Truth on the Market

[TOTM: The following is the seventh in a series of posts by TOTM guests and authors on the politicization of antitrust. The entire series of posts is available here.]

This post is authored by Cento Veljanoski, Managing Partner, Case Associates and IEA Fellow in Law and Economics, Institute of Economic Affairs.

The concept of a “good” or “efficient” cartel is generally regarded by competition authorities as an oxymoron. A cartel is seen as the worst type of antitrust violation and one that warrants zero tolerance. Agreements between competitors to raise prices and share the market are assumed unambiguously to reduce economic welfare. As such, even if these agreements are ineffective, the law should come down hard on attempts to rig prices. In this post, I argue that this view goes too far and that even ‘hard core’ cartels that lower output and increase prices can be efficient, and pro-competitive. I discuss three examples of where hard core cartels may be efficient.

Resuscitating the efficient cartel

Basic economic theory tells us that coordination can be efficient in many instances, and this is accepted in law, e.g. joint ventures and agreements on industry standards.  But where competitors agree on prices and the volume of sales – so called “hard core” cartels – there is intolerance.

Nonetheless there is a recognition that cartel-like arrangements can promote efficiency. For example, Article 101(3)TFEU exempts anticompetitive agreements or practices whose economic and/or technical benefits outweigh their restrictions on competition, provided a fair share of those benefits are passed-on to consumers. However, this so-called ‘efficiency defence’ is highly unlikely to be accepted for hard core cartels nor are the wider economic or non-economic considerations. But as will be shown, there are classes of hard core cartels and restrictive agreement which, while they reduce output, raise prices and foreclose entry, are nonetheless efficient and not anticompetitive.

Destructive competition and the empty core

The claim that cartels have beneficial effects precedes US antitrust law. Trusts were justified as necessary to prevent ‘ruinous’ or ‘destructive’ competition in industries with high fixed costs subject to frequent ‘price wars’. This was the unsuccessful defence in Trans-Missouri (166 U.S. 290 (1897), where 18 US railroad companies formed a trust to set their rates, arguing that absent their agreement there would be ruinous competition, eventual monopoly and even higher prices.  Since then industries such as steel, cement, paper, shipping and airlines have at various times claimed that competition was unsustainable and wasteful.

These seem patently self-serving claims.  But the idea that some industries are unstable without a competitive equilibrium has long been appreciated by economists.  Nearly a century after Trans-Missouri, economist Lester Telser (1996) refreshed the idea that cooperative arrangements among firms in some industries were not attempts to impose monopoly prices but a response to their inherent structural inefficiency. This was based on the concept of an ‘empty core’. While Tesler’s article uses some hideously dense mathematical game theory, the idea is simple to state.  A market is said to have a ‘core’ if there is a set of transactions between buyers and sellers such that there are no other transactions that could make some of the buyers or sellers better off. Such a core will survive in a competitive market if all firms can make zero economic profits. In a market with an empty core no coalition of firms will be able to earn zero profits; some firms will be able to earn a surplus and thereby attract entry, but because the core is empty the new entry will inflict losses on all firms. When firms exit due to their losses, the remaining firms again earn economic profits, and attract entry. There are no competitive long-run stable equilibria for these industries.

The literature suggests that an industry is likely to have an empty core: (1) where firms have fixed production capacities; (2) that are large relative to demand; (3) there are scale economies in production; (4) incremental costs are low, (5) demand is uncertain and fluctuates markedly; and (6) output cannot be stored cheaply. Industries which have frequently been cartelised share many of these features (see above).

In the 1980s several academic studies applied empty core theory to antitrust. Brittlingmayer (1982) claimed that the US iron pipe industry had an empty core and that the famous Addyston Pipe case was thus wrongly decided, and responsible for mergers in the industry.

Sjostrom (1989) and others have argued that conference lines were not attempts to overcharge shippers but to counteract an empty core that led to volatile market shares and freight rates due to excess capacity and fixed schedules.  This type of analysis formed the basis for their exemption from competition laws. Since the nineteenth century, liner conferences had been permitted to fix prices and regulate capacity on routes between Europe, and North America and the Far East. The EU block exemption (Council Regulation 4056/86) allowed them to set common freight rates, to take joint decisions on the limitation of supply and to coordinate timetables. However the justifications for these exemptions has worn thin. As from October 2008, these EU exemptions were removed based on scepticism that liner shipping is an empty core industry particularly because, with the rise of modern leasing and chartering techniques to manage capacity, the addition of shipping capacity is no longer a lumpy process. 

