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Killer Acquisition or Leveling Up: The Use of Mergers to Enter Adjacent Markets

Dirk Auer — 1 February 2023

In the world of video games, the process by which players train themselves or their characters in order to overcome a difficult “boss battle” is called “leveling up.” I find that the phrase also serves as a useful metaphor in the context of corporate mergers. Here, “leveling up” can be thought of as acquiring another firm in order to enter or reinforce one’s presence in an adjacent market where a larger and more successful incumbent is already active.

In video-game terminology, that incumbent would be the “boss.” Acquiring firms choose to level up when they recognize that building internal capacity to compete with the “boss” is too slow, too expensive, or is simply infeasible. An acquisition thus becomes the only way “to beat the boss” (or, at least, to maximize the odds of doing so).

Alas, this behavior is often mischaracterized as a “killer acquisition” or “reverse killer acquisition.” What separates leveling up from killer acquisitions is that the former serve to turn the merged entity into a more powerful competitor, while the latter attempt to weaken competition. In the case of “reverse killer acquisitions,” the assumption is that the acquiring firm would have entered the adjacent market regardless absent the merger, leaving even more firms competing in that market.

In other words, the distinction ultimately boils down to a simple (though hard to answer) question: could both the acquiring and target firms have effectively competed with the “boss” without a merger?

Because they are ubiquitous in the tech sector, these mergers—sometimes also referred to as acquisitions of nascent competitors—have drawn tremendous attention from antitrust authorities and policymakers. All too often, policymakers fail to adequately consider the realistic counterfactual to a merger and mistake leveling up for a killer acquisition. The most recent high-profile example is Meta’s acquisition of the virtual-reality fitness app Within. But in what may be a hopeful sign of a turning of the tide, a federal court appears set to clear that deal over objections from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

Some Recent ‘Boss Battles’

The canonical example of leveling up in tech markets is likely Google’s acquisition of Android back in 2005. While Apple had not yet launched the iPhone, it was already clear by 2005 that mobile would become an important way to access the internet (including Google’s search services). Rumors were swirling that Apple, following its tremendously successful iPod, had started developing a phone, and Microsoft had been working on Windows Mobile for a long time.

In short, there was a serious risk that Google would be reliant on a single mobile gatekeeper (i.e., Apple) if it did not move quickly into mobile. Purchasing Android was seen as the best way to do so. (Indeed, averting an analogous sort of threat appears to be driving Meta’s move into virtual reality today.)

The natural next question is whether Google or Android could have succeeded in the mobile market absent the merger. My guess is that the answer is no. In 2005, Google did not produce any consumer hardware. Quickly and successfully making the leap would have been daunting. As for Android:

Google had significant advantages that helped it to make demands from carriers and OEMs that Android would not have been able to make. In other words, Google was uniquely situated to solve the collective action problem stemming from OEMs’ desire to modify Android according to their own idiosyncratic preferences. It used the appeal of its app bundle as leverage to get OEMs and carriers to commit to support Android devices for longer with OS updates. The popularity of its apps meant that OEMs and carriers would have great difficulty in going it alone without them, and so had to engage in some contractual arrangements with Google to sell Android phones that customers wanted. Google was better resourced than Android likely would have been and may have been able to hold out for better terms with a more recognizable and desirable brand name than a hypothetical Google-less Android. In short, though it is of course possible that Android could have succeeded despite the deal having been blocked, it is also plausible that Android became so successful only because of its combination with Google. (citations omitted)

In short, everything suggests that Google’s purchase of Android was a good example of leveling up. Note that much the same could be said about the company’s decision to purchase Fitbit in order to compete against Apple and its Apple Watch (which quickly dominated the market after its launch in 2015).

A more recent example of leveling up is Microsoft’s planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard. In this case, the merger appears to be about improving Microsoft’s competitive position in the platform market for game consoles, rather than in the adjacent market for games.

At the time of writing, Microsoft is staring down the barrel of a gun: Sony is on the cusp of becoming the runaway winner of yet another console generation. Microsoft’s executives appear to have concluded that this is partly due to a lack of exclusive titles on the Xbox platform. Hence, they are seeking to purchase Activision Blizzard, one of the most successful game studios, known among other things for its acclaimed Call of Duty series.

Again, the question is whether Microsoft could challenge Sony by improving its internal game-publishing branch (known as Xbox Game Studios) or whether it needs to acquire a whole new division. This is obviously a hard question to answer, but a cursory glance at the titles shipped by Microsoft’s publishing studio suggest that the issues it faces could not simply be resolved by throwing more money at its existing capacities. Indeed, Microsoft Game Studios seems to be plagued by organizational failings that might only be solved by creating more competition within the Microsoft company. As one gaming journalist summarized:

The current predicament of these titles goes beyond the amount of money invested or the buzzwords used to market them – it’s about Microsoft’s plan to effectively manage its studios. Encouraging independence isn’t an excuse for such a blatantly hands-off approach which allows titles to fester for years in development hell, with some fostering mistreatment to occur. On the surface, it’s just baffling how a company that’s been ranked as one of the top 10 most reputable companies eight times in 11 years (as per RepTrak) could have such problems with its gaming division.

The upshot is that Microsoft appears to have recognized that its own game-development branch is failing, and that acquiring a well-functioning rival is the only way to rapidly compete with Sony. There is thus a strong case to be made that competition authorities and courts should approach the merger with caution, as it has at least the potential to significantly increase competition in the game-console industry.

Finally, leveling up is sometimes a way for smaller firms to try and move faster than incumbents into a burgeoning and promising segment. The best example of this is arguably Meta’s effort to acquire Within, a developer of VR fitness apps. Rather than being an attempt to thwart competition from a competitor in the VR app market, the goal of the merger appears to be to compete with the likes of Google, Apple, and Sony at the platform level. As Mark Zuckerberg wrote back in 2015, when Meta’s VR/AR strategy was still in its infancy:

Our vision is that VR/AR will be the next major computing platform after mobile in about 10 years… The strategic goal is clearest. We are vulnerable on mobile to Google and Apple because they make major mobile platforms. We would like a stronger strategic position in the next wave of computing….

Over the next few years, we’re going to need to make major new investments in apps, platform services, development / graphics and AR. Some of these will be acquisitions and some can be built in house. If we try to build them all in house from scratch, then we risk that several will take too long or fail and put our overall strategy at serious risk. To derisk this, we should acquire some of these pieces from leading companies.

In short, many of the tech mergers that critics portray as killer acquisitions are just as likely to be attempts by firms to compete head-on with incumbents. This “leveling up” is precisely the sort of beneficial outcome that antitrust laws were designed to promote.

Building Products Is Hard

Critics are often quick to apply the “killer acquisition” label to any merger where a large platform is seeking to enter or reinforce its presence in an adjacent market. The preceding paragraphs demonstrate that it’s not that simple, as these mergers often enable firms to improve their competitive position in the adjacent market. For obvious reasons, antitrust authorities and policymakers should be careful not to thwart this competition.

The harder part is how to separate the wheat from the chaff. While I don’t have a definitive answer, an easy first step would be for authorities to more seriously consider the supply side of the equation.

Building a new product is incredibly hard, even for the most successful tech firms. Microsoft famously failed with its Zune music player and Windows Phone. The Google+ social network never gained any traction. Meta’s foray into the cryptocurrency industry was a sobering experience. Amazon’s Fire Phone bombed. Even Apple, which usually epitomizes Silicon Valley firms’ ability to enter new markets, has had its share of dramatic failures: Apple Maps, its Ping social network, and the first Home Pod, to name a few.

To put it differently, policymakers should not assume that internal growth is always a realistic alternative to a merger. Instead, they should carefully examine whether such a strategy is timely, cost-effective, and likely to succeed.

This is obviously a daunting task. Firms will struggle to dispositively show that they need to acquire the target firm in order to effectively compete against an incumbent. The question essentially hinges on the quality of the firm’s existing management, engineers, and capabilities. All of these are difficult—perhaps even impossible—to measure. At the very least, policymakers can improve the odds of reaching a correct decision by approaching these mergers with an open mind.

Under Chair Lina Khan’s tenure, the FTC has opted for the opposite approach and taken a decidedly hostile view of tech acquisitions. The commission sued to block both Meta’s purchase of Within and Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Likewise, several economists—notably Tommasso Valletti—have called for policymakers to reverse the burden of proof in merger proceedings, and opined that all mergers should be viewed with suspicion because, absent efficiencies, they always reduce competition.

Unfortunately, this skeptical approach is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy: when authorities view mergers with suspicion, they are likely to be dismissive of the benefits discussed above. Mergers will be blocked and entry into adjacent markets will occur via internal growth.

Large tech companies’ many failed attempts to enter adjacent markets via internal growth suggest that such an outcome would ultimately harm the digital economy. Too many “boss battles” will needlessly be lost, depriving consumers of precious competition and destroying startup companies’ exit strategies.

In Antitrust & Competition, Apple, Exclusionary Conduct, Facebook, Federal Trade Commission, Google, Mergers & Acquisitions, Platforms, Truth on the Market Android, Apple, gatekeeper, google, killer acquisition, mergers, Meta, Meta-Within, microsoft

7 Big Questions About the Open App Markets Act

Lazar Radic — 1 November 2022

With just a week to go until the U.S. midterm elections, which potentially herald a change in control of one or both houses of Congress, speculation is mounting that congressional Democrats may seek to use the lame-duck session following the election to move one or more pieces of legislation targeting the so-called “Big Tech” companies.

Gaining particular notice—on grounds that it is the least controversial of the measures—is S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act (OAMA). Introduced by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), the Senate bill has garnered 14 cosponsors: exactly seven Republicans and seven Democrats. It would, among other things, force certain mobile app stores and operating systems to allow “sideloading” and open their platforms to rival in-app payment systems.

Unfortunately, even this relatively restrained legislation—at least, when compared to Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s (D-Minn.) American Innovation and Choice Online Act or the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA)—is highly problematic in its own right. Here, I will offer seven major questions the legislation leaves unresolved.

1. Are Quantitative Thresholds a Good Indicator of ‘Gatekeeper Power’?

It is no secret that OAMA has been tailor-made to regulate two specific app stores: Android’s Google Play Store and Apple’s Apple App Store (see here, here, and, yes, even Wikipedia knows it).The text makes this clear by limiting the bill’s scope to app stores with more than 50 million users, a threshold that only Google Play and the Apple App Store currently satisfy.

However, purely quantitative thresholds are a poor indicator of a company’s potential “gatekeeper power.” An app store might have much fewer than 50 million users but cater to a relevant niche market. By the bill’s own logic, why shouldn’t that app store likewise be compelled to be open to competing app distributors? Conversely, it may be easy for users of very large app stores to multi-home or switch seamlessly to competing stores. In either case, raw user data paints a distorted picture of the market’s realities.

As it stands, the bill’s thresholds appear arbitrary and pre-committed to “disciplining” just two companies: Google and Apple. In principle, good laws should be abstract and general and not intentionally crafted to apply only to a few select actors. In OAMA’s case, the law’s specific thresholds are also factually misguided, as purely quantitative criteria are not a good proxy for the sort of market power the bill purportedly seeks to curtail.

2. Why Does the Bill not Apply to all App Stores?

Rather than applying to app stores across the board, OAMA targets only those associated with mobile devices and “general purpose computing devices.” It’s not clear why.

For example, why doesn’t it cover app stores on gaming platforms, such as Microsoft’s Xbox or Sony’s PlayStation?

Currently, a PlayStation user can only buy digital games through the PlayStation Store, where Sony reportedly takes a 30% cut of all sales—although its pricing schedule is less transparent than that of mobile rivals such as Apple or Google.

Clearly, this bothers some developers. Much like Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney’s ongoing crusade against the Apple App Store, indie-game publisher Iain Garner of Neon Doctrine recently took to Twitter to complain about Sony’s restrictive practices. According to Garner, “Platform X” (clearly PlayStation) charges developers up to $25,000 and 30% of subsequent earnings to give games a modicum of visibility on the platform, in addition to requiring them to jump through such hoops as making a PlayStation-specific trailer and writing a blog post. Garner further alleges that Sony severely circumscribes developers’ ability to offer discounts, “meaning that Platform X owners will always get the worst deal!” (see also here).

Microsoft’s Xbox Game Store similarly takes a 30% cut of sales. Presumably, Microsoft and Sony both have the same type of gatekeeper power in the gaming-console market that Apple and Google are said to have on their respective platforms, leading to precisely those issues that OAMA ostensibly purports to combat. Namely, that consumers are not allowed to choose alternative app stores through which to buy games on their respective consoles, and developers must acquiesce to Sony’s and Microsoft’s terms if they want their games to reach those players.

More broadly, dozens of online platforms also charge commissions on the sales made by their creators. To cite but a few: OnlyFans takes a 20% cut of sales; Facebook gets 30% of the revenue that creators earn from their followers; YouTube takes 45% of ad revenue generated by users; and Twitch reportedly rakes in 50% of subscription fees.

This is not to say that all these services are monopolies that should be regulated. To the contrary, it seems like fees in the 20-30% range are common even in highly competitive environments. Rather, it is merely to observe that there are dozens of online platforms that demand a percentage of the revenue that creators generate and that prevent those creators from bypassing the platform. As well they should, after all, because creating and improving a platform is not free.

It is nonetheless difficult to see why legislation regulating online marketplaces should focus solely on two mobile app stores. Ultimately, the inability of OAMA’s sponsors to properly account for this carveout diminishes the law’s credibility.

3. Should Picking Among Legitimate Business Models Be up to Lawmakers or Consumers?

“Open” and “closed” platforms posit two different business models, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Some consumers may prefer more open platforms because they grant them more flexibility to customize their mobile devices and operating systems. But there are also compelling reasons to prefer closed systems. As Sam Bowman observed, narrowing choice through a more curated system frees users from having to research every possible option every time they buy or use some product. Instead, they can defer to the platform’s expertise in determining whether an app or app store is trustworthy or whether it contains, say, objectionable content.

Currently, users can choose to opt for Apple’s semi-closed “walled garden” iOS or Google’s relatively more open Android OS (which OAMA wants to pry open even further). Ironically, under the pretext of giving users more “choice,” OAMA would take away the possibility of choice where it matters the most—i.e., at the platform level. As Mikolaj Barczentewicz has written:

A sideloading mandate aims to give users more choice. It can only achieve this, however, by taking away the option of choosing a device with a “walled garden” approach to privacy and security (such as is taken by Apple with iOS).

This obviates the nuances between the two and pushes Android and iOS to converge around a single model. But if consumers unequivocally preferred open platforms, Apple would have no customers, because everyone would already be on Android.

Contrary to regulators’ simplistic assumptions, “open” and “closed” are not synonyms for “good” and “bad.” Instead, as Boston University’s Andrei Hagiu has shown, there are fundamental welfare tradeoffs at play between these two perfectly valid business models that belie simplistic characterizations of one being inherently superior to the other.

