The U.S. House this week passed H.R. 2668, the Consumer Protection and Recovery Act (CPRA), which authorizes the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to seek monetary relief in federal courts for injunctions brought under Section 13(b) of the Federal Trade Commission Act.
Potential relief under the CPRA is comprehensive. It includes “restitution for losses, rescission or reformation of contracts, refund of money, return of property … and disgorgement of any unjust enrichment that a person, partnership, or corporation obtained as a result of the violation that gives rise to the suit.” What’s more, under the CPRA, monetary relief may be obtained for violations that occurred up to 10 years before the filing of the suit in which relief is requested by the FTC.
The Senate should reject the House version of the CPRA. Its monetary-recovery provisions require substantial narrowing if it is to pass cost-benefit muster.
The CPRA is a response to the Supreme Court’s April 22 decision in AMG Capital Management v. FTC, which held that Section 13(b) of the FTC Act does not authorize the commission to obtain court-ordered equitable monetary relief. As I explained in an April 22 Truth on the Market post, Congress’ response to the court’s holding should not be to grant the FTC carte blanche authority to obtain broad monetary exactions for any and all FTC Act violations. I argued that “[i]f Congress adopts a cost-beneficial error-cost framework in shaping targeted legislation, it should limit FTC monetary relief authority (recoupment and disgorgement) to situations of consumer fraud or dishonesty arising under the FTC’s authority to pursue unfair or deceptive acts or practices.”
Error cost and difficulties of calculation counsel against pursuing monetary recovery in FTC unfair methods of competition cases. As I explained in my post:
Consumer redress actions are problematic for a large proportion of FTC antitrust enforcement (“unfair methods of competition”) initiatives. Many of these antitrust cases are “cutting edge” matters involving novel theories and complex fact patterns that pose a significant threat of type I [false positives] error. (In comparison, type I error is low in hardcore collusion cases brought by the U.S. Justice Department where the existence, nature, and effects of cartel activity are plain). What’s more, they generally raise extremely difficult if not impossible problems in estimating the degree of consumer harm. (Even DOJ price-fixing cases raise non-trivial measurement difficulties.)
These error-cost and calculation difficulties became even more pronounced as of July 1. On that date, the FTC unwisely voted 3-2 to withdraw a bipartisan 2015 policy statement providing that the commission would apply consumer welfare and rule-of-reason (weighing efficiencies against anticompetitive harm) considerations in exercising its unfair methods of competition authority (see my commentary here). This means that, going forward, the FTC will arrogate to itself unbounded discretion to decide what competitive practices are “unfair.” Business uncertainty, and the costly risk aversion it engenders, would be expected to grow enormously if the FTC could extract monies from firms due to competitive behavior deemed “unfair,” based on no discernible neutral principle.
Error costs and calculation problems also strongly suggest that monetary relief in FTC consumer-protection matters should be limited to cases of fraud or clear deception. As I noted:
[M]atters involving a higher likelihood of error and severe measurement problems should be the weakest candidates for consumer redress in the consumer protection sphere. For example, cases involve allegedly misleading advertising regarding the nature of goods, or allegedly insufficient advertising substantiation, may generate high false positives and intractable difficulties in estimating consumer harm. As a matter of judgment, given resource constraints, seeking financial recoveries solely in cases of fraud or clear deception where consumer losses are apparent and readily measurable makes the most sense from a cost-benefit perspective.
In short, the Senate should rewrite its Section 13(b) amendments to authorize FTC monetary recoveries only when consumer fraud and dishonesty is shown.
Finally, the Senate would be wise to sharply pare back the House language that allows the FTC to seek monetary exactions based on conduct that is a decade old. Serious problems of making accurate factual determinations of economic effects and specific-damage calculations would arise after such a long period of time. Allowing retroactive determinations based on a shorter “look-back” period prior to the filing of a complaint (three years, perhaps) would appear to strike a better balance in allowing reasonable redress while controlling error costs.
U.S. antitrust law is designed to protect competition, not individual competitors. That simple observation lies at the heart of the Consumer Welfare Standard that for years has been the cornerstone of American antitrust policy. An alternative enforcement policy focused on protecting individual firms would discourage highly efficient and innovative conduct by a successful entity, because such conduct, after all, would threaten to weaken or displace less efficient rivals. The result would be markets characterized by lower overall levels of business efficiency and slower innovation, yielding less consumer surplus and, thus, reduced consumer welfare, as compared to the current U.S. antitrust system.
The U.S. Supreme Court gets it. In Reiter v. Sonotone (1979), the court stated plainly that “Congress designed the Sherman Act as a ‘consumer welfare prescription.’” Consistent with that understanding, the court subsequently stressed in Spectrum Sports v. McQuillan (1993) that “[t]he purpose of the [Sherman] Act is not to protect businesses from the working of the market, it is to protect the public from the failure of the market.” This means that a market leader does not have an antitrust duty to assist its struggling rivals, even if it is flouting a regulatory duty to deal. As a unanimous Supreme Court held in Verizon v. Trinko (2004): “Verizon’s alleged insufficient assistance in the provision of service to rivals [in defiance of an FCC-imposed regulatory obligation] is not a recognized antitrust claim under this Court’s existing refusal-to-deal precedents.”
Unfortunately, the New York State Senate seems to have lost sight of the importance of promoting vigorous competition and consumer welfare, not competitor welfare, as the hallmark of American antitrust jurisprudence. The chamber on June 7 passed the ill-named 21st Century Antitrust Act (TCAA), legislation that, if enacted and signed into law, would seriously undermine consumer welfare and innovation. Let’s take a quick look at the TCAA’s parade of horribles.
The TCAA makes it unlawful for any person “with a dominant position in the conduct of any business, trade or commerce, in any labor market, or in the furnishing of any service in this state to abuse that dominant position.”
A “dominant position” may be established through “direct evidence” that “may include, but is not limited to, the unilateral power to set prices, terms, power to dictate non-price contractual terms without compensation; or other evidence that a person is not constrained by meaningful competitive pressures, such as the ability to degrade quality without suffering reduction in profitability. In labor markets, direct evidence of a dominant position may include, but is not limited to, the use of non-compete clauses or no-poach agreements, or the unilateral power to set wages.”
The “direct evidence” language is unbounded and hopelessly vague. What does it mean to not be “constrained by meaningful competitive pressures”? Such an inherently subjective characterization would give prosecutors carte blanche to find dominance. What’s more, since “no court shall require definition of a relevant market” to find liability in the face of “direct evidence,” multiple competitors in a vigorously competitive market might be found “dominant.” Thus, for example, the ability of a firm to use non-compete clauses or no-poach agreements for efficient reasons (such as protecting against competitor free-riding on investments in human capital or competitor theft of trade secrets) would be undermined, even if it were commonly employed in a market featuring several successful and aggressive rivals.
“Indirect evidence” based on market share also may establish a dominant position under the TCAA. Dominance would be presumed if a competitor possessed a market “share of forty percent or greater of a relevant market as a seller” or “thirty percent or greater of a relevant market as a buyer”.
Those numbers are far below the market ranges needed to find a “monopoly” under Section 2 of the Sherman Act. Moreover, given inevitable error associated with both market definitions and share allocations—which, in any event, may fluctuate substantially—potential arbitrariness would attend share based-dominance calculations. Most significantly, of course, market shares may say very little about actual market power. Where entry barriers are low and substitutes wait in the wings, a temporarily large market share may not bestow any ability on a “dominant” firm to exercise power over price or to exclude competitors.
In short, it would be trivially easy for non-monopolists possessing very little, if any, market power to be characterized as “dominant” under the TCAA, based on “direct evidence” or “indirect evidence.”
Once dominance is established, what constitutes an abuse of dominance? The TCAA states that an “abuse of a dominant position may include, but is not limited to, conduct that tends to foreclose or limit the ability or incentive of one or more actual or potential competitors to compete, such as leveraging a dominant position in one market to limit competition in a separate market, or refusing to deal with another person with the effect of unnecessarily excluding or handicapping actual or potential competitors.” In addition, “[e]vidence of pro-competitive effects shall not be a defense to abuse of dominance and shall not offset or cure competitive harm.”
This language is highly problematic. Effective rivalrous competition by its very nature involves behavior by a firm or firms that may “limit the ability or incentive” of rival firms to compete. For example, a company’s introduction of a new cost-reducing manufacturing process, or of a patented product improvement that far surpasses its rivals’ offerings, is the essence of competition on the merits. Nevertheless, it may limit the ability of its rivals to compete, in violation of the TCAA. Moreover, so-called “monopoly leveraging” typically generates substantial efficiencies, and very seldom undermines competition (see here, for example), suggesting that (at best) leveraging theories would generate enormous false positives in prosecution. The TCAA’s explicit direction that procompetitive effects not be considered in abuse of dominance cases further detracts from principled enforcement; it denigrates competition, the very condition that American antitrust law has long sought to promote.
Put simply, under the TCAA, “dominant” firms engaging in normal procompetitive conduct could be held liable (and no doubt frequently would be held liable, given their inability to plead procompetitive justifications) for “abuses of dominance.” To top it off, firms convicted of abusing a dominant position would be liable for treble damages. As such, the TCAA would strongly disincentivize aggressive competitive behavior that raises consumer welfare.
The TCAA’s negative ramifications would be far-reaching. By embracing a civil law “abuse of dominance” paradigm, the TCAA would run counter to a longstanding U.S. common law antitrust tradition that largely gives free rein to efficiency-seeking competition on the merits. It would thereby place a new and unprecedented strain on antitrust federalism. In a digital world where the effects of commercial conduct frequently are felt throughout the United States, the TCAA’s attack on efficient welfare-inducing business practices would have national (if not international) repercussions.
The TCAA would alter business planning calculations for the worse and could interfere directly in the setting of national antitrust policy through congressional legislation and federal antitrust enforcement initiatives. It would also signal to foreign jurisdictions that the United States’ long-expressed staunch support for reliance on the Consumer Welfare Standard as the touchtone of sound antitrust enforcement is no longer fully operative.
Judge Richard Posner is reported to have once characterized state antitrust enforcers as “barnacles on the ship of federal antitrust” (see here). The TCAA is more like a deadly torpedo aimed squarely at consumer welfare and the American common law antitrust tradition. Let us hope that the New York State Assembly takes heed and promptly rejects the TCAA.
Democratic leadership of the House Judiciary Committee have leaked the approach they plan to take to revise U.S. antitrust law and enforcement, with a particular focus on digital platforms.
Broadly speaking, the bills would: raise fees for larger mergers and increase appropriations to the FTC and DOJ; require data portability and interoperability; declare that large platforms can’t own businesses that compete with other businesses that use the platform; effectively ban large platforms from making any acquisitions; and generally declare that large platforms cannot preference their own products or services.
All of these are ideas that have been discussed before. They are very much in line with the EU’s approach to competition, which places more regulation-like burdens on big businesses, and which is introducing a Digital Markets Act that mirrors the Democrats’ proposals. Some Republicans are reportedly supportive of the proposals, which is surprising since they mean giving broad, discretionary powers to antitrust authorities that are controlled by Democrats who take an expansive view of antitrust enforcement as a way to achieve their other social and political goals. The proposals may also be unpopular with consumers if, for example, they would mean that popular features like integrating Maps into relevant Google Search results becomes prohibited.
