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The Four Ways of Spending Data

Stephen Dnes — 28 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.]

In Free to Choose, Milton Friedman famously noted that there are four ways to spend money[1]:

Spending your own money on yourself. For example, buying groceries or lunch. There is a strong incentive to economize and to get full value.
Spending your own money on someone else. For example, buying a gift for another. There is a strong incentive to economize, but perhaps less to achieve full value from the other person’s point of view. Altruism is admirable, but it differs from value maximization, since—strictly speaking—giving cash would maximize the other’s value. Perhaps the point of a gift is that it does not amount to cash and the maximization of the other person’s welfare from their point of view.
Spending someone else’s money on yourself. For example, an expensed business lunch. “Pass me the filet mignon and Chateau Lafite! Do you have one of those menus without any prices?” There is a strong incentive to get maximum utility, but there is little incentive to economize.
Spending someone else’s money on someone else. For example, applying the proceeds of taxes or donations. There may be an indirect desire to see utility, but incentives for quality and cost management are often diminished.

This framework can be criticized. Altruism has a role. Not all motives are selfish. There is an important role for action to help those less fortunate, which might mean, for instance, that a charity gains more utility from category (4) (assisting the needy) than from category (3) (the charity’s holiday party). It always depends on the facts and the context. However, there is certainly a grain of truth in the observation that charity begins at home and that, in the final analysis, people are best at managing their own affairs.

How would this insight apply to data interoperability? The difficult cases of assisting the needy do not arise here: there is no serious sense in which data interoperability does, or does not, result in destitution. Thus, Friedman’s observations seem to ring true: when spending data, those whose data it is seem most likely to maximize its value. This is especially so where collection of data responds to incentives—that is, the amount of data collected and processed responds to how much control over the data is possible.

The obvious exception to this would be a case of market power. If there is a monopoly with persistent barriers to entry, then the incentive may not be to maximize total utility, and therefore to limit data handling to the extent that a higher price can be charged for the lesser amount of data that does remain available. This has arguably been seen with some data-handling rules: the “Jedi Blue” agreement on advertising bidding, Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention and App Tracking Transparency, and Google’s proposed Privacy Sandbox, all restrict the ability of others to handle data. Indeed, they may fail Friedman’s framework, since they amount to the platform deciding how to spend others’ data—in this case, by not allowing them to collect and process it at all.

It should be emphasized, though, that this is a special case. It depends on market power, and existing antitrust and competition laws speak to it. The courts will decide whether cases like Daily Mail v Google and Texas et al. v Google show illegal monopolization of data flows, so as to fall within this special case of market power. Outside the United States, cases like the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority’s Google Privacy Sandbox commitments and the European Union’s proposed commitments with Amazon seek to allow others to continue to handle their data and to prevent exclusivity from arising from platform dynamics, which could happen if a large platform prevents others from deciding how to account for data they are collecting. It will be recalled that even Robert Bork thought that there was risk of market power harms from the large Microsoft Windows platform a generation ago.[2] Where market power risks are proven, there is a strong case that data exclusivity raises concerns because of an artificial barrier to entry. It would only be if the benefits of centralized data control were to outweigh the deadweight loss from data restrictions that this would be untrue (though query how well the legal processes verify this).

Yet the latest proposals go well beyond this. A broad interoperability right amounts to “open season” for spending others’ data. This makes perfect sense in the European Union, where there is no large domestic technology platform, meaning that the data is essentially owned via foreign entities (mostly, the shareholders of successful U.S. and Chinese companies). It must be very tempting to run an industrial policy on the basis that “we’ll never be Google” and thus to embrace “sharing is caring” as to others’ data.

But this would transgress the warning from Friedman: would people optimize data collection if it is open to mandatory sharing even without proof of market power? It is deeply concerning that the EU’s DATA Act is accompanied by an infographic that suggests that coffee-machine data might be subject to mandatory sharing, to allow competition in services related to the data (e.g., sales of pods; spare-parts automation). There being no monopoly in coffee machines, this simply forces vertical disintegration of data collection and handling. Why put a data-collection system into a coffee maker at all, if it is to be a common resource? Friedman’s category (4) would apply: the data is taken and spent by another. There is no guarantee that there would be sensible decision making surrounding the resource.

It will be interesting to see how common-law jurisdictions approach this issue. At the risk of stating the obvious, the polity in continental Europe differs from that in the English-speaking democracies when it comes to whether the collective, or the individual, should be in the driving seat. A close read of the UK CMA’s Google commitments is interesting, in that paragraph 30 requires no self-preferencing in data collection and requires future data-handling systems to be designed with impacts on competition in mind. No doubt the CMA is seeking to prevent data-handling exclusivity on the basis that this prevents companies from using their data collection to compete. This is far from the EU DATA Act’s position in that it is certainly not a right to handle Google’s data: it is simply a right to continue to process one’s own data.

U.S. proposals are at an earlier stage. It would seem important, as a matter of principle, not to make arbitrary decisions about vertical integration in data systems, and to identify specific market-power concerns instead, in line with common-law approaches to antitrust.

It might be very attractive to the EU to spend others’ data on their behalf, but that does not make it right. Those working on the U.S. proposals would do well to ensure that there is a meaningful market-power gate to avoid unintended consequences.

Disclaimer: The author was engaged for expert advice relating to the UK CMA’s Privacy Sandbox case on behalf of the complainant Marketers for an Open Web.

[1] Milton Friedman, Free to Choose, 1980, pp.115-119

[2] Comments at the Yale Law School conference, Robert H. Bork’s influence on Antitrust Law, Sep. 27-28, 2013.

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.

DOJ’s Threatened Reign of Error: Proposed Criminal-Monopolization Prosecutions

Alden Abbott — 17 June 2022

The Biden administration’s antitrust reign of error continues apace. The U.S. Justice Department’s (DOJ) Antitrust Division has indicated in recent months that criminal prosecutions may be forthcoming under Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act, but refuses to provide any guidance regarding enforcement criteria.

Earlier this month, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Richard Powers stated that “there’s ample case law out there to help inform those who have concerns or questions” regarding Section 2 criminal enforcement, conveniently ignoring the fact that criminal Section 2 cases have not been brought in almost half a century. Needless to say, those ancient Section 2 cases (which are relatively few in number) antedate the modern era of economic reasoning in antitrust analysis. What’s more, unlike Section 1 price-fixing and market-division precedents, they yield no clear rule as to what constitutes criminal unilateral behavior. Thus, DOJ’s suggestion that old cases be consulted for guidance is disingenuous at best.

It follows that DOJ criminal-monopolization prosecutions would be sheer folly. They would spawn substantial confusion and uncertainty and disincentivize dynamic economic growth.

Aggressive unilateral business conduct is a key driver of the competitive process. It brings about “creative destruction” that transforms markets, generates innovation, and thereby drives economic growth. As such, one wants to be particularly careful before condemning such conduct on grounds that it is anticompetitive. Accordingly, error costs here are particularly high and damaging to economic prosperity.

Moreover, error costs in assessing unilateral conduct are more likely than in assessing joint conduct, because it is very hard to distinguish between procompetitive and anticompetitive single-firm conduct, as DOJ’s 2008 Report on Single Firm Conduct Under Section 2 explains (citations omitted):

Courts and commentators have long recognized the difficulty of determining what means of acquiring and maintaining monopoly power should be prohibited as improper. Although many different kinds of conduct have been found to violate section 2, “[d]efining the contours of this element … has been one of the most vexing questions in antitrust law.” As Judge Easterbrook observes, “Aggressive, competitive conduct by any firm, even one with market power, is beneficial to consumers. Courts should prize and encourage it. Aggressive, exclusionary conduct is deleterious to consumers, and courts should condemn it. The big problem lies in this: competitive and exclusionary conduct look alike.”
The problem is not simply one that demands drawing fine lines separating different categories of conduct; often the same conduct can both generate efficiencies and exclude competitors. Judicial experience and advances in economic thinking have demonstrated the potential procompetitive benefits of a wide variety of practices that were once viewed with suspicion when engaged in by firms with substantial market power. Exclusive dealing, for example, may be used to encourage beneficial investment by the parties while also making it more difficult for competitors to distribute their products.

If DOJ does choose to bring a Section 2 criminal case soon, would it target one of the major digital platforms? Notably, a U.S. House Judiciary Committee letter recently called on DOJ to launch a criminal investigation of Amazon (see here). Also, current Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan launched her academic career with an article focusing on Amazon’s “predatory pricing” and attacking the consumer welfare standard (see here).

Khan’s “analysis” has been totally discredited. As a trenchant scholarly article by Timothy Muris and Jonathan Nuechterlein explains:

[DOJ’s criminal Section 2 prosecution of A&P, begun in 1944,] bear[s] an eerie resemblance to attacks today on leading online innovators. Increasingly integrated and efficient retailers—first A&P, then “big box” brick-and-mortar stores, and now online retailers—have challenged traditional retail models by offering consumers lower prices and greater convenience. For decades, critics across the political spectrum have reacted to such disruption by urging Congress, the courts, and the enforcement agencies to stop these American success stories by revising antitrust doctrine to protect small businesses rather than the interests of consumers. Using antitrust law to punish pro-competitive behavior makes no more sense today than it did when the government attacked A&P for cutting consumers too good a deal on groceries.

Before bringing criminal Section 2 charges against Amazon, or any other “dominant” firm, DOJ leaders should read and absorb the sobering Muris and Nuechterlein assessment.