It is debatable whether courts, regulators, or legislators are well-situated to resolve these complex tradeoffs by substituting businesses’ product-design decisions and consumers’ revealed preferences with their own. After all, if regulators had such perfect information, we wouldn’t need markets or competition in the first place.

4. Does OAMA Account for the Security Risks of Sideloading?

Platforms retaining some control over the apps or app stores allowed on their operating systems bolsters security, as it allows companies to weed out bad players.

Both Apple and Google do this, albeit to varying degrees. For instance, Android already allows sideloading and third-party in-app payment systems to some extent, while Apple runs a tighter ship. However, studies have shown that it is precisely the iOS “walled garden” model which gives it an edge over Android in terms of privacy and security. Even vocal Apple critic Tim Sweeney recently acknowledged that increased safety and privacy were competitive advantages for Apple.

The problem is that far-reaching sideloading mandates—such as the ones contemplated under OAMA—are fundamentally at odds with current privacy and security capabilities (see here and here).

OAMA’s defenders might argue that the law does allow covered platforms to raise safety and security defenses, thus making the tradeoffs between openness and security unnecessary. But the bill places such stringent conditions on those defenses that platform operators will almost certainly be deterred from risking running afoul of the law’s terms. To invoke the safety and security defenses, covered companies must demonstrate that provisions are applied on a “demonstrably consistent basis”; are “narrowly tailored and could not be achieved through less discriminatory means”; and are not used as a “pretext to exclude or impose unnecessary or discriminatory terms.”

Implementing these stringent requirements will drag enforcers into a micromanagement quagmire. There are thousands of potential spyware, malware, rootkit, backdoor, and phishing (to name just a few) software-security issues—all of which pose distinct threats to an operating system. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the federal courts will almost certainly struggle to control the “consistency” requirement across such varied types.

Likewise, OAMA’s reference to “least discriminatory means” suggests there is only one valid answer to any given security-access tradeoff. Further, depending on one’s preferred balance between security and “openness,” a claimed security risk may or may not be “pretextual,” and thus may or may not be legal.

Finally, the bill text appears to preclude the possibility of denying access to a third-party app or app store for reasons other than safety and privacy. This would undermine Apple’s and Google’s two-tiered quality-control systems, which also control for “objectionable” content such as (child) pornography and social engineering.

5. How Will OAMA Safeguard the Rights of Covered Platforms?

OAMA is also deeply flawed from a procedural standpoint. Most importantly, there is no meaningful way to contest the law’s designation as “covered company,” or the harms associated with it.

Once a company is “covered,” it is presumed to hold gatekeeper power, with all the associated risks for competition, innovation, and consumer choice. Remarkably, this presumption does not admit any qualitative or quantitative evidence to the contrary. The only thing a covered company can do to rebut the designation is to demonstrate that it, in fact, has fewer than 50 million users.

By preventing companies from showing that they do not hold the kind of gatekeeper power that harms competition, decreases innovation, raises prices, and reduces choice (the bill’s stated objectives), OAMA severely tilts the playing field in the FTC’s favor. Even the EU’s enforcer-friendly DMA incorporated a last-minute amendment allowing firms to dispute their status as “gatekeepers.” While this defense is not perfect (companies cannot rely on the same qualitative evidence that the European Commission can use against them), at least gatekeeper status can be contested under the DMA.

6. Should Legislation Protect Competitors at the Expense of Consumers?

Like most of the new wave of regulatory initiatives against Big Tech (but unlike antitrust law), OAMA is explicitly designed to help competitors, with consumers footing the bill.

For example, OAMA prohibits covered companies from using or combining nonpublic data obtained from third-party apps or app stores operating on their platforms in competition with those third parties. While this may have the short-term effect of redistributing rents away from these platforms and toward competitors, it risks harming consumers and third-party developers in the long run.

Platforms’ ability to integrate such data is part of what allows them to bring better and improved products and services to consumers in the first place. OAMA tacitly admits this by recognizing that the use of nonpublic data grants covered companies a competitive advantage. In other words, it allows them to deliver a product that is better than competitors’.

Prohibiting self-preferencing raises similar concerns. Why wouldn’t a company that has invested billions in developing a successful platform and ecosystem not give preference to its own products to recoup some of that investment? After all, the possibility of exercising some control over downstream and adjacent products is what might have driven the platform’s development in the first place. In other words, self-preferencing may be a symptom of competition, and not the absence thereof. Third-party companies also would have weaker incentives to develop their own platforms if they can free-ride on the investments of others. And platforms that favor their own downstream products might simply be better positioned to guarantee their quality and reliability (see here and here).

In all of these cases, OAMA’s myopic focus on improving the lot of competitors for easy political points will upend the mobile ecosystems from which both users and developers derive significant benefit.

7. Shouldn’t the EU Bear the Risks of Bad Tech Regulation?

Finally, U.S. lawmakers should ask themselves whether the European Union, which has no tech leaders of its own, is really a model to emulate. Today, after all, marks the day the long-awaited Digital Markets Act— the EU’s response to perceived contestability and fairness problems in the digital economy—officially takes effect. In anticipation of the law entering into force, I summarized some of the outstanding issues that will define implementation moving forward in this recent tweet thread.

We have been critical of the DMA here at Truth on the Market on several factual, legal, economic, and procedural grounds. The law’s problems range from it essentially being a tool to redistribute rents away from platforms and to third-parties, despite it being unclear why the latter group is inherently more deserving (Pablo Ibañez Colomo has raised a similar point); to its opacity and lack of clarity, a process that appears tilted in the Commission’s favor; to the awkward way it interacts with EU competition law, ignoring the welfare tradeoffs between the models it seeks to impose and perfectly valid alternatives (see here and here); to its flawed assumptions (see, e.g., here on contestability under the DMA); to the dubious legal and economic value of the theory of harm known as “self-preferencing”; to the very real possibility of unintended consequences (e.g., in relation to security and interoperability mandates).

In other words, that the United States lags the EU in seeking to regulate this area might not be a bad thing, after all. Despite the EU’s insistence on being a trailblazing agenda-setter at all costs, the wiser thing in tech regulation might be to remain at a safe distance. This is particularly true when one considers the potentially large costs of legislative missteps and the difficulty of recalibrating once a course has been set.

U.S. lawmakers should take advantage of this dynamic and learn from some of the Old Continent’s mistakes. If they play their cards right and take the time to read the writing on the wall, they might just succeed in averting antitrust’s uncertain future.

The Woman in the High Office

Dirk Auer — 27 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.]

May 2007, Palo Alto

The California sun shone warmly on Eric Schmidt’s face as he stepped out of his car and made his way to have dinner at Madera, a chic Palo Alto restaurant.

Dining out was a welcome distraction from the endless succession of strategy meetings with the nitpickers of the law department, which had been Schmidt’s bread and butter for the last few months. The lawyers seemed to take issue with any new project that Google’s engineers came up with. “How would rivals compete with our maps?”; “Our placement should be no less favorable than rivals’’; etc. The objections were endless.

This is not how things were supposed to be. When Schmidt became Google’s chief executive officer in 2001, his mission was to take the company public and grow the firm into markets other than search. But then something unexpected happened. After campaigning on an anti-monopoly platform, a freshman senator from Minnesota managed to get her anti-discrimination bill through Congress in just her first few months in office. All companies with a market cap of more than $150 billion were now prohibited from favoring their own products. Google had recently crossed that Rubicon, putting a stop to years of carefree expansion into new markets.

But today was different. The waiter led Schmidt to his table overlooking Silicon Valley. His acquaintance was already seated.

With his tall and slender figure, Andy Rubin had garnered quite a reputation among Silicon Valley’s elite. After engineering stints at Apple and Motorola, developing various handheld devices, Rubin had set up his own shop. The idea was bold: develop the first open mobile platform—based on Linux, nonetheless. Rubin had pitched the project to Google in 2005 but given the regulatory uncertainty over the future of antitrust—the same wave of populist sentiment that would carry Klobuchar to office one year later—Schmidt and his team had passed.

“There’s no money in open source,” the company’s CFO ruled. Schmidt had initially objected, but with more pressing matters to deal with, he ultimately followed his CFO’s advice.

Schmidt and Rubin were exchanging pleasantries about Microsoft and Java when the meals arrived–sublime Wagyu short ribs and charred spring onions paired with a 1986 Chateau Margaux.

Rubin finally cut to the chase. “Our mobile operating system will rely on state-of-the-art touchscreen technology. Just like the device being developed by Apple. Buying Android today might be your only way to avoid paying monopoly prices to access Apple’s mobile users tomorrow.”

Schmidt knew this all too well: The future was mobile, and few companies were taking Apple’s upcoming iPhone seriously enough. Even better, as a firm, Android was treading water. Like many other startups, it had excellent software but no business model. And with the Klobuchar bill putting the brakes on startup investment—monetizing an ecosystem had become a delicate legal proposition, deterring established firms from acquiring startups–Schmidt was in the middle of a buyer’s market. “Android we could make us a force to reckon with” Schmidt thought to himself.

But he quickly shook that thought, remembering the words of his CFO: “There is no money in open source.” In an ideal world, Google would have used Android to promote its search engine—placing a search bar on Android users to draw users to its search engine—or maybe it could have tied a proprietary app store to the operating system, thus earning money from in-app purchases. But with the Klobuchar bill, these were no longer options. Not without endless haggling with Google’s planning committee of lawyers.

And they would have a point, of course. Google risked heavy fines and court-issued injunctions that would stop the project in its tracks. Such risks were not to be taken lightly. Schmidt needed a plan to make the Android platform profitable while accommodating Google’s rivals, but he had none.

The desserts were served, Schmidt steered the conversation to other topics, and the sun slowly set over Sand Hill Road.

Present Day, Cupertino

Apple continues to dominate the smartphone industry with little signs of significant competition on the horizon. While there are continuing rumors that Google, Facebook, or even TikTok might enter the market, these have so far failed to transpire.

Google’s failed partnership with Samsung, back in 2012, still looms large over the industry. After lengthy talks to create an open mobile platform failed to materialize, Google ultimately entered into an agreement with the longstanding mobile manufacturer. Unfortunately, the deal was mired by antitrust issues and clashing visions—Samsung was believed to favor a closed ecosystem, rather than the open platform envisioned by Google.

The sense that Apple is running away with the market is only reinforced by recent developments. Last week, Tim Cook unveiled the company’s new iPhone 11—the first ever mobile device to come with three cameras. With an eye-watering price tag of $1,199 for the top-of-the-line Pro model, it certainly is not cheap. In his presentation, Cook assured consumers Apple had solved the security issues that have been an important bugbear for the iPhone and its ecosystem of competing app stores.

Analysts expect the new range of devices will help Apple cement the iPhone’s 50% market share. This is especially likely given the important challenges that Apple’s main rivals continue to face.

The Windows Phone’s reputation for buggy software continues to undermine its competitive position, despite its comparatively low price point. Andy Rubin, the head of the Windows Phone, was reassuring in a press interview, but there is little tangible evidence he will manage to successfully rescue the flailing ship. Meanwhile, Huawei has come under increased scrutiny for the threats it may pose to U.S. national security. The Chinese manufacturer may face a U.S. sales ban, unless the company’s smartphone branch is sold to a U.S. buyer. Oracle is said to be a likely candidate.

The sorry state of mobile competition has become an increasingly prominent policy issue. President Klobuchar took to Twitter and called on mobile-device companies to refrain from acting as monopolists, intimating elsewhere that failure to do so might warrant tougher regulation than her anti-discrimination bill:

Platform Self-Preferencing Can Be Good for Consumers and Even Competitors

Sam Bowman & Geoffrey Manne — 4 March 2021

Critics of big tech companies like Google and Amazon are increasingly focused on the supposed evils of “self-preferencing.” This refers to when digital platforms like Amazon Marketplace or Google Search, which connect competing services with potential customers or users, also offer (and sometimes prioritize) their own in-house products and services.

The objection, raised by several members and witnesses during a Feb. 25 hearing of the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee, is that it is unfair to third parties that use those sites to allow the site’s owner special competitive advantages. Is it fair, for example, for Amazon to use the data it gathers from its service to design new products if third-party merchants can’t access the same data? This seemingly intuitive complaint was the basis for the European Commission’s landmark case against Google.

But we cannot assume that something is bad for competition just because it is bad for certain competitors. A lot of unambiguously procompetitive behavior, like cutting prices, also tends to make life difficult for competitors. The same is true when a digital platform provides a service that is better than alternatives provided by the site’s third-party sellers.

It’s probably true that Amazon’s access to customer search and purchase data can help it spot products it can undercut with its own versions, driving down prices. But that’s not unusual; most retailers do this, many to a much greater extent than Amazon. For example, you can buy AmazonBasics batteries for less than half the price of branded alternatives, and they’re pretty good.

There’s no doubt this is unpleasant for merchants that have to compete with these offerings. But it is also no different from having to compete with more efficient rivals who have lower costs or better insight into consumer demand. Copying products and seeking ways to offer them with better features or at a lower price, which critics of self-preferencing highlight as a particular concern, has always been a fundamental part of market competition—indeed, it is the primary way competition occurs in most markets.

Store-branded versions of iPhone cables and Nespresso pods are certainly inconvenient for those companies, but they offer consumers cheaper alternatives. Where such copying may be problematic (say, by deterring investments in product innovations), the law awards and enforces patents and copyrights to reward novel discoveries and creative works, and trademarks to protect brand identity. But in the absence of those cases where a company has intellectual property, this is simply how competition works.

The fundamental question is “what benefits consumers?” Services like Yelp object that they cannot compete with Google when Google embeds its Google Maps box in Google Search results, while Yelp cannot do the same. But for users, the Maps box adds valuable information to the results page, making it easier to get what they want. Google is not making Yelp worse by making its own product better. Should it have to refrain from offering services that benefit its users because doing so might make competing products comparatively less attractive?

Self-preferencing also enables platforms to promote their offerings in other markets, which is often how large tech companies compete with each other. Amazon has a photo-hosting app that competes with Google Photos and Apple’s iCloud. It recently emailed its customers to promote it. That is undoubtedly self-preferencing, since other services cannot market themselves to Amazon’s customers like this, but if it makes customers aware of an alternative they might not have otherwise considered, that is good for competition.

This kind of behavior also allows companies to invest in offering services inexpensively, or for free, that they intend to monetize by preferencing their other, more profitable products. For example, Google invests in Android’s operating system and gives much of it away for free precisely because it can encourage Android customers to use the profitable Google Search service. Despite claims to the contrary, it is difficult to see this sort of cross-subsidy as harmful to consumers.