While the empty core argument may have merit, it is highly unlikely to persuade European competition authorities, and the experience with legal cartels that have been allowed in order to rationalise production and costs has not been good.

Where there are environmental problems

Cartels in industries with significant environmental problems – which produce economic ‘bads’ rather than goods – can have beneficial effects. Restricting the output of an economic bad is good. Take an extreme example. When most people hear the word cartel, they think of a Colombian drugs cartel. . A drugs cartel reduces drug trafficking to keep its profits high. Competition in the supply would  lead to an over-supply of cheaper drugs, and a cartel charging higher prices and lower output is superior to a competitive outcome.

The same logic applies also to industries in which bads, such as pollution, are a by-product of otherwise legitimate and productive activities.  An industry which generates pollution does not take the full costs of its activities into account, and hence output is over-expanded and prices too low. Economic efficiency requires a reduction in the harmful activities and the associated output.  It also requires the product’s price to increase to incorporate the pollution costs. A cartel that raises prices can move such an industry’s output and harm closer to the efficient level, although this would not be in response to higher pollution-inclusive costs – which makes this a second-best solution.

There has been a fleeting recognition that competition in the presence of external costs is not efficient and that restricting output does not necessarily distort competition. In 1999, the European Commission almost uniquely exempted a cartel-like restrictive agreement among producers and importers of washing machines under Article 101(3)TFEU (Case IV.F.1/36.718. CECED).  The agreement not to produce or import the least energy efficient washing machines representing 10-11% of then EC sales would adversely affect competition and increase prices since the most polluting machines were the least expensive ones.

The Commission has since rowed back from its broad application of Article 101(3)TFEU in CECED. In its 2001 Guidelines on Horizontal Agreements it devoted a chapter to environmental agreements which it removed from its revised 2011 Guidelines (para 329) which treated CECED as a standardisation agreement.

Common property industries

A more clear-cut case of an efficient cartel is where firms compete over a common property resource for which property rights are ill-defined or absent, such as is often the case for fisheries. In these industries, competition leads to excessive entry, over-exploitation, and the dissipation of the economic returns (rents).  A cartel – a ‘club’ of fisherman – having sole control of the fishing grounds would unambiguously increase efficiency even though it increased prices, reduced production and foreclosed entry. 

The benefits of such cartels have not been accepted in law by competition authorities. The Dutch competition authority’s (MNa Case No. 2269/330) and the European Commission’s (Case COMP/39633 Shrimps) shrimps decisions in 2013-14 imposed fines on Dutch shrimp fleet and wholesalers’ organisations for agreeing quotas and prices. One study showed that the Dutch agreement reduced the fishing catch by at least 12%-16% during the cartel period and increased wholesale prices. However, this output reduction and increase in prices was not welfare-reducing if the competitive outcome resulted over-fishing. This and subsequent cases have resulted in a vigorous policy debate in the Netherlands over the use of Article 101(3)TFEU to take the wider benefits into account (ACM Position Paper 2014).

Sustainability and Article 101(3)

There is a growing debate over the conflict between and antitrust and other policy objectives, such as sustainability and industrial policy. One strand of this debate focuses on expanding the efficiency defence under Article 101(3)TFEU.  As currently framed, it has not enabled the reduction in pollution costs or resource over-exploitation to exempt restrictive agreements which distort competition even though these agreements may be efficient. In the pollution case the benefits are generalised ones to third parties not consumers, which are difficult to quantify. In the fisheries case, the short-term welfare of existing consumers is unambiguously reduced as they pay higher prices for less fish; the benefits are long term (more sustainable fish stock which can continue to be consumed) and may not be realized at all by current consumers but rather will accrue to future generations.

To accommodate sustainability concerns and other efficiency factors Article 101(3)TFEU would have to be expanded into a public interest defence based on a wider total welfare objective, not just consumers’ welfare as it is now, which took into account the long-run interest of consumers and third parties potentially affected by a restrictive agreement. This would mark a radical and open-ended expansion of the objectives of European antitrust and the grounds for exemption. It would put sustainability on the same plank as the clamour that industrial policy be taken-into-account by antitrust authorities, which has been firmly resisted so far.  This is not to belittle both the economic and environmental grounds for a public interest defence, it is just to recognise that it is difficult to see how this can be coherently incorporated into Article 101(3)TFEU while at the same time as preserving the integrity and focus of European antitrust.

