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A Reflection on Commissioner Pai, Chairman Pai, and Public Service

Josh Wright —  21 January 2021

[TOTM: The following is part of a digital symposium by TOTM guests and authors on the legal and regulatory issues that arose during Ajit Pai’s tenure as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. The entire series of posts is available here.

Joshua D. Wright is university professor and executive director of the Global Antitrust Institute at George Mason University’s Scalia Law School. He served as a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission from 2013 through 2015.]

Much of this symposium celebrates Ajit’s contributions as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and his accomplishments and leadership in that role. And rightly so. But Commissioner Pai, not just Chairman Pai, should also be recognized.

I first met Ajit when we were both minority commissioners at our respective agencies: the FCC and Federal Trade Commission. Ajit had started several months before I was confirmed. I watched his performance in the minority with great admiration. He reached new heights when he shifted from minority commissioner to chairman, and the accolades he will receive for that work are quite appropriate. But I want to touch on his time as a minority commissioner at the FCC and how that should inform the retrospective of his tenure.

Let me not bury the lead: Ajit Pai has been, in my view, the most successful, impactful minority commissioner in the history of the modern regulatory state. And it is that success that has led him to become the most successful and impactful chairman, too.

I must admit all of this success makes me insanely jealous. My tenure as a minority commissioner ran in parallel with Ajit. We joked together about our fierce duel to be the reigning king of regulatory dissents. We worked together fighting against net neutrality. We compared notes on dissenting statements and opinions. I tried to win our friendly competition. I tried pretty hard. And I lost; worse than I care to admit. But we had fun. And I very much admired the combination of analytical rigor, clarity of exposition, and intellectual honesty in his work. Anyway, the jealousy would be all too much if he weren’t also a remarkable person and friend.

The life of a minority commissioner can be a frustrating one. Like Sisyphus, the minority commissioner often wakes up each day to roll the regulatory (well, in this case, deregulatory) boulder up the hill, only to watch it roll down. And then do it again. And again. At times, it is an exhausting series of jousting matches with the windmills of Washington bureaucracy. It is not often that a minority commissioner has as much success as Commissioner Pai did: dissenting opinions ultimately vindicated by judicial review; substantive victories on critical policy issues; paving the way for institutional and procedural reforms.

It is one thing to write a raging dissent about how the majority has lost all principles. Fire and brimstone come cheap when there aren’t too many consequences to what you have to say. Measure a man after he has been granted power and a chance to use it, and only then will you have a true test of character. Ajit passes that test like few in government ever have.

This is part of what makes Ajit Pai so impressive. I have seen his work firsthand. The multitude of successes Ajit achieved as Chairman Pai were predictable, precisely because Commissioner Pai told the world exactly where he stood on important telecommunications policy issues, the reasons why he stood there, and then, well, he did what he said he would. The Pai regime was much more like a Le’Veon Bell run, between the tackles, than a no-look pass from Patrick Mahomes to Tyreek Hill. Commissioner Pai shared his playbook with the world; he told us exactly where he was going to run the ball. And then Chairman Pai did exactly that. And neither bureaucratic red tape nor political pressure—or even physical threat—could stop him.

Here is a small sampling of his contributions, many of them building on groundwork he laid in the minority:

Focus on Economic Analysis

One of Chairman Pai’s most important contributions to the FCC is his work to systematically incorporate economic analysis into FCC decision-making. The triumph of this effort was establishing the Office of Economic Analysis (OEA) in 2018. The OEA focus on conducting economic analyses of the costs, benefits, and economic impacts of the commission’s proposed rules will be a critical part of agency decision-making from here on out. This act alone would form a legacy any agency head could easily rest their laurels on. The OEA’s work will shape the agency for decades and ensure that agency decisions are made with the oversight economics provides.

This is a hard thing to do; just hiring economists is not enough. Structure matters. How economists get information to decision-makers determines if it will be taken seriously. To this end, Ajit has taken all the lessons from what has made the economists at the FTC so successful—and the lessons from the structural failures at other agencies—and applied them at the FCC.

Structural independence looks like “involving economists on cross-functional teams at the outset and allowing the economics division to make its own, independent recommendations to decision-makers.”[1] And it is necessary for economics to be taken seriously within an agency structure. Ajit has assured that FCC decision-making will benefit from economic analysis for years to come.

Narrowing the Digital Divide

Chairman Pai made helping the disadvantaged get connected to the internet and narrowing the digital divide the top priorities during his tenure. And Commissioner Pai was fighting for this long before the pandemic started.

As businesses, schools, work, and even health care have moved online, the need to get Americans connected with high-speed broadband has never been greater. Under Pai’s leadership, the FCC has removed bureaucratic barriers[2] and provided billions in funding[3] to facilitate rural broadband buildout. We are talking about connections to some 700,000 rural homes and businesses in 45 states, many of whom are gaining access to high-speed internet for the first time.

Ajit has also made sure to keep an eye out for the little guy, and communities that have been historically left behind. Tribal communities,[4] particularly in the rural West, have been a keen focus of his, as he knows all-too-well the difficulties and increased costs associated with servicing those lands. He established programs to rebuild and expand networks in the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico[5] in an effort to bring the islands to parity with citizens living on the mainland.

You need not take my word for it; he really does talk about this all the time. As he said in a speech at the National Tribal Broadband Summit: “Since my first day in this job, I’ve said that closing the digital divide was my top priority. And as this audience knows all too well, nowhere is that divide more pronounced than on Tribal lands.“ That work is not done; it is beyond any one person. But Ajit should be recognized for his work bridging the divide and laying the foundation for future gains.

And again, this work started as minority commissioner. Before he was chairman, Pai proposed projects for rural broadband development; he frequently toured underserved states and communities; and he proposed legislation to offer the 21st century promise to economically depressed areas of the country. Looking at Chairman Pai is only half the picture.

Keeping Americans Connected

One would not think that the head of the Federal Communications Commission would be a leader on important health-care issues, but Ajit has made a real difference here too. One of his major initiatives has been the development of telemedicine solutions to expand access to care in critical communities.

Beyond encouraging buildout of networks in less-connected areas, Pai’s FCC has also worked to allocate funding for health-care providers and educational institutions who were navigating the transition to remote services. He ensured that health-care providers’ telecommunications and information services were funded. He worked with the U.S. Department of Education to direct funds for education stabilization and allowed schools to purchase additional bandwidth. And he granted temporary additional spectrum usage to broadband providers to meet the increased demand upon our nation’s networks. Oh, and his Keep Americans Connected Pledge gathered commitment from more than 800 companies to ensure that Americans would not lose their connectivity due to pandemic-related circumstances. As if the list were not long enough, Congress’ January coronavirus relief package will ensure that these and other programs, like Rip and Replace, will remain funded for the foreseeable future.

I might sound like I am beating a dead horse here, but the seeds of this, too, were laid in his work in the minority. Here he is describing his work in a 2015 interview, as a minority commissioner:

My own father is a physician in rural Kansas, and I remember him heading out in his car to visit the small towns that lay 40 miles or more from home. When he was there, he could provide care for people who would otherwise never see a specialist at all. I sometimes wonder, back in the 1970s and 1980s, how much easier it would have been on patients, and him, if broadband had been available so he could provide healthcare online.

Agency Transparency and Democratization

Many minority commissioners like to harp on agency transparency. Some take a different view when they are in charge. But Ajit made good on his complaints about agency transparency when he became Chairman Pai. He did this through circulating draft items well in advance of monthly open meetings, giving people the opportunity to know what the agency was voting on.

You used to need a direct connection with the FCC to even be aware of what orders were being discussed—the worst of the D.C. swamp—but now anyone can read about the working items, in clear language.

These moves toward a more transparent, accessible FCC dispel the impression that the agency is run by Washington insiders who are disconnected from the average person. The meetings may well be dry and technical—they really are—but Chairman Pai’s statements are not only good-natured and humorous, but informative and substantive. The public has been well-served by his efforts here.

Incentivizing Innovation and Next-Generation Technologies

Chairman Pai will be remembered for his encouragement of innovation. Under his chairmanship, the FCC discontinued rules that unnecessarily required carriers to maintain costly older, lower-speed networks and legacy voice services. It streamlined the discontinuance process for lower-speed services if the carrier is already providing higher-speed service or if no customers are using the service. It also okayed streamlined notice following force majeure events like hurricanes to encourage investment and deployment of newer, faster infrastructure and services following destruction of networks. The FCC also approved requests by companies to provide high-speed broadband through non-geostationary orbit satellite constellations and created a streamlined licensing process for small satellites to encourage faster deployment.

This is what happens when you get a tech nerd at the head of an agency he loves and cares for. A serious commitment to good policy with an eye toward the future.

Restoring Internet Freedom

This is a pretty sensitive one for me. You hear less about it now, other than some murmurs from the Biden administration about changing it, but the debate over net neutrality got nasty and apocalyptic.

It was everywhere; people saying Chairman Pai would end the internet as we know it. The whole web blacked out for a day in protest. People mocked up memes showing a 25 cent-per-Google-search charge. And as a result of this over-the-top rhetoric, my friend, and his family, received death threats.

That is truly beyond the pale. One could not blame anyone for leaving public service in such an environment. I cannot begin to imagine what I would have done in Ajit’s place. But Ajit took the threats on his life with grace and dignity, never lost his sense of humor, and continued to serve the public dutifully with remarkable courage. I think that says a lot about him. And the American public is lucky to have benefited from his leadership.

Now, for the policy stuff. Though it should go without saying, the light-touch framework Chairman Pai returned us to—as opposed to the public utility one—will ensure that the United States maintains its leading position on technological innovation in 5G networks and services. The fact that we have endured COVID—and the massive strain on the internet it has caused—with little to no noticeable impact on internet services is all the evidence you need he made the right choice. Ajit has rightfully earned the title of the “5G Chairman.”

Conclusion

I cannot give Ajit all the praise he truly deserves without sounding sycophantic, or bribed. There are any number of windows into his character, but one rises above the rest for me. And I wanted to take the extra time to thank Ajit for it.

Every year, without question, no matter what was going on—even as chairman—Ajit would come to my classes and talk to my students. At length. In detail. And about any subject they wished. He stayed until he answered all of their questions. If I didn’t politely shove him out of the class to let him go do his real job, I’m sure he would have stayed until the last student left. And if you know anything about how to judge a person’s character, that will tell you all you need to know. 

Congratulations, Chairman Pai.

[1] Jerry Ellig & Catherine Konieczny, The Organization of Economists in Regulatory Agencies: Does Structure Matter?

[2] Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, Fed. Commc’ns Comm’n, https://www.fcc.gov/auction/904.