Self-preferencing can even be good for competing services, including third-party merchants. In many cases, it expands the size of their potential customer base. For example, blockbuster video games released by Sony and Microsoft increase demand for games by other publishers because they increase the total number of people who buy Playstations and Xboxes. This effect is clear on Amazon’s Marketplace, which has grown enormously for third-party merchants even as Amazon has increased the number of its own store-brand products on the site. By making the Amazon Marketplace more attractive, third-party sellers also benefit.

All platforms are open or closed to varying degrees. Retail “platforms,” for example, exist on a spectrum on which Craigslist is more open and neutral than eBay, which is more so than Amazon, which is itself relatively more so than, say, Walmart.com. Each position on this spectrum offers its own benefits and trade-offs for consumers. Indeed, some customers’ biggest complaint against Amazon is that it is too open, filled with third parties who leave fake reviews, offer counterfeit products, or have shoddy returns policies. Part of the role of the site is to try to correct those problems by making better rules, excluding certain sellers, or just by offering similar options directly.

Regulators and legislators often act as if the more open and neutral, the better, but customers have repeatedly shown that they often prefer less open, less neutral options. And critics of self-preferencing frequently find themselves arguing against behavior that improves consumer outcomes, because it hurts competitors. But that is the nature of competition: what’s good for consumers is frequently bad for competitors. If we have to choose, it’s consumers who should always come first.

The DOJ’s Antitrust Case Against Google: A Tough Slog, but Maybe an Intriguing Possibility?

Lawrence White — 14 January 2021

[TOTM: The following is part of a digital symposium by TOTM guests and authors on the law, economics, and policy of the antitrust lawsuits against Google. The entire series of posts is available here.]

The U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) antitrust case against Google, which was filed in October 2020, will be a tough slog.[1] It is an alleged monopolization (Sherman Act, Sec. 2) case; and monopolization cases are always a tough slog.

In this brief essay I will lay out some of the issues in the case and raise an intriguing possibility.

What is the case about?

The case is about exclusivity and exclusion in the distribution of search engine services; that Google paid substantial sums to Apple and to the manufacturers of Android-based mobile phones and tablets and also to wireless carriers and web-browser proprietors—in essence, to distributors—to install the Google search engine as the exclusive pre-set (installed), default search program. The suit alleges that Google thereby made it more difficult for other search-engine providers (e.g., Bing; DuckDuckGo) to obtain distribution for their search-engine services and thus to attract search-engine users and to sell the online advertising that is associated with search-engine use and that provides the revenue to support the search “platform” in this “two-sided market” context.[2]

Exclusion can be seen as a form of “raising rivals’ costs.”[3] Equivalently, exclusion can be seen as a form of non-price predation. Under either interpretation, the exclusionary action impedes competition.

It’s important to note that these allegations are different from those that motivated an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission (which the FTC dropped in 2013) and the cases by the European Union against Google.[4] Those cases focused on alleged self-preferencing; that Google was unduly favoring its own products and services (e.g., travel services) in its delivery of search results to users of its search engine. In those cases, the impairment of competition (arguably) happens with respect to those competing products and services, not with respect to search itself.

What is the relevant market?

For a monopolization allegation to have any meaning, there needs to be the exercise of market power (which would have adverse consequences for the buyers of the product). And in turn, that exercise of market power needs to occur in a relevant market: one in which market power can be exercised.

Here is one of the important places where the DOJ’s case is likely to turn into a slog: the delineation of a relevant market for alleged monopolization cases remains as a largely unsolved problem for antitrust economics.[5] This is in sharp contrast to the issue of delineating relevant markets for the antitrust analysis of proposed mergers. For this latter category, the paradigm of the “hypothetical monopolist” and the possibility that this hypothetical monopolist could prospectively impose a “small but significant non-transitory increase in price” (SSNIP) has carried the day for the purposes of market delineation.

But no such paradigm exists for monopolization cases, in which the usual allegation is that the defendant already possesses market power and has used the exclusionary actions to buttress that market power. To see the difficulties, it is useful to recall the basic monopoly diagram from Microeconomics 101. A monopolist faces a negatively sloped demand curve for its product (at higher prices, less is bought; at lower prices, more is bought) and sets a profit-maximizing price at the level of output where its marginal revenue (MR) equals its marginal costs (MC). Its price is thereby higher than an otherwise similar competitive industry’s price for that product (to the detriment of buyers) and the monopolist earns higher profits than would the competitive industry.

But unless there are reliable benchmarks as to what the competitive price and profits would otherwise be, any information as to the defendant’s price and profits has little value with respect to whether the defendant already has market power. Also, a claim that a firm does not have market power because it faces rivals and thus isn’t able profitably to raise its price from its current level (because it would lose too many sales to those rivals) similarly has no value. Recall the monopolist from Micro 101. It doesn’t set a higher price than the one where MR=MC, because it would thereby lose too many sales to other sellers of other things.

Thus, any firm—regardless of whether it truly has market power (like the Micro 101 monopolist) or is just another competitor in a sea of competitors—should have already set its price at its profit-maximizing level and should find it unprofitable to raise its price from that level.[6] And thus the claim, “Look at all of the firms that I compete with! I don’t have market power!” similarly has no informational value.

Let us now bring this problem back to the Google monopolization allegation: What is the relevant market? In the first instance, it has to be “the provision of answers to user search queries.” After all, this is the “space” in which the exclusion occurred. But there are categories of search: e.g., search for products/services, versus more general information searches (“What is the current time in Delaware?” “Who was the 21^st President of the United States?”). Do those separate categories themselves constitute relevant markets?

Further, what would the exercise of market power in a (delineated relevant) market look like? Higher-than-competitive prices for advertising that targets search-results recipients is one obvious answer (but see below). In addition, because this is a two-sided market, the competitive “price” (or prices) might involve payments by the search engine to the search users (in return for their exposure to the lucrative attached advertising).[7] And product quality might exhibit less variety than a competitive market would provide; and/or the monopolistic average level of quality would be lower than in a competitive market: e.g., more abuse of user data, and/or deterioration of the delivered information itself, via more self-preferencing by the search engine and more advertising-driven preferencing of results.[8]

In addition, a natural focus for a relevant market is the advertising that accompanies the search results. But now we are at the heart of the difficulty of delineating a relevant market in a monopolization context. If the relevant market is “advertising on search engine results pages,” it seems highly likely that Google has market power. If the relevant market instead is all online U.S. advertising (of which Google’s revenue share accounted for 32% in 2019[9]), then the case is weaker; and if the relevant market is all advertising in the United States (which is about twice the size of online advertising[10]), the case is weaker still. Unless there is some competitive benchmark, there is no easy way to delineate the relevant market.[11]

What exactly has Google been paying for, and why?

As many critics of the DOJ’s case have pointed out, it is extremely easy for users to switch their default search engine. If internet search were a normal good or service, this ease of switching would leave little room for the exercise of market power. But in that case, why is Google willing to pay $8-$12 billion annually for the exclusive default setting on Apple devices and large sums to the manufacturers of Android-based devices (and to wireless carriers and browser proprietors)? Why doesn’t Google instead run ads in prominent places that remind users how superior Google’s search results are and how easy it is for users (if they haven’t already done so) to switch to the Google search engine and make Google the user’s default choice?

Suppose that user inertia is important. Further suppose that users generally have difficulty in making comparisons with respect to the quality of delivered search results. If this is true, then being the default search engine on Apple and Android-based devices and on other distribution vehicles would be valuable. In this context, the inertia of their customers is a valuable “asset” of the distributors that the distributors may not be able to take advantage of, but that Google can (by providing search services and selling advertising). The question of whether Google’s taking advantage of this user inertia means that Google exercises market power takes us back to the issue of delineating the relevant market.

There is a further wrinkle to all of this. It is a well-understood concept in antitrust economics that an incumbent monopolist will be willing to pay more for the exclusive use of an essential input than a challenger would pay for access to the input.[12] The basic idea is straightforward. By maintaining exclusive use of the input, the incumbent monopolist preserves its (large) monopoly profits. If the challenger enters, the incumbent will then earn only its share of the (much lower, more competitive) duopoly profits. Similarly, the challenger can expect only the lower duopoly profits. Accordingly, the incumbent should be willing to outbid (and thereby exclude) the challenger and preserve the incumbent’s exclusive use of the input, so as to protect those monopoly profits.

To bring this to the Google monopolization context, if Google does possess market power in some aspect of search—say, because online search-linked advertising is a relevant market—then Google will be willing to outbid Microsoft (which owns Bing) for the “asset” of default access to Apple’s (inertial) device owners. That Microsoft is a large and profitable company and could afford to match (or exceed) Google’s payments to Apple is irrelevant. If the duopoly profits for online search-linked advertising would be substantially lower than Google’s current profits, then Microsoft would not find it worthwhile to try to outbid Google for that default access asset.

Alternatively, this scenario could be wholly consistent with an absence of market power. If search users (who can easily switch) consider Bing to be a lower-quality search service, then large payments by Microsoft to outbid Google for those exclusive default rights would be largely wasted, since the “acquired” default search users would quickly switch to Google (unless Microsoft provided additional incentives for the users not to switch).

But this alternative scenario returns us to the original puzzle: Why is Google making such large payments to the distributors for those exclusive default rights?

An intriguing possibility

Consider the following possibility. Suppose that Google was paying that $8-$12 billion annually to Apple in return for the understanding that Apple would not develop its own search engine for Apple’s device users.[13] This possibility was not raised in the DOJ’s complaint, nor is it raised in the subsequent suits by the state attorneys general.

But let’s explore the implications by going to an extreme. Suppose that Google and Apple had a formal agreement that—in return for the $8-$12 billion per year—Apple would not develop its own search engine. In this event, this agreement not to compete would likely be seen as a violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act (which does not require a market delineation exercise) and Apple would join Google as a co-conspirator. The case would take on the flavor of the FTC’s prosecution of “pay-for-delay” agreements between the manufacturers of patented pharmaceuticals and the generic drug manufacturers that challenge those patents and then receive payments from the former in return for dropping the patent challenge and delaying the entry of the generic substitute.[14]

As of this writing, there is no evidence of such an agreement and it seems quite unlikely that there would have been a formal agreement. But the DOJ will be able to engage in discovery and take depositions. It will be interesting to find out what the relevant executives at Google—and at Apple—thought was being achieved by those payments.

What would be a suitable remedy/relief?

The DOJ’s complaint is vague with respect to the remedy that it seeks. This is unsurprising. The DOJ may well want to wait to see how the case develops and then amend its complaint.

However, even if Google’s actions have constituted monopolization, it is difficult to conceive of a suitable and effective remedy. One apparently straightforward remedy would be to require simply that Google not be able to purchase exclusivity with respect to the pre-set default settings. In essence, the device manufacturers and others would always be able to sell parallel default rights to other search engines: on the basis, say, that the default rights for some categories of customers—or even a percentage of general customers (randomly selected)—could be sold to other search-engine providers.

But now the Gilbert-Newbery insight comes back into play. Suppose that a device manufacturer knows (or believes) that Google will pay much more if—even in the absence of any exclusivity agreement—Google ends up being the pre-set search engine for all (or nearly all) of the manufacturer’s device sales, as compared with what the manufacturer would receive if those default rights were sold to multiple search-engine providers (including, but not solely, Google). Can that manufacturer (recall that the distributors are not defendants in the case) be prevented from making this sale to Google and thus (de facto) continuing Google’s exclusivity?[15]

Even a requirement that Google not be allowed to make any payment to the distributors for a default position may not improve the competitive environment. Google may be able to find other ways of making indirect payments to distributors in return for attaining default rights, e.g., by offering them lower rates on their online advertising.

Further, if the ultimate goal is an efficient outcome in search, it is unclear how far restrictions on Google’s bidding behavior should go. If Google were forbidden from purchasing any default installation rights for its search engine, would (inert) consumers be better off? Similarly, if a distributor were to decide independently that its customers were better served by installing the Google search engine as the default, would that not be allowed? But if it is allowed, how could one be sure that Google wasn’t indirectly paying for this “independent” decision (e.g., through favorable advertising rates)?

It’s important to remember that this (alleged) monopolization is different from the Standard Oil case of 1911 or even the (landline) AT&T case of 1984. In those cases, there were physical assets that could be separated and spun off to separate companies. For Google, physical assets aren’t important. Although it is conceivable that some of Google’s intellectual property—such as Gmail, YouTube, or Android—could be spun off to separate companies, doing so would do little to cure the (arguably) fundamental problem of the inert device users.

In addition, if there were an agreement between Google and Apple for the latter not to develop a search engine, then large fines for both parties would surely be warranted. But what next? Apple can’t be forced to develop a search engine.[16] This differentiates such an arrangement from the “pay-for-delay” arrangements for pharmaceuticals, where the generic manufacturers can readily produce a near-identical substitute for the patented drug and are otherwise eager to do so.

At the end of the day, forbidding Google from paying for exclusivity may well be worth trying as a remedy. But as the discussion above indicates, it is unlikely to be a panacea and is likely to require considerable monitoring for effective enforcement.

Conclusion

The DOJ’s case against Google will be a slog. There are unresolved issues—such as how to delineate a relevant market in a monopolization case—that will be central to the case. Even if the DOJ is successful in showing that Google violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act in monopolizing search and/or search-linked advertising, an effective remedy seems problematic. But there also remains the intriguing question of why Google was willing to pay such large sums for those exclusive default installation rights?

The developments in the case will surely be interesting.

[1] The DOJ’s suit was joined by 11 states. More states subsequently filed two separate antitrust lawsuits against Google in December.

[2] There is also a related argument: That Google thereby gained greater volume, which allowed it to learn more about its search users and their behavior, and which thereby allowed it to provide better answers to users (and thus a higher-quality offering to its users) and better-targeted (higher-value) advertising to its advertisers. Conversely, Google’s search-engine rivals were deprived of that volume, with the mirror-image negative consequences for the rivals. This is just another version of the standard “learning-by-doing” and the related “learning curve” (or “experience curve”) concepts that have been well understood in economics for decades.

[3] See, for example, Steven C. Salop and David T. Scheffman, “Raising Rivals’ Costs: Recent Advances in the Theory of Industrial Structure,” American Economic Review, Vol. 73, No. 2 (May 1983), pp. 267-271; and Thomas G. Krattenmaker and Steven C. Salop, “Anticompetitive Exclusion: Raising Rivals’ Costs To Achieve Power Over Price,” Yale Law Journal, Vol. 96, No. 2 (December 1986), pp. 209-293.

[4] For a discussion, see Richard J. Gilbert, “The U.S. Federal Trade Commission Investigation of Google Search,” in John E. Kwoka, Jr., and Lawrence J. White, eds. The Antitrust Revolution: Economics, Competition, and Policy, 7^th edn. Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 489-513.

[5] For a more complete version of the argument that follows, see Lawrence J. White, “Market Power and Market Definition in Monopolization Cases: A Paradigm Is Missing,” in Wayne D. Collins, ed., Issues in Competition Law and Policy. American Bar Association, 2008, pp. 913-924.

