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What’s the Harm of Targeted Ads on Children’s Content Anyway?

Ben Sperry —  12 September 2019 — Leave a comment

The FTC’s recent YouTube settlement and $170 million fine related to charges that YouTube violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) has the issue of targeted advertising back in the news. With an upcoming FTC workshop and COPPA Rule Review looming, it’s worth looking at this case in more detail and reconsidering COPPA’s 2013 amendment to the definition of personal information.

According to the complaint issued by the FTC and the New York Attorney General, YouTube violated COPPA by collecting personal information of children on its platform without obtaining parental consent. While the headlines scream that this is an egregious violation of privacy and parental rights, a closer look suggests that there is actually very little about the case that normal people would find to be all that troubling. Instead, it appears to be another in the current spate of elitist technopanics.

COPPA defines personal information to include persistent identifiers, like cookies, used for targeted advertising. These cookies allow site operators to have some idea of what kinds of websites a user may have visited previously. Having knowledge of users’ browsing history allows companies to advertise more effectively than is possible with contextual advertisements, which guess at users’ interests based upon the type of content being viewed at the time. The age old problem for advertisers is that “half the money spent on advertising is wasted; the trouble is they don’t know which half.” While this isn’t completely solved by the use of targeted advertising based on web browsing and search history, the fact that such advertising is more lucrative compared to contextual advertisements suggests that it works better for companies.

COPPA, since the 2013 update, states that persistent identifiers are personal information by themselves, even if not linked to any other information that could be used to actually identify children (i.e., anyone under 13 years old). 

As a consequence of this rule, YouTube doesn’t allow children under 13 to create an account. Instead, YouTube created a separate mobile application called YouTube Kids with curated content targeted at younger users. That application serves only contextual advertisements that do not rely on cookies or other persistent identifiers, but the content available on YouTube Kids also remains available on YouTube. 

YouTube’s error, in the eyes of the FTC, was that the site left it to channel owners on YouTube’s general audience site to determine whether to monetize their content through targeted advertising or to opt out and use only contextual advertisements. Turns out, many of those channels — including channels identified by the FTC as “directed to children” — made the more lucrative choice by choosing to have targeted advertisements on their channels. 

Whether YouTube’s practices violate the letter of COPPA or not, a more fundamental question remains unanswered: What is the harm, exactly?

COPPA takes for granted that it is harmful for kids to receive targeted advertisements, even where, as here, the targeting is based not on any knowledge about the users as individuals, but upon the browsing and search history of the device they happen to be on. But children under 13 are extremely unlikely to have purchased the devices they use, to pay for the access to the Internet to use the devices, or to have any disposable income or means of paying for goods and services online. Which makes one wonder: To whom are these advertisements served to children actually targeted? The answer is obvious to everyone but the FTC and those who support the COPPA Rule: the children’s parents.

Television programs aimed at children have long been supported by contextual advertisements for cereal and toys. Tony the Tiger and Lucky the Leprechaun were staples of Saturday morning cartoons when I was growing up, along with all kinds of Hot Wheels commercials. As I soon discovered as a kid, I had the ability to ask my parents to buy these things, but ultimately no ability to buy them on my own. In other words: Parental oversight is essentially built-in to any type of advertisement children see, in the sense that few children can realistically make their own purchases or even view those advertisements without their parents giving them a device and internet access to do so.

When broken down like this, it is much harder to see the harm. It’s one thing to create regulatory schemes to prevent stalkers, creepers, and perverts from using online information to interact with children. It’s quite another to greatly reduce the ability of children’s content to generate revenue by use of relatively anonymous persistent identifiers like cookies — and thus, almost certainly, to greatly reduce the amount of content actually made for and offered to children.

On the one hand, COPPA thus disregards the possibility that controls that take advantage of parental oversight may be the most cost-effective form of protection in such circumstances. As Geoffrey Manne noted regarding the FTC’s analogous complaint against Amazon under the FTC Act, which ignored the possibility that Amazon’s in-app purchasing scheme was tailored to take advantage of parental oversight in order to avoid imposing excessive and needless costs:

[For the FTC], the imagined mechanism of “affirmatively seeking a customer’s authorized consent to a charge” is all benefit and no cost. Whatever design decisions may have informed the way Amazon decided to seek consent are either irrelevant, or else the user-experience benefits they confer are negligible….

Amazon is not abdicating its obligation to act fairly under the FTC Act and to ensure that users are protected from unauthorized charges. It’s just doing so in ways that also take account of the costs such protections may impose — particularly, in this case, on the majority of Amazon customers who didn’t and wouldn’t suffer such unauthorized charges….

At the same time, enforcement of COPPA against targeted advertising on kids’ content will have perverse and self-defeating consequences. As Berin Szoka notes:

This settlement will cut advertising revenue for creators of child-directed content by more than half. This will give content creators a perverse incentive to mislabel their content. COPPA was supposed to empower parents, but the FTC’s new approach actually makes life harder for parents and cripples functionality even when they want it. In short, artists, content creators, and parents will all lose, and it is not at all clear that this will do anything to meaningfully protect children.

This war against targeted advertising aimed at children has a cost. While many cheer the fine levied against YouTube (or think it wasn’t high enough) and the promised changes to its platform (though the dissenting Commissioners didn’t think those went far enough, either), the actual result will be less content — and especially less free content — available to children. 

Far from being a win for parents and children, the shift in oversight responsibility from parents to the FTC will likely lead to less-effective oversight, more difficult user interfaces, less children’s programming, and higher costs for everyone — all without obviously mitigating any harm in the first place.

In federal trade commission, ftc, television, truth on the market , ,
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The District Court’s FTC v. Qualcomm Decision Rests on Impermissible Inferences and Should Be Reversed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baird, Gertner & Picker, Game Theory and the Law

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The district court cites Microsoft for the proposition that

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

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

But Microsoft never suggested that anticompetitiveness itself may be inferred.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Josh Wright has noted:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

Joining ICLE on the brief are:

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


In antitrust, economics, error costs, essential facilities, exclusionary conduct, exclusive dealing, federal trade commission, ftc, FTC v Qualcomm Series, international center for law & economics, law and economics, litigation, monopolization, patent, standard setting, technology, truth on the market, vertical restraints , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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In FTC v. Qualcomm, Judge Koh Gets Lost in the Weeds

Dirk Auer —  28 August 2019 — 1 Comment

[TOTM: The following is the eighth in a series of posts by TOTM guests and authors on the FTC v. Qualcomm case recently decided by Judge Lucy Koh in the Northern District of California. Other posts in this series are here. The blog post is based on a forthcoming paper regarding patent holdup, co-authored by Dirk Auer and Julian Morris.]