Finally, not only would DOJ Section 2 criminal prosecutions represent bad public policy—they would also undermine the rule of law. In a very thoughtful 2017 speech, then-Acting Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Andrew Finch succinctly summarized the importance of the rule of law in antitrust enforcement:

[H]ow do we administer the antitrust laws more rationally, accurately, expeditiously, and efficiently? … Law enforcement requires stability and continuity both in rules and in their application to specific cases.
Indeed, stability and continuity in enforcement are fundamental to the rule of law. The rule of law is about notice and reliance. When it is impossible to make reasonable predictions about how a law will be applied, or what the legal consequences of conduct will be, these important values are diminished. To call our antitrust regime a “rule of law” regime, we must enforce the law as written and as interpreted by the courts and advance change with careful thought.
The reliance fostered by stability and continuity has obvious economic benefits. Businesses invest, not only in innovation but in facilities, marketing, and personnel, and they do so based on the economic and legal environment they expect to face.
Of course, we want businesses to make those investments—and shape their overall conduct—in accordance with the antitrust laws. But to do so, they need to be able to rely on future application of those laws being largely consistent with their expectations. An antitrust enforcement regime with frequent changes is one that businesses cannot plan for, or one that they will plan for by avoiding certain kinds of investments.

Bringing criminal monopolization cases now, after a half-century of inaction, would be antithetical to the stability and continuity that underlie the rule of law. What’s worse, the failure to provide prosecutorial guidance would be squarely at odds with concerns of notice and reliance that inform the rule of law. As such, a DOJ decision to target firms for Section 2 criminal charges would offend the rule of law (and, sadly, follow the FTC ‘s recent example of flouting the rule of law, see here and here).

In sum, the case against criminal Section 2 prosecutions is overwhelming. At a time when DOJ is facing difficulties winning “slam dunk” criminal Section 1 prosecutions targeting facially anticompetitive joint conduct (see here, here, and here), the notion that it would criminally pursue unilateral conduct that may generate substantial efficiencies is ludicrous. Hopefully, DOJ leadership will come to its senses and drop any and all plans to bring criminal Section 2 cases.

The Market Challenge to Populist Antitrust

Jonathan M. Barnett — 16 May 2022

The wave of populist antitrust that has been embraced by regulators and legislators in the United States, United Kingdom, European Union, and other jurisdictions rests on the assumption that currently dominant platforms occupy entrenched positions that only government intervention can dislodge. Following this view, Facebook will forever dominate social networking, Amazon will forever dominate cloud computing, Uber and Lyft will forever dominate ridesharing, and Amazon and Netflix will forever dominate streaming. This assumption of platform invincibility is so well-established that some policymakers advocate significant interventions without making any meaningful inquiry into whether a seemingly dominant platform actually exercises market power.

Yet this assumption is not supported by historical patterns in platform markets. It is true that network effects drive platform markets toward “winner-take-most” outcomes. But the winner is often toppled quickly and without much warning. There is no shortage of examples.

In 2007, a columnist in The Guardian observed that “it may already be too late for competitors to dislodge MySpace” and quoted an economist as authority for the proposition that “MySpace is well on the way to becoming … a natural monopoly.” About one year later, Facebook had overtaken MySpace “monopoly” in the social-networking market. Similarly, it was once thought that Blackberry would forever dominate the mobile-communications device market, eBay would always dominate the online e-commerce market, and AOL would always dominate the internet-service-portal market (a market that no longer even exists). The list of digital dinosaurs could go on.

All those tech leaders were challenged by entrants and descended into irrelevance (or reduced relevance, in eBay’s case). This occurred through the force of competition, not government intervention.

**Why This Time is Probably Not Different**

Given this long line of market precedents, current legislative and regulatory efforts to “restore” competition through extensive intervention in digital-platform markets require that we assume that “this time is different.” Just as that slogan has been repeatedly rebutted in the financial markets, so too is it likely to be rebutted in platform markets.

There is already supporting evidence.

In the cloud market, Amazon’s AWS now faces vigorous competition from Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. In the streaming market, Amazon and Netflix face stiff competition from Disney+ and Apple TV+, just to name a few well-resourced rivals. In the social-networking market, Facebook now competes head-to-head with TikTok and seems to be losing. The market power once commonly attributed to leading food-delivery platforms such as Grubhub, UberEats, and DoorDash is implausible after persistent losses in most cases, and the continuous entry of new services into a rich variety of local and product-market niches.

Those who have advocated antitrust intervention on a fast-track schedule may remain unconvinced by these inconvenient facts. But the market is not.

Investors have already recognized Netflix’s vulnerability to competition, as reflected by a 35% fall in its stock price on April 20 and a decline of more than 60% over the past 12 months. Meta, Facebook’s parent, also experienced a reappraisal, falling more than 26% on Feb. 3 and more than 35% in the past 12 months. Uber, the pioneer of the ridesharing market, has declined by almost 50% over the past 12 months, while Lyft, its principal rival, has lost more than 60% of its value. These price freefalls suggest that antitrust populists may be pursuing solutions to a problem that market forces are already starting to address.

The Forgotten Curse of the Incumbent

For some commentators, the sharp downturn in the fortunes of the so-called “Big Tech” firms would not come as a surprise.

It has long been observed by some scholars and courts that a dominant firm “carries the seeds of its own destruction”—a phrase used by then-professor and later-Judge Richard Posner, writing in the University of Chicago Law Review in 1971. The reason: a dominant firm is liable to exhibit high prices, mediocre quality, or lackluster innovation, which then invites entry by more adept challengers. However, this view has been dismissed as outdated in digital-platform markets, where incumbents are purportedly protected by network effects and switching costs that make it difficult for entrants to attract users. Depending on the set of assumptions selected by an economic modeler, each contingency is equally plausible in theory.

The plunging values of leading platforms supplies real-world evidence that favors the self-correction hypothesis. It is often overlooked that network effects can work in both directions, resulting in a precipitous fall from market leader to laggard. Once users start abandoning a dominant platform for a new competitor, network effects operating in reverse can cause a “run for the exits” that leaves the leader with little time to recover. Just ask Nokia, the world’s leading (and seemingly unbeatable) smartphone brand until the Apple iPhone came along.

Why Market Self-Correction Outperforms Regulatory Correction

Market self-correction inherently outperforms regulatory correction: it operates far more rapidly and relies on consumer preferences to reallocate market leadership—a result perfectly consistent with antitrust’s mission to preserve “competition on the merits.” In contrast, policymakers can misdiagnose the competitive effects of business practices; are susceptible to the influence of private interests (especially those that are unable to compete on the merits); and often mispredict the market’s future trajectory. For Exhibit A, see the protracted antitrust litigation by the U.S. Department against IBM, which started in 1975 and ended in withdrawal of the suit in 1982. Given the launch of the Apple II in 1977, the IBM PC in 1981, and the entry of multiple “PC clones,” the forces of creative destruction swiftly displaced IBM from market leadership in the computing industry.

Regulators and legislators around the world have emphasized the urgency of taking dramatic action to correct claimed market failures in digital environments, casting aside prudential concerns over the consequences if any such failure proves to be illusory or temporary.

But the costs of regulatory failure can be significant and long-lasting. Markets must operate under unnecessary compliance burdens that are difficult to modify. Regulators’ enforcement resources are diverted, and businesses are barred from adopting practices that would benefit consumers. In particular, proposed breakup remedies advocated by some policymakers would undermine the scale economies that have enabled platforms to push down prices, an important consideration in a time of accelerating inflation.

Conclusion

The high concentration levels and certain business practices in digital-platform markets certainly raise important concerns as a matter of antitrust (as well as privacy, intellectual property, and other bodies of) law. These concerns merit scrutiny and may necessitate appropriately targeted interventions. Yet, any policy steps should be anchored in the factually grounded analysis that has characterized decades of regulatory and judicial action to implement the antitrust laws with appropriate care. Abandoning this nuanced framework for a blunt approach based on reflexive assumptions of market power is likely to undermine, rather than promote, the public interest in competitive markets.

In Amazon, Antitrust & Competition, European Union, Facebook, International, Platforms, Truth on the Market, Uber, United Kingdom Amazon, competition, dynamic competition, facebook, network effects, platforms, Richard Posner, social media, stock market

The ABA’s Antitrust Law Section Sounds the Alarm on Klobuchar-Grassley

Lazar Radic and Geoffrey Manne — 12 May 2022

Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa)—cosponsors of the American Innovation Online and Choice Act, which seeks to “rein in” tech companies like Apple, Google, Meta, and Amazon—contend that “everyone acknowledges the problems posed by dominant online platforms.”

In their framing, it is simply an acknowledged fact that U.S. antitrust law has not kept pace with developments in the digital sector, allowing a handful of Big Tech firms to exploit consumers and foreclose competitors from the market. To address the issue, the senators’ bill would bar “covered platforms” from engaging in a raft of conduct, including self-preferencing, tying, and limiting interoperability with competitors’ products.

That’s what makes the open letter to Congress published late last month by the usually staid American Bar Association’s (ABA) Antitrust Law Section so eye-opening. The letter is nothing short of a searing critique of the legislation, which the section finds to be poorly written, vague, and departing from established antitrust-law principles.

The ABA, of course, has a reputation as an independent, highly professional, and heterogenous group. The antitrust section’s membership includes not only in-house corporate counsel, but lawyers from nonprofits, consulting firms, federal and state agencies, judges, and legal academics. Given this context, the comments must be read as a high-level judgment that recent legislative and regulatory efforts to “discipline” tech fall outside the legal mainstream and would come at the cost of established antitrust principles, legal precedent, transparency, sound economic analysis, and ultimately consumer welfare.

