, Merger Guidelines, Mergers & Acquisitions, Patent, Symposia , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Innovation-driven market structure in the ag-biotech industry [Ag-Biotech Symposium]

Geoffrey Manne —  31 March 2017

Geoffrey A. Manne is Executive Director of the International Center for Law & Economics

Dynamic versus static competition

Ever since David Teece and coauthors began writing about antitrust and innovation in high-tech industries in the 1980s, we’ve understood that traditional, price-based antitrust analysis is not intrinsically well-suited for assessing merger policy in these markets.

For high-tech industries, performance, not price, is paramount — which means that innovation is key:

Competition in some markets may take the form of Schumpeterian rivalry in which a succession of temporary monopolists displace one another through innovation. At any one time, there is little or no head-to-head price competition but there is significant ongoing innovation competition.

Innovative industries are often marked by frequent disruptions or “paradigm shifts” rather than horizontal market share contests, and investment in innovation is an important signal of competition. And competition comes from the continual threat of new entry down the road — often from competitors who, though they may start with relatively small market shares, or may arise in different markets entirely, can rapidly and unexpectedly overtake incumbents.

Which, of course, doesn’t mean that current competition and ease of entry are irrelevant. Rather, because, as Joanna Shepherd noted, innovation should be assessed across the entire industry and not solely within merging firms, conduct that might impede new, disruptive, innovative entry is indeed relevant.

But it is also important to remember that innovation comes from within incumbent firms, as well, and, often, that the overall level of innovation in an industry may be increased by the presence of large firms with economies of scope and scale.

In sum, and to paraphrase Olympia Dukakis’ character in Moonstruck: “what [we] don’t know about [the relationship between innovation and market structure] is a lot.”

What we do know, however, is that superficial, concentration-based approaches to antitrust analysis will likely overweight presumed foreclosure effects and underweight innovation effects.

We shouldn’t fetishize entry, or access, or head-to-head competition over innovation, especially where consumer welfare may be significantly improved by a reduction in the former in order to get more of the latter.

As Katz and Shelanski note:

To assess fully the impact of a merger on market performance, merger authorities and courts must examine how a proposed transaction changes market participants’ incentives and abilities to undertake investments in innovation.

At the same time, they point out that

Innovation can dramatically affect the relationship between the pre-merger marketplace and what is likely to happen if the proposed merger is consummated…. [This requires consideration of] how innovation will affect the evolution of market structure and competition. Innovation is a force that could make static measures of market structure unreliable or irrelevant, and the effects of innovation may be highly relevant to whether a merger should be challenged and to the kind of remedy antitrust authorities choose to adopt. (Emphasis added).

Dynamic competition in the ag-biotech industry

These dynamics seem to be playing out in the ag-biotech industry. (For a detailed look at how the specific characteristics of innovation in the ag-biotech industry have shaped industry structure, see, e.g., here (pdf)).  

One inconvenient truth for the “concentration reduces innovation” crowd is that, as the industry has experienced more consolidation, it has also become more, not less, productive and innovative. Between 1995 and 2015, for example, the market share of the largest seed producers and crop protection firms increased substantially. And yet, over the same period, annual industry R&D spending went up nearly 750 percent. Meanwhile, the resulting innovations have increased crop yields by 22%, reduced chemical pesticide use by 37%, and increased farmer profits by 68%.

In her discussion of the importance of considering the “innovation ecosystem” in assessing the innovation effects of mergers in R&D-intensive industries, Joanna Shepherd noted that

In many consolidated firms, increases in efficiency and streamlining of operations free up money and resources to source external innovation. To improve their future revenue streams and market share, consolidated firms can be expected to use at least some of the extra resources to acquire external innovation. This increase in demand for externally-sourced innovation increases the prices paid for external assets, which, in turn, incentivizes more early-stage innovation in small firms and biotech companies. Aggregate innovation increases in the process!

The same dynamic seems to play out in the ag-biotech industry, as well:

The seed-biotechnology industry has been reliant on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as sources of new innovation. New SME startups (often spinoffs from university research) tend to specialize in commercial development of a new research tool, genetic trait, or both. Significant entry by SMEs into the seed-biotechnology sector began in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with a second wave of new entrants in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In recent years, exits have outnumbered entrants, and by 2008 just over 30 SMEs specializing in crop biotechnology were still active. The majority of the exits from the industry were the result of acquisition by larger firms. Of 27 crop biotechnology SMEs that were acquired between 1985 and 2009, 20 were acquired either directly by one of the Big 6 or by a company that itself was eventually acquired by a Big 6 company.

While there is more than one way to interpret these statistics (and they are often used by merger opponents, in fact, to lament increasing concentration), they are actually at least as consistent with an increase in innovation through collaboration (and acquisition) as with a decrease.

For what it’s worth, this is exactly how the startup community views the innovation ecosystem in the ag-biotech industry, as well. As the latest AgFunder AgTech Investing Report states:

The large agribusinesses understand that new innovation is key to their future, but the lack of M&A [by the largest agribusiness firms in 2016] highlighted their uncertainty about how to approach it. They will need to make more acquisitions to ensure entrepreneurs keep innovating and VCs keep investing.

It’s also true, as Diana Moss notes, that

Competition maximizes the potential for numerous collaborations. It also minimizes incentives to refuse to license, to impose discriminatory restrictions in technology licensing agreements, or to tacitly “agree” not to compete…. All of this points to the importance of maintaining multiple, parallel R&D pipelines, a notion that was central to the EU’s decision in Dow-DuPont.