Samsung SGH-F480V – controller board – Qualcomm MSM6280

In his latest book, Tyler Cowen calls big business an “American anti-hero”. Cowen argues that the growing animosity towards successful technology firms is to a large extent unwarranted. After all, these companies have generated tremendous prosperity and jobs.

Though it is less known to the public than its Silicon Valley counterparts, Qualcomm perfectly fits the anti-hero mold. Despite being a key contributor to the communications standards that enabled the proliferation of smartphones around the globe – an estimated 5 Billion people currently own a device – Qualcomm has been on the receiving end of considerable regulatory scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic (including two in the EU; see here and here). 

In the US, Judge Lucy Koh recently ruled that a combination of anticompetitive practices had enabled Qualcomm to charge “unreasonably high royalty rates” for its CDMA and LTE cellular communications technology. Chief among these practices was Qualcomm’s so-called “no license, no chips” policy, whereby the firm refuses to sell baseband processors to implementers that have not taken out a license for its communications technology. Other grievances included Qualcomm’s purported refusal to license its patents to rival chipmakers, and allegations that it attempted to extract exclusivity obligations from large handset manufacturers, such as Apple. According to Judge Koh, these practices resulted in “unreasonably high” royalty rates that failed to comply with Qualcomm’s FRAND obligations.

Judge Koh’s ruling offers an unfortunate example of the numerous pitfalls that decisionmakers face when they second-guess the distributional outcomes achieved through market forces. This is particularly true in the complex standardization space.

The elephant in the room

The first striking feature of Judge Koh’s ruling is what it omits. Throughout the more than two-hundred-page long document, there is not a single reference to the concepts of holdup or holdout (crucial terms of art for a ruling that grapples with the prices charged by an SEP holder). 

At first sight, this might seem like a semantic quibble. But words are important. Patent holdup (along with the “unreasonable” royalties to which it arguably gives rise) is possible only when a number of cumulative conditions are met. Most importantly, the foundational literature on economic opportunism (here and here) shows that holdup (and holdout) mostly occur when parties have made asset-specific sunk investments. This focus on asset-specific investments is echoed by even the staunchest critics of the standardization status quo (here).

Though such investments may well have been present in the case at hand, there is no evidence that they played any part in the court’s decision. This is not without consequences. If parties did not make sunk relationship-specific investments, then the antitrust case against Qualcomm should have turned upon the alleged exclusion of competitors, not the level of Qualcomm’s royalties. The DOJ said this much in its statement of interest concerning Qualcomm’s motion for partial stay of injunction pending appeal. Conversely, if these investments existed, then patent holdout (whereby implementers refuse to license key pieces of intellectual property) was just as much of a risk as patent holdup (here and here). And yet the court completely overlooked this possibility.

The misguided push for component level pricing

The court also erred by objecting to Qualcomm’s practice of basing license fees on the value of handsets, rather than that of modem chips. In simplified terms, implementers paid Qualcomm a percentage of their devices’ resale price. The court found that this was against Federal Circuit law. Instead, it argued that royalties should be based on the value the smallest salable patent-practicing component (in this case, baseband chips). This conclusion is dubious both as a matter of law and of policy.

From a legal standpoint, the question of the appropriate royalty base seems far less clear-cut than Judge Koh’s ruling might suggest. For instance, Gregory Sidak observes that in TCL v. Ericsson Judge Selna used a device’s net selling price as a basis upon which to calculate FRAND royalties. Likewise, in CSIRO v. Cisco, the Court also declined to use the “smallest saleable practicing component” as a royalty base. And finally, as Jonathan Barnett observes, the Circuit Laser Dynamics case law cited  by Judge Koh relates to the calculation of damages in patent infringement suits. There is no legal reason to believe that its findings should hold any sway outside of that narrow context. It is one thing for courts to decide upon the methodology that they will use to calculate damages in infringement cases – even if it is a contested one. It is a whole other matter to shoehorn private parties into adopting this narrow methodology in their private dealings. 

More importantly, from a policy standpoint, there are important advantages to basing royalty rates on the price of an end-product, rather than that of an intermediate component. This type of pricing notably enables parties to better allocate the risk that is inherent in launching a new product. In simplified terms: implementers want to avoid paying large (fixed) license fees for failed devices; and patent holders want to share in the benefits of successful devices that rely on their inventions. The solution, as Alain Bousquet and his co-authors explain, is to agree on royalty payments that are contingent on success in the market:

Because the demand for a new product is uncertain and/or the potential cost reduction of a new technology is not perfectly known, both seller and buyer may be better off if the payment for the right to use an innovation includes a state-contingent royalty (rather than consisting of just a fixed fee). The inventor wants to benefit from a growing demand for a new product, and the licensee wishes to avoid high payments in case of disappointing sales.

While this explains why parties might opt for royalty-based payments over fixed fees, it does not entirely elucidate the practice of basing royalties on the price of an end device. One explanation is that a technology’s value will often stem from its combination with other goods or technologies. Basing royalties on the value of an end-device enables patent holders to more effectively capture the social benefits that flow from these complementarities.

Imagine the price of the smallest saleable component is identical across all industries, despite it being incorporated into highly heterogeneous devices. For instance, the same modem chip could be incorporated into smartphones (of various price ranges), tablets, vehicles, and other connected devices. The Bousquet line of reasoning (above) suggests that it is efficient for the patent holder to earn higher royalties (from the IP that underpins the modem chips) in those segments where market demand is strongest (i.e. where there are stronger complementarities between the modem chip and the end device).

One way to make royalties more contingent on market success is to use the price of the modem (which is presumably identical across all segments) as a royalty base and negotiate a separate royalty rate for each end device (charging a higher rate for devices that will presumably benefit from stronger consumer demand). But this has important drawbacks. For a start, identifying those segments (or devices) that are most likely to be successful is informationally cumbersome for the inventor. Moreover, this practice could land the patent holder in hot water. Antitrust authorities might naïvely conclude that these varying royalty rates violate the “non-discriminatory” part of FRAND.

A much simpler solution is to apply a single royalty rate (or at least attempt to do so) but use the price of the end device as a royalty base. This ensures that the patent holder’s rewards are not just contingent on the number of devices sold, but also on their value. Royalties will thus more closely track the end-device’s success in the marketplace.   