The Antitrust Section’s Comments

As the ABA Antitrust Law Section observes:

The Section has long supported the evolution of antitrust law to keep pace with evolving circumstances, economic theory, and empirical evidence. Here, however, the Section is concerned that the Bill, as written, departs in some respects from accepted principles of competition law and in so doing risks causing unpredicted and unintended consequences.

Broadly speaking, the section’s criticisms fall into two interrelated categories. The first relates to deviations from antitrust orthodoxy and the principles that guide enforcement. The second is a critique of the AICOA’s overly broad language and ambiguous terminology.

Departing from established antitrust-law principles

Substantively, the overarching concern expressed by the ABA Antitrust Law Section is that AICOA departs from the traditional role of antitrust law, which is to protect the competitive process, rather than choosing to favor some competitors at the expense of others. Indeed, the section’s open letter observes that, out of the 10 categories of prohibited conduct spelled out in the legislation, only three require a “material harm to competition.”

Take, for instance, the prohibition on “discriminatory” conduct. As it stands, the bill’s language does not require a showing of harm to the competitive process. It instead appears to enshrine a freestanding prohibition of discrimination. The bill targets tying practices that are already prohibited by U.S. antitrust law, but while similarly eschewing the traditional required showings of market power and harm to the competitive process. The same can be said, mutatis mutandis, for “self-preferencing” and the “unfair” treatment of competitors.

The problem, the section’s letter to Congress argues, is not only that this increases the teleological chasm between AICOA and the overarching goals and principles of antitrust law, but that it can also easily lead to harmful unintended consequences. For instance, as the ABA Antitrust Law Section previously observed in comments to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, a prohibition of pricing discrimination can limit the extent of discounting generally. Similarly, self-preferencing conduct on a platform can be welfare-enhancing, while forced interoperability—which is also contemplated by AICOA—can increase prices for consumers and dampen incentives to innovate. Furthermore, some of these blanket prohibitions are arguably at loggerheads with established antitrust doctrine, such as in, e.g., Trinko, which established that even monopolists are generally free to decide with whom they will deal.

Arguably, the reason why the Klobuchar-Grassley bill can so seamlessly exclude or redraw such a central element of antitrust law as competitive harm is because it deliberately chooses to ignore another, preceding one. Namely, the bill omits market power as a requirement for a finding of infringement or for the legislation’s equally crucial designation as a “covered platform.” It instead prescribes size metrics—number of users, market capitalization—to define which platforms are subject to intervention. Such definitions cast an overly wide net that can potentially capture consumer-facing conduct that doesn’t have the potential to harm competition at all.

It is precisely for this reason that existing antitrust laws are tethered to market power—i.e., because it long has been recognized that only companies with market power can harm competition. As John B. Kirkwood of Seattle University School of Law has written:

Market power’s pivotal role is clear…This concept is central to antitrust because it distinguishes firms that can harm competition and consumers from those that cannot.

In response to the above, the ABA Antitrust Law Section (reasonably) urges Congress explicitly to require an effects-based showing of harm to the competitive process as a prerequisite for all 10 of the infringements contemplated in the AICOA. This also means disclaiming generalized prohibitions of “discrimination” and of “unfairness” and replacing blanket prohibitions (such as the one for self-preferencing) with measured case-by-case analysis.

Opaque language for opaque ideas

Another underlying issue is that the Klobuchar-Grassley bill is shot through with indeterminate language and fuzzy concepts that have no clear limiting principles. For instance, in order either to establish liability or to mount a successful defense to an alleged violation, the bill relies heavily on inherently amorphous terms such as “fairness,” “preferencing,” and “materiality,” or the “intrinsic” value of a product. But as the ABA Antitrust Law Section letter rightly observes, these concepts are not defined in the bill, nor by existing antitrust case law. As such, they inject variability and indeterminacy into how the legislation would be administered.

Moreover, it is also unclear how some incommensurable concepts will be weighed against each other. For example, how would concerns about safety and security be weighed against prohibitions on self-preferencing or requirements for interoperability? What is a “core function” and when would the law determine it has been sufficiently “enhanced” or “maintained”—requirements the law sets out to exempt certain otherwise prohibited behavior? The lack of linguistic and conceptual clarity not only explodes legal certainty, but also invites judicial second-guessing into the operation of business decisions, something against which the U.S. Supreme Court has long warned.

Finally, the bill’s choice of language and recent amendments to its terminology seem to confirm the dynamic discussed in the previous section. Most notably, the latest version of AICOA replaces earlier language invoking “harm to the competitive process” with “material harm to competition.” As the ABA Antitrust Law Section observes, this “suggests a shift away from protecting the competitive process towards protecting individual competitors.” Indeed, “material harm to competition” deviates from established categories such as “undue restraint of trade” or “substantial lessening of competition,” which have a clear focus on the competitive process. As a result, it is not unreasonable to expect that the new terminology might be interpreted as meaning that the actionable standard is material harm to competitors.

In its letter, the antitrust section urges Congress not only to define more clearly the novel terminology used in the bill, but also to do so in a manner consistent with existing antitrust law. Indeed:

The Section further recommends that these definitions direct attention to analysis consistent with antitrust principles: effects-based inquiries concerned with harm to the competitive process, not merely harm to particular competitors

Conclusion

The AICOA is a poorly written, misguided, and rushed piece of regulation that contravenes both basic antitrust-law principles and mainstream economic insights in the pursuit of a pre-established populist political goal: punishing the success of tech companies. If left uncorrected by Congress, these mistakes could have potentially far-reaching consequences for innovation in digital markets and for consumer welfare. They could also set antitrust law on a regressive course back toward a policy of picking winners and losers.

U.S. Senate Self-Preferencing Bill Offers Perfect Recipe for Regulatory Overreach

Sam Bowman — 22 December 2021

Even as delivery services work to ship all of those last-minute Christmas presents that consumers bought this season from digital platforms and other e-commerce sites, the U.S. House and Senate are contemplating Grinch-like legislation that looks to stop or limit how Big Tech companies can “self-preference” or “discriminate” on their platforms.

A platform “self-preferences” when it blends various services into the delivery of a given product in ways that third parties couldn’t do themselves. For example, Google self-preferences when it puts a Google Shopping box at the top of a Search page for Adidas sneakers. Amazon self-preferences when it offers its own AmazonBasics USB cables alongside those offered by Apple or Anker. Costco’s placement of its own Kirkland brand of paper towels on store shelves can also be a form of self-preferencing.

Such purportedly “discriminatory” behavior constitutes much of what platforms are designed to do. Virtually every platform that offers a suite of products and services will combine them in ways that users find helpful, even if competitors find it infuriating. It surely doesn’t help Yelp if Google Search users can see a Maps results box next to a search for showtimes at a local cinema. It doesn’t help other manufacturers of charging cables if Amazon sells a cheaper version under a brand that consumers trust. But do consumers really care about Yelp or Apple’s revenues, when all they want are relevant search results and less expensive products?

Until now, competition authorities have judged this type of conduct under the consumer welfare standard: does it hurt consumers in the long run, or does it help them? This test does seek to evaluate whether the conduct deprives consumers of choice by foreclosing rivals, which could ultimately allow the platform to exploit its customers. But it doesn’t treat harm to competitors—in the form of reduced traffic and profits for Yelp, for example—as a problem in and of itself.

“Non-discrimination” bills introduced this year in both the House and Senate aim to change that, but they would do so in ways that differ in important respects.

The House bill would impose a blanket ban on virtually all “discrimination” by platforms. This means that even such benign behavior as Facebook linking to Facebook Marketplace on its homepage would become presumptively unlawful. The measure would, as I’ve written before, break a lot of the Internet as we know it, but it has the virtue of being explicit and clear about its effects.

The Senate bill is, in this sense, a lot more circumspect. Instead of a blanket ban, it would prohibit what the bill refers to as “unfair” discrimination that “materially harm[s] competition on the covered platform,” with a carve-out exception for discrimination that was “necessary” to maintain or enhance the “core functionality” of the platform. In theory, this would avoid a lot of the really crazy effects of the House bill. Apple likely still could, for example, pre-install a Camera app on the iPhone.

But this greater degree of reasonableness comes at the price of ambiguity. The bill does not define “unfair discrimination,” nor what it would mean for something to be “necessary” to improve the core functionality of a platform. Faced with this ambiguity, companies would be wise to be overly cautious, given the steep penalties they would face for conduct found to be “unfair”: 15% of total U.S. revenues earned during the period when the conduct was ongoing. That’s a lot of money to risk over a single feature!

Also unlike the House legislation, the Senate bill would not create a private right of action, thereby limiting litigation to enforce the bill’s terms to actions brought by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), U.S. Justice Department (DOJ), or state attorneys general.

Put together, these features create the perfect recipe for extensive discretionary power held by a handful of agencies. With such vague criteria and such massive penalties for lawbreaking, the mere threat of a lawsuit could force a company to change its behavior. The rules are so murky that companies might even be threatened with a lawsuit over conduct in one area in order to make them change their behavior in another.

It’s hardly unprecedented for powers like this to be misused. During the Obama administration, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was alleged to have targeted conservative groups for investigation, for which the agency eventually had to apologize (and settle a lawsuit brought by some of the targeted groups). More than a decade ago, the Bank Secrecy Act was used to uncover then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s involvement in an international prostitution ring. Back in 2008, the British government used anti-terrorism powers to seize the assets of some Icelandic banks that had become insolvent and couldn’t repay their British depositors. To this day, municipal governments in Britain use anti-terrorism powers to investigate things like illegal waste dumping and people who wrongly park in spots reserved for the disabled.

