Archives For Duty to deal

Patent Pools, Innovation, and Antitrust Policy

Alden Abbott —  7 December 2022

Late last month, 25 former judges and government officials, legal academics and economists who are experts in antitrust and intellectual property law submitted a letter to Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter in support of the U.S. Justice Department’s (DOJ) July 2020 Avanci business-review letter (ABRL) dealing with patent pools. The pro-Avanci letter was offered in response to an October 2022 letter to Kanter from ABRL critics that called for reconsideration of the ABRL. A good summary account of the “battle of the scholarly letters” may be found here.

The University of Pennsylvania’s Herbert Hovenkamp defines a patent pool as “an arrangement under which patent holders in a common technology or market commit their patents to a single holder, who then licenses them out to the original patentees and perhaps to outsiders.” Although the U.S. antitrust treatment of patent pools might appear a rather arcane topic, it has major implications for U.S. innovation. As AAG Kanter ponders whether to dive into patent-pool policy, a brief review of this timely topic is in order. That review reveals that Kanter should reject the anti-Avanci letter and reaffirm the ABRL.

Background on Patent Pool Analysis

The 2017 DOJ-FTC IP Licensing Guidelines

Section 5.5 of joint DOJ-Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Antitrust Guidelines for the Licensing of Intellectual Property (2017 Guidelines, which revised a prior 1995 version) provides an overview of the agencies’ competitive assessment of patent pools. The 2017 Guidelines explain that, depending on how pools are designed and operated, they may have procompetitive (and efficiency-enhancing) or anticompetitive features.

On the positive side of the ledger, Section 5.5 states:

Cross-licensing and pooling arrangements are agreements of two or more owners of different items of intellectual property to license one another or third parties. These arrangements may provide procompetitive benefits by integrating complementary technologies, reducing transaction costs, clearing blocking positions, and avoiding costly infringement litigation. By promoting the dissemination of technology, cross-licensing and pooling arrangements are often procompetitive.

On the negative side of the ledger, Section 5.5 states (citations omitted):

Cross-licensing and pooling arrangements can have anticompetitive effects in certain circumstances. For example, collective price or output restraints in pooling arrangements, such as the joint marketing of pooled intellectual property rights with collective price setting or coordinated output restrictions, may be deemed unlawful if they do not contribute to an efficiency-enhancing integration of economic activity among the participants. When cross-licensing or pooling arrangements are mechanisms to accomplish naked price-fixing or market division, they are subject to challenge under the per se rule.

Other aspects of pool behavior may be either procompetitive or anticompetitive, depending upon the circumstances, as Section 5.5 explains. The antitrust rule of reason would apply to pool restraints that may have both procompetitive and anticompetitive features.  

For example, requirements that pool members grant licenses to each other for current and future technology at minimal cost could disincentivize research and development. Such requirements, however, could also promote competition by exploiting economies of scale and integrating complementary capabilities of the pool members. According to the 2017 Guidelines, such requirements are likely to cause competitive problems only when they include a large fraction of the potential research and development in an R&D market.

Section 5.5 also applies rule-of-reason case-specific treatment to exclusion from pools. It notes that, although pooling arrangements generally need not be open to all who wish to join (indeed, exclusion of certain parties may be designed to prevent potential free riding), they may be anticompetitive under certain circumstances (citations omitted):

[E]xclusion from a pooling or cross-licensing arrangement among competing technologies is unlikely to have anticompetitive effects unless (1) excluded firms cannot effectively compete in the relevant market for the good incorporating the licensed technologies and (2) the pool participants collectively possess market power in the relevant market. If these circumstances exist, the [federal antitrust] [a]gencies will evaluate whether the arrangement’s limitations on participation are reasonably related to the efficient development and exploitation of the pooled technologies and will assess the net effect of those limitations in the relevant market.

The 2017 Guidelines are informed by the analysis of prior agency-enforcement actions and prior DOJ business-review letters. Through the business-review-letter procedure, an organization may submit a proposed action to the DOJ Antitrust Division and receive a statement as to whether the Division currently intends to challenge the action under the antitrust laws, based on the information provided. Historically, DOJ has used these letters as a vehicle to discuss current agency thinking about safeguards that may be included in particular forms of business arrangements to alleviate DOJ competitive concerns.

DOJ patent-pool letters, in particular, have prompted DOJ to highlight specific sorts of provisions in pool agreements that forestalled competitive problems. To this point, DOJ has never commented favorably on patent-pool safeguards in a letter and then subsequently reversed course to find the safeguards inadequate.

Subsequent to issuance of the 2017 Guidelines, DOJ issued two business-review letters on patent pools: the July 2020 ABRL letter and the January 2021 University Technology Licensing Program business-review letter (UTLP letter). Those two letters favorably discussed competitive safeguards proffered by the entities requesting favorable DOJ reviews.

ABRL Letter

The ABRL letter explains (citations omitted):

[Avanci] proposed [a] joint patent-licensing pool . . . to . . . license patent claims that have been declared “essential” to implementing 5G cellular wireless standards for use in automobile vehicles and distribute royalty income among the Platform’s licensors. Avanci currently operates a licensing platform related to 4G cellular standards and offers licenses to 2G, 3G, and 4G standards-essential patents used in vehicles and smart meters.

After consulting telecommunications and automobile-industry stakeholders, conducing an independent review, and considering prior guidance to other patent pools, “DOJ conclude[d] that, on balance, Avanci’s proposed 5G Platform is unlikely to harm competition.” As such, DOJ announced it had no present intention to challenge the platform.

The DOJ press release accompanying the ABRL letter provides additional valuable information on Avanci’s potential procompetitive efficiencies; its plan to charge fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) rates; and its proposed safeguards:

Avanci’s 5G Platform may make licensing standard essential patents related to vehicle connectivity more efficient by providing automakers with a “one stop shop” for licensing 5G technology. The Platform also has the potential to reduce patent infringement and ensure that patent owners who have made significant contributions to the development of 5G “Release 15” specifications are compensated for their innovation. Avanci represents that the Platform will charge FRAND rates for the patented technologies, with input from both licensors and licensees.