[6] The forgetting of this important point is often termed “the cellophane fallacy”, since this is what the U.S. Supreme Court did in a 1956 antitrust case in which the DOJ alleged that du Pont had monopolized the cellophane market (and du Pont, in its defense claimed that the relevant market was much wider: all flexible wrapping materials); see U.S. v. du Pont, 351 U.S. 377 (1956). For an argument that profit data and other indicia argued for cellophane as the relevant market, see George W. Stocking and Willard F. Mueller, “The Cellophane Case and the New Competition,” American Economic Review, Vol. 45, No. 1 (March 1955), pp. 29-63.

[7] In the context of differentiated services, one would expect prices (positive or negative) to vary according to the quality of the service that is offered. It is worth noting that Bing offers “rewards” to frequent searchers; see https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/defaults-rewards. It is unclear whether this pricing structure of payment to Bing’s customers represents what a more competitive framework in search might yield, or whether the payment just indicates that search users consider Bing to be a lower-quality service.

[8] As an additional consequence of the impairment of competition in this type of search market, there might be less technological improvement in the search process itself – to the detriment of users.

[9] As estimated by eMarketer: https://www.emarketer.com/newsroom/index.php/google-ad-revenues-to-drop-for-the-first-time/.

[10] See https://www.visualcapitalist.com/us-advertisers-spend-20-years/.

[11] And, again, if we return to the du Pont cellophane case: Was the relevant market cellophane? Or all flexible wrapping materials?

[12] This insight is formalized in Richard J. Gilbert and David M.G. Newbery, “Preemptive Patenting and the Persistence of Monopoly,” American Economic Review, Vol. 72, No. 3 (June 1982), pp. 514-526.

[13] To my knowledge, Randal C. Picker was the first to suggest this possibility; see https://www.competitionpolicyinternational.com/a-first-look-at-u-s-v-google/. Whether Apple would be interested in trying to develop its own search engine – given the fiasco a decade ago when Apple tried to develop its own maps app to replace the Google maps app – is an open question. In addition, the Gilbert-Newbery insight applies here as well: Apple would be less inclined to invest the substantial resources that would be needed to develop a search engine when it is thereby in a duopoly market. But Google might be willing to pay “insurance” to reinforce any doubts that Apple might have.

[14] The U.S. Supreme Court, in FTC v. Actavis, 570 U.S. 136 (2013), decided that such agreements could be anti-competitive and should be judged under the “rule of reason”. For a discussion of the case and its implications, see, for example, Joseph Farrell and Mark Chicu, “Pharmaceutical Patents and Pay-for-Delay: Actavis (2013),” in John E. Kwoka, Jr., and Lawrence J. White, eds. The Antitrust Revolution: Economics, Competition, and Policy, 7^th edn. Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 331-353.

[15] This is an example of the insight that vertical arrangements – in this case combined with the Gilbert-Newbery effect – can be a way for dominant firms to raise rivals’ costs. See, for example, John Asker and Heski Bar-Isaac. 2014. “Raising Retailers’ Profits: On Vertical Practices and the Exclusion of Rivals.” American Economic Review, Vol. 104, No. 2 (February 2014), pp. 672-686.

[16] And, again, for the reasons discussed above, Apple might not be eager to make the effort.

Why the Federal Government’s Antitrust Case Against Google Should—and Likely Will—Fail

Thom Lambert — 18 December 2020

On October 20, 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and eleven states with Republican attorneys general sued Google for monopolizing and attempting to monopolize the markets for general internet search services, search advertising, and “general search text” advertising (i.e., ads that resemble search results). Last week, California joined the lawsuit, making it a bipartisan affair.

DOJ and the states (collectively, “the government”) allege that Google has used contractual arrangements to expand and cement its dominance in the relevant markets. In particular, the government complains that Google has agreed to share search ad revenues in exchange for making Google Search the default search engine on various “search access points.”

Google has entered such agreements with Apple (for search on iPhones and iPads), manufacturers of Android devices and the mobile service carriers that support them, and producers of web browsers. Google is also pursuing default status on new internet-enabled consumer products, such as voice assistants and “smart” TVs, appliances, and wearables. In the government’s telling, this all amounts to Google’s sharing of monopoly profits with firms that can ensure its continued monopoly by imposing search defaults that users are unlikely to alter.

There are several obvious weaknesses with the government’s case. One is that preset internet defaults are super easy to change and, in other contexts, are regularly altered. For example, while 88% of desktop and laptop computers use the Windows operating system, which defaults to a Microsoft browser (Internet Explorer or Edge), Google’s Chrome browser commands a 69% market share on desktops and laptops, compared to around 13% for Internet Explorer and Edge combined. Changing a default search engine is as easy as changing a browser default—three simple steps on an iPhone!—and it seems consumers will change defaults they don’t actually prefer.

A second obvious weakness, related to the first, is that the government has alleged no facts suggesting that Google’s search rivals—primarily Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo—would have enjoyed more success but for Google’s purportedly exclusionary agreements. Even absent default status, people likely would have selected Google Search because it’s the better search engine. It doesn’t seem the challenged arrangements caused Google’s search dominance.

Admittedly, the standard of causation in monopolization cases (at least those seeking only injunctive relief) is low. The D.C. Circuit’s Microsoft decision described it as “edentulous” or, less pretentiously, toothless. Nevertheless, the government is unlikely to prevail in its action against Google—and that’s a good thing. Below, I highlight the central deficiency in the government’s Google case and point out problems with the government’s challenges to each of Google’s purportedly exclusionary arrangements.

The Lawsuit’s Overarching Deficiency

We’ve all had the experience of typing a query only to have Google, within a few key strokes, accurately predict what we were going to ask and provide us with exactly the answer we were looking for. It’s both eerie and awesome, and it keeps us returning to Google time and again.

But it’s not magic. Nor has Google hacked our brains. Google is so good at predicting our questions and providing responsive search results because its top-notch algorithms process gazillions of searches and can “learn” from users’ engagement. Scale is thus essential to Google’s quality.

The government’s complaint concedes as much. It acknowledges that “[g]reater scale improves the quality of a general search engine’s algorithms” (¶35) and that “[t]he additional data from scale allows improved automated learning for algorithms to deliver more relevant results, particularly on ‘fresh’ queries (queries seeking recent information), location-based queries (queries asking about something in the searcher’s vicinity), and ‘long-tail’ queries (queries used infrequently)” (¶36). The complaint also asserts that “[t]he most effective way to achieve scale is for the general search engine to be the preset default on mobile devices, computers, and other devices…” (¶38).

Oddly, though, the government chides Google for pursuing “[t]he most effective way” of securing the scale that concededly “improves the quality of a general search engine’s algorithms.” Google’s efforts to ensure and enhance its own product quality are improper, the government says, because “they deny rivals scale to compete effectively” (¶8). In the government’s view, Google is legally obligated to forego opportunities to make its own product better so as to give its rivals a chance to improve their own offerings.

This is inconsistent with U.S. antitrust law. Just as firms are not required to hold their prices high to create a price umbrella for their less efficient rivals, they need not refrain from efforts to improve the quality of their own offerings so as to give their rivals a foothold.

Antitrust does forbid anticompetitive foreclosure of rivals—i.e., business-usurping arrangements that are not the result of efforts to compete on the merits by reducing cost or enhancing quality. But firms are, and should be, free to make their products better, even if doing so makes things more difficult for their rivals. Antitrust, after all, protects competition, not competitors.

The central deficiency in the government’s case is that it concedes that scale is crucial to search engine quality, but it does not assert that there is a “minimum efficient scale”—i.e., a point at which scale economies are exhausted. If a firm takes actions to enhance its own scale beyond minimum efficient scale, and if its efforts may hold its rivals below such scale, then it may have engaged in anticompetitive foreclosure. But a firm that pursues scale that makes its products better is simply competing on the merits.

The government likely did not allege that there is a minimum efficient scale in general internet search services because returns to scale go on indefinitely, or at least for a very long time. But the absence of such an allegation damns the government’s case against Google, for it implies that Google’s efforts to secure the distribution, and thus the greater use, of its services make those services better.

In this regard, the Microsoft case, which the government points to as a model for its action against Google (¶10), is inapposite. Inthat case, the government alleged that Microsoft had entered license agreements that foreclosed Netscape, a potential rival, from the best avenues of browser distribution: original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and internet access providers. The government here similarly alleges that Google has foreclosed rival search engines from the best avenues of search distribution: default settings on mobile devices and web browsers. But a key difference (in addition to the fact that search defaults are quite easy to change) is that Microsoft’s license restrictions foreclosed Netscape without enhancing the quality of Microsoft’s offerings. Indeed, the court emphasized that the challenged Microsoft agreements were anticompetitive because they “reduced rival browsers’ usage share not by improving [Microsoft’s] own product but, rather, by preventing OEMs from taking actions that could increase rivals’ share of usage” (emphasis added). Here, any foreclosure of Google’s search rivals is incidental to Google’s efforts to improve its product by enhancing its scale.

Now, the government might contend that the anticompetitive harms from raising rivals’ distribution costs exceed the procompetitive benefits of enhancing the quality of Google’s search services. Courts, though, have generally been skeptical of claims that exclusion-causing product enhancements are anticompetitive because they do more harm than good. There’s a sound reason for this: courts are ill-equipped to weigh the benefits of product enhancements against the costs of competition reductions resulting from product-enhancement efforts. For that reason, they should—and likely will—stick with the rule that this sort of product-enhancing conduct is competition on the merits, even if it has the incidental effect of raising rivals’ costs. And if they do so, the government will lose this case.

Problems with the Government’s Specific Challenges

Agreements with Android OEMs and Wireless Carriers

The government alleges that Google has foreclosed its search rivals from distribution opportunities on the Android platform. It has done so, the government says, by entering into exclusion-causing agreements with OEMs that produce Android products (Samsung, Motorola, etc.) and with carriers that provide wireless service for Android devices (AT&T, Verizon, etc.).

Android is an open source operating system that is owned by Google and licensed, for free, to producers of mobile internet devices. Under the terms of the challenged agreements, Google’s counterparties promise not to produce Android “forks”—operating systems that are Android-based but significantly alter or “fragment” the basic platform—in order to get access to proprietary Google apps that Android users typically desire and to certain application protocol interfaces (APIs) that enable various functionalities. In addition to these “anti-forking agreements,” counterparties enter various “pre-installation agreements” obligating them to install a suite of Google apps that use Google Search as a default. Installing that suite is a condition for obtaining the right to pre-install Google’s app store (Google Play) and other must-have apps. Finally, OEMs and carriers enter “revenue sharing agreements” that require the use of Google Search as the sole preset default on a number of search access points in exchange for a percentage of search ad revenue derived from covered devices. Taken together, the government says, these anti-forking, pre-installation, and revenue-sharing agreements preclude the emergence of Android rivals (from forks) and ensure the continued dominance of Google Search on Android devices.

Eliminating these agreements, though, would likely harm consumers by reducing competition in the market for mobile operating systems. Within that market, there are two dominant players: Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. Apple earns money off iOS by selling hardware—iPhones and iPads that are pre-installed with iOS. Google licenses Android to OEMs for free but then earns advertising revenue off users’ searches (which provide an avenue for search ads) and other activities (which generate user data for better targeted display ads). Apple and Google thus compete on revenue models. As Randy Picker has explained, Microsoft tried a third revenue model—licensing a Windows mobile operating system to OEMs for a fee—but it failed. The continued competition between Apple and Google, though, allows for satisfaction of heterogenous consumer preferences: Apple products are more expensive but more secure (due to Apple’s tight control over software and hardware); Android devices are cheaper (as the operating system is ad-supported) and offer more innovations (as OEMs have more flexibility), but tend to be less secure. Such variety—a result of business model competition—is good for consumers.

If the government were to prevail and force Google to end the agreements described above, thereby reducing the advertising revenue Google derives from Android, Google would have to either copy Apple’s vertically integrated model so as to recoup its Android investments through hardware sales, charge OEMs for Android (a la Microsoft), or cut back on its investments in Android. In each case, consumers would suffer. The first option would take away an offering preferred by many consumers—indeed most globally, as Android dominates iOS on a worldwide basis. The second option would replace Google’s business model with one that failed, suggesting that consumers value it less. The third option would reduce product quality in the market for mobile operating systems.

In the end, then, the government’s challenge to Google’s Android agreements is myopic and misguided. Competition among business models, like competition along any dimension, inures to the benefit of consumers. Precluding it as the government is demanding would be silly.

Agreements with Browser Producers

Web browsers like Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox are a primary distribution channel for search engines. The government claims that Google has illicitly foreclosed rival search engines from this avenue of distribution by entering revenue-sharing agreements with the major non-Microsoft browsers (i.e., all but Microsoft’s Edge and Internet Explorer). Under those agreements, Google shares up to 40% of ad revenues generated from a browser in exchange for being the preset default on both computer and mobile versions of the browser.

Surely there is no problem, though, with search engines paying royalties to web browsers. That’s how independent browsers like Opera and Firefox make money! Indeed, 95% of Firefox’s revenue comes from search royalties. If browsers were precluded from sharing in search engines’ ad revenues, they would have to find an alternative source of financing. Producers of independent browsers would likely charge license fees, which consumers would probably avoid. That means the only available browsers would be those affiliated with an operating system (Microsoft’s Edge, Apple’s Safari) or a search engine (Google’s Chrome). It seems doubtful that reducing the number of viable browsers would benefit consumers. The law should therefore allow payment of search royalties to browsers. And if such payments are permitted, a browser will naturally set its default search engine so as to maximize its payout.

Google’s search rivals can easily compete for default status on a browser by offering a better deal to the browser producer. In 2014, for example, search engine Yahoo managed to wrest default status on Mozilla’s Firefox away from Google. The arrangement was to last five years, but in 2017, Mozilla terminated the agreement and returned Google to default status because so many Firefox users were changing the browser’s default search engine from Yahoo to Google. This historical example undermines the government’s challenges to Google’s browser agreements by showing (1) that other search engines can attain default status by competing, and (2) that defaults aren’t as “sticky” as the government claims—at least, not when the default is set to a search engine other than the one most people prefer.

In short, there’s nothing anticompetitive about Google’s browser agreements, and enjoining such deals would likely injure consumers by reducing competition among browsers.

Agreements with Apple

That brings us to the allegations that have gotten the most attention in the popular press: those concerning Google’s arrangements with Apple. The complaint alleges that Google pays Apple $8-12 billion a year—a whopping 15-20% of Apple’s net income—for granting Google default search status on iOS devices. In the government’s telling, Google is agreeing to share a significant portion of its monopoly profits with Apple in exchange for Apple’s assistance in maintaining Google’s search monopoly.

An alternative view, of course, is that Google is just responding to Apple’s power: Apple has assembled a giant installed base of loyal customers and can demand huge payments to favor one search engine over another on its popular mobile devices. In that telling, Google may be paying Apple to prevent it from making Bing or another search engine the default on Apple’s search access points.