[3] Press Release, Connect America Fund Auction to Expand Broadband to Over 700,000 Rural Homes and Businesses: Auction Allocates $1.488 Billion to Close the Digital Divide, Fed. Commc’ns Comm’n, https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-353840A1.pdf.

[4] Press Release, FCC Provides Relief for Carriers Serving Tribal Lands, Fed. Commc’ns Comm’n, https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-provides-relief-carriers-serving-tribal-lands.

[5] Press Release, FCC Approves $950 Million to Harden, Improve, and Expand Broadband Networks in Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands, Fed. Commc’ns Comm’n, https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-359891A1.pdf.

In Administrative Law, Broadband, COVID-19, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, Google, Health Care, Net Neutrality, Platforms, Regulation, Regulatory Reform, Retrospective on Ajit Pai’s Tenure as FCC Chairman, Symposia, Telecommunications, Truth on the Market, Twitter, Wireless , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Commentary: In the race for a COVID-19 vaccine, how do we balance risk and safety?

Thomas Hazlett —  28 October 2020
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[TOTM: The following is part of a blog series by TOTM guests and authors on the law, economics, and policy of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The entire series of posts is available here.

This post is authored by Thomas W. Hazlett, (Hugh H. Macaulay Endowed Professor of Economics, John E. Walker Department of Economics Clemson University)] 

(Ed. Note: the following is an excerpt from a piece published by the Chicago Tribune on Oct. 16, 2020. Click here to read the full piece)

No matter your Twitter feed, “vaccines have been one of the greatest public health tools to prevent disease,” as The New York Times explained in January…

Many are terrified that the Food and Drug Administration may hastily authorize injections into hundreds of millions. The FDA and drugmakers are trying to assuage such concerns with enhanced commitments to safety. Nonetheless, fears have been stoked by President Donald Trump’s infomercial-style endorsement of hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 remedy, his foolhardy disdain for face masks and campaign rally boasts of a preelection cure.

Yes, politics. But the opposing political push — the demand that new vaccines must be safe at all costs — is itself a dangerous meme, and the strange bedfellow of anti-vaxxer protesters.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Laurie Garrett inadvertently quantifies the problem. In a Sept. 3 article in Foreign Policy, she cited the H1N1 (swine flu) episode in 2009 as “the last mad rush to vaccinate.” Warning that those shots “caused Guillain-Barr (GBS) paralysis in … 6.2 per 10 million patients who received the vaccine,” she argues that phase 3 trials for COVID-19 vaccines, typically involving just 30,000 people, provide little protection. “There’s no way … we can spot a safety hazard that’s in 1 out of a million, much less 1 out of 10 million, vaccine recipients.” The “safety side,” she told a TV interviewer, “looks insane.”

But, in fact, the “insanity” here is not found in the push for speed or in Garrett’s skepticism about Operation Warp Speed. It lies in a lack of balance between the two. An insufficiently vetted vaccine may cost innocent lives, but so will delaying a vaccine that, on net, saves them…

When promising therapies appear, reducing time to market is often worth the risk — as reflected in a raft of pre-COVID-19 policies, including the FDA’s “emergency use authorizations,” “fast track” drug approvals and “compassionate use” permissions for experimental drugs. In phase 3 trials, independent monitors observe results, and trials may be terminated when pre-specified benefits appear. Patients in the control group become eligible for the treatment instead of the placebo. Larger samples would enhance scientific knowledge, but as probabilities shift regulators act on the reality that the ideal can become the enemy of the good.

Read the full piece at the Chicago Tribune.

In COVID-19, Platforms, Symposia, The Law, Economics, and Policy of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Truth on the Market, Twitter , , , , , ,
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Institutional weakness and the fight against Covid-19 in Peru

Oscar Súmar —  30 July 2020

[TOTM: The following is part of a blog series by TOTM guests and authors on the law, economics, and policy of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The entire series of posts is available here.

This post is authored by Oscar Súmar, Dean of the Law School of the Scientific University of the South (Peru)).]

Peru’s response to the pandemic has been one of the most radical in Latin America: Restrictions were imposed sooner, lasted longer and were among the strictest in the region. Peru went into lockdown on March 15 after only 71 cases had been reported.  Along with the usual restrictions (temporary restaurant and school closures), the Peruvian government took other measures such as bans on the use of private vehicles and the mandatory nightly curfews. For a time, there even were gender-based movement restrictions: men and women were allowed out on different days.

A few weeks into the lockdown, it became obvious that these measures were not flattening the curve of infections. But instead of reconsidering its strategy, the government insisted on the same path, with depressing results. Peru is one of the world’s worst hit countries by Covid-19, with 300k total cases by July 4th, 2020 and one of the countries with the highest “excess of deaths,” reaching 140%. Peru’s government has tried a rich country’s response, despite the fact that Peru lacks the institutions and wealth to make that possible.

The Peruvian response to coronavirus can be attributed to three factors. One, paternalism is popular in Peru and arguments for liberty are ignored. This is confirmed by the fact that President Vizcarra enjoys to this day a great deal of popularity thanks to this draconian lockdown even when the government has repeatedly blamed people’s negligence as the main cause of contagion. Two, government officials have socialistic tendencies. For instance, the Prime Minister – Mr. Zeballos – used to speak freely about price regulations and nationalization, even before the pandemic. And three, Peru’s health system is one of the worst in the region. It was foreseeable that our health system would be overwhelmed in the first few weeks, so our government decided to go into early lockdown.

Peru has also launched one of the most aggressive economic relief programs in the world, equivalent to 12% of its GDP. This program included a “universal bond” for poor families, as well as a loan program for small, medium and large businesses. The program was praised by the media around the world. Despite this programme, Peru has been one of the worst-hit countries in the world in economic terms. The World Bank predicts that Peru will be the country with the biggest GDP contraction in the region.

If anything, Peru played the crisis by the book. But Peru´s lack of strong, legitimate and honest institutions have made its policies ineffectual. Just few months prior to the beginning of the pandemic, President Vizcarra dissolved the Congress. And Peru has been engulfed in a far-reaching corruption scandal for years. Only two years ago, former president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski resigned the presidency being directly implicated in the scandal, and his vice president at the time, Martin Vizcarra, took over. Much of Peru’s political and business elite have also been implicated in this scandal, with members of the elite summoned daily to the criminal prosecutor’s office for questioning.

However, if we want to understand the lack of strong institutions in Peru – and how this affected our response to the pandemic – we need to go back even further. In the 1980s, after having lived through a socialist military dictatorship, a young candidate named Alan Garcia was democratically elected as president. But during Garcia´s presidency, Peru achieved a trillion-dollar foreign debt, record levels of inflation, and imposed price controls and nationalizations. Peru fought a losing war against an armed Marxist terrorist group. By 1990, Peru was on the edge of the abyss. In the 1990 presidential campaign, Peruvians had to decide between a celebrated libertarian intellectual with little political experience, the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, and Alberto Fujimori, a political “outsider” with rather unknown ideas but an aura of pragmatism over his head. We chose the latter.

Fujimori’s two main goals were to end domestic terrorism and to stabilize Peru’s ruined economy. This second task was achieved by following the Washington Consensus receipt: changing the Constitution after a self-inflicted coup d’état. The Consensus has been deemed as a “neoliberal” group of policies, but was really the product of a decades-long consensus among World Bank experts about policies that almost all mainstream economists favor. The policies included were privatization, deregulation, free trade, monetary stability, control over borrowing, and a focusing of public spending on health, education and infrastructure. A secondary part of the recommendations was aimed at institutional reform, poverty alleviation and the reform of tax and labor laws.

The implementation of the Consensus by Fujimori and subsequent governments was a mix of the actual “structural adjustments” recommended by the Bank and systemic over-regulation, mercantilism, and corruption. Every Peruvian president since 1990 is either currently being investigated or has been charged with corruption.

Although Peru’s GDP increased by more than 5% per year for several years since 1990, and poverty numbers have shrunk more than 50% in the last decade, other problems have remained. People have no access to decent healthcare; basic education in Peru is one of the worst in the world; and, more than half of the population does not have access to clean drinking water. Also, informality remains one of our biggest problems since the tax and labor reforms didn’t take place. Our tax base is very small, and our labor legislation is among the costliest in Latin America.

In Peruvian eyes, this is what “neoliberalism” looks like. Peru was good at implementing many of the high-level reforms, but not the detailed and complex institutional ones. The Consensus assumed the coexistence of free market institutions and measures of social assistance. Peru had some of these, but not enough. Even the reforms that did take place weren´t legitimate or part of our actual social consensus.

Taking advantage of people´s discontent, now, some leftist politicians, journalists, academics and activists want nothing more than to return to our previous interventionist Constitution and to socialism. Peruvian people are crying out for change. If the current situation is partially explained by our implementation of the Washington Consensus and that Consensus is deemed “neoliberal”, it´s no surprise that “change” is understood as going back to a more interventionist regime. Our current situation could be seen as the result of people demanding more government intervention, with the government and Congress simply meeting that demand, with no institutional framework to resist this.

The health crisis we are currently experiencing highlights the cost of Peru’s lack of strong institutions. Peru had one of the most ill-prepared public healthcare systems in the World at the beginning of the pandemic, with just 100 intensive care units. But there is virtually no private alternative, because that is so heavily regulated, and what exists is mostly the preserve of the elite. So, instead of working to improve the public system or promote more competition in the private sector, the government threatened clinics with a takeover.

The Peruvian government was unable to deliver policies that matched the real conditions of its population. We have, in effect, the lockdown of a rich country with few of the conditions that have allowed them to work. Inner-city poverty and a large informal economy (at an estimated 70% of Peru’s economy) made the lockdown a health and economic trap for the majority of the population (this study of Norma Loayza is very illustrative).

Incapable of facing the truth about Peru’s ability to withstand a lockdown, government officials relied on regulation to try to reshape reality to their wishes. The result is 20-40 pages of “protocols” to be fulfilled by small companies, completely ignored by the informal 70% of the economy. In some cases, these regulations were obvious examples of rent-seeking as well. For example, only firms with 1 million soles (approximately 300,000 USD) in sales in the past year and with at least three physical branches were allowed to do business online during the lockdown.

Even after the lockdown has been officially terminated since July 1st, the government must approve every industry in order to operate again. At the same time, our Congress has passed legislation prohibiting toll collection (even when is a contractual agreement); it has criminalized “hoarding” and restated “speculation” as a felony crime; and a proposal to freeze all financial debts. Some economic commentators argue that in Peru the “populist virus” is even worse than Covid-19. Peru’s failure in dealing with the virus must be understood in light of its long history of interventionist governments that have let economic sclerosis set in through overregulation and done little to build up the kinds of institutions that would allow a pandemic response that suits Peru to work. Our lack of strong institutions, confidence in the market economy, and human capital in the public sector has put us in an extremely fragile position to fight the virus.