In addition, Avanci has incorporated a number of safeguards into its 5G Platform that can help protect competition, including licensing only technically essential patents; providing for independent evaluation of essential patents; permitting licensing outside the Platform, including in other fields of use, bilateral or multi-lateral licensing by pool members, and the formation of other pools at levels of the automotive supply chain; and by including mechanisms to prevent the sharing of competitively sensitive information.  The Department’s review found that the Platform’s essentiality review may help automakers license the patents they actually need to make connected vehicles.  In addition, the Platform license includes “Have Made” rights that creates new access to cellular standard essential patents for licensed automakers’ third-party component suppliers, permitting them to make non-infringing components for 5G connected vehicles.

UTLP Letter

The United Technology Licensing Program business-review letter (issued less than a year after the ABRL letter, at the end of the Trump administration) discussed a proposal by participating universities to offer licenses to their physical-science patents relating to specified emerging technologies. According to DOJ:

[Fifteen universities agreed to cooperate] in licensing certain complementary patents through UTLP, which will be organized into curated portfolios relating to specific technology applications for autonomous vehicles, the “Internet of Things,” and “Big Data.”  The overarching goal of UTLP is to centralize the administrative costs associated with commercializing university research and help participating universities to overcome the budget, institutional relationship, and other constraints that make licensing in these areas particularly challenging for them.

The UTLP letter concluded, based on representations made in UTLP’s letter request, that the pool was on balance unlikely to harm competition. Specifically:

UTLP has incorporated a number of safeguards into its program to help protect competition, including admitting only non-substitutable patents, with a “safety valve” if a patent to accomplish a particular task is inadvertently included in a portfolio with another, substitutable patent. The program also will allow potential sublicensees to choose an individual patent, a group of patents, or UTLP’s entire portfolio, thereby mitigating the risk that a licensee will be required to license more technology than it needs. The department’s letter notes that UTLP is a mechanism that is intended to address licensing inefficiencies and institutional challenges unique to universities in the physical science context, and makes no assessment about whether this mechanism if set up in another context would have similar procompetitive benefits.

Patent-Pool Guidance in Context

DOJ and FTC patent-pool guidance has been bipartisan. It has remained generally consistent in character from the mid-1990s (when the first 1995 IP licensing guidelines were issued) to early 2021 (the end of the Trump administration, when the UTLP letter was issued). The overarching concern expressed in agency guidance has been to prevent a pool from facilitating collusion among competitors, from discouraging innovation, and from inefficiently excluding competitors.

As technology has advanced over the last quarter century, U.S. antitrust enforcers—and, in particular, DOJ, through a series of business-review letters beginning in 1997 (see the pro-Avanci letter at pages 9-10)—consistently have emphasized the procompetitive efficiencies that pools can generate, while also noting the importance of avoiding anticompetitive harms.

Those letters have “given a pass” to pools whose rules contained safeguards against collusion among pool members (e.g., by limiting pool patents to complementary, not substitute, technologies) and against anticompetitive exclusion (e.g., by protecting pool members’ independence of action outside the pool). In assessing safeguards, DOJ has paid attention to the particular market context in which a pool arises.

Notably, economic research generally supports the conclusion that, in recent decades, patent pools have been an important factor in promoting procompetitive welfare-enhancing innovation and technology diffusion.

For example, a 2015 study by Justus Baron and Tim Pohlmann found that a significant number of pools were created following antitrust authorities’ “more permissive stance toward pooling of patents” beginning in the late 1990s. Studying these new pools, they found “a significant increase in patenting rates after pool announcement” that was “primarily attributable to future members of the pool”.

A 2009 analysis by Richard Gilbert of the University of California, Berkeley (who served as chief economist of the DOJ Antitrust Division during the Clinton administration) concluded that (consistent with the approach adopted in DOJ business-review letters) “antitrust authorities and the courts should encourage policies that promote the formation and durability of beneficial pools that combine complementary patents.”

In a 2014 assessment of the role of patent pools in combatting “patent thickets,” Jonathan Barnett of the USC Gould School of Law concluded:

Using network visualization software, I show that information and communication technology markets rely on patent pools and other cross-licensing structures to mitigate or avoid patent thickets and associated inefficiencies. Based on the composition, structure, terms and pricing of selected leading patent pools in the ICT market, I argue that those pools are best understood as mechanisms by which vertically integrated firms mitigate transactional frictions and reduce the cost of accessing technology inputs.

Admittedly, a few studies of some old patents pools (e.g., the 19th century sewing-machine pool and certain early 20th century New Deal pools) found them to be associated with a decline in patenting. Setting aside possible questions of those studies’ methodologies, the old pooling arrangements bear little resemblance to the carefully crafted pool structures today. In particular, unlike the old pools, the more recent pools embody competitive safeguards (the old pools may have combined substitute patents, for example).   

Business-review letters dealing with pools have provided a degree of legal certainty that has helped encourage their formation, to the benefit of innovation in key industries. The anti-Avanci letter ignores that salient fact, focusing instead on allegedly “abusive” SEP-licensing tactics by the Avanci 5G pool—such as refusal to automatically grant a license to all comers—without considering that the pool may have had legitimate reasons not to license particular parties (who may, for instance, have made bad faith unreasonable licensing demands). In sum, this blinkered approach is wrong as a matter of SEP law and policy (as explained in the pro-Avanci letter) and wrong in its implicit undermining of the socially beneficial patent-pool business-review process.   

The pro-Avanci letter ably describes the serious potential harm generated by the anti-Avanci letter:

In evaluating the carefully crafted Avanci pool structure, the 2020 business review letter appropriately concluded that the pool’s design conformed to the well-established, fact-intensive inquiry concerning actual market practices and efficiencies set forth in previous business review letters. Any reconsideration of the 2020 business review letter, as proposed in the October 17 letter, would give rise to significant uncertainty concerning the Antitrust Division’s commitment to the aforementioned sequence of business review letters that have been issued concerning other patent pools in the information technology industry, as well as the larger group of patent pools that did not specifically seek guidance through the business review letter process but relied on the legal template that had been set forth in those previously issued letters.

This is a point of great consequence. Pooling arrangements in the information technology industry have provided an efficient market-driven solution to the transaction costs that are inherent to patent-intensive industries and, when structured appropriately in light of agency guidance and applicable case law, do not raise undue antitrust concerns. Thanks to pooling and related collective licensing arrangements, the innovations embodied in tens of thousands of patents have been made available to hundreds of device producers and other intermediate users, while innovators have been able to earn a commensurate return on the costs and risks that they undertook to develop new technologies that have transformed entire fields and industries to the benefit of consumers.