The multi-bill approach here suggests that the committee is trying to throw as much at the wall as possible to see what sticks. It may reflect a lack of confidence among the proposers in their ability to get their proposals through wholesale, especially given that Amy Klobuchar’s CALERA bill in the Senate creates an alternative that, while still highly interventionist, does not create ex ante regulation of the Internet the same way these proposals do.
In general, the bills are misguided for three main reasons.
One, they seek to make digital platforms into narrow conduits for other firms to operate on, ignoring the value created by platforms curating their own services by, for example, creating quality controls on entry (as Apple does on its App Store) or by integrating their services with related products (like, say, Google adding events from Gmail to users’ Google Calendars).
Two, they ignore the procompetitive effects of digital platforms extending into each other’s markets and competing with each other there, in ways that often lead to far more intense competition—and better outcomes for consumers—than if the only firms that could compete with the incumbent platform were small startups.
Three, they ignore the importance of incentives for innovation. Platforms invest in new and better products when they can make money from doing so, and limiting their ability to do that means weakened incentives to innovate. Startups and their founders and investors are driven, in part, by the prospect of being acquired, often by the platforms themselves. Making those acquisitions more difficult, or even impossible, means removing one of the key ways startup founders can exit their firms, and hence one of the key rewards and incentives for starting an innovative new business.
The flagship bill, introduced by Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline (D-R.I.), establishes a definition of “covered platform” used by several of the other bills. The measures would apply to platforms with at least 500,000 U.S.-based users, a market capitalization of more than $600 billion, and that is deemed a “critical trading partner” with the ability to restrict or impede the access that a “dependent business” has to its users or customers.
Cicilline’s bill would bar these covered platforms from being able to promote their own products and services over the products and services of competitors who use the platform. It also defines a number of other practices that would be regarded as discriminatory, including:
Restricting or impeding “dependent businesses” from being able to access the platform or its software on the same terms as the platform’s own lines of business;
Conditioning access or status on purchasing other products or services from the platform;
Using user data to support the platform’s own products in ways not extended to competitors;
Restricting the platform’s commercial users from using or accessing data generated on the platform from their own customers;
Restricting platform users from uninstalling software pre-installed on the platform;
Restricting platform users from providing links to facilitate business off of the platform;
Preferencing the platform’s own products or services in search results or rankings;
Interfering with how a dependent business prices its products;
Impeding a dependent business’ users from connecting to services or products that compete with those offered by the platform; and
Retaliating against users who raise concerns with law enforcement about potential violations of the act.
On a basic level, these would prohibit lots of behavior that is benign and that can improve the quality of digital services for users. Apple pre-installing a Weather app on the iPhone would, for example, run afoul of these rules, and the rules as proposed could prohibit iPhones from coming with pre-installed apps at all. Instead, users would have to manually download each app themselves, if indeed Apple was allowed to include the App Store itself pre-installed on the iPhone, given that this competes with other would-be app stores.
Apart from the obvious reduction in the quality of services and convenience for users that this would involve, this kind of conduct (known as “self-preferencing”) is usually procompetitive. For example, self-preferencing allows platforms to compete with one another by using their strength in one market to enter a different one; Google’s Shopping results in the Search page increase the competition that Amazon faces, because it presents consumers with a convenient alternative when they’re shopping online for products. Similarly, Amazon’s purchase of the video-game streaming service Twitch, and the self-preferencing it does to encourage Amazon customers to use Twitch and support content creators on that platform, strengthens the competition that rivals like YouTube face.
It also helps innovation, because it gives firms a reason to invest in services that would otherwise be unprofitable for them. Google invests in Android, and gives much of it away for free, because it can bundle Google Search into the OS, and make money from that. If Google could not self-preference Google Search on Android, the open source business model simply wouldn’t work—it wouldn’t be able to make money from Android, and would have to charge for it in other ways that may be less profitable and hence give it less reason to invest in the operating system.
This behavior can also increase innovation by the competitors of these companies, both by prompting them to improve their products (as, for example, Google Android did with Microsoft’s mobile operating system offerings) and by growing the size of the customer base for products of this kind. For example, video games published by console manufacturers (like Nintendo’s Zelda and Mario games) are often blockbusters that grow the overall size of the user base for the consoles, increasing demand for third-party titles as well.
Sponsored by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), this bill would make it illegal for covered platforms to control lines of business that pose “irreconcilable conflicts of interest,” enforced through civil litigation powers granted to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ).
Specifically, the bill targets lines of business that create “a substantial incentive” for the platform to advantage its own products or services over those of competitors that use the platform, or to exclude or disadvantage competing businesses from using the platform. The FTC and DOJ could potentially order that platforms divest lines of business that violate the act.
This targets similar conduct as the previous bill, but involves the forced separation of different lines of business. It also appears to go even further, seemingly implying that companies like Google could not even develop services like Google Maps or Chrome because their existence would create such “substantial incentives” to self-preference them over the products of their competitors.
Apart from the straightforward loss of innovation and product developments this would involve, requiring every tech company to be narrowly focused on a single line of business would substantially entrench Big Tech incumbents, because it would make it impossible for them to extend into adjacent markets to compete with one another. For example, Apple could not develop a search engine to compete with Google under these rules, and Amazon would be forced to sell its video-streaming services that compete with Netflix and Youtube.
Introduced by Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), this bill would bar covered platforms from making essentially any acquisitions at all. To be excluded from the ban on acquisitions, the platform would have to present “clear and convincing evidence” that the acquired business does not compete with the platform for any product or service, does not pose a potential competitive threat to the platform, and would not in any way enhance or help maintain the acquiring platform’s market position.
The two main ways that founders and investors can make a return on a successful startup are to float the company at IPO or to be acquired by another business. The latter of these, acquisitions, is extremely important. Between 2008 and 2019, 90 percent of U.S. start-up exits happened through acquisition. In a recent survey, half of current startup executives said they aimed to be acquired. One study found that countries that made it easier for firms to be taken over saw a 40-50 percent increase in VC activity, and that U.S. states that made acquisitions harder saw a 27 percent decrease in VC investment deals.
So this proposal would probably reduce investment in U.S. startups, since it makes it more difficult for them to be acquired. It would therefore reduce innovation as a result. It would also reduce inter-platform competition by banning deals that allow firms to move into new markets, like the acquisition of Beats that helped Apple to build a Spotify competitor, or the deals that helped Google, Microsoft, and Amazon build cloud-computing services that all compete with each other. It could also reduce competition faced by old industries, by preventing tech companies from buying firms that enable it to move into new markets—like Amazon’s acquisitions of health-care companies that it has used to build a health-care offering. Even Walmart’s acquisition of Jet.com, which it has used to build an Amazon competitor, could have been banned under this law if Walmart had had a higher market cap at the time.
Under terms of the legislation, covered platforms would be required to allow third parties to transfer data to their users or, with the user’s consent, to a competing business. It also would require platforms to facilitate compatible and interoperable communications with competing businesses. The law directs the FTC to establish technical committees to promulgate the standards for portability and interoperability.
Data portability and interoperability involve trade-offs in terms of security and usability, and overseeing them can be extremely costly and difficult. In security terms, interoperability requirements prevent companies from using closed systems to protect users from hostile third parties. Mandatory openness means increasing—sometimes, substantially so—the risk of data breaches and leaks. In practice, that could mean users’ private messages or photos being leaked more frequently, or activity on a social media page that a user considers to be “their” private data, but that “belongs” to another user under the terms of use, can be exported and publicized as such.
It can also make digital services more buggy and unreliable, by requiring that they are built in a more “open” way that may be more prone to unanticipated software mismatches. A good example is that of Windows vs iOS; Windows is far more interoperable with third-party software than iOS is, but tends to be less stable as a result, and users often prefer the closed, stable system.
Interoperability requirements also entail ongoing regulatory oversight, to make sure data is being provided to third parties reliably. It’s difficult to build an app around another company’s data without assurance that the data will be available when users want it. For a requirement as broad as this bill’s, that could mean setting up quite a large new de facto regulator.
In the UK, Open Banking (an interoperability requirement imposed on British retail banks) has suffered from significant service outages, and targets a level of uptime that many developers complain is too low for them to build products around. Nor has Open Banking yet led to any obvious competition benefits.
A bill that mirrors language in the Endless Frontier Act recently passed by the U.S. Senate, would significantly raise filing fees for the largest mergers. Rather than the current cap of $280,000 for mergers valued at more than $500 million, the bill—sponsored by Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.)–the new schedule would assess fees of $2.25 million for mergers valued at more than $5 billion; $800,000 for those valued at between $2 billion and $5 billion; and $400,000 for those between $1 billion and $2 billion.
Smaller mergers would actually see their filing fees cut: from $280,000 to $250,000 for those between $500 million and $1 billion; from $125,000 to $100,000 for those between $161.5 million and $500 million; and from $45,000 to $30,000 for those less than $161.5 million.
In addition, the bill would appropriate $418 million to the FTC and $252 million to the DOJ’s Antitrust Division for Fiscal Year 2022. Most people in the antitrust world are generally supportive of more funding for the FTC and DOJ, although whether this is actually good or not depends both on how it’s spent at those places.
It’s hard to object if it goes towards deepening the agencies’ capacities and knowledge, by hiring and retaining higher quality staff with salaries that are more competitive with those offered by the private sector, and on greater efforts to study the effects of the antitrust laws and past cases on the economy. If it goes toward broadening the activities of the agencies, by doing more and enabling them to pursue a more aggressive enforcement agenda, and supporting whatever of the above proposals make it into law, then it could be very harmful.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s just-published unanimous decision in AMG Capital Management LLC v. FTC—holding that Section 13(b) of the Federal Trade Commission Act does not authorize the commission to obtain court-ordered equitable monetary relief (such as restitution or disgorgement)—is not surprising. Moreover, by dissipating the cloud of litigation uncertainty that has surrounded the FTC’s recent efforts to seek such relief, the court cleared the way for consideration of targeted congressional legislation to address the issue.
But what should such legislation provide? After briefly summarizing the court’s holding, I will turn to the appropriate standards for optimal FTC consumer redress actions, which inform a welfare-enhancing legislative fix.
The Court’s Opinion
Justice Stephen Breyer’s opinion for the court is straightforward, centering on the structure and history of the FTC Act. Section 13(b) makes no direct reference to monetary relief. Its plain language merely authorizes the FTC to seek a “permanent injunction” in federal court against “any person, partnership, or corporation” that it believes “is violating, or is about to violate, any provision of law” that the commission enforces. In addition, by its terms, Section 13(b) is forward-looking, focusing on relief that is prospective, not retrospective (this cuts against the argument that payments for prior harm may be recouped from wrongdoers).
Furthermore, the FTC Act provisions that specifically authorize conditioned and limited forms of monetary relief (Section 5(l) and Section 19) are in the context of commission cease and desist orders, involving FTC administrative proceedings, unlike Section 13(b) actions that avoid the administrative route. In sum, the court concludes that:
[T]o read §13(b) to mean what it says, as authorizing injunctive but not monetary relief, produces a coherent enforcement scheme: The Commission may obtain monetary relief by first invoking its administrative procedures and then §19’s redress provisions (which include limitations). And the Commission may use §13(b) to obtain injunctive relief while administrative proceedings are foreseen or in progress, or when it seeks only injunctive relief. By contrast, the Commission’s broad reading would allow it to use §13(b) as a substitute for §5 and §19. For the reasons we have just stated, that could not have been Congress’ intent.
The court’s opinion concludes by succinctly rejecting the FTC’s arguments to the contrary.
