Wall Street Journal commentator, Greg Ip, reviews Thomas Philippon’s forthcoming book, The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up On Free Markets. Ip describes a “growing mountain” of research on industry concentration in the U.S. and reports that Philippon concludes competition has declined over time, harming U.S. consumers.
In one example, Philippon points to air travel. He notes that concentration in the U.S. has increased rapidly—spiking since the Great Recession—while concentration in the EU has increased modestly. At the same time, Ip reports “U.S. airlines are now far more profitable than their European counterparts.” (Although it’s debatable whether a five percentage point difference in net profit margin is “far more profitable”).
On first impression, the figures fit nicely with the populist antitrust narrative: As concentration in the U.S. grew, so did profit margins. Closer inspection raises some questions, however.
For example, the U.S. airline industry had a negative net profit margin in each of the years prior to the spike in concentration. While negative profits may be good for consumers, it would be a stretch to argue that long-run losses are good for competition as a whole. At some point one or more of the money losing firms is going to pull the ripcord. Which raises the issue of causation.
Just looking at the figures from the WSJ article, one could argue that rather than concentration driving profit margins, instead profit margins are driving concentration. Indeed, textbook IO economics would indicate that in the face of losses, firms will exit until economic profit equals zero. Paraphrasing Alfred Marshall, “Which blade of the scissors is doing the cutting?”
While the concentration and profits story fits the antitrust populist narrative, other observations run contrary to Philippon’s conclusion. For example, airline prices, as measured by price indexes, show that changes in U.S. and EU airline prices have fairly closely tracked each other until 2014, when U.S. prices began dropping. Sure, airlines have instituted baggage fees, but the CPI includes taxes, fuel surcharges, airport, security, and baggage fees. It’s not obvious that U.S. consumers are worse off in the so-called era of rising concentration.
Regressing U.S. air fare price index against Philippon’s concentration information in the figure above (and controlling for general inflation) finds that if U.S. concentration in 2015 was the same as in 1995, U.S. airfares would be about 2.8% lower. That a 1,250 point increase in HHI would be associated with a 2.8% increase in prices indicates that the increased concentration in U.S. airlines has led to no significant increase in consumer prices.
Also, if consumers are truly worse off, one would expect to see a drop off or slow down in the use of air travel. An eyeballing of passenger data does not fit the populist narrative. Instead, we see airlines are carrying more passengers and consumers are paying lower prices on average.
While it’s true that low-cost airlines have shaken up air travel in the EU, the differences are not solely explained by differences in market concentration. For example, U.S. regulations prohibit foreign airlines from operating domestic flights while EU carriers compete against operators from other parts of Europe. While the WSJ’s figures tell an interesting story of concentration, prices, and profits, they do not provide a compelling case of anticompetitive conduct.
A spate of recent newspaperinvestigations and commentary have focused on Apple allegedly discriminating against rivals in the App Store. The underlying assumption is that Apple, as a vertically integrated entity that operates both a platform for third-party apps and also makes it own apps, is acting nefariously whenever it “discriminates” against rival apps through prioritization, enters into popular app markets, or charges a “tax” or “surcharge” on rival apps.
For most people, the word discrimination has a pejorative connotation of animus based upon prejudice: racism, sexism, homophobia. One of the definitions you will find in the dictionary reflects this. But another definition is a lot less charged: the act of making or perceiving a difference. (This is what people mean when they say that a person has a discriminating palate, or a discriminating taste in music, for example.)
In economics, discrimination can be a positive attribute. For instance, effective price discrimination can result in wealthier consumers paying a higher price than less well off consumers for the same product or service, and it can ensure that products and services are in fact available for less-wealthy consumers in the first place. That would seem to be a socially desirable outcome (although under some circumstances, perfect price discrimination can be socially undesirable).
Antitrust law rightly condemns conduct only when it harms competition and not simply when it harms a competitor. This is because it is competition that enhances consumer welfare, not the presence or absence of a competitor — or, indeed, the profitability of competitors. The difficult task for antitrust enforcers is to determine when a vertically integrated firm with “market power” in an upstream market is able to effectively discriminate against rivals in a downstream market in a way that harms consumers.
Even assuming the claims of critics are true, alleged discrimination by Apple against competitor apps in the App Store may harm those competitors, but it doesn’t necessarily harm either competition or consumer welfare.
The three potential antitrust issues facing Apple can be summarized as:
Prioritization – “It has been prioritizing its own apps in search, as recent investigations by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal [have] documented.”
Tax – “Its 30 percent cut of revenue has disadvantaged competitors like Spotify, which can artificially inflate its price over what Apple is able to charge for its equivalent service.”
There is nothing new here economically. All three issues are analogous to claims against other tech companies. But, as I detail below, the evidence to establish any of these claims at best represents harm to competitors, and fails to establish any harm to the competitive process or to consumer welfare.
Prioritization
Antitrust enforcers have rejected similar prioritization claims against Google. For instance, rivals like Microsoft and Yelp have funded attacks against Google, arguing the search engine is harming competition by prioritizing its own services in its product search results over competitors. As ICLE and affiliated scholars have pointed out, though, there is nothing inherently harmful to consumers about such prioritization. There are also numerous benefits in platforms directly answering queries, even if it ends up directing users to platform-owned products or services.
there is good reason to believe that Google’s decision to favor its own content over that of other sites is procompetitive. Beyond determining and ensuring relevance, Google surely has the prerogative to vigorously compete and to decide how to design its products to keep up with a changing market. In this case, that means designing, developing, and offering its own content to partially displace the original “ten blue links” design of its search results page and offer its own answers to users’ queries in its stead.
Here, the antitrust case against Apple for prioritization is similarly flawed. For example, as noted in a recent article in the WSJ, users often use the App Store search in order to find apps they already have installed:
“Apple customers have a very strong connection to our products and many of them use search as a way to find and open their apps,” Apple said in a statement. “This customer usage is the reason Apple has strong rankings in search, and it’s the same reason Uber, Microsoft and so many others often have high rankings as well.”
If a substantial portion of searches within the App Store are for apps already on the iPhone, then showing the Apple app near the top of the search results could easily be consumer welfare-enhancing.
Apple is also theoretically leaving money on the table by prioritizing its (already pre-loaded) apps over third party apps. If its algorithm promotes its own apps over those that may earn it a 30% fee — additional revenue — the prioritization couldn’t plausibly be characterized as a “benefit” to Apple. Apple is ultimately in the business of selling hardware. Losing customers of the iPhone or iPad by prioritizing apps consumers want less would not be a winning business strategy.
Further, it stands to reason that those who use an iPhone may have a preference for Apple apps. Such consumers would be naturally better served by seeing Apple’s apps prioritized over third-party developer apps. And if consumers do not prefer Apple’s apps, rival apps are merely seconds of scrolling away.
Moreover, all of the above assumes that Apple is engaging in sufficiently pervasive discrimination through prioritzation to have a major impact on the app ecosystem. But substantial evidence exists that the universe of searches for which Apple’s algorithm prioritizes Apple apps is small. For instance, most searches are for branded apps already known by the searcher:
Keywords: how many are brands?
Top 500: 58.4%
Top 400: 60.75%
Top 300: 68.33%
Top 200: 80.5%
Top 100: 86%
Top 50: 90%
Top 25: 92%
Top 10: 100%
This is corroborated by data from the NYT’s own study, which suggests Apple prioritized its own apps first in only roughly 1% of the overall keywords queried:
Whatever the precise extent of increase in prioritization, it seems like any claims of harm are undermined by the reality that almost 99% of App Store results don’t list Apple apps first.
The fact is, very few keyword searches are even allegedly affected by prioritization. And the algorithm is often adjusting to searches for apps already pre-loaded on the device. Under these circumstances, it is very difficult to conclude consumers are being harmed by prioritization in search results of the App Store.
Entry
The issue of Apple building apps to compete with popular apps in its marketplace is similar to complaints about Amazon creating its own brands to compete with what is sold by third parties on its platform. For instance, as reported multiple times in the Washington Post:
Clue, a popular app that women use to track their periods, recently rocketed to the top of the App Store charts. But the app’s future is now in jeopardy as Apple incorporates period and fertility tracking features into its own free Health app, which comes preinstalled on every device. Clue makes money by selling subscriptions and services in its free app.
However, there is nothing inherently anticompetitive about retailers selling their own brands. If anything, entry into the market is normally procompetitive. As Randy Picker recently noted with respect to similar claims against Amazon:
The heart of this dynamic isn’t new. Sears started its catalogue business in 1888 and then started using the Craftsman and Kenmore brands as in-house brands in 1927. Sears was acquiring inventory from third parties and obviously knew exactly which ones were selling well and presumably made decisions about which markets to enter and which to stay out of based on that information. Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer, has a number of well-known private brands and firms negotiating with Walmart know full well that Walmart can enter their markets, subject of course to otherwise applicable restraints on entry such as intellectual property laws… I think that is possible to tease out advantages that a platform has regarding inventory experimentation. It can outsource some of those costs to third parties, though sophisticated third parties should understand where they can and cannot have a sustainable advantage given Amazon’s ability to move to build-or-bought first-party inventory. We have entire bodies of law— copyright, patent, trademark and more—that limit the ability of competitors to appropriate works, inventions and symbols. Those legal systems draw very carefully considered lines regarding permitted and forbidden uses. And antitrust law generally favors entry into markets and doesn’t look to create barriers that block firms, large or small, from entering new markets.
If anything, Apple is in an even better position than Amazon. Apple invests revenue in app development, not because the apps themselves generate revenue, but because it wants people to use the hardware, i.e. the iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches. The reason Apple created an App Store in the first place is because this allows Apple to make more money from selling devices. In order to promote security on those devices, Apple institutes rules for the App Store, but it ultimately decides whether to create its own apps and provide access to other apps based upon its desire to maximize the value of the device. If Apple chooses to create free apps in order to improve iOS for users and sell more hardware, it is not a harm to competition.
Apple’s ability to enter into popular app markets should not be constrained unless it can be shown that by giving consumers another choice, consumers are harmed. As noted above, most searches in the App Store are for branded apps to begin with. If consumers already know what they want in an app, it hardly seems harmful for Apple to offer — and promote — its own, additional version as well.
In the case of Clue, if Apple creates a free health app, it may hurt sales for Clue. But it doesn’t hurt consumers who want the functionality and would prefer to get it from Apple for free. This sort of product evolution is not harming competition, but enhancing it. And, it must be noted, Apple doesn’t exclude Clue from its devices. If, indeed, Clue offers a better product, or one that some users prefer, they remain able to find it and use it.
The so-called App Store “Tax”
The argument that Apple has an unfair competitive advantage over rival apps which have to pay commissions to Apple to be on the App Store (a “tax” or “surcharge”) has similarly produced no evidence of harm to consumers.
Apple invested a lot into building the iPhone and the App Store. This infrastructure has created an incrediblylucrativemarketplace for app developers to exploit. And, lest we forget a point fundamental to our legal system, Apple’s App Store is its property.
The WSJ and NYT stories give the impression that Apple uses its commissions on third party apps to reduce competition for its own apps. However, this is inconsistent with how Apple charges its commission.