Conclusion

President Joe Biden’s 2021 Executive Order on Competition commits the Biden administration to “the promotion of competition and innovation by firms small and large, at home and worldwide.” One factor in promoting competition and innovation has been the legal certainty flowing from well-reasoned DOJ business-review letters on patent pools, issued on a bipartisan basis for more than a quarter of a century.

A DOJ decision to reconsider (in other words, to withdraw) the sound guidance embodied in the ABRL would detract from this certainty and thereby threaten to undermine innovation promoted by patent pools. Accordingly, AAG Kanter should reject the advice proffered by the anti-Avanci letter and publicly reaffirm his support for the ABRL—and, more generally, for the DOJ business-review process.

In Antitrust & Competition, Exclusionary Conduct, Intellectual Property, Patent, Truth on the Market , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Why the FTC had to Abandon the Duty to Deal Argument Against Qualcomm

Geoffrey Manne & Ben Sperry —  16 January 2020

On November 22, the FTC filed its answering brief in the FTC v. Qualcomm litigation. As we’ve noted before, it has always seemed a little odd that the current FTC is so vigorously pursuing this case, given some of the precedents it might set and the Commission majority’s apparent views on such issues. But this may also help explain why the FTC has now opted to eschew the district court’s decision and pursue a novel, but ultimately baseless, legal theory in its brief.

The FTC’s decision to abandon the district court’s reasoning constitutes an important admission: contrary to the district court’s finding, there is no legal basis to find an antitrust duty to deal in this case. As Qualcomm stated in its reply brief (p. 12), “the FTC disclaims huge portions of the decision.” In its effort to try to salvage its case, however, the FTC reveals just how bad its arguments have been from the start, and why the case should be tossed out on its ear.

What the FTC now argues

The FTC’s new theory is that SEP holders that fail to honor their FRAND licensing commitments should be held liable under “traditional Section 2 standards,” even though they do not have an antitrust duty to deal with rivals who are members of the same standard-setting organizations (SSOs) under the “heightened” standard laid out by the Supreme Court in Aspen and Trinko:  

To be clear, the FTC does not contend that any breach of a FRAND commitment is a Sherman Act violation. But Section 2 liability is appropriate when, as here, a monopolist SEP holder commits to license its rivals on FRAND terms, and then implements a blanket policy of refusing to license those rivals on any terms, with the effect of substantially contributing to the acquisition or maintenance of monopoly power in the relevant market…. 

The FTC does not argue that Qualcomm had a duty to deal with its rivals under the Aspen/Trinko standard. But that heightened standard does not apply here, because—unlike the defendants in Aspen, Trinko, and the other duty-to-deal precedents on which it relies—Qualcomm entered into a voluntary contractual commitment to deal with its rivals as part of the SSO process, which is itself a derogation from normal market competition. And although the district court applied a different approach, this Court “may affirm on any ground finding support in the record.” Cigna Prop. & Cas. Ins. Co. v. Polaris Pictures Corp., 159 F.3d 412, 418-19 (9th Cir. 1998) (internal quotation marks omitted) (emphasis added) (pp.69-70).

In other words, according to the FTC, because Qualcomm engaged in the SSO process—which is itself “a derogation from normal market competition”—its evasion of the constraints of that process (i.e., the obligation to deal with all comers on FRAND terms) is “anticompetitive under traditional Section 2 standards.”

The most significant problem with this new standard is not that it deviates from the basis upon which the district court found Qualcomm liable; it’s that it is entirely made up and has no basis in law.

Absent an antitrust duty to deal, patent law grants patentees the right to exclude rivals from using patented technology

Part of the bundle of rights connected with the property right in patents is the right to exclude, and along with it, the right of a patent holder to decide whether, and on what terms, to sell licenses to rivals. The law curbs that right only in select circumstances. Under antitrust law, such a duty to deal, in the words of the Supreme Court in Trinko, “is at or near the outer boundary of §2 liability.” The district court’s ruling, however, is based on the presumption of harm arising from a SEP holder’s refusal to license, rather than an actual finding of anticompetitive effect under §2. The duty to deal it finds imposes upon patent holders an antitrust obligation to license their patents to competitors. (While, of course, participation in an SSO may contractually obligate an SEP-holder to license its patents to competitors, that is an entirely different issue than whether it operates under a mandatory requirement to do so as a matter of public policy).  

The right of patentees to exclude is well-established, and injunctions enforcing that right are regularly issued by courts. Although the rate of permanent injunctions has decreased since the Supreme Court’s eBay decision, research has found that federal district courts still grant them over 70% of the time after a patent holder prevails on the merits. And for patent litigation involving competitors, the same research finds that injunctions are granted 85% of the time.  In principle, even SEP holders can receive injunctions when infringers do not act in good faith in FRAND negotiations. See Microsoft Corp. v. Motorola, Inc., 795 F.3d 1024, 1049 n.19 (9th Cir. 2015):

We agree with the Federal Circuit that a RAND commitment does not always preclude an injunctive action to enforce the SEP. For example, if an infringer refused to accept an offer on RAND terms, seeking injunctive relief could be consistent with the RAND agreement, even where the commitment limits recourse to litigation. See Apple Inc., 757 F.3d at 1331–32. 

Aside from the FTC, federal agencies largely agree with this approach to the protection of intellectual property. For instance, the Department of Justice, the US Patent and Trademark Office, and the National Institute for Standards and Technology recently released their 2019 Joint Policy Statement on Remedies for Standards-Essential Patents Subject to Voluntary F/RAND Commitments, which clarifies that:

All remedies available under national law, including injunctive relief and adequate damages, should be available for infringement of standards-essential patents subject to a F/RAND commitment, if the facts of a given case warrant them. Consistent with the prevailing law and depending on the facts and forum, the remedies that may apply in a given patent case include injunctive relief, reasonable royalties, lost profits, enhanced damages for willful infringement, and exclusion orders issued by the U.S. International Trade Commission. These remedies are equally available in patent litigation involving standards-essential patents. While the existence of F/RAND or similar commitments, and conduct of the parties, are relevant and may inform the determination of appropriate remedies, the general framework for deciding these issues remains the same as in other patent cases. (emphasis added).

By broadening the antitrust duty to deal well beyond the bounds set by the Supreme Court, the district court opinion (and the FTC’s preferred approach, as well) eviscerates the right to exclude inherent in patent rights. In the words of retired Federal Circuit Judge Paul Michel in an amicus brief in the case: 

finding antitrust liability premised on the exercise of valid patent rights will fundamentally abrogate the patent system and its critical means for promoting and protecting important innovation.