What Comes Next
The Supreme Court’s decision has been anticipated by informed observers. All four sitting FTC Commissioners have already called for a Section 13(b) “legislative fix,” and in an April 20 hearing of Senate Commerce Committee, Chairwoman Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) emphasized that, “[w]e have to do everything we can to protect this authority and, if necessary, pass new legislation to do so.”
What, however, should be the contours of such legislation? In considering alternative statutory rules, legislators should keep in mind not only the possible consumer benefits of monetary relief, but the costs of error, as well. Error costs are a ubiquitous element of public law enforcement, and this is particularly true in the case of FTC actions. Ideally, enforcers should seek to minimize the sum of the costs attributable to false positives (type I error), false negatives (type II error), administrative costs, and disincentive costs imposed on third parties, which may also be viewed as a subset of false positives. (See my 2014 piece “A Cost-Benefit Framework for Antitrust Enforcement Policy.”
Monetary relief is most appropriate in cases where error costs are minimal, and the quantum of harm is relatively easy to measure. This suggests a spectrum of FTC enforcement actions that may be candidates for monetary relief. Ideally, selection of targets for FTC consumer redress actions should be calibrated to yield the highest return to scarce enforcement resources, with an eye to optimal enforcement criteria.
Consider consumer protection enforcement. The strongest cases involve hardcore consumer fraud (where fraudulent purpose is clear and error is almost nil); they best satisfy accuracy in measurement and error-cost criteria. Next along the spectrum are cases of non-fraudulent but unfair or deceptive acts or practices that potentially involve some degree of error. In this category, situations involving easily measurable consumer losses (e.g., systematic failure to deliver particular goods requested or poor quality control yielding shipments of ruined goods) would appear to be the best candidates for monetary relief.
Moving along the spectrum, matters involving a higher likelihood of error and severe measurement problems should be the weakest candidates for consumer redress in the consumer protection sphere. For example, cases involve allegedly misleading advertising regarding the nature of goods, or allegedly insufficient advertising substantiation, may generate high false positives and intractable difficulties in estimating consumer harm. As a matter of judgment, given resource constraints, seeking financial recoveries solely in cases of fraud or clear deception where consumer losses are apparent and readily measurable makes the most sense from a cost-benefit perspective.
Consumer redress actions are problematic for a large proportion of FTC antitrust enforcement (“unfair methods of competition”) initiatives. Many of these antitrust cases are “cutting edge” matters involving novel theories and complex fact patterns that pose a significant threat of type I error. (In comparison, type I error is low in hardcore collusion cases brought by the U.S. Justice Department where the existence, nature, and effects of cartel activity are plain). What’s more, they generally raise extremely difficult if not impossible problems in estimating the degree of consumer harm. (Even DOJ price-fixing cases raise non-trivial measurement difficulties.)
For example, consider assigning a consumer welfare loss number to a patent antitrust settlement that may or may not have delayed entry of a generic drug by some length of time (depending upon the strength of the patent) or to a decision by a drug company to modify a drug slightly just before patent expiration in order to obtain a new patent period (raising questions of valuing potential product improvements). These and other examples suggest that only rarely should the FTC pursue requests for disgorgement or restitution in antitrust cases, if error-cost-centric enforcement criteria are to be honored.
Unfortunately, the FTC currently has nothing to say about when it will seek monetary relief in antitrust matters. Commendably, in 2003, the commission issued a Policy Statement on Monetary Equitable Remedies in Competition Cases specifying that it would only seek monetary relief in “exceptional cases” involving a “[c]lear [v]iolation” of the antitrust laws. Regrettably, in 2012, a majority of the FTC (with Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen dissenting) withdrew that policy statement and the limitations it imposed. As I concluded in a 2012 article:
This action, which was taken without the benefit of advance notice and public comment, raises troubling questions. By increasing business uncertainty, the withdrawal may substantially chill efficient business practices that are not well understood by enforcers. In addition, it raises the specter of substantial error costs in the FTC’s pursuit of monetary sanctions. In short, it appears to represent a move away from, rather than towards, an economically enlightened antitrust enforcement policy.
In a 2013 speech, then-FTC Commissioner Josh Wright also lamented the withdrawal of the 2003 Statement, and stated that he would limit:
… the FTC’s ability to pursue disgorgement only against naked price fixing agreements among competitors or, in the case of single firm conduct, only if the monopolist’s conduct has no plausible efficiency justification. This latter category would include fraudulent or deceptive conduct, or tortious activity such as burning down a competitor’s plant.
As a practical matter, the FTC does not bring cases of this sort. The DOJ brings naked price-fixing cases and the unilateral conduct cases noted are as scarce as unicorns. Given that fact, Wright’s recommendation may rightly be seen as a rejection of monetary relief in FTC antitrust cases. Based on the previously discussed serious error-cost and measurement problems associated with monetary remedies in FTC antitrust cases, one may also conclude that the Wright approach is right on the money.
Finally, a recent article by former FTC Chairman Tim Muris, Howard Beales, and Benjamin Mundel opined that Section 13(b) should be construed to “limit[] the FTC’s ability to obtain monetary relief to conduct that a reasonable person would know was dishonest or fraudulent.” Although such a statutory reading is now precluded by the Supreme Court’s decision, its incorporation in a new statutory “fix” would appear ideal. It would allow for consumer redress in appropriate cases, while avoiding the likely net welfare losses arising from a more expansive approach to monetary remedies.
Conclusion
The AMG Capital decision is sure to generate legislative proposals to restore the FTC’s ability to secure monetary relief in federal court. If Congress adopts a cost-beneficial error-cost framework in shaping targeted legislation, it should limit FTC monetary relief authority (recoupment and disgorgement) to situations of consumer fraud or dishonesty arising under the FTC’s authority to pursue unfair or deceptive acts or practices. Giving the FTC carte blanche to obtain financial recoveries in the full spectrum of antitrust and consumer protection cases would spawn uncertainty and could chill a great deal of innovative business behavior, to the ultimate detriment of consumer welfare.
[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 21st 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, 7th 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.
[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, 7th 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.
This week the Senate will hold a hearing into potential anticompetitive conduct by Google in its display advertising business—the “stack” of products that it offers to advertisers seeking to place display ads on third-party websites. It is also widely reported that the Department of Justice is preparing a lawsuit against Google that will likely include allegations of anticompetitive behavior in this market, and is likely to be joined by a number of state attorneys general in that lawsuit. Meanwhile, several papers have been published detailing these allegations.
This aspect of digital advertising can be incredibly complex and difficult to understand. Here we explain how display advertising fits in the broader digital advertising market, describe how display advertising works, consider the main allegations against Google, and explain why Google’s critics are misguided to focus on antitrust as a solution to alleged problems in the market (even if those allegations turn out to be correct).
Display advertising in context
Over the past decade, the price of advertising has fallen steadily while output has risen. Spending on digital advertising in the US grew from $26 billion in 2010 to nearly $130 billion in 2019, an average increase of 20% a year. Over the same period the Producer Price Index for Internet advertising sales declined by nearly 40%. The rising spending in the face of falling prices indicates the number of ads bought and sold increased by approximately 27% a year. Since 2000, advertising spending has been falling as a share of GDP, with online advertising growing as a share of that. The combination of increasing quantity, decreasing cost, and increasing total revenues are consistent with a growing and increasingly competitive market.
Display advertising on third-party websites is only a small subsection of the digital advertising market, comprising approximately 15-20% of digital advertising spending in the US. The rest of the digital advertising market is made up of ads on search results pages on sites like Google, Amazon and Kayak, on people’s Instagram and Facebook feeds, listings on sites like Zillow (for houses) or Craigslist, referral fees paid to price comparison websites for things like health insurance, audio and visual ads on services like Spotify and Hulu, and sponsored content from influencers and bloggers who will promote products to their fans.
And digital advertising itself is only one of many channels through which companies can market their products. About 53% of total advertising spending in the United States goes on digital channels, with 30% going on TV advertising and the rest on things like radio ads, billboards and other more traditional forms of advertising. A few people still even read physical newspapers and the ads they contain, although physical newspapers’ bigger money makers have traditionally been classified ads, which have been replaced by less costly and more effective internet classifieds, such as those offered by Craigslist, or targeted ads on Google Maps or Facebook.
Indeed, it should be noted that advertising itself is only part of the larger marketing market of which non-advertising marketing communication—e.g., events, sales promotion, direct marketing, telemarketing, product placement—is as big a part as is advertising (each is roughly $500bn globally); it just hasn’t been as thoroughly disrupted by the Internet yet. But it is a mistake to assume that digital advertising is not a part of this broader market. And of that $1tr global market, Internet advertising in total occupies only about 18%—and thus display advertising only about 3%.
Ad placement is only one part of the cost of digital advertising. An advertiser trying to persuade people to buy its product must also do market research and analytics to find out who its target market is and what they want. Moreover, there are the costs of designing and managing a marketing campaign and additional costs to analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of the campaign.
Nevertheless, one of the most straightforward ways to earn money from a website is to show ads to readers alongside the publisher’s content. To satisfy publishers’ demand for advertising revenues, many services have arisen to automate and simplify the placement of and payment for ad space on publishers’ websites. Google plays a large role in providing these services—what is referred to as “open display” advertising. And it is Google’s substantial role in this space that has sparked speculation and concern among antitrust watchdogs and enforcement authorities.
Before delving into the open display advertising market, a quick note about terms. In these discussions, “advertisers” are businesses that are trying to sell people stuff. Advertisers include large firms such as Best Buy and Disney and small businesses like the local plumber or financial adviser. “Publishers” are websites that carry those ads, and publish content that users want to read. Note that the term “publisher” refers to all websites regardless of the things they’re carrying: a blog about the best way to clean stains out of household appliances is a “publisher” just as much as the New York Times is.
Under this broad definition, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are also considered publishers. In their role as publishers, they have a common goal: to provide content that attracts users to their pages who will act on the advertising displayed. “Users” are you and me—the people who want to read publishers’ content, and to whom advertisers want to show ads. Finally, “intermediaries” are the digital businesses, like Google, that sit in between the advertisers and the publishers, allowing them to do business with each other without ever meeting or speaking.
The display advertising market
If you’re an advertiser, display advertising works like this: your company—one that sells shoes, let’s say—wants to reach a certain kind of person and tell her about the company’s shoes. These shoes are comfortable, stylish, and inexpensive. You use a tool like Google Ads (or, if it’s a big company and you want a more expansive campaign over which you have more control, Google Marketing Platform) to design and upload an ad, and tell Google about the people you want to read—their age and location, say, and/or characterizations of their past browsing and searching habits (“interested in sports”).
Using that information, Google finds ad space on websites whose audiences match the people you want to target. This ad space is auctioned off to the highest bidder among the range of companies vying, with your shoe company, to reach users matching the characteristics of the website’s users. Thanks to tracking data, it doesn’t just have to be sports-relevant websites: as a user browses sports-related sites on the web, her browser picks up files (cookies) that will tag her as someone potentially interested in sports apparel for targeting later.
So a user might look at a sports website and then later go to a recipe blog, and there receive the shoes ad on the basis of her earlier browsing. You, the shoe seller, hope that she will either click through and buy (or at least consider buying) the shoes when she sees those ads, but one of the benefits of display advertising over search advertising is that—as with TV ads or billboard ads—just seeing the ad will make her aware of the product and potentially more likely to buy it later. Advertisers thus sometimes pay on the basis of clicks, sometimes on the basis of views, and sometimes on the basis of conversion (when a consumer takes an action of some sort, such as making a purchase or filling out a form).