And yet collaboration and licensing have long been prevalent in this industry. Examples are legion, but here are just a few significant ones:

  • Monsanto’s “global licensing agreement for the use of the CRISPR-Cas genome-editing technology in agriculture with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.”
  • Dow and Arcadia Biosciences’ “strategic collaboration to develop and commercialize new breakthrough yield traits and trait stacks in corn.”
  • Monsanto and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s “licensing agreement to develop crops tolerant to the broadleaf herbicide dicamba. This agreement is based on discoveries by UNL plant scientists.”

Both large and small firms in the ag-biotech industry continually enter into new agreements like these. See, e.g., here and here for a (surely incomplete) list of deals in 2016 alone.

At the same time, across the industry, new entry has been rampant despite increased M&A activity among the largest firms. Recent years have seen venture financing in AgTech skyrocket — from $400 million in 2010 to almost $5 billion in 2015 — and hundreds of startups now enter the industry annually.

The pending mergers

Today’s pending mergers are consistent with this characterization of a dynamic market in which structure is being driven by incentives to innovate, rather than monopolize. As Michael Sykuta points out,

The US agriculture sector has been experiencing consolidation at all levels for decades, even as the global ag economy has been growing and becoming more diverse. Much of this consolidation has been driven by technological changes that created economies of scale, both at the farm level and beyond.

These deals aren’t fundamentally about growing production capacity, expanding geographic reach, or otherwise enhancing market share; rather, each is a fundamental restructuring of the way the companies do business, reflecting today’s shifting agricultural markets, and the advanced technology needed to respond to them.

Technological innovation is unpredictable, often serendipitous, and frequently transformative of the ways firms organize and conduct their businesses. A company formed to grow and sell hybrid seeds in the 1920s, for example, would either have had to evolve or fold by the end of the century. Firms today will need to develop (or purchase) new capabilities and adapt to changing technology, scientific knowledge, consumer demand, and socio-political forces. The pending mergers seemingly fit exactly this mold.

As Allen Gibby notes, these mergers are essentially vertical combinations of disparate, specialized pieces of an integrated whole. Take the proposed Bayer/Monsanto merger, for example. Bayer is primarily a chemicals company, developing advanced chemicals to protect crops and enhance crop growth. Monsanto, on the other hand, primarily develops seeds and “seed traits” — advanced characteristics that ensure the heartiness of the seeds, give them resistance to herbicides and pesticides, and speed their fertilization and growth. In order to translate the individual advances of each into higher yields, it is important that these two functions work successfully together. Doing so enhances crop growth and protection far beyond what, say, spreading manure can accomplish — or either firm could accomplish working on its own.

The key is that integrated knowledge is essential to making this process function. Developing seed traits to work well with (i.e., to withstand) certain pesticides requires deep knowledge of the pesticide’s chemical characteristics, and vice-versa. Processing huge amounts of data to determine when to apply chemical treatments or to predict a disease requires not only that the right information is collected, at the right time, but also that it is analyzed in light of the unique characteristics of the seeds and chemicals. Increased communications and data-sharing between manufacturers increases the likelihood that farmers will use the best products available in the right quantity and at the right time in each field.

Vertical integration solves bargaining and long-term planning problems by unifying the interests (and the management) of these functions. Instead of arm’s length negotiation, a merged Bayer/Monsanto, for example, may better maximize R&D of complicated Ag/chem products through fully integrated departments and merged areas of expertise. A merged company can also coordinate investment decisions (instead of waiting up to 10 years to see what the other company produces), avoid duplication of research, adapt to changing conditions (and the unanticipated course of research), pool intellectual property, and bolster internal scientific capability more efficiently. All told, the merged company projects spending about $16 billion on R&D over the next six years. Such coordinated investment will likely garner far more than either company could from separately spending even the same amount to develop new products. 

Controlling an entire R&D process and pipeline of traits for resistance, chemical treatments, seeds, and digital complements would enable the merged firm to better ensure that each of these products works together to maximize crop yields, at the lowest cost, and at greater speed. Consider the advantages that Apple’s tightly-knit ecosystem of software and hardware provides to computer and device users. Such tight integration isn’t the only way to compete (think Android), but it has frequently proven to be a successful model, facilitating some functions (e.g., handoff between Macs and iPhones) that are difficult if not impossible in less-integrated systems. And, it bears noting, important elements of Apple’s innovation have come through acquisition….

Conclusion

As LaFontaine and Slade have made clear, theoretical concerns about the anticompetitive consequences of vertical integrations are belied by the virtual absence of empirical support:

Under most circumstances, profit–maximizing vertical–integration and merger decisions are efficient, not just from the firms’ but also from the consumers’ points of view.

Other antitrust scholars are skeptical of vertical-integration fears because firms normally have strong incentives to deal with providers of complementary products. Bayer and Monsanto, for example, might benefit enormously from integration, but if competing seed producers seek out Bayer’s chemicals to develop competing products, there’s little reason for the merged firm to withhold them: Even if the new seeds out-compete Monsanto’s, Bayer/Monsanto can still profit from providing the crucial input. Its incentive doesn’t necessarily change if the merger goes through, and whatever “power” Bayer has as an input is a function of its scientific know-how, not its merger with Monsanto.

In other words, while some competitors could find a less hospitable business environment, consumers will likely suffer no apparent ill effects, and continue to receive the benefits of enhanced product development and increased productivity.

That’s what we’d expect from innovation-driven integration, and antitrust enforcers should be extremely careful before thwarting or circumscribing these mergers lest they end up thwarting, rather than promoting, consumer welfare.

In Agricultural and Biotech Mergers Symposium, Antitrust & Competition, Apple, European Union, Intellectual Property, International, International Center for Law & Economics, Law & Economics, Mergers & Acquisitions, Monopolization, Platforms, Symposia, Vertical Restraints , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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