Archives For Dan Spulber

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

Dirk Auer —  12 December 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Significant investments and network effects ≠ barriers to entry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. First mover advantage?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Google’s users were not “captured”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

In Antitrust & Competition, Apple, Barriers to Entry, Google, International, Market Definition, Platforms, Truth on the Market , , , , , , ,
permalink

Patents as a Key to Commercialization: Guidance for Patent-Antitrust Analysis

Alden Abbott —  28 September 2016

Public comments on the proposed revision to the joint U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) – U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Antitrust-IP Licensing Guidelines have, not surprisingly, focused primarily on fine points of antitrust analysis carried out by those two federal agencies (see, for example, the thoughtful recommendations by the Global Antitrust Institute, here).  In a September 23 submission to the FTC and the DOJ, however, U.S. International Trade Commissioner F. Scott Kieff focused on a broader theme – that patent-antitrust assessments should keep in mind the indirect effects on commercialization that stem from IP (and, in particular, patents).  Kieff argues that antitrust enforcers have employed a public law “rules-based” approach that balances the “incentive to innovate” created when patents prevent copying against the goals of competition.  In contrast, Kieff characterizes the commercialization approach as rooted in the property rights nature of patents and the use of private contracting to bring together complementary assets and facilitate coordination.  As Kieff explains (in italics, footnote citations deleted):

A commercialization approach to IP views IP more in the tradition of private law, rather than public law. It does so by placing greater emphasis on viewing IP as property rights, which in turn is accomplished by greater reliance on interactions among private parties over or around those property rights, including via contracts. Centered on the relationships among private parties, this approach to IP emphasizes a different target and a different mechanism by which IP can operate. Rather than target particular individuals who are likely to respond to IP as incentives to create or invent in particular, this approach targets a broad, diverse set of market actors in general; and it does so indirectly. This broad set of indirectly targeted actors encompasses the creator or inventor of the underlying IP asset as well as all those complementary users of a creation or an invention who can help bring it to market, such as investors (including venture capitalists), entrepreneurs, managers, marketers, developers, laborers, and owners of other key assets, tangible and intangible, including other creations or inventions. Another key difference in this approach to IP lies in the mechanism by which these private actors interact over and around IP assets. This approach sees IP rights as tools for facilitating coordination among these diverse private actors, in furtherance of their own private interests in commercializing the creation or invention.

This commercialization approach sees property rights in IP serving a role akin to beacons in the dark, drawing to themselves all of those potential complementary users of the IP-protected-asset to interact with the IP owner and each other. This helps them each explore through the bargaining process the possibility of striking contracts with each other.

Several payoffs can flow from using this commercialization approach. Focusing on such a beacon-and-bargain effect can relieve the governmental side of the IP system of the need to amass the detailed information required to reasonably tailor a direct targeted incentive, such as each actor’s relative interests and contributions, needs, skills, or the like. Not only is amassing all of that information hard for the government to do, but large, established market actors may be better able than smaller market entrants to wield the political influence needed to get the government to act, increasing risk of concerns about political economy, public choice, and fairness. Instead, when governmental bodies closely adhere to a commercialization approach, each private party can bring its own expertise and other assets to the negotiating table while knowing—without necessarily having to reveal to other parties or the government—enough about its own level of interest and capability when it decides whether to strike a deal or not.            

Such successful coordination may help bring new business models, products, and services to market, thereby decreasing anticompetitive concentration of market power. It also can allow IP owners and their contracting parties to appropriate the returns to any of the rival inputs they invested towards developing and commercializing creations or inventions—labor, lab space, capital, and the like. At the same time, the government can avoid having to then go back to evaluate and trace the actual relative contributions that each participant brought to a creation’s or an invention’s successful commercialization—including, again, the cost of obtaining and using that information and the associated risks of political influence—by enforcing the terms of the contracts these parties strike with each other to allocate any value resulting from the creation’s or invention’s commercialization. In addition, significant economic theory and empirical evidence suggests this can all happen while the quality-adjusted prices paid by many end users actually decline and public access is high. In keeping with this commercialization approach, patents can be important antimonopoly devices, helping a smaller “David” come to market and compete against a larger “Goliath.”

A commercialization approach thereby mitigates many of the challenges raised by the tension that is a focus of the other intellectual approaches to IP, as well as by the responses these other approaches have offered to that tension, including some – but not all – types of AT regulation and enforcement. Many of the alternatives to IP that are often suggested by other approaches to IP, such as rewards, tax credits, or detailed rate regulation of royalties by AT enforcers can face significant challenges in facilitating the private sector coordination benefits envisioned by the commercialization approach to IP. While such approaches often are motivated by concerns about rising prices paid by consumers and direct benefits paid to creators and inventors, they may not account for the important cases in which IP rights are associated with declines in quality-adjusted prices paid by consumers and other forms of commercial benefits accrued to the entire IP production team as well as to consumers and third parties, which are emphasized in a commercialization approach. In addition, a commercialization approach can embrace many of the practical checks on the market power of an IP right that are often suggested by other approaches to IP, such as AT review, government takings, and compulsory licensing. At the same time this approach can show the importance of maintaining self-limiting principles within each such check to maintain commercialization benefits and mitigate concerns about dynamic efficiency, public choice, fairness, and the like.