And as we’ve noted elsewhere, this approach would seriously threaten consumer welfare:

Of course Qualcomm conditions the purchase of its chips on the licensing of its intellectual property; how could it be any other way? The alternative would require Qualcomm to actually facilitate the violation of its property rights by forcing it to sell its chips to device makers even if they refuse its patent license terms. In that world, what device maker would ever agree to pay more than a pittance for a patent license? The likely outcome is that Qualcomm charges more for its chips to compensate (or simply stops making them). Great, the FTC says; then competitors can fill the gap and — voila: the market is more competitive, prices will actually fall, and consumers will reap the benefits.

Except it doesn’t work that way. As many economists, including both the current [now former] and a prominent former chief economist of the FTC, have demonstrated, forcing royalty rates lower in such situations is at least as likely to harm competition as to benefit it. There is no sound theoretical or empirical basis for concluding that using antitrust to move royalty rates closer to some theoretical ideal will actually increase consumer welfare. All it does for certain is undermine patent holders’ property rights, virtually ensuring there will be less innovation.

The FTC realizes the district court doesn’t have the evidence to support its duty to deal analysis

Antitrust law does not abrogate the right of a patent holder to exclude and to choose when and how to deal with rivals, unless there is a proper finding of a duty to deal. In order to find a duty to deal, there must be a harm to competition, not just a competitor, which, under the Supreme Court’s Aspen and Trinko cases can be inferred in the duty-to-deal context only where the challenged conduct leads to a “profit sacrifice.” But the record does not support such a finding. As we wrote in our amicus brief:

[T]he Supreme Court has identified only a single scenario from which it may plausibly be inferred that defendant’s refusal to deal with rivals harms consumers: The existence of a prior, profitable course of dealing, and the termination and replacement of that arrangement with an alternative that not only harms rivals, but also is less profitable for defendant. 

A monopolist’s willingness to forego (short-term) profits plausibly permits an inference that conduct is not procompetitive, because harm to a rival caused by an increase in efficiency should lead to higher—not lower—profits for defendant. And “[i]f a firm has been ‘attempting to exclude rivals on some basis other than efficiency,’ it’s fair to characterize its behavior as predatory.” Aspen Skiing, 472 U.S. at 605 (quoting Robert Bork, The Antitrust Paradox 138 (1978)).

In an effort to satisfy this standard, the district court states that “because Qualcomm previously licensed its rivals, but voluntarily stopped licensing rivals even though doing so was profitable, Qualcomm terminated a voluntary and profitable course of dealing.” Slip op. at 137. 

But it is not enough merely that the prior arrangement was profitable. Rather, Trinko and Aspen Skiing hold that when a monopolist ends a profitable relationship with a rival, anticompetitive exclusion may be inferred only when it also refuses to engage in an ongoing arrangement that, in the short run, is more profitable than no relationship at all. The key is the relative value to the monopolist of the current options on offer, not the value to the monopolist of the terminated arrangement. See Trinko, 540 U.S. at 409 (“a willingness to forsake short-term profits”); Aspen Skiing, 472 U.S. at 610–11 (“it was willing to sacrifice short-run benefits”)…

The record here uniformly indicates Qualcomm expected to maximize its royalties by dealing with OEMs rather than rival chip makers; it neither anticipated nor endured short-term loss. As the district court itself concluded, Qualcomm’s licensing practices avoided patent exhaustion and earned it “humongously more lucrative” royalties. Slip op. at 1243–254. That Qualcomm anticipated greater profits from its conduct precludes an inference of anticompetitive harm.

Moreover, Qualcomm didn’t refuse to allow rivals to use its patents; it simply didn’t sell them explicit licenses to do so. As discussed in several places by the district court:

According to Andrew Hong (Legal Counsel at Samsung Intellectual Property Center), during license negotiations, Qualcomm made it clear to Samsung that “Qualcomm’s standard business practice was not to provide licenses to chip manufacturers.” Hong Depo. 161:16-19. Instead, Qualcomm had an “unwritten policy of not going after chip manufacturers.” Id. at 161:24-25… (p.123)

* * *

Alex Rogers (QTL President) testified at trial that as part of the 2018 Settlement Agreement between Samsung and Qualcomm, Qualcomm did not license Samsung, but instead promised only that Qualcomm would offer Samsung a FRAND license before suing Samsung: “Qualcomm gave Samsung an assurance that should Qualcomm ever seek to assert its cellular SEPs against that component business, against those components, we would first make Samsung an offer on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms.” Tr. at 1989:5-10. (p.124)

This is an important distinction. Qualcomm allows rivals to use its patented technology by not asserting its patent rights against them—which is to say: instead of licensing its technology for a fee, Qualcomm allows rivals to use its technology to develop their own chips royalty-free (and recoups its investment by licensing the technology to OEMs that choose to implement the technology in their devices). 

The irony of this analysis, of course, is that the district court effectively suggests that Qualcomm must charge rivals a positive, explicit price in exchange for a license in order to facilitate competition, while allowing rivals to use its patented technology for free (or at the “cost” of some small reduction in legal certainty, perhaps) is anticompetitive.

Nonetheless, the district court’s factual finding that Qualcomm’s licensing scheme was “humongously” profitable shows there was no profit sacrifice as required for a duty to deal finding. The general presumption that patent holders can exclude rivals is not subject to an antitrust duty to deal where there is no profit sacrifice by the patent holder. Here, however, Qualcomm did not sacrifice profits by adopting the challenged licensing scheme. 

It is perhaps unsurprising that the FTC chose not to support the district court’s duty-to-deal argument, even though its holding was in the FTC’s favor. But, while the FTC was correct not to countenance the district court’s flawed arguments, the FTC’s alternative argument in its reply brief is even worse.