[TOTM: The following is the fifth in a series of posts by TOTM guests and authors on the politicization of antitrust. The entire series of posts is available here.]

This post is authored by Ramsi Woodcock, Assistant Professor, College of Law, and Assistant Professor, Department of Management at Gatton College of Business & Economics, University of Kentucky.

When in 2011 Paul Krugman attacked the press for bending over backwards to give equal billing to conservative experts on social security, even though the conservatives were plainly wrong, I celebrated. Social security isn’t the biggest part of the government’s budget, and calls to privatize it in order to save the country from bankruptcy were blatant fear mongering. Why should the press report those calls with a neutrality that could mislead readers into thinking the position reasonable?

Journalists’ ethic of balanced reporting looked, at the time, like gross negligence at best, and deceit at worst. But lost in the pathos of the moment was the rationale behind that ethic, which is not so much to ensure that the truth gets into print as to prevent the press from making policy. For if journalists do not practice balance, then they ultimately decide the angle to take.

And journalists, like the rest of us, will choose their own.

The dark underbelly of the engaged journalism unleashed by progressives like Krugman has nowhere been more starkly exposed than in the unfolding assault of journalists, operating as a special interest, on Google, Facebook, and Amazon, three companies that writers believe have decimated their earnings over the past decade.

In story after story, journalists have manufactured an antitrust movement aimed at breaking up these companies, even though virtually no expert in antitrust law or economics, on either the right or the left, can find an antitrust case against them, and virtually no expert would place any of these three companies at the top of the genuinely long list of monopolies in America that are due for an antitrust reckoning.

Bitter ledes

Headlines alone tell the story. We have: “What Happens After Amazon’s Domination Is Complete? Its Bookstore Offers Clues”; “Be Afraid, Jeff Bezos, Be Very Afraid”; “How Should Big Tech Be Reined In? Here Are 4 Prominent Ideas”;  “The Case Against Google”; and “Powerful Coalition Pushes Back on Anti-Tech Fervor.”

My favorite is: “It’s Time to Break Up Facebook.” Unlike the others, it belongs to an Op-Ed, so a bias is appropriate. Not appropriate, however, is the howler, contained in the article’s body, that “a host of legal scholars like Lina Khan, Barry Lynn and Ganesh Sitaraman are plotting a way forward” toward breakup. Lina Khan has never held an academic appointment. Barry Lynn does not even have a law degree. And Ganesh Sitaraman’s academic specialty is constitutional law, not antitrust. But editors let it through anyway.

As this unguarded moment shows, the press has treated these and other members of a small network of activists and legal scholars who operate on antitrust’s fringes as representative of scholarly sentiment regarding antitrust action. The only real antitrust scholar among them is Tim Wu, who, when you look closely at his public statements, has actually gone no further than to call for Facebook to unwind its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.

In more sober moments, the press has acknowledged that the law does not support antitrust attacks on the tech giants. But instead of helping readers to understand why, the press instead presents this as a failure of the law. “To Take Down Big Tech,” read one headline in The New York Times, “They First Need to Reinvent the Law.” I have documented further instances of unbalanced reporting here.

This is not to say that we don’t need more antitrust in America. Herbert Hovenkamp, who the New York Times once recognized as  “the dean of American antitrust law,” but has since downgraded to “an antitrust expert” after he came out against the breakup movement, has advocated stronger monopsony enforcement across labor markets. Einer Elhauge at Harvard is pushing to prevent index funds from inadvertently generating oligopolies in markets ranging from airlines to pharmacies. NYU economist Thomas Philippon has called for deconcentration of banking. Yale’s Fiona Morton has pointed to rising markups across the economy as a sign of lax antitrust enforcement. Jonathan Baker has argued with great sophistication for more antitrust enforcement in general.

But no serious antitrust scholar has traced America’s concentration problem to the tech giants.

Advertising monopolies old and new

So why does the press have an axe to grind with the tech giants? The answer lies in the creative destruction wrought by Amazon on the publishing industry, and Google and Facebook upon the newspaper industry.

Newspapers were probably the most durable monopolies of the 20^th century, so lucrative that Warren Buffett famously picked them as his preferred example of businesses with “moats” around them. But that wasn’t because readers were willing to pay top dollar for newspapers’ reporting. Instead, that was because, incongruously for organizations dedicated to exposing propaganda of all forms on their front pages, newspapers have long striven to fill every other available inch of newsprint with that particular kind of corporate propaganda known as commercial advertising.