To be sure, a focus on commercialization does not ignore creators or inventors or creations or inventions themselves. For example, a system successful in commercializing inventions can have the collateral benefit of providing positive incentives to those who do invent through the possibility of sharing in the many rewards associated with successful commercialization. Nor does a focus on commercialization guarantee that IP rights cause more help than harm. Significant theoretical and empirical questions remain open about benefits and costs of each approach to IP. And significant room to operate can remain for AT enforcers pursuing their important public mission, including at the IP-AT interface.

Commissioner Kieff’s evaluation is in harmony with other recent scholarly work, including Professor Dan Spulber’s explanation that the actual nature of long-term private contracting arrangements among patent licensors and licensees avoids alleged competitive “imperfections,” such as harmful “patent hold-ups,” “patent thickets,” and “royalty stacking” (see my discussion here).  More generally, Commissioner Kieff’s latest pronouncement is part of a broader and growing theoretical and empirical literature that demonstrates close associations between strong patent systems and economic growth and innovation (see, for example, here).

There is a major lesson here for U.S. (and foreign) antitrust enforcement agencies.  As I have previously pointed out (see, for example, here), in recent years, antitrust enforcers here and abroad have taken positions that tend to weaken patent rights.  Those positions typically are justified by the existence of “patent policy deficiencies” such as those that Professor Spulber’s paper debunks, as well as an alleged epidemic of low quality “probabilistic patents” (see, for example, here) – justifications that ignore the substantial economic benefits patents confer on society through contracting and commercialization.  It is high time for antitrust to accommodate the insights drawn from this new learning.  Specifically, government enforcers should change their approach and begin incorporating private law/contracting/commercialization considerations into patent-antitrust analysis, in order to advance the core goals of antitrust – the promotion of consumer welfare and efficiency.  Better yet, if the FTC and DOJ truly want to maximize the net welfare benefits of antitrust, they should undertake a more general “policy reboot” and adopt a “decision-theoretic” error cost approach to enforcement policy, rooted in cost-benefit analysis (see here) and consistent with the general thrust of Roberts Court antitrust jurisprudence (see here).

In Antitrust & Competition, Antitrust Division, Economic Theory, Federal Trade Commission, Intellectual Property, International, International Trade, Justice Department, Patent , , , , , , , , ,
permalink

Intellectual Property, Innovation and Economic Growth: Mercatus Gets it Wrong

Adam Mossoff —  28 August 2014

[Cross posted at the CPIP Blog.]

By Mark Schultz & Adam Mossoff

A handful of increasingly noisy critics of intellectual property (IP) have emerged within free market organizations. Both the emergence and vehemence of this group has surprised most observers, since free market advocates generally support property rights. It’s true that there has long been a strain of IP skepticism among some libertarian intellectuals. However, the surprised observer would be correct to think that the latest critique is something new. In our experience, most free market advocates see the benefit and importance of protecting the property rights of all who perform productive labor – whether the results are tangible or intangible.

How do the claims of this emerging critique stand up? We have had occasion to examine the arguments of free market IP skeptics before. (For example, see here, here, here.) So far, we have largely found their claims wanting.

We have yet another occasion to examine their arguments, and once again we are underwhelmed and disappointed. We recently posted an essay at AEI’s Tech Policy Daily prompted by an odd report recently released by the Mercatus Center, a free-market think tank. The Mercatus report attacks recent research that supposedly asserts, in the words of the authors of the Mercatus report, that “the existence of intellectual property in an industry creates the jobs in that industry.” They contend that this research “provide[s] no theoretical or empirical evidence to support” its claims of the importance of intellectual property to the U.S. economy.

Our AEI essay responds to these claims by explaining how these IP skeptics both mischaracterize the studies that they are attacking and fail to acknowledge the actual historical and economic evidence on the connections between IP, innovation, and economic prosperity. We recommend that anyone who may be confused by the assertions of any IP skeptics waving the banner of property rights and the free market read our essay at AEI, as well as our previous essays in which we have called out similarly odd statements from Mercatus about IP rights.

The Mercatus report, though, exemplifies many of the concerns we raise about these IP skeptics, and so it deserves to be considered at greater length.

For instance, something we touched on briefly in our AEI essay is the fact that the authors of this Mercatus report offer no empirical evidence of their own within their lengthy critique of several empirical studies, and at best they invoke thin theoretical support for their contentions.

This is odd if only because they are critiquing several empirical studies that develop careful, balanced and rigorous models for testing one of the biggest economic questions in innovation policy: What is the relationship between intellectual property and jobs and economic growth?

Apparently, the authors of the Mercatus report presume that the burden of proof is entirely on the proponents of IP, and that a bit of hand waving using abstract economic concepts and generalized theory is enough to defeat arguments supported by empirical data and plausible methodology.