In COVID-19, Platforms, Symposia, The Law, Economics, and Policy of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Truth on the Market, Twitter , , , , , ,
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Would You Rather: Merger or Nationalization?

Eric Fruits —  1 June 2020

[TOTM: The following is part of a blog series by TOTM guests and authors on the law, economics, and policy of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The entire series of posts is available here.

This post is authored by Eric Fruits, (Chief Economist, International Center for Law & Economics).]

While much of the world of competition policy has focused on mergers in the COVID-19 era. Some observers see mergers as one way of saving distressed but valuable firms. Others have called for a merger moratorium out of fear that more mergers will lead to increased concentration and market power. In the meantime, there has been a growing push for increased nationalization of a wide range of businesses and industries.

In most cases, the call for a government takeover is not a reaction to the public health and economic crises associated with coronavirus. Instead, COVID-19 is a convenient excuse to pursue long sought after policies.

Last year, well before the pandemic, New York mayor Bill de Blasio called for a government takeover of electrical grid operator ConEd because he was upset over blackouts during a heatwave. Earlier that year, he threatened to confiscate housing units from private landlords, “we will seize their buildings, and we will put them in the hands of a community nonprofit that will treat tenants with the respect they deserve.”

With that sort of track record, it should come as no surprise the mayor proposed a government takeover of key industries to address COVID-19: “This is a case for a nationalization, literally a nationalization, of crucial factories and industries that could produce the medical supplies to prepare this country for what we need.” Dana Brown, director of The Next System Project at The Democracy Collaborative, agrees, “We should nationalize what remains of the American vaccine industry now, thereby assuring that any coronavirus vaccines produced can be made as widely available and as inexpensive soon as possible.” 

Dan Sullivan in the American Prospect suggests the U.S. should nationalize all the airlines. Some have gone so far as calling for nationalization of the U.S. oil industry.

On the one hand, it’s clear that de Blasio and Brown have no confidence in the price system to efficiently allocate resources. Alternatively, they may have overconfidence in the political/bureaucratic system to efficiently, and “equitably,” distribute resources. On the other hand, as Daniel Takash points out in an earlier post, both pharmaceuticals and oil are relatively unpopular industries with many Americans, in which case the threat of a government takeover has a big dose of populist score settling:

Yet last year a Gallup poll found that of 25 major industries, the pharmaceutical industry was the most unpopular–trailing behind fossil fuels, lawyers, and even the federal government. 

In the early days of the pandemic, France’s finance minister Bruno Le Maire promised to protect “big French companies.” The minister identified a range of actions under consideration: “That can be done by recapitalization, that can be done by taking a stake, I can even use the term nationalization if necessary.” While he did not mention any specific companies, it’s been speculated Air France KLM may be a target.

The Italian government is expected to nationalize Alitalia soon. The airline has been in state administration since May 2017, and the Italian government will have 100% control of the airline by June. Last week, the German government took a 20% stake in Lufthansa, in what has been characterized as a “temporary partial nationalization.” In Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been coy about speculation that the government might nationalize Air Canada. 

Obviously, these takeovers have “bailout” written all over them, and bailouts have their own anticompetitive consequences that can be worse than those associated with mergers. For example, RyanAir announced it will contest the aid package for Lufthansa. RyanAir chief executive Michael O’Leary claims the aid will allow Lufthansa to “engage in below-cost selling” and make it harder for RyanAir and its rival low-cost carrier EasyJet to compete. 

There is also a bit of a “national champion” aspect to the takeovers. Each of the potential targets are (or were) considered their nation’s flagship airline. World Bank economists Tanja Goodwin and Georgiana Pop highlight the risk of nationalization harming competition: 

These [sic] should avoid rescuing firms that were already failing. …  But governments should also refrain from engaging in production or service delivery in industries that can be served by the private sector. The role of SOEs [state owned enterprises] should be assessed in order to ensure that bailout packages are not exclusively and unnecessarily favoring a dominant SOE.

To be sure, COVID-19 related mergers could raise the specter of increased market power post-pandemic. But, this risk must be balanced against the risks posed by a merger moratorium. These include the risk of widespread bankruptcies (that’s another post) and/or the possibility of nationalization of firms and industries. Either option can reduce competition which can bring harm to consumers, employees, and suppliers.

In Antitrust & Competition, COVID-19, Health Care, International Center for Law & Economics, Mergers & Acquisitions, Pharmaceuticals, Symposia, The Law, Economics, and Policy of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Truth on the Market , , , , , , ,
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We Need to Talk About Privacy Absolutism

Dirk Auer —  29 May 2020

[TOTM: The following is part of a blog series by TOTM guests and authors on the law, economics, and policy of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The entire series of posts is available here.

This post is authored by Dirk Auer, (Senior Researcher, Liege Competition & Innovation Institute; Senior Fellow, ICLE).]

Privacy absolutism is the misguided belief that protecting citizens’ privacy supersedes all other policy goals, especially economic ones. This is a mistake. Privacy is one value among many, not an end in itself. Unfortunately, the absolutist worldview has filtered into policymaking and is beginning to have very real consequences. Readers need look no further than contact tracing applications and the fight against Covid-19.

Covid-19 has presented the world with a privacy conundrum worthy of the big screen. In fact, it’s a plotline we’ve seen before. Moviegoers will recall that, in the wildly popular film “The Dark Knight”, Batman has to decide between preserving the privacy of Gotham’s citizens or resorting to mass surveillance in order to defeat the Joker. Ultimately, the caped crusader begrudgingly chooses the latter. Before the Covid-19 outbreak, this might have seemed like an unrealistic plot twist. Fast forward a couple of months, and it neatly illustrates the difficult decision that most western societies urgently need to make as they consider the use of contract tracing apps to fight Covid-19.

Contact tracing is often cited as one of the most promising tools to safely reopen Covid-19-hit economies. Unfortunately, its adoption has been severely undermined by a barrage of overblown privacy fears.

Take the contact tracing API and App co-developed by Apple and Google. While these firms’ efforts to rapidly introduce contact tracing tools are laudable, it is hard to shake the feeling that they have been holding back slightly. 

In an overt attempt to protect users’ privacy, Apple and Google’s joint offering does not collect any location data (a move that has irked some states). Similarly, both firms have repeatedly stressed that users will have to opt-in to their contact tracing solution (as opposed to the API functioning by default). And, of course, all the data will be anonymous – even for healthcare authorities. 

This is a missed opportunity. Google and Apple’s networks include billions of devices. That puts them in a unique position to rapidly achieve the scale required to successfully enable the tracing of Covid-19 infections. Contact tracing applications need to reach a critical mass of users to be effective. For instance, some experts have argued that an adoption rate of at least 60% is necessary. Unfortunately, existing apps – notably in Singapore, Australia, Norway and Iceland – have struggled to get anywhere near this number. Forcing users to opt-out of Google and Apple’s services could go a long way towards inverting this trend. Businesses could also boost these numbers by making them mandatory for their employees and consumers.

However, it is hard to blame Google or Apple for not pushing the envelope a little bit further. For the best part of a decade, they and other firms have repeatedly faced specious accusations of “surveillance capitalism”. This has notably resulted in heavy-handed regulation (including the GDPR, in the EU, and the CCPA, in California), as well as significant fines and settlements. 

Those chickens have now come home to roost. The firms that are probably best-placed to implement an effective contact tracing solution simply cannot afford the privacy-related risks. This includes the risk associated with violating existing privacy law, but also potential reputational consequences. 

Matters have also been exacerbated by the overly cautious stance of many western governments, as well as their citizens: 

  • The European Data Protection Board cautioned governments and private sector actors to anonymize location data collected via contact tracing apps. The European Parliament made similar pronouncements.
  • A group of Democratic Senators pushed back against Apple and Google’s contact tracing solution, notably due to privacy considerations.
  • And public support for contact tracing is also critically low. Surveys in the US show that contact tracing is significantly less popular than more restrictive policies, such as business and school closures. Similarly, polls in the UK suggest that between 52% and 62% of Britons would consider using contact tracing applications.
  • Belgium’s initial plans for a contact tracing application were struck down by its data protection authority on account that they did not comply with the GDPR.
  • Finally, across the globe, there has been pushback against so-called “centralized” tracing apps, notably due to privacy fears.

In short, the West’s insistence on maximizing privacy protection is holding back its efforts to combat the joint threats posed by Covid-19 and the unfolding economic recession. 

But contrary to the mass surveillance portrayed in the Dark Knight, the privacy risks entailed by contact tracing are for the most part negligible. State surveillance is hardly a prospect in western democracies. And the risk of data breaches is no greater here than with many other apps and services that we all use daily. To wit, password, email, and identity theft are still, by far, the most common targets for cyber attackers. Put differently, cyber criminals appear to be more interested in stealing assets that can be readily monetized, rather than location data that is almost worthless. This suggests that contact tracing applications, whether centralized or not, are unlikely to be an important target for cyberattackers.

The meagre risks entailed by contact tracing – regardless of how it is ultimately implemented – are thus a tiny price to pay if they enable some return to normalcy. At the time of writing, at least 5,8 million human beings have been infected with Covid-19, causing an estimated 358,000 deaths worldwide. Both Covid-19 and the measures destined to combat it have resulted in a collapse of the global economy – what the IMF has called “the worst economic downturn since the great depression”. Freedoms that the west had taken for granted have suddenly evaporated: the freedom to work, to travel, to see loved ones, etc. Can anyone honestly claim that is not worth temporarily sacrificing some privacy to partially regain these liberties?

More generally, it is not just contact tracing applications and the fight against Covid-19 that have suffered because of excessive privacy fears. The European GDPR offers another salient example. Whatever one thinks about the merits of privacy regulation, it is becoming increasingly clear that the EU overstepped the mark. For instance, an early empirical study found that the entry into force of the GDPR markedly decreased venture capital investments in Europe. Michal Gal aptly summarizes the implications of this emerging body of literature:

The price of data protection through the GDPR is much higher than previously recognized. The GDPR creates two main harmful effects on competition and innovation: it limits competition in data markets, creating more concentrated market structures and entrenching the market power of those who are already strong; and it limits data sharing between different data collectors, thereby preventing the realization of some data synergies which may lead to better data-based knowledge. […] The effects on competition and innovation identified may justify a reevaluation of the balance reached to ensure that overall welfare is increased. 

In short, just like the Dark Knight, policymakers, firms and citizens around the world need to think carefully about the tradeoff that exists between protecting privacy and other objectives, such as saving lives, promoting competition, and increasing innovation. As things stand, however, it seems that many have veered too far on the privacy end of the scale.