The FTC itself has a history of abusing its authority. As Commissioners Noah Phillips and Christine Wilson remind us, the commission was nearly shut down in the 1970s after trying to use its powers to “protect” children from seeing ads for sugary foods, interpreting its consumer-protection mandate so broadly that it considered tooth decay as falling within its scope.

As I’ve written before, both Chair Lina Khan and Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter appear to believe that the FTC ought to take a broad vision of its goals. Slaughter has argued that antitrust ought to be “antiracist.” Khan believes that the “the dispersion of political and economic control” is the proper goal of antitrust, not consumer welfare or some other economic goal.

Khan in particular does not appear especially bound by the usual norms that might constrain this sort of regulatory overreach. In recent weeks, she has pushed through contentious decisions by relying on more than 20 “zombie votes” cast by former Commissioner Rohit Chopra on the final day before he left the agency. While it has been FTC policy since 1984 to count votes cast by departed commissioners unless they are superseded by their successors, Khan’s FTC has invoked this relatively obscure rule to swing more decisions than every single predecessor combined.

Thus, while the Senate bill may avoid immediately breaking large portions of the Internet in ways the House bill would, it would instead place massive discretionary powers into the hands of authorities who have expansive views about the goals those powers ought to be used to pursue.

This ought to be concerning to anyone who disapproves of public policy being made by unelected bureaucrats, rather than the people’s chosen representatives. If Republicans find an empowered Khan-led FTC worrying today, surely Democrats ought to feel the same about an FTC run by Trump-style appointees in a few years. Both sides may come to regret creating an agency with so much unchecked power.

5 Thoughts on the Senate’s Proposed Platform Self-Preferencing Ban

Sam Bowman & Geoffrey Manne — 14 October 2021

A bipartisan group of senators unveiled legislation today that would dramatically curtail the ability of online platforms to “self-preference” their own services—for example, when Apple pre-installs its own Weather or Podcasts apps on the iPhone, giving it an advantage that independent apps don’t have. The measure accompanies a House bill that included similar provisions, with some changes.

1. The Senate bill closely resembles the House version, and the small improvements will probably not amount to much in practice.

The major substantive changes we have seen between the House bill and the Senate version are:

Violations in Section 2(a) have been modified to refer only to conduct that “unfairly” preferences, limits, or discriminates between the platform’s products and others, and that “materially harm[s] competition on the covered platform,” rather than banning all preferencing, limits, or discrimination.
The evidentiary burden required throughout the bill has been changed from “clear and convincing” to a “preponderance of evidence” (in other words, greater than 50%).
An affirmative defense has been added to permit a platform to escape liability if it can establish that challenged conduct that “was narrowly tailored, was nonpretextual, and was necessary to… maintain or enhance the core functionality of the covered platform.”
The minimum market capitalization for “covered platforms” has been lowered from $600 billion to $550 billion.
The Senate bill would assess fines of 15% of revenues from the period during which the conduct occurred, in contrast with the House bill, which set fines equal to the greater of either 15% of prior-year revenues or 30% of revenues from the period during which the conduct occurred.
Unlike the House bill, the Senate bill does not create a private right of action. Only the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ), Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and state attorneys-generals could bring enforcement actions on the basis of the bill.

Item one here certainly mitigates the most extreme risks of the House bill, which was drafted, bizarrely, to ban all “preferencing” or “discrimination” by platforms. If that were made law, it could literally have broken much of the Internet. The softened language reduces that risk somewhat.

However, Section 2(b), which lists types of conduct that would presumptively establish a violation under Section 2(a), is largely unchanged. As outlined here, this would amount to a broad ban on a wide swath of beneficial conduct. And “unfair” and “material” are notoriously slippery concepts. As a practical matter, their inclusion here may not significantly alter the course of enforcement under the Senate legislation from what would ensue under the House version.

Item three, which allows challenged conduct to be defended if it is “necessary to… maintain or enhance the core functionality of the covered platform,” may also protect some conduct. But because the bill requires companies to prove that challenged conduct is not only beneficial, but necessary to realize those benefits, it effectively implements a “guilty until proven innocent” standard that is likely to prove impossible to meet. The threat of permanent injunctions and enormous fines will mean that, in many cases, companies simply won’t be able to justify the expense of endeavoring to improve even the “core functionality” of their platforms in any way that could trigger the bill’s liability provisions. Thus, again, as a practical matter, the difference between the Senate and House bills may be only superficial.

The effect of this will likely be to diminish product innovation in these areas, because companies could not know in advance whether the benefits of doing so would be worth the legal risk. We have previously highlighted existing conduct that may be lost if a bill like this passes, such as pre-installation of apps or embedding maps and other “rich” results in boxes on search engine results pages. But the biggest loss may be things we don’t even know about yet, that just never happen because the reward from experimentation is not worth the risk of being found to be “discriminating” against a competitor.

We dove into the House bill in Breaking Down the American Choice and Innovation Online Act and Breaking Down House Democrats’ Forthcoming Competition Bills.

2. The prohibition on “unfair self-preferencing” is vague and expansive and will make Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple’s products worse. Consumers don’t want digital platforms to be dumb pipes, or to act like a telephone network or sewer system. The Internet is filled with a superabundance of information and options, as well as a host of malicious actors. Good digital platforms act as middlemen, sorting information in useful ways and taking on some of the risk that exists when, inevitably, we end up doing business with untrustworthy actors.

When users have the choice, they tend to prefer platforms that do quite a bit of “discrimination”—that is, favoring some sellers over others, or offering their own related products or services through the platform. Most people prefer Amazon to eBay because eBay is chaotic and riskier to use.

Competitors that decry self-preferencing by the largest platforms—integrating two different products with each other, like putting a maps box showing only the search engine’s own maps on a search engine results page—argue that the conduct is enabled only by a platform’s market dominance and does not benefit consumers.

Yet these companies often do exactly the same thing in their own products, regardless of whether they have market power. Yelp includes a map on its search results page, not just restaurant listings. DuckDuckGo does the same. If these companies offer these features, it is presumably because they think their users want such results. It seems perfectly plausible that Google does the same because it thinks its users—literally the same users, in most cases—also want them.

Fundamentally, and as we discuss in Against the Vertical Disrcimination Presumption, there is simply no sound basis to enact such a bill (even in a slightly improved version):

The notion that self-preferencing by platforms is harmful to innovation is entirely speculative. Moreover, it is flatly contrary to a range of studies showing that the opposite is likely true. In reality, platform competition is more complicated than simple theories of vertical discrimination would have it, and there is certainly no basis for a presumption of harm.

We discussed self-preferencing further in Platform Self-Preferencing Can Be Good for Consumers and Even Competitors, and showed that platform “discrimination” is often what consumers want from digital platforms in On the Origin of Platforms: An Evolutionary Perspective.

3. The bill massively empowers an FTC that seems intent to use antitrust to achieve political goals. The House bill would enable competitors to pepper covered platforms with frivolous lawsuits. The bill’s sponsors presumably hope that removing the private right of action will help to avoid that. But the bill still leaves intact a much more serious risk to the rule of law: the bill’s provisions are so broad that federal antitrust regulators will have enormous discretion over which cases they take.

This means that whoever is running the FTC and DOJ will be able to threaten covered platforms with a broad array of lawsuits, potentially to influence or control their conduct in other, unrelated areas. While some supporters of the bill regard this as a positive, most antitrust watchers would greet this power with much greater skepticism. Fundamentally, both bills grant antitrust enforcers wildly broad powers to pursue goals unrelated to competition. FTC Chair Lina Khan has, for example, argued that “the dispersion of political and economic control” ought to be antitrust’s goal. Commissioner Rebecca Kelly-Slaughter has argued that antitrust should be “antiracist”.

Whatever the desirability of these goals, the broad discretionary authority the bills confer on the antitrust agencies means that individual commissioners may have significantly greater scope to pursue the goals that they believe to be right, rather than Congress.

See discussions of this point at What Lina Khan’s Appointment Means for the House Antitrust Bills, Republicans Should Tread Carefully as They Consider ‘Solutions’ to Big Tech, The Illiberal Vision of Neo-Brandeisian Antitrust, and Alden Abbott’s discussion of FTC Antitrust Enforcement and the Rule of Law.

4. The bill adopts European principles of competition regulation. These are, to put it mildly, not obviously conducive to the sort of innovation and business growth that Americans may expect. Europe has no tech giants of its own, a condition that shows little sign of changing. Apple, alone, is worth as much as the top 30 companies in Germany’s DAX index, and the top 40 in France’s CAC index. Landmark European competition cases have seen Google fined for embedding Shopping results in the Search page—not because it hurt consumers, but because it hurt competing price –comparison websites.

A fundamental difference between American and European competition regimes is that the U.S. system is far more friendly to businesses that obtain dominant market positions because they have offered better products more cheaply. Under the American system, successful businesses are normally given broad scope to charge high prices and refuse to deal with competitors. This helps to increase the rewards and incentive to innovate and invest in order to obtain that strong market position. The European model is far more burdensome.

The Senate bill adopts a European approach to refusals to deal—the same approach that led the European Commission to fine Microsoft for including Windows Media Player with Windows—and applies it across Big Tech broadly. Adopting this kind of approach may end up undermining elements of U.S. law that support innovation and growth.

For more, see How US and EU Competition Law Differ.