This move raises a foundational question that frames all debates about IP rights today: On whom should the burden rest? On those who claim that IP has beneficial economic effects? Or on those who claim otherwise, such as the authors of the Mercatus report?

The burden of proof here is an important issue. Too often, recent debates about IP rights have started from an assumption that the entire burden of proof rests on those investigating or defending IP rights. Quite often, IP skeptics appear to believe that their criticism of IP rights needs little empirical or theoretical validation, beyond talismanic invocations of “monopoly” and anachronistic assertions that the Framers of the US Constitution were utilitarians.

As we detail in our AEI essay, though, the problem with arguments like those made in the Mercatus report is that they contradict history and empirics. For the evidence that supports this claim, including citations to the many studies that are ignored by the IP skeptics at Mercatus and elsewhere, check out the essay.

Despite these historical and economic facts, one may still believe that the US would enjoy even greater prosperity without IP. But IP skeptics who believe in this counterfactual world face a challenge. As a preliminary matter, they ought to acknowledge that they are the ones swimming against the tide of history and prevailing belief. More important, the burden of proof is on them – the IP skeptics – to explain why the U.S. has long prospered under an IP system they find so odious and destructive of property rights and economic progress, while countries that largely eschew IP have languished. This obligation is especially heavy for one who seeks to undermine empirical work such as the USPTO Report and other studies.

In sum, you can’t beat something with nothing. For IP skeptics to contest this evidence, they should offer more than polemical and theoretical broadsides. They ought to stop making faux originalist arguments that misstate basic legal facts about property and IP, and instead offer their own empirical evidence. The Mercatus report, however, is content to confine its empirics to critiques of others’ methodology – including claims their targets did not make.

For example, in addition to the several strawman attacks identified in our AEI essay, the Mercatus report constructs another strawman in its discussion of studies of copyright piracy done by Stephen Siwek for the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI). Mercatus inaccurately and unfairly implies that Siwek’s studies on the impact of piracy in film and music assumed that every copy pirated was a sale lost – this is known as “the substitution rate problem.” In fact, Siwek’s methodology tackled that exact problem.

IPI and Siwek never seem to get credit for this, but Siwek was careful to avoid the one-to-one substitution rate estimate that Mercatus and others foist on him and then critique as empirically unsound. If one actually reads his report, it is clear that Siwek assumes that bootleg physical copies resulted in a 65.7% substitution rate, while illegal downloads resulted in a 20% substitution rate. Siwek’s methodology anticipates and renders moot the critique that Mercatus makes anyway.

After mischaracterizing these studies and their claims, the Mercatus report goes further in attacking them as supporting advocacy on behalf of IP rights. Yes, the empirical results have been used by think tanks, trade associations and others to support advocacy on behalf of IP rights. But does that advocacy make the questions asked and resulting research invalid? IP skeptics would have trumpeted results showing that IP-intensive industries had a minimal economic impact, just as Mercatus policy analysts have done with alleged empirical claims about IP in other contexts. In fact, IP skeptics at free-market institutions repeatedly invoke studies in policy advocacy that allegedly show harm from patent litigation, despite these studies suffering from far worse problems than anything alleged in their critiques of the USPTO and other studies.

Finally, we noted in our AEI essay how it was odd to hear a well-known libertarian think tank like Mercatus advocate for more government-funded programs, such as direct grants or prizes, as viable alternatives to individual property rights secured to inventors and creators. There is even more economic work being done beyond the empirical studies we cited in our AEI essay on the critical role that property rights in innovation serve in a flourishing free market, as well as work on the economic benefits of IP rights over other governmental programs like prizes.

Today, we are in the midst of a full-blown moral panic about the alleged evils of IP. It’s alarming that libertarians – the very people who should be defending all property rights – have jumped on this populist bandwagon. Imagine if free market advocates at the turn of the Twentieth Century had asserted that there was no evidence that property rights had contributed to the Industrial Revolution. Imagine them joining in common cause with the populist Progressives to suppress the enforcement of private rights and the enjoyment of economic liberty. It’s a bizarre image, but we are seeing its modern-day equivalent, as these libertarians join the chorus of voices arguing against property and private ordering in markets for innovation and creativity.

It’s also disconcerting that Mercatus appears to abandon its exceptionally high standards for scholarly work-product when it comes to IP rights. Its economic analyses and policy briefs on such subjects as telecommunications regulation, financial and healthcare markets, and the regulatory state have rightly made Mercatus a respected free-market institution. It’s unfortunate that it has lent this justly earned prestige and legitimacy to stale and derivative arguments against property and private ordering in the innovation and creative industries. It’s time to embrace the sound evidence and back off the rhetoric.