In Apple, COVID-19, Data Privacy & Security, European Union, Facebook, Google, International, Platforms, Symposia, The Law, Economics, and Policy of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Truth on the Market, United Kingdom , , , , , , , , ,
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Rebuilding Trust in Coronaworld

Julian Morris —  22 May 2020

[TOTM: The following is part of a blog series by TOTM guests and authors on the law, economics, and policy of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The entire series of posts is available here.

This post is authored by Julian Morris, (Director of Innovation Policy, ICLE).]

Governments are beginning to lift the lockdowns they imposed to slow the spread of COVID-19. That is a good thing. But simply lifting the restrictions won’t immediately take us back to normality. For that to happen requires a massive investment in mechanisms that will rebuild trust.

Prior to COVID-19, people implicitly trusted that travelling on public transit, working in an office, attending a ball game, or going to a shopping mall would not subject them to the risk of infection by a potentially deadly virus (or any other terrible eventuality). In the wake of the pandemic, this implicit trust is gone. Many people are afraid of COVID-19 and will require reassurance. While governments likely contributed significantly to the loss of trust, they are likely not in the best position to rebuild that trust. The onus is thus on businesses and civic organizations to provide reassurance and rebuild trust. This post outlines two ways businesses can contribute to this effort.

Lockdowns and the Trust Deficit

As the incidence of COVID-19 began to rise dramatically in March, governments across the world imposed “lockdowns.” These curfew-like arrangements have gone well beyond the limits on public gatherings and other “social distancing” strategies deployed during previous major pandemics such as the Spanish ‘flu of 1918-19. Indeed, they are among the most far-reaching restrictions ever imposed on human activity during peacetime. Hundreds of millions of people have been cooped up at home for nearly two months, allowed out only briefly each day for exercise or to buy groceries. Millions of those now at home have also lost their main source of income.

Governments are now finally beginning to remove some of the most severe of these restrictions, allowing more businesses to operate. As they do so, businesses are trying to figure out what the post-lockdown economy is going to look like: Will employees come back to work in offices? Will customers shop in stores, eat at restaurants, visit movie theatres, and use rideshares, taxis, planes, and public transit?

Many people are fearful about the consequences of going back to work. A recent IPSOS-MORI poll for the Washington Post found that 74 percent of American adults want policymakers to, “keep trying to slow the spread of the coronavirus, even if that means keeping many businesses closed,” while just 25 percent prefer to, “open up businesses and get the economy going again, even if that means more people would get the coronavirus.” Meanwhile, in a recent survey in the UK, the TUC union found that 40% of workers were worried about the prospects of returning to crowded workplaces.  

The loss of trust is likely in part be due to conditioning: for the past two months we have been told by all and sundry to avoid other people (except over Zoom). Governments likely contributed to this through their promotion of scary predictions that millions could die if people didn’t “stay home, stay safe.” Partly, however, it is a natural reaction to the perceived threat posed by COVID-19.

For the elderly and those with underlying conditions more likely to be adversely affected by COVID-19, such anxiety is understandable. But even many people less likely to become seriously ill or die from COVID-19 are worried. This is also not surprising: They may have heard horror stories of young, otherwise healthy people who ended up on a ventilator and either died or suffered permanent lung damage. Or perhaps they read about the mysterious effects COVID-19 can have on other organs, ranging from the intestines to the brain. Or they may have a more vulnerable person in our household and are worried about the possibility that we might infect them. Or, as I am sure is the case with many, they just don’t know—and this is their reaction to uncertainty (fueled, in part by the now-discredited predictions of doom).

Regardless of why a person fears COVID-19, the fact is that many do. And one thing common to all of them is a trust deficit. Given widespread uncertainty regarding who has the virus, how can one trust that the business one works, shops, or dines at provides a safe environment free of COVID-19? This even extends to friends and colleagues: how can one individual trust another individual they might encounter while at work or at play? And it applies also to the use of taxis and rideshares; how can riders and drivers trust one another?

It might be argued that since governments were in no small part responsible for generating the trust deficit, through their well-intentioned but probably misguided efforts to lock down the economy and constant exhortations to avoid all human contact, they should now be trying to do what they can to rebuild trust. Unfortunately, however, they may not be in a very good position to do that. While governments are quite good at scaring people (“I’m from the government and I’m here to help”), they are less good at providing reassurance (“I’m from the government and I’m here to help”), or even data. In other words, governments aren’t much good at engaging in the kinds of “costly signalling” necessary to build trust between individuals and businesses. As a result, much of the responsibility for rebuilding trust will fall on businesses and civic organizations.

Businesses can do several things that would likely reduce this trust deficit and allay the fears of employees and customers. First, they can establish, communicate, and implement clear standards for employees and customers regarding the practices to be adopted to reduce infection risk. Second, and relatedly, where employees are likely to be working in close quarters with one another or with customers or suppliers, they can adopt mechanisms to establish the COVID-19 status of those employees, suppliers and customers (somewhat along the lines of the system implemented by Taiwan in February and subsequently elaborated by Hal Singer in his post in this series here). 

The following sections briefly consider how such systems might work.

CV19 Standards

Companies that have not been locked down are already implementing processes to limit the exposure of employees to potentially infected customers, suppliers, and other employees. For example, many supermarkets require staff to use masks and/or protective screens and gloves. Some stores also require customers to wear masks, limit how many people can be in the store, and impose distancing rules. Some have even built seemingly permanent screens in front of check-out clerks and imposed seemingly permanent rules for in-store movement.  Other stores and restaurants are currently limiting service to take-out and delivery.

At present, the approaches taken by businesses vary considerably. There is nothing inherently wrong with this; indeed, it is a healthy part of a market process in which companies develop different solutions to the same problem and allow consumers to pick and choose the ones that work best for them. Consumers can be aided in this process by reading reviews and ratings provided by other consumers; that model has worked well for goods and services purchased online. As Paul Seabright has noted, these systems are designed to enable users to build trusting relationships with suppliers. Survey data suggest that consumers find such systems more trustworthy than government regulations.

But when consumers are not well placed to evaluate the most effective solution, for example because it is difficult to observe the effectiveness of the solution directly, it can be helpful for third parties to evaluate the various solutions and either rank them or set out voluntary pass-fail standards. COVID-19 is just such a case: individual consumers and employees are unlikely to be in a good position to evaluate the relative effectiveness of different processes and technologies designed to limit the transmission of SARS-CoV-2. As such, pass-fail standards developed and/or validated by credible, independent third parties are likely to be the most effective way to help rebuild trust.

Standards will vary depending on the type of establishment and activity. For some businesses, such as theatres, gyms, and mass transit systems, the standards will likely be more onerous than others. Plausibly, such establishments could reduce transmission through such things as: mandatory masks, mandatory use of antiviral hand sanitizer on entry, regular cleaning, the use of HEPA filters (which remove the droplets on which the virus is spread), and other technologies. But given the very close proximity of people in such systems, often for extended periods (half an hour or more), the risk of significant viral load being transferred from one person to another, even if wearing basic masks, remains.

For standards to be effective as a means of regaining the trust of employees, suppliers, and consumers, it is important that they are communicated effectively through marketing campaigns, likely including advertising and signage. Standards will also likely change over time as understanding of the way the virus is transmitted, technologies that can prevent transmission, and hence best practices improve. The need for such standards will also likely change over time and once the virus is no longer a major threat there should be no need for such standards. For these reasons, standards should be both voluntary and developed privately. However, governments can play a role in encouraging the adoption of such standards by legislating that organizations that are compliant with a recognized standard will not be liable if an infection occurs on their property or through the actions of their employees.

In addition to other practices designed to reduce transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, some businesses have begun testing employees for the virus, to determine who is and who is not currently infected, so that infected individuals can be isolated until they are no longer infectious (employees who are required to isolate continue to receive their salary). Some businesses are also considering testing for antibodies to the virus, to determine who has had the virus and likely has some immunity. By doing such testing, businesses are probably reducing transmission both among employees and between employees and customers to a greater extent than by merely implementing technologies, hygiene and distancing rules. But the tests are not perfect and given the potential for infection outside work, it is possible that an employee who tests negative on one day could then become infected and be infective a few days later. While daily testing might be an option for some firms, it is unrealistic for most—and will not solve the trust problem for most individuals.

CV19 Status Verification

This brings us to the second major thing that business can do to reduce the trust gap: status verification. The idea here is to enable parties to ascertain one another’s current COVID-19 status without the need to resort to constant testing. One possible approach is to use a smartphone-based app that combines various pieces of information (time stamped virus tests and antibody tests, anonymized information about contacts with people who subsequently tested positive, and self-reported health-relevant data) to offer the most accurate and up-to-date status of an individual.

In principle, such a status app could be used by employers to minimize the likelihood that their staff have COVID (and to require those that may be infected to self-isolate and obtain a test). But their potential application is far wider:

·       Universities, churches, theatres, restaurants, bars, and events might utilize the status app not only for employees but also to determine who may participate and/or what forms of PPE they should utilize and/or where participants may congregate.

·       Airlines might utilize status apps to determine who might fly and where passengers should be seated.

·       Jurisdictions might utilize status apps as a means of facilitating more rapid immigration – and to enable those who most likely do not have COVID-19 to avoid most quarantine requirements.

·       Public transit systems might utilize status apps to determine who can use the system.

·       Taxis and ridesharing services, such as Uber and Lyft, might utilize data from the status app to help match riders and drivers.

·       Personal services facilitators such as Thumbtack might utilize the app to help match service providers and customers.

·       Hotels, AirBnB and vacation rental facilitators such as vrbo might use status apps for both hosts (and their employees and contractors) and guests in order to minimize infection risk during a visit.

·       Online dating and matchmaking services such as Match and Tinder might utilize status apps to help facilitate virus-compatible matches. (While SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 is not really comparable to HIV/AIDS, it is noteworthy that sites already exist that seek to match people who are HIV positive.)

How a CV19 Status App might Work

A basic schema for a CV19 status app would be:

·       Red = Has COVID-19 (e.g. recently tested positive for virus)

·       Red-Amber = May have COVID-19 (e.g. recently tested negative for virus but either has COVID-19 related symptoms or has been in contact with someone who tested positive).

·       Amber = Is susceptible: Has not had COVID-19 and likely does not have COVID-19 (e.g. recently tested negative for COVID-19, has no COVID-19 symptoms, and has had no recent known contact with someone who tested positive).

·       Green = Has had COVID-19 and is now presumed to be immune (either tested positive for CV19 and then tested negative for CV19, or tested negative for CV19 and also tested positive for Antibodies) (See below regarding immunity concerns.)

