Archives For economic freedom

Why Restoring Internet Freedom Was a Landmark Accomplishment

Randy May —  15 January 2021

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

Randy May is president of the Free State Foundation.]

I am pleased to participate in this retrospective symposium regarding Ajit Pai’s tenure as Federal Communications Commission chairman. I have been closely involved in communications law and policy for nearly 45 years, and, as I’ve said several times since Chairman Pai announced his departure, he will leave as one of the most consequential leaders in the agency’s history. And, I should hastily add, consequential in a positive way, because it’s possible to be consequential in a not-so-positive way.

Chairman Pai’s leadership has been impactful in many different areas—for example, spectrum availability, media deregulation, and institutional reform, to name three—but in this tribute I will focus on his efforts regarding “net neutrality.” I use the quotes because the term has been used by many to mean many different things in many different contexts.

Within a year of becoming chairman, and with the support of fellow Republican commissioners Michael O’Rielly and Brendan Carr, Ajit Pai led the agency in reversing the public utility-like “net neutrality” regulation that had been imposed by the Obama FCC in February 2015 in what became known as the Title II Order. The Title II Order had classified internet service providers (ISPs) as “telecommunications carriers” subject to the same common-carrier regulatory regime imposed on monopolistic Ma Bell during most of the 20th century. While “forbearing” from imposing the full array of traditional common-carrier regulatory mandates, the Title II Order also subjected ISPs to sanctions if they violated an amorphous “general conduct standard,” which provided that ISPs could not “unreasonably” interfere with or disadvantage end users or edge providers like Google, Facebook, and the like.

The aptly styled Restoring Internet Freedom Order (RIF Order), adopted in December 2017, reversed nearly all of the Title II Order’s heavy-handed regulation of ISPs in favor of a light-touch regulatory regime. It was aptly named, because the RIF Order “restored” market “freedom” to internet access regulation that had mostly prevailed since the turn of the 21st century. It’s worth remembering that, in 1999, in opting not to require that newly emerging cable broadband providers be subjected to a public utility-style regime, Clinton-appointee FCC Chairman William Kennard declared: “[T]he alternative is to go to the telephone world…and just pick up this whole morass of regulation and dump it wholesale on the cable pipe. That is not good for America.” And worth recalling, too, that in 2002, the commission, under the leadership of Chairman Michael Powell, determined that “broadband services should exist in a minimal regulatory environment that promotes investment and innovation in a competitive market.”

It was this reliance on market freedom that was “restored” under Ajit Pai’s leadership. In an appearance at a Free State Foundation event in December 2016, barely a month before becoming chairman, then-Commissioner Pai declared: “It is time to fire up the weed whacker and remove those rules that are holding back investment, innovation, and job creation.” And he added: “Proof of market failure should guide the next commission’s consideration of new regulations.” True to his word, the weed whacker was used to cut down the public utility regime imposed on ISPs by his predecessor. And the lack of proof of any demonstrable market failure was at the core of the RIF Order’s reasoning.

It is true that, as a matter of law, the D.C. Circuit’s affirmance of the Restoring Internet Freedom Order in Mozilla v. FCC rested heavily on the application by the court of Chevron deference, just as it is true that Chevron deference played a central role in the affirmance of the Title II Order and the Brand X decision before that. And it would be disingenuous to suggest that, if a newly reconstituted Biden FCC reinstitutes a public utility-like regulatory regime for ISPs, that Chevron deference won’t once again play a central role in the appeal.

But optimist that I am, and focusing not on what possibly may be done as a matter of law, but on what ought to be done as a matter of policy, the “new” FCC should leave in place the RIF Order’s light-touch regulatory regime. In affirming most of the RIF Order in Mozilla, the D.C. Circuit agreed there was substantial evidence supporting the commission’s predictive judgment that reclassification of ISPs “away from public-utility style regulation” was “likely to increase ISP investment and output.” And the court agreed there was substantial evidence to support the commission’s position that such regulation is especially inapt for “a dynamic industry built on technological development and disruption.”

Indeed, the evidence has only become more substantial since the RIF Order’s adoption. Here are only a few factual snippets: According to CTIA, wireless-industry investment for 2019 grew to $29.1 billion, up from $27.4 billion in 2018 and $25.6 billion in 2017.  USTelecom estimates that wireline broadband ISPs invested approximately $80 billion in network infrastructure in 2018, up more than $3.1 billion from $76.9 billion in 2017. And total investment most likely increased in 2019 for wireline ISPs like it did for wireless ISPs. Figures cited in the FCC’s 2020 Broadband Deployment Report indicate that fiber broadband networks reached an additional 6.5 million homes in 2019, a 16% increase over the prior year and the largest single-year increase ever. 

Additionally, more Americans have access to broadband internet access services, and at ever higher speeds. According to an April 2020 report by USTelecom, for example, gigabit internet service is available to at least 85% of U.S. homes, compared to only 6% of U.S. homes three-and-a-half years ago. In an October 2020 blog post, Chairman Pai observed that “average download speeds for fixed broadband in the United States have doubled, increasing by over 99%” since the RIF Order was adopted. Ookla Speedtests similarly show significant gains in mobile wireless speeds, climbing to 47/10 Mbps in September 2020 compared to 27/8 Mbps in the first half of 2018.

More evidentiary support could be offered regarding the positive results that followed adoption of the RIF Order, and I assume in the coming year it will be. But the import of abandonment of public utility-like regulation of ISPs should be clear.

There is certainly much that Ajit Pai, the first-generation son of immigrants who came to America seeking opportunity in the freedom it offered, accomplished during his tenure. To my way of thinking, “Restoring Internet Freedom” ranks at—or at least near—the top of the list.

In Administrative Law, Broadband, Facebook, Federal Communications Commission, Google, Net Neutrality, Platforms, Regulation, Regulatory Reform, Retrospective on Ajit Pai’s Tenure as FCC Chairman, Symposia, Telecommunications, Truth on the Market, Wireless , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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The Antitrust Prohibition of Favoritism, or the Imposition of Corporate Selflessness

Aurelien Portuese —  16 December 2020

[TOTM: The following is part of a digital symposium by TOTM guests and authors on the law, economics, and policy of the antitrust lawsuits against Google. The entire series of posts is available here.]

It is my endeavor to scrutinize the questionable assessment articulated against default settings in the U.S. Justice Department’s lawsuit against Google. Default, I will argue, is no antitrust fault. Default in the Google case drastically differs from default referred to in the Microsoft case. In Part I, I argue the comparison is odious. Furthermore, in Part II, it will be argued that the implicit prohibition of default settings echoes, as per listings, the explicit prohibition of self-preferencing in search results. Both aspects – default’s implicit prohibition and self-preferencing’s explicit prohibition – are the two legs of a novel and integrated theory of sanctioning corporate favoritism. The coming to the fore of such theory goes against the very essence of the capitalist grain. In Part III, I note the attempt to instill some corporate selflessness is at odds with competition on the merits and the spirit of fundamental economic freedoms.

When Default is No-Fault

The recent complaint filed by the DOJ and 11 state attorneys general claims that Google has abused its dominant position on the search-engine market through several ways, notably making Google the default search engine both in Google Chrome web browser for Android OS and in Apple’s Safari web browser for iOS. Undoubtedly, default setting confers a noticeable advantage for users’ attraction – it is sought and enforced on purpose. Nevertheless, the default setting confers an unassailable position unless the product remains competitive. Furthermore, the default setting can hardly be proven to be anticompetitive in the Google case. Indeed, the DOJ puts considerable effort in the complaint to make the Google case resemble the 20-year-old Microsoft case. Former Federal Trade Commission Chairman William Kovacic commented: “I suppose the Justice Department is telling the court, ‘You do not have to be scared of this case. You’ve done it before […] This is Microsoft part 2.”[1]

However, irrespective of the merits of the Microsoft case two decades ago, the Google default setting case bears minimal resemblance to the Microsoft default setting of Internet Explorer. First, as opposed to the Microsoft case, where default by Microsoft meant pre-installed software (i.e., Internet Explorer)[2], the Google case does not relate to the pre-installment of the Google search engine (since it is just a webpage) but a simple setting. This technical difference is significant: although “sticky”[3], the default setting, can be outwitted with just one click[4]. It is dissimilar to the default setting, which can only be circumvented by uninstalling software[5], searching and installing a new one[6]. Moreover, with no certainty that consumers will effectively use Google search engine, default settings come with advertising revenue sharing agreements between Google and device manufacturers, mobile phone carriers, competing browsers and Apple[7]. These mutually beneficial deals represent a significant cost with no technical exclusivity [8]. In other words, the antitrust treatment of a tie-in between software and hardware in the Microsoft case cannot be convincingly extrapolated to the default setting of a “webware”[9] as relevant in the Google case.

Second, the Google case cannot legitimately resort to extrapolating the Microsoft case for another technical (and commercial) aspect: the Microsoft case was a classic tie-in case where the tied product (Internet Explorer) was tied into the main product (Windows). As a traditional tie-in scenario, the tied product (Internet Explorer) was “consistently offered, promoted, and distributed […] as a stand-alone product separate from, and not as a component of, Windows […]”[10]. In contrast, Google has never sold Google Chrome or Android OS. It offered both Google Chrome and Android OS for free, necessarily conditional to Google search engine as default setting. The very fact that Google Chrome or Android OS have never been “stand-alone” products, to use the Microsoft case’s language, together with the absence of software installation, dramatically differentiates the features pertaining to the Google case from those of the Microsoft case. The Google case is not a traditional tie-in case: it is a case against default setting when both products (the primary and related products) are given for free, are not saleable, are neither tangible nor intangible goods but only popular digital services due to significant innovativeness and ease of usage. The Microsoft “complaint challenge[d] only Microsoft’s concerted attempts to maintain its monopoly in operating systems and to achieve dominance in other markets, not by innovation and other competition on the merits, but by tie-ins.” Quite noticeably, the Google case does not mention tie-in ,as per Google Chrome or Android OS.

The complaint only refers to tie-ins concerning Google’s app being pre-installed on Android OS. Therefore, concerning Google’s dominance on the search engine market, it cannot be said that the default setting of Google search in Android OS entails tie-in. Google search engine has no distribution channel (since it is only a website) other than through downstream partnerships (i.e., vertical deals with Android device manufacturers). To sanction default setting on downstream trading partners is tantamount to refusing legitimate means to secure distribution channels of proprietary and zero-priced services. To further this detrimental logic, it would mean that Apple may no longer offer its own apps in its own iPhones or, in offline markets, that a retailer may no longer offer its own (default) bags at the till since it excludes rivals’ sale bags. Products and services naked of any adjacent products and markets (i.e., an iPhone or Android OS with no app or a shopkeeper with no bundled services) would dramatically increase consumers’ search costs while destroying innovators’ essential distribution channels for innovative business models and providing few departures from the status quo as long as consumers will continue to value default products[11].

Default should not be an antitrust fault: the Google case makes default settings a new line of antitrust injury absent tie-ins. In conclusion, as a free webware, Google search’s default setting cannot be compared to default installation in the Microsoft case since minimal consumer stickiness entails (almost) no switching costs. As free software, Google’s default apps cannot be compared to Microsoft case either since pre-installation is the sine qua non condition of the highly valued services (Android OS) voluntarily chosen by device manufacturers. Default settings on downstream products can only be reasonably considered as antitrust injury when the dominant company is erroneously treated as a de facto essential facility – something evidenced by the similar prohibition of self-preferencing.

When Self-Preference is No Defense

Self-preferencing is to listings what the default setting is to operating systems. They both are ways to market one’s own products (i.e., alternative to marketing toward end-consumers). While default setting may come with both free products and financial payments (Android OS and advertising revenue sharing), self-preferencing may come with foregone advertising revenues in order to promote one’s own products. Both sides can be apprehended as the two sides of the same coin:[12] generating the ad-funded main product’s distribution channels – Google’s search engine. Both are complex advertising channels since both venues favor one’s own products regarding consumers’ attention. Absent both channels, the payments made for default agreements and the foregone advertising revenues in self-preferencing one’s own products would morph into marketing and advertising expenses of Google search engine toward end-consumers.

The DOJ complaint lambasts that “Google’s monopoly in general search services also has given the company extraordinary power as the gateway to the internet, which uses to promote its own web content and increase its profits.” This blame was at the core of the European Commission’s Google Shopping decision in 2017[13]: it essentially holds Google accountable for having, because of its ad-funded business model, promoted its own advertising products and demoted organic links in search results. According to which Google’s search results are no longer relevant and listed on the sole motivation of advertising revenue

But this argument is circular: should these search results become irrelevant, Google’s core business would become less attractive, thereby generating less advertising revenue. This self-inflicted inefficiency would deprive Google of valuable advertising streams and incentivize end-consumers to switch to search engine rivals such as Bing, DuckDuckGo, Amazon (product search), etc. Therefore, an ad-funded company such as Google needs to reasonably arbitrage between advertising objectives and the efficiency of its core activities (here, zero-priced organic search services). To downplay (the ad-funded) self-referencing in order to foster (the zero-priced) organic search quality would disregard the two-sidedness of the Google platform: it would harm advertisers and the viability of the ad-funded business model without providing consumers and innovation protection it aims at providing. The problematic and undesirable concept of “search neutrality” would mean algorithmic micro-management for the sake of an “objective” listing considered acceptable only to the eyes of the regulator.