That’s the advertiser’s perspective. From the publisher’s perspective—the owner of that recipe blog, let’s say—you want to auction ad space off to advertisers like that shoe company. In that case, you go to an ad server—Google’s product is called AdSense—give them a little bit of information about your site, and add some html code to your website. These ad servers gather information about your content (e.g., by looking at keywords you use) and your readers (e.g., by looking at what websites they’ve used in the past to make guesses about what they’ll be interested in) and places relevant ads next to and among your content. If they click, lucky you—you’ll get paid a few cents or dollars.
Apart from privacy concerns about the tracking of users, the really tricky and controversial part here concerns the way scarce advertising space is allocated. Most of the time, it’s done through auctions that happen in real time: each time a user loads a website, an auction is held in a fraction of a second to decide which advertiser gets to display an ad. The longer this process takes, the slower pages load and the more likely users are to get frustrated and go somewhere else.
As well as the service hosting the auction, there are lots of little functions that different companies perform that make the auction and placement process smoother. Some fear that by offering a very popular product integrated end to end, Google’s “stack” of advertising products can bias auctions in favour of its own products. There’s also speculation that Google’s product is so tightly integrated and so effective at using data to match users and advertisers that it is not viable for smaller rivals to compete.
We’ll discuss this speculation and fear in more detail below. But it’s worth bearing in mind that this kind of real-time bidding for ad placement was not always the norm, and is not the only way that websites display ads to their users even today. Big advertisers and websites often deal with each other directly. As with, say, TV advertising, large companies advertising often have a good idea about the people they want to reach. And big publishers (like popular news websites) often have a good idea about who their readers are. For example, big brands often want to push a message to a large number of people across different customer types as part of a broader ad campaign.
Of these kinds of direct sales, sometimes the space is bought outright, in advance, and reserved for those advertisers. In most cases, direct sales are run through limited, intermediated auction services that are not open to the general market. Put together, these kinds of direct ad buys account for close to 70% of total US display advertising spending. The remainder—the stuff that’s left over after these kinds of sales have been done—is typically sold through the real-time, open display auctions described above.
Different adtech products compete on their ability to target customers effectively, to serve ads quickly (since any delay in the auction and ad placement process slows down page load times for users), and to do so inexpensively. All else equal (including the effectiveness of the ad placement), advertisers want to pay the lowest possible price to place an ad. Similarly, publishers want to receive the highest possible price to display an ad. As a result, both advertisers and publishers have a keen interest in reducing the intermediary’s “take” of the ad spending.
This is all a simplification of how the market works. There is not one single auction house for ad space—in practice, many advertisers and publishers end up having to use lots of different auctions to find the best price. As the market evolved to reach this state from the early days of direct ad buys, new functions that added efficiency to the market emerged.
In the early years of ad display auctions, individual processes in the stack were performed by numerous competing companies. Through a process of “vertical integration” some companies, such as Google, brought these different processes under the same roof, with the expectation that integration would streamline the stack and make the selling and placement of ads more efficient and effective. The process of vertical integration in pursuit of efficiency has led to a more consolidated market in which Google is the largest player, offering simple, integrated ad buying products to advertisers and ad selling products to publishers.
Google is by no means the only integrated adtech service provider, however: Facebook, Amazon, Verizon, AT&T/Xandr, theTradeDesk, LumenAd, Taboola and others also provide end-to-end adtech services. But, in the market for open auction placement on third-party websites, Google is the biggest.
The cases against Google
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) carried out a formal study into the digital advertising market between 2019 and 2020, issuing its final report in July of this year. Although also encompassing Google’s Search advertising business and Facebook’s display advertising business (both of which relate to ads on those companies “owned and operated” websites and apps), the CMA study involved the most detailed independent review of Google’s open display advertising business to date.
That study did not lead to any competition enforcement proceedings, but it did conclude that Google’s vertically integrated products led to conflicts of interest that could lead it to behaving in ways that did not benefit the advertisers and publishers that use it. One example was Google’s withholding of certain data from publishers that would make it easier for them to use other ad selling products; another was the practice of setting price floors that allegedly led advertisers to pay more than they would otherwise.
Instead the CMA recommended the setting up of a “Digital Markets Unit” (DMU) that could regulate digital markets in general, and a code of conduct for Google and Facebook (and perhaps other large tech platforms) intended to govern their dealings with smaller customers.
The CMA’s analysis is flawed, however. For instance, it makes big assumptions about the dependency of advertisers on display advertising, largely assuming that they would not switch to other forms of advertising if prices rose, and it is light on economics. But factually it is the most comprehensively researched investigation into digital advertising yet published.
Piggybacking on the CMA’s research, and mounting perhaps the strongest attack on Google’s adtech offerings to date, was a paper released just prior to the CMA’s final report called “Roadmap for a Digital Advertising Monopolization Case Against Google”, by Yale economist Fiona Scott Morton and Omidyar Network lawyer David Dinielli. Dinielli will testify before the Senate committee.
While the Scott Morton and Dinielli paper is extremely broad, it also suffers from a number of problems.
One, because it was released before the CMA’s final report, it is largely based on the interim report released months earlier by the CMA, halfway through the market study in December 2019. This means that several of its claims are out of date. For example, it makes much of the possibility raised by the CMA in its interim report that Google may take a larger cut of advertising spending than its competitors, and claims made in another report that Google introduces “hidden” fees that increases the overall cut it takes from ad auctions.
But in the final report, after further investigation, the CMA concludes that this is not the case. In the final report, the CMA describes its analysis of all Google Ad Manager open auctions related to UK web traffic during the period between 8–14 March 2020 (involving billions of auctions). This, according to the CMA, allowed it to observe any possible “hidden” fees as well. The CMA concludes:
Our analysis found that, in transactions where both Google Ads and Ad Manager (AdX) are used, Google’s overall take rate is approximately 30% of advertisers’ spend. This is broadly in line with (or slightly lower than) our aggregate market-wide fee estimate outlined above. We also calculated the margin between the winning bid and the second highest bid in AdX for Google and non-Google DSPs, to test whether Google was systematically able to win with a lower margin over the second highest bid (which might have indicated that they were able to use their data advantage to extract additional hidden fees). We found that Google’s average winning margin was similar to that of non-Google DSPs. Overall, this evidence does not indicate that Google is currently extracting significant hidden fees. As noted below, however, it retains the ability and incentive to do so. (p. 275, emphasis added)
Scott Morton and Dinielli also misquote and/or misunderstand important sections of the CMA interim report as relating to display advertising when, in fact, they relate to search. For example, Scott Morton and Dinielli write that the “CMA concluded that Google has nearly insurmountable advantages in access to location data, due to the location information [uniquely available to it from other sources].” (p. 15). The CMA never makes any claim of “insurmountable advantage,” however. Rather, to support the claim, Scott Morton and Dinielli cite to a portion of the CMA interim report recounting a suggestion made by Microsoft regarding the “critical” value of location data in providing relevant advertising.
But that portion of the report, as well as the suggestion made by Microsoft, is about search advertising. While location data may also be valuable for display advertising, it is not clear that the GPS-level data that is so valuable in providing mobile search ad listings (for a nearby cafe or restaurant, say) is particularly useful for display advertising, which may be just as well-targeted by less granular, city- or county-level location data, which is readily available from a number of sources. In any case, Scott Morton and Dinielli are simply wrong to use a suggestion offered by Microsoft relating to search advertising to demonstrate the veracity of an assertion about a conclusion drawn by the CMA regarding display advertising.
Scott Morton and Dinielli also confusingly word their own judgements about Google’s conduct in ways that could be misinterpreted as conclusions by the CMA:
The CMA reports that Google has implemented an anticompetitive sales strategy on the publisher ad server end of the intermediation chain. Specifically, after purchasing DoubleClick, which became its publisher ad server, Google apparently lowered its prices to publishers by a factor of ten, at least according to one publisher’s account related to the CMA. (p. 20)
In fact, the CMA does not conclude that Google lowering its prices was an “anticompetitive sales strategy”—it does not use these words at all—and what Scott Morton and Dinielli are referring to is a claim by a rival ad server business, Smart, that Google cutting its prices after acquiring Doubleclick led to Google expanding its market share. Apart from the misleading wording, it is unclear why a competition authority should consider it to be “anticompetitive” when prices are falling and kept low, and—as Smart reported to the CMA—its competitor’s response is to enhance its own offering.
The case that remains
Stripping away the elements of Scott Morton and Dinielli’s case that seem unsubstantiated by a more careful reading of the CMA reports, and with the benefit of the findings in the CMA’s final report, we are left with a case that argues that Google self-preferences to an unreasonable extent, giving itself a product that is as successful as it is in display advertising only because of Google’s unique ability to gain advantage from its other products that have little to do with display advertising. Because of this self-preferencing, they might argue, innovative new entrants cannot compete on an equal footing, so the market loses out on incremental competition because of the advantages Google gets from being the world’s biggest search company, owning YouTube, running Google Maps and Google Cloud, and so on.
The most significant examples of this are Google’s use of data from other products—like location data from Maps or viewing history from YouTube—to target ads more effectively; its ability to enable advertisers placing search ads to easily place display ads through the same interface; its introduction of faster and more efficient auction processes that sidestep the existing tools developed by other third-party ad exchanges; and its design of its own tool (“open bidding”) for aggregating auction bids for advertising space to compete with (rather than incorporate) an alternative tool (“header bidding”) that is arguably faster, but costs more money to use.
These allegations require detailed consideration, and in a future paper we will attempt to assess them in detail. But in thinking about them now it may be useful to consider the remedies that could be imposed to address them, assuming they do diminish the ability of rivals to compete with Google: what possible interventions we could make in order to make the market work better for advertisers, publishers, and users.
We can think of remedies as falling into two broad buckets: remedies that stop Google from doing things that improve the quality of its own offerings, thus making it harder for others to keep up; and remedies that require it to help rivals improve their products in ways otherwise accessible only to Google (e.g., by making Google’s products interoperable with third-party services) without inherently diminishing the quality of Google’s own products.
The first camp of these, what we might call “status quo minus,” includes rules banning Google from using data from its other products or offering single order forms for advertisers, or, in the extreme, a structural remedy that “breaks up” Google by either forcing it to sell off its display ad business altogether or to sell off elements of it.
What is striking about these kinds of interventions is that all of them “work” by making Google worse for those that use it. Restrictions on Google’s ability to use data from other products, for example, will make its service more expensive and less effective for those who use it. Ads will be less well-targeted and therefore less effective. This will lead to lower bids from advertisers. Lower ad prices will be transmitted through the auction process to produce lower payments for publishers. Reduced publisher revenues will mean some content providers exit. Users will thus be confronted with less available content and ads that are less relevant to them and thus, presumably, more annoying. In other words: No one will be better off, and most likely everyone will be worse off.
The reason a “single order form” helps Google is that it is useful to advertisers, the same way it’s useful to be able to buy all your groceries at one store instead of lots of different ones. Similarly, vertical integration in the “ad stack” allows for a faster, cheaper, and simpler product for users on all sides of the market. A different kind of integration that has been criticized by others, where third-party intermediaries can bid more quickly if they host on Google Cloud, benefits publishers and users because it speeds up auction time, allowing websites to load faster. So does Google’s unified alternative to “header bidding,” giving a speed boost that is apparently valuable enough to publishers that they will pay for it.