This schema is shown in the decision tree below

There are numerous technical issues relating to the operation of an app designed to establish a person’s CV19 status that must be addressed for it to function effectively. First, it will be necessary to ensure that the person using the app is the person whose status is being asserted. It should be possible to address this by storing the information from tests, contacts with infected people, and self-reported symptoms on an immutable digital ledger and use biometric identification both to record and to share status information. (Storing the status information on a person’s phone in this way also avoids the risk of hacking that plagues centralized databases.)

Next there is the question of authenticating test data recorded by the app. Ideally, this would be done by having a trusted third party—such as a doctor, nurse, or pharmacist—verify the data. If that is not feasible—for example because the test was carried out at home—then some other mechanism will be required to ensure the data is input correctly, such as rewards for accurate self-reports and/or penalties for inaccurate self-reports. (Self-reported data could also be treated within the system as less reliable, or simply as tentative—requiring verified test data to be added within a specified period.)

Beyond these verification issues, there remain problems with the specificity and sensitivity of tests—implying a likelihood of both false positive and false negatives. Although there are now both PCR and antibody tests that achieve very high levels of accuracy, even small numbers of false negative PCR tests and false positive antibody tests would clearly create problems for the effective functioning of the status app system. To address these problems, it may be necessary to undertake secondary testing for some portion of the tests.

The more challenging problem is that of infection after tests are conducted. As noted above, this can in principle be mitigated—but not eliminated—by incorporating contact tracing and/or self-reporting of symptoms. Related to this is the possibility that having COVID-19 confers only limited immunity (as has been suggested in relation to some people who have seemingly become reinfected). This obviously poses problems for the notion of a “Green” status; if reinfection is possible, then Green clearly would not be a permanent designation and would require regular testing. The evidence remains ambiguous, with news of five US sailors who had COVID then tested negative twice subsequently having new symptoms and testing positive again; on the other hand, a recent study suggests that people who test positive after recovery do not have a live (infectious) version of the virus.

Contact tracing apps have been used successfully in several locations as part of a strategy for containing COVID-19. However, the only really successful implementations so far have been those in China, South Korea and Hong Kong, which had a mandatory component and were highly centralized. By contrast, apps that required voluntary uptake have generally been less successful.

One reason for the lack of success of voluntary contact tracing apps is heightened concern regarding privacy (for example, the app used in Hong Kong enables anyone to find the gender, age, and precise locations of every person in the city who currently has COVID-19). Of course it is worth repeating Jane Bambauer’s observation in an earlier post that “Objections to surveillance lose their moral and logical bearings when the alternatives are out-of-control disease or mass lockdowns. Compared to those, mass surveillance is the most liberty-preserving option.” But assuming imprisonment is not the only alternative, concerns over privacy are not necessarily unmoored from logic or ethics (pace Christine Wilson’s earlier post). And to address these concerns, several groups have developed privacy-protecting systems. For example, the TCN coalition developed a system that shares anonymized tokens with other nearby phones over Bluetooth Low Energy. That system has now been adopted by Google and Apple in an API that is being made available to government health authorities (but not to other private app developers).

Another reason voluntary contact tracing apps have not been successful is the lack of incentives to adopt them. The main benefit of a contact tracing app is that it notifies the user when they have been in close contact with someone who subsequently tested positive. Logically, the people most likely voluntarily to adopt a contact tracing app are those who are most risk averse. But those people would also presumably be taking strong measures to avoid contracting COVID-19, so they would be less likely to become infected. By contrast, the people most likely to become infected are those who are least risk averse. But those people are least likely to be motivated to use the contact tracing app. In other words, even if there is relatively wide uptake of the app (say, 40% of the population, as in Iceland), it is likely to miss many of the people most likely to be spreading COVID-19 and so would not actually be very useful as a means of identifying and containing clusters.

Tying the contact tracing app to a CV19 Status App potentially overcomes this incentive compatibility problem, since anyone who wants to engage in an activity that requires use of the app would automatically participate in the contact tracing system. It could thus be quite effective at identifying instances of transmission that occur during activities that require the app to be used, which would also presumably be activities that put users at higher risk.

Nonetheless, for the app to be useful as a means of identifying clusters of COVID-19, either a significant proportion of common activities would have to require use of the app (e.g. public transit, rideshares, gyms, and shopping malls) or it would have to be used by at least some proportion of those not required to use it for access to activities.  

Adding a symptom monitoring component can help in two ways. First, by offering users a way to self-assess for early symptoms of COVID-19, it encourages more people to download and use the app.  More important, symptom monitoring can help identify additional potential COVID-19 infections, both among the individuals reporting symptoms and among their contacts. Thus, the combination of test data, symptom data and contact tracing become the information determining a person’s current status in a manner that is more reliable than relying on any one datum.

It should be noted that even combining these data will not make the status app 100% accurate. Some people with COVID-19 will likely slip through as Green or Orange and others will likely inadvertently be infected as a result. But the number of such instances is likely to be small and certainly much lower than would be the case without the use of the app. Moreover, widespread use of the app should dramatically reduce the infection rate throughout the population, with benefits to all.     

Conclusions

Both CV19 standards and CV19 status verification offer potential means by which to address the trust deficit that has emerged in the context of the continuing COVID-19 pandemic. A company that adopts both solutions would likely dramatically reduce the chances of their employees, suppliers and customers contracting the virus on their premises. That would also likely reduce the company’s liability, which could be rewarded by insurance providers offering discounts. Indeed, one could envisage a greater role for insurance companies in designing or certifying the standards and the status app.

However, the real benefits of these systems come not from one or a few companies adopting them but from widespread adoption, which has the potential dramatically to reduce the transmission of the virus both now and in the future (should there be a second wave). This leads to something of a paradox: Governments could mandate adoption, but such an approach may be counterproductive for two reasons. First, much knowledge is dispersed and tacit, so it is generally better to allow private actors to determine which standards to adopt (lest an inferior standard be the subject of a mandate). Second, if companies are genuinely concerned to address the trust deficit, then they will be willing to invest in standards and to limit access though status apps — both of which entail costs. By contrast, if governments mandate the use of standards and apps, they would effectively prevent firms from engaging in such costly signalling, so would undermine at least part of the effectiveness of such tools as trust-generative.

In Antitrust & Competition, Apple, China, COVID-19, Google, International, Platforms, Symposia, The Law, Economics, and Policy of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Truth on the Market, Twitter, Tying, United Kingdom , , , , ,
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Uber/Grubhub: Pandemic Profiteering, Merger Moratoriums, and Rising Concentration … Or Not

Eric Fruits —  15 May 2020

[TOTM: The following is part of a blog series by TOTM guests and authors on the law, economics, and policy of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The entire series of posts is available here.

This post is authored by Eric Fruits, (Chief Economist, International Center for Law & Economics).]

Earlier this week, merger talks between Uber and food delivery service Grubhub surfaced. House Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David N. Cicilline quickly reacted to the news:

Americans are struggling to put food on the table, and locally owned businesses are doing everything possible to keep serving people in our communities, even under great duress. Uber is a notoriously predatory company that has long denied its drivers a living wage. Its attempt to acquire Grubhub—which has a history of exploiting local restaurants through deceptive tactics and extortionate fees—marks a new low in pandemic profiteering. We cannot allow these corporations to monopolize food delivery, especially amid a crisis that is rendering American families and local restaurants more dependent than ever on these very services. This deal underscores the urgency for a merger moratorium, which I and several of my colleagues have been urging our caucus to support.

Pandemic profiteering rolls nicely off the tongue, and we’re sure to see that phrase much more over the next year or so. 

Grubhub shares jumped 29% Tuesday, the day the merger talks came to light, shown in the figure below. The Wall Street Journal reports companies are considering a deal that would value Grubhub stock at around 1.9 Uber shares, or $60-65 dollars a share, based on Thursday’s price.

But is that “pandemic profiteering?”

After Amazon announced its intended acquisition of Whole Foods, the grocer’s stock price soared by 27%. Rep. Cicilline voiced some convoluted concerns about that merger, but said nothing about profiteering at the time. Different times, different messaging.

Rep. Cicilline and others have been calling for a merger moratorium during the pandemic and used the Uber/Grubhub announcement as Exhibit A in his indictment of merger activity.

A moratorium would make things much easier for regulators. No more fighting over relevant markets, no HHI calculations, no experts debating SSNIPs or GUPPIs, no worries over consumer welfare, no failing firm defenses. Just a clear, brightline “NO!”

Even before the pandemic, it was well known that the food delivery industry was due for a shakeout. NPR reports, even as the business is growing, none of the top food-delivery apps are turning a profit, with one analyst concluding consolidation was “inevitable.” Thus, even if a moratorium slowed or stopped the Uber/Grubhub merger, at some point a merger in the industry will happen and the U.S. antitrust authorities will have to evaluate it.

First, we have to ask, “What’s the relevant market?” The government has a history of defining relevant markets so narrowly that just about any merger can be challenged. For example, for the scuttled Whole Foods/Wild Oats merger, the FTC famously narrowed the market to “premium natural and organic supermarkets.” Surely, similar mental gymnastics will be used for any merger involving food delivery services.

While food delivery has grown in popularity over the past few years, delivery represents less than 10% of U.S. food service sales. While Rep. Cicilline may be correct that families and local restaurants are “more dependent than ever” on food delivery, delivery is only a small fraction of a large market. Even a monopoly of food delivery service would not confer market power on the restaurant and food service industry.

No reasonable person would claim an Uber/Grubhub merger would increase market power in the restaurant and food service industry. But, it might convey market power in the food delivery market. Much attention is paid to the “Big Four”–DoorDash, Grubhub, Uber Eats, and Postmates. But, these platform delivery services are part of the larger food service delivery market, of which platforms account for about half of the industry’s revenues. Pizza accounts for the largest share of restaurant-to-consumer delivery.

This raises the big question of what is the relevant market: Is it the entire food delivery sector, or just the platform-to-consumer sector? 

Based on the information in the figure below, defining the market narrowly would place an Uber/Grubhub merger squarely in the “presumed to be likely to enhance market power” category.

  • 2016 HHI: <3,175
  • 2018 HHI: <1,474
  • 2020 HHI: <2,249 pre-merger; <4,153 post-merger

Alternatively, defining the market to encompass all food delivery would cut the platforms’ shares roughly in half and the merger would be unlikely to harm competition, based on HHI. Choosing the relevant market is, well, relevant.

The Second Measure data suggests that concentration in the platform delivery sector decreased with the entry of Uber Eats, but subsequently increased with DoorDash’s rising share–which included the acquisition of Caviar from Square.

(NB: There seems to be a significant mismatch in the delivery revenue data. Statista reports platform delivery revenues increased by about 40% from 2018 to 2020, but Second Measure indicates revenues have more than doubled.) 

Geoffrey Manne, in an earlier post points out “while national concentration does appear to be increasing in some sectors of the economy, it’s not actually so clear that the same is true for local concentration — which is often the relevant antitrust market.” That may be the case here.