Furthermore, self-preferencing entails a sort of positive discrimination toward one’s own products[14]. If discrimination has traditionally been antitrust lines of injuries, self-preferencing is an “epithet”[15] outside antitrust remits for good reasons[16]. Indeed, should self-interested (i.e., rationally minded) companies and individuals are legally complied to self-demote their own products and services? If only big (how big?) companies are legally complied to self-demote their products and services, to what extent will exempted companies involved in self-preferencing become liable to do so?

Indeed, many uncertainties, legal and economic ones, may spawn from the emerging prohibition of self-preferencing. More fundamentally, antitrust liability may clash with basic corporate governance principles where self-interestedness allows self-preferencing and command such self-promotion. The limits of antitrust have been reached when two sets of legal regimes, both applicable to companies, suggest contradictory commercial conducts. To what extent may Amazon no longer promote its own series on Amazon Video in a similar manner Netflix does? To what extent can Microsoft no longer promote Bing’s search engine to compete with Google’s search engine effectively? To what extent Uber may no longer promote UberEATS in order to compete with delivery services effectively? Not only the business of business is doing business[17], but also it is its duty for which shareholders may hold managers to account.

The self is moral; there is a corporate morality of business self-interest. In other words, corporate selflessness runs counter to business ethics since corporate self-interest yields the self’s rivalrous positioning within a competitive order. Absent a corporate self-interest, self-sacrifice may generate value destruction for the sake of some unjustified and ungrounded claims. The emerging prohibition of self-preferencing, similar to the established ban on the default setting on one’s own products into other proprietary products, materializes the corporate self’s losing. Both directions coalesce to instill the legally embedded duty of self-sacrifice for the competitor’s welfare instead of the traditional consumer welfare and the dynamics of innovation, which never unleash absent appropriabilities. In conclusion, to expect firms, however big or small, to act irrespective of their identities (i.e., corporate selflessness) would constitute an antitrust error and would be at odds with capitalism.

Toward an Integrated Theory of Disintegrating Favoritism

The Google lawsuit primarily blames Google for default settings enforced via several deals. The lawsuit also makes self-preferencing anticompetitive conduct under antitrust rules. These two charges are novel and dubious in their remits. They nevertheless represent a fundamental catalyst for the development of a new and problematic unified antitrust theory prohibiting favoritism:  companies may no longer favor their products and services, both vertically and horizontally, irrespective of consumer benefits, irrespective of superior efficiency arguments, and irrespective of dynamic capabilities enhancement. Indeed, via an unreasonably expanded vision of leveraging, antitrust enforcement is furtively banning a company to favor its own products and services based on greater consumer choice as a substitute to consumer welfare, based on the protection of the opportunities of rivals to innovate and compete as a substitute to the essence of competition and innovation, and based on limiting the outreach and size of companies as a substitute to the capabilities and efficiencies of these companies. Leveraging becomes suspicious and corporate self-favoritism under accusation. The Google lawsuit materializes this impractical trend, which further enshrines the precautionary approach to antitrust enforcement[18].

[1] Jessica Guynn, Google Justice Department antitrust lawsuit explained: this is what it means for you. USA Today, October 20, 2020.

[2] The software (Internet Explorer) was tied in the hardware (Windows PC).

[3] U.S. v Google LLC, Case A:20, October 20, 2020, 3 (referring to default settings as “especially sticky” with respect to consumers’ willingness to change).

[4] While the DOJ affirms that “being the preset default general search engine is particularly valuable because consumers rarely change the preset default”, it nevertheless provides no evidence of the breadth of such consumer stickiness. To be sure, search engine’s default status does not necessarily lead to usage as evidenced by the case of South Korea. In this country, despite Google’s preset default settings, the search engine Naver remains dominant in the national search market with over 70% of market shares. The rivalry exerted by Naver on Google demonstrates that limits of consumer stickiness to default settings. See Alesia Krush, Google vs. Naver: Why Can’t Google Dominate Search in Korea? Link-Assistant.Com, available at: https://www.link-assistant.com/blog/google-vs-naver-why-cant-google-dominate-search-in-korea/ . As dominant search engine in Korea, Naver is subject to antitrust investigations with similar leveraging practices as Google in other countries, see Shin Ji-hye, FTC sets up special to probe Naver, Google, The Korea Herald, November 19, 2019, available at :  http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20191119000798 ; Kim Byung-wook, Complaint against Google to be filed with FTC, The Investor, December 14, 2020, available at : https://www.theinvestor.co.kr/view.php?ud=20201123000984  (reporting a complaint by Naver and other Korean IT companies against Google’s 30% commission policy on Google Play Store’s apps).

[5] For instance, the then complaint acknowledged that “Microsoft designed Windows 98 so that removal of Internet Explorer by OEMs or end users is operationally more difficult than it was in Windows 95”, in U.S. v Microsoft Corp., Civil Action No 98-1232, May 18, 1998, para.20.

[6] The DOJ complaint itself quotes “one search competitor” who is reported to have noted consumer stickiness “despite the simplicity of changing a default setting to enable customer choice […]” (para.47). Therefore, default setting for search engine is remarkably simple to bypass but consumers do not often do so, either due to satisfaction with Google search engine and/or due to search and opportunity costs.

[7] See para.56 of the DOJ complaint.

[8] Competing browsers can always welcome rival search engines and competing search engine apps can always be downloaded despite revenue sharing agreements. See paras.78-87 of the DOJ complaint.

[9] Google search engine is nothing but a “webware” – a complex set of algorithms that work via online access of a webpage with no prior download. For a discussion on the definition of webware, see https://www.techopedia.com/definition/4933/webware .

[10] Id. para.21.

[11] Such outcome would frustrate traditional ways of offering computers and mobile devices as acknowledged by the DOJ itself in the Google complaint: “new computers and new mobile devices generally come with a number of preinstalled apps and out-of-the-box setting. […] Each of these search access points can and almost always does have a preset default general search engine”, at para. 41. Also, it appears that present default general search engine is common commercial practices since, as the DOJ complaint itself notes when discussing Google’s rivals (Microsoft’s Bing and Amazon’s Fire OS), “Amazon preinstalled its own proprietary apps and agreed to make Microsoft’s Bing the preset default general search engine”, in para.130. The complaint fails to identify alternative search engines which are not preset defaults, thus implicitly recognizing this practice as a widespread practice.

[12] To use Vesterdof’s language, see Bo Vesterdorf, Theories of Self-Preferencing and Duty to Deal – Two Sides of the Same Coin, Competition Law & Policy Debate 1(1) 4, (2015). See also Nicolas Petit, Theories of Self-Preferencing under Article 102 TFEU: A Reply to Bo Vesterdorf, 5-7 (2015).

[13] Case 39740 Google Search (Shopping). Here the foreclosure effects of self-preferencing are only speculated: « the Commission is not required to prove that the Conduct has the actual effect of decreasing traffic to competing comparison shopping services and increasing traffic to Google’s comparison-shopping service. Rather, it is sufficient for the Commission to demonstrate that the Conduct is capable of having, or likely to have, such effects.” (para.601 of the Decision). See P. Ibáñez Colomo, Indispensability and Abuse of Dominance: From Commercial Solvents to Slovak Telekom and Google Shopping, 10 Journal of European Competition Law & Practice 532 (2019); Aurelien Portuese, When Demotion is Competition: Algorithmic Antitrust Illustrated, Concurrences, no 2, May 2018, 25-37; Aurelien Portuese, Fine is Only One Click Away, Symposium on the Google Shopping Decision, Case Note, 3 Competition and Regulatory Law Review, (2017).

[14] For a general discussion on law and economics of self-preferencing, see Michael A. Salinger, Self-Preferencing, Global Antitrust Institute Report, 329-368 (2020).

[15]Pablo Ibanez Colomo, Self-Preferencing: Yet Another Epithet in Need of Limiting Principles, 43 World Competition (2020) (concluding that self-preferencing is « misleading as a legal category »).

[16] See, for instances, Pedro Caro de Sousa, What Shall We Do About Self-Preferencing? Competition Policy International, June 2020.

[17] Milton Friedman, The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits, New York Times, September 13, 1970. This echoes Adam Smith’s famous statement that « It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard for their own self-interest » from the 1776 Wealth of Nations. In Ayn Rand’s philosophy, the only alternative to rational self-interest is to sacrifice one’s own interests either for fellowmen (altruism) or for supernatural forces (mysticism). See Ayn Rand, The Objectivist Ethics, in The Virtue of Selfishness, Signet, (1964).

[18] Aurelien Portuese, European Competition Enforcement and the Digital Economy : The Birthplace of Precautionary Antitrust, Global Antitrust Institute’s Report on the Digital Economy, 597-651.

In Amazon, Antitrust & Competition, Antitrust Division, Apple, Corporate & Securities Law, European Union, Federal Trade Commission, Google, International, Justice Department, Platforms, Symposia, Symposium on the Future of American Antitrust: The Google Lawsuits, Truth on the Market , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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The CARES Act and the Tantalizing Promise of a Universal Basic Income

Miranda Fleischer —  22 April 2020

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

This post is authored by Miranda Perry Fleischer, (Professor Law and Co-Director of Tax Programs at the University of San Diego School of Law); and Matt Zwolinski (Professor of Philosophy, University of San Diego; founder and director, USD Center for Ethics, Economics, and Public Policy; founder and contributor, Bleeding Heart Libertarians Blog)] 

This week, Americans began receiving cold, hard cash from the government. Meant to cushion the economic fallout of Covid-19, the CARES Act provides households with relief payments of up to $1200 per adult and $500 per child. As we have written elsewhere, direct cash transfers are the simplest, least paternalistic, and most efficient way to protect Americans’ economic health – pandemic or not. The idea of simply giving people money has deep historical and wide ideological roots, culminating in Andrew Yang’s popularization of a universal basic income (“UBI”) during his now-suspended presidential campaign. The CARES Act relief provisions embody some of the potential benefits of a UBI, but nevertheless fail in key ways to deliver its true promise.

Provide Cash, No-Strings-Attached

Most promisingly, the relief payments are no-strings-attached. Recipients can use them as they – not the government – think best, be it for rent, food, or a laptop for a child to learn remotely. This freedom is a welcome departure from most current aid programs, which are often in-kind or restricted transfers. Kansas prohibits welfare recipients from using benefits at movie theaters and swimming pools. SNAP recipients cannot purchase “hot food” such as a ready-to-eat roasted chicken; California has a 17-page pamphlet identifying which foods users of Women, Infants and Children (“WIC”) benefits can buy (for example, white eggs but not brown). 

These restrictions arise from a distrust of beneficiaries. Yet numerous studies show that recipients of cash transfers do not waste benefits on alcohol, drugs or gambling. Instead, beneficiaries in developing countries purchase livestock, metal roofs, or healthier food. In wealthier countries, cash transfers are associated with improvements in infant health, better nutrition, higher test scores, more schooling, and lower rates of arrest for young adults – all of which suggest beneficiaries do not waste cash.

Avoid Asset Tests

A second positive of the relief payments is that they eschew asset tests, unlike many welfare programs. For example, a family can lose hundreds of dollars of SNAP benefits if their countable assets exceed $2,250. Such limits act as an implicit wealth tax and discourage lower-income individuals from saving. Indeed, some recipients report engaging in transactions like buying furniture on lay-away (which does not count) to avoid the asset limits. Lower-income individuals, for whom a car repair bill or traffic ticket can lead to financial ruin, should be encouraged to – not penalized for – saving for a rainy day.

Don’t Worry So Much about the Labor Market  

A third pro is that the direct relief payments are not tied to a showing of desert. They do not require one to work, be looking for work, or show that one is either unable to work or engaged in a substitute such as child care or school. Again, this contrasts with most current welfare programs. SNAP requires able-bodied childless adults to work or participate in training or education 80 hours a month. Supplemental Security Income requires non-elderly recipients to prove that they are blind or disabled. Nor do the relief payments require recipients to pass a drug test, or prove they have no criminal record.

As with spending restrictions, these requirements display distrust of beneficiaries. The fear is that “money for nothing” will encourage low-income individuals to leave their jobs en masse. But this fear, too, is largely overblown. Although past experiments with unconditional transfers show that total work hours drop, the bulk of this drop is from teenagers staying in school longer, new mothers delaying entrance into the workforce, and primary earners reducing their hours from say, 60 to 50 hours a week. We could also imagine UBI recipients spending time volunteering, engaging in the arts, or taking care of friends and relatives. None of these are necessarily bad things.

Don’t Limit Aid to the “Deserving”

On these three counts, the CARES Act embraces the promise of a UBI. But the CARES Act departs from key aspects of a well-designed, true UBI. Most importantly, the size of the relief payments – one-time transfers of $1200 per adult – pale in comparison to the Act’s enhanced unemployment benefits of $600/week. This mismatch underscores how deeply ingrained our country’s obsession with helping only the “deserving” poor is and how narrowly “desert” is defined. The Act’s most generous aid is limited to individuals with pre-existing connections to the formal labor market who leave under very specific conditions. Someone who cannot work because they are caring for a family member sick with COVID-19 qualifies, but not an adult child who left a job months ago to care for an aging parent with Alzheimer’s. A parent who cannot work because her child’s school was cancelled due to the pandemic qualifies, but not a parent who hasn’t worked the past couple years due to the lack of affordable child care. And because unemployment benefits not only turn on being previously employed but also rise the higher one’s past wages were, this mismatch magnifies that our safety net helps the slightly poor much more than the very poorest among us. 

Don’t Impose Bureaucratic Hurdles

The botched roll-out of the enhanced unemployment benefits illustrates another downside to targeting aid only to the “deserving”: It is far more complicated than giving aid to all who need it. Guidance for self-employed workers (newly eligible for such benefits) is still forthcoming. Individuals with more than one employer before the crisis struggle to input multiple jobs in the system, even though their benefits increase as their past wages do. Even college graduates have trouble completing the clunky forms; a friend who teaches yoga had to choose between “aqua fitness instructor” and “physical education” when listing her job. 