So who would benefit from stopping Google from doing these things, or even forcing Google to sell its operations in this area? Not advertisers or publishers. Maybe Google’s rival ad intermediaries would; presumably, artificially hamstringing Google’s products would make it easier for them to compete with Google. But if so, it’s difficult to see how this would be an overall improvement. It is even harder to see how this would improve the competitive process—the very goal of antitrust. Rather, any increase in the competitiveness of rivals would result not from making their products better, but from making Google’s product worse. That is a weakening of competition, not its promotion.
On the other hand, interventions that aim to make Google’s products more interoperable at least do not fall prey to this problem. Such “status quo plus” interventions would aim to take the benefits of Google’s products and innovations and allow more companies to use them to improve their own competing products. Not surprisingly, such interventions would be more in line with the conclusions the CMA came to than the divestitures and operating restrictions proposed by Scott Morton and Dinielli, as well as (reportedly) state attorneys general considering a case against Google.
But mandated interoperability raises a host of different concerns: extensive and uncertain rulemaking, ongoing regulatory oversight, and, likely, price controls, all of which would limit Google’s ability to experiment with and improve its products. The history of such mandated duties to deal or compulsory licenses is a troubled one, at best. But even if, for the sake of argument, we concluded that these kinds of remedies were desirable, they are difficult to impose via an antitrust lawsuit of the kind that the Department of Justice is expected to launch. Most importantly, if the conclusion of Google’s critics is that Google’s main offense is offering a product that is just too good to compete with without regulating it like a utility, with all the costs to innovation that that would entail, maybe we ought to think twice about whether an antitrust intervention is really worth it at all.
[TOTM: The following is part of a blog series by TOTM guests and authors on the law, economics, and policy of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The entire series of posts is available here.
This post is authored by John Newman, Associate Professor, University of Miami School of Law; Advisory Board Member, American Antitrust Institute; Affiliated Fellow, Thurman Arnold Project, Yale; Former Trial Attorney, DOJ Antitrust Division.)]
Cooperation is the basis of productivity. The war of all against all is not a good model for any economy.
Who said it—a rose-emoji Twitter Marxist, or a card-carrying member of the laissez faire Chicago School of economics? If you guessed the latter, you’d be right. Frank Easterbrook penned these words in an antitrust decision written shortly after he left the University of Chicago to become a federal judge. Easterbrook’s opinion, now a textbook staple, wholeheartedly endorsed a cooperative agreement between two business owners not to compete with each another.
But other enforcers and judges have taken a far less favorable view of cooperation—particularly when workers are the ones cooperating. A few years ago, in an increasingly rare example of interagency agreement, the DOJ and FTC teamed up to argue against a Seattle ordinance that would have permitted drivers to cooperatively bargain with Uber and Lyft. Why the hostility from enforcers? “Competition is the lynchpin of the U.S. economy,” explained Acting FTC Chairman Maureen Ohlhausen.
Should workers be able to cooperate to counter concentrated corporate power? Or is bellum omnium contra omnes truly the “lynchpin” of our industrial policy?
The coronavirus pandemic has thrown this question into sharper relief than ever before. Low-income workers—many of them classified as independent contractors—have launched multiple coordinated boycotts in an effort to improve working conditions. The antitrust agencies, once quick to condemn similar actions by Uber and Lyft drivers, have fallen conspicuously silent.
Why? Why should workers be allowed to negotiate cooperatively for a healthier workplace, yet not for a living wage? In a society largely organized around paying for basic social services, money is health—and even life itself.
Unraveling the Double Standard
Antitrust law, like the rest of industrial policy, involves difficult questions over which members of society can cooperate with one another. These laws allocate “coordination rights”. Before the coronavirus pandemic, industrial policy seemed generally to favor allocating these rights to corporations, while simultaneously denying them to workers and class-action plaintiffs. But, as the antitrust agencies’ apparent about-face on workplace organizing suggests, the times may be a-changing.
Some of today’s most existential threats to societal welfare—pandemics, climate change, pollution—will best be addressed via cooperation, not atomistic rivalry. On-the-ground stakeholders certainly seem to think so. Absent a coherent, unified federal policy to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, state governors have reportedly begun to consider cooperating to provide a coordinated regional response. Last year, a group of auto manufacturers voluntarily agreed to increase fuel-efficiency standards and reduce emissions. They did attract an antitrust investigation, but it was subsequently dropped—a triumph for pro-social cooperation. It was perhaps also a reminder that corporations, each of which is itself a cooperative enterprise, can still play the role they were historically assigned: serving the public interest.
Going forward, policy-makers should give careful thought to how their actions and inactions encourage or stifle cooperation. Judge Easterbrook praised an agreement between business owners because it “promoted enterprise”. What counts as legitimate “enterprise”, though, is an eminently contestable proposition.
The federal antitrust agencies’ anti-worker stance in particular seems ripe for revisiting. Its modern origins date back to the 1980s, when President Reagan’s FTC challenged a coordinated boycott among D.C.-area criminal-defense attorneys. The boycott was a strike of sorts, intended to pressure the city into increasing court-appointed fees to a level that would allow for adequate representation. (The mayor’s office, despite being responsible for paying the fees, actually encouraged the boycott.) As the sole buyer of this particular type of service, the government wielded substantial power in the marketplace. A coordinated front was needed to counter it. Nonetheless, the FTC condemned the attorneys’ strike as per se illegal—a label supposedly reserved for the worst possible anticompetitive behavior—and the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately agreed.
Reviving Cooperation
In the short run, the federal antitrust agencies should formally reverse this anti-labor course. When workers cooperate in an attempt to counter employers’ power, antitrust intervention is, at best, a misallocation of scarce agency resources. Surely there are (much) bigger fish to fry. At worst, hostility to such cooperation directly contravenes Congress’ vision for the antitrust laws. These laws were intended to protect workers from concentrated downstream power, not to force their exposure to it—as the federal agencies themselves have recognized elsewhere.
In the longer run, congressional action may be needed. Supreme Court antitrust case law condemning worker coordination should be legislatively overruled. And, in a sharp departure from the current trend, we should be making it easier, not harder, for workers to form cooperative unions. Capital can be combined into a legal corporation in just a few hours, while it takes more than a month to create an effective labor union. None of this is to say that competition should be abandoned—much the opposite, in fact. A market that pits individual workers against highly concentrated cooperative entities is hardly “competitive”.
Thinking more broadly, antitrust and industrial policy may need to allow—or even encourage—cooperation in a number of sectors. Automakers’ and other manufacturers’ voluntary efforts to fight climate change should be lauded and protected, not investigated. Where cooperation is already shielded and even incentivized, as is the case with corporations, affirmative steps may be needed to ensure that the public interest is being furthered.
The current moment is without precedent. Industrial policy is destined, and has already begun, to change. Although competition has its place, it cannot serve as the sole lynchpin for a just economy. Now more than ever, a revival of cooperation is needed.
Near the end of her new proposal to break up Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple, Senator Warren asks, “So what would the Internet look like after all these reforms?”
It’s a good question, because, as she herself notes, “Twenty-five years ago, Facebook, Google, and Amazon didn’t exist. Now they are among the most valuable and well-known companies in the world.”
To Warren, our most dynamic and innovative companies constitute a problem that needs solving.
She described the details of that solution in a blog post:
First, [my administration would restore competition to the tech sector] by passing legislation that requires large tech platforms to be designated as “Platform Utilities” and broken apart from any participant on that platform.
* * *
For smaller companies…, their platform utilities would be required to meet the same standard of fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory dealing with users, but would not be required to structurally separate….
* * * Second, my administration would appoint regulators committed to reversing illegal and anti-competitive tech mergers…. I will appoint regulators who are committed to… unwind[ing] anti-competitive mergers, including:
Let’s consider for a moment what this brave new world will look like — not the nirvana imagined by regulators and legislators who believe that decimating a company’s business model will deter only the “bad” aspects of the model while preserving the “good,” as if by magic, but the inevitable reality of antitrust populism.
Utilities? Are you kidding? For an overview of what the future of tech would look like under Warren’s “Platform Utility” policy, take a look at your water, electricity, and sewage service. Have you noticed any improvement (or reduction in cost) in those services over the past 10 or 15 years? How about the roads? Amtrak? Platform businesses operating under a similar regulatory regime would also similarly stagnate. Enforcing platform “neutrality” necessarily requires meddling in the most minute of business decisions, inevitably creating unintended and costly consequences along the way.
Network companies, like all businesses, differentiate themselves by offering unique bundles of services to customers. By definition, this means vertically integrating with some product markets and not others. Why are digital assistants like Siri bundled into mobile operating systems? Why aren’t the vast majority of third-party apps also bundled into the OS? If you want utilities regulators instead of Google or Apple engineers and designers making these decisions on the margin, then Warren’s “Platform Utility” policy is the way to go.
Grocery Stores. To take one specific case cited by Warren, how much innovation was there in the grocery store industry before Amazon bought Whole Foods? Since the acquisition, large grocery retailers, like Walmart and Kroger, have increased their investment in online services to better compete with the e-commerce champion. Many industry analysts expect grocery stores to use computer vision technology and artificial intelligence to improve the efficiency of check-out in the near future.
Smartphones. Imagine how forced neutrality would play out in the context of iPhones. If Apple can’t sell its own apps, it also can’t pre-install its own apps. A brand new iPhone with no apps — and even more importantly, no App Store — would be, well, just a phone, out of the box. How would users even access a site or app store from which to download independent apps? Would Apple be allowed to pre-install someone else’s apps? That’s discriminatory, too. Maybe it will be forced to offer a menu of all available apps in all categories (like the famously useless browser ballot screen demanded by the European Commission in its Microsoft antitrust case)? It’s hard to see how that benefits consumers — or even app developers.
Internet Search. Or take search. Calls for “search neutrality” have been bandied about for years. But most proponents of search neutrality fail to recognize that all Google’s search results entail bias in favor of its own offerings. As Geoff Manne and Josh Wright noted in 2011 at the height of the search neutrality debate:
[S]earch engines offer up results in the form not only of typical text results, but also maps, travel information, product pages, books, social media and more. To the extent that alleged bias turns on a search engine favoring its own maps, for example, over another firm’s, the allegation fails to appreciate that text results and maps are variants of the same thing, and efforts to restrain a search engine from offering its own maps is no different than preventing it from offering its own search results.
Nevermind that Google with forced non-discrimination likely means Google offering only the antiquated “ten blue links” search results page it started with in 1998 instead of the far more useful “rich” results it offers today; logically it would also mean Google somehow offering the set of links produced by any and all other search engines’ algorithms, in lieu of its own. If you think Google will continue to invest in and maintain the wealth of services it offers today on the strength of the profits derived from those search results, well, Elizabeth Warren is probably already your favorite politician.
And regulatory oversight of algorithmic content won’t just result in an impoverished digital experience; it will inevitably lead to an authoritarian one, as well:
Any agency granted a mandate to undertake such algorithmic oversight, and override or reconfigure the product of online services, thereby controls the content consumers may access…. This sort of control is deeply problematic… [because it saddles users] with a pervasive set of speech controls promulgated by the government. The history of such state censorship is one which has demonstrated strong harms to both social welfare and rule of law, and should not be emulated.
Digital Assistants. Consider also the veritable cage match among the tech giants to offer “digital assistants” and “smart home” devices with ever-more features at ever-lower prices. Today the allegedly non-existent competition among these companies is played out most visibly in this multi-featured market, comprising advanced devices tightly integrated with artificial intelligence, voice recognition, advanced algorithms, and a host of services. Under Warren’s nondiscrimination principle this market disappears. Each device can offer only a connectivity platform (if such a service is even permitted to be bundled with a physical device…) — and nothing more.