The figure below is a sample of platform delivery shares by city. I added data from an earlier study of 2017 shares. In all but two metro areas, Uber and Grubhub’s combined market share declined from 2017 to 2020. In Boston, the combined shares did not change and in Los Angeles, the combined shares increased by 1%.

(NB: There are some serious problems with this data, notably that it leaves out the restaurant-to-consumer sector and assumes the entire platform-to-consumer sector is comprised of only the “Big Four.”)

Platform-to-consumer delivery is a complex two-sided market in which the platforms link, and compete for, both restaurants and consumers. Platforms compete for restaurants, drivers, and consumers. Restaurants have a choice of using multiple platforms or entering into exclusive arrangements. Many drivers work for multiple platforms, and many consumers use multiple platforms. 

Fundamentally, the rise of platform-to-consumer is an evolution in vertical integration. Restaurants can choose to offer no delivery, use their own in-house delivery drivers, or use a third party delivery service. Every platform faces competition from in-house delivery, placing a limit on their ability to raise prices to restaurants and consumers.

The choice of delivery is not an either-or decision. For example, many pizza restaurants who have their own delivery drivers also use platform delivery service. Their own drivers may serve a limited geographic area, but the platforms allow the restaurant to expand its geographic reach, thereby increasing its sales. Even so, the platforms face competition from in-house delivery.

Mergers or other forms of shake out in the food delivery industry are inevitable. Mergers will raise important questions about relevant product and geographic markets as well as competition in two-sided markets. While there is a real risk of harm to restaurants, drivers, and consumers, there is also a real possibility of welfare enhancing efficiencies. These questions will never be addressed with an across-the-board merger moratorium.

In Amazon, Antitrust & Competition, COVID-19, Google, International Center for Law & Economics, Mergers & Acquisitions, Platforms, Symposia, The Law, Economics, and Policy of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Truth on the Market , , , , , , ,
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The Negative Externalities of Protecting Privacy

Kristian Stout —  7 May 2020

[TOTM: The following is part of a blog series by TOTM guests and authors on the law, economics, and policy of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The entire series of posts is available here.

This post is authored by Kristian Stout, (Associate Director, International Center for Law & Economics]

The public policy community’s infatuation with digital privacy has grown by leaps and bounds since the enactment of GDPR and the CCPA, but COVID-19 may leave the most enduring mark on the actual direction that privacy policy takes. As the pandemic and associated lockdowns first began, there were interesting discussions cropping up about the inevitable conflict between strong privacy fundamentalism and the pragmatic steps necessary to adequately trace the spread of infection. 

Axiomatic of this controversy is the Apple/Google contact tracing system, software developed for smartphones to assist with the identification of individuals and populations that have likely been in contact with the virus. The debate sparked by the Apple/Google proposal highlights what we miss when we treat “privacy” (however defined) as an end in itself, an end that must necessarily  trump other concerns. 

The Apple/Google contact tracing efforts

Apple/Google are doing yeoman’s work attempting to produce a useful contact tracing API given the headwinds of privacy advocacy they face. Apple’s webpage describing its new contact tracing system is a testament to the extent to which strong privacy protections are central to its efforts. Indeed, those privacy protections are in the very name of the service: “Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing” program. But, vitally, the utility of the Apple/Google API is ultimately a function of its efficacy as a tracing tool, not in how well it protects privacy.

Apple/Google — despite the complaints of some states — are rolling out their Covid-19-tracking services with notable limitations. Most prominently, the APIs will not allow collection of location data, and will only function when users explicitly opt-in. This last point is important because there is evidence that opt-in requirements, by their nature, tend to reduce the flow of information in a system, and when we are considering tracing solutions to an ongoing pandemic surely less information is not optimal. Further, all of the data collected through the API will be anonymized, preventing even healthcare authorities from identifying particular infected individuals.

These restrictions prevent the tool from being as effective as it could be, but it’s not clear how Apple/Google could do any better given the political climate. For years, the Big Tech firms have been villainized by privacy advocates that accuse them of spying on kids and cavalierly disregarding consumer privacy as they treat individuals’ data as just another business input. The problem with this approach is that, in the midst of a generational crisis, our best tools are being excluded from the fight. Which begs the question: perhaps we have privacy all wrong? 

Privacy is one value among many

The U.S. constitutional order explicitly protects our privacy as against state intrusion in order to guarantee, among other things, fair process and equal access to justice. But this strong presumption against state intrusion—far from establishing a fundamental or absolute right to privacy—only accounts for part of the privacy story. 

The Constitution’s limit is a recognition of the fact that we humans are highly social creatures and that privacy is one value among many. Properly conceived, privacy protections are themselves valuable only insofar as they protect other things we value. Jane Bambauer explored some of this in an earlier post where she characterized privacy as, at best, an “instrumental right” — that is a tool used to promote other desirable social goals such as “fairness, safety, and autonomy.”

Following from Jane’s insight, privacy — as an instrumental good — is something that can have both positive and negative externalities, and needs to be enlarged or attenuated as its ability to serve instrumental ends changes in different contexts. 

According to Jane:

There is a moral imperative to ignore even express lack of consent when withholding important information that puts others in danger. Just as many states affirmatively require doctors, therapists, teachers, and other fiduciaries to report certain risks even at the expense of their client’s and ward’s privacy …  this same logic applies at scale to the collection and analysis of data during a pandemic.

Indeed, dealing with externalities is one of the most common and powerful justifications for regulation, and an extreme form of “privacy libertarianism” —in the context of a pandemic — is likely to be, on net, harmful to society.

Which brings us back to efforts of Apple/Google. Even if those firms wanted to risk the ire of  privacy absolutists, it’s not clear that they could do so without incurring tremendous regulatory risk, uncertainty and a popular backlash. As statutory matters, the CCPA and the GDPR chill experimentation in the face of potentially crippling fines. While the FTC Act’s Section 5 prohibition on “unfair or deceptive” practices is open to interpretation in manners which could result in existentially damaging outcomes. Further, some polling suggests that the public appetite for contact tracing is not particularly high – though, as is often the case, such pro-privacy poll outcomes rarely give appropriate shrift to the tradeoff required.

As a general matter, it’s important to think about the value of individual privacy, and how best to optimally protect it. But privacy does not stand above all other values in all contexts. It is entirely reasonable to conclude that, in a time of emergency, if private firms can devise more effective solutions for mitigating the crisis, they should have more latitude to experiment. Knee-jerk preferences for an amorphous “right of privacy” should not be used to block those experiments.

Much as with the Cosmic Turtle, its tradeoffs all the way down. Most of the U.S. is in lockdown, and while we vigorously protect our privacy, we risk frustrating the creation of tools that could put a light at the end of the tunnel. We are, in effect, trading liberty and economic self-determination for privacy.

Once the worst of the Covid-19 crisis has passed — hastened possibly by the use of contact tracing programs — we can debate the proper use of private data in exigent circumstances. For the immediate future, we should instead be encouraging firms like Apple/Google to experiment with better ways to control the pandemic. 

In Apple, Constitutional Law, COVID-19, Data Privacy & Security, Facebook, Federal Trade Commission, Google, International Center for Law & Economics, Platforms, Section 5, Symposia, The Law, Economics, and Policy of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Truth on the Market, Twitter , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Amazon is Not Welcome in France. And That Reflects French Double Standards

Eline Chivot —  6 May 2020

[TOTM: The following is part of a blog series by TOTM guests and authors on the law, economics, and policy of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The entire series of posts is available here.

This post is authored by Eline Chivot, (Senior Policy Analyst, Center for Data Innovation, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.).]

As the COVID-19 outbreak led to the shutdown of many stores, e-commerce and brick-and-mortar shops have been stepping up efforts to facilitate online deliveries while ensuring their workers’ safety. Without online retail, lockdown conditions would have been less tolerable, and confinement measures less sustainable. Yet a recent French court’s ruling on Amazon seems to be a justification for making life more difficult for some of these businesses and more inconvenient for people by limiting consumer choice. But in a context that calls for as much support to economic activity and consumer welfare as possible, that makes little sense. In fact, the court’s decision is symptomatic of how countries use industrial policy to treat certain companies with double standards.

On April 24, Amazon lost its appeal of a French court order requiring the platform to stop delivering “non-essential items” until it evaluates workers’ risk of coronavirus exposure in its six French warehouses. The online retailer is now facing penalties of about 100,000 euros (about $110,000) per delivery, and was given 48 hours to reduce its warehouse activities and operations. 

But the complexity of logistics would make it difficult to adjust and limit deliveries to just “essential items.” Given the novelty of the situation, there were no official, precise, and pre-determined lists in place, nor was there clarity about who gets to decide, nor was there a common understanding of what customers would consider essential services or goods. As a result, Amazon temporarily closed its six French distribution centers, and is now shipping to its French customers from its warehouses in other European countries. If France wants to apply such measure for worker safety in this time of crisis, that’s clearly its right. But the requirement should apply to all online retailers equally, not just to the American company Amazon.

The court’s decision was made on the grounds that Amazon had not implemented sufficient safety measures for its workers. The turnaround last week of trade unions (who had initiated the complaints against Amazon and called for the shutdown of its facilities) and their proposition to “gradually” resume operations speak volume. Like many other companies, Amazon had  invested in additional safety measures for its employees during the crisis, distributed masks and gloves to its workers, had taken their temperatures before their shifts, had built testing capacity, and proactively decided to prioritize the delivery of essential goods. Like many other companies, Amazon had to rapidly cope with unprecedented circumstances it wasn’t prepared to handle, while having to juggle a surge in online orders during lockdowns and make do with some governments’ unclear guidance regarding safety measures.

But France has long prioritized worker welfare over broad economic welfare—which includes worker welfare, but also consumer welfare and economic growth. Yet, in this case, that prioritization seems to only apply to Amazon. French retailers like Fnac, Cdiscount, Spartoo, and La Redoute did not face the same degree of judicial scrutiny despite similar complaints about distribution centers. Nor did they have to restrict their deliveries to “essential goods.” But in France, it seems, what is good for French geese isn’t good for U.S. ganders. In fact, the real issue appears to be the French application of industrial policy.  According to a union representative of Fnac, this is about “preventing Amazon from gaining market share over French retailers during lockdown,” so that the latter can reap the benefits. Using the crisis as an excuse to restructure the French retail sector is certainly one creative application of industrial policy.

Moreover, by applying these restrictions (either just to Amazon or across all retailers who engage in e-commerce), the French government is deepening the economic crisis. The restrictions it has imposed on Amazon are likely to accentuate the losses many French small- and medium-sized companies are already facing because of the COVID-19 crisis, while also having longer-term negative consequences for its logistics network in France. Many such firms rely on Amazon’s platform to sell, ship, and develop their business, and now have to turn to more expensive delivery services. In addition, the reduction in activity by its distribution centers could force Amazon to furlough many of its 9,300 French workers.