In Copyright, Intellectual Property, Law & Economics, Patent, Telecommunications , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
permalink

The price of closing the Google search antitrust case: questionable precedent on patents

Geoffrey Manne —  4 January 2013

The Federal Trade Commission yesterday closed its investigation of Google’s search business (see my comment here) without taking action. The FTC did, however, enter into a settlement with Google over the licensing of Motorola Mobility’s standards-essential patents (SEPs). The FTC intends that agreement to impose some limits on an area of great complexity and vigorous debate among industry, patent experts and global standards bodies: The allowable process for enforcing FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) licensing of SEPs, particularly the use of injunctions by patent holders to do so. According to Chairman Leibowitz, “[t]oday’s landmark enforcement action will set a template for resolution of SEP licensing disputes across many industries.” That effort may or may not be successful. It also may be misguided.

In general, a FRAND commitment incentivizes innovation by allowing a SEP owner to recoup its investments and the value of its technology through licensing, while, at the same, promoting competition and avoiding patent holdup by ensuring that licensing agreements are reasonable. When the process works, and patent holders negotiate licensing rights in good faith, patents are licensed, industries advance and consumers benefit.

FRAND terms are inherently indeterminate and flexible—indeed, they often apply precisely in situations where licensors and licensees need flexibility because each licensing circumstance is nuanced and a one-size-fits-all approach isn’t workable. Superimposing process restraints from above isn’t necessarily the best thing in dealing with what amounts to a contract dispute. But few can doubt the benefits of greater clarity in this process; the question is whether the FTC’s particular approach to the problem sacrifices too much in exchange for such clarity.

The crux of the issue in the Google consent decree—and the most controversial aspect of SEP licensing negotiations—is the role of injunctions. The consent decree requires that, before Google sues to enjoin a manufacturer from using its SEPs without a license, the company must follow a prescribed path in licensing negotiations. In particular:

Under this Order, before seeking an injunction on FRAND-encumbered SEPs, Google must: (1) provide a potential licensee with a written offer containing all of the material license terms necessary to license its SEPs, and (2) provide a potential licensee with an offer of binding arbitration to determine the terms of a license that are not agreed upon. Furthermore, if a potential licensee seeks judicial relief for a FRAND determination, Google must not seek an injunction during the pendency of the proceeding, including appeals.

There are a few exceptions, summarized by Commissioner Ohlhausen:

These limitations include when the potential licensee (a) is outside the jurisdiction of the United States; (b) has stated in writing or sworn testimony that it will not license the SEP on any terms [in other words, is not a “willing licensee”]; (c) refuses to enter a license agreement on terms set in a final ruling of a court – which includes any appeals – or binding arbitration; or (d) fails to provide written confirmation to a SEP owner after receipt of a terms letter in the form specified by the Commission. They also include certain instances when a potential licensee has brought its own action seeking injunctive relief on its FRAND-encumbered SEPs.

To the extent that the settlement reinforces what Google (and other licensors) would do anyway, and even to the extent that it imposes nothing more than an obligation to inject a neutral third party into FRAND negotiations to assist the parties in resolving rate disputes, there is little to complain about. Indeed, this is the core of the agreement, and, importantly, it seems to preserve Google’s right to seek injunctions to enforce its patents, subject to the agreement’s process requirements.

Industry participants and standard-setting organizations have supported injunctions, and the seeking and obtaining of injunctions against infringers is not in conflict with SEP patentees’ obligations. Even the FTC, in its public comments, has stated that patent owners should be able to obtain injunctions on SEPs when an infringer has rejected a reasonable license offer. Thus, the long-anticipated announcement by the FTC in the Google case may help to provide some clarity to the future negotiation of SEP licenses, the possible use of binding arbitration, and the conditions under which seeking injunctive relief will be permissible (as an antitrust matter).

Nevertheless, U.S. regulators, including the FTC, have sometimes opined that seeking injunctions on products that infringe SEPs is not in the spirit of FRAND. Everyone seems to agree that more certainty is preferable; the real issue is whether and when injunctions further that aim or not (and whether and when they are anticompetitive).

In October, Renata Hesse, then Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, remarked during a patent roundtable that

[I]t would seem appropriate to limit a patent holder’s right to seek an injunction to situations where the standards implementer is unwilling to have a neutral third-party determine the appropriate F/RAND terms or is unwilling to accept the F/RAND terms approved by such a third-party.

In its own 2011 Report on the “IP Marketplace,” the FTC acknowledged the fluidity and ambiguity surrounding the meaning of “reasonable” licensing terms and the problems of patent enforcement. While noting that injunctions may confer a costly “hold-up” power on licensors that wield them, the FTC nevertheless acknowledged the important role of injunctions in preserving the value of patents and in encouraging efficient private negotiation:

Three characteristics of injunctions that affect innovation support generally granting an injunction. The first and most fundamental is an injunction’s ability to preserve the exclusivity that provides the foundation of the patent system’s incentives to innovate. Second, the credible threat of an injunction deters infringement in the first place. This results from the serious consequences of an injunction for an infringer, including the loss of sunk investment. Third, a predictable injunction threat will promote licensing by the parties. Private contracting is generally preferable to a compulsory licensing regime because the parties will have better information about the appropriate terms of a license than would a court, and more flexibility in fashioning efficient agreements.