But such a world entails not only the end of an entire, promising avenue of consumer-benefiting innovation, it also entails the end of a promising avenue of consumer-benefiting competition. It beggars belief that anyone thinks consumers would benefit by forcing technology companies into their own silos, ensuring that the most powerful sources of competition for each other are confined to their own fiefdoms by order of law.
Breaking business models
Beyond the product-feature dimension, Sen. Warren’s proposal would be devastating for innovative business models. Why is Amazon Prime Video bundled with free shipping? Because the marginal cost of distribution for video is close to zero and bundling it with Amazon Prime increases the value proposition for customers. Why is almost every Google service free to users? Because Google’s business model is supported by ads, not monthly subscription fees. Each of the tech giants has carefully constructed an ecosystem in which every component reinforces the others. Sen. Warren’s plan would not only break up the companies, it would prohibit their business models — the ones that both created and continue to sustain these products. Such an outcome would manifestly harm consumers.
Both of Warren’s policy “solutions” are misguided and will lead to higher prices and less innovation. Her cause for alarm is built on a multitude of mistaken assumptions, but let’s address just a few (Warren in bold):
“Nearly half of all e-commerce goes through Amazon.” Yes, but it has only 5% of total retail in the United States. As my colleague Kristian Stout says, “the Internet is not a market; it’s a distribution channel.”
“Amazon has used its immense market power to force smaller competitors like Diapers.com to sell at a discounted rate.” The real story, as the founders of Diapers.com freely admitted, is that they sold diapers as what they hoped would be a loss leader, intending to build out sales of other products once they had a base of loyal customers:
And so we started with selling the loss leader product to basically build a relationship with mom. And once they had the passion for the brand and they were shopping with us on a weekly or a monthly basis that they’d start to fall in love with that brand. We were losing money on every box of diapers that we sold. We weren’t able to buy direct from the manufacturers.
Like all entrepreneurs, Diapers.com’s founders took a calculated risk that didn’t pay off as hoped. Amazon subsequently acquired the company (after it had declined a similar buyout offer from Walmart). (Antitrust laws protect consumers, not inefficient competitors). And no, this was not a case of predatory pricing. After many years of trying to make the business profitable as a subsidiary, Amazon shut it down in 2017.
“In the 1990s, Microsoft — the tech giant of its time — was trying to parlay its dominance in computer operating systems into dominance in the new area of web browsing. The federal government sued Microsoft for violating anti-monopoly laws and eventually reached a settlement. The government’s antitrust case against Microsoft helped clear a path for Internet companies like Google and Facebook to emerge.” The government’s settlement with Microsoft is not the reason Google and Facebook were able to emerge. Neither company entered the browser market at launch. Instead, they leapfrogged the browser entirely and created new platforms for the web (only later did Google create Chrome).
Furthermore, if the Microsoft case is responsible for “clearing a path” for Google is it not also responsible for clearing a path for Google’s alleged depredations? If the answer is that antitrust enforcement should be consistently more aggressive in order to rein in Google, too, when it gets out of line, then how can we be sure that that same more-aggressive enforcement standard wouldn’t have curtailed the extent of the Microsoft ecosystem in which it was profitable for Google to become Google? Warren implicitly assumes that only the enforcement decision in Microsoft was relevant to Google’s rise. But Microsoft doesn’t exist in a vacuum. If Microsoft cleared a path for Google, so did every decision not to intervene, which, all combined, created the legal, business, and economic environment in which Google operates.
Warren characterizes Big Tech as a weight on the American economy. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. These superstar companies are the drivers of productivity growth, all ranking at or near the top for most spending on research and development. And while data may not be the new oil, extracting value from it may require similar levels of capital expenditure. Last year, Big Tech spent as much or more on capex as the world’s largest oil companies:
Warren also faults Big Tech for a decline in startups, saying,
The number of tech startups has slumped, there are fewer high-growth young firms typical of the tech industry, and first financing rounds for tech startups have declined 22% since 2012.
But this trend predates the existence of the companies she criticizes, as this chart from Quartz shows:
The exact causes of the decline in business dynamism are still uncertain, but recent research points to a much more mundane explanation: demographics. Labor force growth has been declining, which has led to an increase in average firm age, nudging fewer workers to start their own businesses.
Furthermore, it’s not at all clear whether this is actually a decline in business dynamism, or merely a change in business model. We would expect to see the same pattern, for example, if would-be startup founders were designing their software for acquisition and further development within larger, better-funded enterprises.
Will Rinehart recently looked at the literature to determine whether there is indeed a “kill zone” for startups around Big Tech incumbents. One paper finds that “an increase in fixed costs explains most of the decline in the aggregate entrepreneurship rate.” Another shows an inverse correlation across 50 countries between GDP and entrepreneurship rates. Robert Lucas predicted these trends back in 1978, pointing out that productivity increases would lead to wage increases, pushing marginal entrepreneurs out of startups and into big companies.
It’s notable that many in the venture capital community would rather not have Sen. Warren’s “help”:
If big companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon are prevented from acquiring startups, that actually reduces competition. The reason is that if there is less M&A due to legal uncertainty, there is a reduced incentive for angels & VCs to fund those startups in the first place.
just to sustain constant growth in GDP per person, the U.S. must double the amount of research effort searching for new ideas every 13 years to offset the increased difficulty of finding new ideas.
If this assessment is correct, it may well be that coming up with productive and profitable innovations is simply becoming more expensive, and thus, at the margin, each dollar of venture capital can fund less of it. Ironically, this also implies that larger firms, which can better afford the additional resources required to sustain exponential growth, are a crucial part of the solution, not the problem.
Warren believes that Big Tech is the cause of our social ills. But Americans have more trust in Amazon, Facebook, and Google than in the political institutions that would break them up. It would be wise for her to reflect on why that might be the case. By punishing our most valuable companies for past successes, Warren would chill competition and decrease returns to innovation.
Finally, in what can only be described as tragic irony, the most prominent political figure who shares Warren’s feelings on Big Tech is President Trump. Confirming the horseshoe theory of politics, far-left populism and far-right populism seem less distinguishable by the day. As our colleague Gus Hurwitz put it, with this proposal Warren is explicitly endorsing the unitary executive theory and implicitly endorsing Trump’s authority to direct his DOJ to “investigate specific cases and reach specific outcomes.” Which cases will he want to have investigated and what outcomes will he be seeking? More good questions that Senator Warren should be asking. The notion that competition, consumer welfare, and growth are likely to increase in such an environment is farcical.
By Pinar Akman, Professor of Law, University of Leeds*
The European Commission’s decision in Google Android cuts a fine line between punishing a company for its success and punishing a company for falling afoul of the rules of the game. Which side of the line it actually falls on cannot be fully understood until the Commission publishes its full decision. Much depends on the intricate facts of the case. As the full decision may take months to come, this post offers merely the author’s initial thoughts on the decision on the basis of the publicly available information.
The eye-watering fine of $5.1 billion — which together with the fine of $2.7 billion in the Google Shopping decision from last year would (according to one estimate) suffice to fund for almost one year the additional yearly public spending necessary to eradicate world hunger by 2030 — will not be further discussed in this post. This is because the fine is assumed to have been duly calculated on the basis of the Commission’s relevant Guidelines, and, from a legal and commercial point of view, the absolute size of the fine is not as important as the infringing conduct and the remedy Google will need to adopt to comply with the decision.
First things first. This post proceeds on the premise that the aim of competition law is to prevent the exclusion of competitors that are (at least) as efficient as the dominant incumbent, whose exclusion would ultimately harm consumers.
Next, it needs to be noted that the Google Android case is a more conventional antitrust case than Google Shopping in the sense that one can at least envisage a potentially robust antitrust theory of harm in the former case. If a dominant undertaking ties its products together to exclude effective competition in some of these markets or if it pays off customers to exclude access by its efficient competitors to consumers, competition law intervention may be justified.
The central question in Google Android is whether on the available facts this appears to have happened.
What we know and market definition
The premise of the case is that Google used its dominance in the Google Play Store (which enables users to download apps onto their Android phones) to “cement Google’s dominant position in general internet search.”
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.
Thus, for example, in Microsoft (Windows Operating System —> media players), Hilti (patented cartridge strips —> nails), and Tetra Pak II (packaging machines —> non-aseptic cartons), the tied market was actually or potentially competitive, and this was why the tying was alleged to have eliminated competition. It will be interesting to see which case the Commission uses as precedent in its decision — more on that later.
Also noteworthy is that the Commission does not appear to have defined a separate mobile search market that would have been competitive but for Google’s alleged leveraging. The market has been defined as the general internet search market. So, according to the Commission, the Google Search App and Google Search engine appear to be one and the same thing, and desktop and mobile devices are equivalent (or substitutable).
Finding mobile and desktop devices to be equivalent to one another may have implications for other cases including the ongoing appeal in Google Shopping where, for example, the Commission found that “[m]obile [apps] are not a viable alternative for replacing generic search traffic from Google’s general search results pages” for comparison shopping services. The argument that mobile apps and mobile traffic are fundamental in Google Android but trivial in Google Shopping may not play out favourably for the Commission before the Court of Justice of the EU.
Another interesting market definition point is that the Commission has found Apple not to be a competitor to Google in the relevant market defined by the Commission: the market for “licensable smart mobile operating systems.” Apple does not fall within that market because Apple does not license its mobile operating system to anyone: Apple’s model eliminates all possibility of competition from the start and is by definition exclusive.
Although there is some internal logic in the Commission’s exclusion of Apple from the upstream market that it has defined, is this not a bit of a definitional stop? 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?
To be fair, the Commission does consider there to be some competition between Apple and Android devices at the level of consumers — just not sufficient to constrain Google at the upstream, manufacturer level.
Nevertheless, the implication of the Commission’s assessment that separates the upstream and downstream in this way is akin to saying that the world’s two largest corn producers that produce the corn used to make corn flakes do not compete with one another in the market for corn flakes because one of them uses its corn exclusively in its own-brand cereal.
Although the Commission cabins the use of supply-side substitutability in market definition, its own guidance on the topic notes that
Supply-side substitutability may also be taken into account when defining markets in those situations in which its effects are equivalent to those of demand substitution in terms of effectiveness and immediacy. This means that suppliers are able to switch production to the relevant products and market them in the short term….
Apple could — presumably — rather immediately and at minimal cost produce and market a version of iOS for use on third-party device makers’ devices. By the Commission’s own definition, it would seem to make sense to include Apple in the relevant market. Nevertheless, it has apparently not done so here.
The message that the Commission sends with the finding is that if Android had not been open source and freely available, and if Google competed with Apple with its own version of a walled-garden built around exclusivity, it is possible that none of its practices would have raised any concerns. Or, should Apple be expecting a Statement of Objections next from the EU Commission?
Is Microsoft really the relevant precedent?
Given that Google Android appears to revolve around the idea of tying and leveraging, the EU Commission’s infringement decision against Microsoft, which found an abusive tie in Microsoft’s tying of Windows Operating System with Windows Media Player, appears to be the most obvious precedent, at least for the tying part of the case.
There are, however, potentially important factual differences between the two cases. To take just a few examples:
Microsoft charged for the Windows Operating System, whereas Google does not;
Microsoft tied the setting of Windows Media Player as the default to OEMs’ licensing of the operating system (Windows), whereas Google ties the setting of Search as the default to device makers’ use of other Google apps, while allowing them to use the operating system (Android) without any Google apps; and
Downloading competing media players was difficult due to download speeds and lack of user familiarity, whereas it is trivial and commonplace for users to download apps that compete with Google’s.