It was a lucrative arrangement. Newspapers exhibit powerful network effects, meaning that the more people read a paper the more advertisers want to advertise in it. As a result, many American cities came to have but one major newspaper monopolizing the local advertising market.

One such local paper, the Lorain Journal of Lorain, Ohio, sparked a case that has since become part of the standard antitrust curriculum in law schools. The paper tried to leverage its monopoly to destroy a local radio station that was competing for its advertising business. The Supreme Court affirmed liability for monopolization.

In the event, neither radio nor television ultimately undermined newspapers’ advertising monopolies. But the internet is different. Radio, television, and newspaper advertising can coexist, because they can target only groups, and often not the same ones, minimizing competition between them. The internet, by contrast, reaches individuals, making it strictly superior to group-based advertising. The internet also lets at least some firms target virtually all individuals in the country, allowing those firms to compete with all comers.

You might think that newspapers, which quickly became an important web destination, were perfectly positioned to exploit the new functionality. But being a destination turned out to be a problem. Consumers reveal far more valuable information about themselves to web gateways, like search and social media, than to particular destinations, like newspaper websites. But consumer data is the key to targeted advertising.

That gave Google and Facebook a competitive advantage, and because these companies also enjoy network effects—search and social media get better the more people use them—they inherited the newspapers’ old advertising monopolies.

That was a catastrophe for journalists, whose earnings and employment prospects plummeted. It was also a catastrophe for the public, because newspapers have a tradition of plowing their monopoly profits into investigative journalism that protects democracy, whereas Google and Facebook have instead invested their profits in new technologies like self-driving cars and cryptocurrencies.

The catastrophe of countervailing power

Amazon has found itself in journalists’ crosshairs for disrupting another industry that feeds writers: publishing. Book distribution was Amazon’s first big market, and Amazon won it, driving most brick and mortar booksellers to bankruptcy. Publishing, long dominated by a few big houses that used their power to extract high wholesale prices from booksellers, some of the profit from which they passed on to authors as royalties, now faced a distribution industry that was even more concentrated and powerful than was publishing. The Department of Justice stamped out a desperate attempt by publishers to cartelize in response, and profits, and author royalties, have continued to fall.

Journalists, of course, are writers, and the disruption of publishing, taken together with the disruption of news, have left journalists with the impression that they have nowhere to turn to escape the new economy.

The abuse of antitrust

Except antitrust.

Unschooled in the fine points of antitrust policy, it seems obvious to them that the Armageddon in newspapers and publishing is a problem of monopoly and that antitrust enforcers should do something about it.  

Only it isn’t and they shouldn’t. The courts have gone to great lengths over the past 130 years to distinguish between doing harm to competition, which is prohibited by the antitrust laws, and doing harm to competitors, which is not.

Disrupting markets by introducing new technologies that make products better is no antitrust violation, even if doing so does drive legacy firms into bankruptcy, and throws their employees out of work and into the streets. Because disruption is really the only thing capitalism has going for it. Disruption is the mechanism by which market economies generate technological advances and improve living standards in the long run. The antitrust laws are not there to preserve old monopolies and oligopolies such as those long enjoyed by newspapers and publishers.

In fact, by tearing down barriers to market entry, the antitrust laws strive to do the opposite: to speed the destruction and replacement of legacy monopolies with new and more innovative ones.

That’s why the entire antitrust establishment has stayed on the sidelines regarding the tech fight. It’s hard to think of three companies that have more obviously risen to prominence over the past generation by disrupting markets using superior technologies than Amazon, Google, and Facebook. It may be possible to find an anticompetitive practice here or there—I certainly have—but no serious antitrust scholar thinks the heart of these firms’ continued dominance lies other than in their technical savvy. The nuclear option of breaking up these firms just makes no sense.

Indeed, the disruption inflicted by these firms on newspapers and publishing is a measure of the extent to which these firms have improved book distribution and advertising, just as the vast disruption created by the industrial revolution was a symptom of the extraordinary technological advances of that period. Few people, and not even Karl Marx, thought that the solution to those disruptions lay with Ned Ludd. The solution to the disruption wrought by Google, Amazon, and Facebook today similarly does not lie in using the antitrust laws to smash the machines.

Governments eventually learned to address the disruption created by the original industrial revolution not by breaking up the big firms that brought that revolution about, but by using tax and transfer, and rate regulation, to ensure that the winners share their gains with the losers. However the press’s campaign turns out, rate regulation, not antitrust, is ultimately the approach that government will take to Amazon, Google, and Facebook if these companies continue to grow in power. Because we don’t have to decide between social justice and technological advance. We can have both. And voters will demand it.