These frustrations are just another example of the government’s ineptitude at determining who is and is not work capable – even in good times. Often, the very people that can navigate the system to convince the government they are unable to work are actually the most work-capable. Those least capable of work, unable to navigate the system, receive nothing. And as millions of Americans spend countless hours on the phone and navigating crashing websites, they are learning what has been painfully obvious to many lower-income individuals for years – the government often puts insurmountable barriers in the way of even the “deserving poor.” These barriers – numerous office visits, lengthy forms, drug tests – are sometimes so time consuming that beneficiaries must choose between obtaining benefits to which they are legally entitled and applying for jobs or working extra hours. Lesson one from the CARES Act is that universal payments, paid to all, avoid these pitfalls. 

Don’t Means Test Up Front

The CARES Act contains three other flaws that a well-designed UBI would also fix. First, the structure of the cash transfers highlights the drawbacks of upfront means testing. In an attempt to limit aid to Americans in financial distress, the $1200 relief payments begin to phase-out at five cents on the dollar when income exceeds a certain threshold: $75,000 for childless, single individuals and $150,000 for married couples. The catch is that for most Americans, their 2019 or 2018 incomes will determine whether their relief payments phase-out – and therefore how much aid they receive now, in 2020. In a world where 22 million Americans have filed for unemployment in the past month, looking to one or two-year old data to determine need is meaningless. Many Americans whose pre-pandemic incomes exceeded the threshold are now struggling to make mortgage payments and put food on the table, but will receive little or no direct cash aid under the CARES Act until April of 2021.

This absurdity magnifies a problem inherent in ex ante means tests. Often, one’s past financial status does not tell us much about an individual’s current needs. This is particularly true when incomes fluctuate from period to period, as is the case with many lower-income workers. Imagine a fast food worker and SNAP beneficiary whose schedule changes month to month, if not week to week. If she is lucky enough to work a lot in November, she may see her December SNAP benefits reduced. But what if her boss gives her fewer shifts in December? Both her paycheck and her SNAP benefits will be lower in December, leaving her struggling.

The solution is to send cash to all Americans, and recapture the transfer through the income tax system. Mathematically, an ex post tax is exactly the same as an ex ante phase out. Consider the CARES Act. A childless single individual with an income of $85,000 is $10,000 over the threshold, reducing her benefit by $500 and netting her $700. Giving her a check for $1200 and taxing her an additional 5% on income above $75,000 also nets her $700. As a practical matter, however, an ex post tax is more accurate because hindsight is 20-20. Lesson two from the CARES Act is that universal payments offset by taxes are superior to ex ante means-testing.

Provide Regular Payments

Third, the CARES Act provides one lump sum payment, with struggling Americans wondering whether Congress will act again. This is a missed opportunity: Studies show that families receiving SNAP benefits face challenges planning for even a month at a time. Lesson three is that guaranteed monthly or bi-weekly payments – as a true UBI would provide — would help households plan and provide some peace of mind amidst this uncertainty.

Provide Equal Payments to Children and Adults

Finally, the CARES Act provides a smaller benefit to children than adults. This is nonsensical. A single parent with two children faces greater hardship than a married couple with one child, as she has the same number of mouths to feed with fewer earners. Further, social science evidence suggests that augmenting family income has positive long-run consequences for children. Lesson four from the CARES Act – the empirical case for a UBI is strongest for families with children.

It’s Better to Be Overly, not Underly, Generous

The Act’s direct cash payments are a step in the right direction. But they demonstrate that not all cash assistance plans are created equal. Uniform and periodic payments to all – regardless of age and one’s relationship to the workforce – is the best way to protect Americans’ economic health, pandemic or not. This is not the time to be stingy or moralistic in our assistance. Better to err on the side of being overly generous now, especially when we can correct that error later through the tax system. Errors that result in withholding aid from those who need it, alas, might not be so easy to correct.

In COVID-19, Law & Economics, Symposia, Taxes, The Law, Economics, and Policy of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Truth on the Market , , , , , , , , , ,
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Kochland: An Inadvertent Paean to the Glories of the Free Market

Kristian Stout —  5 September 2019

A recently published book, “Kochland – The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America” by Christopher Leonard, presents a gripping account of relentless innovation and the power of the entrepreneur to overcome adversity in pursuit of delivering superior goods and services to the market while also reaping impressive profits. It’s truly an inspirational American story.

Now, I should note that I don’t believe Mr. Leonard actually intended his book to be quite so complimentary to the Koch brothers and the vast commercial empire they built up over the past several decades. He includes plenty of material detailing, for example, their employees playing fast and loose with environmental protection rules, or their labor lawyers aggressively bargaining with unions, sometimes to the detriment of workers. And all of the stories he presents are supported by sympathetic emotional appeals through personal anecdotes. 

But, even then, many of the negative claims are part of a larger theme of Koch Industries progressively improving its business practices. One prominent example is how Koch Industries learned from its environmentally unfriendly past and implemented vigorous programs to ensure “10,000% compliance” with all federal and state environmental laws. 

What really stands out across most or all of the stories Leonard has to tell, however, is the deep appreciation that Charles Koch and his entrepreneurially-minded employees have for the fundamental nature of the market as an information discovery process. Indeed, Koch Industries has much in common with modern technology firms like Amazon in this respect — but decades before the information technology revolution made the full power of “Big Data” gathering and processing as obvious as it is today.

The impressive information operation of Koch Industries

Much of Kochland is devoted to stories in which Koch Industries’ ability to gather and analyze data from across its various units led to the production of superior results for the economy and consumers. For example,  

Koch… discovered that the National Parks Service published data showing the snow pack in the California mountains, data that Koch could analyze to determine how much water would be flowing in future months to generate power at California’s hydroelectric plants. This helped Koch predict with great accuracy the future supply of electricity and the resulting demand for natural gas.

Koch Industries was able to use this information to anticipate the amount of power (megawatt hours) it needed to deliver to the California power grid (admittedly, in a way that was somewhat controversial because of poorly drafted legislation relating to the new regulatory regime governing power distribution and resale in the state).

And, in 2000, while many firms in the economy were still riding the natural gas boom of the 90s, 

two Koch analysts and a reservoir engineer… accurately predicted a coming disaster that would contribute to blackouts along the West Coast, the bankruptcy of major utilities, and skyrocketing costs for many consumers.

This insight enabled Koch Industries to reap huge profits in derivatives trading, and it also enabled it to enter — and essentially rescue — a market segment crucial for domestic farmers: nitrogen fertilizer.

The market volatility in natural gas from the late 90s through early 00s wreaked havoc on the nitrogen fertilizer industry, for which natural gas is the primary input. Farmland — a struggling fertilizer producer — had progressively mismanaged its business over the preceding two decades by focusing on developing lines of business outside of its core competencies, including blithely exposing itself to the volatile natural gas market in pursuit of short-term profits. By the time it was staring bankruptcy in the face, there were no other companies interested in acquiring it. 

Koch’s analysts, however, noticed that many of Farmland’s key fertilizer plants were located in prime locations for reaching local farmers. Once the market improved, whoever controlled those key locations would be in a superior position for selling into the nitrogen fertilizer market. So, by utilizing the data it derived from its natural gas operations (both operating pipelines and storage facilities, as well as understanding the volatility of gas prices and availability through its derivatives trading operations), Koch Industries was able to infer that it could make substantial profits by rescuing this bankrupt nitrogen fertilizer business. 

Emblematic of Koch’s philosophy of only making long-term investments, 

[o]ver the next ten years, [Koch Industries] spent roughly $500 million to outfit the plants with new technology while streamlining production… Koch installed a team of fertilizer traders in the office… [t]he traders bought and sold supplies around the globe, learning more about fertilizer markets each day. Within a few years, Koch Fertilizer built a global distribution network. Koch founded a new company, called Koch Energy Services, which bought and sold natural gas supplies to keep the fertilizer plants stocked.

Thus, Koch Industries not only rescued midwest farmers from shortages that would have decimated their businesses, it invested heavily to ensure that production would continue to increase to meet future demand. 

As noted, this acquisition was consistent with the ethos of Koch Industries, which stressed thinking about investments as part of long-term strategies, in contrast to their “counterparties in the market [who] were obsessed with the near-term horizon.” This led Koch Industries to look at investments over a period measured in years or decades, an approach that allowed the company to execute very intricate investment strategies: 

If Koch thought there was going to be an oversupply of oil in the Gulf Coast region, for example, it might snap up leases on giant oil barges, knowing that when the oversupply hit, companies would be scrambling for extra storage space and willing to pay a premium for the leases that Koch bought on the cheap. This was a much safer way to execute the trade than simply shorting the price of oil—even if Koch was wrong about the supply glut, the downside was limited because Koch could still sell or use the barge leases and almost certainly break even.

Entrepreneurs, regulators, and the problem of incentives

All of these accounts and more in Kochland brilliantly demonstrate a principal salutary role of entrepreneurs in the market, which is to discover slack or scarce resources in the system and manage them in a way that they will be available for utilization when demand increases. Guaranteeing the presence of oil barges in the face of market turbulence, or making sure that nitrogen fertilizer is available when needed, is precisely the sort of result sound public policy seeks to encourage from firms in the economy. 

Government, by contrast — and despite its best intentions — is institutionally incapable of performing the same sorts of entrepreneurial activities as even very large private organizations like Koch Industries. The stories recounted in Kochland demonstrate this repeatedly. 

For example, in the oil tanker episode, Koch’s analysts relied on “huge amounts of data from outside sources” – including “publicly available data…like the federal reports that tracked the volume of crude oil being stored in the United States.” Yet, because that data was “often stale” owing to a rigid, periodic publication schedule, it lacked the specificity necessary for making precise interventions in markets. 

Koch’s analysts therefore built on that data using additional public sources, such as manifests from the Customs Service which kept track of the oil tanker traffic in US waters. Leveraging all of this publicly available data, Koch analysts were able to develop “a picture of oil shipments and flows that was granular in its specificity.”

Similarly, when trying to predict snowfall in the western US, and how that would affect hydroelectric power production, Koch’s analysts relied on publicly available weather data — but extended it with their own analytical insights to make it more suitable to fine-grained predictions. 

By contrast, despite decades of altering the regulatory scheme around natural gas production, transport and sales, and being highly involved in regulating all aspects of the process, the federal government could not even provide the data necessary to adequately facilitate markets. Koch’s energy analysts would therefore engage in various deals that sometimes would only break even — if it meant they could develop a better overall picture of the relevant markets: 

As was often the case at Koch, the company… was more interested in the real-time window that origination deals could provide into the natural gas markets. Just as in the early days of the crude oil markets, information about prices was both scarce and incredibly valuable. There were not yet electronic exchanges that showed a visible price of natural gas, and government data on sales were irregular and relatively slow to come. Every origination deal provided fresh and precise information about prices, supply, and demand.

In most, if not all, of the deals detailed in Kochland, government regulators had every opportunity to find the same trends in the publicly available data — or see the same deficiencies in the data and correct them. Given their access to the same data, government regulators could, in some imagined world, have developed policies to mitigate the effects of natural gas market collapses, handle upcoming power shortages, or develop a reliable supply of fertilizer to midwest farmers. But they did not. Indeed, because of the different sets of incentives they face (among other factors), in the real world, they cannot do so, despite their best intentions.

The incentive to innovate

This gets to the core problem that Hayek described concerning how best to facilitate efficient use of dispersed knowledge in such a way as to achieve the most efficient allocation and distribution of resources: 

The various ways in which the knowledge on which people base their plans is communicated to them is the crucial problem for any theory explaining the economic process, and the problem of what is the best way of utilizing knowledge initially dispersed among all the people is at least one of the main problems of economic policy—or of designing an efficient economic system.

The question of how best to utilize dispersed knowledge in society can only be answered by considering who is best positioned to gather and deploy that knowledge. There is no fundamental objection to “planning”  per se, as Hayek notes. Indeed, in a complex society filled with transaction costs, there will need to be entities capable of internalizing those costs  — corporations or governments — in order to make use of the latent information in the system. The question is about what set of institutions, and what set of incentives governing those institutions, results in the best use of that latent information (and the optimal allocation and distribution of resources that follows from that). 

Armen Alchian captured the different incentive structures between private firms and government agencies well: 

The extent to which various costs and effects are discerned, measured and heeded depends on the institutional system of incentive-punishment for the deciders. One system of rewards-punishment may increase the extent to which some objectives are heeded, whereas another may make other goals more influential. Thus procedures for making or controlling decisions in one rewards-incentive system are not necessarily the “best” for some other system…

In the competitive, private, open-market economy, the wealth-survival prospects are not as strong for firms (or their employees) who do not heed the market’s test of cost effectiveness as for firms who do… as a result the market’s criterion is more likely to be heeded and anticipated by business people. They have personal wealth incentives to make more thorough cost-effectiveness calculations about the products they could produce …

In the government sector, two things are less effective. (1) The full cost and value consequences of decisions do not have as direct and severe a feedback impact on government employees as on people in the private sector. The costs of actions under their consideration are incomplete simply because the consequences of ignoring parts of the full span of costs are less likely to be imposed on them… (2) The effectiveness, in the sense of benefits, of their decisions has a different reward-inventive or feedback system … it is fallacious to assume that government officials are superhumans, who act solely with the national interest in mind and are never influenced by the consequences to their own personal position.