For instance, Apple doesn’t charge commissions on free apps, which make up 84% of the App Store. Apple also doesn’t charge commissions for apps that are free to download but are supported by advertising — including hugely popular apps like Yelp, Buzzfeed, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook. Even apps which are “readers” where users purchase or subscribe to content outside the app but use the app to access that content are not subject to commissions, like Spotify, Netflix, Amazon Kindle, and Audible. Apps for “physical goods and services” — like Amazon, Airbnb, Lyft, Target, and Uber — are also free to download and are not subject to commissions. The class of apps which are subject to a 30% commission include:
paid apps (like many games),
free apps that then have in-app purchases (other games and services like Skype and TikTok),
and free apps with digital subscriptions (Pandora, Hulu, which have 30% commission first year and then 15% in subsequent years), and
cross-platform apps (Dropbox, Hulu, and Minecraft) which allow for digital goods and services to be purchased in-app and Apple collects commission on in-app sales, but not sales from other platforms.
Despite protestations to the contrary, these costs are hardly unreasonable: third party apps receive the benefit not only of being in Apple’s App Store (without which they wouldn’t have any opportunity to earn revenue from sales on Apple’s platform), but also of the features and other investments Apple continues to pour into its platform — investments that make the ecosystem better for consumers and app developers alike. There is enormous value to the platform Apple has invested in, and a great deal of it is willingly shared with developers and consumers. It does not make it anticompetitive to ask those who use the platform to pay for it.
In fact, these benefits are probably even more important for smaller developers rather than bigger ones who can invest in the necessary back end to reach consumers without the App Store, like Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon Kindle. For apps without brand reputation (and giant marketing budgets), the ability for consumers to trust that downloading the app will not lead to the installation of malware (as often occurs when downloading from the web) is surely essential to small developers’ ability to compete. The App Store offers this.
Despite the claims made in Spotify’s complaint against Apple, Apple doesn’t have a duty to deal with app developers. Indeed, Apple could theoretically fill the App Store with only apps that it developed itself, like Apple Music. Instead, Apple has opted for a platform business model, which entails the creation of a new outlet for others’ innovation and offerings. This is pro-consumer in that it created an entire marketplace that consumers probably didn’t even know they wanted — and certainly had no means to obtain — until it existed. Spotify, which out-competed iTunes to the point that Apple had to go back to the drawing board and create Apple Music, cannot realistically complain that Apple’s entry into music streaming is harmful to competition. Rather, it is precisely what vigorous competition looks like: the creation of more product innovation, lower prices, and arguably (at least for some) higher quality.
Interestingly, Spotify is not even subject to the App Store commission. Instead, Spotify offers a work-around to iPhone users to obtain its premium version without ads on iOS. What Spotify actually desires is the ability to sell premium subscriptions to Apple device users without paying anything above the de minimis up-front cost to Apple for the creation and maintenance of the App Store. It is unclear how many potential Spotify users are affected by the inability to directly buy the ad-free version since Spotify discontinued offering it within the App Store. But, whatever the potential harm to Spotify itself, there’s little reason to think consumers or competition bear any of it.
Conclusion
There is no evidence that Apple’s alleged “discrimination” against rival apps harms consumers. Indeed, the opposite would seem to be the case. The regulatory discrimination against successful tech platforms like Apple and the App Store is far more harmful to consumers.
When she rolled out her plan to break up Big Tech, Elizabeth Warren paid for ads (like the one shown above) claiming that “Facebook and Google account for 70% of all internet traffic.” This statistic has since been repeated in various forms by Rolling Stone, Vox, National Review, and Washingtonian. In my last post, I fact checked this claim and found it wanting.
Warren’s data
As supporting evidence, Warren cited a Newsweek article from 2017, which in turn cited a blog post from an open-source freelancer, who was aggregating data from a 2015 blog post published by Parse.ly, a web analytics company, which said: “Today, Facebook remains a top referring site to the publishers in Parse.ly’s network, claiming 39 percent of referral traffic versus Google’s share of 34 percent.” At the time, Parse.ly had “around 400 publisher domains” in its network. To put it lightly, this is not what it means to “account for” or “control” or “directly influence” 70 percent of all internet traffic, as Warren and others have claimed.
Internet traffic measured in bytes
In an effort to contextualize how extreme Warren’s claim was, in my last post I used a common measure of internet traffic — total volume in bytes — to show that Google and Facebook account for less than 20 percent of global internet traffic. Some Warren defenders have correctly pointed out that measuring internet traffic in bytes will weight the results toward data-heavy services, such as video streaming. It’s not obvious a priori, however, whether this would bias the results in favor of Facebook and Google or against them, given that users stream lots of video using those companies’ sites and apps (hello, YouTube).
Internet traffic measured by time spent by users
As I said in my post, there are multiple ways to measure total internet traffic, and no one of them is likely to offer a perfect measure. So, to get a fuller picture, we could also look at how users are spending their time on the internet. While there is no single source for global internet time use statistics, we can combine a few to reach an estimate (NB: this analysis includes time spent in apps as well as on the web).
According to the Global Digital report by Hootsuite and We Are Social, in 2018 there were 4.021 billion active internet users, and the worldwide average for time spent using the internet was 6 hours and 42 minutes per day. That means there were 1,616 billion internet user-minutes per day.
Data from Apptopia shows that, in the three months from May through July 2018, users spent 300 billion hours in Facebook-owned apps and 118 billion hours in Google-owned apps. In other words, all Facebook-owned apps consume, on average, 197 billion user-minutes per day and all Google-owned apps consume, on average, 78 billion user-minutes per day. And according to SimilarWeb data for the three months from June to August 2019, web users spent 11 billion user-minutes per day visiting Facebook domains (facebook.com, whatsapp.com, instagram.com, messenger.com) and 52 billion user-minutes per day visiting Google domains, including google.com (and all subdomains) and youtube.com.
If you add up all app and web user-minutes for Google and Facebook, the total is 338 billion user minutes per day. A staggering number. But as a share of all internet traffic (in this case measured in terms of time spent)? Google- and Facebook-owned sites and apps account for about 21 percent of user-minutes.
Internet traffic measured by “connections”
In my last post, I cited a Sandvine study that measured total internet traffic by volume of upstream and downstream bytes. The same report also includes numbers for what Sandvine calls “connections,” which is defined as “the number of conversations occurring for an application.” Sandvine notes that while “some applications use a single connection for all traffic, others use many connections to transfer data or video to the end user.” For example, a video stream on Netflix uses a single connection, while every item on a webpage, such as loading images, may require a distinct connection.
Cam Cullen, Sandvine’s VP of marketing, also implored readers to “never forget Google connections include YouTube, Search, and DoubleClick — all of which are very noisy applications and universally consumed,” which would bias this statistic toward inflating Google’s share. With these caveats in mind, Sandvine’s data shows that Google is responsible for 30 percent of these connections, while Facebook is responsible for under 8 percent of connections. Note that Netflix’s share is less than 1 percent, which implies this statistic is not biased toward data-heavy services. Again, the numbers for Google and Facebook are a far cry from what Warren and others are claiming.
I’m not sure whether either of these measures is preferable to what I offered in my original post, but each is at least a plausible measure of internet traffic — and all of them fall well short of Waren’s claimed 70 percent. What I do know is that the preferred metric offered by the people most critical of my post — external referrals to online publishers (content sites) — is decidedly not a plausible measure of internet traffic.
In defense of Warren, Jason Kint, the CEO of a trade association for digital content publishers, wrote, “I just checked actual benchmark data across our members (most publishers) and 67% of their external traffic comes through Google or Facebook.” Rand Fishkin cites his own analysis of data from Jumpshot showing that 66.0 percent of external referral visits were sent by Google and 5.1 percent were sent by Facebook.
In another response to my piece, former digital advertising executive, Dina Srinivasan, said, “[Percentage] of referrals is relevant because it is pointing out that two companies control a large [percentage] of business that comes through their door.”
In my opinion, equating “external referrals to publishers” with “internet traffic” is unacceptable for at least two reasons.
First, the internet is much broader than traditional content publishers — it encompasses everything from email and Yelp to TikTok, Amazon, and Netflix. The relevant market is consumer attention and, in that sense, every internet supplier is bidding for scarce time. In a recent investor letter, Netflixsaid, “We compete with (and lose to) ‘Fortnite’ more than HBO,” adding: “There are thousands of competitors in this highly fragmented market vying to entertain consumers and low barriers to entry for those great experiences.” Previously, CEO Reed Hastings had only half-jokingly said, “We’re competing with sleep on the margin.” In this debate over internet traffic, the opposing side fails to grasp the scope of the internet market. It is unsuprising, then, that the one metric that does best at capturing attention — time spent — is about the same as bytes.
Second, and perhaps more important, even if we limit our analysis to publisher traffic, the external referral statistic these critics cite completely (and conveniently?) omits direct and internal traffic — traffic that represents the majority of publisher traffic. In fact, according to Parse.ly’s most recent data, which now includes more than 3,000 “high-traffic sites,” only 35 percent of total traffic comes from search and social referrers (as the graph below shows). Of course, Google and Facebook drive the majority of search and social referrals. But given that most users visit webpages without being referred at all, Google and Facebook are responsible for less than a third of total traffic.
It is simply incorrect to say, as Srinivasan does, that external referrals offers a useful measurement of internet traffic because it captures a “large [percentage] of business that comes through [publishers’] door.” Well, “large” is relative, but the implication that these external referrals from Facebook and Google explain Warren’s 70%-of-internet-traffic claim is both factually incorrect and horribly misleading — especially in an antitrust context.
It is factually incorrect because, at most, Google and Facebook are responsible for a third of the traffic on these sites; it is misleading because if our concern is ensuring that users can reach content sites without passing through Google or Facebook, the evidence is clear that they can and do — at least twice as often as they follow links from Google or Facebook to do so.
Conclusion
As my colleague Gus Hurwitz said, Warren is making a very specific and very alarming claim:
There may be ‘softer’ versions of [Warren’s claim] that are reasonably correct (e.g., digital ad revenue, visibility into traffic). But for 99% of people hearing (and reporting on) these claims, they hear the hard version of the claim: Google and Facebook control 70% of what you do online. That claim is wrong, alarmist, misinformation, intended to foment fear, uncertainty, and doubt — to bootstrap the argument that ‘everything is terrible, worse, really!, and I’m here to save you.’ This is classic propaganda.
Google and Facebook do account for a 59 percent (and declining) share of US digital advertising. But that’s not what Warren said (nor would anyone try to claim with a straight face that “volume of advertising” was the same thing as “internet traffic”). And if our concern is with competition, it’s hard to look at the advertising market and conclude that it’s got a competition problem. Prices are falling like crazy (down 42 percent in the last decade), and volume is only increasing. If you add in offline advertising (which, whatever you think about market definition here, certainly competes with online advertising at the very least on some dimensions) Google and Facebook are responsible for only about 32 percent.
In her comments criticizing my article, Dina Srinivasan mentioned another of these “softer” versions:
Also, each time a publisher page loads, what [percentage] then queries Google or Facebook servers during the page loads? About 98+% of every page load. That stat is not even in Warren or your analysis. That is 1000% relevant.
It’s true that Google and Facebook have visibility into a great deal of all internet traffic (beyond their own) through a variety of products and services: browsers, content delivery networks (CDNs), web beacons, cloud computing, VPNs, data brokers, single sign-on (SSO), and web analytics services. But seeing internet traffic is not the same thing as “account[ing] for” — or controlling or even directly influencing — internet traffic. The first is a very different claim than the latter, and one with considerably more attenuated competitive relevance (if any). It certainly wouldn’t be a sufficient basis for advocating that Google and Facebook be broken up — which is probably why, although arguably accurate, it’s not the statistic upon which Warren based her proposal to do so.
In the Federal Trade Commission’s recent hearings on competition policy in the 21st century, Georgetown professor Steven Salop urged greater scrutiny of vertical mergers. He argued that regulators should be skeptical of the claim that vertical integration tends to produce efficiencies that can enhance consumer welfare. In his presentation to the FTC, Professor Salop provided what he viewed as exceptions to this long-held theory.