If that’s the case, what Google is doing is both procompetitive and a boon to consumers. Microsoft could easily outbid Google to have Bing set as the default search engine on Apple’s devices. Microsoft’s market capitalization exceeds that of Google parent Alphabet by about $420 billion ($1.62 trillion versus $1.2 trillion), which is roughly the value of Walmart. Despite its ability to outbid Google for default status, Microsoft hasn’t done so, perhaps because it realizes that defaults aren’t that sticky when the default service isn’t the one most people prefer. Microsoft knows that from its experience with Internet Explorer and Edge (which collectively command only around 13% of the desktop browser market even though they’re the defaults on Windows, which has a 88% market share on desktops and laptops), and from its experience with Bing (where “Google” is the number one search term). Nevertheless, the possibility remains that Microsoft could outbid Google for default status, improve its quality to prevent users from changing the default (or perhaps pay users for sticking with Bing), and thereby take valuable scale from Google, impairing the quality of Google Search. To prevent that from happening, Google shares with Apple a generous portion of its search ad revenues, which, given the intense competition for mobile device sales, Apple likely passes along to consumers in the form of lower phone and tablet prices.

If the government succeeds in enjoining Google’s payments to Apple for default status, other search engines will presumably be precluded from such arrangements as well. After all, the “foreclosure” effect of paying for default search status on Apple products is the same regardless of which search engine does the paying, and U.S. antitrust law does not “punish” successful firms by forbidding them from engaging in competitive activities that are open to their rivals.

Ironically, then, the government’s success in its challenge to Google’s Apple payments would benefit Google at the expense of consumers: Google would almost certainly remain the default search engine on Apple products, as it is most preferred by consumers and no rival could pay to dislodge it; Google would not have to pay a penny to retain its default status; and Apple would lose revenues that it likely passes along to consumers in the form of lower prices. The courts are unlikely to countenance this perverse result by ruling that Google’s arrangements with Apple violate the antitrust laws.

Arrangements with Producers of Internet-Enabled “Smart” Devices

The final part of the government’s case against Google starkly highlights a problem that is endemic to the entire lawsuit. The government claims that Google, having locked up all the traditional avenues of search distribution with the arrangements described above, is now seeking to foreclose search distribution in the new avenues being created by internet-enabled consumer products like wearables (e.g., smart watches), voice assistants, smart TVs, etc. The alleged monopolistic strategy is similar to those described above: Google will share some of its monopoly profits in exchange for search default status on these smart devices, thereby preventing rival search engines from attaining valuable scale.

It’s easy to see in this context, though, why Google’s arrangements are likely procompetitive. Unlike web browsers, mobile phones, and tablets, internet-enabled smart devices are novel. Innovators are just now discovering new ways to embed internet functionality into everyday devices.

Putting oneself in the position of these innovators helps illuminate a key beneficial aspect of Google’s arrangements: They create an incentive to develop new and attractive means of distributing search. Innovators currently at work on internet-enabled devices are no doubt spurred on by the possibility of landing a lucrative distribution agreement with Google or another search engine. Banning these sorts of arrangements—the consequence of governmental success in this lawsuit—would diminish the incentive to innovate.

But that can be said of every single one of the arrangements the government is challenging. Because of Google’s revenue-sharing with search distributors, each of them has an added incentive to make their distribution channels desirable to consumers. Android OEMs and Apple will work harder to produce mobile devices that people will want to use for internet searches; browser producers will endeavor to improve their offerings. By paying producers of search access points a portion of the search ad revenues generated on their platforms, Google motivates them to generate more searches, which they can best do by making their products as attractive as possible.

At the end of the day, then, the government’s action against Google seeks to condemn conduct that benefits consumers. Because of the challenged arrangements, Google makes its own search services better, is able to license Android for free, ensures the continued existence of independent web browsers like Firefox and Opera, helps lower the price of iPhones and iPads, and spurs innovators to develop new “Internet of Things” devices that can harness the power of the web.

The Biden administration would do well to recognize this lawsuit for what it is: a poorly conceived effort to appear to be “doing something” about a Big Tech company that has drawn the ire (for different reasons) of both progressives and conservatives. DOJ and its state co-plaintiffs should seek dismissal of this action.

The Antitrust Prohibition of Favoritism, or the Imposition of Corporate Selflessness

Aurelien Portuese — 16 December 2020

It is my endeavor to scrutinize the questionable assessment articulated against default settings in the U.S. Justice Department’s lawsuit against Google. Default, I will argue, is no antitrust fault. Default in the Google case drastically differs from default referred to in the Microsoft case. In Part I, I argue the comparison is odious. Furthermore, in Part II, it will be argued that the implicit prohibition of default settings echoes, as per listings, the explicit prohibition of self-preferencing in search results. Both aspects – default’s implicit prohibition and self-preferencing’s explicit prohibition – are the two legs of a novel and integrated theory of sanctioning corporate favoritism. The coming to the fore of such theory goes against the very essence of the capitalist grain. In Part III, I note the attempt to instill some corporate selflessness is at odds with competition on the merits and the spirit of fundamental economic freedoms.

When Default is No-Fault

The recent complaint filed by the DOJ and 11 state attorneys general claims that Google has abused its dominant position on the search-engine market through several ways, notably making Google the default search engine both in Google Chrome web browser for Android OS and in Apple’s Safari web browser for iOS. Undoubtedly, default setting confers a noticeable advantage for users’ attraction – it is sought and enforced on purpose. Nevertheless, the default setting confers an unassailable position unless the product remains competitive. Furthermore, the default setting can hardly be proven to be anticompetitive in the Google case. Indeed, the DOJ puts considerable effort in the complaint to make the Google case resemble the 20-year-old Microsoft case. Former Federal Trade Commission Chairman William Kovacic commented: “I suppose the Justice Department is telling the court, ‘You do not have to be scared of this case. You’ve done it before […] This is Microsoft part 2.”^[1]

However, irrespective of the merits of the Microsoft case two decades ago, the Google default setting case bears minimal resemblance to the Microsoft default setting of Internet Explorer. First, as opposed to the Microsoft case, where default by Microsoft meant pre-installed software (i.e., Internet Explorer)[2], the Google case does not relate to the pre-installment of the Google search engine (since it is just a webpage) but a simple setting. This technical difference is significant: although “sticky”[3], the default setting, can be outwitted with just one click[4]. It is dissimilar to the default setting, which can only be circumvented by uninstalling software[5], searching and installing a new one[6]. Moreover, with no certainty that consumers will effectively use Google search engine, default settings come with advertising revenue sharing agreements between Google and device manufacturers, mobile phone carriers, competing browsers and Apple[7]. These mutually beneficial deals represent a significant cost with no technical exclusivity [8]. In other words, the antitrust treatment of a tie-in between software and hardware in the Microsoft case cannot be convincingly extrapolated to the default setting of a “webware”[9] as relevant in the Google case.

Second, the Google case cannot legitimately resort to extrapolating the Microsoft case for another technical (and commercial) aspect: the Microsoft case was a classic tie-in case where the tied product (Internet Explorer) was tied into the main product (Windows). As a traditional tie-in scenario, the tied product (Internet Explorer) was “consistently offered, promoted, and distributed […] as a stand-alone product separate from, and not as a component of, Windows […]”[10]. In contrast, Google has never sold Google Chrome or Android OS. It offered both Google Chrome and Android OS for free, necessarily conditional to Google search engine as default setting. The very fact that Google Chrome or Android OS have never been “stand-alone” products, to use the Microsoft case’s language, together with the absence of software installation, dramatically differentiates the features pertaining to the Google case from those of the Microsoft case. The Google case is not a traditional tie-in case: it is a case against default setting when both products (the primary and related products) are given for free, are not saleable, are neither tangible nor intangible goods but only popular digital services due to significant innovativeness and ease of usage. The Microsoft “complaint challenge[d] only Microsoft’s concerted attempts to maintain its monopoly in operating systems and to achieve dominance in other markets, not by innovation and other competition on the merits, but by tie-ins.” Quite noticeably, the Google case does not mention tie-in ,as per Google Chrome or Android OS.

The complaint only refers to tie-ins concerning Google’s app being pre-installed on Android OS. Therefore, concerning Google’s dominance on the search engine market, it cannot be said that the default setting of Google search in Android OS entails tie-in. Google search engine has no distribution channel (since it is only a website) other than through downstream partnerships (i.e., vertical deals with Android device manufacturers). To sanction default setting on downstream trading partners is tantamount to refusing legitimate means to secure distribution channels of proprietary and zero-priced services. To further this detrimental logic, it would mean that Apple may no longer offer its own apps in its own iPhones or, in offline markets, that a retailer may no longer offer its own (default) bags at the till since it excludes rivals’ sale bags. Products and services naked of any adjacent products and markets (i.e., an iPhone or Android OS with no app or a shopkeeper with no bundled services) would dramatically increase consumers’ search costs while destroying innovators’ essential distribution channels for innovative business models and providing few departures from the status quo as long as consumers will continue to value default products[11].

Default should not be an antitrust fault: the Google case makes default settings a new line of antitrust injury absent tie-ins. In conclusion, as a free webware, Google search’s default setting cannot be compared to default installation in the Microsoft case since minimal consumer stickiness entails (almost) no switching costs. As free software, Google’s default apps cannot be compared to Microsoft case either since pre-installation is the sine qua non condition of the highly valued services (Android OS) voluntarily chosen by device manufacturers. Default settings on downstream products can only be reasonably considered as antitrust injury when the dominant company is erroneously treated as a de facto essential facility – something evidenced by the similar prohibition of self-preferencing.

When Self-Preference is No Defense

Self-preferencing is to listings what the default setting is to operating systems. They both are ways to market one’s own products (i.e., alternative to marketing toward end-consumers). While default setting may come with both free products and financial payments (Android OS and advertising revenue sharing), self-preferencing may come with foregone advertising revenues in order to promote one’s own products. Both sides can be apprehended as the two sides of the same coin:[12] generating the ad-funded main product’s distribution channels – Google’s search engine. Both are complex advertising channels since both venues favor one’s own products regarding consumers’ attention. Absent both channels, the payments made for default agreements and the foregone advertising revenues in self-preferencing one’s own products would morph into marketing and advertising expenses of Google search engine toward end-consumers.

The DOJ complaint lambasts that “Google’s monopoly in general search services also has given the company extraordinary power as the gateway to the internet, which uses to promote its own web content and increase its profits.” This blame was at the core of the European Commission’s Google Shopping decision in 2017[13]: it essentially holds Google accountable for having, because of its ad-funded business model, promoted its own advertising products and demoted organic links in search results. According to which Google’s search results are no longer relevant and listed on the sole motivation of advertising revenue

But this argument is circular: should these search results become irrelevant, Google’s core business would become less attractive, thereby generating less advertising revenue. This self-inflicted inefficiency would deprive Google of valuable advertising streams and incentivize end-consumers to switch to search engine rivals such as Bing, DuckDuckGo, Amazon (product search), etc. Therefore, an ad-funded company such as Google needs to reasonably arbitrage between advertising objectives and the efficiency of its core activities (here, zero-priced organic search services). To downplay (the ad-funded) self-referencing in order to foster (the zero-priced) organic search quality would disregard the two-sidedness of the Google platform: it would harm advertisers and the viability of the ad-funded business model without providing consumers and innovation protection it aims at providing. The problematic and undesirable concept of “search neutrality” would mean algorithmic micro-management for the sake of an “objective” listing considered acceptable only to the eyes of the regulator.

Furthermore, self-preferencing entails a sort of positive discrimination toward one’s own products[14]. If discrimination has traditionally been antitrust lines of injuries, self-preferencing is an “epithet”[15] outside antitrust remits for good reasons[16]. Indeed, should self-interested (i.e., rationally minded) companies and individuals are legally complied to self-demote their own products and services? If only big (how big?) companies are legally complied to self-demote their products and services, to what extent will exempted companies involved in self-preferencing become liable to do so?

Indeed, many uncertainties, legal and economic ones, may spawn from the emerging prohibition of self-preferencing. More fundamentally, antitrust liability may clash with basic corporate governance principles where self-interestedness allows self-preferencing and command such self-promotion. The limits of antitrust have been reached when two sets of legal regimes, both applicable to companies, suggest contradictory commercial conducts. To what extent may Amazon no longer promote its own series on Amazon Video in a similar manner Netflix does? To what extent can Microsoft no longer promote Bing’s search engine to compete with Google’s search engine effectively? To what extent Uber may no longer promote UberEATS in order to compete with delivery services effectively? Not only the business of business is doing business[17], but also it is its duty for which shareholders may hold managers to account.

The self is moral; there is a corporate morality of business self-interest. In other words, corporate selflessness runs counter to business ethics since corporate self-interest yields the self’s rivalrous positioning within a competitive order. Absent a corporate self-interest, self-sacrifice may generate value destruction for the sake of some unjustified and ungrounded claims. The emerging prohibition of self-preferencing, similar to the established ban on the default setting on one’s own products into other proprietary products, materializes the corporate self’s losing. Both directions coalesce to instill the legally embedded duty of self-sacrifice for the competitor’s welfare instead of the traditional consumer welfare and the dynamics of innovation, which never unleash absent appropriabilities. In conclusion, to expect firms, however big or small, to act irrespective of their identities (i.e., corporate selflessness) would constitute an antitrust error and would be at odds with capitalism.

Toward an Integrated Theory of Disintegrating Favoritism

The Google lawsuit primarily blames Google for default settings enforced via several deals. The lawsuit also makes self-preferencing anticompetitive conduct under antitrust rules. These two charges are novel and dubious in their remits. They nevertheless represent a fundamental catalyst for the development of a new and problematic unified antitrust theory prohibiting favoritism: companies may no longer favor their products and services, both vertically and horizontally, irrespective of consumer benefits, irrespective of superior efficiency arguments, and irrespective of dynamic capabilities enhancement. Indeed, via an unreasonably expanded vision of leveraging, antitrust enforcement is furtively banning a company to favor its own products and services based on greater consumer choice as a substitute to consumer welfare, based on the protection of the opportunities of rivals to innovate and compete as a substitute to the essence of competition and innovation, and based on limiting the outreach and size of companies as a substitute to the capabilities and efficiencies of these companies. Leveraging becomes suspicious and corporate self-favoritism under accusation. The Google lawsuit materializes this impractical trend, which further enshrines the precautionary approach to antitrust enforcement[18].

[1] Jessica Guynn, Google Justice Department antitrust lawsuit explained: this is what it means for you. USA Today, October 20, 2020.

[2] The software (Internet Explorer) was tied in the hardware (Windows PC).

[3] U.S. v Google LLC, Case A:20, October 20, 2020, 3 (referring to default settings as “especially sticky” with respect to consumers’ willingness to change).