In short, basing royalties on the value of an end-device is an informationally light way for the inventor to capture some of the unforeseen value that might stem from the inclusion of its technology in an end device. Mandating that royalty rates be based on the value of the smallest saleable component ignores this complex reality.

Prices are almost impossible to reconstruct

Judge Koh was similarly imperceptive when assessing Qualcomm’s contribution to the value of key standards, such as LTE and CDMA. 

For a start, she reasoned that Qualcomm’s royalties were large compared to the number of patents it had contributed to these technologies:

Moreover, Qualcomm’s own documents also show that Qualcomm is not the top standards contributor, which confirms Qualcomm’s own statements that QCT’s monopoly chip market share rather than the value of QTL’s patents sustain QTL’s unreasonably high royalty rates.

Given the tremendous heterogeneity that usually exists between the different technologies that make up a standard, simply counting each firm’s contributions is a crude and misleading way to gauge the value of their patent portfolios. Accordingly, Qualcomm argued that it had made pioneering contributions to technologies such as CDMA, and 4G/5G. Though the value of Qualcomm’s technologies is ultimately an empirical question, the court’s crude patent counting  was unlikely to provide a satisfying answer.

Just as problematically, the court also concluded that Qualcomm’s royalties were unreasonably high because “modem chips do not drive handset value.” In its own words:

Qualcomm’s intellectual property is for communication, and Qualcomm does not own intellectual property on color TFT LCD panel, mega-pixel DSC module, user storage memory, decoration, and mechanical parts. The costs of these non-communication-related components have become more expensive and now contribute 60-70% of the phone value. The phone is not just for communication, but also for computing, movie-playing, video-taking, and data storage.

As Luke Froeb and his co-authors have also observed, the court’s reasoning on this point is particularly unfortunate. Though it is clearly true that superior LCD panels, cameras, and storage increase a handset’s value – regardless of the modem chip that is associated with them – it is equally obvious that improvements to these components are far more valuable to consumers when they are also associated with high-performance communications technology.

For example, though there is undoubtedly standalone value in being able to take improved pictures on a smartphone, this value is multiplied by the ability to instantly share these pictures with friends, and automatically back them up on the cloud. Likewise, improving a smartphone’s LCD panel is more valuable if the device is also equipped with a cutting edge modem (both are necessary for consumers to enjoy high-definition media online).

In more technical terms, the court fails to acknowledge that, in the presence of perfect complements, each good makes an incremental contribution of 100% to the value of the whole. A smartphone’s components would be far less valuable to consumers if they were not associated with a high-performance modem, and vice versa. The fallacy to which the court falls prey is perfectly encapsulated by a quote it cites from Apple’s COO:

Apple invests heavily in the handset’s physical design and enclosures to add value, and those physical handset features clearly have nothing to do with Qualcomm’s cellular patents, it is unfair for Qualcomm to receive royalty revenue on that added value.

The question the court should be asking, however, is whether Apple would have gone to the same lengths to improve its devices were it not for Qualcomm’s complementary communications technology. By ignoring this question, Judge Koh all but guaranteed that her assessment of Qualcomm’s royalty rates would be wide of the mark.

Concluding remarks

In short, the FTC v. Qualcomm case shows that courts will often struggle when they try to act as makeshift price regulators. It thus lends further credence to Gergory Werden and Luke Froeb’s conclusion that:

Nothing is more alien to antitrust than enquiring into the reasonableness of prices. 

This is especially true in complex industries, such as the standardization space. The colossal number of parameters that affect the price for a technology are almost impossible to reproduce in a top-down fashion, as the court attempted to do in the Qualcomm case. As a result, courts will routinely draw poor inferences from factors such as the royalty base agreed upon by parties, the number of patents contributed by a firm, and the complex manner in which an individual technology may contribute to the value of an end-product. Antitrust authorities and courts would thus do well to recall the wise words of Friedrich Hayek:

If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them. We cannot expect that this problem will be solved by first communicating all this knowledge to a central board which, after integrating all knowledge, issues its orders. We must solve it by some form of decentralization.

In FTC v Qualcomm Series, licensing, patent, Patents, standard setting, truth on the market , , , , , , , ,
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Should Patent Hold-Out Concerns Trump Patent Hold-Up Misgivings?

Llobet & Padilla —  18 July 2019

[TOTM: The following is the seventh in a series of posts by TOTM guests and authors on the FTC v. Qualcomm case recently decided by Judge Lucy Koh in the Northern District of California. Other posts in this series are here.]

This post is authored by Gerard Lloblet, Professor of Economics at CEMFI, and Jorge Padilla, Senior Managing Director at Compass Lexecon. Both have advised SEP holders, and to a lesser extent licensees, in royalty negotiations and antitrust disputes.]

Over the last few years competition authorities in the US and elsewhere have repeatedly warned about the risk of patent hold-up in the licensing of Standard Essential Patents (SEPs). Concerns about such risks were front and center in the recent FTC case against Qualcomm, where the Court ultimately concluded that Qualcomm had used a series of anticompetitive practices to extract unreasonable royalties from implementers. This post evaluates the evidence for such a risk, as well as the countervailing risk of patent hold-out.

In general, hold up may arise when firms negotiate trading terms after they have made costly, relation-specific investments. Since the costs of these investments are sunk when trading terms are negotiated, they are not factored into the agreed terms. As a result, depending on the relative bargaining power of the firms, the investments made by the weaker party may be undercompensated (Williamson, 1979). 

In the context of SEPs, patent hold-up would arise if SEP owners were able to take advantage of the essentiality of their patents to charge excessive royalties to manufacturers of products reading on those patents that made irreversible investments in the standard (see Lemley and Shapiro (2007)). Similarly, in the recent FTC v. Qualcomm ruling, trial judge Lucy Koh concluded that firms may also use commercial strategies (in this case, Qualcomm’s “no license, no chips” policy, refusing to deal with certain parties and demanding exclusivity from others) to extract royalties that depart from the FRAND benchmark.

After years of heated debate, however, there is no consensus about whether patent hold-up actually exists. Some argue that there is no evidence of hold-up in practice. If patent hold-up were a significant problem, manufacturers would anticipate that their investments would be expropriated and would thus decide not to invest in the first place. But end-product manufacturers have invested considerable amounts in standardized technologies (Galetovic et al, 2015). Others claim that while investment is indeed observed, actual investment levels are “necessarily” below those that would be observed in the absence of hold-up. They allege that, since that counterfactual scenario is not observable, it is not surprising that more than fifteen years after the patent hold-up hypothesis was first proposed, empirical evidence of its existence is lacking.