In short, incentives matter — and are a function of the institutional arrangement of the system. Given the same set of data about a scarce set of resources, over the long run, the private sector generally has stronger incentives to manage resources efficiently than does government. As Ludwig von Mises showed, moving those decisions into political hands creates a system of political preferences that is inherently inferior in terms of the production and distribution of goods and services.

Koch Industries: A model of entrepreneurial success

The market is not perfect, but no human institution is perfect. Despite its imperfections, the market provides the best system yet devised for fairly and efficiently managing the practically unlimited demands we place on our scarce resources. 

Kochland provides a valuable insight into the virtues of the market and entrepreneurs, made all the stronger by Mr. Leonard’s implied project of “exposing” the dark underbelly of Koch Industries. The book tells the bad tales, which I’m willing to believe are largely true. I would, frankly, be shocked if any large entity — corporation or government — never ran into problems with rogue employees, internal corporate dynamics gone awry, or a failure to properly understand some facet of the market or society that led to bad investments or policy. 

The story of Koch Industries — presented even as it is through the lens of a “secret history”  — is deeply admirable. It’s the story of a firm that not only learns from its own mistakes, as all firms must do if they are to survive, but of a firm that has a drive to learn in its DNA. Koch Industries relentlessly gathers information from the market, sometimes even to the exclusion of short-term profit. It eschews complex bureaucratic structures and processes, which encourages local managers to find opportunities and nimbly respond.

Kochland is a quick read that presents a gripping account of one of America’s corporate success stories. There is, of course, a healthy amount of material in the book covering the Koch brothers’ often controversial political activities. Nonetheless, even those who hate the Koch brothers on account of politics would do well to learn from the model of entrepreneurial success that Kochland cannot help but describe in its pages. 

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The Capitalist Paradox: How Cooperation Enables Free Market Competition

Paul H. Rubin —  21 August 2019

Paul H. Rubin is the Dobbs Professor of Economics Emeritus, Emory University, and President, Southern Economic Association, 2013

I want to thank Geoff for inviting me to blog about my new book.

My book, The Capitalist Paradox: How Cooperation Enables Free Market Competition, Bombardier Books, 2019, has been published. The main question I address in this short book is: Given the obvious benefits of markets over socialism, why do so many still oppose markets? I have been concerned with this issue for many years. Given the current state of American politics, the question is even more important than when I began the book.

I begin by pointing out that humans are not good intuitive economists. Our minds evolved in a simple setting where the economy was simple, with little trade, little specialization (except by age and gender), and little capital. In this world there was no need for our brains to evolve to understand economics. (Politics is a different story.) The main takeaway from this world was that our minds evolved to view the world as zero-sum.  Zero-sum thinking is the error behind most policy errors in economics.

The second part of the argument is that in many cases, when economists are discussing efficiency issues (such as optimal taxation) listeners are hearing distribution issues. So we economists would do better to begin with a discussion showing that there are efficiency (“size of the pie”) effects before showing what they are in a particular case.  That is, we should show that taxation can affect total income before showing how it does so in a particular case. I call this “really basic economics,” which should be taught before basic economics. It is sometimes said that experts understand their field so well that they are “mind blind” to the basics, and that is the situation here.

I then show that competition is an improper metaphor for economics.  Discussions of competition brings up sports (and in economics the notion of competition was borrowed from sports) and sports is zero-sum. Thus, when economists discuss competition, they reinforce people’s notion that economics is zero sum.  People do not like competition. A quote from the book:

Here are some common modifiers of “competition” and the number of Google references to each:

“Cutthroat competition” (256,000), “excessive competition” (159,000), “destructive competition” (105,000), “ruthless competition” (102,000), “ferocious competition” (66,700), “vicious competition” (53,500), “unfettered competition” (37,000), “unrestrained competition” (34,500), “harmful competition” (18,000), and “dog-eat-dog competition” (15, 000). Conversely, for “beneficial competition” there are 16,400 references. For “beneficial cooperation” there are 548,000 references, and almost no references to any of the negative modifiers of cooperation.

The final point, and what ties it all together, is a discussion showing that the economy is actually more cooperative than it is competitive. There are more cooperative relationships in an economy than there are competitive interactions.  The basic economic element is a transaction, and transactions are cooperative.  Competition chooses the best agents to cooperate with, but cooperation does the work and creates the consumer surplus. Thus, referring to markets as “cooperative” rather than “competitive” would not only reduce hostility towards markets, but would also be more accurate.

An economist reading this book would probably not learn much economics. I do not advocate any major change in economic theory from competition to cooperation. But I propose a different way to view the economy, and one that might help us better explain what we are doing to students and to policy makers, including voters.

In Amazon, Economic Theory, Google, Platforms, Truth on the Market , ,
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We need leaders that embrace complexity, not dumb it down

Gus Hurwitz —  16 April 2019

In a recent NY Times opinion piece, Tim Wu, like Elizabeth Holmes, lionizes Steve Jobs. Like Jobs with the iPod and iPhone, and Holmes with the Theranos Edison machine, Wu tells us we must simplify the public’s experience of complex policy into a simple box with an intuitive interface. In this spirit he argues that “what the public wants from government is help with complexity,” such that “[t]his generation of progressives … must accept that simplicity and popularity are not a dumbing-down of policy.”

This argument provides remarkable insight into the complexity problems of progressive thought. Three of these are taken up below: the mismatch of comparing the work of the government to the success of Jobs; the mismatch between Wu’s telling of and Jobs’s actual success; and the latent hypocrisy in Wu’s “simplicity for me, complexity for thee” argument.

Contra Wu’s argument, we need politicians that embrace and lay bare the complexity of policy issues. Too much of our political moment is dominated by demagogues on every side of policy debates offering simple solutions to simplified accounts of complex policy issues. We need public intellectuals, and hopefully politicians as well, to make the case for complexity. Our problems are complex and solutions to them hard (and sometimes unavailing). Without leaders willing to steer into complexity, we can never have a polity able to address complexity.

I. “Good enough for government work” isn’t good enough for Jobs

As an initial matter, there is a great deal of wisdom in Wu’s recognition that the public doesn’t want complexity. As I said at the annual Silicon Flatirons conference in February, consumers don’t want a VCR with lots of dials and knobs that let them control lots of specific features—they just want the damn thing to work. And as that example is meant to highlight, once it does work, most consumers are happy to leave well enough alone (as demonstrated by millions of clocks that would continue to blink 12:00 if VCRs weren’t so 1990s).

Where Wu goes wrong, though, is that he fails to recognize that despite this desire for simplicity, for two decades VCR manufacturers designed and sold VCRs with clocks that were never set—a persistent blinking to constantly remind consumers of their own inadequacies. Had the manufacturers had any insight into the consumer desire for simplicity, all those clocks would have been used for something—anything—other than a reminder that consumers didn’t know how to set them. (Though, to their credit, these devices were designed to operate as most consumers desired without imposing any need to set the clock upon them—a model of simplicity in basic operation that allows consumers to opt-in to a more complex experience.)

If the government were populated by visionaries like Jobs, Wu’s prescription would be wise. But Jobs was a once-in-a-generation thinker. No one in a generation of VCR designers had the insight to design a VCR without a clock (or at least a clock that didn’t blink in a constant reminder of the owner’s inability to set it). And similarly few among the ranks of policy designers are likely to have his abilities, either. On the other hand, the public loves the promise of easy solutions to complex problems. Charlatans and demagogues who would cast themselves in his image, like Holmes did with Theranos, can find government posts in abundance.

Of course, in his paean to offering the public less choice, Wu, himself an oftentime designer of government policy, compares the art of policy design to the work of Jobs—not of Holmes. But where he promises a government run in the manner of Apple, he would more likely give us one more in the mold of Theranos.

There is a more pernicious side to Wu’s argument. He speaks of respect for the public, arguing that “Real respect for the public involves appreciating what the public actually wants and needs,” and that “They would prefer that the government solve problems for them.” Another aspect of respect for the public is recognizing their fundamental competence—that progressive policy experts are not the only ones who are able to understand and address complexity. Most people never set their VCRs’ clocks because they felt no need to, not because they were unable to figure out how to do so. Most people choose not to master the intricacies of public policy. But this is not because the progressive expert class is uniquely able to do so. It is—as Wu notes, that most people do not have the unlimited time or attention that would be needed to do so—time and attention that is afforded to him by his social class.

Wu’s assertion that the public “would prefer that the government solve problems for them” carries echoes of Louis Brandeis, who famously said of consumers that they were “servile, self-indulgent, indolent, ignorant.” Such a view naturally gives rise to Wu’s assumption that the public wants the government to solve problems for them. It assumes that they are unable to solve those problems on their own.

But what Brandeis and progressives cast in his mold attribute to servile indolence is more often a reflection that hoi polloi simply do not have the same concerns as Wu’s progressive expert class. If they had the time to care about the issues Wu would devote his government to, they could likely address them on their own. The fact that they don’t is less a reflection of the public’s ability than of its priorities.

II. Jobs had no monopoly on simplicity

There is another aspect to Wu’s appeal to simplicity in design that is, again, captured well in his invocation of Steve Jobs. Jobs was exceptionally successful with his minimalist, simple designs. He made a fortune for himself and more for Apple. His ideas made Apple one of the most successful companies, with one of the largest user bases, in the history of the world.

Yet many people hate Apple products. Some of these users prefer to have more complex, customizable devices—perhaps because they have particularized needs or perhaps simply because they enjoy having that additional control over how their devices operate and the feeling of ownership that that brings. Some users might dislike Apple products because the interface that is “intuitive” to millions of others is not at all intuitive to them. As trivial as it sounds, most PC users are accustomed to two-button mice—transitioning to Apple’s one-button mouse is exceptionally  discomfitting for many of these users. (In fairness, the one-button mouse design used by Apple products is not attributable to Steve Jobs.) And other users still might prefer devices that are simple in other ways, so are drawn to other products that better cater to their precise needs.

Apple has, perhaps, experienced periods of market dominance with specific products. But this has never been durable—Apple has always faced competition. And this has ensured that those parts of the public that were not well-served by Jobs’s design choices were not bound to use them—they always had alternatives.

Indeed, that is the redeeming aspect of the Theranos story: the market did what it was supposed to. While too many consumers may have been harmed by Holmes’ charlatan business practices, the reality is that once she was forced to bring the company’s product to market it was quickly outed as a failure.

This is how the market works. Companies that design good products, like Apple, are rewarded; other companies then step in to compete by offering yet better products or by addressing other segments of the market. Some of those companies succeed; most, like Theranos, fail.

This dynamic simply does not exist with government. Government is a policy monopolist. A simplified, streamlined, policy that effectively serves half the population does not effectively serve the other half. There is no alternative government that will offer competing policy designs. And to the extent that a given policy serves part of the public better than others, it creates winners and losers.

Of course, the right response to the inadequacy of Wu’s call for more, less complex policy is not that we need more, more complex policy. Rather, it’s that we need less policy—at least policy being dictated and implemented by the government. This is one of the stalwart arguments we free market and classical liberal types offer in favor of market economies: they are able to offer a wider range of goods and services that better cater to a wider range of needs of a wider range of people than the government. The reason policy grows complex is because it is trying to address complex problems; and when it fails to address those problems on a first cut, the solution is more often than not to build “patch” fixes on top of the failed policies. The result is an ever-growing book of rules bound together with voluminous “kludges” that is forever out-of-step with the changing realities of a complex, dynamic world.

The solution to so much complexity is not to sweep it under the carpet in the interest of offering simpler, but only partial, solutions catered to the needs of an anointed subset of the public. The solution is to find better ways to address those complex problems—and often times it’s simply the case that the market is better suited to such solutions.

III. A complexity: What does Wu think of consumer protection?

There is a final, and perhaps most troubling, aspect to Wu’s argument. He argues that respect for the public does not require “offering complete transparency and a multiplicity of choices.” Yet that is what he demands of business. As an academic and government official, Wu has been a loud and consistent consumer protection advocate, arguing that consumers are harmed when firms fail to provide transparency and choice—and that the government must use its coercive power to ensure that they do so.

Wu derives his insight that simpler-design-can-be-better-design from the success of Jobs—and recognizes more broadly that the consumer experience of products of the technological revolution (perhaps one could even call it the tech industry) is much better today because of this simplicity than it was in earlier times. Consumers, in other words, can be better off with firms that offer less transparency and choice. This, of course, is intuitive when one recognizes (as Wu has) that time and attention are among the scarcest of resources.

Steve Jobs and Elizabeth Holmes both understood that the avoidance of complexity and minimizing of choices are hallmarks of good design. Jobs built an empire around this; Holmes cost investors hundreds of millions of dollars in her failed pursuit. But while Holmes failed where Jobs succeeded, her failure was not tragic: Theranos was never the only medical testing laboratory in the market and, indeed, was never more than a bit player in that market. For every Apple that thrives, the marketplace erases a hundred Theranoses. But we do not have a market of governments. Wu’s call for policy to be more like Apple is a call for most government policy to fail like Theranos. Perhaps where the challenge is to do more complex policy simply, the simpler solution is to do less, but simpler, policy well.

Conclusion

We need less dumbing down of complex policy in the interest of simplicity; and we need leaders who are able to make citizens comfortable with and understanding of complexity. Wu is right that good policy need not be complex. But the lesson from that is not that complex policy should be made simple. Rather, the lesson is that policy that cannot be made simple may not be good policy after all.