The FTC’s novel theory of harm is unsupported and weak

As noted, the FTC’s alternative theory is that Qualcomm violated Section 2 simply by failing to live up to its contractual SSO obligations. For the FTC, because Qualcomm joined an SSO, it is no longer in a position to refuse to deal legally. Moreover, there is no need to engage in an Aspen/Trinko analysis in order to find liability. Instead, according to the FTC’s brief, liability arises because the evasion of an exogenous pricing constraint (such as an SSO’s FRAND obligation) constitutes an antitrust harm:

Of course, a breach of contract, “standing alone,” does not “give rise to antitrust liability.” City of Vernon v. S. Cal. Edison Co., 955 F.2d 1361, 1368 (9th Cir. 1992); cf. Br. 52 n.6. Instead, a monopolist’s conduct that breaches such a contractual commitment is anticompetitive only when it satisfies traditional Section 2 standards—that is, only when it “tends to impair the opportunities of rivals and either does not further competition on the merits or does so in an unnecessarily restrictive way.” Cascade Health, 515 F.3d at 894. The district court’s factual findings demonstrate that Qualcomm’s breach of its SSO commitments satisfies both elements of that traditional test. (emphasis added)

To begin, it must be noted that the operative language quoted by the FTC from Cascade Health is attributed in Cascade Health to Aspen Skiing. In other words, even Cascade Health recognizes that Aspen Skiing represents the Supreme Court’s interpretation of that language in the duty-to-deal context. And in that case—in contrast to the FTC’s argument in its brief—the Court required demonstration of such a standard to mean that a defendant “was not motivated by efficiency concerns and that it was willing to sacrifice short-run benefits and consumer goodwill in exchange for a perceived long-run impact on its… rival.” (Aspen Skiing at 610-11) (emphasis added).

The language quoted by the FTC cannot simultaneously justify an appeal to an entirely different legal standard separate from that laid out in Aspen Skiing. As such, rather than dispensing with the duty to deal requirements laid out in that case, Cascade Health actually reinforces them.

Second, to support its argument the FTC points to Broadcom v. Qualcomm, 501 F.3d 297 (3rd Cir. 2007) as an example of a court upholding an antitrust claim based on a defendant’s violation of FRAND terms. 

In Broadcom, relying on the FTC’s enforcement action against Rambus before it was overturned by the D.C. Circuit, the Third Circuit found that there was an actionable issue when Qualcomm deceived other members of an SSO by promising to

include its proprietary technology in the… standard by falsely agreeing to abide by the [FRAND policies], but then breached those agreements by licensing its technology on non-FRAND terms. The intentional acquisition of monopoly power through deception… violates antitrust law. (emphasis added)

Even assuming Broadcom were good law post-Rambus, the case is inapposite. In Broadcom the court found that Qualcomm could be held to violate antitrust law by deceiving the SSO (by falsely promising to abide by FRAND terms) in order to induce it to accept Qualcomm’s patent in the standard. The court’s concern was that, by falsely inducing the SSO to adopt its technology, Qualcomm deceptively acquired monopoly power and limited access to competing technology:

When a patented technology is incorporated in a standard, adoption of the standard eliminates alternatives to the patented technology…. Firms may become locked in to a standard requiring the use of a competitor’s patented technology. 

Key to the court’s finding was that the alleged deception induced the SSO to adopt the technology in its standard:

We hold that (1) in a consensus-oriented private standard-setting environment, (2) a patent holder’s intentionally false promise to license essential proprietary technology on FRAND terms, (3) coupled with an SDO’s reliance on that promise when including the technology in a standard, and (4) the patent holder’s subsequent breach of that promise, is actionable conduct. (emphasis added)

Here, the claim is different. There is no allegation that Qualcomm engaged in deceptive conduct that affected the incorporation of its technology into the relevant standard. Indeed, there is no allegation that Qualcomm’s alleged monopoly power arises from its challenged practices; only that it abused its lawful monopoly power to extract supracompetitive prices. Even if an SEP holder may be found liable for falsely promising not to evade a commitment to deal with rivals in order to acquire monopoly power from its inclusion in a technological standard under Broadcom, that does not mean that it can be held liable for evading a commitment to deal with rivals unrelated to its inclusion in a standard, nor that such a refusal to deal should be evaluated under any standard other than that laid out in Aspen Skiing.

Moreover, the FTC nowhere mentions the DC Circuit’s subsequent Rambus decision overturning the FTC and calling the holding in Broadcom into question, nor does it discuss the Supreme Court’s NYNEX decision in any depth. Yet these cases stand clearly for the opposite proposition: a court cannot infer competitive harm from a company’s evasion of a FRAND pricing constraint. As we wrote in our amicus brief: 

In Rambus Inc. v. FTC, 522 F.3d 456 (D.C. Cir. 2008), the D.C. Circuit, citing NYNEX, rejected the FTC’s contention that it may infer anticompetitive effect from defendant’s evasion of a constraint on its monopoly power in an analogous SEP-licensing case: “But again, as in NYNEX, an otherwise lawful monopolist’s end-run around price constraints, even when deceptive or fraudulent, does not alone present a harm to competition.” Id. at 466 (citation omitted). NYNEX and Rambus reinforce the Court’s repeated holding that an inference is permissible only where it points clearly to anticompetitive effect—and, bad as they may be, evading obligations under other laws or violating norms of “business morality” do not permit a court to undermine “[t]he freedom to switch suppliers [which] lies close to the heart of the competitive process that the antitrust laws seek to encourage. . . . Thus, this Court has refused to apply per se reasoning in cases involving that kind of activity.” NYNEX, 525 U.S. at 137 (citations omitted).

Essentially, the FTC’s brief alleges that Qualcomm’s conduct amounts to an evasion of the constraint imposed by FRAND terms—without which the SSO process itself is presumptively anticompetitive. Indeed, according to the FTC, it is only the FRAND obligation that saves the SSO agreement from being inherently anticompetitive. 

In fact, when a firm has made FRAND commitments to an SSO, requiring the firm to comply with its commitments mitigates the risk that the collaborative standard-setting process will harm competition. Product standards—implicit “agreement[s] not to manufacture, distribute, or purchase certain types of products”—“have a serious potential for anticompetitive harm.” Allied Tube, 486 U.S. at 500 (citation and footnote omitted). Accordingly, private SSOs “have traditionally been objects of antitrust scrutiny,” and the antitrust laws tolerate private standard-setting “only on the understanding that it will be conducted in a nonpartisan manner offering procompetitive benefits,” and in the presence of “meaningful safeguards” that prevent the standard-setting process from falling prey to “members with economic interests in stifling product competition.” Id. at 500- 01, 506-07; see Broadcom, 501 F.3d at 310, 314-15 (collecting cases). 

FRAND commitments are among the “meaningful safeguards” that SSOs have adopted to mitigate this serious risk to competition…. 