5. The proposals are based on a misunderstanding of the state of competition in the American economy, and of antitrust enforcement. It is widely believed that the U.S. economy has seen diminished competition. This is mistaken, particularly with respect to digital markets. Apparent rises in market concentration and profit margins disappear when we look more closely: local-level concentration is falling even as national-level concentration is rising, driven by more efficient chains setting up more stores in areas that were previously served by only one or two firms.

And markup rises largely disappear after accounting for fixed costs like R&D and marketing.

Where profits are rising, in areas like manufacturing, it appears to be mainly driven by increased productivity, not higher prices. Real prices have not risen in line with markups. Where profitability has increased, it has been mainly driven by falling costs.

Nor have the number of antitrust cases brought by federal antitrust agencies fallen. The likelihood of a merger being challenged more than doubled between 1979 and 2017. And there is little reason to believe that the deterrent effect of antitrust has weakened. Many critics of Big Tech have decided that there must be a problem and have worked backwards from that conclusion, selecting whatever evidence supports it and ignoring the evidence that does not. The consequence of such motivated reasoning is bills like this.

See Geoff’s April 2020 written testimony to the House Judiciary Investigation Into Competition in Digital Markets here.

Why There Needs to Be More, not Less, Consolidation in Video Streaming

Dirk Auer — 12 October 2021

*Still from* **Squid Game***, Netflix and Siren Pictures Inc., 2021*

Recent commentary on the proposed merger between WarnerMedia and Discovery, as well as Amazon’s acquisition of MGM, often has included the suggestion that the online content-creation and video-streaming markets are excessively consolidated, or that they will become so absent regulatory intervention. For example, in a recent letter to the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ), the American Antitrust Institute and Public Knowledge opine that:

Slow and inadequate oversight risks the streaming market going the same route as cable—where consumers have little power, few options, and where consolidation and concentration reign supreme. A number of threats to competition are clear, as discussed in this section, including: (1) market power issues surrounding content and (2) the role of platforms in “gatekeeping” to limit competition.

But the AAI/PK assessment overlooks key facts about the video-streaming industry, some of which suggest that, if anything, these markets currently suffer from too much fragmentation.

The problem is well-known: any individual video-streaming service will offer only a fraction of the content that viewers want, but budget constraints limit the number of services that a household can afford to subscribe to. It may be counterintuitive, but consolidation in the market for video-streaming can solve both problems at once.

One subscription is not enough

Surveys find that U.S. households currently maintain, on average, four video-streaming subscriptions. This explains why even critics concede that a plethora of streaming services compete for consumer eyeballs. For instance, the AAI and PK point out that:

Today, every major media company realizes the value of streaming and a bevy of services have sprung up to offer different catalogues of content.
These companies have challenged the market leader, Netflix and include: Prime Video (2006), Hulu (2007), Paramount+ (2014), ESPN+ (2018), Disney+ (2019), Apple TV+ (2019), HBO Max (2020), Peacock (2020), and Discovery+ (2021).

With content scattered across several platforms, multiple subscriptions are the only way for households to access all (or most) of the programs they desire. Indeed, other than price, library sizes and the availability of exclusive content are reportedly the main drivers of consumer purchase decisions.

Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with the current equilibrium in which consumers multi-home across multiple platforms. One potential explanation is demand for high-quality exclusive content, which requires tremendous investment to develop and promote. Production costs for TV series routinely run in the tens of millions of dollars per episode (see here and here). Economic theory predicts these relationship-specific investments made by both producers and distributors will cause producers to opt for exclusive distribution or vertical integration. The most sought-after content is thus exclusive to each platform. In other words, exclusivity is likely the price that users must pay to ensure that high-quality entertainment continues to be produced.

But while this paradigm has many strengths, the ensuing fragmentation can be detrimental to consumers, as this may lead to double marginalization or mundane issues like subscription fatigue. Consolidation can be a solution to both.

Substitutes, complements, or unrelated?

As Hal Varian explains in his seminal book, the relationship between two goods can range among three extremes: perfect substitutes (i.e., two goods are perfectly interchangeable); perfect complements (i.e., there is no value to owning one good without the other); or goods that exist in independent markets (i.e., the price of one good does not affect demand for the other).

These distinctions are critical when it comes to market concentration. All else equal—which is obviously not the case in reality—increased concentration leads to lower prices for complements, and higher prices for substitutes. Finally, if demand for two goods is unrelated, then bringing them under common ownership should not affect their price.

To at least some extent, streaming services should be seen as complements rather than substitutes—or, at least, as services with unrelated demand. If they were perfect substitutes, consumers would be indifferent between two Netflix subscriptions or one Netflix plan and one Amazon Prime plan. That is obviously not the case. Nor are they perfect complements, which would mean that Netflix is worthless without Amazon Prime, Disney+, and other services.

However, there is reason to believe there exists some complementarity between streaming services, or at least that demand for them is independent. Most consumers subscribe to multiple services, and almost no one subscribes to the same service twice:

This assertion is also supported by the ubiquitous bundling of subscriptions in the cable distribution industry, which also has recently been seen in video-streaming markets. For example, in the United States, Disney+ can be purchased in a bundle with Hulu and ESPN+.

The key question is: is each service more valuable, less valuable, or as valuable in isolation than they are when bundled? If households place some additional value on having a complete video offering (one that includes child entertainment, sports, more mature content, etc.), and if they value the convenience of accessing more of their content via a single app, then we can infer these services are to some extent complementary.

Finally, it is worth noting that any complementarity between these services would be largely endogenous. If the industry suddenly switched to a paradigm of non-exclusive content—as is broadly the case for audio streaming—the above analysis would be altered (though, as explained above, such a move would likely be detrimental to users). Streaming services would become substitutes if they offered identical catalogues.

In short, the extent to which streaming services are complements ultimately boils down to an empirical question that may fluctuate with industry practices. As things stand, there is reason to believe that these services feature some complementarities, or at least that demand for them is independent. In turn, this suggests that further consolidation within the industry would not lead to price increases and may even reduce them.

Consolidation can enable price discrimination

It is well-established that bundling entertainment goods can enable firms to better engage in price discrimination, often increasing output and reducing deadweight loss in the process.

Take George Stigler’s famous explanation for the practice of “block booking,” in which movie studios sold multiple films to independent movie theatres as a unit. Stigler assumes the underlying goods are neither substitutes nor complements:

Stigler, George J. (1963) “United States v. Loew’s Inc.: A Note on Block-Booking,” *Supreme Court Review*: Vol. 1963 : No. 1 , Article 2.

The upshot is that, when consumer tastes for content are idiosyncratic—as is almost certainly the case for movies and television series, movies—it can counterintuitively make sense to sell differing content as a bundle. In doing so, the distributor avoids pricing consumers out of the content upon which they place a lower value. Moreover, this solution is more efficient than price discriminating on an unbundled basis, as doing so would require far more information on the seller’s part and would be vulnerable to arbitrage.

In short, bundling enables each consumer to access a much wider variety of content. This, in turn, provides a powerful rationale for mergers in the video-streaming space—particularly where they can bring together varied content libraries. Put differently, it cuts in favor of more, not less, concentration in video-streaming markets (at least, up to a certain point).

Finally, a wide array of scale-related economies further support the case for concentration in video-streaming markets. These include potential economies of scale, network effects, and reduced transaction costs.

The simplest of these ideas is that the cost of video streaming may decrease at the margin (i.e., serving each marginal viewer might be cheaper than the previous one). In other words, mergers of video-streaming services mayenable platforms to operate at a more efficient scale. There has notably been some discussion of whether Netflix benefits from scale economies of this sort. But this is, of course, ultimately an empirical question. As I have written with Geoffrey Manne, we should not assume that this is the case for all digital platforms, or that these increasing returns are present at all ranges of output.

Likewise, the fact that content can earn greater revenues by reaching a wider audience (or a greater number of small niches) may increase a producer’s incentive to create high-quality content. For example, Netflix’s recent hit series Squid Game reportedly cost $16.8 million to produce a total of nine episodes. This is significant for a Korean-language thriller. These expenditures were likely only possible because of Netflix’s vast network of viewers. Video-streaming mergers can jump-start these effects by bringing previously fragmented audiences onto a single platform.

Finally, operating at a larger scale may enable firms and consumers to economize on various transaction and search costs. For instance, consumers don’t need to manage several subscriptions, and searching for content is easier within a single ecosystem.

Conclusion

In short, critics could hardly be more wrong in assuming that consolidation in the video-streaming industry will necessarily harm consumers. To the contrary, these mergers should be presumptively welcomed because, to a first approximation, they are likely to engender lower prices and reduce deadweight loss.

Critics routinely draw parallels between video streaming and the consolidation that previously moved through the cable industry. They suggest these events as evidence that consolidation was (and still is) inefficient and exploitative of consumers. As AAI and PK frame it:

Moreover, given the broader competition challenges that reside in those markets, and the lessons learned from a failure to ensure competition in the traditional MVPD markets, enforcers should be particularly vigilant.

But while it might not have been ideal for all consumers, the comparatively laissez-faire approach to competition in the cable industry arguably facilitated the United States’ emergence as a global leader for TV programming. We are now witnessing what appears to be a similar trend in the online video-streaming market.

This is mostly a good thing. While a single streaming service might not be the optimal industry configuration from a welfare standpoint, it would be equally misguided to assume that fragmentation necessarily benefits consumers. In fact, as argued throughout this piece, there are important reasons to believe that the status quo—with at least 10 significant players—is too fragmented and that consumers would benefit from additional consolidation.