In Apple, Platforms, Regulation, Truth on the Market , , , , , , ,
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What’s hip (in antitrust) today should stay passé: Henry G. Manne on “hipster antitrust”

Geoffrey Manne —  10 May 2018

Today would have been Henry Manne’s 90th birthday. When he passed away in 2015 he left behind an immense and impressive legacy. In 1991, at the inaugural meeting of the American Law & Economics Association (ALEA), Manne was named a Life Member of ALEA and, along with Nobel Laureate Ronald Coase, and federal appeals court judges Richard Posner and Guido Calabresi, one of the four Founders of Law and Economics. The organization I founded, the International Center for Law & Economics is dedicated to his memory, along with that of his great friend and mentor, UCLA economist Armen Alchian.

Manne is best known for his work in corporate governance and securities law and regulation, of course. But sometimes forgotten is that his work on the market for corporate control was motivated by concerns about analytical flaws in merger enforcement. As former FTC commissioners Maureen Ohlhausen and Joshua Wright noted in a 2015 dissenting statement:

The notion that the threat of takeover would induce current managers to improve firm performance to the benefit of shareholders was first developed by Henry Manne. Manne’s pathbreaking work on the market for corporate control arose out of a concern that antitrust constraints on horizontal mergers would distort its functioning. See Henry G. Manne, Mergers and the Market for Corporate Control, 73 J. POL. ECON. 110 (1965).

But Manne’s focus on antitrust didn’t end in 1965. Moreover, throughout his life he was a staunch critic of misguided efforts to expand the power of government, especially when these efforts claimed to have their roots in economic reasoning — which, invariably, was hopelessly flawed. As his obituary notes:

In his teaching, his academic writing, his frequent op-eds and essays, and his work with organizations like the Cato Institute, the Liberty Fund, the Institute for Humane Studies, and the Mont Pèlerin Society, among others, Manne advocated tirelessly for a clearer understanding of the power of markets and competition and the importance of limited government and economically sensible regulation.

Thus it came to be, in 1974, that Manne was called to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly, on Michigan Senator Philip A. Hart’s proposed Industrial Reorganization Act. His testimony is a tour de force, and a prescient rejoinder to the faddish advocates of today’s “hipster antitrust”— many of whom hearken longingly back to the antitrust of the 1960s and its misguided “gurus.”

Henry Manne’s trenchant testimony critiquing the Industrial Reorganization Act and its (ostensible) underpinnings is reprinted in full in this newly released ICLE white paper (with introductory material by Geoffrey Manne):

Henry G. Manne: Testimony on the Proposed Industrial Reorganization Act of 1973 — What’s Hip (in Antitrust) Today Should Stay Passé

Sen. Hart proposed the Industrial Reorganization Act in order to address perceived problems arising from industrial concentration. The bill was rooted in the belief that industry concentration led inexorably to monopoly power; that monopoly power, however obtained, posed an inexorable threat to freedom and prosperity; and that the antitrust laws (i.e., the Sherman and Clayton Acts) were insufficient to address the purported problems.

That sentiment — rooted in the reflexive application of the (largely-discredited structure-conduct-performance (SCP) paradigm) — had already become largely passé among economists in the 70s, but it has resurfaced today as the asserted justification for similar (although less onerous) antitrust reform legislation and the general approach to antitrust analysis commonly known as “hipster antitrust.”

The critiques leveled against the asserted economic underpinnings of efforts like the Industrial Reorganization Act are as relevant today as they were then. As Henry Manne notes in his testimony:

To be successful in this stated aim [“getting the government out of the market”] the following dreams would have to come true: The members of both the special commission and the court established by the bill would have to be satisfied merely to complete their assigned task and then abdicate their tremendous power and authority; they would have to know how to satisfactorily define and identify the limits of the industries to be restructured; the Government’s regulation would not sacrifice significant efficiencies or economies of scale; and the incentive for new firms to enter an industry would not be diminished by the threat of a punitive response to success.

The lessons of history, economic theory, and practical politics argue overwhelmingly against every one of these assumptions.

Both the subject matter of and impetus for the proposed bill (as well as Manne’s testimony explaining its economic and political failings) are eerily familiar. The preamble to the Industrial Reorganization Act asserts that

competition… preserves a democratic society, and provides an opportunity for a more equitable distribution of wealth while avoiding the undue concentration of economic, social, and political power; [and] the decline of competition in industries with oligopoly or monopoly power has contributed to unemployment, inflation, inefficiency, an underutilization of economic capacity, and the decline of exports….

The echoes in today’s efforts to rein in corporate power by adopting structural presumptions are unmistakable. Compare, for example, this language from Sen. Klobuchar’s Consolidation Prevention and Competition Promotion Act of 2017:

[C]oncentration that leads to market power and anticompetitive conduct makes it more difficult for people in the United States to start their own businesses, depresses wages, and increases economic inequality;

undue market concentration also contributes to the consolidation of political power, undermining the health of democracy in the United States; [and]

the anticompetitive effects of market power created by concentration include higher prices, lower quality, significantly less choice, reduced innovation, foreclosure of competitors, increased entry barriers, and monopsony power.

Remarkably, Sen. Hart introduced his bill as “an alternative to government regulation and control.” Somehow, it was the antithesis of “government control” to introduce legislation that, in Sen. Hart’s words,

involves changing the life styles of many of our largest corporations, even to the point of restructuring whole industries. It involves positive government action, not to control industry but to restore competition and freedom of enterprise in the economy

Like today’s advocates of increased government intervention to design the structure of the economy, Sen. Hart sought — without a trace of irony — to “cure” the problem of politicized, ineffective enforcement by doubling down on the power of the enforcers.

Henry Manne was having none of it. As he pointedly notes in his testimony, the worst problems of monopoly power are of the government’s own making. The real threat to democracy, freedom, and prosperity is the political power amassed in the bureaucratic apparatus that frequently confers monopoly, at least as much as the monopoly power it spawns:

[I]t takes two to make that bargain [political protection and subsidies in exchange for lobbying]. And as we look around at various industries we are constrained to ask who has not done this. And more to the point, who has not succeeded?

It is unhappily almost impossible to name a significant industry in the United States that has not gained some degree of protection from the rigors of competition from Federal, State or local governments.

* * *

But the solution to inefficiencies created by Government controls cannot lie in still more controls. The politically responsible task ahead for Congress is to dismantle our existing regulatory monster before it strangles us.

We have spawned a gigantic bureaucracy whose own political power threatens the democratic legitimacy of government.

We are rapidly moving toward the worst features of a centrally planned economy with none of the redeeming political, economic, or ethical features usually claimed for such systems.

The new white paper includes Manne’s testimony in full, including his exchange with Sen. Hart and committee staffers following his prepared remarks.

It is, sadly, nearly as germane today as it was then.

One final note: The subtitle for the paper is a reference to the song “What Is Hip?” by Tower of Power. Its lyrics are decidedly apt:

You done went and found you a guru,

In your effort to find you a new you,

And maybe even managed

To raise your conscious level.

While you’re striving to find the right road,

There’s one thing you should know:

What’s hip today

Might become passé.

— Tower of Power, What Is Hip? (Emilio Castillo, John David Garibaldi & Stephen M. Kupka, What Is Hip? (Bob-A-Lew Songs 1973), from the album TOWER OF POWER (Warner Bros. 1973))

And here’s the song, in all its glory:

 

In Antitrust & Competition, Economic Theory, International Center for Law & Economics, Law & Economics, Mergers & Acquisitions , , , , , , , , , ,
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The illiberal vision of neo-Brandeisian antitrust

Geoffrey Manne —  16 April 2018

Following is the (slightly expanded and edited) text of my remarks from the panel, Antitrust and the Tech Industry: What Is at Stake?, hosted last Thursday by CCIA. Bruce Hoffman (keynote), Bill Kovacic, Nicolas Petit, and Christine Caffarra also spoke. If we’re lucky Bruce will post his remarks on the FTC website; they were very good.

(NB: Some of these comments were adapted (or lifted outright) from a forthcoming Cato Policy Report cover story co-authored with Gus Hurwitz, so Gus shares some of the credit/blame.)

 

The urge to treat antitrust as a legal Swiss Army knife capable of correcting all manner of social and economic ills is apparently difficult for some to resist. Conflating size with market power, and market power with political power, many recent calls for regulation of industry — and the tech industry in particular — are framed in antitrust terms. Take Senator Elizabeth Warren, for example:

[T]oday, in America, competition is dying. Consolidation and concentration are on the rise in sector after sector. Concentration threatens our markets, threatens our economy, and threatens our democracy.

And she is not alone. A growing chorus of advocates are now calling for invasive, “public-utility-style” regulation or even the dissolution of some of the world’s most innovative companies essentially because they are “too big.”

According to critics, these firms impose all manner of alleged harms — from fake news, to the demise of local retail, to low wages, to the veritable destruction of democracy — because of their size. What is needed, they say, is industrial policy that shackles large companies or effectively mandates smaller firms in order to keep their economic and political power in check.

But consider the relationship between firm size and political power and democracy.

Say you’re successful in reducing the size of today’s largest tech firms and in deterring the creation of new, very-large firms: What effect might we expect this to have on their political power and influence?

For the critics, the effect is obvious: A re-balancing of wealth and thus the reduction of political influence away from Silicon Valley oligarchs and toward the middle class — the “rudder that steers American democracy on an even keel.”

But consider a few (and this is by no means all) countervailing points:

To begin, at the margin, if you limit firm growth as a means of competing with rivals, you make correspondingly more important competition through political influence. Erecting barriers to entry and raising rivals’ costs through regulation are time-honored American political traditions, and rent-seeking by smaller firms could both be more prevalent, and, paradoxically, ultimately lead to increased concentration.

Next, by imbuing antitrust with an ill-defined set of vague political objectives, you also make antitrust into a sort of “meta-legislation.” As a result, the return on influencing a handful of government appointments with authority over antitrust becomes huge — increasing the ability and the incentive to do so.

And finally, if the underlying basis for antitrust enforcement is extended beyond economic welfare effects, how long can we expect to resist calls to restrain enforcement precisely to further those goals? All of a sudden the effort and ability to get exemptions will be massively increased as the persuasiveness of the claimed justifications for those exemptions, which already encompass non-economic goals, will be greatly enhanced. We might even find, again, that we end up with even more concentration because the exceptions could subsume the rules.

All of which of course highlights the fundamental, underlying problem: If you make antitrust more political, you’ll get less democratic, more politically determined, results — precisely the opposite of what proponents claim to want.

Then there’s democracy, and calls to break up tech in order to save it. Calls to do so are often made with reference to the original intent of the Sherman Act and Louis Brandeis and his “curse of bigness.” But intentional or not, these are rallying cries for the assertion, not the restraint, of political power.

The Sherman Act’s origin was ambivalent: although it was intended to proscribe business practices that harmed consumers, it was also intended to allow politically-preferred firms to maintain high prices in the face of competition from politically-disfavored businesses.

The years leading up to the adoption of the Sherman Act in 1890 were characterized by dramatic growth in the efficiency-enhancing, high-tech industries of the day. For many, the purpose of the Sherman Act was to stem this growth: to prevent low prices — and, yes, large firms — from “driving out of business the small dealers and worthy men whose lives have been spent therein,” in the words of Trans-Missouri Freight, one of the early Supreme Court decisions applying the Act.

Left to the courts, however, the Sherman Act didn’t quite do the trick. By 1911 (in Standard Oil and American Tobacco) — and reflecting consumers’ preferences for low prices over smaller firms — only “unreasonable” conduct was actionable under the Act. As one of the prime intellectual engineers behind the Clayton Antitrust Act and the Federal Trade Commission in 1914, Brandeis played a significant role in the (partial) legislative and administrative overriding of the judiciary’s excessive support for economic efficiency.

Brandeis was motivated by the belief that firms could become large only by illegitimate means and by deceiving consumers. But Brandeis was no advocate for consumer sovereignty. In fact, consumers, in Brandeis’ view, needed to be saved from themselves because they were, at root, “servile, self-indulgent, indolent, ignorant.”

There’s a lot that today we (many of us, at least) would find anti-democratic in the underpinnings of progressivism in US history: anti-consumerism; racism; elitism; a belief in centrally planned, technocratic oversight of the economy; promotion of social engineering, including through eugenics; etc. The aim of limiting economic power was manifestly about stemming the threat it posed to powerful people’s conception of what political power could do: to mold and shape the country in their image — what economist Thomas Sowell calls “the vision of the anointed.”

That may sound great when it’s your vision being implemented, but today’s populist antitrust resurgence comes while Trump is in the White House. It’s baffling to me that so many would expand and then hand over the means to design the economy and society in their image to antitrust enforcers in the executive branch and presidentially appointed technocrats.

Throughout US history, it is the courts that have often been the bulwark against excessive politicization of the economy, and it was the courts that shepherded the evolution of antitrust away from its politicized roots toward rigorous, economically grounded policy. And it was progressives like Brandeis who worked to take antitrust away from the courts. Now, with efforts like Senator Klobuchar’s merger bill, the “New Brandeisians” want to rein in the courts again — to get them out of the way of efforts to implement their “big is bad” vision.

But the evidence that big is actually bad, least of all on those non-economic dimensions, is thin and contested.

While Zuckerberg is grilled in Congress over perceived, endemic privacy problems, politician after politician and news article after news article rushes to assert that the real problem is Facebook’s size. Yet there is no convincing analysis (maybe no analysis of any sort) that connects its size with the problem, or that evaluates whether the asserted problem would actually be cured by breaking up Facebook.