Courts have therefore recognized that conduct that breaches or otherwise “side-steps” these safeguards is appropriately subject to conventional Sherman Act scrutiny, not the heightened Aspen/Trinko standard… (p.83-84)

In defense of the proposition that courts apply “traditional antitrust standards to breaches of voluntary commitments made to mitigate antitrust concerns,” the FTC’s brief cites not only Broadcom, but also two other cases:

While this Court has long afforded firms latitude to “deal or refuse to deal with whomever [they] please[] without fear of violating the antitrust laws,” FountWip, Inc. v. Reddi-Wip, Inc., 568 F.2d 1296, 1300 (9th Cir. 1978) (citing Colgate, 250 U.S. at 307), it, too, has applied traditional antitrust standards to breaches of voluntary commitments made to mitigate antitrust concerns. In Mount Hood Stages, Inc. v. Greyhound Corp., 555 F.2d 687 (9th Cir. 1977), this Court upheld a judgment holding that Greyhound violated Section 2 by refusing to interchange bus traffic with a competing bus line after voluntarily committing to do so in order to secure antitrust approval from the Interstate Commerce Commission for proposed acquisitions. Id. at 69723; see also, e.g., Biovail Corp. Int’l v. Hoechst Aktiengesellschaft, 49 F. Supp. 2d 750, 759 (D.N.J. 1999) (breach of commitment to deal in violation of FTC merger consent decree exclusionary under Section 2). (p.85-86)

The cases the FTC cites to justify the proposition all deal with companies sidestepping obligations in order to falsely acquire monopoly power. The two cases cited above both involve companies making promises to government agencies to win merger approval and then failing to follow through. And, as noted, Broadcom deals with the acquisition of monopoly power by making false promises to an SSO to induce the choice of proprietary technology in a standard. While such conduct in the acquisition of monopoly power may be actionable under Broadcom (though this is highly dubious post-Rambus), none of these cases supports the FTC’s claim that an SEP holder violates antitrust law any time it evades an SSO obligation to license its technology to rivals. 

Conclusion

Put simply, the district court’s opinion in FTC v. Qualcomm runs headlong into the Supreme Court’s Aspen decision and founders there. This is why the FTC is trying to avoid analyzing the case under Aspen and subsequent duty-to-deal jurisprudence (including Trinko, the 9th Circuit’s MetroNet decision, and the 10th Circuit’s Novell decision): because it knows that if the appellate court applies those standards, the district court’s duty-to-deal analysis will fail. The FTC’s basis for applying a different standard is unsupportable, however. And even if its logic for applying a different standard were valid, the FTC’s proffered alternative theory is groundless in light of Rambus and NYNEX. The Ninth Circuit should vacate the district court’s finding of liability. 

In Antitrust & Competition, Apple, Federal Trade Commission, FTC v. Qualcomm: Analyzing the theory of the case, Intellectual Property, International, International Trade, Law & Economics, Patent, Platforms, Truth on the Market , , , , , , , , ,
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The District Court’s FTC v. Qualcomm Decision Rests on Impermissible Inferences and Should Be Reversed

Geoffrey Manne & Ben Sperry —  3 September 2019
FTC v. Qualcomm

Last week the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) and twelve noted law and economics scholars filed an amicus brief in the Ninth Circuit in FTC v. Qualcomm, in support of appellant (Qualcomm) and urging reversal of the district court’s decision. The brief was authored by Geoffrey A. Manne, President & founder of ICLE, and Ben Sperry, Associate Director, Legal Research of ICLE. Jarod M. Bona and Aaron R. Gott of Bona Law PC collaborated in drafting the brief and they and their team provided invaluable pro bono legal assistance, for which we are enormously grateful. Signatories on the brief are listed at the end of this post.

We’ve written about the case several times on Truth on the Market, as have a number of guest bloggers, in our ongoing blog series on the case here.   

The ICLE amicus brief focuses on the ways that the district court exceeded the “error cost” guardrails erected by the Supreme Court to minimize the risk and cost of mistaken antitrust decisions, particularly those that wrongly condemn procompetitive behavior. As the brief notes at the outset:

The district court’s decision is disconnected from the underlying economics of the case. It improperly applied antitrust doctrine to the facts, and the result subverts the economic rationale guiding monopolization jurisprudence. The decision—if it stands—will undercut the competitive values antitrust law was designed to protect.  

The antitrust error cost framework was most famously elaborated by Frank Easterbrook in his seminal article, The Limits of Antitrust (1984). It has since been squarely adopted by the Supreme Court—most significantly in Brooke Group (1986), Trinko (2003), and linkLine (2009).  

In essence, the Court’s monopolization case law implements the error cost framework by (among other things) obliging courts to operate under certain decision rules that limit the use of inferences about the consequences of a defendant’s conduct except when the circumstances create what game theorists call a “separating equilibrium.” A separating equilibrium is a 

solution to a game in which players of different types adopt different strategies and thereby allow an uninformed player to draw inferences about an informed player’s type from that player’s actions.

Baird, Gertner & Picker, Game Theory and the Law

The key problem in antitrust is that while the consequence of complained-of conduct for competition (i.e., consumers) is often ambiguous, its deleterious effect on competitors is typically quite evident—whether it is actually anticompetitive or not. The question is whether (and when) it is appropriate to infer anticompetitive effect from discernible harm to competitors. 

Except in the narrowly circumscribed (by Trinko) instance of a unilateral refusal to deal, anticompetitive harm under the rule of reason must be proven. It may not be inferred from harm to competitors, because such an inference is too likely to be mistaken—and “mistaken inferences are especially costly, because they chill the very conduct the antitrust laws are designed to protect.” (Brooke Group (quoting yet another key Supreme Court antitrust error cost case, Matsushita (1986)). 

Yet, as the brief discusses, in finding Qualcomm liable the district court did not demand or find proof of harm to competition. Instead, the court’s opinion relies on impermissible inferences from ambiguous evidence to find that Qualcomm had (and violated) an antitrust duty to deal with rival chip makers and that its conduct resulted in anticompetitive foreclosure of competition. 

We urge you to read the brief (it’s pretty short—maybe the length of three blogs posts) to get the whole argument. Below we draw attention to a few points we make in the brief that are especially significant. 