Meanwhile, innovators are concerned about a risk in the opposite direction, the risk of patent hold-out. As Epstein and Noroozi (2018) explain,

By “patent holdout” we mean the converse problem, i.e., that an implementer refuses to negotiate in good faith with an innovator for a license to valid patent(s) that the implementer infringes, and instead forces the innovator to either undertake significant litigation costs and time delays to extract a licensing payment through court order, or else to simply drop the matter because the licensing game is no longer worth the candle.

Patent hold-out, also known as “efficient infringement,” is especially relevant in the standardization context for two reasons. First, SEP owners are oftentimes required to license their patents under Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) conditions. Particularly when, as occurs in some jurisdictions, innovators are not allowed to request an injunction, they have little or no leverage in trying to require licensees to accept a licensing deal. Secondly, SEP owners typically possess many complementary patents and, therefore, seek to license their portfolio of SEPs at once, since that minimizes transaction costs. Yet, some manufacturers de facto refuse to negotiate in this way and choose to challenge the validity of the SEP portfolio patent-by-patent and/or jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction. This strategy involves large litigation costs and is therefore inefficient. SEP holders claim that this practice is anticompetitive and it also leads to royalties that are too low.

While the concerns of SEP holders seem to have attracted the attention of the leadership of the US DOJ (see, for example, here), some authors have dismissed them as theoretically groundless, empirically immaterial and irrelevant from an antitrust perspective (see here). 

Evidence of patent hold-out from litigation

In an ongoing work, Llobet and Padilla (forthcoming), we analyze the effects of the sequential litigation strategy adopted by some manufacturers and compare its consequences with the simultaneous litigation of the whole portfolio. We show that sequential litigation results in lower royalty payments than simultaneous litigation and may result in under-compensation of innovation and the dissipation of social surplus when litigation costs are high.

The model relies on two basic and realistic assumptions. First, in sequential lawsuits, the result of a trial affects the probability that each party wins the following one. That is, if the manufacturer wins the first trial, it has a higher probability of winning the second, as a first victory may uncover information about the validity of other patents that relate to the same type of innovation, which will be less likely to be upheld in court. Second, the impact of a validity challenge on royalty payments is asymmetric: they are reduced to zero if the patent is found to be invalid but are not increased if it is found valid (and infringed).

Our results indicate that these features of the legal system can be strategically used by the manufacturer. The intuition is as follows. Suppose that the innovator sets a royalty rate for each patent for which, in the simultaneous trial case, the manufacturer would be indifferent between settling and litigating. Under sequential litigation, however, the manufacturer might be willing to challenge a patent because of the gain in a future trial. This is due to the asymmetric effects that winning or losing the second trial has on the royalty rate that this firm will have to pay. In particular, if the manufacturer wins the first trial, so that the first patent is invalidated, its probability of winning the second one increases, which means that the innovator is likely to settle for a lower royalty rate for the second patent or see both patents invalidated in court. In the opposite case, if the innovator wins the first trial, so that the second is also likely to be unfavorable to the manufacturer, the latter always has the option to pay up the original royalty rate and avoid the second trial. In other words, the possibility for the manufacturer to negotiate the royalty rate downwards after a victory, without the risk of it being increased in case of a defeat, fosters sequential litigation and results in lower royalties than the simultaneous litigation of all patents would produce. 

This mechanism, while being applicable to any portfolio that includes patents the validity of which is related, becomes more significant in the context of SEPs for two reasons. The first is the difficulty of innovators to adjust their royalties upwards after the first successful trial, as it might be considered a breach of their FRAND commitments. The second is that, following recent competition law litigation in the EU and other jurisdictions, SEP owners are restricted in their ability to seek (preliminary) injunctions even in the case of willful infringement. Our analysis demonstrates that the threat of injunction mitigates, though it is unlikely to eliminate completely, the incentive to litigate sequentially and, therefore, excessively (i.e. even when such litigation reduces social welfare).

We also find a second motivation for excessive litigation: business stealing. Manufacturers litigate excessively in order to avoid payment and thus achieve a valuable cost advantage over their competitors. They prefer to litigate even when litigation costs are so large that it would be preferable for society to avoid litigation because their royalty burden is reduced both in absolute terms and relative to the royalty burden for its rivals (while it does not go up if the patents are found valid). This business stealing incentive will result in the under-compensation of innovators, as above, but importantly it may also result in the anticompetitive foreclosure of more efficient competitors.

Consider, for example, a scenario in which a large firm with the ability to fund protracted litigation efforts competes in a downstream market with a competitive fringe, comprising small firms for which litigation is not an option. In this scenario, the large manufacturer may choose to litigate to force the innovator to settle on a low royalty. The large manufacturer exploits the asymmetry with its defenseless small rivals to reduce its IP costs. In some jurisdictions it may also exploit yet another asymmetry in the legal system to achieve an even larger cost advantage. If both the large manufacturer and the innovator choose to litigate and the former wins, the patent is invalidated, and the large manufacturer avoids paying royalties altogether. Whether this confers a comparative advantage on the large manufacturer depends on whether the invalidation results in the immediate termination of all other existing licenses or not.

Our work thus shows that patent hold-out concerns are both theoretically cogent and have non-trivial antitrust implications. Whether such concerns merit intervention is an empirical matter. While reviewing that evidence is outside the scope of our work, our own litigation experience suggests that patent hold-out should be taken seriously.

In FTC v Qualcomm Series, truth on the market , , , ,
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FTC v. Qualcomm: A Case of Regulatory Capture?

Jonathan M. Barnett —  18 July 2019

[TOTM: The following is the sixth in a series of posts by TOTM guests and authors on the FTC v. Qualcomm case recently decided by Judge Lucy Koh in the Northern District of California. Other posts in this series are here.

This post is authored by Jonathan M. Barnett, Torrey H. Webb Professor of Law at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law.]

There is little doubt that the decision in May 2019 by the Northern District of California in FTC v. Qualcomm is of historical importance. Unless reversed or modified on appeal, the decision would require that the lead innovator behind 3G and 4G smartphone technology renegotiate hundreds of existing licenses with device producers and offer new licenses to any interested chipmakers.

The court’s sweeping order caps off a global campaign by implementers to re-engineer the property-rights infrastructure of the wireless markets. Those efforts have deployed the instruments of antitrust and patent law to override existing licensing arrangements and thereby reduce the input costs borne by device producers in the downstream market. This has occurred both directly, in arguments made by those firms in antitrust and patent litigation or through the filing of amicus briefs, or indirectly by advocating that regulators bring antitrust actions against IP licensors.