* * *

But denying an injunction every time an infringer’s switching costs exceed the economic value of the invention would dramatically undermine the ability of a patent to deter infringement and encourage innovation. For this reason, courts should grant injunctions in the majority of cases.…

Consistent with this view, the European Commission’s Deputy Director-General for Antitrust, Cecilio Madero Villarejo, recently expressed concern that some technology companies that complain of being denied a license on FRAND terms never truly intend to acquire licenses, but rather “want[] to create conditions for a competition case to be brought.”

But with the Google case, the Commission appears to back away from its seeming support for injunctions, claiming that:

Seeking and threatening injunctions against willing licensees of FRAND-encumbered SEPs undermines the integrity and efficiency of the standard-setting process and decreases the incentives to participate in the process and implement published standards. Such conduct reduces the value of standard setting, as firms will be less likely to rely on the standard-setting process.

Reconciling the FTC’s seemingly disparate views turns on the question of what a “willing licensee” is. And while the Google settlement itself may not magnify the problems surrounding the definition of that term, it doesn’t provide any additional clarity, either.

The problem is that, even in its 2011 Report, in which FTC noted the importance of injunctions, it defines a willing licensee as one who would license at a hypothetical, ex ante rate absent the threat of an injunction and with a different risk profile than an after-the-fact infringer. In other words, the FTC’s definition of willing licensee assumes a willingness to license only at a rate determined when an injunction is not available, and under the unrealistic assumption that the true value of a SEP can be known ex ante. Not surprisingly, then, the Commission finds it easy to declare an injunction invalid when a patentee demands a (higher) royalty rate in an actual negotiation, with actual knowledge of a patent’s value and under threat of an injunction.

As Richard Epstein, Scott Kieff and Dan Spulber discuss in critiquing the FTC’s 2011 Report:

In short, there is no economic basis to equate a manufacturer that is willing to commit to license terms before the adoption and launch of a standard, with one that instead expropriates patent rights at a later time through infringement. The two bear different risks and the late infringer should not pay the same low royalty as a party that sat down at the bargaining table and may actually have contributed to the value of the patent through its early activities. There is no economically meaningful sense in which any royalty set higher than that which a “willing licensee would have paid” at the pre-standardization moment somehow “overcompensates patentees by awarding more than the economic value of the patent.”

* * *

Even with a RAND commitment, the patent owner retains the valuable right to exclude (not merely receive later compensation from) manufacturers who are unwilling to accept reasonable license terms. Indeed, the right to exclude influences how those terms should be calculated, because it is quite likely that prior licensees in at least some areas will pay less if larger numbers of parties are allowed to use the same technology. Those interactive effects are ignored in the FTC calculations.

With this circular logic, all efforts by patentees to negotiate royalty rates after infringement has occurred can be effectively rendered anticompetitive if the patentee uses an injunction or the threat of an injunction against the infringer to secure its reasonable royalty.

The idea behind FRAND is rather simple (reward inventors; protect competition), but the practice of SEP licensing is much more complicated. Circumstances differ from case to case, and, more importantly, so do the parties’ views on what may constitute an appropriate licensing rate under FRAND. As I have written elsewhere, a single company may have very different views on the meaning of FRAND depending on whether it is the licensor or licensee in a given negotiation—and depending on whether it has already implemented a standard or not. As one court looking at the very SEPs at issue in the Google case has pointed out:

[T]he court is mindful that at the time of an initial offer, it is difficult for the offeror to know what would in fact constitute RAND terms for the offeree. Thus, what may appear to be RAND terms from the offeror’s perspective may be rejected out-of-pocket as non-RAND terms by the offeree. Indeed, it would appear that at any point in the negotiation process, the parties may have a genuine disagreement as to what terms and conditions of a license constitute RAND under the parties’ unique circumstances.

The fact that many firms engaged in SEP negotiations are simultaneously and repeatedly both licensors and licensees of patents governed by multiple SSOs further complicates the process—but also helps to ensure that it will reach a conclusion that promotes innovation and ensures that consumers reap the rewards.

In fact, an important issue in assessing the propriety of injunctions is the recognition that, in most cases, firms would rather license their patents and receive royalties than exclude access to their IP and receive no compensation (and incur the costs of protracted litigation, to boot). Importantly, for firms that both license out their own patents and license in those held by other firms (the majority of IT firms and certainly the norm for firms participating in SSOs), continued interactions on both sides of such deals help to ensure that licensing—not withholding—is the norm.

Companies are waging the smartphone patent wars with very different track records on SSO participation. Apple, for example, is relatively new to the mobile communications space and has relatively few SEPs, while other firms, like Samsung, are long-time players in the space with histories of extensive licensing (in both directions). But, current posturing aside, both firms have an incentive to license their patents, as Mark Summerfield notes:

Apple’s best course of action will most likely be to enter into licensing agreements with its competitors, which will not only result in significant revenues, but also push up the prices (or reduce the margins) on competitive products.