The anti-progress wing of the progressive movement

Alas, smashing the machines is precisely what journalists and their supporters are demanding in calling for the breakup of Amazon, Google, and Facebook. Zephyr Teachout, for example, recently told an audience at Columbia Law School that she would ban targeted advertising except for newspapers. That would restore newspapers’ old advertising monopolies, but also make targeted advertising less effective, for the same reason that Google and Facebook are the preferred choice of advertisers today. (Of course, making advertising more effective might not be a good thing. More on this below.)

This contempt for technological advance has been coupled with a broader anti-intellectualism, best captured by an extraordinary remark made by Barry Lynn, director of the pro-breakup Open Markets Institute, and sometime advocate for the Author’s Guild. The Times quotes him saying that because the antitrust laws once contained a presumption against mergers to market shares in excess of 25%, all policymakers have to do to get antitrust right is “be able to count to four. We don’t need economists to help us count to four.”

But size really is not a good measure of monopoly power. Ask Nokia, which controlled more than half the market for cell phones in 2007, on the eve of Apple’s introduction of the iPhone, but saw its share fall almost to zero by 2012. Or Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer and a monopolist in many smaller retail markets, which nevertheless saw its stock fall after Amazon announced one-day shipping.

Journalists themselves acknowledge that size does not always translate into power when they wring their hands about the Amazon-driven financial troubles of large retailers like Macy’s. Determining whether a market lacks competition really does require more than counting the number of big firms in the market.

I keep waiting for a devastating critique of arguments that Amazon operates in highly competitive markets to emerge from the big tech breakup movement. But that’s impossible for a movement that rejects economics as a corporate plot. Indeed, even an economist as pro-antitrust as Thomas Philippon, who advocates a return to antitrust’s mid-20^th century golden age of massive breakups of firms like Alcoa and AT&T, affirms in a new book that American retail is actually a bright spot in an otherwise concentrated economy.

But you won’t find journalists highlighting that. The headline of a Times column promoting Philippon’s book? “Big Business Is Overcharging you $5000 a Year.” I tend to agree. But given all the anti-tech fervor in the press, Philippon’s chapter on why the tech giants are probably not an antitrust problem ought to get a mention somewhere in the column. It doesn’t.

John Maynard Keynes famously observed that “though no one will believe it—economics is a technical and difficult subject.” So too antitrust. A failure to appreciate the field’s technical difficulty is manifest also in Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s antitrust proposals, which were heavily influenced by breakup advocates.

Warren has argued that no large firm should be able to compete on its own platforms, not seeming to realize that doing business means competing on your own platforms. To show up to work in the morning in your own office space is to compete on a platform, your office, from which you exclude competitors. The rule that large firms (defined by Warren as those with more than $25 billion in revenues) cannot compete on their own platforms would just make doing large amounts of business illegal, a result that Warren no doubt does not desire.

The power of the press

The press’s campaign against Amazon, Google, and Facebook is working. Because while they may not be as well financed as Amazon, Google, or Facebook, writers can offer their friends something more valuable than money: publicity.

That appears to have induced a slew of politicians, including both Senator Warren on the left and Senator Josh Hawley on the right, to pander to breakup advocates. The House antitrust investigation into the tech giants, led by a congressman who is simultaneously championing legislation advocated by the News Media Alliance, a newspaper trade group, to give newspapers an exemption from the antitrust laws, may also have similar roots. So too the investigations announced by dozens of elected state attorneys general.

The investigations recently opened by the FTC and Department of Justice may signal no more than a desire not to look idle while so many others act. Which is why the press has the power to turn fiction into reality. Moreover, under the current Administration, the Department of Justice has already undertaken two suspiciously partisan antitrust investigations, and President Trump has made clear his hatred for the liberal bastions that are Amazon, Google and Facebook. The fact that the press has made antitrust action against the tech giants a progressive cause provides convenient cover for the President to take down some enemies.

The future of the news

Rate regulation of Amazon, Google, or Facebook is the likely long-term resolution of concerns about these firms’ power. But that won’t bring back newspapers, which henceforth will always play the loom to Google and Facebook’s textile mills, at least in the advertising market.

Journalists and their defenders, like Teachout, have been pushing to restore newspapers’ old monopolies by government fiat. No doubt that would make existing newspapers, and their staffs, very happy. But what is good for Big News is not necessarily good for journalism in the long run.