Breaking Down the American Choice and Innovation Online Act

Sam Bowman — 1 September 2021

The American Choice and Innovation Online Act (previously called the Platform Anti-Monopoly Act), introduced earlier this summer by U.S. Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), would significantly change the nature of digital platforms and, with them, the internet itself. Taken together, the bill’s provisions would turn platforms into passive intermediaries, undermining many of the features that make them valuable to consumers. This seems likely to remain the case even after potential revisions intended to minimize the bill’s unintended consequences.

In its current form, the bill is split into two parts that each is dangerous in its own right. The first, Section 2(a), would prohibit almost any kind of “discrimination” by platforms. Because it is so open-ended, lawmakers might end up removing it in favor of the nominally more focused provisions of Section 2(b), which prohibit certain named conduct. But despite being more specific, this section of the bill is incredibly far-reaching and would effectively ban swaths of essential services.

I will address the potential effects of these sections point-by-point, but both elements of the bill suffer from the same problem: a misguided assumption that “discrimination” by platforms is necessarily bad from a competition and consumer welfare point of view. On the contrary, this conduct is often exactly what consumers want from platforms, since it helps to bring order and legibility to otherwise-unwieldy parts of the Internet. Prohibiting it, as both main parts of the bill do, would make the Internet harder to use and less competitive.

Section 2(a)

Section 2(a) essentially prohibits any behavior by a covered platform that would advantage that platform’s services over any others that also uses that platform; it characterizes this preferencing as “discrimination.”

As we wrote when the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust bills were first announced, this prohibition on “discrimination” is so broad that, if it made it into law, it would prevent platforms from excluding or disadvantaging any product of another business that uses the platform or advantaging their own products over those of their competitors.

The underlying assumption here is that platforms should be like telephone networks: providing a way for different sides of a market to communicate with each other, but doing little more than that. When platforms do do more—for example, manipulating search results to favor certain businesses or to give their own products prominence —it is seen as exploitative “leveraging.”

But consumers often want platforms to be more than just a telephone network or directory, because digital markets would be very difficult to navigate without some degree of “discrimination” between sellers. The Internet is so vast and sellers are often so anonymous that any assistance which helps you choose among options can serve to make it more navigable. As John Gruber put it:

From what I’ve seen over the last few decades, the quality of the user experience of every computing platform is directly correlated to the amount of control exerted by its platform owner. The current state of the ownerless world wide web speaks for itself.

Sometimes, this manifests itself as “self-preferencing” of another service, to reduce additional time spent searching for the information you want. When you search for a restaurant on Google, it can be very useful to get information like user reviews, the restaurant’s phone number, a button on mobile to phone them directly, estimates of how busy it is, and a link to a Maps page to see how to actually get there.

This is, undoubtedly, frustrating for competitors like Yelp, who would like this information not to be there and for users to have to click on either a link to Yelp or a link to Google Maps. But whether it is good or bad for Yelp isn’t relevant to whether it is good for users—and it is at least arguable that it is, which makes a blanket prohibition on this kind of behavior almost inevitably harmful.

If it isn’t obvious why removing this kind of feature would be harmful for users, ask yourself why some users search in Yelp’s app directly for this kind of result. The answer, I think, is that Yelp gives you all the information above that Google does (and sometimes is better, although I tend to trust Google Maps’ reviews over Yelp’s), and it’s really convenient to have all that on the same page. If Google could not provide this kind of “rich” result, many users would probably stop using Google Search to look for restaurant information in the first place, because a new friction would have been added that made the experience meaningfully worse. Removing that option would be good for Yelp, but mainly because it removes a competitor.

If all this feels like stating the obvious, then it should highlight a significant problem with Section 2(a) in the Cicilline bill: it prohibits conduct that is directly value-adding for consumers, and that creates competition for dedicated services like Yelp that object to having to compete with this kind of conduct.

This is true across all the platforms the legislation proposes to regulate. Amazon prioritizes some third-party products over others on the basis of user reviews, rates of returns and complaints, and so on; Amazon provides private label products to fill gaps in certain product lines where existing offerings are expensive or unreliable; Apple pre-installs a Camera app on the iPhone that, obviously, enjoys an advantage over rival apps like Halide.

Some or all of this behavior would be prohibited under Section 2(a) of the Cicilline bill. Combined with the bill’s presumption that conduct must be defended affirmatively—that is, the platform is presumed guilty unless it can prove that the challenged conduct is pro-competitive, which may be very difficult to do—and the bill could prospectively eliminate a huge range of socially valuable behavior.

Supporters of the bill have already been left arguing that the law simply wouldn’t be enforced in these cases of benign discrimination. But this would hardly be an improvement. It would mean the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) have tremendous control over how these platforms are built, since they could challenge conduct in virtually any case. The regulatory uncertainty alone would complicate the calculus for these firms as they refine, develop, and deploy new products and capabilities.

So one potential compromise might be to do away with this broad-based rule and proscribe specific kinds of “discriminatory” conduct instead. This approach would involve removing Section 2(a) from the bill but retaining Section 2(b), which enumerates 10 practices it deems to be “other discriminatory conduct.” This may seem appealing, as it would potentially avoid the worst abuses of the broad-based prohibition. In practice, however, it would carry many of the same problems. In fact, many of 2(b)’s provisions appear to go even further than 2(a), and would proscribe even more procompetitive conduct that consumers want.

Sections 2(b)(1) and 2(b)(9)

The wording of these provisions is extremely broad and, as drafted, would seem to challenge even the existence of vertically integrated products. As such, these prohibitions are potentially even more extensive and invasive than Section 2(a) would have been. Even a narrower reading here would seem to preclude safety and privacy features that are valuable to many users. iOS’s sandboxing of apps, for example, serves to limit the damage that a malware app can do on a user’s device precisely because of the limitations it imposes on what other features and hardware the app can access.

Section 2(b)(2)

This provision would preclude a firm from conditioning preferred status on use of another service from that firm. This would likely undermine the purpose of platforms, which is to absorb and counter some of the risks involved in doing business online. An example of this is Amazon’s tying eligibility for its Prime program to sellers that use Amazon’s delivery service (FBA – Fulfilled By Amazon). The bill seems to presume in an example like this that Amazon is leveraging its power in the market—in the form of the value of the Prime label—to profit from delivery. But Amazon could, and already does, charge directly for listing positions; it’s unclear why it would benefit from charging via FBA when it could just charge for the Prime label.

An alternate, simpler explanation is that FBA improves the quality of the service, by granting customers greater assurance that a Prime product will arrive when Amazon says it will. Platforms add value by setting out rules and providing services that reduce the uncertainties between buyers and sellers they’d otherwise experience if they transacted directly with each other. This section’s prohibition—which, as written, would seem to prevent any kind of quality assurance—likely would bar labelling by a platform, even where customers explicitly want it.

Section 2(b)(3)

As written, this would prohibit platforms from using aggregated data to improve their services at all. If Apple found that 99% of its users uninstalled an app immediately after it was installed, it would be reasonable to conclude that the app may be harmful or broken in some way, and that Apple should investigate. This provision would ban that.

Sections 2(b)(4) and 2(b)(6)

These two provisions effectively prohibit a platform from using information it does not also provide to sellers. Such prohibitions ignore the fact that it is often good for sellers to lack certain information, since withholding information can prevent abuse by malicious users. For example, a seller may sometimes try to bribe their customers to post positive reviews of their products, or even threaten customers who have posted negative ones. Part of the role of a platform is to combat that kind of behavior by acting as a middleman and forcing both consumer users and business users to comply with the platform’s own mechanisms to control that kind of behavior.

If this seems overly generous to platforms—since, obviously, it gives them a lot of leverage over business users—ask yourself why people use platforms at all. It is not a coincidence that people often prefer Amazon to dealing with third-party merchants and having to navigate those merchants’ sites themselves. The assurance that Amazon provides is extremely valuable for users. Much of it comes from the company’s ability to act as a middleman in this way, lowering the transaction costs between buyers and sellers.

Section 2(b)(5)

This provision restricts the treatment of defaults. It is, however, relatively restrained when compared to, for example, the DOJ’s lawsuit against Google, which treats as anticompetitive even payment for defaults that can be changed. Still, many of the arguments that apply in that case also apply here: default status for apps can be a way to recoup income foregone elsewhere (e.g., a browser provided for free that makes its money by selling the right to be the default search engine).

Section 2(b)(7)

This section gets to the heart of why “discrimination” can often be procompetitive: that it facilitates competition between platforms. The kind of self-preferencing that this provision would prohibit can allow firms that have a presence in one market to extend that position into another, increasing competition in the process. Both Apple and Amazon have used their customer bases in smartphones and e-commerce, respectively, to grow their customer bases for video streaming, in competition with Netflix, Google’s YouTube, cable television, and each other. If Apple designed a search engine to compete with Google, it would do exactly the same thing, and we would be better off because of it. Restricting this kind of behavior is, perversely, exactly what you would do if you wanted to shield these incumbents from competition.

Section 2(b)(8)

As with other provisions, this one would preclude one of the mechanisms by which platforms add value: creating assurance for customers about the products they can expect if they visit the platform. Some of this relates to child protection; some of the most frustrating stories involve children being overcharged when they use an iPhone or Android app, and effectively being ripped off because of poor policing of the app (or insufficiently strict pricing rules by Apple or Google). This may also relate to rules that state that the seller cannot offer a cheaper product elsewhere (Amazon’s “General Pricing Rule” does this, for example). Prohibiting this would simply impose a tax on customers who cannot shop around and would prefer to use a platform that they trust has the lowest prices for the item they want.