[4] While the DOJ affirms that “being the preset default general search engine is particularly valuable because consumers rarely change the preset default”, it nevertheless provides no evidence of the breadth of such consumer stickiness. To be sure, search engine’s default status does not necessarily lead to usage as evidenced by the case of South Korea. In this country, despite Google’s preset default settings, the search engine Naver remains dominant in the national search market with over 70% of market shares. The rivalry exerted by Naver on Google demonstrates that limits of consumer stickiness to default settings. See Alesia Krush, Google vs. Naver: Why Can’t Google Dominate Search in Korea? Link-Assistant.Com, available at: https://www.link-assistant.com/blog/google-vs-naver-why-cant-google-dominate-search-in-korea/ . As dominant search engine in Korea, Naver is subject to antitrust investigations with similar leveraging practices as Google in other countries, see Shin Ji-hye, FTC sets up special to probe Naver, Google, The Korea Herald, November 19, 2019, available at : http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20191119000798 ; Kim Byung-wook, Complaint against Google to be filed with FTC, The Investor, December 14, 2020, available at : https://www.theinvestor.co.kr/view.php?ud=20201123000984 (reporting a complaint by Naver and other Korean IT companies against Google’s 30% commission policy on Google Play Store’s apps).

[5] For instance, the then complaint acknowledged that “Microsoft designed Windows 98 so that removal of Internet Explorer by OEMs or end users is operationally more difficult than it was in Windows 95”, in U.S. v Microsoft Corp., Civil Action No 98-1232, May 18, 1998, para.20.

[6] The DOJ complaint itself quotes “one search competitor” who is reported to have noted consumer stickiness “despite the simplicity of changing a default setting to enable customer choice […]” (para.47). Therefore, default setting for search engine is remarkably simple to bypass but consumers do not often do so, either due to satisfaction with Google search engine and/or due to search and opportunity costs.

[7] See para.56 of the DOJ complaint.

[8] Competing browsers can always welcome rival search engines and competing search engine apps can always be downloaded despite revenue sharing agreements. See paras.78-87 of the DOJ complaint.

[9] Google search engine is nothing but a “webware” – a complex set of algorithms that work via online access of a webpage with no prior download. For a discussion on the definition of webware, see https://www.techopedia.com/definition/4933/webware .

[10] Id. para.21.

[11] Such outcome would frustrate traditional ways of offering computers and mobile devices as acknowledged by the DOJ itself in the Google complaint: “new computers and new mobile devices generally come with a number of preinstalled apps and out-of-the-box setting. […] Each of these search access points can and almost always does have a preset default general search engine”, at para. 41. Also, it appears that present default general search engine is common commercial practices since, as the DOJ complaint itself notes when discussing Google’s rivals (Microsoft’s Bing and Amazon’s Fire OS), “Amazon preinstalled its own proprietary apps and agreed to make Microsoft’s Bing the preset default general search engine”, in para.130. The complaint fails to identify alternative search engines which are not preset defaults, thus implicitly recognizing this practice as a widespread practice.

[12] To use Vesterdof’s language, see Bo Vesterdorf, Theories of Self-Preferencing and Duty to Deal – Two Sides of the Same Coin, Competition Law & Policy Debate 1(1) 4, (2015). See also Nicolas Petit, Theories of Self-Preferencing under Article 102 TFEU: A Reply to Bo Vesterdorf, 5-7 (2015).

[13] Case 39740 Google Search (Shopping). Here the foreclosure effects of self-preferencing are only speculated: « the Commission is not required to prove that the Conduct has the actual effect of decreasing traffic to competing comparison shopping services and increasing traffic to Google’s comparison-shopping service. Rather, it is sufficient for the Commission to demonstrate that the Conduct is capable of having, or likely to have, such effects.” (para.601 of the Decision). See P. Ibáñez Colomo, Indispensability and Abuse of Dominance: From Commercial Solvents to Slovak Telekom and Google Shopping, 10 Journal of European Competition Law & Practice 532 (2019); Aurelien Portuese, When Demotion is Competition: Algorithmic Antitrust Illustrated, Concurrences, no 2, May 2018, 25-37; Aurelien Portuese, Fine is Only One Click Away, Symposium on the Google Shopping Decision, Case Note, 3 Competition and Regulatory Law Review, (2017).

[14] For a general discussion on law and economics of self-preferencing, see Michael A. Salinger, Self-Preferencing, Global Antitrust Institute Report, 329-368 (2020).

[15]Pablo Ibanez Colomo, Self-Preferencing: Yet Another Epithet in Need of Limiting Principles, 43 World Competition (2020) (concluding that self-preferencing is « misleading as a legal category »).

[16] See, for instances, Pedro Caro de Sousa, What Shall We Do About Self-Preferencing? Competition Policy International, June 2020.

[17] Milton Friedman, The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits, New York Times, September 13, 1970. This echoes Adam Smith’s famous statement that « It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard for their own self-interest » from the 1776 Wealth of Nations. In Ayn Rand’s philosophy, the only alternative to rational self-interest is to sacrifice one’s own interests either for fellowmen (altruism) or for supernatural forces (mysticism). See Ayn Rand, The Objectivist Ethics, in The Virtue of Selfishness, Signet, (1964).

[18] Aurelien Portuese, European Competition Enforcement and the Digital Economy : The Birthplace of Precautionary Antitrust, Global Antitrust Institute’s Report on the Digital Economy, 597-651.

The Epic Flaws of Epic’s Antitrust Gambit

Dirk Auer — 27 August 2020

Much has already been said about the twin antitrust suits filed by Epic Games against Apple and Google. For those who are not familiar with the cases, the game developer – most famous for its hit title Fortnite and the “Unreal Engine” that underpins much of the game (and movie) industry – is complaining that Apple and Google are thwarting competition from rival app stores and in-app payment processors.

Supporters have been quick to see in these suits a long-overdue challenge against the 30% commissions that Apple and Google charge. Some have even portrayed Epic as a modern-day Robin Hood, leading the fight against Big Tech to the benefit of small app developers and consumers alike. Epic itself has been keen to stoke this image, comparing its litigation to a fight for basic freedoms in the face of Big Brother:

However, upon closer inspection, cracks rapidly appear in this rosy picture. What is left is a company partaking in blatant rent-seeking that threatens to harm the sprawling ecosystems that have emerged around both Apple and Google’s app stores.

Two issues are particularly salient. First, Epic is trying to protect its own interests at the expense of the broader industry. If successful, its suit would merely lead to alternative revenue schemes that – although more beneficial to itself – would leave smaller developers to shoulder higher fees. Second, the fees that Epic portrays as extortionate were in fact key to the emergence of mobile gaming.

Epic’s utopia is not an equilibrium

Central to Epic’s claims is the idea that both Apple and Google: (i) thwart competition from rival app stores, and implement a series of measures that prevent developers from reaching gamers through alternative means (such as pre-installing apps, or sideloading them in the case of Apple’s platforms); and (ii) tie their proprietary payment processing services to their app stores. According to Epic, this ultimately enables both Apple and Google to extract “extortionate” commissions (30%) from app developers.

But Epic’s whole case is based on the unrealistic assumption that both Apple and Google will sit idly by while rival play stores and payment systems take a free-ride on the vast investments they have ploughed into their respective smartphone platforms. In other words, removing Apple and Google’s ability to charge commissions on in-app purchases does not prevent them from monetizing their platforms elsewhere.

Indeed, economic and strategic management theory tells us that so long as Apple and Google single-handedly control one of the necessary points of access to their respective ecosystems, they should be able to extract a sizable share of the revenue generated on their platforms. One can only speculate, but it is easy to imagine Apple and Google charging rival app stores for access to their respective platforms, or charging developers for access to critical APIs.

Epic itself seems to concede this point. In a recent Verge article, it argued that Apple was threatening to cut off its access to iOS and Mac developer tools, which Apple currently offers at little to no cost:

Apple will terminate Epic’s inclusion in the Apple Developer Program, a membership that’s necessary to distribute apps on iOS devices or use Apple developer tools, if the company does not “cure your breaches” to the agreement within two weeks, according to a letter from Apple that was shared by Epic. Epic won’t be able to notarize Mac apps either, a process that could make installing Epic’s software more difficult or block it altogether. Apple requires that all apps are notarized before they can be run on newer versions of macOS, even if they’re distributed outside the App Store.

There is little to prevent Apple from more heavily monetizing these tools – should Epic’s antitrust case successfully prevent it from charging commissions via its app store.

All of this raises the question: why is Epic bringing a suit that, if successful, would merely result in the emergence of alternative fee schedules (as opposed to a significant reduction of the overall fees paid by developers).

One potential answer is that the current system is highly favorable to small apps that earn little to no revenue from purchases and who benefit most from the trust created by Apple and Google’s curation of their stores. It is, however, much less favorable to developers like Epic who no longer require any curation to garner the necessary trust from consumers and who earn a large share of their revenue from in-app purchases.

In more technical terms, the fact that all in-game payments are made through Apple and Google’s payment processing enables both platforms to more easily price-discriminate. Unlike fixed fees (but just like royalties), percentage commissions are necessarily state-contingent (i.e. the same commission will lead to vastly different revenue depending on an underlying app’s success). The most successful apps thus contribute far more to a platform’s fixed costs. For instance, it is estimated that mobile games account for 72% of all app store spend. Likewise, more than 80% of the apps on Apple’s store pay no commission at all.

This likely expands app store output by getting lower value developers on board. In that sense, it is akin to Ramsey pricing (where a firm/utility expands social welfare by allocating a higher share of fixed costs to the most inelastic consumers). Unfortunately, this would be much harder to accomplish if high value developers could easily bypass Apple or Google’s payment systems.

The bottom line is that Epic appears to be fighting to change Apple and Google’s app store business models in order to obtain fee schedules that are better aligned with its own interests. This is all the more important for Epic Games, given that mobile gaming is becoming increasingly popular relative to other gaming mediums (also here).

The emergence of new gaming platforms

Up to this point, I have mostly presented a zero-sum view of Epic’s lawsuit – i.e. developers and platforms are fighting over the distribution app store profits (though some smaller developers may lose out). But this ignores what is likely the chief virtue of Apple and Google’s “closed” distribution model. Namely, that it has greatly expanded the market for mobile gaming (and other mobile software), and will likely continue to do so in the future.

Much has already been said about the significant security and trust benefits that Apple and Google’s curation of their app stores (including their control of in-app payments) provide to users. Benedict Evans and Ben Thompson have both written excellent pieces on this very topic.

In a nutshell, the closed model allows previously unknown developers to rapidly expand because (i) users do not have to fear their apps contain some form of malware, and (ii) they greatly reduce payments frictions, most notably security related ones. But while these are indeed tremendous benefits, another important upside seems to have gone relatively unnoticed.

The “closed” business model also gives Apple and Google (as well as other platforms) significant incentives to develop new distribution mediums (smart TVs spring to mind) and improve existing ones. In turn, this greatly expands the audience that software developers can reach. In short, developers get a smaller share of a much larger pie.

The economics of two-sided markets are enlightening in this respect. Apple and Google’s stores are what Armstrong and Wright (here and here) refer to as “competitive bottlenecks”. That is, they compete aggressively (amongst themselves, and with other gaming platforms) to attract exclusive users. They can then charge developers a premium to access those users (note, however, that in the case at hand the incidence of those platform fees is unclear).

This gives platforms significant incentives to continuously attract and retain new users. For instance, if Steve Jobs is to be believed, giving consumers better access to media such as eBooks, video and games was one of the driving forces behind the launch of the iPad.

This model of innovation would be seriously undermined if developers and consumers could easily bypass platforms (as Epic games is seeking to do).

In response, some commentators have countered that platforms may use their strong market positions to squeeze developers, thereby undermining software investments. But such a course of action may ultimately be self-defeating. For instance, writing about retail platforms imitating third-party sellers, Anfrei Hagiu, Tat-How Teh and Julian Wright have argued that:

[T]he platform has an incentive to commit itself not to imitate highly innovative third-party products in order to preserve their incentives to innovate.

Seen in this light, Apple and Google’s 30% commissions can be seen as a soft commitment not to expropriate developers, thus leaving them with a sizable share of the revenue generated on each platform. This may explain why the 30% commission has become a standard in the games industry (and beyond).

Furthermore, from an evolutionary perspective, it is hard to argue that the 30% commission is somehow extortionate. If game developers were systematically expropriated, then the gaming industry – in particular its mobile segment – would not have grown so drastically over the past years:

All of this this likely explains why a recent survey found that 81% of app developers believed regulatory intervention would be misguided:

81% of developers and publishers believe that the relationship between them and platforms is best handled within the industry, rather than through government intervention. Competition and choice mean that developers will use platforms that they work with best.

The upshot is that the “closed” model employed by Apple and Google has served the gaming industry well. There is little compelling reason to overhaul that model today.

Final thoughts

When all is said and done, there is no escaping the fact that Epic games is currently playing a high-stakes rent-seeking game. As Apple noted in its opposition to Epic’s motion for a temporary restraining order:

Epic did not, and has not, contested that it is in breach of the App Store Guidelines and the License Agreement. Epic’s plan was to violate the agreements intentionally in order to manufacture an emergency. The moment Fortnite was removed from the App Store, Epic launched an extensive PR smear campaign against Apple and a litigation plan was orchestrated to the minute; within hours, Epic had filed a 56-page complaint, and within a few days, filed nearly 200 pages with this Court in a pre-packaged “emergency” motion. And just yesterday, it even sought to leverage its request to this Court for a sales promotion, announcing a “#FreeFortniteCup” to take place on August 23, inviting players for one last “Battle Royale” across “all platforms” this Sunday, with prizes targeting Apple.

Epic is ultimately seeking to introduce its own app store on both Apple and Google’s platforms, or at least bypass their payment processing services (as Spotify is seeking to do in the EU).

Unfortunately, as this post has argued, condoning this type of free-riding could prove highly detrimental to the entire mobile software industry. Smaller companies would almost inevitably be left to foot a larger share of the bill, existing platforms would become less secure, and the development of new ones could be hindered. At the end of the day, 30% might actually be a small price to pay.

In Antitrust & Competition, Apple, European Union, Google, International, Platforms, Truth on the Market Android, antitrust, Apple App Store, Contract, contracts, Google Play, iOS, private antitrust litigation

Making Sense of the Google Android Decision (part 3): Where is the Harm?

Dirk Auer — 8 January 2020

This is the third in a series of TOTM blog posts discussing the Commission’s recently published Google Android decision (the first post can be found here, and the second here). It draws on research from a soon-to-be published ICLE white paper.

(Comparison of Google and Apple’s smartphone business models. Red $ symbols represent money invested; Green $ symbols represent sources of revenue; Black lines show the extent of Google and Apple’s control over their respective platforms)

For the third in my series of posts about the Google Android decision, I will delve into the theories of harm identified by the Commission.