Also, vertical merger efficiencies are not inevitable. I mean, vertical integration is common, but so is vertical non-integration. There is an awful lot of companies that are not vertically integrated. And we have lots of examples in which vertical integration has failed. Pepsi’s acquisition of KFC and Pizza Hut; you know, of course Coca-Cola has not merged with McDonald’s . . . .
Aside from the logical fallacy of cherry picking examples (he also includes Betamax/VHS and the split up of Alcoa and Arconic, as well as “integration and disintegration” “in cable”), Professor Salop misses the fact that PepsiCo’s 20 year venture into restaurants had very little to do with vertical integration.
Popular folklore says PepsiCo got into fast food because it was looking for a way to lock up sales of its fountain sodas. Soda is considered one of the highest margin products sold by restaurants. Vertical integration by a soda manufacturer into restaurants would eliminate double marginalization with the vertically integrated firm reaping most of the gains. The folklore fits nicely with economic theory. But, the facts may not fit the theory.
PepsiCo acquired Pizza Hut in 1977, Taco Bell in 1978, and Kentucky Fried Chicken in 1986. Prior to PepsiCo’s purchase, KFC had been owned by spirits company Heublein and conglomerate RJR Nabisco. This was the period of conglomerates—Pillsbury owned Burger King and General Foods owned Burger Chef (or maybe they were vertically integrated into bun distribution).
In the early 1990s Pepsi also bought California Pizza Kitchen, Chevys Fresh Mex, and D’Angelo Grilled Sandwiches.
In 1997, PepsiCo exited the restaurant business. It spun off Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC to Tricon Global Restaurants, which would later be renamed Yum! Brands. CPK and Chevy’s were purchased by private equity investors. D’Angelo was sold to Papa Gino’s Holdings, a restaurant chain. Since then, both Chevy’s and Papa Gino’s have filed for bankruptcy and Chevy’s has had some major shake-ups.
Professor Salop’s story focuses on the spin-off as an example of the failure of vertical mergers. But there is also a story of success. PepsiCo was in the restaurant business for two decades. More importantly, it continued its restaurant acquisitions over time. If PepsiCo’s restaurants strategy was a failure, it seems odd that the company would continue acquisitions into the early 1990s.
It’s easy, and largely correct, to conclude that PepsiCo’s restaurant acquisitions involved some degree of vertical integration, with upstream PepsiCo selling beverages to downstream restaurants. At the time PepsiCo bought Kentucky Fried Chicken, the New York Times reported KFC was Coke’s second-largest fountain account, behind McDonald’s.
But, what if vertical efficiencies were not the primary reason for the acquisitions?
Growth in U.S. carbonated beverage sales began slowing in the 1970s. It was also the “decade of the fast-food business.” From 1971 to 1977, Pizza Hut’s profits grew an average of 40% per year. Colonel Sanders sold his ownership in KFC for $2 million in 1964. Seven years later, the company was sold to Heublein for $280 million; PepsiCo paid $850 million in 1986.
Although KFC was Coke’s second largest customer at the time, about 20% of KFC’s stores served Pepsi products, “PepsiCo stressed that the major reason for the acquisition was to expand its restaurant business, which last year accounted for 26 percent of its revenues of $8.1 billion,” according to the New York Times.
Viewed in this light, portfolio diversification goes a much longer way toward explaining PepsiCo’s restaurant purchases than hoped-for vertical efficiencies. In 1997, former PepsiCo chairman Roger Enrico explained to investment analysts that the company entered the restaurant business in the first place, “because it didn’t see future growth in its soft drink and snack” businesses and thought diversification into restaurants would provide expansion opportunities.
Prior to its Pizza Hut and Taco Bell acquisitions, PepsiCo owned companies as diverse as Frito-Lay, North American Van Lines, Wilson Sporting Goods, and Rheingold Brewery. This further supports a diversification theory rather than a vertical integration theory of PepsiCo’s restaurant purchases.
The mid 1990s and early 2000s were tough times for restaurants. Consumers were demanding healthier foods and fast foods were considered the worst of the worst. This was when Kentucky Fried Chicken rebranded as KFC. Debt hangovers from the leveraged buyout era added financial pressure. Many restaurant groups were filing for bankruptcy and competition intensified among fast food companies. PepsiCo’s restaurants could not cover their cost of capital, and what was once a profitable diversification strategy became a financial albatross, so the restaurants were spun off.
Thus, it seems more reasonable to conclude PepsiCo’s exit from restaurants was driven more by market exigencies than by a failure to achieve vertical efficiencies. While the folklore of locking up distribution channels to eliminate double marginalization fits nicely with theory, the facts suggest a more mundane model of a firm scrambling to deliver shareholder wealth through diversification in the face of changing competition.
These days, lacking a coherent legal theory presents no challenge to the would-be antitrust crusader. In a previous post, we noted how Shaoul Sussman’s predatory pricing claims against Amazon lacked a serious legal foundation. Sussman has returned with a new post, trying to build out his fledgling theory, but fares little better under even casual scrutiny.
According to Sussman, Amazon’s allegedly anticompetitive
conduct not only cemented its role as the primary destination for consumers that shop online but also helped it solidify its power over brands.
Further, the company
was willing to go to great lengths to ensure brand availability and inventory, including turning to the grey market, recruiting unauthorized sellers, and even selling diverted goods and counterfeits to its customers.
Sussman is trying to make out a fairly convoluted predatory pricing case, but once again without ever truly connecting the dots in a way that develops a cognizable antitrust claim. According to Sussman:
Amazon sold products as a first-party to consumers on its platform at below average variable cost and [] Amazon recently began to recoup its losses by shifting the bulk of the transactions that occur on the website to its marketplace, where millions of third-party sellers pay hefty fees that enable Amazon to take a deep cut of every transaction.
Sussman now bases this claim on an allegation that Amazon relied on “grey market” sellers on its platform, the presence of which forces legitimate brands onto the Amazon Marketplace. Moreover, Sussman claims that — somehow — these brands coming on board on Amazon’s terms forces those brands raise prices elsewhere, and the net effect of this process at scale is that prices across the economy have risen.
As we detail below, Sussman’s chimerical argument depends on conflating unrelated concepts and relies on non-public anecdotal accounts to piece together an argument that, even if you squint at it, doesn’t make out a viable theory of harm.
Conflating legal reselling and illegal counterfeit selling as the “grey market”
The biggest problem with Sussman’s new theory is that he conflates pro-consumer unauthorized reselling and anti-consumer illegal counterfeiting, erroneously labeling both the “grey market”:
Amazon had an ace up its sleeve. My sources indicate that the company deliberately turned to and empowered the “grey market“ — where both genuine, authentic goods and knockoffs are purchased and resold outside of brands’ intended distribution pipes — to dominate certain brands.
By definition, grey market goods are — as the link provided by Sussman states — “goods sold outside the authorized distribution channels by entities which may have no relationship with the producer of the goods.” Yet Sussman suggests this also encompasses counterfeit goods. This conflation is no minor problem for his argument. In general, the grey market is legal and beneficial for consumers. Brands such as Nike may try to limit the distribution of their products to channels the company controls, but they cannot legally prevent third parties from purchasing Nike products and reselling them on Amazon (or anywhere else).
This legal activity can increase consumer choice and can lead to lower prices, even though Sussman’s framing omits these key possibilities:
In the course of my conversations with former Amazon employees, some reported that Amazon actively sought out and recruited unauthorized sellers as both third-party sellers and first-party suppliers. Being unauthorized, these sellers were not bound by the brands’ policies and therefore outside the scope of their supervision.
In other words, Amazon actively courted third-party sellers who could bring legitimate goods, priced competitively, onto its platform. Perhaps this gives Amazon “leverage” over brands that would otherwise like to control the activities of legal resellers, but it’s exceedingly strange to try to frame this as nefarious or anticompetitive behavior.
Of course, we shouldn’t ignore the fact that there are also potential consumer gains when Amazon tries to restrict grey market activity by partnering with brands. But it is up to Amazon and the brands to determine through a contracting process when it makes the most sense to partner and control the grey market, or when consumers are better served by allowing unauthorized resellers. The point is: there is simply no reason to assume that either of these approaches is inherently problematic.
Yet, even when Amazon tries to restrict its platform to authorized resellers, it exposes itself to a whole different set of complaints. In 2018, the company made a deal with Apple to bring the iPhone maker onto its marketplace platform. In exchange for Apple selling its products directly on Amazon, the latter agreed to remove unauthorized Apple resellers from the platform. Sussman portrays this as a welcome development in line with the policy changes he recommends.
But news reports last month indicate the FTC is reviewing this deal for potential antitrust violations. One is reminded of Ronald Coase’s famous lament that he “had gotten tired of antitrust because when the prices went up the judges said it was monopoly, when the prices went down they said it was predatory pricing, and when they stayed the same they said it was tacit collusion.” It seems the same is true for Amazon and its relationship with the grey market.
Amazon’s incentive to remove counterfeits
What is illegal — and explicitly against Amazon’s marketplace rules — is selling counterfeit goods. Counterfeit goods destroy consumer trust in the Amazon ecosystem, which is why the company actively polices its listings for abuses. And as Sussman himself notes, when there is an illegal counterfeit listing, “Brands can then file a trademark infringement lawsuit against the unauthorized seller in order to force Amazon to suspend it.”
Sussman’s attempt to hang counterfeiting problems around Amazon’s neck belies the actual truth about counterfeiting: probably the most cost-effective way to stop counterfeiting is simply to prohibit all third-party sellers. Yet, a serious cost-benefit analysis of Amazon’s platforms could hardly support such an action (and would harm the small sellers that antitrust activists seem most concerned about).
But, more to the point, if Amazon’s strategy is to encourage piracy, it’s doing a terrible job. It engages in litigation against known pirates, and earlier this year it rolled out a suite of tools (called Project Zero) meant to help brand owners report and remove known counterfeits. As part of this program, according to Amazon, “brands provide key data points about themselves (e.g., trademarks, logos, etc.) and we scan over 5 billion daily listing update attempts, looking for suspected counterfeits.” And when a brand identifies a counterfeit listing, they can remove it using a self-service tool (without needing approval from Amazon).
Any large platform that tries to make it easy for independent retailers to reach customers is going to run into a counterfeit problem eventually. In his rush to discover some theory of predatory pricing to stick on Amazon, Sussman ignores the tradeoffs implicit in running a large platform that essentially democratizes retail:
Indeed, the democratizing effect of online platforms (and of technology writ large) should not be underestimated. While many are quick to disparage Amazon’s effect on local communities, these arguments fail to recognize that by reducing the costs associated with physical distance between sellers and consumers, e-commerce enables even the smallest merchant on Main Street, and the entrepreneur in her garage, to compete in the global marketplace.
In short, Amazon Marketplace is designed to make it as easy as possible for anyone to sell their products to Amazon customers. As the WSJ reported:
Counterfeiters, though, have been able to exploit Amazon’s drive to increase the site’s selection and offer lower prices. The company has made the process to list products on its website simple—sellers can register with little more than a business name, email and address, phone number, credit card, ID and bank account—but that also has allowed impostors to create ersatz versions of hot-selling items, according to small brands and seller consultants.
The existence of counterfeits is a direct result of policies designed to lower prices and increase consumer choice. Thus, we would expect some number of counterfeits to exist as a result of running a relatively open platform. The question is not whether counterfeits exist, but — at least in terms of Sussman’s attempt to use antitrust law — whether there is any reason to think that Amazon’s conduct with respect to counterfeits is actually anticompetitive. But, even if we assume for the moment that there is some plausible way to draw a competition claim out of the existence of counterfeit goods on the platform, his theory still falls apart.