Barry Lynn claims that the origins of antitrust are in the checks and balances of the Constitution, extended to economic power. But if that’s right, then the consumer welfare standard and the courts are the only things actually restraining the disruption of that order. If there may be gains to be had from tweaking the minutiae of the process of antitrust enforcement and adjudication, by all means we should have a careful, lengthy discussion about those tweaks.

But throwing the whole apparatus under the bus for the sake of an unsubstantiated, neo-Brandeisian conception of what the economy should look like is a terrible idea.

In Amazon, Antitrust & Competition, Barriers to Entry, Exemptions, Facebook, Federal Trade Commission, Google, International, International Trade, Mergers & Acquisitions, Platforms, Regulation , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Second Circuit’s BMI Decision Commendably Overturns the Justice Department’s Interference with Efficient Contracting in Performance Rights Licensing

Alden Abbott —  22 December 2017

Introduction and Summary

On December 19, 2017, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit presented Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI) with an early Christmas present.  Specifically, the Second Circuit commendably affirmed the District Court for the Southern District of New York’s September 2016 ruling rejecting the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) August 2016 reinterpretation of its longstanding antitrust consent decree with BMI.  Because the DOJ reinterpretation also covered a parallel DOJ consent decree with the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), the Second Circuit’s decision by necessary implication benefits ASCAP as well, although it was not a party to the suit.

The Second Circuit’s holding is sound as a matter of textual interpretation and wise as a matter of economic policy.  Indeed, DOJ’s current antitrust leadership, which recognizes the importance of vibrant intellectual property licensing in the context of patents (see here), should be pleased that the Second Circuit rescued it from a huge mistake by the Obama Administration DOJ in the context of copyright licensing.

Background

BMI and ASCAP are the two leading U.S. “performing rights organizations” (PROs).  They contract with music copyright holders to act as intermediaries that provide “blanket” licenses to music users (e.g., television and radio stations, bars, and internet music distributors) for use of their full copyrighted musical repertoires, without the need for song-specific licensing negotiations.  This greatly reduces the transactions costs of arranging for the playing of musical works, benefiting music users, the listening public, and copyright owners (all of whom are assured of at least some compensation for their endeavors).  ASCAP and BMI are big businesses, with each PRO holding licenses to over ten million works and accounting for roughly 45 percent of the domestic music licensing market (ninety percent combined).

Because both ASCAP and BMI pool copyrighted songs that could otherwise compete with each other, and both grant users a single-price “blanket license” conveying the rights to play their full set of copyrighted works, the two organizations could be seen as restricting competition among copyrighted works and fixing the prices of copyrighted substitutes – raising serious questions under section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act, which condemns contracts that unreasonably restrain trade.  This led the DOJ to bring antitrust suits against ASCAP and BMI over eighty years ago, which were settled by separate judicially-filed consent decrees in 1941.

The decrees imposed a variety of limitations on the two PROs’ licensing practices, aimed at preventing ASCAP and BMI from exercising anticompetitive market power (such as the setting of excessive licensing rates).  The decrees were amended twice over the years, most recently in 2001, to take account of changing market conditions.  The U.S. Supreme Court noted the constraining effect of the decrees in BMI v. CBS (1979), in ruling that the BMI and ASCAP blanket licenses did not constitute per se illegal price fixing.  The Court held, rather, that the licenses should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis under the antitrust “rule of reason,” since the licenses inherently generated great efficiency benefits (“the immediate use of covered compositions, without the delay of prior individual negotiations”) that had to be weighed against potential anticompetitive harms.

The August 4, 2016 DOJ Consent Decree Interpretation

Fast forward to 2014, when DOJ undertook a new review of the ASCAP and BMI decrees, and requested the submission of public comments to aid it in its deliberations.  This review came to an official conclusion two years later, on August 4, 2016, when DOJ decided not to amend the decrees – but announced a decree interpretation that limits ASCAP’s and BMI’s flexibility.  Specifically, DOJ stated that the decrees needed to be “more consistently applied.”  By this, the DOJ meant that BMI and ASCAP should only grant blanket licenses that cover all of the rights to 100 percent of the works in the PROs’ respective catalogs (“full-work licensing”), not licenses that cover only partial interests in those works.  DOJ stated:

Only full-work licensing can yield the substantial procompetitive benefits associated with blanket licenses that distinguish ASCAP’s and BMI’s activities from other agreements among competitors that present serious issues under the antitrust laws.

The New DOJ Interpretation Was Bad as a Matter of Policy

DOJ’s August 4 interpretation rejected industry practice.  Under it, ASCAP and BMI were only allowed to offer a license covering all of the copyright interests in a musical competition, even if the license covers a joint work.

For example, consider a band of five composer-musicians, each of whom has a fractional interest in the copyright covering the band’s new album which is a joint work.  Prior to the DOJ’s new interpretation, each musician was able to offer a partial interest in the joint work to a performance rights organization, reflecting the relative shares of the total copyright interest covering the work.  The organization could offer a partial license, and a user could aggregate different partial licenses in order to cover the whole joint work.  Following the new interpretation, however, BMI and ASCAP could not offer partial licenses to that work to users.  This denied the band’s individual members the opportunity to deal profitably with BMI and ASCAP, thereby undermining their ability to receive fair compensation.

As the two PROs warned, this approach, if upheld, would “cause unnecessary chaos in the marketplace and place unfair financial burdens and creative constraints on songwriters and composers.”  According to ASCAP President Paul Williams, “It is as if the DOJ saw songwriters struggling to stay afloat in a sea of outdated regulations and decided to hand us an anchor, in the form of 100 percent licensing, instead of a life preserver.”  Furthermore, the president and CEO of BMI, Mike O’Neill, stated:  “We believe the DOJ’s interpretation benefits no one – not BMI or ASCAP, not the music publishers, and not the music users – but we are most sensitive to the impact this could have on you, our songwriters and composers.”

The PROs’ views were bolstered by a January 2016 U.S. Copyright Office report, which concluded that “an interpretation of the consent decrees that would require 100-percent licensing or removal of a work from the ASCAP or BMI repertoire would appear to be fraught with legal and logistical problems, and might well result in a sharp decrease in repertoire available through these [performance rights organizations’] blanket licenses.”  Regrettably, during the decree review period, DOJ ignored the expert opinion of the Copyright Office, as well as the public record comments of numerous publishers and artists (see here, for example) indicating that a 100 percent licensing requirement would depress returns to copyright owners and undermine the creative music industry.

Most fundamentally, DOJ’s new interpretation of the BMI and ASCAP consent decrees involved an abridgment of economic freedom.  It further limited the flexibility of copyright music holders and music users to contract with intermediaries to promote the efficient distribution of music performance rights, in a manner that benefits the listening public while allowing creative artists sufficient compensation for their efforts.  DOJ made no compelling showing that a new consent decree constraint was needed to promote competition (100 percent licensing only).  Far from promoting competition, DOJ’s new interpretation undermined it.  DOJ micromanagement of copyright licensing by consent decree reinterpretation was a costly new regulatory initiative that reflected a lack of appreciation for intellectual property rights, which incentivize innovation.  In short, DOJ’s latest interpretation of the ASCAP and BMI decrees was terrible policy.

The New DOJ Interpretation Ran Counter to International Norms

The new DOJ interpretation had unfortunate international policy implications as well.  According to Gadi Oron, Director General of the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC), a Paris-based organization that regroups 239 rights societies from 123 countries, including ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC, the new interpretation departed from international norms in the music licensing industry and have disruptive international effects:

It is clear that the DoJ’s decisions have been made without taking the interests of creators, neither American nor international, into account. It is also clear that they were made with total disregard for the international framework, where fractional licensing is practiced, even if it’s less of a factor because many countries only have one performance rights organization representing songwriters in their territory. International copyright laws grant songwriters exclusive rights, giving them the power to decide who will license their rights in each territory and it is these rights that underpin the landscape in which authors’ societies operate. The international system of collective management of rights, which is based on reciprocal representation agreements and founded on the freedom of choice of the rights holder, would be negatively affected by such level of government intervention, at a time when it needs support more than ever.

The New DOJ Interpretation Was Defective as a Matter of Law, and the District Court and the Second Circuit So Held

As I explained in a November 2016 Heritage Foundation commentary (citing arguments made by counsel for BMI), DOJ’s new interpretation not only was bad domestic and international policy, it was inconsistent with sound textual construction of the decrees themselves.  The BMI decree (and therefore the analogous ASCAP decree as well) did not expressly require 100 percent licensing and did not unambiguously prohibit fractional licensing.  Accordingly, since a consent decree is an injunction, and any activity not expressly required or prohibited thereunder is permitted, fractional shares licensing should be authorized.  DOJ’s new interpretation ignored this principle.  It also was at odds with a report of the U.S. Copyright Office that concluded the BMI consent decree “must be understood to include partial interests in musical works.”  Furthermore, the new interpretation was belied by the fact that the PRO licensing market has developed and functioned efficiently for decades by pricing, collecting, and distributing fees for royalties on a fractional basis.  Courts view such evidence of trade practice and custom as relevant in determining the meaning of a consent decree.

The district court for the Southern District of New York accepted these textual arguments in its September 2016 ruling, granting BMI’s request for a declaratory judgment that the BMI decree did not require Decree did not require 100% (“full-work”) licensing.  The court explained:

Nothing in the Consent Decree gives support to the Division’s views. If a fractionally-licensed composition is disqualified from inclusion in BMI’s repertory, it is not for violation of any provision of the Consent Decree. While the Consent Decree requires BMI to license performances of those compositions “the right of public performances of which [BMI] has or hereafter shall have the right to license or sublicense” (Art. II(C)), it contains no provision regarding the source, extent, or nature of that right. It does not address the possibilities that BMI might license performances of a composition without sufficient legal right to do so, or under a worthless or invalid copyright, or users might perform a music composition licensed by fewer than all of its creators. . . .

The Consent Decree does not regulate the elements of the right to perform compositions. Performance of a composition under an ineffective license may infringe an author’s rights under copyright, contract or other law, but it does not infringe the Consent Decree, which does not extend to matters such as the invalidity or value of copyrights of any of the compositions in BMI’s repertory. Questions of the validity, scope and limits of the right to perform compositions are left to the congruent and competing interests in the music copyright market, and to copyright, property and other laws, to continue to resolve and enforce. Infringements (and fractional infringements) and remedies are not part of the Consent Decree’s subject-matter.

The Second Circuit affirmed, agreeing with the district court’s reading of the decree:

The decree does not address the issue of fractional versus full work licensing, and the parties agree that the issue did not arise at the time of the . . . [subsequent] amendments [to the decree]. . . .

This appeal begins and ends with the language of the consent decree. It is a “well-established principle that the language of a consent decree must dictate what a party is required to do and what it must refrain from doing.” Perez v. Danbury Hosp., 347 F.3d 419, 424 (2d Cir. 2003); United States v. Armour & Co., 402 U.S. 673, 682 (1971) (“[T]he scope of a consent decree must be discerned within its four corners…”). “[C]ourts must abide by the express terms of a consent decree and may not impose additional requirements or supplementary obligations on the parties even to fulfill the purposes of the decree more effectively.” Perez, 347 F.3d at 424; see also Barcia v. Sitkin, 367 F.3d 87, 106 (2d Cir. 2004) (internal citations omitted) (The district court may not “impose obligations on a party that are not unambiguously mandated by the decree itself.”). Accordingly, since the decree is silent on fractional licensing, BMI may (and perhaps must) offer them unless a clear and unambiguous command of the decree would thereby be violated. See United States v. Int’l Bhd. Of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen & Helpers of Am., AFLCIO, 998 F.2d 1101, 1107 (2d Cir. 1993); see also Armour, 402 U.S. at 681-82.

Conclusion

The federal courts wisely have put to rest an ill-considered effort by the Obama Antitrust Division to displace longstanding industry practices that allowed efficient flexibility in the licensing of copyright interests by PROs.  Let us hope that the Trump Antitrust Division will not just accept the Second Circuit’s decision, but will positively embrace it as a manifestation of enlightened antitrust-IP policy – one in harmony with broader efforts by the Division to restore sound thinking to the antitrust treatment of patent licensing and intellectual property in general.

In Antitrust & Competition, Antitrust Division, Copyright, Intellectual Property, Justice Department, Patent, Truth on the Market , , , , ,
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A Pro-Free Market Approach to Brexit Negotiations Is Key

Alden Abbott —  15 December 2017

The terms of the United Kingdom’s (UK) exit from the European Union (EU) – “Brexit” – are of great significance not just to UK and EU citizens, but for those in the United States and around the world who value economic liberty (see my Heritage Foundation memorandum giving the reasons why, here).

If Brexit is to promote economic freedom and enhanced economic welfare, Brexit negotiations between the UK and the EU must not limit the ability of the United Kingdom to pursue (1) efficiency-enhancing regulatory reform and (2) trade liberalizing agreements with non-EU nations.  These points are expounded upon in a recent economic study (The Brexit Inflection Point) by the non-profit UK think tank the Legatum Institute, which has produced an impressive body of research on the benefits of Brexit, if implemented in a procompetitive, economically desirable fashion.  (As a matter of full disclosure, I am a member of Legatum’s “Special Trade Commission,” which “seeks to re-focus the public discussion on Brexit to a positive conversation on opportunities, rather than challenges, while presenting empirical evidence of the dangers of not following an expansive trade negotiating path.”  Members of the Special Trade Commission are unpaid – they serve on a voluntary pro bono basis.)