Moreover, there are also some conceptual hurdles in finding the conduct to be that of tying.
First, the difference between “pre-installed,” “default,” and “exclusive” matters a lot in establishing whether effective competition has been foreclosed. The Commission’s Press Release notes that to pre-install Google Play, manufacturers have to also pre-install Google Search App and Google Chrome. It also states that Google Search is the default search engine on Google Chrome. The Press Release does not indicate that Google Search App has to be the exclusive or default search app. (It is worth noting, however, that the Statement of Objections in Google Android did allege that Google violated EU competition rules by requiring Search to be installed as the default. We will have to await the decision itself to see if this was dropped from the case or simply not mentioned in the Press Release).
In fact, the fact that the other infringement found is that of Google’s making payments to manufacturers in return for exclusively pre-installing the Google Search App indirectly suggests that not every manufacturer pre-installs Google Search App as the exclusive, pre-installed search app. This means that any other search app (provider) can also (request to) be pre-installed on these devices. The same goes for the browser app.
Of course, regardless, even if the manufacturer does not pre-install competing apps, the consumer is free to download any other app — for search or browsing — as they wish, and can do so in seconds.
In short, pre-installation on its own does not necessarily foreclose competition, and thus may not constitute an illegal tie under EU competition law. This is particularly so when download speeds are fast (unlike the case at the time of Microsoft) and consumers regularly do download numerous apps.
What may, however, potentially foreclose effective competition is where a dominant undertaking makes payments to stop its customers, as a practical matter, from selling its rivals’ products. Intel, for example, was found to have abused its dominant position through payments to a computer retailer in return for its not selling computers with its competitor AMD’s chips, and to computer manufacturers in return for delaying the launch of computers with AMD chips.
In Google Android, the exclusivity provision that would require manufacturers to pre-install Google Search App exclusively in return for financial incentives may be deemed to be similar to this.
Having said that, unlike in Intel where a given computer can have a CPU from only one given manufacturer, even the exclusive pre-installation of the Google Search App would not have prevented consumers from downloading competing apps. So, again, in theory effective competition from other search apps need not have been foreclosed.
It must also be noted that just because a Google app is pre-installed does not mean that it generates any revenue to Google — consumers have to actually choose to use that app as opposed to another one that they might prefer in order for Google to earn any revenue from it. The Commission seems to place substantial weight on pre-installation which it alleges to create “a status quo bias.”
The concern with this approach is that it is not possible to know whether those consumers who do not download competing apps do so out of a preference for Google’s apps or, instead, for other reasons that might indicate competition not to be working. Indeed, one hurdle as regards conceptualising the infringement as tying is that it would require establishing that a significant number of phone users would actually prefer to use Google Play Store (the tying product) without Google Search App (the tied product).
This is because, according to the Commission’s Guidance Paper, establishing tying starts with identifying two distinct products, and
[t]wo products are distinct if, in the absence of tying or bundling, a substantial number of customers would purchase or would have purchased the tying product without also buying the tied product from the same supplier.
Thus, if a substantial number of customers would not want to use Google Play Store without also preferring to use Google Search App, this would cause a conceptual problem for making out a tying claim.
In fact, the conduct at issue in Google Android may be closer to a refusal to supply type of abuse.
Refusal to supply also seems to make more sense regarding the prevention of the development of Android forks being found to be an abuse. In this context, it will be interesting to see how the Commission overcomes the argument that Android forks can be developed freely and Google may have legitimate business reasons in wanting to associate its own, proprietary apps only with a certain, standardised-quality version of the operating system.
More importantly, the possible underlying theory in this part of the case is that the Google apps — and perhaps even the licensed version of Android — are a “must-have,” which is close to an argument that they are an essential facility in the context of Android phones. But that would indeed require a refusal to supply type of abuse to be established, which does not appear to be the case.
What will happen next?
To answer the question raised in the title of this post — whether the Google Android decision will benefit consumers — one needs to consider what Google may do in order to terminate the infringing conduct as required by the Commission, whilst also still generating revenue from Android.
This is because unbundling Google Play Store, Google Search App and Google Chrome (to allow manufacturers to pre-install Google Play Store without the latter two) will disrupt Google’s main revenue stream (i.e., ad revenue generated through the use of Google Search App or Google Search within the Chrome app) which funds the free operating system. This could lead Google to start charging for the operating system, and limiting to whom it licenses the operating system under the Commission’s required, less-restrictive terms.
As the Commission does not seem to think that Apple constrains Google when it comes to dealings with device manufacturers, in theory, Google should be able to charge up to the monopoly level licensing fee to device manufacturers. If that happens, the price of Android smartphones may go up. It is possible that there is a new competitor lurking in the woods that will grow and constrain that exercise of market power, but how this will all play out for consumers — as well as app developers who may face increasing costs due to the forking of Android — really remains to be seen.
* Pinar Akman is Professor of Law, Director of Centre for Business Law and Practice, University of Leeds, UK. This piece has not been commissioned or funded by any entity. The author has not been involved in the Google Android case in any capacity. In the past, the author wrote a piece on the Commission’s Google Shopping case, ‘The Theory of Abuse in Google Search: A Positive and Normative Assessment under EU Competition Law,’ supported by a research grant from Google. The author would like to thank Peter Whelan, Konstantinos Stylianou, and Geoffrey Manne for helpful comments. All errors remain her own. The author can be contacted here.
Today the European Commission launched its latest salvo against Google, issuing a decision in its three-year antitrust investigation into the company’s agreements for distribution of the Android mobile operating system. The massive fine levied by the Commission will dominate the headlines, but the underlying legal theory and proposed remedies are just as notable — and just as problematic.
The nirvana fallacy
It is sometimes said that the most important question in all of economics is “compared to what?” UCLA economist Harold Demsetz — one of the most important regulatory economists of the past century — coined the term “nirvana fallacy” to critique would-be regulators’ tendency to compare messy, real-world economic circumstances to idealized alternatives, and to justify policies on the basis of the discrepancy between them. Wishful thinking, in other words.
The Commission’s Android decision falls prey to the nirvana fallacy. It conjures a world in which Google offers its Android operating system on unrealistic terms, prohibits it from doing otherwise, and neglects the actual consequences of such a demand.
The idea at the core of the Commission’s decision is that by making its own services (especially Google Search and Google Play Store) easier to access than competing services on Android devices, Google has effectively foreclosed rivals from effective competition. In order to correct that claimed defect, the Commission demands that Google refrain from engaging in practices that favor its own products in its Android licensing agreements:
At a minimum, Google has to stop and to not re-engage in any of the three types of practices. The decision also requires Google to refrain from any measure that has the same or an equivalent object or effect as these practices.
The basic theory is straightforward enough, but its application here reflects a troubling departure from the underlying economics and a romanticized embrace of industrial policy that is unsupported by the realities of the market.
In a recent interview, European Commission competition chief, Margrethe Vestager, offered a revealing insight into her thinking about her oversight of digital platforms, and perhaps the economy in general: “My concern is more about whether we get the right choices,” she said. Asked about Facebook, for example, she specified exactly what she thinks the “right” choice looks like: “I would like to have a Facebook in which I pay a fee each month, but I would have no tracking and advertising and the full benefits of privacy.”
Some consumers may well be sympathetic with her preference (and even share her specific vision of what Facebook should offer them). But what if competition doesn’t result in our — or, more to the point, Margrethe Vestager’s — prefered outcomes? Should competition policy nevertheless enact the idiosyncratic consumer preferences of a particular regulator? What if offering consumers the “right” choices comes at the expense of other things they value, like innovation, product quality, or price? And, if so, can antitrust enforcers actually engineer a better world built around these preferences?
Android’s alleged foreclosure… that doesn’t really foreclose anything
The Commission’s primary concern is with the terms of Google’s deal: In exchange for royalty-free access to Android and a set of core, Android-specific applications and services (like Google Search and Google Maps) Google imposes a few contractual conditions.
Google allows manufacturers to use the Android platform — in which the company has invested (and continues to invest) billions of dollars — for free. It does not require device makers to include any of its core, Google-branded features. But if a manufacturer does decide to use any of them, it must include all of them, and make Google Search the device default. In another (much smaller) set of agreements, Google also offers device makers a small share of its revenue from Search if they agree to pre-install only Google Search on their devices (although users remain free to download and install any competing services they wish).
Essentially, that’s it. Google doesn’t allow device makers to pick and choose between parts of the ecosystem of Google products, free-riding on Google’s brand and investments. But manufacturers are free to use the Android platform and to develop their own competing brand built upon Google’s technology.
Other apps may be installed in addition to Google’s core apps. Google Search need not be the exclusive search service, but it must be offered out of the box as the default. Google Play and Chrome must be made available to users, but other app stores and browsers may be pre-installed and even offered as the default. And device makers who choose to do so may share in Search revenue by pre-installing Google Search exclusively — but users can and do install a different search service.
Alternatives to all of Google’s services (including Search) abound on the Android platform. It’s trivial both to install them and to set them as the default. Meanwhile, device makers regularly choose to offer these apps alongside Google’s services, and some, like Samsung, have developed entire customized app suites of their own. Still others, like Amazon, pre-install no Google apps and use Android without any of these constraints (and whose Google-free tablets are regularly ranked as the best-rated and most popular in Europe).
By contrast, Apple bundles its operating system with its devices, bypasses third-party device makers entirely, and offers consumers access to its operating system only if they pay (lavishly) for one of the very limited number of devices the company offers, as well. It is perhaps not surprising — although it is enlightening — that Apple earns more revenue in an average quarter from iPhone sales than Google is reported to have earnedin total from Android since it began offering it in 2008.
Reality — and the limits it imposes on efforts to manufacture nirvana
The logic behind Google’s approach to Android is obvious: It is the extension of Google’s “advertisers pay” platform strategy to mobile. Rather than charging device makers (and thus consumers) directly for its services, Google earns its revenue by charging advertisers for targeted access to users via Search. Remove Search from mobile devices and you remove the mechanism by which Google gets paid.
It’s true that most device makers opt to offer Google’s suite of services to European users, and that most users opt to keep Google Search as the default on their devices — that is, indeed, the hoped-for effect, and necessary to ensure that Google earns a return on its investment.
That users often choose to keep using Google services instead of installing alternatives, and that device makers typically choose to engineer their products around the Google ecosystem, isn’t primarily the result of a Google-imposed mandate; it’s the result of consumer preferences for Google’s offerings in lieu of readily available alternatives.
The EU decision against Google appears to imagine a world in which Google will continue to develop Android and allow device makers to use the platform and Google’s services for free, even if the likelihood of recouping its investment is diminished.
The Commission also assessed in detail Google’s arguments that the tying of the Google Search app and Chrome browser were necessary, in particular to allow Google to monetise its investment in Android, and concluded that these arguments were not well founded. Google achieves billions of dollars in annual revenues with the Google Play Store alone, it collects a lot of data that is valuable to Google’s search and advertising business from Android devices, and it would still have benefitted from a significant stream of revenue from search advertising without the restrictions.
For the Commission, Google’s earned enough [trust me: you should follow the link. It’s my favorite joke…].
But that world in which Google won’t alter its investment decisions based on a government-mandated reduction in its allowable return on investment doesn’t exist; it’s a fanciful Nirvana.