There is both theoretical and empiricalevidence for why Amazon is likely not engaged in the conduct Sussman describes. As a platform owner involved in a repeated game with customers, sellers, and developers, Amazon has an incentive to increase trust within the ecosystem. Counterfeit goods directly destroy that trust and likely decrease sales in the long run. If individuals can’t depend on the quality of goods on Amazon, they can easily defect to Walmart, eBay, or any number of smaller independent sellers. That’s why Amazon enters into agreements with companies like Apple to ensure there are only legitimate products offered. That’s also why Amazon actively sues counterfeiters in partnership with its sellers and brands, and also why Project Zero is a priority for the company.
Sussman relies on private, anecdotal claims while engaging in speculation that is entirely unsupported by public data
Much of Sussman’s evidence is “[b]ased on conversations [he] held with former employees, sellers, and brands following the publication of [his] paper”, which — to put it mildly — makes it difficult for anyone to take seriously, let alone address head on. Here’s one example:
One third-party seller, who asked to remain anonymous, was willing to turn over his books for inspection in order to illustrate the magnitude of the increase in consumer prices. Together, we analyzed a single product, of which tens of thousands of units have been sold since 2015. The minimum advertised price for this single product, at any and all outlets, has increased more than 30 percent in the past four years. Despite this fact, this seller’s margins on this product are tighter than ever due to Amazon’s fee increases.
Needless to say, sales data showing the minimum advertised price for a single product “has increased more than 30 percent in the past four years” is not sufficient to prove, well, anything. At minimum, showing an increase in prices above costs would require data from a large and representative sample of sellers. All we have to go on from the article is a vague anecdote representing — maybe — one data point.
Not only is Sussman’s own data impossible to evaluate, but he bases his allegations on speculation that is demonstrably false. For instance, he asserts that Amazon used its leverage over brands in a way that caused retail prices to rise throughout the economy. But his starting point assumption is flatly contradicted by reality:
To remedy this, Amazon once again exploited brands’ MAP policies. As mentioned, MAP policies effectively dictate the minimum advertised price of a given product across the entire retail industry. Traditionally, this meant that the price of a typical product in a brick and mortar store would be lower than the price online, where consumers are charged an additional shipping fee at checkout.
Sussman presents no evidence for the claim that “the price of a typical product in a brick and mortar store would be lower than the price online.” The widespread phenomenon of showrooming — when a customer examines a product at a brick-and-mortar store but then buys it for a lower price online — belies the notion that prices are higher online. One recent study by Nielsen found that “nearly 75% of grocery shoppers have used a physical store to ‘showroom’ before purchasing online.”
In fact, the company’s downward pressure on prices is so large that researchers now speculate that Amazon and other internet retailers are partially responsible for the low and stagnant inflation in the US over the last decade (dubbing this the “Amazon effect”). It is also curious that Sussman cites shipping fees as the reason prices are higher online while ignoring all the overhead costs of running a brick-and-mortar store which online retailers don’t incur. The assumption that prices are lower in brick-and-mortar stores doesn’t pass the laugh test.
Conclusion
Sussman can keep trying to tell a predatory pricing story about Amazon, but the more convoluted his theories get — and the less based in empirical reality they are — the less convincing they become. There is a predatory pricing law on the books, but it’s hard to bring a case because, as it turns out, it’s actually really hard to profitably operate as a predatory pricer. Speculating over complicated new theories might be entertaining, but it would be dangerous and irresponsible if these sorts of poorly supported theories were incorporated into public policy.
Ursula von der Leyen has just announced the composition of the next European Commission. For tech firms, the headline is that Margrethe Vestager will not only retain her job as the head of DG Competition, she will also oversee the EU’s entire digital markets policy in her new role as Vice-President in charge of digital policy. Her promotion within the Commission as well as her track record at DG Competition both suggest that the digital economy will continue to be the fulcrum of European competition and regulatory intervention for the next five years.
The regulation (or not) of digital markets is an extremely important topic. Not only do we spend vast swaths of both our professional and personal lives online, but firms operating in digital markets will likely employ an ever-increasing share of the labor force in the near future.
Likely recognizing the growing importance of the digital economy, the previous EU Commission intervened heavily in the digital sphere over the past five years. This resulted in a series of high-profile regulations (including the GDPR, the platform-to-business regulation, and the reform of EU copyright) and competition law decisions (most notably the Google cases).
Lauded by supporters of the administrative state, these interventions have drawn flak from numerous corners. This includes foreign politicians (especially Americans) who see in these measures an attempt to protect the EU’s tech industry from its foreign rivals, as well as free market enthusiasts who argue that the old continent has moved further in the direction of digital paternalism.
Vestager’s increased role within the new Commission, the EU’s heavy regulation of digital markets over the past five years, and early pronouncements from Ursula von der Leyen all suggest that the EU is in for five more years of significant government intervention in the digital sphere.
Vestager the slayer of Big Tech
During her five years as Commissioner for competition, Margrethe Vestager has repeatedly been called the most powerful woman in Brussels (see here and here), and it is easy to see why. Yielding the heavy hammer of European competition and state aid enforcement, she has relentlessly attacked the world’s largest firms, especially American’s so-called “Tech Giants”.
The record-breaking fines imposed on Google were probably her most high-profile victory. When Vestager entered office, in 2014, the EU’s case against Google had all but stalled. The Commission and Google had spent the best part of four years haggling over a potential remedy that was ultimately thrown out. Grabbing the bull by the horns, Margrethe Vestager made the case her own.
Five years, three infringement decisions, and €8.25 billion euros later, Google probably wishes it had managed to keep the 2014 settlement alive. While Vestager’s supporters claim that justice was served, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, among others, branded her a protectionist (although, as Geoffrey Manne and I have noted, the evidence for this is decidedly mixed). Critics also argued that her decisions would harm innovation and penalize consumers (see here and here). Regardless, the case propelled Vestager into the public eye. It turned her into one of the most important political forces in Brussels. Cynics might even suggest that this was her plan all along.
But Google is not the only tech firm to have squared off with Vestager. Under her watch, Qualcomm was slapped with a total of €1.239 Billion in fines. The Commission also opened an investigation into Amazon’s operation of its online marketplace. If previous cases are anything to go by, the probe will most probably end with a headline-grabbing fine. The Commission even launched a probe into Facebook’s planned Libra cryptocurrency, even though it has yet to be launched, and recent talk suggests it may never be. Finally, in the area of state aid enforcement, the Commission ordered Ireland to recover €13 Billion in allegedly undue tax benefits from Apple.
Margrethe Vestager also initiated a large-scale consultation on competition in the digital economy. The ensuing report concluded that the answer was more competition enforcement. Its findings will likely be cited by the Commission as further justification to ramp up its already significant competition investigations in the digital sphere.
Outside of the tech sector, Vestager has shown that she is not afraid to adopt controversial decisions. Blocking the proposed merger between Siemens and Alstom notably drew the ire of Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, as the deal would have created a European champion in the rail industry (a key political demand in Germany and France).
These numerous interventions all but guarantee that Vestager will not be pushing for light touch regulation in her new role as Vice-President in charge of digital policy. Vestager is also unlikely to put a halt to some of the “Big Tech” investigations that she herself launched during her previous spell at DG Competition. Finally, given her evident political capital in Brussels, it’s a safe bet that she will be given significant leeway to push forward landmark initiatives of her choosing.
Vestager the prophet
Beneath these attempts to rein-in “Big Tech” lies a deeper agenda that is symptomatic of the EU’s current zeitgeist. Over the past couple of years, the EU has been steadily blazing a trail in digital market regulation (although much less so in digital market entrepreneurship and innovation). Underlying this push is a worldview that sees consumers and small startups as the uninformed victims of gigantic tech firms. True to form, the EU’s solution to this problem is more regulation and government intervention. This is unlikely to change given the Commission’s new (old) leadership.
If digital paternalism is the dogma, then Margrethe Vestager is its prophet. As Thibault Schrepel has shown, her speeches routinely call for digital firms to act “fairly”, and for policymakers to curb their “power”. According to her, it is our democracy that is at stake. In her own words, “you can’t sensibly talk about democracy today, without appreciating the enormous power of digital technology”. And yet, if history tells us one thing, it is that heavy-handed government intervention is anathema to liberal democracy.
The Commission’s Google decisions neatly illustrate this worldview. For instance, in Google Shopping, the Commission concluded that Google was coercing consumers into using its own services, to the detriment of competition. But the Google Shopping decision focused entirely on competitors, and offered no evidence showing actual harm to consumers (see here). Could it be that users choose Google’s products because they actually prefer them? Rightly or wrongly, the Commission went to great lengths to dismiss evidence that arguably pointed in this direction (see here, §506-538).
Other European forays into the digital space are similarly paternalistic. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) assumes that consumers are ill-equipped to decide what personal information they share with online platforms. Queue a deluge of time-consuming consent forms and cookie-related pop-ups. The jury is still out on whether the GDPR has improved users’ privacy. But it has been extremely costly for businesses — American S&P 500 companies and UK FTSE 350 companies alone spent an estimated total of $9 billion to comply with the GDPR — and has at least temporarily slowed venture capital investment in Europe.
Likewise, the recently adopted Regulation on platform-to-business relations operates under the assumption that small firms routinely fall prey to powerful digital platforms:
Given that increasing dependence, the providers of those services [i.e. digital platforms] often have superior bargaining power, which enables them to, in effect, behave unilaterally in a way that can be unfair and that can be harmful to the legitimate interests of their businesses users and, indirectly, also of consumers in the Union. For instance, they might unilaterally impose on business users practices which grossly deviate from good commercial conduct, or are contrary to good faith and fair dealing.
But the platform-to-business Regulation conveniently overlooks the fact that economic opportunism is a two-way street. Small startups are equally capable of behaving in ways that greatly harm the reputation and profitability of much larger platforms. The Cambridge Analytica leak springs to mind. And what’s “unfair” to one small business may offer massive benefits to other businesses and consumers.
Make what you will about the underlying merits of these individual policies, we should at least recognize that they are part of a greater whole, where Brussels is regulating ever greater aspects of our online lives — and not clearly for the benefit of consumers.
With Margrethe Vestager now overseeing even more of these regulatory initiatives, readers should expect more of the same. The Mission Letter she received from Ursula von der Leyen is particularly enlightening in that respect:
I want you to coordinate the work on upgrading our liability and safety rules for digital platforms, services and products as part of a new Digital Services Act….
I want you to focus on strengthening competition enforcement in all sectors.
A hard rain’s a gonna fall… on Big Tech
Today’s announcements all but confirm that the EU will stay its current course in digital markets. This is unfortunate.
Digital firms currently provide consumers with tremendous benefits at no direct charge. A recent study shows that median users would need to be paid €15,875 to give up search engines for a year. They would also require €536 in order to forgo WhatsApp for a month, €97 for Facebook, and €59 to drop digital maps for the same duration.
By continuing to heap ever more regulations on successful firms, the EU risks killing the goose that laid the golden egg. This is not just a theoretical possibility. The EU’s policies have already put technology firms under huge stress, and it is not clear that this has always been outweighed by benefits to consumers. The GDPR has notably caused numerous foreign firms to stop offering their services in Europe. And the EU’s Google decisions have forced it to start charging manufacturers for some of its apps. Are these really victories for European consumers?
It is also worth asking why there are so few European leaders in the digital economy. Not so long ago, European firms such as Nokia and Ericsson were at the forefront of the digital revolution. Today, with the possible exception of Spotify, the EU has fallen further down the global pecking order in the digital economy.