Unfortunately, however, leading UK press commentators have urged the UK Government to accede to a full harmonization of UK domestic regulations and trade policy with the EU.  Such a deal would be disastrous.  It would prevent the UK from entering into mutually beneficial trade liberalization pacts with other nations or groups of nations (e.g., with the U.S. and with the members of the Transpacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement), because such arrangements by necessity would lead to a divergence with EU trade strictures.  It would also preclude the UK from unilaterally reducing harmful regulatory burdens that are a byproduct of economically inefficient and excessive EU rules.  In short, it would be antithetical to economic freedom and economic welfare.

Notably, in a November 30 article (Six Impossible Notions About “Global Britain”), a well-known business journalist, Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, sharply criticized The Brexit Inflection Point’s recommendation that the UK should pursue trade and regulatory policies that would diverge from EU standards.  Notably, Wolf characterized as an “impossible thing” Legatum’s point that the UK should not “’allow itself to be bound by the EU’s negotiating mandate.’  We all now know this is infeasible.  The EU holds the cards and it knows it holds the cards. The Legatum authors still do not.”

Shanker Singham, Director of Economic Policy and Prosperity Studies at Legatum, brilliantly responded to Wolf’s critique in a December 4 article (published online by CAPX) entitled A Narrow-Minded Brexit Is Doomed to Fail.  Singham’s trenchant analysis merits being set forth in its entirety (by permission of the author):

“Last week, the Financial Times’s chief economics commentator, Martin Wolf, dedicated his column to criticising The Brexit Inflection Point, a report for the Legatum Institute in which Victoria Hewson, Radomir Tylecote and I discuss what would constitute a good end state for the UK as it seeks to exercise an independent trade and regulatory policy post Brexit, and how we get from here to there.

We write these reports to advance ideas that we think will help policymakers as they tackle the single biggest challenge this country has faced since the Second World War. We believe in a market place of ideas, and we welcome challenge. . . .

[W]e are thankful that Martin Wolf, an eminent economist, has chosen to engage with the substance of our arguments. However, his article misunderstands the nature of modern international trade negotiations, as well as the reality of the European Union’s regulatory system – and so his claim that, like the White Queen, we “believe in impossible things” simply doesn’t stack up.

Mr Wolf claims there are six impossible things that we argue. We will address his rebuttals in turn.

But first, in discussions about the UK’s trade policy, it is important to bear in mind that the British government is currently discussing the manner in which it will retake its independent WTO membership. This includes agricultural import quotas, and its WTO rectification processes with other WTO members.

If other countries believe that the UK will adopt the position of maintaining regulatory alignment with the EU, as advocated by Mr Wolf and others, the UK’s negotiating strategy would be substantially weaker. It would quite wrongly suggest that the UK will be unable to lower trade barriers and offer the kind of liberalisation that our trading partners seek and that would work best for the UK economy. This could negatively impact both the UK and the EU’s ongoing discussions in the WTO.

Has the EU’s trading system constrained growth in the World?

The first impossible thing Mr Wolf claims we argue is that the EU system of protectionism and harmonised regulation has constrained economic growth for Britain and the world. He is right to point out that the volume of world trade has increased, and the UK has, of course, experienced GDP growth while a member of the EU.

However, as our report points out, the EU’s prescriptive approach to regulation, especially in the recent past (for example, its approach on data protection, audio-visual regulation, the restrictive application of the precautionary principle, REACH chemicals regulation, and financial services regulations to name just a few) has led to an increase in anti-competitive regulation and market distortions that are wealth destructive.

As the OECD notes in various reports on regulatory reform, regulation can act as a behind-the-border barrier to trade and impede market openness for trade and investment. Inefficient regulation imposes unnecessary burdens on firms, increases barriers to entry, impacts on competition and incentives for innovation, and ultimately hurts productivity. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is an example of regulation that is disproportionate to its objectives; it is highly prescriptive and imposes substantial compliance costs for business that want to use data to innovate.

Rapid growth during the post-war period is in part thanks to the progressive elimination of border trade barriers. But, in terms of wealth creation, we are no longer growing at that rate. Since before the financial crisis, measures of actual wealth creation (not GDP which includes consumer and government spending) such as industrial output have stalled, and the number of behind-the-border regulatory barriers has been increasing.

The global trading system is in difficulty. The lack of negotiation of a global trade round since the Uruguay Round, the lack of serious services liberalisation in either the built-in agenda of the WTO or sectorally following on from the Basic Telecoms Agreement and its Reference Paper on Competition Safeguards in 1997 has led to an increase in behind-the-border barriers and anti-competitive distortions and regulation all over the world. This stasis in international trade negotiations is an important contributory factor to what many economists have talked about as a “new normal” of limited growth, and a global decline in innovation.

Meanwhile the EU has sought to force its regulatory system on the rest of the world (the GDPR is an example of this). If it succeeds, the result would be the kind of wealth destruction that pushes more people into poverty. It is against this backdrop that the UK is negotiating with both the EU and the rest of the world.

The question is whether an independent UK, the world’s sixth biggest economy and second biggest exporter of services, is able to contribute to improving the dynamics of the global economic architecture, which means further trade liberalisation. The EU is protectionist against outside countries, which is antithetical to the overall objectives of the WTO. This is true in agriculture and beyond. For example, the EU imposes tariffs on cars at four times the rate applied by the US, while another large auto manufacturing country, Japan, has unilaterally removed its auto tariffs.

In addition, the EU27 represents a declining share of UK exports, which is rather counter-intuitive for a Customs Union and single market. In 1999, the EU represented 55 per cent of UK exports, and by 2016, this was 43 per cent. That said, the EU will remain an important, albeit declining, market for the UK, which is why we advocate a comprehensive free trade agreement with it.

Can the UK secure meaningful regulatory recognition from the EU without being identical to it?

Second, Mr Wolf suggests that regulatory recognition between the UK and EU is possible only if there is harmonisation or identical regulation between the UK and EU.

This is at odds with WTO practice, stretching back to its rules on domestic laws and regulation as encapsulated in Article III of the GATT and Article VI of the GATS, and as expressed in the Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) and Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) agreements.

This is the critical issue. The direction of travel of international trade thinking is towards countries recognising each other’s regulatory systems if they achieve the same ultimate goal of regulation, even if the underlying regulation differs, and to regulate in ways that are least distortive to international trade and competition. There will be areas where this level of recognition will not be possible, in which case UK exports into the EU will of course have to satisfy the standards of the EU. But even here we can mitigate the trade costs to some extent by Mutual Recognition Agreements on conformity assessment and market surveillance.

Had the US taken the view that it would not receive regulatory recognition unless their regulatory systems were the same, the recent agreement on prudential measures in insurance and reinsurance services between the EU and US would not exist. In fact this point highlights the crucial issue which the UK must successfully negotiate, and one in which its interests are aligned with other countries and with the direction of travel of the WTO itself. The TBT and SPS agreements broadly provide that mutual recognition should not be denied where regulatory goals are aligned but technical regulation differs.

Global trade and regulatory policy increasingly looks for regulation that promotes competition. The EU is on a different track, as the GDPR demonstrates. This is the reason that both the Canada-EU agreement (CETA) and the EU offer in the Trade in Services agreement (TiSA) does not include new services. If GDPR were to become the global standard, trade in data would be severely constrained, slowing the development of big data solutions, the fourth industrial revolution, and new services trade generally.

As many firms recognise, this would be extremely damaging to global prosperity. In arguing that regulatory recognition is only available if the UK is fully harmonised with the EU, Mr Wolf may be in harmony with the EU approach to regulation. But that is exactly the approach that is damaging the global trading environment.

Can the UK exercise trade policy leadership?

Third, Mr Wolf suggests that other countries do not, and will not, look to the UK for trade leadership. He cites the US’s withdrawal from the trade negotiating space as an example. But surely the absence of the world’s biggest services exporter means that the world’s second biggest exporter of services will be expected to advocate for its own interests, and argue for greater services liberalisation.

Mr Wolf believes that the UK is a second-rank power in decline. We take a different view of the world’s sixth biggest economy, the financial capital of the world and the second biggest exporter of services. As former New Zealand High Commissioner, Sir Lockwood Smith, has said, the rest of the world does not see the UK as the UK too often seems to see itself.

The global companies that have their headquarters in the UK do not see things the same way as Mr Wolf. In fact, the lack of trade leadership since 1997 means that a country with significant services exports would be expected to show some leadership.

Mr Wolf’s point is that far from seeking to grandiosely lead global trade negotiations, the UK should stick to its current knitting, which consists of its WTO rectification, and includes the negotiation of its agricultural import quotas and production subsidies in agriculture. This is perhaps the most concerning part of his argument. Yes, the UK must rectify its tariff schedules, but for that process to be successful, especially on agricultural import quotas, it must be able to demonstrate to its partners that it will be able to grant further liberalisation in the near term future. If it can’t, then its trading partners will have no choice but to demand as much liberalisation as they can secure right now in the rectification process.

This will complicate that process, and cause damage to the UK as it takes up its independent WTO membership. Those WTO partners who see the UK as vulnerable on this point will no doubt see validation in Mr Wolf’s article and assume it means that no real liberalisation will be possible from the UK. The EU should note that complicating this process for the UK will not help the EU in its own WTO processes, where it is vulnerable.

Trade negotiations are dynamic not static and the UK must act quickly

Fourth, Mr Wolf suggests that the UK is not under time pressure to “escape from the EU”.  This statement does not account for how international trade negotiations work in practice. In order for countries to cooperate with the UK on its WTO rectification, and its TRQ negotiations, as well to seriously negotiate with it, they have to believe that the UK will have control over tariff schedules and regulatory autonomy from day one of Brexit (even if we may choose not to make changes to it for an implementation period).

If non-EU countries think that the UK will not be able to exercise its freedom for several years, they will simply demand their pound of flesh in the negotiations now, and get on with the rest of their trade policy agenda. Trade negotiations are not static. The US executive could lose trade-negotiating authority in the summer of next year if the NAFTA renegotiation is not going well. Other countries will seek to accede to the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). China is moving forward with its Regional Cooperation and Economic Partnership, which does not meaningfully touch on domestic regulatory barriers. Much as we might criticise Donald Trump, his administration has expressed strong political will for a UK-US agreement, and in that regard has broken with traditional US trade policy thinking. The UK has an opportunity to strike and must take it.

The UK should prevail on the EU to allow Customs Agencies to be inter-operable from day one

Fifth, with respect to the challenges raised on customs agencies working together, our report argued that UK customs and the customs agencies of the EU member states should discuss customs arrangements at a practical and technical level now. What stands in the way of this is the EU’s stubbornness. Customs agencies are in regular contact on a business-as-usual basis, so the inability of UK and member-state customs agencies to talk to each other about the critical issue of new arrangements would seem to border on negligence. Of course, the EU should allow member states to have these critical conversations now.  Given the importance of customs agencies interoperating smoothly from day one, the UK Government must press its case with the European Commission to allow such conversations to start happening as a matter of urgency.

Does the EU hold all the cards?

Sixth, Mr Wolf argues that the EU holds all the cards and knows it holds all the cards, and therefore disagrees with our claim that the the UK should “not allow itself to be bound by the EU’s negotiating mandate”. As with his other claims, Mr Wolf finds himself agreeing with the EU’s negotiators. But that does not make him right.

While absence of a trade deal will of course damage UK industries, the cost to EU industries is also very significant. Beef and dairy in Ireland, cars and dairy in Bavaria, cars in Catalonia, textiles and dairy in Northern Italy – all over Europe (and in politically sensitive areas), industries stands to lose billions of Euros and thousands of jobs. This is without considering the impact of no financial services deal, which would increase the cost of capital in the EU, aborting corporate transactions and raising the cost of the supply chain. The EU has chosen a mandate that risks neither party getting what it wants.

The notion that the EU is a masterful negotiator, while the UK’s negotiators are hopeless is not the global view of the EU and the UK. Far from it. The EU in international trade negotiations has a reputation for being slow moving, lacking in creative vision, and unable to conclude agreements. Indeed, others have generally gone to the UK when they have been met with intransigence in Brussels.

What do we do now?

Mr Wolf’s argument amounts to a claim that the UK is not capable of the kind of further and deeper liberalisation that its economy would suggest is both possible and highly desirable both for the UK and the rest of the world. According to Mr Wolf, the UK can only consign itself to a highly aligned regulatory orbit around the EU, unable to realise any other agreements, and unable to influence the regulatory system around which it revolves, even as that system becomes ever more prescriptive and anti-competitive. Such a position is at odds with the facts and would guarantee a poor result for the UK and also cause opportunities to be lost for the rest of the world.

In all of our [Legatum Brexit-related] papers, we have started from the assumption that the British people have voted to leave the EU, and the government is implementing that outcome. We have then sought to produce policy recommendations based on what would constitute a good outcome as a result of that decision. This can be achieved only if we maximise the opportunities and minimise the disruptions.

We all recognise that the UK has embarked on a very difficult process. But there is a difference between difficult and impossible. There is also a difference between tasks that must be done and take time, and genuine negotiation points. We welcome the debate that comes from constructive challenge of our proposals; and we ask in turn that those who criticise us suggest alternative plans that might achieve positive outcomes. We look forward to the opportunity of a broader debate so that collectively the country can find the best path forward.”

 

In Antitrust & Competition, Barriers to Entry, China, European Union, International, International Trade, Regulation, Regulatory Reform, Telecommunications, Truth on the Market, United Kingdom , , , , ,
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2018 Edition of the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom: Freedom to Trade Is a Key to Prosperity

Alden Abbott —  21 November 2017

The latest rankings of trade freedom around the world will be set forth and assessed in the 24th annual edition of the Heritage Foundation annual Index of Economic Freedom (Index), which will be published in January 2018.  Today Heritage published a sneak preview of the 2018 Index’s analysis of freedom to trade, which merits public attention.  First, though, a bit of background on the Index’s philosophy and methodology is appropriate.