The big picture is that the Commission’s analysis was particularly one-sided. The Commission failed to adequately account for the complex business challenges that Google faced – such as monetizing the Android platform and shielding it from fragmentation. To make matters worse, its decision rests on dubious factual conclusions and extrapolations. The result is a highly unbalanced assessment that could ultimately hamstring Google and prevent it from effectively competing with its smartphone rivals, Apple in particular.

1. Tying without foreclosure

The first theory of harm identified by the Commission concerned the tying of Google’s Search app with the Google Play app, and of Google’s Chrome app with both the Google Play and Google Search apps.

Oversimplifying, Google required its OEMs to choose between either pre-installing a bundle of Google applications, or forgoing some of the most important ones (notably Google Play). The Commission argued that this gave Google a competitive advantage that rivals could not emulate (even though Google’s terms did not preclude OEMs from simultaneously pre-installing rival web browsers and search apps).

To support this conclusion, the Commission notably asserted that no alternative distribution channel would enable rivals to offset the competitive advantage that Google obtained from tying. This finding is, at best, dubious.

For a start, the Commission claimed that user downloads were not a viable alternative distribution channel, even though roughly 250 million apps are downloaded on Google’s Play store every day.

The Commission sought to overcome this inconvenient statistic by arguing that Android users were unlikely to download apps that duplicated the functionalities of a pre-installed app – why download a new browser if there is already one on the user’s phone?

But this reasoning is far from watertight. For instance, the 17^th most-downloaded Android app, the “Super-Bright Led Flashlight” (with more than 587million downloads), mostly replicates a feature that is pre-installed on all Android devices. Moreover, the five most downloaded Android apps (Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram and Skype) provide functionalities that are, to some extent at least, offered by apps that have, at some point or another, been preinstalled on many Android devices (notably Google Hangouts, Google Photos and Google+).

The Commission countered that communications apps were not appropriate counterexamples, because they benefit from network effects. But this overlooks the fact that the most successful communications and social media apps benefited from very limited network effects when they were launched, and that they succeeded despite the presence of competing pre-installed apps. Direct user downloads are thus a far more powerful vector of competition than the Commission cared to admit.

Similarly concerning is the Commission’s contention that paying OEMs or Mobile Network Operators (“MNOs”) to pre-install their search apps was not a viable alternative for Google’s rivals. Some of the reasons cited by the Commission to support this finding are particularly troubling.

For instance, the Commission claimed that high transaction costs prevented parties from concluding these pre installation deals.

But pre-installation agreements are common in the smartphone industry. In recent years, Microsoft struck a deal with Samsung to pre-install some of its office apps on the Galaxy Note 10. It also paid Verizon to pre-install the Bing search app on a number of Samsung phones, in 2010. Likewise, a number of Russian internet companies have been in talks with Huawei to pre-install their apps on its devices. And Yahoo reached an agreement with Mozilla to make it the default search engine for its web browser. Transaction costs do not appear to have been an obstacle in any of these cases.

The Commission also claimed that duplicating too many apps would cause storage space issues on devices.

And yet, a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that storage space is unlikely to be a major issue. For instance, the Bing Search app has a download size of 24MB, whereas typical entry-level smartphones generally have an internal memory of at least 64GB (that can often be extended to more than 1TB with the addition of an SD card). The Bing Search app thus takes up less than one-thousandth of these devices’ internal storage. Granted, the Yahoo search app is slightly larger than Microsoft’s, weighing almost 100MB. But this is still insignificant compared to a modern device’s storage space.

Finally, the Commission claimed that rivals were contractually prevented from concluding exclusive pre-installation deals because Google’s own apps would also be pre-installed on devices.

However, while it is true that Google’s apps would still be present on a device, rivals could still pay for their applications to be set as default. Even Yandex – a plaintiff – recognized that this would be a valuable solution. In its own words (taken from the Commission’s decision):

Pre-installation alongside Google would be of some benefit to an alternative general search provider such as Yandex […] given the importance of default status and pre-installation on home screen, a level playing field will not be established unless there is a meaningful competition for default status instead of Google.

In short, the Commission failed to convincingly establish that Google’s contractual terms prevented as-efficient rivals from effectively distributing their applications on Android smartphones. The evidence it adduced was simply too thin to support anything close to that conclusion.

2. The threat of fragmentation

The Commission’s second theory of harm concerned the so-called “antifragmentation” agreements concluded between Google and OEMs. In a nutshell, Google only agreed to license the Google Search and Google Play apps to OEMs that sold “Android Compatible” devices (i.e. devices sold with a version of Android did not stray too far from Google’s most recent version).

According to Google, this requirement was necessary to limit the number of Android forks that were present on the market (as well as older versions of the standard Android). This, in turn, reduced development costs and prevented the Android platform from unraveling.

The Commission disagreed, arguing that Google’s anti-fragmentation provisions thwarted competition from potential Android forks (i.e. modified versions of the Android OS).

This conclusion raises at least two critical questions: The first is whether these agreements were necessary to ensure the survival and competitiveness of the Android platform, and the second is why “open” platforms should be precluded from partly replicating a feature that is essential to rival “closed” platforms, such as Apple’s iOS.

Let us start with the necessity, or not, of Google’s contractual terms. If fragmentation did indeed pose an existential threat to the Android ecosystem, and anti-fragmentation agreements averted this threat, then it is hard to make a case that they thwarted competition. The Android platform would simply not have been as viable without them.

The Commission dismissed this possibility, relying largely on statements made by Google’s rivals (many of whom likely stood to benefit from the suppression of these agreements). For instance, the Commission cited comments that it received from Yandex – one of the plaintiffs in the case:

(1166) The fact that fragmentation can bring significant benefits is also confirmed by third-party respondents to requests for information:

[…]
(2) Yandex, which stated: “Whilst the development of Android forks certainly has an impact on the fragmentation of the Android ecosystem in terms of additional development being required to adapt applications for various versions of the OS, the benefits of fragmentation outweigh the downsides…”

Ironically, the Commission relied on Yandex’s statements while, at the same time, it dismissed arguments made by Android app developers, on account that they were conflicted. In its own words:

Google attached to its Response to the Statement of Objections 36 letters from OEMs and app developers supporting Google’s views about the dangers of fragmentation […] It appears likely that the authors of the 36 letters were influenced by Google when drafting or signing those letters.

More fundamentally, the Commission’s claim that fragmentation was not a significant threat is at odds with an almost unanimous agreement among industry insiders.

For example, while it is not dispositive, a rapid search for the terms “Google Android fragmentation”, using the DuckDuckGo search engine, leads to results that cut strongly against the Commission’s conclusions. Of the ten first results, only one could remotely be construed as claiming that fragmentation was not an issue. The others paint a very different picture (below are some of the most salient excerpts):

“There’s a fairly universal perception that Android fragmentation is a barrier to a consistent user experience, a security risk, and a challenge for app developers.” (here)
“Android fragmentation, a problem with the operating system from its inception, has only become more acute an issue over time, as more users clamor for the latest and greatest software to arrive on their phones.” (here)
“Android Fragmentation a Huge Problem: Study.” (here)
“Google’s Android fragmentation fix still isn’t working at all.” (here)
“Does Google care about Android fragmentation? Not now—but it should.” (here).
“This is very frustrating to users and a major headache for Google… and a challenge for corporate IT,” Gold said, explaining that there are a large number of older, not fully compatible devices running various versions of Android.” (here)

Perhaps more importantly, one might question why Google should be treated differently than rivals that operate closed platforms, such as Apple, Microsoft and Blackberry (before the last two mostly exited the Mobile OS market). By definition, these platforms limit all potential forks (because they are based on proprietary software).

The Commission argued that Apple, Microsoft and Blackberry had opted to run “closed” platforms, which gave them the right to prevent rivals from copying their software.

While this answer has some superficial appeal, it is incomplete. Android may be an open source project, but this is not true of Google’s proprietary apps. Why should it be forced to offer them to rivals who would use them to undermine its platform? The Commission did not meaningfully consider this question.

And yet, industry insiders routinely compare the fragmentation of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android OS, in order to gage the state of competition between both firms. For instance, one commentator noted:

[T]he gap between iOS and Android users running the latest major versions of their operating systems has never looked worse for Google.

Likewise, an article published in Forbes concluded that Google’s OEMs were slow at providing users with updates, and that this might drive users and developers away from the Android platform:

For many users the Android experience isn’t as up-to-date as Apple’s iOS. Users could buy the latest Android phone now and they may see one major OS update and nothing else. […] Apple users can be pretty sure that they’ll get at least two years of updates, although the company never states how long it intends to support devices.
However this problem, in general, makes it harder for developers and will almost certainly have some inherent security problems. Developers, for example, will need to keep pushing updates – particularly for security issues – to many different versions. This is likely a time-consuming and expensive process.

To recap, the Commission’s decision paints a world that is either black or white: either firms operate closed platforms, and they are then free to limit fragmentation as they see fit, or they create open platforms, in which case they are deemed to have accepted much higher levels of fragmentation.

This stands in stark contrast to industry coverage, which suggests that users and developers of both closed and open platforms care a great deal about fragmentation, and demand that measures be put in place to address it. If this is true, then the relative fragmentation of open and closed platforms has an important impact on their competitive performance, and the Commission was wrong to reject comparisons between Google and its closed ecosystem rivals.

3. Google’s revenue sharing agreements

The last part of the Commission’s case centered on revenue sharing agreements between Google and its OEMs/MNOs. Google paid these parties to exclusively place its search app on the homescreen of their devices. According to the Commission, these payments reduced OEMs and MNOs’ incentives to pre-install competing general search apps.

However, to reach this conclusion, the Commission had to make the critical (and highly dubious) assumption that rivals could not match Google’s payments.

To get to that point, it notably assumed that rival search engines would be unable to increase their share of mobile search results beyond their share of desktop search results. The underlying intuition appears to be that users who freely chose Google Search on desktop (Google Search & Chrome are not set as default on desktop PCs) could not be convinced to opt for a rival search engine on mobile.

But this ignores the possibility that rivals might offer an innovative app that swayed users away from their preferred desktop search engine.

More importantly, this reasoning cuts against the Commission’s own claim that pre-installation and default placement were critical. If most users, dismiss their device’s default search app and search engine in favor of their preferred ones, then pre-installation and default placement are largely immaterial, and Google’s revenue sharing agreements could not possibly have thwarted competition (because they did not prevent users from independently installing their preferred search app). On the other hand, if users are easily swayed by default placement, then there is no reason to believe that rivals could not exceed their desktop market share on mobile phones.

The Commission was also wrong when it claimed that rival search engines were at a disadvantage because of the structure of Google’s revenue sharing payments. OEMs and MNOs allegedly lost all of their payments from Google if they exclusively placed a rival’s search app on the home screen of a single line of handsets.

The key question is the following: could Google automatically tilt the scales to its advantage by structuring the revenue sharing payments in this way? The answer appears to be no.

For instance, it has been argued that exclusivity may intensify competition for distribution. Conversely, other scholars have claimed that exclusivity may deter entry in network industries. Unfortunately, the Commission did not examine whether Google’s revenue sharing agreements fell within this category.

It thus provided insufficient evidence to support its conclusion that the revenue sharing agreements reduced OEMs’ (and MNOs’) incentives to pre-install competing general search apps, rather than merely increasing competition “for the market”.

4. Conclusion

To summarize, the Commission overestimated the effect that Google’s behavior might have on its rivals. It almost entirely ignored the justifications that Google put forward and relied heavily on statements made by its rivals. The result is a one-sided decision that puts undue strain on the Android Business model, while providing few, if any, benefits in return.

Making Sense of the Google Android Decision (part 2): Ignoring Google’s Competitors

Dirk Auer — 12 December 2019

This is the second in a series of TOTM blog posts discussing the Commission’s recently published Google Android decision (the first post can be found here). It draws on research from a soon-to-be published ICLE white paper.

(Left, Android 10 Website; Right, iOS 13 Website)

In a previous post, I argued that the Commission failed to adequately define the relevant market in its recently published Google Android decision.

This improper market definition might not be so problematic if the Commission had then proceeded to undertake a detailed (and balanced) assessment of the competitive conditions that existed in the markets where Google operates (including the competitive constraints imposed by Apple).

Unfortunately, this was not the case. The following paragraphs respond to some of the Commission’s most problematic arguments regarding the existence of barriers to entry, and the absence of competitive constraints on Google’s behavior.

The overarching theme is that the Commission failed to quantify its findings and repeatedly drew conclusions that did not follow from the facts cited. As a result, it was wrong to conclude that Google faced little competitive pressure from Apple and other rivals.

1. Significant investments and network effects ≠ barriers to entry

In its decision, the Commission notably argued that significant investments (millions of euros) are required to set up a mobile OS and App store. It also argued that market for licensable mobile operating systems gave rise to network effects.

But contrary to the Commission’s claims, neither of these two factors is, in and of itself, sufficient to establish the existence of barriers to entry (even under EU competition law’s loose definition of the term, rather than Stigler’s more technical definition)

Take the argument that significant investments are required to enter the mobile OS market.

The main problem is that virtually every market requires significant investments on the part of firms that seek to enter. Not all of these costs can be seen as barriers to entry, or the concept would lose all practical relevance.

For example, purchasing a Boeing 737 Max airplane reportedly costs at least $74 million. Does this mean that incumbents in the airline industry are necessarily shielded from competition? Of course not.

Instead, the relevant question is whether an entrant with a superior business model could access the capital required to purchase an airplane and challenge the industry’s incumbents.

Returning to the market for mobile OSs, the Commission should thus have questioned whether as-efficient rivals could find the funds required to produce a mobile OS. If the answer was yes, then the investments highlighted by the Commission were largely immaterial. As it happens, several firms have indeed produced competing OSs, including CyanogenMod, LineageOS and Tizen.

The same is true of Commission’s conclusion that network effects shielded Google from competitors. While network effects almost certainly play some role in the mobile OS and app store markets, it does not follow that they act as barriers to entry in competition law terms.

As Paul Belleflamme recently argued, it is a myth that network effects can never be overcome. And as I have written elsewhere, the most important question is whether users could effectively coordinate their behavior and switch towards a superior platform, if one arose (See also Dan Spulber’s excellent article on this point).

The Commission completely ignored this critical interrogation during its discussion of network effects.

2. The failure of competitors is not proof of barriers to entry

Just as problematically, the Commission wrongly concluded that the failure of previous attempts to enter the market was proof of barriers to entry.

This is the epitome of the Black Swan fallacy (i.e. inferring that all swans are white because you have never seen a relatively rare, but not irrelevant, black swan).

The failure of rivals is equally consistent with any number of propositions:

There were indeed barriers to entry;
Google’s products were extremely good (in ways that rivals and the Commission failed to grasp);
Google responded to intense competitive pressure by continuously improving its product (and rivals thus chose to stay out of the market);
Previous rivals were persistently inept (to take the words of Oliver Williamson); etc.