The EU knows this, and plans to invest €100 Billion in order to boost European tech startups. But these sums will be all but wasted if excessive regulation threatens the long-term competitiveness of European startups.
So if more of the same government intervention isn’t the answer, then what is? Recognizing that consumers have agency and are responsible for their own decisions might be a start. If you don’t like Facebook, close your account. Want a search engine that protects your privacy? Try DuckDuckGo. If YouTube and Spotify’s suggestions don’t appeal to you, create your own playlists and turn off the autoplay functions. The digital world has given us more choice than we could ever have dreamt of; but this comes with responsibility. Both Margrethe Vestager and the European institutions have often seemed oblivious to this reality.
If the EU wants to turn itself into a digital economy powerhouse, it will have to switch towards light-touch regulation that allows firms to experiment with disruptive services, flexible employment options, and novel monetization strategies. But getting there requires a fundamental rethink — one that the EU’s previous leadership refused to contemplate. Margrethe Vestager’s dual role within the next Commission suggests that change isn’t coming any time soon.
[This post is the seventh in an ongoing symposium on “Should We Break Up Big Tech?” that features analysis and opinion from various perspectives.]
[This post is authored by Alec Stapp, Research Fellow at the International Center for Law & Economics]
Should we break up Microsoft?
In all the talk of breaking up “Big Tech,” no one seems to mention the biggest tech company of them all. Microsoft’s market cap is currently higher than those of Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook. If big is bad, then, at the moment, Microsoft is the worst.
Apart from size, antitrust activists also claim that the structure and behavior of the Big Four — Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon — is why they deserve to be broken up. But they never include Microsoft, which is curious given that most of their critiques also apply to the largest tech giant:
Microsoft is big (current market cap exceeds $1 trillion)
Microsoft is dominant in narrowly-defined markets (e.g., desktop operating systems)
Microsoft is simultaneously operating and competing on a platform (i.e., the Microsoft Store)
Microsoft is a conglomerate capable of leveraging dominance from one market into another (e.g., Windows, Office 365, Azure)
Microsoft has its own “kill zone” for startups (196 acquisitions since 1994)
Microsoft operates a search engine that preferences its own content over third-party content (i.e., Bing)
Microsoft operates a platform that moderates user-generated content (i.e., LinkedIn)
To be clear, this is not to say that an antitrust case against Microsoft is as strong as the case against the others. Rather, it is to say that the cases against the Big Four on these dimensions are as weak as the case against Microsoft, as I will show below.
Big is bad
Tim Wu published a book last year arguing for more vigorous antitrust enforcement — including against Big Tech — called “The Curse of Bigness.” As you can tell by the title, he argues, in essence, for a return to the bygone era of “big is bad” presumptions. In his book, Wu mentions “Microsoft” 29 times, but only in the context of its 1990s antitrust case. On the other hand, Wu has explicitly called for antitrust investigations of Amazon, Facebook, and Google. It’s unclear why big should be considered bad when it comes to the latter group but not when it comes to Microsoft. Maybe bigness isn’t actually a curse, after all.
As the saying goes in antitrust, “Big is not bad; big behaving badly is bad.” This aphorism arose to counter erroneous reasoning during the era of structure-conduct-performance when big was presumed to mean bad. Thanks to an improved theoretical and empirical understanding of the nature of the competitive process, there is now a consensus that firms can grow large either via superior efficiency or by engaging in anticompetitive behavior. Size alone does not tell us how a firm grew big — so it is not a relevant metric.
Dominance in narrowly-defined markets
Critics of Google say it has a monopoly on search and critics of Facebook say it has a monopoly on social networking. Microsoft is similarly dominant in at least a few narrowly-defined markets, including desktop operating systems (Windows has a 78% market share globally):
Microsoft is also dominant in the “professional networking platform” market after its acquisition of LinkedIn in 2016. And the legacy tech giant is still the clear leader in the “paid productivity software” market. (Microsoft’s Office 365 revenue is roughly 10x Google’s G Suite revenue).
The problem here is obvious. These are overly-narrow market definitions for conducting an antitrust analysis. Is it true that Facebook’s platforms are the only service that can connect you with your friends? Should we really restrict the productivity market to “paid”-only options (as the EU similarly did in its Android decision) when there are so many free options available? These questions are laughable. Proper market definition requires considering whether a hypothetical monopolist could profitably impose a small but significant and non-transitory increase in price (SSNIP). If not (which is likely the case in the narrow markets above), then we should employ a broader market definition in each case.
Simultaneously operating and competing on a platform
Elizabeth Warren likes to say that if you own a platform, then you shouldn’t both be an umpire and have a team in the game. Let’s put aside the problems with that flawed analogy for now. What she means is that you shouldn’t both run the platform and sell products, services, or apps on that platform (because it’s inherently unfair to the other sellers).
Warren’s solution to this “problem” would be to create a regulated class of businesses called “platform utilities” which are “companies with an annual global revenue of $25 billion or more and that offer to the public an online marketplace, an exchange, or a platform for connecting third parties.” Microsoft’s revenue last quarter was $32.5 billion, so it easily meets the first threshold. And Windows obviously qualifies as “a platform for connecting third parties.”
Just as in mobile operating systems, desktop operating systems are compatible with third-party applications. These third-party apps can be free (e.g., iTunes) or paid (e.g., Adobe Photoshop). Of course, Microsoft also makes apps for Windows (e.g., Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc.). But the more you think about the technical details, the blurrier the line between the operating system and applications becomes. Is the browser an add-on to the OS or a part of it (as Microsoft Edge appears to be)? The most deeply-embedded applications in an OS are simply called “features.”
Even though Warren hasn’t explicitly mentioned that her plan would cover Microsoft, it almost certainly would. Previously, she left Apple out of the Medium post announcing her policy, only to later tell a journalist that the iPhone maker would also be prohibited from producing its own apps. But what Warren fails to include in her announcement that she would break up Apple is that trying to police the line between a first-party platform and third-party applications would be a nightmare for companies and regulators, likely leading to less innovation and higher prices for consumers (as they attempt to rebuild their previous bundles).
Leveraging dominance from one market into another
The core critique in Lina Khan’s “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” is that the very structure of Amazon itself is what leads to its anticompetitive behavior. Khan argues (in spite of the data) that Amazon uses profits in some lines of business to subsidize predatory pricing in other lines of businesses. Furthermore, she claims that Amazon uses data from its Amazon Web Services unit to spy on competitors and snuff them out before they become a threat.
Of course, this is similar to the theory of harm in Microsoft’s 1990s antitrust case, that the desktop giant was leveraging its monopoly from the operating system market into the browser market. Why don’t we hear the same concern today about Microsoft? Like both Amazon and Google, you could uncharitably describe Microsoft as extending its tentacles into as many sectors of the economy as possible. Here are some of the markets in which Microsoft competes (and note how the Big Four also compete in many of these same markets):
What these potential antitrust harms leave out are the clear consumer benefits from bundling and vertical integration. Microsoft’s relationships with customers in one market might make it the most efficient vendor in related — but separate — markets. It is unsurprising, for example, that Windows customers would also frequently be Office customers. Furthermore, the zero marginal cost nature of software makes it an ideal product for bundling, which redounds to the benefit of consumers.
The “kill zone” for startups
In a recent article for The New York Times, Tim Wu and Stuart A. Thompson criticize Facebook and Google for the number of acquisitions they have made. They point out that “Google has acquired at least 270 companies over nearly two decades” and “Facebook has acquired at least 92 companies since 2007”, arguing that allowing such a large number of acquisitions to occur is conclusive evidence of regulatory failure.
Microsoft has made 196 acquisitions since 1994, but they receive no mention in the NYT article (or in most of the discussion around supposed “kill zones”). But the acquisitions by Microsoft or Facebook or Google are, in general, not problematic. They provide a crucial channel for liquidity in the venture capital and startup communities (the other channel being IPOs). According to the latest data from Orrick and Crunchbase, between 2010 and 2018, there were 21,844 acquisitions of tech startups for a total deal value of $1.193 trillion.
By comparison, according to data compiled by Jay R. Ritter, a professor at the University of Florida, there were 331 tech IPOs for a total market capitalization of $649.6 billion over the same period. Making it harder for a startup to be acquired would not result in more venture capital investment (and therefore not in more IPOs), according to recent research by Gordon M. Phillips and Alexei Zhdanov. The researchers show that “the passage of a pro-takeover law in a country is associated with more subsequent VC deals in that country, while the enactment of a business combination antitakeover law in the U.S. has a negative effect on subsequent VC investment.”
As investor and serial entrepreneur Leonard Speiser said recently, “If the DOJ starts going after tech companies for making acquisitions, venture investors will be much less likely to invest in new startups, thereby reducing competition in a far more harmful way.”
Search engine bias
Google is often accused of biasing its search results to favor its own products and services. The argument goes that if we broke them up, a thousand search engines would bloom and competition among them would lead to less-biased search results. While it is a very difficult — if not impossible — empirical question to determine what a “neutral” search engine would return, one attempt by Josh Wright found that “own-content bias is actually an infrequent phenomenon, and Google references its own content more favorably than other search engines far less frequently than does Bing.”
The report goes on to note that “Google references own content in its first results position when no other engine does in just 6.7% of queries; Bing does so over twice as often (14.3%).” Arguably, users of a particular search engine might be more interested in seeing content from that company because they have a preexisting relationship. But regardless of how we interpret these results, it’s clear this not a frequent phenomenon.
So why is Microsoft being left out of the antitrust debate now?
One potential reason why Google, Facebook, and Amazon have been singled out for criticism of practices that seem common in the tech industry (and are often pro-consumer) may be due to the prevailing business model in the journalism industry. Google and Facebook are by far the largest competitors in the digital advertising market, and Amazon is expected to be the third-largest player by next year, according to eMarketer. As Ramsi Woodcock pointed out, news publications are also competing for advertising dollars, the type of conflict of interest that usually would warrant disclosure if, say, a journalist held stock in a company they were covering.
Or perhaps Microsoft has successfully avoided receiving the same level of antitrust scrutiny as the Big Four because it is neither primarily consumer-facing like Apple or Amazon nor does it operate a platform with a significant amount of political speech via user-generated content (UGC) like Facebook or Google (YouTube). Yes, Microsoft moderates content on LinkedIn, but the public does not get outraged when deplatforming merely prevents someone from spamming their colleagues with requests “to add you to my professional network.”
Microsoft’s core areas are in the enterprise market, which allows it to sidestep the current debates about the supposed censorship of conservatives or unfair platform competition. To be clear, consumer-facing companies or platforms with user-generated content do not uniquely merit antitrust scrutiny. On the contrary, the benefits to consumers from these platforms are manifest. If this theory about why Microsoft has escaped scrutiny is correct, it means the public discussion thus far about Big Tech and antitrust has been driven by perception, not substance.
[This post is the sixth in an ongoing symposium on “Should We Break Up Big Tech?” that features analysis and opinion from various perspectives.]
[This post is authored by Thibault Schrepel, Faculty Associate at the Berkman Center at Harvard University and Assistant Professor in European Economic Law at Utrecht University School of Law.]
The pretense of ignorance
Over the last few years, I have published a series of antitrust conversations with Nobel laureates in economics. I have discussed big tech dominance with most of them, and although they have different perspectives, all of them agreed on one thing: they do not know what the effect of breaking up big tech would be. In fact, I have never spoken with any economist who was able to show me convincing empirical evidence that breaking up big tech would on net be good for consumers. The same goes for political scientists; I have never read any article that, taking everything into consideration, proves empirically that breaking up tech companies would be good for protecting democracies, if that is the objective (please note that I am not even discussing the fact that using antitrust law to do that would violate the rule of law, for more on the subject, click here).