While some commentators make it sound as if injunctions threaten to cripple smartphone makers by preventing them from licensing essential technology on viable terms, companies in this space have been perfectly capable of orchestrating large-scale patent licensing campaigns. That these may increase costs to competitors is a feature—not a bug—of the system, representing the return on innovation that patents are intended to secure. Microsoft has wielded its sizeable patent portfolio to drive up the licensing fees paid by Android device manufacturers, and some commentators have even speculated that Microsoft makes more revenue from Android than Google does. But while Microsoft might prefer to kill Android with its patents, given the unlikeliness of this, as MG Siegler notes,

[T]he next best option is to catch a free ride on the Android train. Patent licensing deals already in place with HTC, General Dynamics, and others could mean revenues of over $1 billion by next year, as Forbes reports. And if they’re able to convince Samsung to sign one as well (which could effectively force every Android partner to sign one), we could be talking multiple billions of dollars of revenue each year.

Hand-wringing about patents is the norm, but so is licensing, and your smartphone exists, despite the thousands of patents that read on it, because the firms that hold those patents—some SEPs and some not—have, in fact, agreed to license them.

The inability to seek an injunction against an infringer, however, would ensure instead that patentees operate with reduced incentives to invest in technology and to enter into standards because they are precluded from benefiting from any subsequent increase in the value of their patents once they do so. As Epstein, Kieff and Spulber write:

The simple reality is that before a standard is set, it just is not clear whether a patent might become more or less valuable. Some upward pressure on value may be created later to the extent that the patent is important to a standard that is important to the market. In addition, some downward pressure may be caused by a later RAND commitment or some other factor, such as repeat play. The FTC seems to want to give manufacturers all of the benefits of both of these dynamic effects by in effect giving the manufacturer the free option of picking different focal points for elements of the damages calculations. The patentee is forced to surrender all of the benefit of the upward pressure while the manufacturer is allowed to get all of the benefit of the downward pressure.

Thus the problem with even the limited constraints imposed by the Google settlement: To the extent that the FTC’s settlement amounts to a prohibition on Google seeking injunctions against infringers unless the company accepts the infringer’s definition of “reasonable,” the settlement will harm the industry. It will reinforce a precedent that will likely reduce the incentives for companies and individuals to innovate, to participate in SSOs, and to negotiate in good faith.

Contrary to most assumptions about the patent system, it needs stronger, not weaker, property rules. With a no-injunction rule (whether explicit or de facto (as the Google settlement’s definition of “willing licensee” unfolds)), a potential licensee has little incentive to negotiate with a patent holder and can instead refuse to license, infringe, try its hand in court, avoid royalties entirely until litigation is finished (and sometimes even longer), and, in the end, never be forced to pay a higher royalty than it would have if it had negotiated before the true value of the patents was known.

Flooding the courts and discouraging innovation and peaceful negotiations hardly seem like benefits to the patent system or the market. Unfortunately, the FTC’s approach to SEP licensing exemplified by the Google settlement may do just that. Continue Reading…

In Antitrust & Competition, Antitrust Division, Apple, European Union, Exclusionary Conduct, Federal Trade Commission, Google, Intellectual Property, International, Justice Department, Law & Economics, Patent, Platforms, Section 5, Standard Setting , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
permalink

Epstein, Kieff & Spulber Eviscerate the FTC’s Proposal on Regulating SSOs

Geoffrey Manne —  24 August 2011

In a thorough and convincing paper, “The FTC’s Proposal for Regulating IP through SSOs Would Replace Private Coordination with Government Hold-Up,” Richard Epstein, Scott Kieff and Dan Spulber assess and then decimate the FTC’s proposal on patent notice and remedies, “The Evolving IP Marketplace: Aligning Patent Notice and Remedies with Competition.”  Note Epstein, Kieff and Spulber:

In its recent report entitled “The Evolving IP Marketplace,” the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) advances a far‐reaching regulatory approach (Proposal) whose likely effect would be to distort the operation of the intellectual property (IP) marketplace in ways that will hamper the innovation and commercialization of new technologies. The gist of the FTC Proposal is to rely on highly non-­standard and misguided definitions of economic terms of art such as “ex ante” and “hold-­up,” while urging new inefficient rules for calculating damages for patent infringement. Stripped of the technicalities, the FTC Proposal would so reduce the costs of infringement by downstream users that the rate of infringement would unduly increase, as potential infringers find it in their interest to abandon the voluntary market in favor of a more attractive system of judicial pricing. As the number of nonmarket transactions increases, the courts will play an ever larger role in deciding the terms on which the patents of one party may be used by another party. The adverse effects of this new trend will do more than reduce the incentives for innovation; it will upset the current set of well-­‐functioning private coordination activities in the IP marketplace that are needed to accomplish the commercialization of new technologies. Such a trend would seriously undermine capital formation, job growth, competition, and the consumer welfare the FTC seeks to promote.