Whether or not FTC v. Qualcomm is correctly decided largely depends on whether or not downstream firms’ interest in minimizing the costs of obtaining technology inputs from upstream R&D specialists aligns with the public interest in preserving dynamically efficient innovation markets. As I discuss below, there are three reasons to believe those interests are not aligned in this case. If so, the court’s order would simply engineer a wealth transfer from firms that have led innovation in wireless markets to producers that have borne few of the costs and risks involved in doing so. Members of the former group each exhibits R&D intensities (R&D expenditures as a percentage of sales) in the high teens to low twenties; the latter, approximately five percent. Of greater concern, the court’s upending of long-established licensing arrangements endangers business models that monetize R&D by licensing technology to a large pool of device producers (see Qualcomm), rather than earning returns through self-contained hardware and software ecosystems (see Apple). There is no apparent antitrust rationale for picking and choosing among these business models in innovation markets.

Reason #1: FRAND is a Two-Sided Deal

To fully appreciate the recent litigations involving the FTC and Apple on the one hand, and Qualcomm on the other hand, it is necessary to return to the origins of modern wireless markets.

Starting in the late 1980s, various firms were engaged in the launch of the GSM wireless network in Western Europe. At that time, each European telecom market typically consisted of a national monopoly carrier and a favored group of local equipment suppliers. The GSM project, which envisioned a trans-national wireless communications market, challenged this model. In particular, the national carrier and equipment monopolies were threatened by the fact that the GSM standard relied in part on patented technology held by an outside innovator—namely, Motorola. As I describe in a forthcoming publication, the “FRAND” (fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory) principles that today govern the licensing of standard-essential patents in wireless markets emerged from a negotiation between, on the one hand, carriers and producers who sought a royalty cap and, on the other hand, a technology innovator that sought to preserve its licensing freedom going forward.

This negotiation history is important. Any informed discussion of the meaning of FRAND must recognize that this principle was adopted as something akin to a “good faith” contractual term designed to promote two objectives:

  1. Protect downstream adopters from holdup tactics by upstream innovators; and
  2. enable upstream innovators to enjoy an appreciable portion of the value generated by sales in the consumer market.

Any interpretation of FRAND that does not meet these conditions will induce upstream firms to reduce R&D investment, limit participation in standard-setting activities, or vertically integrate forward to capture directly a return on R&D dollars.

Reason #2: No Evidence of Actual Harm

In the December 2018 appellate court proceedings in which the Department of Justice unsuccessfully challenged the AT&T/Time-Warner merger, Judge David Sentelle of the D.C. Circuit said to the government’s legal counsel:

If you’re going to rely on an economic model, you have to rely on it with quantification. The bare theorem . . . doesn’t prove anything in a particular case.

The government could not credibly reply to that query in the AT&T case and, if appropriately challenged, could not do so in this case.

Far from being a market that calls out for federal antitrust intervention, the smartphone market offers what appears to be an almost textbook case of dynamic efficiency. For over a decade, implementers, along with sympathetic regulators and commentators, have argued that the market suffers (or, in a variation, will imminently suffer) from inflated prices, reduced output and delayed innovation as a result of “patent hold-up” and “royalty stacking” by opportunistic patent owners. In the course of several decades that have passed since the launch of the GSM network, none of these predictions have yet to materialize. To the contrary. The market has exhibited expanding output, declining prices (adjusted for increased functionality), constant innovation, and regular entry into the production market. Multiple empirical studies (e.g. this, this and this) have found that device producers bear on average an aggregate royalty burden in the single to mid-digits.

This hardly seems like a market in which producers and consumers are being “victimized” by what the Northern District of California calls “unreasonably high” licensing fees (compared to an unspecified, and inherently unspecifiable, dynamically efficient benchmark). Rather, it seems more likely that device producers—many of whom provided the testimony which the court referenced in concluding that royalty rates were “unreasonably high”—would simply prefer to pay an even lower fee to R&D input suppliers (with no assurance that any of the cost-savings would flow to consumers).

Reason #3: The “License as Tax” Fallacy

The rhetorical centerpiece of the FTC’s brief relied on an analogy between the patent license fees earned by Qualcomm in the downstream device market and the tax that everyone pays to the IRS. The court’s opinion wholeheartedly adopted this narrative, determining that Qualcomm imposes a tax (or, as Judge Koh terms it, a “surcharge”) on the smartphone market by demanding a fee from OEMs for use of its patent portfolio whether or not the OEM purchases chipsets from Qualcomm or another firm. The tax analogy is fundamentally incomplete, both in general and in this case in particular.

It is true that much of the economic literature applies monopoly taxation models to assess the deadweight losses attributed to patents. While this analogy facilitates analytical tractability, a “zero-sum” approach to patent licensing overlooks the value-creating “multiplier” effect that licensing generates in real-world markets. Specifically, broad-based downstream licensing by upstream patent owners—something to which SEP owners commit under FRAND principles—ensures that device makers can obtain the necessary technology inputs and, in doing so, facilitates entry by producers that do not have robust R&D capacities. All of that ultimately generates gains for consumers.

This “positive-sum” multiplier effect appears to be at work in the smartphone market. Far from acting as a tax, Qualcomm’s licensing policies appear to have promoted entry into the smartphone market, which has experienced fairly robust turnover in market leadership. While Apple and Samsung may currently dominate the U.S. market, they face intense competition globally from Chinese firms such as Huawei, Xiaomi and Oppo. That competitive threat is real. As of 2007, Nokia and Blackberry were the overwhelming market leaders and appeared to be indomitable. Yet neither can be found in the market today. That intense “gale of competition”, sustained by the fact that any downstream producer can access the required technology inputs upon payment of licensing fees to upstream innovators, challenges the view that Qualcomm’s licensing practices have somehow restrained market growth.

Concluding Thoughts: Antitrust Flashback

When competitive harms are so unclear (and competitive gains so evident), modern antitrust law sensibly prescribes forbearance. A famous “bad case” from antitrust history shows why.