According to the unions, Amazon’s activity is judged “nonessential to the life of the country.” Never mind that Amazon partners with French retailers like Casino and is rescuing brands like Deliveroo during the crisis. In addition, online companies like Amazon, HelloFresh and Instacart hired more workers to manage growing demands during the crisis, while others had to furlough or layoff their staff. Beyond, French brands will need economically robust allies like Amazon to compete with Chinese state-backed giants like Alibaba that are expanding their footprint in European markets, and that have come under fire for dubious workplace practices.  

Finally, the French court’s decision is an inconvenience to the 22.2 million people in France who order via Amazon, depend on efficient home deliveries to cope with strict confinement measures, and are now being told what is essential or not. With Amazon relying on other European warehouses for deliveries and being forced to limit them to items such as IT products, health and nutrition items, food, and pet food, consumers will be faced with delayed deliveries and reduced access to product variety. The court’s decision also hurts many French merchants who use Amazon for warehousing and fulfillment, as they are effectively locked out of accessing their stock. 

Non-discrimination is, or least should be, a core principle of rule-of-law nations. It appears that, at least in this case, France does not think it should apply to non-French firms.

In Amazon, China, COVID-19, International, International Trade, Platforms, Symposia, The Law, Economics, and Policy of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Truth on the Market , , , , , , , ,
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Let’s (NOT) Stop All the Mergers: The Case for Letting the Agencies Do Their Jobs

Noah J. Phillips —  5 May 2020

[TOTM: The following is part of a blog series by TOTM guests and authors on the law, economics, and policy of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The entire series of posts is available here.

This post is authored by Noah Phillips[1] (Commissioner of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission).]   

Never let a crisis go to waste, or so they say. In the past two weeks, some of the same people who sought to stop mergers and acquisitions during the bull market took the opportunity of the COVID-19 pandemic and the new bear market to call to ban M&A. On Friday, April 24th, Rep. David Cicilline proposed that a merger ban be included in the next COVID-19-related congressional legislative package.[2] By Monday, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, warning of “predatory” M&A and private equity “vultures”, teamed up with a similar proposal.[3] 

I’m all for stopping anticompetitive M&A that we cannot resolve. In the past few months alone, the Federal Trade Commission has been quite busy, suing to stop transactions in the hospital, e-cigarette, coal, body-worn camera, razor, and gene sequencing industries, and forcing deals to stop in the pharmaceutical, medical staffing, and consumer products spaces. But is a blanket ban, unprecedented in our nation’s history, warranted, now? 

The theory that the pandemic requires the government to shut down M&A goes something like this: the antitrust agencies are overwhelmed and cannot do the job of reviewing mergers under the Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) Act, which gives the U.S. antitrust agencies advance notice of certain transactions and 30 days to decide whether to seek more information about them.[4] That state of affairs will, in turn, invite a rush of companies looking to merge with minimal oversight, exacerbating the problem by flooding the premerger notification office (PNO) with new filings. Another version holds, along similar lines, that the precipitous decline in the market will precipitate a merger “wave” in which “dominant corporations” and “private equity vultures” will gobble up defenseless small businesses. Net result: anticompetitive transactions go unnoticed and unchallenged. That’s the theory, at least as it has been explained to me. The facts are different.

First, while the restrictions related to COVID-19 require serious adjustments at the antitrust agencies just as they do at workplaces across the country (we’re working from home, dealing with remote technology, and handling kids just like the rest), merger review continues. Since we started teleworking, the FTC has, among other things, challenged Altria’s $12.8 billion investment in JUUL’s e-cigarette business and resolved competitive concerns with GE’s sale of its biopharmaceutical business to Danaher and Ossur’s acquisition of a competing prosthetic limbs manufacturer, College Park. With our colleagues at the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, we announced a new e-filing system for HSR filings and temporarily suspended granting early termination. We sought voluntary extensions from companies. But, in less than two weeks, we were able to resume early termination—back to “new normal”, at least. I anticipate there may be additional challenges; and the FTC will assess constraints in real-time to deal with further disruptions. But we have not sacrificed the thoroughness of our investigations; and we will not.

Second, there is no evidence of a merger “wave”, or that the PNO is overwhelmed with HSR filings. To the contrary, according to Bloomberg, monthly M&A volume hit rock bottom in April – the lowest since 2004. As of last week, the PNO estimates nearly 60% reduction in HSR reported transactions during the past month, compared to the historical average. Press reports indicate that M&A activity is down dramatically because of the crisis. Xerox recently announced it was suspending its hostile bid for Hewlett-Packard ($30 billion); private equity firm Sycamore Partners announced it is walking away from its takeover of Victoria’s Secret ($525 million); and Boeing announced it is backing out of its merger with Embraer ($4.2 billion) — just a few examples of companies, large corporations and private equity firms alike, stopping M&A on their own. (The market is funny like that.)

Slowed M&A during a global pandemic and economic crisis is exactly what you would expect. The financial uncertainty facing companies lowers shareholder and board confidence to dive into a new acquisition or sale. Financing is harder to secure. Due diligence is postponed. Management meetings are cancelled. Agreeing on price is another big challenge. The volatility in stock prices makes valuation difficult, and lessens the value of equity used to acquire. Cash is needed elsewhere, like to pay workers and keep operations running. Lack of access to factories and other assets as a result of travel restrictions and stay-at-home orders similarly make valuation harder. Management can’t even get in a room to negotiate and hammer out the deal because of social distancing (driving a hard bargain on Zoom may not be the same).

Experience bears out those expectations. Consider our last bear market, the financial crisis that took place over a decade ago. Publicly available FTC data show the number of HSR reported transactions dropped off a cliff. During fiscal year 2009, the height of the crisis, HSR reported transactions were down nearly 70% compared to just two years earlier, in fiscal year 2007. Not surprising.

Source: https://www.ftc.gov/site-information/open-government/data-sets

Nor should it be surprising that the current crisis, with all its uncertainty and novelty, appears itself to be slowing down M&A.

So, the antitrust agencies are continuing merger review, and adjusting quickly to the new normal. M&A activity is down, dramatically, on its own. That makes the pandemic an odd excuse to stop M&A. Maybe the concern wasn’t really about the pandemic in the first place? The difference in perspective may depend on one’s general view of the value of M&A. If you think mergers are mostly (or all) bad, and you discount the importance of the market for corporate control, the cost to stopping them all is low. If you don’t, the cost is high.[5]

As a general matter, decades of research and experience tell us that the vast majority of mergers are either pro-competitive or competitively-neutral.[6] But M&A, even dramatically-reduced, also has an important role to play in a moment of economic adjustment. It helps allocate assets in an efficient manner, for example giving those with the wherewithal to operate resources (think companies, or plants) an opportunity that others may be unable to utilize. Consumers benefit if a merger leads to the delivery of products or services that one company could not efficiently provide on its own, and from the innovation and lower prices that better management and integration can provide. Workers benefit, too, as they remain employed by going concerns.[7] It serves no good, including for competition, to let companies that might live, die.[8]

M&A is not the only way in which market forces can help. The antitrust agencies have always recognized pro-competitive benefits to collaboration between competitors during times of crisis.  In 2005, after hurricanes Katrina and Rita, we implemented an expedited five-day review of joint projects between competitors aimed at relief and construction. In 2017, after hurricanes Harvey and Irma, we advised that hospitals could combine resources to meet the health care needs of affected communities and companies could combine distribution networks to ensure goods and services were available. Most recently, in response to the current COVID-19 emergency, we announced an expedited review process for joint ventures. Collaboration can be concerning, so we’re reviewing; but it can also help.

Our nation is going through an unprecedented national crisis, with a horrible economic component that is putting tens of millions out of work and causing a great deal of suffering. Now is a time of great uncertainty, tragedy, and loss; but also of continued hope and solidarity. While merger review is not the top-of-mind issue for many—and it shouldn’t be—American consumers stand to gain from pro-competitive mergers, during and after the current crisis. Those benefits would be wiped out with a draconian ‘no mergers’ policy during the COVID-19 emergency. Might there be anticompetitive merger activity? Of course, which is why FTC staff are working hard to vet potentially anticompetitive mergers and prevent harm to consumers. Let’s let them keep doing their jobs.

[1] The views expressed in this blog post are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Trade Commission or any other commissioner. An abbreviated version of this essay was previously published in the New York Times’ DealBook newsletter. Noah Phillips, The case against banning mergers, N.Y. Times, Apr. 27, 2020, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/business/dealbook/small-business-ppp-loans.html.

[2] The proposal would allow transactions only if a company is already in bankruptcy or is otherwise about to fail.

[3] The “Pandemic Anti-Monopoly Act” proposes a merger moratorium on (1) firms with over $100 million in revenue or market capitalization of over $100 million; (2) PE firms and hedge funds (or entities that are majority-owned by them); (3) businesses that have an exclusive patent on products related to the crisis, such as personal protective equipment; and (4) all HSR reportable transactions.

[4] Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976, 15 U.S.C. § 18a. The antitrust agencies can challenge transactions after they happen, but they are easier to stop beforehand; and Congress designed HSR to give us an opportunity to do so.

[5] Whatever your view, the point is that the COVID-19 crisis doesn’t make sense as a justification for banning M&A. If ban proponents oppose M&A generally, they should come out and say that. And they should level with the public about just how much they propose to ban. The specifics of the proposals are beyond the scope of this essay, but it’s worth noting that the “large companies [gobbling] up . . . small businesses” of which Sen. Warren warns include any firm with $100 million in annual revenue and anyone making a transaction reportable under HSR. $100 million seems like a lot of money to many of us, but the Ohio State University National Center for the Middle Market defines a mid-sized company as having annual revenues between $10 million and $1 billion. Many if not most of the transactions that would be banned look nothing like the kind of acquisitions ban proponents are describing.

[6] As far back as the 1980s, the Horizontal Merger Guidelines reflected this idea, stating: “While challenging competitively harmful mergers, the Department [of Justice Antitrust Division] seeks to avoid unnecessary interference with the larger universe of mergers that are either competitively beneficial or neutral.” Horizontal Merger Guidelines (1982); see also Hovenkamp, Appraising Merger Efficiencies, 24 Geo. Mason L. Rev. 703, 704 (2017) (“we tolerate most mergers because of a background, highly generalized belief that most—or at least many—do produce cost savings or improvements in products, services, or distribution”); Andrade, Mitchell & Stafford, New Evidence and Perspectives on Mergers, 15 J. ECON. PERSPECTIVES 103, 117 (2001) (“We are inclined to defend the traditional view that mergers improve efficiency and that the gains to shareholders at merger announcement accurately reflect improved expectations of future cash flow performance.”).