Focusing in particular on SSOs, the trio homes in on the potential incentive problem created by the FTC’s proposal:

The central problem with the FTC’s approach is that it would interfere seriously with the helpful incentives all parties in the IP marketplace presently have to contract with each other. The FTC’s approach ignores the powerful incentives that it creates in putative licenses to spurn the voluntary market in order to obtain a strategic advantage over the licensor. In any voluntary market, the low rates that go to initial licensees reflect the uncertainty of the value of the patented technology at the time the license is issued. Once that technology has proven its worth, there is no sound reason to allow any potential licensee who instead held out from the originally offered deal to get bargain rates down the road. Allowing such an option would make the holdout better off than the contracting party. Such holdouts would not need to take licenses for technologies with low value, while resting assured they would still get technologies with high value at below market rates. The FTC seems to overlook that a well-­‐functioning patent damage system should do more than merely calibrate damages after the fact. An efficient approach to damages is one that also reduces the number of infringements overall by making sure that the infringer cannot improve his economic position by his own wrong.

The FTC Proposal rests on the misguided conviction that the law should not allow a licensor to “demand and obtain royalty payments based on the infringer’s switching costs” once the manufacturer has “sunk costs into using the technology;” and it labels any such payments as the result of “hold-­up.”

As Epstein, et al. discuss, current private ordering (reciprocal dealing, repeat play, RAND terms, etc.) works perfectly well to address real hold-up problems, and the FTC seems to be both defining the problem oddly and, thus, creating a problem that doesn’t really exist.

Although not discussed directly, the paper owes a great deal to the great Ben Klein and especially his paper, Why Hold-Ups Occur: The Self-Enforcing Range of Contractual Relationships (to say nothing of Klein, Crawford & Alchian, of course).  Likewise, although not discussed in the paper, Josh and Bruce Kobayashi’s excellent paper, Federalism, Substantive Preemption and Limits on Antitrust: An Application to Patent Holdup is an essential precursor to this paper, addressing the comparative merits of antitrust  and contract-based evaluation of claimed patent holdups in SSOs.

Highly-recommended and an important addition to the ever-interesting antitrust/IP discussion.

In Antitrust & Competition, Economic Theory, Federal Trade Commission, Federalism, Intellectual Property, Law & Economics, Patent , , , , , , , ,
permalink

Regulating Innovation: Competition Policy and Patent Law Under Uncertainty

Geoffrey Manne —  28 August 2009

Later this year Josh and I have an edited volume with the above title coming out with Cambridge University Press.  The list of contributors is phenomenal, including:

  • Bob Cooter
  • Vincenzo Denicolo
  • Richard Epstein
  • Luigi Franzoni
  • Damien Geradin
  • Keith Hylton
  • Marco Iansiti
  • Scott Kieff
  • Bruce Kobayashi
  • Haizhen Lee
  • Stan Leibowitz
  • Mark Lemley
  • Doug Lichtman
  • Steve Margolis
  • Mike Meurer
  • Adam Mossoff
  • Greg Richards
  • Greg Sidak
  • Henry Smith
  • Dan Spulber
  • David Teece
  • Josh Wright

Our introductory essay, available here, discusses the papers and lays out some of our thoughts about what we know (or don’t know) about how to encourage innovation through competition and patent laws. As they say, get it while it’s hot!

The abstract for the introduction:

This essay is the introduction to a forthcoming volume entitled, Regulating Innovation: Competition Policy and Patent Law Under Uncertainty (Cambridge U. Press 2009 forthcoming).

In addition to introducing all of the papers in the volume, this essay introduces the organizing themes of the volume. Innovation is critical to economic growth. While it is well understood that legal institutions play an important role in fostering an environment conducive to innovation and its commercialization, much less is known about the optimal design of specific institutions. Regulatory design decisions, and in particular competition policy and intellectual property regimes, can have profoundly positive or negative consequences for economic growth and welfare. However, the ratio of what is known to unknown with respect to the relationship between innovation, competition, and regulatory policy is staggeringly low. In addition to this uncertainty concerning the relationships between regulation, innovation, and economic growth, the process of innovation itself is not well understood.

The regulation of innovation and the optimal design of legal institutions in this environment of uncertainty are two of the most important policy challenges of the 21st century. Any legal regime must attempt to assess the tradeoffs associated with rules that will affect incentives to innovate, allocative efficiency, competition, and freedom of economic actors to commercialize the fruits of their innovative labors and foster economic growth. Unfortunately, as this essay describes, our tools for assessing these tradeoffs are limited.

Any coherent regulatory framework must take account of the low level of empirical knowledge surrounding the complex relationship between regulation – both through competition policy and patent law – and innovation, and the corresponding uncertainty caused by this absence of knowledge. The relationship between regulation and innovation has posed a significant challenge to antitrust economists at least since Schumpeter’s suggestion that dynamic competition would result in “creative destruction,” leading to a competitive process where one monopolist would replace another sequentially as new entrants developed a superior product.