In 1953, the Department of Justice won an antitrust suit against United Shoe Machinery Corporation, which had led innovation in shoe manufacturing equipment and subsequently dominated that market. United Shoe’s purportedly anti-competitive practices included a lease-only policy that incorporated training and repair services at no incremental charge. The court found this to be a coercive tie that preserved United Shoe’s dominant position, despite the absence of any evidence of competitive harm. Scholars have subsequently shown (e.g. this and  this; see also this) that the court did not adequately consider (at least) two efficiency explanations: (1) lease-only policies were widespread in the market because this facilitated access by smaller capital-constrained manufacturers, and (2) tying support services to equipment enabled United Shoe to avoid free-riding on its training services by other equipment suppliers. In retrospect, courts relied on a mere possibility theorem ultimately to order the break-up of a technological pioneer, with potentially adverse consequences for manufacturers that relied on its R&D efforts.

The court’s decision in FTC v. Qualcomm is a flashback to cases like United Shoe in which courts found liability and imposed dramatic remedies with little economic inquiry into competitive harm. It has become fashionable to assert that current antitrust law is too cautious in finding liability. Yet there is a sound reason why, outside price-fixing, courts generally insist that theories of antitrust liability include compelling evidence of competitive harm. Antitrust remedies are strong medicine and should be administered with caution. If courts and regulators do not zealously scrutinize the factual support for antitrust claims, then they are vulnerable to capture by private entities whose business objectives may depart from the public interest in competitive markets. While no antitrust fact-pattern is free from doubt, over two decades of market performance strongly favor the view that long-standing licensing arrangements in the smartphone market have resulted in substantial net welfare gains for consumers. If so, the prudent course of action is simply to leave the market alone.

In FTC v Qualcomm Series, truth on the market , ,
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Use and abuse of bargaining models in antitrust: AT&T/Time-Warner and FTC v. Qualcomm

Ginsburg & Wright —  14 March 2019

[TOTM: The following is the third in a series of posts by TOTM guests and authors on the FTC v. Qualcomm case, currently awaiting decision by Judge Lucy Koh in the Northern District of California. The entire series of posts is available here.

This post is authored by Douglas H. Ginsburg, Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University; Senior Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit; and former Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice; and Joshua D. Wright, University Professor, Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University; Executive Director, Global Antitrust Institute; former U.S. Federal Trade Commissioner from 2013-15; and one of the founding bloggers at Truth on the Market.]

[Ginsburg & Wright: Professor Wright is recused from participation in the FTC litigation against Qualcomm, but has provided counseling advice to Qualcomm concerning other regulatory and competition matters. The views expressed here are our own and neither author received financial support.]

The Department of Justice Antitrust Division (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have spent a significant amount of time in federal court litigating major cases premised upon an anticompetitive foreclosure theory of harm. Bargaining models, a tool used commonly in foreclosure cases, have been essential to the government’s theory of harm in these cases. In vertical merger or conduct cases, the core theory of harm is usually a variant of the claim that the transaction (or conduct) strengthens the firm’s incentives to engage in anticompetitive strategies that depend on negotiations with input suppliers. Bargaining models are a key element of the agency’s attempt to establish those claims and to predict whether and how firm incentives will affect negotiations with input suppliers, and, ultimately, the impact on equilibrium prices and output. Application of bargaining models played a key role in evaluating the anticompetitive foreclosure theories in the DOJ’s litigation to block the proposed merger of AT&T and Time Warner Cable. A similar model is at the center of the FTC’s antitrust claims against Qualcomm and its patent licensing business model.

Modern antitrust analysis does not condemn business practices as anticompetitive without solid economic evidence of an actual or likely harm to competition. This cautious approach was developed in the courts for two reasons. The first is that the difficulty of distinguishing between procompetitive and anticompetitive explanations for the same conduct suggests there is a high risk of error. The second is that those errors are more likely to be false positives than false negatives because empirical evidence and judicial learning have established that unilateral conduct is usually either procompetitive or competitively neutral. In other words, while the risk of anticompetitive foreclosure is real, courts have sensibly responded by requiring plaintiffs to substantiate their claims with more than just theory or scant evidence that rivals have been harmed.

An economic model can help establish the likelihood and/or magnitude of competitive harm when the model carefully captures the key institutional features of the competition it attempts to explain. Naturally, this tends to mean that the economic theories and models proffered by dueling economic experts to predict competitive effects take center stage in antitrust disputes. The persuasiveness of an economic model turns on the robustness of its assumptions about the underlying market. Model predictions that are inconsistent with actual market evidence give one serious pause before accepting the results as reliable.

For example, many industries are characterized by bargaining between providers and distributors. The Nash bargaining framework can be used to predict the outcomes of bilateral negotiations based upon each party’s bargaining leverage. The model assumes that both parties are better off if an agreement is reached, but that as the utility of one party’s outside option increases relative to the bargain, it will capture an increasing share of the surplus. Courts have had to reconcile these seemingly complicated economic models with prior case law and, in some cases, with direct evidence that is apparently inconsistent with the results of the model.

Indeed, Professor Carl Shapiro recently used bargaining models to analyze harm to competition in two prominent cases alleging anticompetitive foreclosure—one initiated by the DOJ and one by the FTC—in which he served as the government’s expert economist. In United States v. AT&T Inc., Dr. Shapiro testified that the proposed transaction between AT&T and Time Warner would give the vertically integrated company leverage to extract higher prices for content from AT&T’s rival, Dish Network. Soon after, Dr. Shapiro presented a similar bargaining model in FTC v. Qualcomm Inc. He testified that Qualcomm leveraged its monopoly power over chipsets to extract higher royalty rates from smartphone OEMs, such as Apple, wishing to license its standard essential patents (SEPs). In each case, Dr. Shapiro’s models were criticized heavily by the defendants’ expert economists for ignoring market realities that play an important role in determining whether the challenged conduct was likely to harm competition.

Judge Leon’s opinion in AT&T/Time Warner—recently upheld on appeal—concluded that Dr. Shapiro’s application of the bargaining model was significantly flawed, based upon unreliable inputs, and undermined by evidence about actual market performance presented by defendant’s expert, Dr. Dennis Carlton. Dr. Shapiro’s theory of harm posited that the combined company would increase its bargaining leverage and extract greater affiliate fees for Turner content from AT&T’s distributor rivals. The increase in bargaining leverage was made possible by the threat of a post-merger blackout of Turner content for AT&T’s rivals. This theory rested on the assumption that the combined firm would have reduced financial exposure from a long-term blackout of Turner content and would therefore have more leverage to threaten a blackout in content negotiations. The purpose of his bargaining model was to quantify how much AT&T could extract from competitors subjected to a long-term blackout of Turner content.