This reminds me of Friedrich Hayek’s Nobel memorial lecture, in which he discussed the “pretense of knowledge.” He argued that some issues will always remain too complex for humans (even helped by quantum computers and the most advanced AI; that’s right!). Breaking up big tech is one such issue; it is simply impossible simultaneously to consider the micro and macro-economic impacts of such an enormous undertaking, which would affect, literally, billions of people. Not to mention the political, sociological and legal issues, all of which combined are beyond human understanding.
Ignorance + fear = fame
In the absence of clear-cut conclusions, here is why (I think), some officials are arguing for breaking up big tech. First, it may be possible that some of them actually believe that it would be great. But I am sure we agree that beliefs should not be a valid basis for such actions. More realistically, the answer can be found in the work of another Nobel laureate, James Buchanan, and in particular his 1978 lecture in Vienna entitled “Politics Without Romance.”
In his lecture and the paper that emerged from it, Buchanan argued that while markets fail, so do governments. The latter is especially relevant insofar as top officials entrusted with public power may, occasionally at least, use that power to benefit their personal interests rather than the public interest. Thus, the presumption that government-imposed corrections for market failures always accomplish the desired objectives must be rejected. Taking that into consideration, it follows that the expected effectiveness of public action should always be established as precisely and scientifically as possible before taking action. Integrating these insights from Hayek and Buchanan, we must conclude that it is not possible to know whether the effects of breaking up big tech would on net be positive.
The question then is why, in the absence of positive empirical evidence, are some officials arguing for breaking up tech giants then? Well, because defending such actions may help them achieve their personal goals. Often, it is more important for public officials to show their muscle and take action, rather showing great care about reaching a positive net result for society. This is especially true when it is practically impossible to evaluate the outcome due to the scale and complexity of the changes that ensue. That enables these officials to take credit for being bold while avoiding blame for the harms.
But for such a call to be profitable for the public officials, they first must legitimize the potential action in the eyes of the majority of the public. Until now, most consumers evidently like the services of tech giants, which is why it is crucial for the top officials engaged in such a strategy to demonize those companies and further explain to consumers why they are wrong to enjoy them. Only then does defending the breakup of tech giants becomes politically valuable.
Some data, one trend
In a recent paper entitled “Antitrust Without Romance,” I have analyzed the speeches of the five current FTC commissioners, as well as the speeches of the current and three previous EU Competition Commissioners. What I found is an increasing trend to demonize big tech companies. In other words, public officials increasingly seek to prepare the general public for the idea that breaking up tech giants would be great.
In Europe, current Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager has sought to establish an opposition between the people (referred under the pronoun “us”) and tech companies (referred under the pronoun “them”) in more than 80% of her speeches. She further describes these companies as engaging in manipulation of the public and unleashing violence. She says they, “distort or fabricate information, manipulate people’s views and degrade public debate” and help “harmful, untrue information spread faster than ever, unleashing violence and undermining democracy.” Furthermore, she says they cause, “danger of death.” On this basis, she mentions the possibility of breaking them up (for more data about her speeches, see this link).
In the US, we did not observe a similar trend. Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim, who has responsibility for antitrust enforcement at the Department of Justice, describes the relationship between people and companies as being in opposition in fewer than 10% of his speeches. The same goes for most of the FTC commissioners (to see all the data about their speeches, see this link). The exceptions are FTC Chairman Joseph J. Simons, who describes companies’ behavior as “bad” from time to time (and underlines that consumers “deserve” better) and Commissioner Rohit Chopra, who describes the relationship between companies and the people as being in opposition to one another in 30% of his speeches. Chopra also frequently labels companies as “bad.” These are minor signs of big tech demonization compared to what is currently done by European officials. But, unfortunately, part of the US doctrine (which does not hide political objectives) pushes for demonizing big tech companies. One may have reason to fear that such a trend will grow in the US as it has in Europe, especially considering the upcoming presidential campaign in which far-right and far-left politicians seem to agree about the need to break up big tech.
And yet, let’s remember that no-one has any documented, tangible, and reproducible evidence that breaking up tech giants would be good for consumers, or societies at large, or, in fact, for anyone (even dolphins, okay). It might be a good idea; it might be a bad idea. Who knows? But the lack of evidence either way militates against taking such action. Meanwhile, there is strong evidence that these discussions are fueled by a handful of individuals wishing to benefit from such a call for action. They do so, first, by depicting tech giants as representing the new elite in opposition to the people and they then portray themselves as the only saviors capable of taking action.
Epilogue: who knows, life is not a Tarantino movie
For the last 30 years, antitrust law has been largely immune to strategic takeover by political interests. It may now be returning to a previous era in which it was the instrument of a few. This transformation is already happening in Europe (it is expected to hit case law there quite soon) and is getting real in the US, where groups display political goals and make antitrust law a Trojan horse for their personal interests.The only semblance of evidence they bring is a few allegedly harmful micro-practices (see Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox), which they use as a basis for defending the urgent need of macro, structural measures, such as breaking up tech companies. This is disproportionate, but most of all and in the absence of better knowledge, purely opportunistic and potentially foolish. Who knows at this point whether antitrust law will come out intact of this populist and moralist episode? And who knows what the next idea of those who want to use antitrust law for purely political purposes will be. Life is not a Tarantino movie; it may end up badly.
If a firm is too big, it will be because it is “a merger for monopoly”;
If the firms aren’t that big, it will be for “coordinated effects”;
If a firm is small, then it will be because it will “eliminate a maverick”.
It’s a version of Ronald Coase’s complaint about antitrust, asrelated by William Landes:
Ronald said he had gotten tired of antitrust because when the prices went up the judges said it was monopoly, when the prices went down, they said it was predatory pricing, and when they stayed the same, they said it was tacit collusion.
Of all the reasons to block a merger, the maverick notion is the weakest, and it’s well past time to ditch it.
TheHorizontal Merger Guidelines define a “maverick” as “a firm that plays a disruptive role in the market to the benefit of customers.” According to the Guidelines, this includes firms:
With a new technology or business model that threatens to disrupt market conditions;
With an incentive to take the lead in price cutting or other competitive conduct or to resist increases in industry prices;
That resist otherwise prevailing industry norms to cooperate on price setting or other terms of competition; and/or
With an ability and incentive to expand production rapidly using available capacity to “discipline prices.”
There appears to be no formal model of maverick behavior that does not rely on some a priori assumption that the firm is a maverick.
For example, John Kwoka’s 1989model assumes the maverick firm has different beliefs about how competing firms would react if the maverick varies its output or price. Louis Kaplow and Carl Shapiro developed a simplemodel in which the firm with the smallest market share may play the role of a maverick. They note, however, that this raises the question—in a model in which every firm faces the same cost and demand conditions—why would there be any variation in market shares? The common solution, according to Kaplow and Shapiro, is cost asymmetries among firms. If that is the case, then “maverick” activity is merely a function of cost, rather than some uniquely maverick-like behavior.
The idea of the maverick firm requires that the firm play a critical role in the market. The maverick must be the firm that outflanks coordinated action or acts as a bulwark against unilateral action. By this loosey goosey definition of maverick, a single firm can make the difference between success or failure of anticompetitive behavior by its competitors. Thus, the ability and incentive to expand production rapidly is a necessary condition for a firm to be considered a maverick. For example, Kaplow and Shapiroexplain:
Of particular note is the temptation of one relatively small firm to decline to participate in the collusive arrangement or secretly to cut prices to serve, say, 4% rather than 2% of the market. As long as price cuts by a small firm are less likely to be accurately observed or inferred by the other firms than are price cuts by larger firms, the presence of small firms that are capable of expanding significantly is especially disruptive to effective collusion.
A “maverick” firm’s ability to “discipline prices” depends crucially on its ability to expand output in the face of increased demand for its products. Similarly, the other non-maverick firms can be “disciplined” by the maverick only in the face of a credible threat of (1) a noticeable drop in market share that (2) leads to lower profits.
The government’s complaint inAT&T/T-Mobile’s 2011 proposed merger alleges:
Relying on its disruptive pricing plans, its improved high-speed HSPA+ network, and a variety of other initiatives, T-Mobile aimed to grow its nationwide share to 17 percent within the next several years, and to substantially increase its presence in the enterprise and government market. AT&T’s acquisition of T-Mobile would eliminate the important price, quality, product variety, and innovation competition that an independent T-Mobile brings to the marketplace.
At the time of the proposed merger, T-Mobileaccounted for 11% of U.S. wireless subscribers. At the end of 2016, its market share had hit 17%. About half of the increase can be attributed to its 2012 merger with MetroPCS. Over the same period, Verizon’s market share increased from 33% to 35% and AT&T market share remained stable at 32%. It appears that T-Mobile’s so-called maverick behavior did more to disrupt the market shares of smaller competitors Sprint and Leap (which was acquired by AT&T). Thus, it is not clear, ex post, that T-Mobile posed any threat to AT&T or Verizon’s market shares.
Geoffrey Manne raised somequestions about the government’s maverick theory which also highlights a fundamental problem with the willy nilly way in which firms are given the maverick label:
. . . it’s just not enough that a firm may be offering products at a lower price—there is nothing “maverick-y” about a firm that offers a different, less valuable product at a lower price. I have seen no evidence to suggest that T-Mobile offered the kind of pricing constraint on AT&T that would be required to make it out to be a maverick.
While T-Mobile had a reputation for lower mobile prices, in 2011, the firm waslagging behind Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T in the rollout of 4G technology. In other words, T-Mobile was offering an inferior product at a lower price. That’s not a maverick, that’s product differentiation with hedonic pricing.
More recently, in his opposition to the proposed T-Mobile/Sprint merger, Gene Kimmelman from Public Knowledgeasserts that both firms are mavericks and their combination would cause their maverick magic to disappear:
Sprint, also, can be seen as a maverick. It has offered “unlimited” plans and simplified its rate plans, for instance, driving the rest of the industry forward to more consumer-friendly options. As Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure stated, “Sprint and T-Mobile have similar DNA and have eliminated confusing rate plans, converging into one rate plan: Unlimited.” Whether both or just one of the companies can be seen as a “maverick” today, in either case the newly combined company would simply have the same structural incentives as the larger carriers both Sprint and T-Mobile today work so hard to differentiate themselves from.
Kimmelman provides no mechanism by which the magic would go missing, but instead offers a version of an adversity-builds-character argument:
Allowing T-Mobile to grow to approximately the same size as AT&T, rather than forcing it to fight for customers, will eliminate the combined company’s need to disrupt the market and create an incentive to maintain the existing market structure.
For 30 years, the notion of the maverick firm has been a concept in search of a model. If the concept cannot be modeled decades after being introduced, maybe the maverick can’t be modeled.
What’s left are ad hoc assertions mixed with speculative projections in hopes that some sympathetic judge can be swayed. However, some judges seem to be more skeptical than sympathetic, as inH&R Block/TaxACT :
The parties have spilled substantial ink debating TaxACT’s maverick status. The arguments over whether TaxACT is or is not a “maverick” — or whether perhaps it once was a maverick but has not been a maverick recently — have not been particularly helpful to the Court’s analysis. The government even put forward as supposed evidence a TaxACT promotional press release in which the company described itself as a “maverick.” This type of evidence amounts to little more than a game of semantic gotcha. Here, the record is clear that while TaxACT has been an aggressive and innovative competitor in the market, as defendants admit, TaxACT is not unique in this role. Other competitors, including HRB and Intuit, have also been aggressive and innovative in forcing companies in the DDIY market to respond to new product offerings to the benefit of consumers.