Interfering in this dynamic process for the sake of static efficiency gains is perilous, but, of course, not impossible. But regulators and policy makers must take (more) seriously the condition of fundamental uncertainty in which they act, and the significant costs of their inevitable errors before justifying interventions on grounds of promoting competition or facilitating innovation.

This essay and the chapters in this book, approach this critical set of problems from an economic perspective, relying on the tools of microeconomics, quantitative analysis, and comparative institutional analysis to explore and begin to provide answers to the myriad challenges facing policymakers. The strength of this analysis—often described as the New Institutional Economic approach—is in its recognition that understanding economic performance requires not only economic modeling of narrow behavior, but also an understanding of that behavior in its legal, economic, social, and political institutional context.

The essay includes a table of contents for the book.

In Announcements, Antitrust & Competition, Intellectual Property, Law & Economics, Patent , , , , ,
permalink

Reflections on the GMU/Microsoft Conference

Geoffrey Manne —  14 May 2007

As you may know, this past Friday we (Geoff and Josh) organized the inaugural GMU/Microsoft Conference on the Law and Economics of Innovation. Overall, we were extremely pleased with our first entry in this conference series, The Regulation of Innovation and Economic Growth. We had about 130 register for the conference, including many high level FTC and DOJ officials, academics, and industry representatives. In the end we had about 95 attendees. We also hosted a dinner for about 45 Washington VIPs (several FTC folks, a federal judge, prominent attorneys, representatives from USTR and Commerce, etc.) the evening before at Citronelle. A good time and good conversation were had by all.

The conference started off on the right foot with an opening address from Bob Cooter (Berkeley Law) which pointed to institutional and legal solutions to the “double trust problem” in innovation as a primary factor in unleashing entrepreneurial forces in countries facing high levels of poverty and stagnant growth. The basic point was that various institutions—including importantly IP laws—serve to facilitate the essential melding of ideas and capital necessary to promote innovation and to encourage economic growth. The talk was derived from a book Cooter is currently writing (with Hans-Bernd Schaefer), two draft chapters of which are available here.

The three subsequent panels discussed the innovative process & bundling in technology markets, IP Reform, and Antitrust Regulation of Innovation. The papers are available here. We both took notes on the presentations and share some reflections on the papers and discussions below the fold.

Continue Reading…

In Antitrust & Competition, Antitrust Division, Error Costs, Intellectual Property, Justice Department, Law & Economics, Patent, Platforms, Regulation, Truth on the Market, Tying , , , , ,
permalink

GMU/ Microsoft Innovation Forum Next Week!

Josh Wright —  26 April 2007

As Geoff noted the other day, The First Annual GMU / Microsoft Annual Conference on the Law and Economics Innovation is now just one week away. It will be Friday, May 4th at GMU Law from 9 am to 4pm. This year’s topic is “The Regulation of Innovation and Economic Growth.” Conference papers and discussion will focus on the innovative process itself and the question of how regulation, particularly antitrust and intellectual property regimes, might foster or impede growth.

Geoff and I, along with a ton of others who had a substantial role in putting this project together, truly hope that this will be the first in a long running collaboration between GMU and Microsoft which will produce a forum for academics, regulators, industry representatives, and policy makers together to discuss this important topic and present research.

As exciting as it is to have a hand in organizing the event, and as happy as I am that it will take place right there at GMU Law, the best thing about this conference is by far the quality of program that Geoff was able to pull together. I will admit to our faithful TOTM readers that Geoff deserves all the credit for this. I’m thrilled to be able to participate in one of the panels myself along with Jon Baker, Dan Spulber, and Keith Hylton — all economists whom I respect greatly and whose work I am familiar with. Here’s the entire conference agenda, which includes the following speakers, commentors, and moderators:

  • Jonathan B. Baker, American University Washington College of Law
  • Ronald A. Cass, Dean Emeritus, Boston University School of Law
  • Robert D. Cooter, University of California at Berkeley School of Law
  • Keith N. Hylton, Boston University School of Law
  • Marco Iansiti, Harvard Business School
  • Bruce H. Kobayashi, George Mason School of Law
  • Douglas G. Lichtman, University of Chicago Law School
  • Stan J. Liebowitz, University of Texas/Dallas School of Management
  • Stephen E. Margolis, North Carolina State College of Management
  • Randal Picker, University of Chicago Law School
  • Howard A. Shelanski, University of California at Berkeley School of Law
  • Daniel F. Spulber, Kellogg School of Management
  • Joshua D. Wright, George Mason University School of Law

The papers, including my own, can be downloaded here.

For those of you law and economics types heading to ALEA in Boston for the weekend, there is plenty of time to join us Friday and make it to Boston on time for dinner Friday night.  Conference registration is free.  Come join us and make sure to say hello. For those of you who cannot make it, I plan on doing some “not-so-live” blogging after both the GMU/Microsoft Conference as well as ALEA over the weekend.

In Announcements, Intellectual Property, Law & Economics, Patent, Regulation , , ,
permalink