[7] Jointly with our colleagues at the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, we issued a statement last week affirming our commitment to enforcing the antitrust laws against those who seek to exploit the pandemic to engage in anticompetitive conduct in labor markets.

[8] The legal test to make such a showing for an anti-competitive transaction is high. Known as the “failing firm defense”, it is available only to firms that can demonstrate their fundamental inability to compete effectively in the future. The Horizontal Merger Guidelines set forth three elements to establish the defense: (1) the allegedly failing firm would be unable to meet its financial obligations in the near future; (2) it would not be able to reorganize successfully under Chapter 11; and (3) it has made unsuccessful good-faith efforts to elicit reasonable alternative offers that would keep its tangible and intangible assets in the relevant market and pose a less severe danger to competition than the actual merger. Horizontal Merger Guidelines § 11; see also Citizen Publ’g v. United States, 394 U.S. 131, 137-38 (1969). The proponent of the failing firm defense bears the burden to prove each element, and failure to prove a single element is fatal. In re Otto Bock, FTC No. 171-0231, Docket No. 9378 Commission Opinion (Nov. 2019) at 43; see also Citizen Publ’g, 394 U.S. at 138-39.

In Antitrust & Competition, Antitrust Division, Corporate & Securities Law, COVID-19, Federal Trade Commission, Financial Regulation, Health Care, Intellectual Property, Justice Department, Merger Guidelines, Mergers & Acquisitions, Patent, Pharmaceuticals, Symposia, The Law, Economics, and Policy of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Truth on the Market , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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There Aren’t Luddites in a Quarantine

William Eric Rinehart —  28 April 2020

[TOTM: The following is part of a blog series by TOTM guests and authors on the law, economics, and policy of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The entire series of posts is available here.

This post is authored by Will Rinehart, (Senior Research Fellow, Center for Growth and Opportunity).]

Nellie Bowles, a longtime critic of tech, recently had a change of heart about tech, which she relayed in the New York Times:

Before the coronavirus, there was something I used to worry about. It was called screen time. Perhaps you remember it.

I thought about it. I wrote about it. A lot. I would try different digital detoxes as if they were fad diets, each working for a week or two before I’d be back on that smooth glowing glass.

Now I have thrown off the shackles of screen-time guilt. My television is on. My computer is open. My phone is unlocked, glittering. I want to be covered in screens. If I had a virtual reality headset nearby, I would strap it on.

Bowles isn’t alone. The Washington Post recently documented how social distancing has caused people to “rethink of one of the great villains of modern technology: screens.” Matthew Yglesias of Vox has been critical of tech in the past as well, but recently admitted that these tools are “making our lives much better.” Cal Newport might have called for Twitter to be shut down, but now thinks the service can be useful. These anecdotes speak to a larger trend. According to one national poll, some 88 percent of Americans now have a better appreciation for technology since this pandemic has forced them to rely upon it. 

Before COVID-19, catchy headlines like “Heavy Social Media Use Linked With Mental Health Issues In Teens” and “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” were met with nods and approvals. These concerns found backing in legislation like Senator Josh Hawley’s “Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology Act” or SMART Act. The opening lines of the SMART Act make it clear the legislation would “prohibit social media companies from using practices that exploit human psychology or brain physiology to substantially impede freedom of choice, [and] to require social media companies to take measures to mitigate the risks of internet addiction and psychological exploitation.”  

Most psychologists steer clear of using the term addiction because it means a person engages in hazardous use, shows tolerance, and neglects social roles. Because social media, gaming, and cell phone use don’t meet this threshold, the profession tends to describe those who experience negative impacts as engaging in problematic use of the tech, which is only applied to a small minority. According to one estimate, for example, only half of a percent of gamers have patterns of problematic use. 

Even though tech use doesn’t meet the criteria for addiction, the term addiction finds purchase in policy discussions and media outlets because it suggests a healthier norm. Computer games have prosocial benefits, yet it is common to hear that the activity is no match for going outside to play. The same kind of argument exists with social media and phone use; face-to-face communication is preferred to tech-enabled communication. 

But the coronavirus has inverted the normal conditions. Social distancing doesn’t allow us to connect in person or play outside with friends. Faced with no other alternative, technology has been embraced. Videoconferencing is up, as is social media use. This new norm has  brought with it a needed rethink of critiques of tech. Even before this moment, however, the research on tech effects has had its problems.    

To begin, even though it has been researched extensively, screen time and social media use aren’t shown to clearly cause harm. Earlier this year, psychologists Candice Odgers and Michaeline Jensen conducted a massive literature review and summarized the research as “a mix of often conflicting small positive, negative and null associations.” The researchers also point out that studies finding a negative relationship between well-being and tech use tend to be correlational, not causational, and thus are “unlikely to be of clinical or practical significance” to parents or therapists.  

Through no fault of their own, researchers tend to focus a limited number of relationships when it comes to tech use. But professors Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski were able to sidestep these problems by getting computers to test every theoretically defensible hypothesis. In a writeup appropriately titled “Beyond Cherry-Picking,” the duo explained why this method is important to policy makers:

Although statistical significance is often used as an indicator that findings are practically significant, the paper moves beyond this surrogate to put its findings in a real-world context.  In one dataset, for example, the negative effect of wearing glasses on adolescent well-being is significantly higher than that of social media use. Yet policymakers are currently not contemplating pumping billions into interventions that aim to decrease the use of glasses.

Their academic paper throws cold water on the screen time and tech use debate. Since social media explains only 0.4% of the variation in well-being, much greater welfare gains can be made by concentrating on other policy issues. For example, regularly eating breakfast, getting enough sleep, and avoiding marijuana use play much larger roles in the well-being of adolescents. Social media is only a tiny portion of what determines well-being as the chart below helps to illustrate. 

Second, most social media research relies on self-reporting methods, which are systematically biased and often unreliable. Communication professor Michael Scharkow, for example, compared self-reports of Internet use with the computer log files, which show everything that a computer has done and when, and found that “survey data are only moderately correlated with log file data.” A quartet of psychology professors in the UK discovered that self-reported smartphone use and social media addiction scales face similar problems in that they don’t correctly capture reality. Patrick Markey, Professor and Director of the IR Laboratory at Villanova University, summarized the work, “the fear of smartphones and social media was built on a castle made of sand.”  

Expert bodies have also been changing their tune as well. The American Academy of Pediatrics took a hardline stance for years, preaching digital abstinence. But the organization has since backpedaled and now says that screens are fine in moderation. The organization now suggests that parents and children should work together to create boundaries. 

Once this pandemic is behind us, policymakers and experts should reconsider the screen time debate. We need to move from loaded terms like addiction and embrace a more realistic model of the world. The truth is that everyone’s relationship with technology is complicated. Instead of paternalistic legislation, leaders should place the onus on parents and individuals to figure out what is right for them.      

In COVID-19, Facebook, Google, International, Platforms, Symposia, The Law, Economics, and Policy of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Truth on the Market, Twitter, United Kingdom , , , , , ,
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Paid to Stay Home? An Entirely Intended Consequence of the COVID-19 Stimulus

Eric Fruits —  24 April 2020

[TOTM: The following is part of a blog series by TOTM guests and authors on the law, economics, and policy of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The entire series of posts is available here.

This post is authored by Eric Fruits, (Chief Economist, International Center for Law & Economics).]

In an earlier TOTM post, we argued as the economy emerges from the COVID-19 crisis, perhaps the best policy would allow properly motivated firms and households to themselves balance the benefits, costs, and risks of transitioning to “business as usual.” 

Sometimes, however, well meaning government policies disrupt the balance and realign motivations.

Our post contrasted firms who determined they could remain open by undertaking mitigation efforts with those who determined they could not safely remain open. One of these latter firms was Portland-based ChefStable, which operates more than 20 restaurants and bars. Kurt Huffman, the owner of ChefStable, shut down all the company’s properties one day before the Oregon governor issued her “Stay home, stay safe” order.

An unintended consequence

In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Mr. Huffman reports his business was able to shift to carryout and delivery, which ended up being more successful than anticipated. So successful, in fact, that he needed to bring back some of the laid-off employees. That’s when he ran into one of the stimulus package’s unintended—but not unanticipated—consequences of providing federal-level payments on top of existing state-level guarantees:

We started making the calls last week, just as our furloughed employees began receiving weekly Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation checks of $600 under the Cares Act. When we asked our employees to come back, almost all said, “No thanks.” If they return to work, they’ll have to take a pay cut.

***

But as of this week, that same employee receives $1,016 a week, or $376 more than he made as a full time employee. Why on earth would he want to come back to work?

Mr. Huffman’s not alone. NPR reports on a Kentucky coffee shop owner who faces the same difficulty keeping her employees at work:

“The very people we hired have now asked us to be laid off,” Marietta wrote in a blog post. “Not because they did not like their jobs or because they did not want to work, but because it would cost them literally hundreds of dollars per week to be employed.”

With the federal government now offering $600 a week on top of the state’s unemployment benefits, she recognized her former employees could make more money staying home than they did on the job.

Or, a fully intended consequence

The NPR piece indicates the Trump administration opted for the relatively straightforward (if not simplistic) unemployment payments as a way to get the money to unemployed workers as quickly as possible.

On the other hand, maybe the unemployment premium was not an unintended consequence. Perhaps, there was some intention.

If the purpose of the stay-at-home orders is to “flatten the curve” and slow the spread of the coronavirus, then it can be argued the purpose of the stimulus spending is to mitigate some of the economic costs. 

If this is the case, it can also be argued that the unemployment premium paid by the federal government was designed to encourage people to stay at home and delay returning to work. In fact, it may be more effective than a bunch of loophole laden employment regulations that would require an army of enforcers.

Mr. Huffman seems confident his employees will be ready to return to work in August, when the premium runs out. John Cochrane, however, is not so confident, writing on his blog, “Hint to Mr. Huffman: I would not bet too much that this deadline is not extended.”

With the administration’s state-by-state phased re-opening of the economy, the unemployment premium payments could be tweaked so only residents in states in Phase 1 or 2 would be eligible to receive the premium payments.

Of course, this tweak would unleash its own unintended consequences. In particular, it would encourage some states to slow walk the re-opening of their economies as a way to extract more federal money for their residents. My wild guess: The slow walking states will be the same states who have been most affected by the state and local tax deductibility provisions in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

As with all government policies, the unemployment provisions in the COVID-19 stimulus raise the age old question: If a policy generates unintended consequences that are not unanticipated, can those consequences really be unintended?

In COVID-19, International Center for Law & Economics, Law & Economics, Symposia, The Law, Economics, and Policy of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Truth on the Market , , , , , , , , ,
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