The district court bases its approach entirely on Microsoft — which it misinterprets in clear contravention of Supreme Court case law

The district court doesn’t stay within the strictures of the Supreme Court’s monopolization case law. In fact, although it obligingly recites some of the error cost language from Trinko, it quickly moves away from Supreme Court precedent and bases its approach entirely on its reading of the D.C. Circuit’s Microsoft (2001) decision. 

Unfortunately, the district court’s reading of Microsoft is mistaken and impermissible under Supreme Court precedent. Indeed, both the Supreme Court and the D.C. Circuit make clear that a finding of illegal monopolization may not rest on an inference of anticompetitive harm.

The district court cites Microsoft for the proposition that

Where a government agency seeks injunctive relief, the Court need only conclude that Qualcomm’s conduct made a “significant contribution” to Qualcomm’s maintenance of monopoly power. The plaintiff is not required to “present direct proof that a defendant’s continued monopoly power is precisely attributable to its anticompetitive conduct.”

It’s true Microsoft held that, in government actions seeking injunctions, “courts [may] infer ‘causation’ from the fact that a defendant has engaged in anticompetitive conduct that ‘reasonably appears capable of making a significant contribution to maintaining monopoly power.’” (Emphasis added). 

But Microsoft never suggested that anticompetitiveness itself may be inferred.

“Causation” and “anticompetitive effect” are not the same thing. Indeed, Microsoft addresses “anticompetitive conduct” and “causation” in separate sections of its decision. And whereas Microsoft allows that courts may infer “causation” in certain government actions, it makes no such allowance with respect to “anticompetitive effect.” In fact, it explicitly rules it out:

[T]he plaintiff… must demonstrate that the monopolist’s conduct indeed has the requisite anticompetitive effect…; no less in a case brought by the Government, it must demonstrate that the monopolist’s conduct harmed competition, not just a competitor.”

The D.C. Circuit subsequently reinforced this clear conclusion of its holding in Microsoft in Rambus: 

Deceptive conduct—like any other kind—must have an anticompetitive effect in order to form the basis of a monopolization claim…. In Microsoft… [t]he focus of our antitrust scrutiny was properly placed on the resulting harms to competition.

Finding causation entails connecting evidentiary dots, while finding anticompetitive effect requires an economic assessment. Without such analysis it’s impossible to distinguish procompetitive from anticompetitive conduct, and basing liability on such an inference effectively writes “anticompetitive” out of the law.

Thus, the district court is correct when it holds that it “need not conclude that Qualcomm’s conduct is the sole reason for its rivals’ exits or impaired status.” But it is simply wrong to hold—in the same sentence—that it can thus “conclude that Qualcomm’s practices harmed competition and consumers.” The former claim is consistent with Microsoft; the latter is emphatically not.

Under Trinko and Aspen Skiing the district court’s finding of an antitrust duty to deal is impermissible 

Because finding that a company operates under a duty to deal essentially permits a court to infer anticompetitive harm without proof, such a finding “comes dangerously close to being a form of ‘no-fault’ monopolization,” as Herbert Hovenkamp has written. It is also thus seriously disfavored by the Court’s error cost jurisprudence.

In Trinko the Supreme Court interprets its holding in Aspen Skiing to identify essentially a single scenario from which it may plausibly be inferred that a monopolist’s refusal to deal with rivals harms consumers: the existence of a prior, profitable course of dealing, and the termination and replacement of that arrangement with an alternative that not only harms rivals, but also is less profitable for the monopolist.

In an effort to satisfy this standard, the district court states that “because Qualcomm previously licensed its rivals, but voluntarily stopped licensing rivals even though doing so was profitable, Qualcomm terminated a voluntary and profitable course of dealing.”

But it’s not enough merely that the prior arrangement was profitable. Rather, Trinko and Aspen Skiing hold that when a monopolist ends a profitable relationship with a rival, anticompetitive exclusion may be inferred only when it also refuses to engage in an ongoing arrangement that, in the short run, is more profitable than no relationship at all. The key is the relative value to the monopolist of the current options on offer, not the value to the monopolist of the terminated arrangement. In a word, what the Court requires is that the defendant exhibit behavior that, but-for the expectation of future, anticompetitive returns, is irrational.

It should be noted, as John Lopatka (here) and Alan Meese (here) (both of whom joined the amicus brief) have written, that even the Supreme Court’s approach is likely insufficient to permit a court to distinguish between procompetitive and anticompetitive conduct. 

But what is certain is that the district court’s approach in no way permits such an inference.

“Evasion of a competitive constraint” is not an antitrust-relevant refusal to deal

In order to infer anticompetitive effect, it’s not enough that a firm may have a “duty” to deal, as that term is colloquially used, based on some obligation other than an antitrust duty, because it can in no way be inferred from the evasion of that obligation that conduct is anticompetitive.

The district court bases its determination that Qualcomm’s conduct is anticompetitive on the fact that it enables the company to avoid patent exhaustion, FRAND commitments, and thus price competition in the chip market. But this conclusion is directly precluded by the Supreme Court’s holding in NYNEX. 

Indeed, in Rambus, the D.C. Circuit, citing NYNEX, rejected the FTC’s contention that it may infer anticompetitive effect from defendant’s evasion of a constraint on its monopoly power in an analogous SEP-licensing case: “But again, as in NYNEX, an otherwise lawful monopolist’s end-run around price constraints, even when deceptive or fraudulent, does not alone present a harm to competition.”

As Josh Wright has noted:

[T]he objection to the “evasion” of any constraint approach is… that it opens the door to enforcement actions applied to business conduct that is not likely to harm competition and might be welfare increasing.

Thus NYNEX and Rambus (and linkLine) reinforce the Court’s repeated holding that an inference of harm to competition is permissible only where conduct points clearly to anticompetitive effect—and, bad as they may be, evading obligations under other laws or violating norms of “business morality” do not suffice.

The district court’s elaborate theory of harm rests fundamentally on the claim that Qualcomm injures rivals—and the record is devoid of evidence demonstrating actual harm to competition. Instead, the court infers it from what it labels “unreasonably high” royalty rates, enabled by Qualcomm’s evasion of competition from rivals. In turn, the court finds that that evasion of competition can be the source of liability if what Qualcomm evaded was an antitrust duty to deal. And, in impermissibly circular fashion, the court finds that Qualcomm indeed evaded an antitrust duty to deal—because its conduct allowed it to sustain “unreasonably high” prices. 

The Court’s antitrust error cost jurisprudence—from Brooke Group to NYNEX to Trinko & linkLine—stands for the proposition that no such circular inferences are permitted.