The Commission did not demonstrate that its own inference was the right one, nor did it even demonstrate any awareness that other explanations were at least equally plausible.

3. First mover advantage?

Much of the same can be said about the Commission’s observation that Google enjoyed a first mover advantage.

The elephant in the room is that Google was not the first mover in the smartphone market (and even less so in the mobile phone industry). The Commission attempted to sidestep this uncomfortable truth by arguing that Google was the first mover in the Android app store market. It then concluded that Google had an advantage because users were familiar with Android’s app store.

To call this reasoning “naive” would be too kind. Maybe consumers are familiar with Google’s products today, but they certainly weren’t when Google entered the market.

Why would something that did not hinder Google (i.e. users’ lack of familiarity with its products, as opposed to those of incumbents such as Nokia or Blackberry) have the opposite effect on its future rivals?

Moreover, even if rivals had to replicate Android’s user experience (and that of its app store) to prove successful, the Commission did not show that there was anything that prevented them from doing so — a particularly glaring omission given the open-source nature of the Android OS.

The result is that, at best, the Commission identified a correlation but not causality. Google may arguably have been the first, and users might have been more familiar with its offerings, but this still does not prove that Android flourished (and rivals failed) because of this.

4. It does not matter that users “do not take the OS into account” when they purchase a device

The Commission also concluded that alternatives to Android (notably Apple’s iOS and App Store) exercised insufficient competitive constraints on Google. Among other things, it argued that this was because users do not take the OS into account when they purchase a smartphone (so Google could allegedly degrade Android without fear of losing users to Apple)..

In doing so, the Commission failed to grasp that buyers might base their purchases on a devices’ OS without knowing it.

Some consumers will simply follow the advice of a friend, family member or buyer’s guide. Acutely aware of their own shortcomings, they thus rely on someone else who does take the phone’s OS into account.

But even when they are acting independently, unsavvy consumers may still be driven by technical considerations. They might rely on a brand’s reputation for providing cutting edge devices (which, per the Commission, is the most important driver of purchase decisions), or on a device’s “feel” when they try it in a showroom. In both cases, consumers’ choices could indirectly be influenced by a phone’s OS.

In more technical terms, a phone’s hardware and software are complementary goods. In these settings, it is extremely difficult to attribute overall improvements to just one of the two complements. For instance, a powerful OS and chipset are both equally necessary to deliver a responsive phone. The fact that consumers may misattribute a device’s performance to one of these two complements says nothing about their underlying contribution to a strong end-product (which, in turn, drives purchase decisions). Likewise, battery life is reportedly one of the most important features for users, yet few realize that a phone’s OS has a large impact on it.

Finally, if consumers were really indifferent to the phone’s operating system, then the Commission should have dropped at least part of its case against Google. The Commission’s claim that Google’s anti-fragmentation agreements harmed consumers (by reducing OS competition) has no purchase if Android is provided free of charge and consumers are indifferent to non-price parameters, such as the quality of a phone’s OS.

5. Google’s users were not “captured”

Finally, the Commission claimed that consumers are loyal to their smartphone brand and that competition for first time buyers was insufficient to constrain Google’s behavior against its “captured” installed base.

It notably found that 82% of Android users stick with Android when they change phones (compared to 78% for Apple), and that 75% of new smartphones are sold to existing users.

The Commission asserted, without further evidence, that these numbers proved there was little competition between Android and iOS.

But is this really so? In almost all markets consumers likely exhibit at least some loyalty to their preferred brand. At what point does this become an obstacle to interbrand competition? The Commission offered no benchmark mark against which to assess its claims.

And although inter-industry comparisons of churn rates should be taken with a pinch of salt, it is worth noting that the Commission’s implied 18% churn rate for Android is nothing out of the ordinary (see, e.g., here, here, and here), including for industries that could not remotely be called anticompetitive.

To make matters worse, the Commission’s own claimed figures suggest that a large share of sales remained contestable (roughly 39%).

Imagine that, every year, 100 devices are sold in Europe (75 to existing users and 25 to new users, according to the Commission’s figures). Imagine further that the installed base of users is split 76–24 in favor of Android. Under the figures cited by the Commission, it follows that at least 39% of these sales are contestable.

According to the Commission’s figures, there would be 57 existing Android users (76% of 75) and 18 Apple users (24% of 75), of which roughly 10 (18%) and 4 (22%), respectively, switch brands in any given year. There would also be 25 new users who, even according to the Commission, do not display brand loyalty. The result is that out of 100 purchasers, 25 show no brand loyalty and 14 switch brands. And even this completely ignores the number of consumers who consider switching but choose not to after assessing the competitive options.

Conclusion

In short, the preceding paragraphs argue that the Commission did not meet the requisite burden of proof to establish Google’s dominance. Of course, it is one thing to show that the Commission’s reasoning was unsound (it is) and another to establish that its overall conclusion was wrong.

At the very least, I hope these paragraphs will convey a sense that the Commission loaded the dice, so to speak. Throughout the first half of its lengthy decision, it interpreted every piece of evidence against Google, drew significant inferences from benign pieces of information, and often resorted to circular reasoning.

The following post in this blog series argues that these errors also permeate the Commission’s analysis of Google’s allegedly anticompetitive behavior.

In Antitrust & Competition, Apple, Barriers to Entry, Google, International, Market Definition, Platforms, Truth on the Market abuse of dominance, Android, Competition law, Dan Spulber, EU, European Commission, google, international competition

Making Sense of the Google Android Decision (part 1): Four Problems with the EU Commission’s Market Definition

Dirk Auer — 14 November 2019

A screenshot of a cell phone

Description automatically generated

This is the first in a series of TOTM blog posts discussing the Commission’s recently published Google Android decision. It draws on research from a soon-to-be published ICLE white paper.

The European Commission’s recent Google Android decision will surely go down as one of the most important competition proceedings of the past decade. And yet, an in-depth reading of the 328 page decision should leave attentive readers with a bitter taste.

One of the Commission’s most significant findings is that the Android operating system and Apple’s iOS are not in the same relevant market, along with the related conclusion that Apple’s App Store and Google Play are also in separate markets.

This blog post points to a series of flaws that undermine the Commission’s reasoning on this point. As a result, the Commission’s claim that Google and Apple operate in separate markets is mostly unsupported.

1. Everyone but the European Commission thinks that iOS competes with Android

Surely the assertion that the two predominant smartphone ecosystems in Europe don’t compete with each other will come as a surprise to… anyone paying attention:

The internet is replete with “Android versus Apple” buying guides: “Apple iPhone 11 vs the Android competition”, “iOS 13 vs. Android 10: How Apple and Google match up”, “iPhone vs. Android: Which is better?”, etc.
Both Apple and Google have webpages that help users to switch from one platform to the other:

The business pages of newspapers routinely talk of the fierce rivalry that exists between Apple and Google: “Why competition between Apple and Google is more brutal than ever”, “Google vs. Apple: Why Their Competition Is Good For You”, etc.
Numerous competition policy papers reach a similar conclusion. Nicolas Petit refers to Apple and Google as “moligopolists”. David Evans speaks of “dynamic competition”. Marshall Van Alstyne and his co-authors have analyzed the strategies deployed by Google and Apple to compete against each other.
Finally, the annual reports of Apple and Google both cite the other firm as an important competitor (if not by name):

Apple 10-K:

The Company believes the availability of third-party software applications and services for its products depends in part on the developers’ perception and analysis of the relative benefits of developing, maintaining and upgrading such software and services for the Company’s products compared to competitors’ platforms, such as Android for smartphones and tablets and Windows for personal computers.

Google 10-K:

We face competition from: Companies that design, manufacture, and market consumer electronics products, including businesses that have developed proprietary platforms.

This leads to a critical question: Why did the Commission choose to depart from the instinctive conclusion that Google and Apple compete vigorously against each other in the smartphone and mobile operating system market?

As explained below, its justifications for doing so were deeply flawed.

2. It does not matter that OEMs cannot license iOS (or the App Store)

One of the main reasons why the Commission chose to exclude Apple from the relevant market is that OEMs cannot license Apple’s iOS or its App Store.

But is it really possible to infer that Google and Apple do not compete against each other because their products are not substitutes from OEMs’ point of view?

The answer to this question is likely no.

Relevant markets, and market shares, are merely a proxy for market power (which is the appropriate baseline upon which build a competition investigation). As Louis Kaplow puts it:

[T]he entire rationale for the market definition process is to enable an inference about market power.

If there is a competitive market for Android and Apple smartphones, then it is somewhat immaterial that Google is the only firm to successfully offer a licensable mobile operating system (as opposed to Apple and Blackberry’s “closed” alternatives).

By exercising its “power” against OEMs by, for instance, degrading the quality of Android, Google would, by the same token, weaken its competitive position against Apple. Google’s competition with Apple in the smartphone market thus constrains Google’s behavior and limits its market power in Android-specific aftermarkets (on this topic, see Borenstein et al., and Klein).

This is not to say that Apple’s iOS (and App Store) is, or is not, in the same relevant market as Google Android (and Google Play). But the fact that OEMs cannot license iOS or the App Store is mostly immaterial for market definition purposes.

3. Google would find itself in a more “competitive” market if it decided to stop licensing the Android OS

The Commission’s reasoning also leads to illogical outcomes from a policy standpoint.

Google could suddenly find itself in a more “competitive” market if it decided to stop licensing the Android OS and operated a closed platform (like Apple does). The direct purchasers of its products – consumers – would then be free to switch between Apple and Google’s products.

As a result, an act that has no obvious effect on actual market power — and that could have a distinctly negative effect on consumers — could nevertheless significantly alter the outcome of competition proceedings on the Commission’s theory.

One potential consequence is that firms might decide to close their platforms (or refuse to open them in the first place) in order to avoid competition scrutiny (because maintaining a closed platform might effectively lead competition authorities to place them within a wider relevant market). This might ultimately reduce product differentiation among mobile platforms (due to the disappearance of open ecosystems) – the exact opposite of what the Commission sought to achieve with its decision.

This is, among other things, what Antonin Scalia objected to in his Eastman Kodak dissent:

It is quite simply anomalous that a manufacturer functioning in a competitive equipment market should be exempt from the per se rule when it bundles equipment with parts and service, but not when it bundles parts with service [when the manufacturer has a high share of the “market” for its machines’ spare parts]. This vast difference in the treatment of what will ordinarily be economically similar phenomena is alone enough to call today’s decision into question.

4. Market shares are a poor proxy for market power, especially in narrowly defined markets

Finally, the problem with the Commission’s decision is not so much that it chose to exclude Apple from the relevant markets, but that it then cited the resulting market shares as evidence of Google’s alleged dominance:

(440) Google holds a dominant position in the worldwide market (excluding China) for the licensing of smart mobile OSs since 2011. This conclusion is based on:
(1) the market shares of Google and competing developers of licensable smart mobile OSs […]

In doing so, the Commission ignored one of the critical findings of the law & economics literature on market definition and market power: Although defining a narrow relevant market may not itself be problematic, the market shares thus adduced provide little information about a firm’s actual market power.

For instance, Richard Posner and William Landes have argued that:

If instead the market were defined narrowly, the firm’s market share would be larger but the effect on market power would be offset by the higher market elasticity of demand; when fewer substitutes are included in the market, substitution of products outside of the market is easier. […]
If all the submarket approach signifies is willingness in appropriate cases to call a narrowly defined market a relevant market for antitrust purposes, it is unobjectionable – so long as appropriately less weight is given to market shares computed in such a market.

Likewise, Louis Kaplow observes that:

In choosing between a narrower and a broader market (where, as mentioned, we are supposing that the truth lies somewhere in between), one would ask whether the inference from the larger market share in the narrower market overstates market power by more than the inference from the smaller market share in the broader market understates market power. If the lesser error lies with the former choice, then the narrower market is the relevant market; if the latter minimizes error, then the broader market is best.

The Commission failed to heed these important findings.

5. Conclusion

The upshot is that Apple should not have been automatically excluded from the relevant market.

To be clear, the Commission did discuss this competition from Apple later in the decision. And it also asserted that its findings would hold even if Apple were included in the OS and App Store markets, because Android’s share of devices sold would have ranged from 45% to 79%, depending on the year (although this ignores other potential metrics such as the value of devices sold or Google’s share of advertising revenue.

However, by gerrymandering the market definition (which European case law likely permitted it to do), the Commission ensured that Google would face an uphill battle, starting from a very high market share and thus a strong presumption of dominance.

Moreover, that it might reach the same result by adopting a more accurate market definition is no excuse for adopting a faulty one and resting its case (and undertaking its entire analysis) on it. In fact, the Commission’s choice of a faulty market definition underpins its entire analysis, and is far from a “harmless error.”

I shall discuss the consequences of this error in an upcoming blog post. Stay tuned.

The European Commission’s Google Android decision takes a mistaken, ahistorical view of the smartphone market

Julian Morris — 23 July 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A brief history of smartphone competition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For example, the Commission asserts that

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

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

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

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

The troubling absence of Apple from the Commission’s decision

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

Archives For Android

Some Recent ‘Boss Battles’

Building Products Is Hard

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2. Why Does the Bill not Apply to all App Stores?

3. Should Picking Among Legitimate Business Models Be up to Lawmakers or Consumers?

4. Does OAMA Account for the Security Risks of Sideloading?

5. How Will OAMA Safeguard the Rights of Covered Platforms?

6. Should Legislation Protect Competitors at the Expense of Consumers?

7. Shouldn’t the EU Bear the Risks of Bad Tech Regulation?

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May 2007, Palo Alto

Present Day, Cupertino

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What is the case about?

What is the relevant market?

What exactly has Google been paying for, and why?

An intriguing possibility

What would be a suitable remedy/relief?

Conclusion

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The Lawsuit’s Overarching Deficiency

Problems with the Government’s Specific Challenges

Agreements with Android OEMs and Wireless Carriers

Agreements with Browser Producers

Agreements with Apple

Arrangements with Producers of Internet-Enabled “Smart” Devices

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When Default is No-Fault

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Epic’s utopia is not an equilibrium

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Final thoughts

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1. Tying without foreclosure

2. The threat of fragmentation

3. Google’s revenue sharing agreements

4. Conclusion

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1. Significant investments and network effects ≠ barriers to entry

2. The failure of competitors is not proof of barriers to entry

3. First mover advantage?

4. It does not matter that users “do not take the OS into account” when they purchase a device

5. Google’s users were not “captured”

Conclusion

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1. Everyone but the European Commission thinks that iOS competes with Android

2. It does not matter that OEMs cannot license iOS (or the App Store)

3. Google would find itself in a more “competitive” market if it decided to stop licensing the Android OS

4. Market shares are a poor proxy for market power, especially in narrowly defined markets

5. Conclusion

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A brief history of smartphone competition

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

The troubling absence of Apple from the Commission’s decision

Conclusion

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