Judge Leon highlighted a number of reasons for rejecting the DOJ’s argument. First, Dr. Shapiro’s model failed to account for existing long-term affiliate contracts, post-litigation offers of arbitration agreements, and the increasing competitiveness of the video programming and distribution industry. Second, Dr. Carlton had demonstrated persuasively that previous vertical integration in the video programming and distribution industry did not have a significant effect on content prices. Finally, Dr. Shapiro’s model primarily relied upon three inputs: (1) the total number of subscribers the unaffiliated distributor would lose in the event of a long-term blackout of Turner content, (2) the percentage of the distributor’s lost subscribers who would switch to AT&T as a result of the blackout, and (3) the profit margin AT&T would derive from the subscribers it gained from the blackout. Many of Dr. Shapiro’s inputs necessarily relied on critical assumptions and/or third-party sources. Judge Leon considered and discredited each input in turn. 

The parties in Qualcomm are, as of the time of this posting, still awaiting a ruling. Dr. Shapiro’s model in that case attempts to predict the effect of Qualcomm’s alleged “no license, no chips” policy. He compared the gains from trade OEMs receive when they purchase a chip from Qualcomm and pay Qualcomm a FRAND royalty to license its SEPs with the gains from trade OEMs receive when they purchase a chip from a rival manufacturer and pay a “royalty surcharge” to Qualcomm to license its SEPs. In other words, the FTC’s theory of harm is based upon the premise that Qualcomm is charging a supra-FRAND rate for its SEPs (the“royalty surcharge”) that squeezes the margins of OEMs. That margin squeeze, the FTC alleges, prevents rival chipset suppliers from obtaining a sufficient return when negotiating with OEMs. The FTC predicts the end result is a reduction in competition and an increase in the price of devices to consumers.

Qualcomm, like Judge Leon in AT&T, questioned the robustness of Dr. Shapiro’s model and its predictions in light of conflicting market realities. For example, Dr. Shapiro, argued that the

leverage that Qualcomm brought to bear on the chips shifted the licensing negotiations substantially in Qualcomm’s favor and led to a significantly higher royalty than Qualcomm would otherwise have been able to achieve.

Yet, on cross-examination, Dr. Shapiro declined to move from theory to empirics when asked if he had quantified the effects of Qualcomm’s practice on any other chip makers. Instead, Dr. Shapiro responded that he had not, but he had “reason to believe that the royalty surcharge was substantial” and had “inevitable consequences.” Under Dr. Shapiro’s theory, one would predict that royalty rates were higher after Qualcomm obtained market power.

As with Dr. Carlton’s testimony inviting Judge Leon to square the DOJ’s theory with conflicting historical facts in the industry, Qualcomm’s economic expert, Dr. Aviv Nevo, provided an analysis of Qualcomm’s royalty agreements from 1990-2017, confirming that there was no economic and meaningful difference between the royalty rates during the time frame when Qualcomm was alleged to have market power and the royalty rates outside of that time frame. He also presented evidence that ex ante royalty rates did not increase upon implementation of the CDMA standard or the LTE standard. Moreover, Dr.Nevo testified that the industry itself was characterized by declining prices and increasing output and quality.

Dr. Shapiro’s model in Qualcomm appears to suffer from many of the same flaws that ultimately discredited his model in AT&T/Time Warner: It is based upon assumptions that are contrary to real-world evidence and it does not robustly or persuasively identify anticompetitive effects. Some observers, including our Scalia Law School colleague and former FTC Chairman, Tim Muris, would apparently find it sufficient merely to allege a theoretical “ability to manipulate the marketplace.” But antitrust cases require actual evidence of harm. We think Professor Muris instead captured the appropriate standard in his important article rejecting attempts by the FTC to shortcut its requirement of proof in monopolization cases:

This article does reject, however, the FTC’s attempt to make it easier for the government to prevail in Section 2 litigation. Although the case law is hardly a model of clarity, one point that is settled is that injury to competitors by itself is not a sufficient basis to assume injury to competition …. Inferences of competitive injury are, of course, the heart of per se condemnation under the rule of reason. Although long a staple of Section 1, such truncation has never been a part of Section 2. In an economy as dynamic as ours, now is hardly the time to short-circuit Section 2 cases. The long, and often sorry, history of monopolization in the courts reveals far too many mistakes even without truncation.

Timothy J. Muris, The FTC and the Law of Monopolization, 67 Antitrust L. J. 693 (2000)

We agree. Proof of actual anticompetitive effects rather than speculation derived from models that are not robust to market realities are an important safeguard to ensure that Section 2 protects competition and not merely individual competitors.

The future of bargaining models in antitrust remains to be seen. Judge Leon certainly did not question the proposition that they could play an important role in other cases. Judge Leon closely dissected the testimony and models presented by both experts in AT&T/Time Warner. His opinion serves as an important reminder. As complex economic evidence like bargaining models become more common in antitrust litigation, judges must carefully engage with the experts on both sides to determine whether there is direct evidence on the likely competitive effects of the challenged conduct. Where “real-world evidence,” as Judge Leon called it, contradicts the predictions of a bargaining model, judges should reject the model rather than the reality. Bargaining models have many potentially important antitrust applications including horizontal mergers involving a bargaining component – such as hospital mergers, vertical mergers, and licensing disputes. The analysis of those models by the Ninth and D.C. Circuits will have important implications for how they will be deployed by the agencies and parties moving forward.

In antitrust, antitrust division, economics, exclusionary conduct, federal trade commission, ftc, FTC v Qualcomm Series, law and economics, mergers & acquisitions, Patents, technology, television, wireless , , , ,
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Calling into Question the FTC’s Theory of the Case in FTC v. Qualcomm

Luke Froeb —  5 March 2019

[TOTM: The following is the second in a series of posts by TOTM guests and authors on the FTC v. Qualcomm case, currently awaiting decision by Judge Lucy Koh in the Northern District of California. The entire series of posts is available here.

This post is authored by Luke Froeb (William C. Oehmig Chair in Free Enterprise and Entrepreneurship at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University; former chief economist at the Antitrust Division of the US Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission), Michael Doane (Competition Economics, LLC) & Mikhael Shor (Associate Professor of Economics, University of Connecticut).]

[Froeb, Doane & Shor: This post does not attempt to answer the question of what the court should decide in FTC v. Qualcomm because we do not have access to the information that would allow us to make such a determination. Rather, we focus on economic issues confronting the court by drawing heavily from our writings in this area: Gregory Werden & Luke Froeb, Why Patent Hold-Up Does Not Violate Antitrust Law; Luke Froeb & Mikhael Shor, Innovators, Implementors and Two-sided Hold-up; Bernard Ganglmair, Luke Froeb & Gregory Werden, Patent Hold Up and Antitrust: How a Well-Intentioned Rule Could Retard Innovation.]