The nature and measurement of economic freedom are explained in the 2017 Index:

Economic freedom is the fundamental right of every human to control his or her own labor and property. In an economically free society, individuals are free to work, produce, consume, and invest in any way they please. In economically free societies, governments allow labor, capital, and goods to move freely, and refrain from coercion or constraint of liberty beyond the extent necessary to protect and maintain liberty itself. . . .  

[The Freedom Index] measure[s] economic freedom based on 12 quantitative and qualitative factors, grouped into four broad categories, or pillars, of economic freedom:

  1. Rule of Law (property rights, government integrity, judicial effectiveness)
  2. Government Size (government spending, tax burden, fiscal health)
  3. Regulatory Efficiency (business freedom, labor freedom, monetary freedom)
  4. Open Markets (trade freedom, investment freedom, financial freedom)

Each of the twelve economic freedoms within these categories is graded on a scale of 0 to 100. A country’s overall score is derived by averaging these twelve economic freedoms, with equal weight being given to each. More information on the grading and methodology can be found in the appendix.

As was the case in previous versions, the 2018 Index explores various aspects of economic freedom in several essays that accompany its rankings.  In particular, with respect to international trade, the 2018 Index demonstrates that citizens of countries that embrace free trade are better off than those in countries that do not.  The data show a strong correlation between trade freedom and a variety of positive indicators, including economic prosperity, unpolluted environments, food security, gross national income per capita, and the absence of politically motivated violence or unrest.  Reducing trade barriers remains a proven recipe for prosperity that a majority of Americans support.

The 2018 Index’s three key trade-related takeaways are:

  1. A comparison of economic performance and trade scores in the 2018 Index shows how trade freedom increases prosperity and overall well-being.
  2. Countries with the most trade freedom have much higher per capita incomes, greater food security, cleaner environments, and less politically motivated violence.
  3. Free trade policies also encourage freedom in general. Most Americans support free trade, and believe its benefits outweigh any disadvantages.

Follow this space for further updates on the 2018 Index.

In International, International Trade, Truth on the Market ,
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Democratic Party “Better Deal” Antitrust Proposals Would be a “Worse Deal” for the American Economy and Consumers

Alden Abbott —  2 August 2017

On July 24, as part of their newly-announced “Better Deal” campaign, congressional Democrats released an antitrust proposal (“Better Deal Antitrust Proposal” or BDAP) entitled “Cracking Down on Corporate Monopolies and the Abuse of Economic and Political Power.”  Unfortunately, this antitrust tract is really an “Old Deal” screed that rehashes long-discredited ideas about “bigness is badness” and “corporate abuses,” untethered from serious economic analysis.  (In spirit it echoes the proposal for a renewed emphasis on “fairness” in antitrust made by then Acting Assistant Attorney General Renata Hesse in 2016 – a recommendation that ran counter to sound economics, as I explained in a September 2016 Truth on the Market commentary.)  Implementation of the BDAP’s recommendations would be a “worse deal” for American consumers and for American economic vitality and growth.

The BDAP’s Portrayal of the State of Antitrust Enforcement is Factually Inaccurate, and it Ignores the Real Problems of Crony Capitalism and Regulatory Overreach

The Better Deal Antitrust Proposal begins with the assertion that antitrust has failed in recent decades:

Over the past thirty years, growing corporate influence and consolidation has led to reductions in competition, choice for consumers, and bargaining power for workers.  The extensive concentration of power in the hands of a few corporations hurts wages, undermines job growth, and threatens to squeeze out small businesses, suppliers, and new, innovative competitors.  It means higher prices and less choice for the things the American people buy every day. . .  [This is because] [o]ver the last thirty years, courts and permissive regulators have allowed large companies to get larger, resulting in higher prices and limited consumer choice in daily expenses such as travel, cable, and food and beverages.  And because concentrated market power leads to concentrated political power, these companies deploy armies of lobbyists to increase their stranglehold on Washington.  A Better Deal on competition means that we will revisit our antitrust laws to ensure that the economic freedom of all Americans—consumers, workers, and small businesses—come before big corporations that are getting even bigger.

This statement’s assertions are curious (not to mention problematic) in multiple respects.

First, since Democratic administrations have held the White House for sixteen of the past thirty years, the BDAP appears to acknowledge that Democratic presidents have overseen a failed antitrust policy.

Second, the broad claim that consumers have faced higher prices and limited consumer choice with regard to their daily expenses is baseless.  Indeed, internet commerce and new business models have sharply reduced travel and entertainment costs for the bulk of American consumers, and new “high technology” products such as smartphones and electronic games have been characterized by dramatic improvements in innovation, enhanced variety, and relatively lower costs.  Cable suppliers face vibrant competition from competitive satellite providers, fiberoptic cable suppliers (the major telcos such as Verizon), and new online methods for distributing content.  Consumer price inflation has been extremely low in recent decades, compared to the high inflationary, less innovative environment of the 1960s and 1970s – decades when federal antitrust law was applied much more vigorously.  Thus, the claim that weaker antitrust has denied consumers “economic freedom” is at war with the truth.

Third, the claim that recent decades have seen the creation of “concentrated market power,” safe from antitrust challenge, ignores the fact that, over the last three decades, apolitical government antitrust officials under both Democratic and Republican administrations have applied well-accepted economic tools (wielded by the scores of Ph.D. economists in the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission) in enforcing the antitrust laws.  Antitrust analysis has used economics to focus on inefficient business conduct that would maintain or increase market power, and large numbers of cartels have been prosecuted and questionable mergers (including a variety of major health care and communications industry mergers) have been successfully challenged.  The alleged growth of “concentrated market power,” untouched by incompetent antitrust enforcers, is a myth.  Furthermore, claims that mere corporate size and “aggregate concentration” are grounds for antitrust concern (“big is bad”) were decisively rejected by empirical economic research published in the 1970s, and are no more convincing today.  (As I pointed out in a January 2017 blog posting at this site, recent research by highly respected economists debunks a few claims that federal antitrust enforcers have been “excessively tolerant” of late in analyzing proposed mergers.)

More interesting is the BDAP’s claim that “armies of [corporate] lobbyists” manage to “increase their stranglehold on Washington.”  This is not an antitrust concern, however, but, rather, a complaint against crony capitalism and overregulation, which became an ever more serious problem under the Obama Administration.  As I explained in my October 2016 critique of the American Antitrust Institute’s September 2008 National Competition Policy Report (a Report which is very similar in tone to the BDAP), the rapid growth of excessive regulation during the Obama years has diminished competition by creating new regulatory schemes that benefit entrenched and powerful firms (such as Dodd-Frank Act banking rules that impose excessive burdens on smaller banks).  My critique emphasized that, “as Dodd-Frank and other regulatory programs illustrate, large government rulemaking schemes often are designed to favor large and wealthy well-connected rent-seekers at the expense of smaller and more dynamic competitors.”  And, more generally, excessive regulatory burdens undermine the competitive process, by distorting business decisions in a manner that detracts from competition on the merits.

It follows that, if the BDAP really wanted to challenge “unfair” corporate advantages, it would seek to roll back excessive regulation (see my November 2012 article on Trump Administration competition policy).  Indeed, the Trump Administration’s regulatory reform program (which features agency-specific regulatory reform task forces) seeks to do just that.  Perhaps then the BDAP could be rewritten to focus on endorsing President Trump’s regulatory reform initiative, rather than emphasizing a meritless “big is bad” populist antitrust policy that was consigned to the enforcement dustbin decades ago.

The BDAP’s Specific Proposals Would Harm the Economy and Reduce Consumer Welfare

Unfortunately, the BDAP does more than wax nostalgic about old-time “big is bad” antitrust policy.  It affirmatively recommends policy changes that would harm the economy.

First, the BDAP would require “a broader, longer-term view and strong presumptions that market concentration can result in anticompetitive conduct.”  Specifically, it would create “new standards to limit large mergers that unfairly consolidate corporate power,” including “mergers [that] reduce wages, cut jobs, lower product quality, limit access to services, stifle innovation, or hinder the ability of small businesses and entrepreneurs to compete.”  New standards would also “explicitly consider the ways in which control of consumer data can be used to stifle competition or jeopardize consumer privacy.”

Unlike current merger policy, which evaluates likely competitive effects, centered on price and quality, estimated in economically relevant markets, these new standards are open-ended.  They could justify challenges based on such a wide variety of factors that they would incentivize direct competitors not to merge, even in cases where the proposed merged entity would prove more efficient and able to enhance quality or innovation.  Certain less efficient competitors – say small businesses – could argue that they would be driven out of business, or that some jobs in the industry would disappear, in order to prompt government challenges.  But such challenges would tend to undermine innovation and business improvements, and the inevitable redistribution of assets to higher-valued uses that is a key benefit of corporate reorganizations and acquisitions.  (Mergers might focus instead, for example, on inefficient conglomerate acquisitions among companies in unrelated industries, which were incentivized by the overly strict 1960s rules that prohibited mergers among direct competitors.)  Such a change would represent a retreat from economic common sense, and be at odds with consensus economically-sound merger enforcement guidance that U.S. enforcers have long recommended other countries adopt.  Furthermore, questions of consumer data and privacy are more appropriately dealt with as consumer protection questions, which the Federal Trade Commission has handled successfully for years.

Second, the BDAP would require “frequent, independent [after-the-fact] reviews of mergers” and require regulators “to take corrective measures if they find abusive monopolistic conditions where previously approved [consent decree] measures fail to make good on their intended outcomes.”

While high profile mergers subject to significant divestiture or other remedial requirements have in appropriate circumstances included monitoring requirements, the tone of this recommendation is to require that far more mergers be subjected to detailed and ongoing post-acquisition reviews.  The cost of such monitoring is substantial, however, and routine reliance on it (backed by the threat of additional enforcement actions based merely on changing economic conditions) could create excessive caution in the post-merger management of newly-consolidated enterprises.  Indeed, potential merged parties might decide in close cases that this sort of oversight is not worth accepting, and therefore call off potentially efficient transactions that would have enhanced economic welfare.  (The reality of enforcement error cost, and the possibility of misdiagnosis of post-merger competitive conditions, is not acknowledged by the BDAP.)

Third, a newly created “competition advocate” independent of the existing federal antitrust enforcers would be empowered to publicly recommend investigations, with the enforcers required to justify publicly why they chose not to pursue a particular recommended investigation.  The advocate would ensure that antitrust enforcers are held “accountable,” assure that complaints about “market exploitation and anticompetitive conduct” are heard, and publish data on “concentration and abuses of economic power” with demographic breakdowns.

This third proposal is particularly egregious.  It is at odds with the long tradition of prosecutorial discretion that has been enjoyed by the federal antitrust enforcers (and law enforcers in general).  It would also empower a special interest intervenor to promote the complaints of interest groups that object to efficiency-seeking business conduct, thereby undermining the careful economic and legal analysis that is consistently employed by the expert antitrust agencies.  The references to “concentration” and “economic power” clarify that the “advocate” would have an untrammeled ability to highlight non-economic objections to transactions raised by inefficient competitors, jealous rivals, or self-styled populists who object to excessive “bigness.”  This would strike at the heart of our competitive process, which presumes that private parties will be allowed to fulfill their own goals, free from government micromanagement, absent indications of a clear and well-defined violation of law.  In sum, the “competition advocate” is better viewed as a “special interest” advocate empowered to ignore normal legal constraints and unjustifiably interfere in business transactions.  If empowered to operate freely, such an advocate (better viewed as an albatross) would undoubtedly chill a wide variety of business arrangements, to the detriment of consumers and economic innovation.

Finally, the BDAP refers to a variety of ills that are said to affect specific named industries, in particular airlines, cable/telecom, beer, food prices, and eyeglasses.  Airlines are subject to a variety of capacity limitations (limitations on landing slots and the size/number of airports) and regulatory constraints (prohibitions on foreign entry or investment) that may affect competitive conditions, but airlines mergers are closely reviewed by the Justice Department.  Cable and telecom companies face a variety of federal, state, and local regulations, and their mergers also are closely scrutinized.  The BDAP’s reference to the proposed AT&T/Time Warner merger ignores the potential efficiencies of this “vertical” arrangement involving complementary assets (see my coauthored commentary here), and resorts to unsupported claims about wrongful “discrimination” by “behemoths” – issues that in any event are examined in antitrust merger reviews.  Unsupported references to harm to competition and consumer choice are thrown out in the references to beer and agrochemical mergers, which also receive close economically-focused merger scrutiny under existing law.  Concerns raised about the price of eyeglasses ignore the role of potentially anticompetitive regulation – that is, bad government – in harming consumer welfare in this sector.  In short, the alleged competitive “problems” the BDAP raises with respect to particular industries are no more compelling than the rest of its analysis.  The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission are hard at work applying sound economics to these sectors.  They should be left to do their jobs, and the BDAP’s industry-specific commentary (sadly, like the rest of its commentary) should be accorded no weight.

Conclusion

Congressional Democrats would be well-advised to ditch their efforts to resurrect the counterproductive antitrust policy from days of yore, and instead focus on real economic problems, such as excessive and inappropriate government regulation, as well as weak protection for U.S. intellectual property rights, here and abroad (see here, for example).  Such a change in emphasis would redound to the benefit of American consumers and producers.

 

 

In Antitrust & Competition, Banking, Cartels, Federal Trade Commission, Financial Regulation, Intellectual Property, Regulation, Regulatory Reform, Telecommunications, Truth on the Market
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