It’s time to send the maverick out of town and into the sunset.
[This post is the third in an ongoing symposium on “Should We Break Up Big Tech?” that will feature analysis and opinion from various perspectives.]
[This post is authored by John E. Lopatka, Robert Noll Distinguished Professor of Law, School of Law, The Pennsylvania State University]
Big Tech firms stand accused of many evils, and the clamor to break them up is loud. Should we fetch our pitchforks? The antitrust laws are designed to address a range of wrongs and authorize a set of remedies, which include but do not emphasize divestiture. When the harm caused by a Big Tech company is of a kind the antitrust laws are intended to prevent, an appropriate antitrust remedy can be devised. In such a case, it makes sense to use antitrust: If antitrust and its remedies are adequate to do the job fully, no legislative changes are required. When the harm falls outside the ambit of antitrust and any other pertinent statute, a choice must be made. Antitrust can be expanded; other statutes can be amended or enacted; or any harms that are not perfectly addressed by existing statutory and common law can be left alone, for legal institutions are never perfect, and a disease can be less harmful than a cure.
A comprehensive list of the myriad and changing attacks on Big Tech firms would be difficult to compile. Indeed, the identity of the offenders is not self-evident, though Google (Alphabet), Facebook, Amazon, and Apple have lately attracted the most attention. The principal charges against Big Tech firms seem to be these: 1) compromising consumer privacy; 2) manipulating the news; 3) accumulating undue social and political influence; 4) stifling innovation by acquiring creative upstarts; 5) using market power in one market to injure competitors in adjacent markets; 6) exploiting input suppliers; 7) exploiting their own employees; and 8) damaging communities by location choices.
These charges are not uniform across the Big Tech targets. Some charges have been directed more forcefully against some firms than others. For instance, infringement of consumer privacy has been a focus of attacks on Facebook. Both Facebook and Google have been accused of manipulating the news. And claims about the exploitation of input suppliers and employees and the destruction of communities have largely been directed at Amazon.
What is “Big Tech”?
Despite the variance among firms, the attacks against all of them proceed from the same syllogism: Some tech firms are big; big tech firms do social harm; therefore, big tech firms should be broken up. From an antitrust perspective, something is missing. Start with the definition of a “tech” firm. In the modern economy, every firm relies on sophisticated technology – from an auto repair shop to an airplane manufacturer to a social media website operator. Every firm is a tech firm. But critics have a more limited concept in mind. They are concerned about platforms, or intermediaries, in multi-sided markets. These markets exhibit indirect network effects. In a two-sided market, for instance, each side of the market benefits as the size of the other side grows. Platforms provide value by coordinating the demand and supply of different groups of economic actors where the actors could not efficiently interact by themselves. In short, platforms reduce transaction costs. They have been around for centuries, but their importance has been magnified in recent years by rapid advances in technology. Rational observers can sensibly ask whether platforms are peculiarly capable of causing harm. But critics tend to ignore or at least to discount the value that platforms provide, and doing so presents a distorted image that breeds bad policy.
Assuming we know what a tech firm is, what is “big”? One could measure size by many standards. Most critics do not bother to define “big,” though at least Senator Elizabeth Warren has proposed defining one category of bigness as firms with annual global revenue of $25 billion or more and a second category as those with annual global revenue of between $90 million and $25 billion. The proper standard for determining whether tech firms are objectionably large is not self-evident. Indeed, a size threshold embodied in any legal policy will almost always be somewhat arbitrary. That by itself is not a failing of a policy prescription. But why use a size screen at all? A few answers are possible. Large firms may do more harm than small firms when harm is proportionate to size. Size may matter because government intervention is costly and less sensitive to firm size than is harm, implying that only harm caused by large firms is large enough to outweigh the costs of enforcement. And most important, the size of a firm may be related to the kind of harm the firm is accused of doing. Perhaps only a firm of a certain size can inflict a particular kind of injury. A clear standard of size and its justification ought to precede any policy prescription.
What’s the (antitrust) beef?
The social harms that Big Tech firms are accused of doing are a hodgepodge. Some are familiar to antitrust scholars as either current or past objects of antitrust concern; others are not. Antitrust protects against a certain kind of economic harm: The loss of economic welfare caused by a restriction on competition. Though the terms are sometimes used in different ways, the core concept is reasonably clear and well accepted. In most cases, economic welfare is synonymous with consumer welfare. Economic welfare, though, is a broader concept. For example, economic welfare is reduced when buyers exercise market power to the detriment of sellers and by productive inefficiencies. But despite the claim of some Big Tech critics, when consumer welfare is at stake, it is not measured exclusively by the price consumers pay. Economists often explicitly refer to quality-adjusted prices and implicitly have the qualification in mind in any analysis of price. Holding quality constant makes quantitative models easier to construct, but a loss of quality is a matter of conventional antitrust concern. The federal antitrust agencies’ horizontal merger guidelines recognize that “reduced product quality, reduced product variety, reduced service, [and] diminished innovation” are all cognizable adverse effects. The scope of antitrust is not as constricted as some critics assert. Still, it has limits.
Leveraging market power is standard antitrust fare, though it is not nearly as prevalent as once thought. Horizontal mergers that reduce economic welfare are an antitrust staple. The acquisition and use of monopsony power to the detriment of input suppliers is familiar antitrust ground. If Big Tech firms have committed antitrust violations of this ilk, the offenses can be remedied under the antitrust laws.
Other complaints against the Big Tech firms do not fit comfortably or at all within the ambit of antitrust. Antitrust does not concern itself with political or social influence. Influence is a function of size, but not relative to any antitrust market. Firms that have more resources than other firms may have more influence, but the deployment of those resources across the economy is irrelevant. The use of antitrust to attack conglomerate mergers was an inglorious period in antitrust history. Injuries to communities or to employees are not a proper antitrust concern when they result from increased efficiency. Acquisitions might stifle innovation, which is a proper antitrust concern, but they might spur innovation by inducing firms to create value and thereby become attractive acquisition targets or by facilitating integration. Whether the consumer interest in informational privacy has much to do with competition is difficult to say. Privacy in this context means the collection and use of data. In a multi-sided market, one group of participants may value not only the size but also the composition and information about another group. Competition among platforms might or might not occur on the dimension of privacy. For any platform, however, a reduction in the amount of valuable data it can collect from one side and provide to another side will reduce the price it can charge the second side, which can flow back and injure the first side. In all, antitrust falters when it is asked to do what it cannot do well, and whether other laws should be brought to bear depends on a cost/benefit calculus.
Does Big Tech’s conduct merit antitrust action?
When antitrust is used, it unquestionably requires a causal connection between conduct and harm. Conduct must restrain competition, and the restraint must cause cognizable harm. Most of the attacks against Big Tech firms if pursued under the antitrust laws would proceed as monopolization claims. A firm must have monopoly power in a relevant market; the firm must engage in anticompetitive conduct, typically conduct that excludes rivals without increasing efficiency; and the firm must have or retain its monopoly power because of the anticompetitive conduct.
Put aside the flaccid assumption that all the targeted Big Tech platforms have monopoly power in relevant markets. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t, but an assumption is unwarranted. Focus instead on the conduct element of monopolization. Most of the complaints about Big Tech firms concern their use of whatever power they have. Use isn’t enough. Each of the firms named above has achieved its prominence by extraordinary innovation, shrewd planning, and effective execution in an unforgiving business climate, one in which more platforms have failed than have succeeded. This does not look like promising ground for antitrust.
Of course, even firms that generally compete lawfully can stray. But to repeat, monopolists do not monopolize unless their unlawful conduct is causally connected to their market power. The complaints against the Big Tech firms are notably weak on allegations of anticompetitive conduct that resulted in the acquisition or maintenance of their market positions. Some critics have assailed Facebook’s acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram. Even assuming these firms competed with Facebook in well-defined antitrust markets, the claim that Facebook’s dominance in its core business was created or maintained by these acquisitions is a stretch.
The difficulty fashioning remedies
The causal connection between conduct and monopoly power becomes particularly important when remedies are fashioned for monopolization. Microsoft, the first major monopolization case against a high tech platform, is instructive. DOJ in its complaint sought only conduct remedies for Microsoft’s alleged unlawful maintenance of a monopoly in personal computer operating systems. The trial court found that Microsoft had illegally maintained its monopoly by squelching Netscape’s Navigator and Sun’s Java technologies, and by the end of trial DOJ sought and the court ordered structural relief in the form of “vertical” divestiture, separating Microsoft’s operating system business from its applications business. Some commentators at the time argued for various kinds of “horizontal” divestiture, which would have created competing operating system platforms. The appellate court set aside the order, emphasizing that an antitrust remedy must bear a close causal connection to proven anticompetitive conduct. Structural remedies are drastic, and a plaintiff must meet a heightened standard of proof of causation to justify any kind of divestiture in a monopolization case. On remand, DOJ abandoned its request for divestiture. The evidence that Microsoft maintained its market position by inhibiting the growth of middleware was sufficient to support liability, but not structural relief.
The court’s trepidation was well-founded. Divestiture makes sense when monopoly power results from acquisitions, because the mergers expose joints at which the firm might be separated without rending fully integrated operations. But imposing divestiture on a monopolist for engaging in single-firm exclusionary conduct threatens to destroy the integration that is the essence of any firm and is almost always disproportional to the offense. Even if conduct remedies can be more costly to enforce than structural relief, the additional cost is usually less than the cost to the economy of forgone efficiency.
The proposals to break up the Big Tech firms are ill-defined. Based on what has been reported, no structural relief could be justified as antitrust relief. Whatever conduct might have been unlawful was overwhelmingly unilateral. The few acquisitions that have occurred didn’t appreciably create or preserve monopoly power, and divestiture wouldn’t do much to correct the misbehavior critics see anyway. Big Tech firms could be restructured through new legislation, but that would be a mistake. High tech platform markets typically yield dominant firms, though heterogeneous demand often creates space for competitors. Markets are better at achieving efficient structures than are government planners. Legislative efforts at restructuring are likely to invite circumvention or lock in inefficiency.
Regulate “Big Tech” instead?
In truth, many critics are willing to put up with dominant tech platforms but want them regulated. If we learned any lesson from the era of pervasive economic regulation of public utilities, it is that regulation is costly and often yields minimal benefits. George Stigler and Claire Friedland demonstrated 57 years ago that electric utility regulation had little impact. The era of regulation was followed by an era of deregulation. Yet the desire to regulate remains strong, and as Stigler and Friedland observed, “if wishes were horses, one would buy stock in a harness factory.” And just how would Big Tech platform regulators regulate? Senator Warren offers a glimpse of the kind of regulation that critics might impose: “Platform utilities would be required to meet a standard of fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory dealing with users.” This kind of standard has some meaning in the context of a standard-setting organization dealing with patent holders. What it would mean in the context of a social media platform, for example, is anyone’s guess. Would it prevent biasing of information for political purposes, and what government official should be entrusted with that determination? What is certain is that it would invite government intervention into markets that are working well, if not perfectly. It would invite public officials to tradeoff economic welfare for a host of values embedded in the concept of fairness. Federal agencies charged with promoting the “public interest” have a difficult enough time reaching conclusions where competition is one of several specific values to be considered. Regulation designed to address all the evils high tech platforms are thought to perpetrate would make traditional economic or public-interest regulation look like child’s play.