The district court’s foreclosure analysis also improperly relies on inferences in lieu of economic evidence

Because the district court doesn’t perform a competitive effects analysis, it fails to demonstrate the requisite “substantial” foreclosure of competition required to sustain a claim of anticompetitive exclusion. Instead the court once again infers anticompetitive harm from harm to competitors. 

The district court makes no effort to establish the quantity of competition foreclosed as required by the Supreme Court. Nor does the court demonstrate that the alleged foreclosure harms competition, as opposed to just rivals. Foreclosure per se is not impermissible and may be perfectly consistent with procompetitive conduct.

Again citing Microsoft, the district court asserts that a quantitative finding is not required. Yet, as the court’s citation to Microsoft should have made clear, in its stead a court must find actual anticompetitive effect; it may not simply assert it. As Microsoft held: 

It is clear that in all cases the plaintiff must… prove the degree of foreclosure. This is a prudential requirement; exclusivity provisions in contracts may serve many useful purposes. 

The court essentially infers substantiality from the fact that Qualcomm entered into exclusive deals with Apple (actually, volume discounts), from which the court concludes that Qualcomm foreclosed rivals’ access to a key customer. But its inference that this led to substantial foreclosure is based on internal business statements—so-called “hot docs”—characterizing the importance of Apple as a customer. Yet, as Geoffrey Manne and Marc Williamson explain, such documentary evidence is unreliable as a guide to economic significance or legal effect: 

Business people will often characterize information from a business perspective, and these characterizations may seem to have economic implications. However, business actors are subject to numerous forces that influence the rhetoric they use and the conclusions they draw….

There are perfectly good reasons to expect to see “bad” documents in business settings when there is no antitrust violation lurking behind them.

Assuming such language has the requisite economic or legal significance is unsupportable—especially when, as here, the requisite standard demands a particular quantitative significance.

Moreover, the court’s “surcharge” theory of exclusionary harm rests on assumptions regarding the mechanism by which the alleged surcharge excludes rivals and harms consumers. But the court incorrectly asserts that only one mechanism operates—and it makes no effort to quantify it. 

The court cites “basic economics” via Mankiw’s Principles of Microeconomics text for its conclusion:

The surcharge affects demand for rivals’ chips because as a matter of basic economics, regardless of whether a surcharge is imposed on OEMs or directly on Qualcomm’s rivals, “the price paid by buyers rises, and the price received by sellers falls.” Thus, the surcharge “places a wedge between the price that buyers pay and the price that sellers receive,” and demand for such transactions decreases. Rivals see lower sales volumes and lower margins, and consumers see less advanced features as competition decreases.

But even assuming the court is correct that Qualcomm’s conduct entails such a surcharge, basic economics does not hold that decreased demand for rivals’ chips is the only possible outcome. 

In actuality, an increase in the cost of an input for OEMs can have three possible effects:

  1. OEMs can pass all or some of the cost increase on to consumers in the form of higher phone prices. Assuming some elasticity of demand, this would mean fewer phone sales and thus less demand by OEMs for chips, as the court asserts. But the extent of that effect would depend on consumers’ demand elasticity and the magnitude of the cost increase as a percentage of the phone price. If demand is highly inelastic at this price (i.e., relatively insensitive to the relevant price change), it may have a tiny effect on the number of phones sold and thus the number of chips purchased—approaching zero as price insensitivity increases.
  2. OEMs can absorb the cost increase and realize lower profits but continue to sell the same number of phones and purchase the same number of chips. This would not directly affect demand for chips or their prices.
  3. OEMs can respond to a price increase by purchasing fewer chips from rivals and more chips from Qualcomm. While this would affect rivals’ chip sales, it would not necessarily affect consumer prices, the total number of phones sold, or OEMs’ margins—that result would depend on whether Qualcomm’s chips cost more or less than its rivals’. If the latter, it would even increase OEMs’ margins and/or lower consumer prices and increase output.

Alternatively, of course, the effect could be some combination of these.

Whether any of these outcomes would substantially exclude rivals is inherently uncertain to begin with. But demonstrating a reduction in rivals’ chip sales is a necessary but not sufficient condition for proving anticompetitive foreclosure. The FTC didn’t even demonstrate that rivals were substantially harmed, let alone that there was any effect on consumers—nor did the district court make such findings. 

Doing so would entail consideration of whether decreased demand for rivals’ chips flows from reduced consumer demand or OEMs’ switching to Qualcomm for supply, how consumer demand elasticity affects rivals’ chip sales, and whether Qualcomm’s chips were actually less or more expensive than rivals’. Yet the court determined none of these. 

Conclusion

Contrary to established Supreme Court precedent, the district court’s decision relies on mere inferences to establish anticompetitive effect. The decision, if it stands, would render a wide range of potentially procompetitive conduct presumptively illegal and thus harm consumer welfare. It should be reversed by the Ninth Circuit.

Joining ICLE on the brief are:

  • Donald J. Boudreaux, Professor of Economics, George Mason University
  • Kenneth G. Elzinga, Robert C. Taylor Professor of Economics, University of Virginia
  • Janice Hauge, Professor of Economics, University of North Texas
  • Justin (Gus) Hurwitz, Associate Professor of Law, University of Nebraska College of Law; Director of Law & Economics Programs, ICLE
  • Thomas A. Lambert, Wall Chair in Corporate Law and Governance, University of Missouri Law School
  • John E. Lopatka, A. Robert Noll Distinguished Professor of Law, Penn State University Law School
  • Daniel Lyons, Professor of Law, Boston College Law School
  • Geoffrey A. Manne, President and Founder, International Center for Law & Economics; Distinguished Fellow, Northwestern University Center on Law, Business & Economics
  • Alan J. Meese, Ball Professor of Law, William & Mary Law School
  • Paul H. Rubin, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Economics Emeritus, Emory University
  • Vernon L. Smith, George L. Argyros Endowed Chair in Finance and Economics, Chapman University School of Business; Nobel Laureate in Economics, 2002
  • Michael Sykuta, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Missouri


In Antitrust & Competition, Apple, Exclusive Dealing, Federal Trade Commission, FTC v. Qualcomm: Analyzing the theory of the case, Intellectual Property, International Center for Law & Economics, Law & Economics, Monopolization, Patent, Platforms, Standard Setting, Truth on the Market, Vertical Restraints , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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