Google’s real alternatives to the status quo are charging for the use of Android, closing the Android platform and distributing it (like Apple) only on a fully integrated basis, or discontinuing Android.
In reality, and compared to these actual alternatives, Google’s restrictions are trivial. Remember, Google doesn’t insist that Google Search be exclusive, only that it benefit from a “leg up” by being pre-installed as the default. And on this thin reed Google finances the development and maintenance of the (free) Android operating system and all of the other (free) apps from which Google otherwise earns little or no revenue.
It’s hard to see how consumers, device makers, or app developers would be made better off without Google’s restrictions, but in the real world in which the alternative is one of the three manifestly less desirable options mentioned above.
Missing the real competition for the trees
What’s more, while ostensibly aimed at increasing competition, the Commission’s proposed remedy — like the conduct it addresses — doesn’t relate to Google’s most significant competitors at all.
Facebook, Instagram, Firefox, Amazon, Spotify, Yelp, and Yahoo, among many others, are some of the most popular apps on Android phones, including in Europe. They aren’t foreclosed by Google’s Android distribution terms, and it’s even hard to imagine that they would be more popular if only Android phones didn’t come with, say, Google Search pre-installed.
It’s a strange anticompetitive story that has Google allegedly foreclosing insignificant competitors while apparently ignoring its most substantial threats.
The primary challenges Google now faces are from Facebook drawing away the most valuable advertising and Amazon drawing away the most valuable product searches (and increasingly advertising, as well). The fact that Google’s challenged conduct has never shifted in order to target these competitors as their threat emerged, and has had no apparent effect on these competitive dynamics, says all one needs to know about the merits of the Commission’s decision and the value of its proposed remedy.
In reality, as Demsetz suggested, Nirvana cannot be designed by politicians, especially in complex, modern technology markets. Consumers’ best hope for something close — continued innovation, low prices, and voluminous choice — lies in the evolution of markets spurred by consumer demand, not regulators’ efforts to engineer them.
Regardless of which standard you want to apply to competition law – consumer welfare, total welfare, hipster, or redneck antitrust – it’s never good when competition/antitrust agencies are undermining innovation. Yet, this is precisely what the European Commission is doing.
Today, the agency announced a €4.34 billion fine against Alphabet (Google). It represents more than 30% of what the company invests annually in R&D (based on 2017 figures). This is more than likely to force Google to cut its R&D investments, or, at least, to slow them down.
In fact, the company says in a recent 10-K filing with the SEC that it is uncertain as to the impact of these sanctions on its financial stability. It follows that the European Commission necessarily is ignorant of such concerns, as well, which is thus clearly not reflected in the calculation of its fine.
One thing is for sure, however: In the end, consumers will suffer if the failure to account for the fine’s effect on innovation will lead to less of it from Google.
And Google is not alone in this situation. In a paper just posted by the International Center for Law & Economics, I conduct an empirical study comparing all the fines imposed by the European Commission on the basis of Article 102 TFEU over the period 2004 to 2018 (Android included) with the annual R&D investments by the targeted companies.
The results are indisputable: The European Commission’s fines are disproportionate in this regard and have the probable effect of slowing down the innovation of numerous sanctioned companies.
For this reason, an innovation protection mechanism should be incorporated into the calculation of the EU’s Article 102 fines. I propose doing so by introducing a new limit that caps Article 102 fines at a certain percentage of companies’ investment in R&D.
Our story begins on the morning of January 9, 2007. Few people knew it at the time, but the world of wireless communications was about to change forever. Steve Jobs walked on stage wearing his usual turtleneck, and proceeded to reveal the iPhone. The rest, as they say, is history. The iPhone moved the wireless communications industry towards a new paradigm. No more physical keyboards, clamshell bodies, and protruding antennae. All of these were replaced by a beautiful black design, a huge touchscreen (3.5” was big for that time), a rear-facing camera, and (a little bit later) a revolutionary new way to consume applications: the App Store. Sales soared and Apple’s stock started an upward trajectory that would see it become one of the world’s most valuable companies.
The story could very well have ended there. If it had, we might all be using iPhones today. However, years before, Google had commenced its own march into the wireless communications space by purchasing a small startup called Android. A first phone had initially been slated for release in late 2007. But Apple’s iPhone announcement sent Google back to the drawing board. It took Google and its partners until 2010 to come up with a competitive answer – the Google Nexus One produced by HTC.
Understanding the strategy that Google put in place during this three year timespan is essential to understanding the European Commission’s Google Android decision.
How to beat one of the great innovations?
In order to overthrow — or even merely just compete with — the iPhone, Google faced the same dilemma that most second-movers have to contend with: imitate or differentiate. Its solution was a mix of both. It took the touchscreen, camera, and applications, but departed on one key aspect. Whereas Apple controls the iPhone from end-to-end, Google opted for a licensed, open-source operating system that substitutes a more-decentralized approach for Apple’s so-called “walled garden.”
Google and a number of partners founded the Open Handset Alliance (“OHA”) in November 2007. This loose association of network operators, software companies and handset manufacturers became the driving force behind the Android OS. Through the OHA, Google and its partners have worked to develop minimal specifications for OHA-compliant Android devices in order to ensure that all levels of the device ecosystem — from device makers to app developers — function well together. As its initial press release boasts, through the OHA:
Handset manufacturers and wireless operators will be free to customize Android in order to bring to market innovative new products faster and at a much lower cost. Developers will have complete access to handset capabilities and tools that will enable them to build more compelling and user-friendly services, bringing the Internet developer model to the mobile space. And consumers worldwide will have access to less expensive mobile devices that feature more compelling services, rich Internet applications and easier-to-use interfaces — ultimately creating a superior mobile experience.
The open source route has a number of advantages — notably the improved division of labor — but it is not without challenges. One key difficulty lies in coordinating and incentivizing the dozens of firms that make up the alliance. Google must not only keep the diverse Android ecosystem directed toward a common, compatible goal, it also has to monetize a product that, by its very nature, is given away free of charge. It is Google’s answers to these two problems that set off the Commission’s investigation.
The first problem is a direct consequence of Android’s decentralization. Whereas there are only a small number of iPhones (the couple of models which Apple markets at any given time) running the same operating system, Android comes in a jaw-dropping array of flavors. Some devices are produced by Google itself, others are the fruit of high-end manufacturers such as Samsung and LG, there are also so-called “flagship killers” like OnePlus, and budget phones from the likes of Motorola and Honor (one of Huawei’s brands). The differences don’t stop there. Manufacturers, like Samsung, Xiaomi and LG (to name but a few) have tinkered with the basic Android setup. Samsung phones heavily incorporate its Bixby virtual assistant, while Xiaomi packs in a novel user interface. The upshot is that the Android marketplace is tremendously diverse.
Managing this variety is challenging, to say the least (preventing projects from unravelling into a myriad of forks is always an issue for open source projects). Google and the OHA have come up with an elegant solution. The alliance penalizes so-called “incompatible” devices — that is, handsets whose software or hardware stray too far from a predetermined series of specifications. When this is the case, Google may refuse to license its proprietary applications (most notably the Play Store). This minimum level of uniformity ensures that apps will run smoothly on all devices. It also provides users with a consistent experience (thereby protecting the Android brand) and reduces the cost of developing applications for Android. Unsurprisingly, Android developers have lauded these “anti-fragmentation” measures, branding the Commission’s case a disaster.
A second important problem stems from the fact that the Android OS is an open source project. Device manufacturers can thus license the software free of charge. This is no small advantage. It shaves precious dollars from the price of Android smartphones, thus opening-up the budget end of the market. Although there are numerous factors at play, it should be noted that a top of the range Samsung Galaxy S9+ is roughly 30% cheaper ($819) than its Apple counterpart, the iPhone X ($1165).
Offering a competitive operating system free of charge might provide a fantastic deal for consumers, but it poses obvious business challenges. How can Google and other members of the OHA earn a return on the significant amounts of money poured into developing, improving, and marketing and Android devices? As is often the case with open source projects, they essentially rely on complementarities. Google produces the Android OS in the hope that it will boost users’ consumption of its profitable, ad-supported services (Google Search in particular). This is sometimes referred to as a loss leader or complementary goods strategy.
Google uses two important sets of contractual provisions to cement this loss leader strategy. First, it seemingly bundles a number of proprietary applications together. Manufacturers must pre-load the Google Search and Chrome apps in order to obtain the Play Store app (the lynchpin on which the Android ecosystem sits). Second, Google has concluded a number of “revenue sharing” deals with manufacturers and network operators. These companies receive monetary compensation when the Google Search is displayed prominently on a user’s home screen. In effect, they are receiving a cut of the marginal revenue that the use of this search bar generates for Google. Both of these measures ultimately nudge users — but do not force them, as neither prevents users from installing competing apps — into using Google’s most profitable services.
Readers would be forgiven for thinking that this is a win-win situation. Users get a competitive product free of charge, while Google and other members of the OHA earn enough money to compete against Apple.
The Commission is of another mind, however.
Commission’s hubris
The European Commission believes that Google is hurting competition. Though the text of the decision is not yet available, the thrust of its argument is that Google’s anti-fragmentation measures prevent software developers from launching competing OSs, while the bundling and revenue sharing both thwart rival search engines.
This analysis runs counter to some rather obvious facts:
For a start, the Android ecosystem is vibrant. Numerous firms have launched forked versions of Android, both with and without Google’s apps. Amazon’s Fire line of devices is a notable example.
Second, although Google’s behavior does have an effect on the search engine market, there is nothing anticompetitive about it. Yahoo could very well have avoided its high-profile failure if, way back in 2005, it had understood the importance of the mobile internet. At the time, it still had a 30% market share, compared to Google’s 36%. Firms that fail to seize upon business opportunities will fall out of the market. This is not a bug; it is possibly the most important feature of market economies. It reveals the products that consumers prefer and stops resources from being allocated to less valuable propositions.
Last but not least, Google’s behavior does not prevent other search engines from placing their own search bars or virtual assistants on smartphones. This is essentially what Samsung has done by ditching Google’s assistant in favor of its Bixby service. In other words, Google is merely competing with other firms to place key apps on or near the home screen of devices.
Even if the Commission’s reasoning where somehow correct, the competition watchdog is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. The potential repercussions for Android, the software industry, and European competition law are great:
For a start, the Commission risks significantly weakening Android’s competitive position relative to Apple. Android is a complex ecosystem. The idea that it is possible to bring incremental changes to its strategy without threatening the viability of the whole is a sign of the Commission’s hubris.
More broadly, the harsh treatment of Google could have significant incentive effects for other tech platforms. As others have already pointed out, the Commission’s decision rests on the idea that dominant firms should not be allowed to favor their own services compared to those of rivals. Taken a face value, this anti-discrimination policy will push firms to design closed platforms. If rivals are excluded from the very start, there is no one against whom to discriminate. Antitrust watchdogs are thus kept at bay (and thus the Commission is acting against Google’s marginal preference for its own services, rather than Apple’s far-more-substantial preferencing of its own services). Moving to a world of only walled gardens might harm users and innovators alike.
Over the next couple of days and weeks, many will jump to the Commission’s defense. They will see its action as a necessary step against the abstract “power” of Silicon Valley’s tech giants. Rivals will feel vindicated. But when all is done and dusted, there seems to be little doubt that the decision is misguided. The Commission will have struck a blow to the heart of the most competitive offering in the smartphone space. And consumers will be the biggest losers.
This is not what the competition laws were intended to achieve.
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