The silver lining to the disruption of newspapers’ old advertising monopolies is that it has created an opportunity for newspapers to wean themselves off a funding source that has always made little sense for organizations dedicated to helping Americans make informed, independent decisions, free of the manipulation of others.

For advertising has always had a manipulative function, alongside its function of disseminating product information to consumers. And, as I have argued elsewhere, now that the vast amounts of product information available for free on the internet have made advertising obsolete as a source of product information, manipulation is now advertising’s only real remaining function.

Manipulation causes consumers to buy products they don’t really want, giving firms that advertise a competitive advantage that they don’t deserve. That makes for an antitrust problem, this time with real consequences not just for competitors, but also for technological advance, as manipulative advertising drives dollars away from superior products toward advertised products, and away from investment in innovation and toward investment in consumer seduction.

The solution is to ban all advertising, targeted or not, rather than to give newspapers an advertising monopoly. And to give journalism the state subsidies that, like all public goods, from defense to highways, are journalism’s genuine due. The BBC provides a model of how that can be done without fear of government influence.

Indeed, Teachout’s proposed newspaper advertising monopoly is itself just a government subsidy, but a subsidy extracted through an advertising medium that harms consumers. Direct government subsidization achieves the same result, without the collateral consumer harm.

The press’s brazen advocacy of antitrust action against the tech giants, without making clear how much the press itself has to gain from that action, and the utter absence of any expert support for this approach, represents an abdication by the press of its responsibility to create an informed citizenry that is every bit as profound as the press’s lapses on social security a decade ago.

I’m glad we still have social security. But I’m also starting to miss balanced journalism.

1/3/2020: Editor’s note – this post was edited for clarification and minor copy edits.

[TOTM: The following is the fourth in a series of posts by TOTM guests and authors on the politicization of antitrust. The entire series of posts is available here.]

This post is authored by Valentin Mircea, a Senior Partner at Mircea and Partners Law Firm, Bucharest, Romania.

The enforcement of competition rules in the European Union is at historic heights. Competition enforcers at the European Commission seem to think that they have reached a point of perfect equilibrium, or perfection in enforcement. “Everything we do is right,” they seem to say, because for decades no significant competition decision by the Commission has been annulled on substance. Meanwhile, the objectives of EU competition law multiply continuously, as DG Competition assumes more and more public policy objectives. Indeed, so wide is DG Competition’s remit that it has become a kind of government in itself, charged with many areas and facing several problems looking for a cure.

The consumer welfare standard is merely affirmed and rarely pursued in the enforcement of the EU competition rules, where even the abuse of dominance tends to be considered as a per se infringement, at least until the European Court of Justice had its say in Intel. It helps that this standard has been always of a secondary importance in the European Union, where the objective of market integration prevailed over time.

Now other issues are catching the eye of the European Commission and the easiest way to handle things such as the increasing power of the technology companies was to make use of the toolkit of the EU competition enforcement.  A technology giant such as Google has already been hit three times with significant fines; but beyond the transient glory of these decisions, nothing significant happened in the market, to other companies or to consumers. Or it did? I’m not sure and nobody seems to check or even care. But the impetus in investigating and applying fines on the technology companies is unshaken — and is likely to remain so at least until the European Court of Justice has its say in a new roster of cases, which will not happen very soon.

The EU competition rules look both over- and under-enforced. This seeming paradox is explained by the formalistic approach of the European Commission and its willingness to serve political purposes, often the result of lobbying from various industries.  In the European Union, competition enforcement increasingly resembles Swiss Army knife; it is good for quick fixes of various problems, while not solving entirely any of them. 

The pursuit of political goals is not necessarily bad in itself; it seems obvious that competition enforcers should listen to the worries of the societies in which they live. Once objectives such as welfare seem to have been attained, it is thus not entirely surprising that enforcement should move towards fixing other societal problems. Take the case of the antitrust laws in the United States, the enactment of which was not determined by an overwhelming concern for consumer welfare or economic efficiency but by powerful lobbies that convinced Congress to act as a referee for their long-lasting disputes with different industries.  In spite of this not-so-glorious origin, the resultant antitrust rules have generated many benefits throughout the world and are an essential part of the efforts to keep markets competitive and ensure a level-playing field. So, why worry that the European Commission – and, more recently, even certain national competition authorities (such as Germany) – have developed a tendency to use powerful competition rules to make order in other areas, where the public opinion, irrespective if it is or not aware of the real causes of concern, requires it?