Section 2(b)(10)

Ostensibly a “whistleblower” provision, this section could leave platforms with no recourse, not even removing a user from its platform, in response to spurious complaints intended purely to extract value for the complaining business rather than to promote competition. On its own, this sort of provision may be fairly harmless, but combined with the provisions above, it allows the bill to add up to a rent-seekers’ charter.

Conclusion

In each case above, it’s vital to remember that a reversed burden of proof applies. So, there is a high chance that the law will side against the defendant business, and a large downside for conduct that ends up being found to violate these provisions. That means that platforms will likely err on the side of caution in many cases, avoiding conduct that is ambiguous, and society will probably lose a lot of beneficial behavior in the process.

Put together, the provisions undermine much of what has become an Internet platform’s role: to act as an intermediary, de-risk transactions between customers and merchants who don’t know each other, and tweak the rules of the market to maximize its attractiveness as a place to do business. The “discrimination” that the bill would outlaw is, in practice, behavior that makes it easier for consumers to navigate marketplaces of extreme complexity and uncertainty, in which they often know little or nothing about the firms with whom they are trying to transact business.

Customers do not want platforms to be neutral, open utilities. They can choose platforms that are like that already, such as eBay. They generally tend to prefer ones like Amazon, which are not neutral and which carefully cultivate their service to be as streamlined, managed, and “discriminatory” as possible. Indeed, many of people’s biggest complaints with digital platforms relate to their openness: the fake reviews, counterfeit products, malware, and spam that come with letting more unknown businesses use your service. While these may be unavoidable by-products of running a platform, platforms compete on their ability to ferret them out. Customers are unlikely to thank legislators for regulating Amazon into being another eBay.

The Klobuchar Bill’s Not-So-Bright Lines for Antitrust Scrutiny

Eric Fruits & Geoffrey Manne — 20 July 2021

In a recent op-ed, Robert Bork Jr. laments the Biden administration’s drive to jettison the Consumer Welfare Standard that has formed nearly half a century of antitrust jurisprudence. The move can be seen in the near-revolution at the Federal Trade Commission, in the president’s executive order on competition enforcement, and in several of the major antitrust bills currently before Congress.

Bork notes the Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act, introduced by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), would “outlaw any mergers or acquisitions for the more than 80 large U.S. companies valued over $100 billion.”

Bork is correct that it will be more than 80 companies, but it is likely to be way more. While the Klobuchar bill does not explicitly outlaw such mergers, under certain circumstances, it shifts the burden of proof to the merging parties, who must demonstrate that the benefits of the transaction outweigh the potential risks. Under current law, the burden is on the government to demonstrate the potential costs outweigh the potential benefits.

One of the measure’s specific triggers for this burden-shifting is if the acquiring party has a market capitalization, assets, or annual net revenue of more than $100 billion and seeks a merger or acquisition valued at $50 million or more. About 120 or more U.S. companies satisfy at least one of these conditions. The end of this post provides a list of publicly traded companies, according to Zacks’ stock screener, that would likely be subject to the shift in burden of proof.

If the goal is to go after Big Tech, the Klobuchar bill hits the mark. All of the FAANG companies—Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Alphabet (formerly known as Google)—satisfy one or more of the criteria. So do Microsoft and PayPal.

But even some smaller tech firms will be subject to the shift in burden of proof. Zoom and Square have market caps that would trigger under Klobuchar’s bill and Snap is hovering around $100 billion in market cap. Twitter and eBay, however, are well under any of the thresholds. Likewise, privately owned Advance Communications, owner of Reddit, would also likely fall short of any of the triggers.

Snapchat has a little more than 300 million monthly active users. Twitter and Reddit each have about 330 million monthly active users. Nevertheless, under the Klobuchar bill, Snapchat is presumed to have more market power than either Twitter or Reddit, simply because the market assigns a higher valuation to Snap.

But this bill is about more than Big Tech. Tesla, which sold its first car only 13 years ago, is now considered big enough that it will face the same antitrust scrutiny as the Big 3 automakers. Walmart, Costco, and Kroger would be subject to the shifted burden of proof, while Safeway and Publix would escape such scrutiny. An acquisition by U.S.-based Nike would be put under the microscope, but a similar acquisition by Germany’s Adidas would not fall under the Klobuchar bill’s thresholds.

Tesla accounts for less than 2% of the vehicles sold in the United States. I have no idea what Walmart, Costco, Kroger, or Nike’s market share is, or even what comprises “the” market these companies compete in. What we do know is that the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission excel at narrowly crafting market definitions so that just about any company can be defined as dominant.

So much of the recent interest in antitrust has focused on Big Tech. But even the biggest of Big Tech firms operate in dynamic and competitive markets. None of my four children use Facebook or Twitter. My wife and I don’t use Snapchat. We all use Netflix, but we also use Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, YouTube, and Amazon Prime Video. None of these services have a monopoly on our eyeballs, our attention, or our pocketbooks.

The antitrust bills currently working their way through Congress abandon the long-standing balancing of pro- versus anti-competitive effects of mergers in favor of a “big is bad” approach. While the Klobuchar bill appears to provide clear guidance on the thresholds triggering a shift in the burden of proof, the arbitrary nature of the thresholds will result in arbitrary application of the burden of proof. If passed, we will soon be faced with a case in which two firms who differ only in market cap, assets, or sales will be subject to very different antitrust scrutiny, resulting in regulatory chaos.

Publicly traded companies with more than $100 billion in market capitalization

3M	Danaher Corp.	PepsiCo
Abbott Laboratories	Deere & Co.	Pfizer
AbbVie	Eli Lilly and Co.	Philip Morris International
Adobe Inc.	ExxonMobil	Procter & Gamble
Advanced Micro Devices	Facebook Inc.	Qualcomm
Alphabet Inc.	General Electric Co.	Raytheon Technologies
Amazon	Goldman Sachs	Salesforce
American Express	Honeywell	ServiceNow
American Tower	IBM	Square Inc.
Amgen	Intel	Starbucks
Apple Inc.	Intuit	Target Corp.
Applied Materials	Intuitive Surgical	Tesla Inc.
AT&T	Johnson & Johnson	Texas Instruments
Bank of America	JPMorgan Chase	The Coca-Cola Co.
Berkshire Hathaway	Lockheed Martin	The Estée Lauder Cos.
BlackRock	Lowe’s	The Home Depot
Boeing	Mastercard	The Walt Disney Co.
Bristol Myers Squibb	McDonald’s	Thermo Fisher Scientific
Broadcom Inc.	Medtronic	T-Mobile US
Caterpillar Inc.	Merck & Co.	Union Pacific Corp.
Charles Schwab Corp.	Microsoft	United Parcel Service
Charter Communications	Morgan Stanley	UnitedHealth Group
Chevron Corp.	Netflix	Verizon Communications
Cisco Systems	NextEra Energy	Visa Inc.
Citigroup	Nike Inc.	Walmart
Comcast	Nvidia	Wells Fargo
Costco	Oracle Corp.	Zoom Video Communications
CVS Health	PayPal

Publicly traded companies with more than $100 billion in current assets

Ally Financial	Freddie Mac
American International Group	KeyBank
BNY Mellon	M&T Bank
Capital One	Northern Trust
Citizens Financial Group	PNC Financial Services
Fannie Mae	Regions Financial Corp.
Fifth Third Bank	State Street Corp.
First Republic Bank	Truist Financial
Ford Motor Co.	U.S. Bancorp

Publicly traded companies with more than $100 billion in sales

AmerisourceBergen	Dell Technologies
Anthem	General Motors
Cardinal Health	Kroger
Centene Corp.	McKesson Corp.
Cigna	Walgreens Boots Alliance

Alston Decision Shows Consumer Welfare Standard Isn’t Broken

Jeffrey Ogar — 28 June 2021

From Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), populist calls to “fix” our antitrust laws and the underlying Consumer Welfare Standard have found a foothold on Capitol Hill. At the same time, there are calls to “fix” the Supreme Court by packing it with new justices. The court’s unanimous decision in NCAA v. Alston demonstrates that neither needs repair. To the contrary, clearly anti-competitive conduct—like the NCAA’s compensation rules—is proscribed under the Consumer Welfare Standard, and every justice from Samuel Alito to Sonia Sotomayor can agree on that.

In 1984, the court in NCAA v. Board of Regents suggested that “courts should take care when assessing the NCAA’s restraints on student-athlete compensation.” After all, joint ventures like sports leagues are entitled to rule-of-reason treatment. But while times change, the Consumer Welfare Standard is sufficiently flexible to meet those changes.

Where a competitive restraint exists primarily to ensure that “enormous sums of money flow to seemingly everyone except the student athletes,” the court rightly calls it out for what it is. As Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in his concurrence:

Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate. And under ordinary principles of antitrust law, it is not evident why college sports should be any different. The NCAA is not above the law.

Disturbing these “ordinary principles”—whether through legislation, administrative rulemaking, or the common law—is simply unnecessary. For example, the Open Markets Institute filed an amicus brief arguing that the rule of reason should be “bounded” and willfully blind to the pro-competitive benefits some joint ventures can create (an argument that has been used, unsuccessfully, to attack ridesharing services like Uber and Lyft). Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) has proposed shifting the burden of proof so that merging parties are guilty until proven innocent. Sen. Warren would go further, deeming Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods anti-competitive simply because the company is “big,” and ignoring the merger’s myriad pro-competitive benefits. Sen. Hawley has gone further still: calling on Amazon to be investigated criminally for the crime of being innovative and successful.