Concluding remarks
Big Tech firms have generated immense value. They may do real harm. From all that can now be gleaned, any harm has had little to do with antitrust, and it certainly doesn’t justify breaking them up. Nor should they be broken up as an exercise in central economic planning. If abuses can be identified, such as undesirable invasions of privacy, focused legislation may be in order, but even then only if the government action is predictably less costly than the abuses.
Thomas Wollmann has a new paper — “Stealth Consolidation: Evidence from an Amendment to the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act” — in American Economic Review: Insights this month. Greg Ip included this research in an article for the WSJ in which he claims that “competition has declined and corporate concentration risen through acquisitions often too small to draw the scrutiny of antitrust watchdogs.” In other words, “stealth consolidation”.
Wollmann’s study uses a difference-in-differences approach to examine the effect on merger activity of the 2001 amendment to the Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976 (15 U.S.C. 18a). The amendment abruptly increased the pre-merger notification threshold from $15 million to $50 million in deal size. Strictly on those terms, the paper shows that raising the pre-merger notification threshold increased merger activity.
However, claims about “stealth consolidation” are controversial because they connote nefarious intentions and anticompetitive effects. As Wollmann admits in the paper, due to data limitations, he is unable to show that the new mergers are in fact anticompetitive or that the social costs of these mergers exceed the social benefits. Therefore, more research is needed to determine the optimal threshold for pre-merger notification rules, and claiming that harmful “stealth consolidation” is occurring is currently unwarranted.
Background: The “Unscrambling the Egg” Problem
In general, it is more difficult to unwind a consummated anticompetitive merger than it is to block a prospective anticompetitive merger. As Wollmann notes, for example, “El Paso Natural Gas Co. acquired its only potential rival in a market” and “the government’s challenge lasted 17 years and involved seven trips to the Supreme Court.”
Rolling back an anticompetitive merger is so difficult that it came to be known as “unscrambling the egg.” As William J. Baer, a former director of the Bureau of Competition at the FTC, described it, “there were strong incentives for speedily and surreptitiously consummating suspect mergers and then protracting the ensuing litigation” prior to the implementation of a pre-merger notification rule. These so-called “midnight mergers” were intended to avoid drawing antitrust scrutiny.
In 2001, Congress amended the HSR Act and effectively raised the threshold for premerger notification from $15 million in acquired firm assets to $50 million. This sudden and dramatic change created an opportunity to use a difference-in-differences technique to study the relationship between filing an HSR notification and merger activity.
According to Wollmann, here’s what notifications look like for never-exempt mergers (>$50M):
And here’s what notifications for newly-exempt ($15M < X < $50M) mergers look like:
So what does that mean for merger investigations? Here is the number of investigations into never-exempt mergers:
We see a pretty consistent relationship between number of mergers and number of investigations. More mergers means more investigations.
How about for newly-exempt mergers?
Here, investigations go to zero while merger activity remains relatively stable. In other words, it appears that some mergers that would have been investigated had they required an HSR notification were not investigated.
Wollmann then uses four-digit SIC code industries to sort mergers into horizontal and non-horizontal categories. Here are never-exempt mergers:
He finds that almost all of the increase in merger activity (relative to the counterfactual in which the notification threshold were unchanged) is driven by horizontal mergers. And here are newly-exempt mergers:
Policy Implications & Limitations
The charts show a stark change in investigations and merger activity. The difference-in-differences methodology is solid and the author addresses some potential confounding variables (such as presidential elections). However, the paper leaves the broader implications for public policy unanswered.
Furthermore, given the limits of the data in this analysis, it’s not possible for this approach to explain competitive effects in the relevant antitrust markets, for three reasons:
Four-digit SIC code industries are not antitrust markets
Wollmann chose to classify mergers “as horizontal or non-horizontal based on whether or not the target and acquirer operate in the same four-digit SIC code industry, which is common convention.” But as Werden & Froeb (2018) notes, four-digit SIC code industries are orders of magnitude too large in most cases to be useful for antitrust analysis:
The evidence from cartel cases focused on indictments from 1970–80. Because the Justice Department prosecuted many local cartels, for 52 of the 80 indictments examined, the Commerce Quotient was less than 0.01, i.e., the SIC 4-digit industry was at least 100 times the apparent scope of the affected market. Of the 80 indictments, 19 involved SIC 4-digit industries that had been thought to comport well with markets, so these were the most instructive. For 16 of the 19, the SIC 4-digit industry was at least 10 times the apparent scope of the affected market (i.e., the Commerce Quotient was less than 0.1).
Antitrust authorities do not rely on SIC 4-digit industry codes and instead establish a market definition based on the facts of each case. It is not possible to infer competitive effects from census data as Wollmann attempts to do.
The data cannot distinguish between anticompetitive mergers and procompetitive mergers
As Wollmann himself notes, the results tell us nothing about the relative costs and benefits of the new HSR policy:
Even so, these findings do not on their own advocate for one policy over another. To do so requires equating industry consolidation to a specific amount of economic harm and then comparing the resulting figure to the benefits derived from raising thresholds, which could be large. Even if the agencies ignore the reduced regulatory burden on firms, introducing exemptions can free up agency resources to pursue other cases (or reduce public spending). These and related issues require careful consideration but simply fall outside the scope of the present work.
For instance, firms could be reallocating merger activity to targets below the new threshold to avoid erroneous enforcement or they could be increasing merger activity for small targets due to reduced regulatory costs and uncertainty.
The study is likely underpowered for effects on blocked mergers
While the paper provides convincing evidence that investigations of newly-exempt mergers decreased dramatically following the change in the notification threshold, there is no equally convincing evidence of an effect on blocked mergers. As Wollmann points out, blocked mergers were exceedingly rare both before and after the Amendment (emphasis added):
Over 57,000 mergers comprise the sample, which spans eighteen years. The mean number of mergers each year is 3,180. The DOJ and FTC receive 31,464 notifications over this period, or 1,748 per year. Also, as stated above, blocked mergers are very infrequent: there are on average 13 per year pre-Amendment and 9 per-year post-Amendment.
Since blocked mergers are such a small percentage of total mergers both before and after the Amendment, we likely cannot tell from the data whether actual enforcement action changed significantly due to the change in notification threshold.
Greg Ip’s write-up for the WSJ includes some relevant charts for this issue. Ironically for a piece about the problems of lax merger review, the accompanying graphs show merger enforcement actions slightly increasing at both the FTC and the DOJ since 2001:
Overall, Wollmann’s paper does an effective job showing how changes in premerger notification rules can affect merger activity. However, due to data limitations, we cannot conclude anything about competitive effects or enforcement intensity from this study.
This guest post is by Corbin K. Barthold, Litigation Counsel at Washington Legal Foundation.
Complexity need not follow size. A star is huge but mostly homogenous. “It’s core is so hot,” explains Martin Rees, “that no chemicals can exist (complex molecules get torn apart); it is basically an amorphous gas of atomic nuclei and electrons.”
Nor does complexity always arise from remoteness of space or time. Celestial gyrations can be readily grasped. Thales of Miletus probably predicted a solar eclipse. Newton certainly could have done so. And we’re confident that in 4.5 billion years the Andromeda galaxy will collide with our own.
If the simple can be seen in the large and the distant, equally can the complex be found in the small and the immediate. A double pendulum is chaotic. Likewise the local weather, the fluctuations of a wildlife population, or the dispersion of the milk you pour into your coffee.
Our economy is not like a planetary orbit. It’s more like the weather or the milk. No one knows which companies will become dominant, which products will become popular, or which industries will become defunct. No one can see far ahead. Investing is inherently risky because the future of the economy, or even a single segment of it, is intractably uncertain. Do not hand your savings to any expert who says otherwise. Experts, in fact, often see the least of all.
But if a broker with a “sure thing” stock is a mountebank, what does that make an antitrust scholar with an “optimum structure” for a market?
Not a prophet.
There is so much that we don’t know. Consider, for example, the notion that market concentration is a good measure of market competitiveness. The idea seems intuitive enough, and in many corners it remains an article of faith.
But the markets where this assumption is most plausible—hospital care and air travel come to mind—are heavily shaped by that grand monopolist we call government. Only a large institution can cope with the regulatory burden placed on the healthcare industry. As Tyler Cowen writes, “We get the level of hospital concentration that we have in essence chosen through politics and the law.”
As for air travel: the government promotes concentration by barring foreign airlines from the domestic market. In any case, the state of air travel does not support a straightforward conclusion that concentration equals power. The price of flying has fallen almost continuously since passage of the Airline Deregulation Act in 1978. The major airlines are disciplined by fringe carriers such as JetBlue and Southwest.
It is by no means clear that, aside from cases of government-imposed concentration, a consolidated market is something to fear. Technology lowers costs, lower costs enable scale, and scale tends to promote efficiency. Scale can arise naturally, therefore, from the process of creating better and cheaper products.
Say you’re a nineteenth-century cow farmer, and the railroad reaches you. Your shipping costs go down, and you start to sell to a wider market. As your farm grows, you start to spread your capital expenses over more sales. Your prices drop. Then refrigerated rail cars come along, you start slaughtering your cows on site, and your shipping costs go down again. Your prices drop further. Farms that fail to keep pace with your cost-cutting go bust. The cycle continues until beef is cheap and yours is one of the few cow farms in the area. The market improves as it consolidates.
As the decades pass, this story repeats itself on successively larger stages. The relentless march of technology has enabled the best companies to compete for regional, then national, and now global market share. We should not be surprised to see ever fewer firms offering ever better products and services.
Bear in mind, moreover, that it’s rarely the same company driving each leap forward. As Geoffrey Manne and Alec Stapp recently noted in this space, markets are not linear. Just after you adopt the next big advance in the logistics of beef production, drone delivery will disrupt your delivery network, cultured meat will displace your product, or virtual-reality flavoring will destroy your industry. Or—most likely of all—you’ll be ambushed by something you can’t imagine.
Does market concentration inhibit innovation? It’s possible. “To this day,” write Joshua Wright and Judge Douglas Ginsburg, “the complex relationship between static product market competition and the incentive to innovate is not well understood.”
There’s that word again: complex. When will thumping company A in an antitrust lawsuit increase the net amount of innovation coming from companies A, B, C, and D? Antitrust officials have no clue. They’re as benighted as anyone. These are the people who will squash Blockbuster’s bid to purchase a rival video-rental shop less than two years before Netflix launches a streaming service.
And it’s not as if our most innovative companies are using market concentration as an excuse to relax. If its only concern were maintaining Google’s grip on the market for internet-search advertising, Alphabet would not have spent $16 billion on research and development last year. It spent that much because its long-term survival depends on building the next big market—the one that does not exist yet.
No expert can reliably make the predictions necessary to say when or how a market should look different. And if we empowered some experts to make such predictions anyway, no other experts would be any good at predicting what the empowered experts would predict. Experts trying to give us “well structured” markets will instead give us a costly, politicized, and stochastic antitrust enforcement process.
Here’s a modest proposal. Instead of using the antitrust laws to address the curse of bigness, let’s create the Office of the Double Pendulum. We can place the whole section in a single room at the Justice Department.
All we’ll need is some ping-pong balls, a double pendulum, and a monkey. On each ball will be the name of a major corporation. Once a quarter—or a month; reasonable minds can differ—a ball will be drawn, and the monkey prodded into throwing the pendulum. An even number of twirls saves the company on the ball. An odd number dooms it to being broken up.
This system will punish success just as haphazardly as anything our brightest neo-Brandeisian scholars can devise, while avoiding the ruinously expensive lobbying, rent-seeking, and litigation that arise when scholars succeed in replacing the rule of law with the rule of experts.
All hail the chaos monkey. Unutterably complex. Ineffably simple.