But in fact, what is happening today is bad and is setting precedents never seen before.  The speed at which new fronts are being opened, where the enforcement of the EU competition rules is an essential part of the weaponry, gives rise to two main areas of concern.

First, EU competition enforcers are generally ill-equipped to address sensitive technical issues that even big experts in the field do not understand properly, such as the use of the Big Data (a vague concept itself, open to various interpretations).  While creating a different set of rules and a new toolkit for the digital economy does not seem to be warranted (debates are still raging on this subject), a dose of humility as to the right level of knowledge required for a proper understanding of the interactions and for proper enforcement, would be most welcome.  Venturing into territories where conventional economics does not apply to its full extent, such as the absence of a price, an essential element of competition, requires a prudent and diligent enforcer to hold back, advance cautiously, and act only where deemed necessary, in an appropriate and proportionate way. So doing is more likely to have an observably beneficial impact, in contrast to the illusory glory of simply confronting the tech giants.

Second, given the limited resources of the European Commission and the national competition authorities in the Member States, exaggerated attention to cases in the technology and digital economy sectors will result in less enforcement in the traditional economy, where cartels and other harmful behaviors still happen, with often more visible negative effects on consumers and the economy. It is no longer fashionable to tackle such cases, as they do not draw the same attention from the media and their outcomes are not likely to create the same fame to the EU competition enforcers.

More recently, in an interesting move, the new European Commission unified the competition and the digital economy portfolios under the astute supervision of commissioner Margrethe Vestager. Beyond the anomaly to put together ex-ante and ex-post powers, the move signals an even larger propensity towards using competition enforcement tools in order to investigate and try to rein in the power of the behemoths of the digital economy.  The change is a powerful political message that EU competition enforcement will be even more prone to cases and decisions motivated by the pursuit of various public policy goals.

I am not saying that the approach taken by the EU competition enforcers has no chance of generating benefits for European consumers. But I am worried that moving ahead with the same determination and with the same limited expertise of the case handlers as has so far been demonstrated, is unlikely to deliver such a beneficial outcome. Moreover, contrary to the stated intention of the policy, it is likely to chill further the prospects for EU technology ventures. 

Last but not least, courageous enforcement of EU competition rules is not a panacea for the unwanted effects on the evidentiary tier, which might put in danger the credibility of this enforcement, its most valuable feature. Indeed, EU competition enforcement may be at its heights but there is no certainty that it won’t fall from there — and falling could be as spectacular as the cases which made the European Commission get to this point. I thus advocate for DG Competition to be wise and humble, to take one step at a time, to acknowledge that markets are generally able to self-correct, and to remember that the history of the economy is little more than a cemetery of forgotten giants that were once assumed to be unshakeable and unstoppable.

[TOTM: The following is the first in a series of posts by TOTM guests and authors on the politicization of antitrust. The entire series of posts is available here.]

This post is authored by Steven J. Cernak, Partner at Bona Law and Adjunct Professor, University of Michigan Law School and Western Michigan University Thomas M. Cooley Law School. This paper represents the current views of the author alone and not necessarily the views of any past, present or future employer or client.

When some antitrust practitioners hear “the politicization of antitrust,” they cringe while imagining, say, merger approval hanging on the size of the bribe or closeness of the connection with the right politician.  Even a more benign interpretation of the phrase “politicization of antitrust” might drive some antitrust technocrats up the wall:  “Why must the mainstream media and, heaven forbid, politicians start weighing in on what antitrust interpretations, policy and law should be?  Don’t they know that we have it all figured out and, if we decide it needs any tweaks, we’ll make those over drinks at the ABA Antitrust Section Spring Meeting?”

While I agree with the reaction to the cringe-worthy interpretation of “politicization,” I think members of the antitrust community should not be surprised or hostile to the second interpretation, that is, all the new attention from new people.  Such attention is not unusual historically; more importantly, it provides an opportunity to explain the benefits and limits of antitrust enforcement and the competitive process it is meant to protect. 

The Sherman Act itself, along with its state-level predecessors, was the product of a political reaction to perceived problems of the late 19^th Century – hence all of today’s references to a “new gilded age” as echoes of the political arguments of 1890.  Since then, the Sherman Act has not been immutable.  The U.S. antitrust laws have changed – and new antitrust enforcers have even been added – when the political debates convinced enough that change was necessary.  Today’s political discussion could be surprising to so many members of the antitrust community because they were not even alive when the last major change was debated and passed. 