Several of the current proposals, including those from Sens. Klobuchar and Hawley (and those recently introduced in the House that essentially single out firms for disfavored treatment), would replace the Consumer Welfare Standard that has underpinned antitrust law for decades with a policy that effectively punishes firms for being politically unpopular.

These examples demonstrate we should be wary when those in power assert that things are so irreparably broken that they need a complete overhaul. The “solutions” peddled usually increase politicians’ power by enabling them to pick winners and losers through top-down approaches that stifle the bottom-up innovations that make consumers’ lives better.

Are antitrust law and the Supreme Court perfect? Hardly. But in a 9-0 decision, the court proved this week that there’s nothing broken about either.

Antitrust Lessons from AT&T’s M&A Fiasco

Jonathan M. Barnett — 24 May 2021

AT&T’s $102 billion acquisition of Time Warner in 2019 will go down in M&A history as an exceptionally ill-advised transaction, resulting in the loss of tens of billions of dollars of shareholder value. It should also go down in history as an exceptional ill-chosen target of antitrust intervention. The U.S. Department of Justice, with support from many academic and policy commentators, asserted with confidence that the vertical combination of these content and distribution powerhouses would result in an entity that could exercise market power to the detriment of competitors and consumers.

The chorus of condemnation continued with vigor even after the DOJ’s loss in court and AT&T’s consummation of the transaction. With AT&T’s May 17 announcement that it will unwind the two-year-old acquisition and therefore abandon its strategy to integrate content and distribution, it is clear these predictions of impending market dominance were unfounded.

This widely shared overstatement of antitrust risk derives from a simple but fundamental error: regulators and commentators were looking at the wrong market.

The DOJ’s Antitrust Case against the Transaction

The business case for the AT&T/Time Warner transaction was straightforward: it promised to generate synergies by combining a leading provider of wireless, broadband, and satellite television services with a leading supplier of video content. The DOJ’s antitrust case against the transaction was similarly straightforward: the combined entity would have the ability to foreclose “must have” content from other “pay TV” (cable and satellite television) distributors, resulting in adverse competitive effects.

This foreclosure strategy was expected to take two principal forms. First, AT&T could temporarily withhold (or threaten to withhold) content from rival distributors absent payment of a higher carriage fee, which would then translate into higher fees for subscribers. Second, AT&T could permanently withhold content from rival distributors, who would then lose subscribers to AT&T’s DirectTV satellite television service, further enhancing AT&T’s market power.

Many commentators, both in the trade press and significant portions of the scholarly community, characterized the transaction as posing a high-risk threat to competitive conditions in the pay TV market. These assertions reflected the view that the new entity would exercise a bottleneck position over video-content distribution in the pay TV market and would exercise that power to impose one-sided terms to the detriment of content distributors and consumers.

Notwithstanding this bevy of endorsements, the DOJ’s case was rejected by the district court and the decision was upheld by the D.C. appellate court. The district judge concluded that the DOJ had failed to show that the combined entity would exercise any credible threat to withhold “must have” content from distributors. A key reason: the lost carriage fees AT&T would incur if it did withhold content were so high, and the migration of subscribers from rival pay TV services so speculative, that it would represent an obviously irrational business strategy. In short: no sophisticated business party would ever take AT&T’s foreclosure threat seriously, in which case the DOJ’s predictions of market power were insufficiently compelling to justify the use of government power to block the transaction.

The Fundamental Flaws in the DOJ’s Antitrust Case

The logical and factual infirmities of the DOJ’s foreclosure hypothesis have been extensively and ably covered elsewhere and I will not repeat that analysis. Following up on my previous TOTM commentary on the transaction, I would like to emphasize the point that the DOJ’s case against the transaction was flawed from the outset for two more fundamental reasons.

False Assumption #1

The assumption that the combined entity could withhold so-called “must have” content to cause significant and lasting competitive injury to rival distributors flies in the face of market realities. Content is an abundant, renewable, and mobile resource. There are few entry barriers to the content industry: a commercially promising idea will likely attract capital, which will in turn secure the necessary equipment and personnel for production purposes. Any rival distributor can access a rich menu of valuable content from a plethora of sources, both domestically and worldwide, each of which can provide new content, as required. Even if the combined entity held a license to distribute purportedly “must have” content, that content would be up for sale (more precisely, re-licensing) to the highest bidder as soon as the applicable contract term expired. This is not mere theorizing: it is a widely recognized feature of the entertainment industry.

False Assumption #2

Even assuming the combined entity could wield a portfolio of “must have” content to secure a dominant position in the pay TV market and raise content acquisition costs for rival pay TV services, it still would lack any meaningful pricing power in the relevant consumer market. The reason: significant portions of the viewing population do not want any pay TV or only want dramatically “slimmed-down” packages. Instead, viewers increasingly consume content primarily through video-streaming services—a market in which platforms such as Amazon and Netflix already enjoyed leading positions at the time of the transaction. Hence, even accepting the DOJ’s theory that the combined entity could somehow monopolize the pay TV market consisting of cable and satellite television services, the theory still fails to show any reasonable expectation of anticompetitive effects in the broader and economically relevant market comprising pay TV and streaming services. Any attempt to exercise pricing power in the pay TV market would be economically self-defeating, since it would likely prompt a significant portion of consumers to switch to (or start to only use) streaming services.

The Antitrust Case for the Transaction

When properly situated within the market that was actually being targeted in the AT&T/Time Warner acquisition, the combined entity posed little credible threat of exercising pricing power. To the contrary, the combined entity was best understood as an entrant that sought to challenge the two pioneer entities—Amazon and Netflix—in the “over the top” content market.

Each of these incumbent platforms individually had (and have) multi-billion-dollar content production budgets that rival or exceed the budgets of major Hollywood studios and enjoy worldwide subscriber bases numbering in the hundreds of millions. If that’s not enough, AT&T was not the only entity that observed the displacement of pay TV by streaming services, as illustrated by the roughly concurrent entry of Disney’s Disney+ service, Apple’s Apple TV+ service, Comcast NBCUniversal’s Peacock service, and others. Both the existing and new competitors are formidable entities operating in a market with formidable capital requirements. In 2019, Netflix, Amazon, and Apple TV expended approximately $15 billion, $6 billion, and again, $6 billion, respectively, on content; by contrast, HBO Max, AT&T’s streaming service, expended approximately $3.5 billion.

In short, the combined entity faced stiff competition from existing and reasonably anticipated competitors, requiring several billions of dollars on “content spend” to even stay in the running. Far from being able to exercise pricing power in an imaginary market defined by DOJ litigators for strategic purposes, the AT&T/Time Warner entity faced the challenge of merely surviving in a real-world market populated by several exceptionally well-financed competitors. At best, the combined entity “threatened” to deliver incremental competitive benefits by adding a robust new platform to the video-streaming market; at worst, it would fail in this objective and cause no incremental competitive harm. As it turns out, the latter appears to be the case.

The Enduring Virtues of Antitrust Prudence

AT&T’s M&A fiasco has important lessons for broader antitrust debates about the evidentiary standards that should be applied by courts and agencies when assessing alleged antitrust violations, in general, and vertical restraints, in particular.

Among some scholars, regulators, and legislators, it has become increasingly received wisdom that prevailing evidentiary standards, as reflected in federal case law and agency guidelines, are excessively demanding, and have purportedly induced chronic underenforcement. It has been widely asserted that the courts’ and regulators’ focus on avoiding “false positives” and the associated costs of disrupting innocuous or beneficial business practices has resulted in an overly cautious enforcement posture, especially with respect to mergers and vertical restraints.

In fact, these views were expressed by some commentators in endorsing the antitrust case against the AT&T/Time-Warner transaction. Some legislators have gone further and argued for substantial amendments to the antitrust law to provide enforcers and courts with greater latitude to block or re-engineer combinations that would not pose sufficiently demonstrated competitive risks under current statutory or case law.

The swift downfall of the AT&T/Time-Warner transaction casts great doubt on this critique and accompanying policy proposals. It was precisely the district court’s rigorous application of those “overly” demanding evidentiary standards that avoided what would have been a clear false-positive error. The failure of the “blockbuster” combination to achieve not only market dominance, but even reasonably successful entry, validates the wisdom of retaining those standards.

The fundamental mismatch between the widely supported antitrust case against the transaction and the widely overlooked business realities of the economically relevant consumer market illustrates the ease with which largely theoretical and decontextualized economic models of competitive harm can lead to enforcement actions that lack any reasonable basis in fact.

Archives For Amazon

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Why This Time is Probably Not Different

The Forgotten Curse of the Incumbent

Why Market Self-Correction Outperforms Regulatory Correction

Conclusion

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The Antitrust Section’s Comments

Departing from established antitrust-law principles

Opaque language for opaque ideas

Conclusion

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One subscription is not enough

Substitutes, complements, or unrelated?

Consolidation can enable price discrimination

Scale-related economies

Conclusion

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Section 2(a)

Sections 2(b)(1) and 2(b)(9)

Section 2(b)(2)

Section 2(b)(3)

Sections 2(b)(4) and 2(b)(6)

Section 2(b)(5)

Section 2(b)(7)

Section 2(b)(8)

Section 2(b)(10)

Conclusion

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Publicly traded companies with more than $100 billion in market capitalization

Publicly traded companies with more than $100 billion in current assets

Publicly traded companies with more than $100 billion in sales

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The DOJ’s Antitrust Case against the Transaction

The Fundamental Flaws in the DOJ’s Antitrust Case

The Antitrust Case for the Transaction

The Enduring Virtues of Antitrust Prudence

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