More generally, the U.S. political position on other government regulation of – or intervention or participation in – free markets has varied considerably over the years.  While controversial when they were passed, we now take Medicare and Medicaid for granted and debate “Medicare for all” – why shouldn’t an overhaul of the Sherman Act also be a legitimate political discussion?  The Interstate Commerce Commission might be gone and forgotten but at one time it garnered political support to regulate the most powerful industries of the late 19^th and early 20^th Century – why should a debate on new ways to regulate today’s powerful industries be out of the question? 

So today’s antitrust practitioners should avoid the temptation to proclaim an “end of history” and that all antitrust policy questions have been asked and answered and instead, as some of us have been suggesting since at least the last election cycle, join the political debate.  But now, for those of us who are generally supportive of the U.S. antitrust status quo, the question is how? 

Some have been pushing back on the supposed evidence that a change in antitrust or other governmental policies is necessary.  For instance, in late 2015 the White House Council of Economic Advisers published a paper on increased concentration in many industries which others have used as evidence of a failure of antitrust law to protect competition.  Josh Wright has used several platforms to point out that the industry measurement was too broad and the concentration level too low to be useful in these discussions.  Also, he reminded readers that concentration and levels of competition are different concepts that are not necessarily linked.  On questions surrounding inequality and stagnation of standards of living, Russ Roberts has produced a series of videos that try to explain why any such questions are difficult to answer with the easy numbers available and why, perhaps, it is not correct that “the rich got all the gains.” 

Others, like Dan Crane for instance, have advanced the debate by trying to get those commentators who are unhappy with the status quo to explain what they see as the problems and the proposed fixes.  While it might be too much to ask for unanimity among a diverse group of commentators, the debate might be more productive now that some more specific complaints and solutions have begun to emerge. 

Even if the problems are properly identified, we should not allow anyone to blithely assume that any – or any particular – increase in government oversight will solve it without creating different issues.  The Federal Trade Commission tackled this issue in its final hearing on Competition and Consumer Protection in the 21^st Century with a panel on Frank Easterbrook’s seminal “Limits of Antitrust” paper.  I was fortunate enough to be on that panel and tried to summarize the ongoing importance of “Limits,” and advance the broader debate, by encouraging those who would change antitrust policy and increase supervision of the market to have appropriate “regulatory humility” (a term borrowed from former FTC Chairman Maureen Ohlhausen) about what can be accomplished.

I identified three varieties of humility present in “Limits” and pertinent here.  First, there is the humility to recognize that mastering anything as complex as an economy or any significant industry will require knowledge of innumerable items, some unseen or poorly understood, and so could be impossible.  Here, Easterbrook echoes Friedrich Hayek’s “Pretense of Knowledge” Nobel acceptance speech. 

Second, there is the humility to recognize that any judge or enforcer, like any other human being, is subject to her own biases and predilections, whether based on experience or the institutional framework within which she works.  While market participants might not be perfect, great thinkers from Madison to Kovacic have recognized that “men (or any agency leaders) are not angels” either.  As Thibault Schrepel has explained, it would be “romantic” to assume that any newly-empowered government enforcer will always act in the best interest of her constituents. 

Finally, there is the humility to recognize that humanity has been around a long time and faced a number of issues and that we might learn something from how our predecessors reacted to what appear to be similar issues in history.  Given my personal history and current interests, I have focused on events from the automotive industry; however, the story of the unassailable power (until it wasn’t) of A&P and how it spawned the Robinson-Patman Act, ably told by Tim Muris and Jonathan Neuchterlein, might be more pertinent here.  So challenging those advocating for big changes to explain why they are so confident this time around can be useful. 

But while all those avenues of argument can be effective in explaining why greater government intervention in the form of new antitrust policies might be worse than the status quo, we also must do a better job at explaining why antitrust and the market forces it protects are actually good for society.  If democratic capitalism really has “lengthened the life span, made the elimination of poverty and famine thinkable, enlarged the range of human choice” as claimed by Michael Novak in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, we should do more to spread that good news. 

Maybe we need to spend more time telling and retelling the “I, Pencil” or “It’s a Wonderful Loaf” stories about how well markets can and do work at coordinating the self-interested behavior of many to the benefit of even more.  Then we can illustrate the limited role of antitrust in that complex effort – say, punishing any collusion among the mills or bakers in those two stories to ensure the process works as beautifully and simply displayed.  For the first time in decades, politicians and real people, like the consumers whose welfare we are supposed to be protecting, are paying attention to our wonderful world of antitrust.  We should seize the opportunity to explain what we do and why it matters and discuss if any improvements can be made.