Not everything is “hold-up”

It is not uncommon—in fact it is expected—that parties to a negotiation would have different opinions about the reasonableness of any deal. Every buyer asks for a price as low as possible, and sellers naturally request prices at which buyers (feign to) balk. A recent movement among some lawyers and economists has been to label such disagreements in the context of standard-essential patents not as a natural part of bargaining, but as dispositive proof of “hold-up,” or the innovator’s purported abuse of newly gained market power to extort implementers. We have four primary issues with this hold-up fad.

First, such claims of “hold-up” are trotted out whenever an innovator’s royalty request offends the commentator’s sensibilities, and usually with reference to a theoretical hold-up possibility rather than any matter-specific evidence that hold-up is actually present. Second, as we have argued elsewhere, such arguments usually ignore the fact that implementers of innovations often possess significant countervailing power to “hold-out” as well. This is especially true as implementers have successfully pushed to curtail injunctive relief in standard-essential patent cases. Third, as Greg Werden and Froeb have recently argued, it is not clear why patent holdup—even where it might exist—need implicate antitrust law rather than be adequately handled as a contractual dispute. Lastly, it is certainly not the case that every disagreement over the value of an innovation is an exercise in hold-up, as even economists and lawyers have not reached anything resembling a consensus on the correct interpretation of a “fair” royalty.

At the heart of this case (and many recent cases) is (1) an indictment of Qualcomm’s desire to charge royalties to the maker of consumer devices based on the value of its technology and (2) a lack (to the best of our knowledge from public documents) of well vetted theoretical models that can provide the underpinning for the theory of the case. We discuss these in turn.

The smallest component “principle”

In arguing that “Qualcomm’s royalties are disproportionately high relative to the value contributed by its patented inventions,” (Complaint, ¶ 77) a key issue is whether Qualcomm can calculate royalties as a percentage of the price of a device, rather than a small percentage of the price of a chip. (Complaint, ¶¶ 61-76).

So what is wrong with basing a royalty on the price of the final product? A fixed portion of the price is not a perfect proxy for the value of embedded intellectual property, but it is a reasonable first approximation, much like retailers use fixed markups for products rather than optimizing the price of each SKU if the cost of individual determinations negate any benefits to doing so. The FTC’s main issue appears to be that the price of a smartphone reflects “many features in addition to the cellular connectivity and associated voice and text capabilities provided by early feature phones.” (Complaint, ¶ 26). This completely misses the point. What would the value of an iPhone be if it contained all of those “many features” but without the phone’s communication abilities? We have some idea, as Apple has for years marketed its iPod Touch for a quarter of the price of its iPhone line. Yet, “[f]or most users, the choice between an iPhone 5s and an iPod touch will be a no-brainer: Being always connected is one of the key reasons anyone owns a smartphone.”

What the FTC and proponents of the smallest component principle miss is that some of the value of all components of a smartphone are derived directly from the phone’s communication ability. Smartphones didn’t initially replace small portable cameras because they were better at photography (in fact, smartphone cameras were and often continue to be much worse than devoted cameras). The value of a smartphone camera is that it combines picture taking with immediate sharing over text or through social media. Thus, unlike the FTC’s claim that most of the value of a smartphone comes from features that are not communication, many features on a smartphone derive much of their value from the communication powers of the phone.

In the alternative, what the FTC wants is for the royalty not to reflect the value of the intellectual property but instead to be a small portion of the cost of some chipset—akin to an author of a paperback negotiating royalties based on the cost of plain white paper. As a matter of economics, a single chipset royalty cannot allow an innovator to capture the value of its innovation. This, in turn, implies that innovators underinvest in future technologies. As we have previously written:

For example, imagine that the same component (incorporating the same essential patent) is used to help stabilize flight of both commercial airplanes and toy airplanes. Clearly, these industries are likely to have different values for the patent. By negotiating over a single royalty rate based on the component price, the innovator would either fail to realize the added value of its patent to commercial airlines, or (in the case that the component is targeted primary to the commercial airlines) would not realize the incremental market potential from the patent’s use in toy airplanes. In either case, the innovator will not be negotiating over the entirety of the value it creates, leading to too little innovation.

The role of economics

Modern antitrust practice is to use economic models to explain how one gets from the evidence presented in a case to an anticompetitive conclusion. As Froeb, et al. have discussed, by laying out a mapping from the evidence to the effects, the legal argument is made clear, and gains credibility because it becomes falsifiable. The FTC complaint hypothesizes that “Qualcomm has excluded competitors and harmed competition through a set of interrelated policies and practices.” (Complaint, ¶ 3). Although Qualcomm explains how each of these policies and practices, by themselves, have clear business justifications, the FTC claims that combining them leads to an anticompetitive outcome.

Without providing a formal mapping from the evidence to an effect, it becomes much more difficult for a court to determine whether the theory of harm is correct or how to weigh the evidence that feeds the conclusion. Without a model telling it “what matters, why it matters, and how much it matters,” it is much more difficult for a tribunal to evaluate the “interrelated policies and practices.” In previous work, we have modeled the bilateral bargaining between patentees and licensees and have shown that when bilateral patent contracts are subject to review by an antitrust court, bargaining in the shadow of such a court can reduce the incentive to invest and thereby reduce welfare.

Concluding policy thoughts

What the FTC makes sound nefarious seems like a simple policy: requiring companies to seek licenses to Qualcomm’s intellectual property independent of any hardware that those companies purchase, and basing the royalty of that intellectual property on (an admittedly crude measure of) the value the IP contributes to that product. High prices alone do not constitute harm to competition. The FTC must clearly explain why their complaint is not simply about the “fairness” of the outcome or its desire that Qualcomm employ different bargaining paradigms, but rather how Qualcomm’s behavior harms the process of competition.

In the late 1950s, Nobel Laureate Robert Solow attributed about seven-eighths of the growth in U.S. GDP to technical progress. As Solow later commented: “Adding a couple of tenths of a percentage point to the growth rate is an achievement that eventually dwarfs in welfare significance any of the standard goals of economic policy.” While he did not have antitrust in mind, the import of his comment is clear: whatever static gains antitrust litigation may achieve, they are likely dwarfed by the dynamic gains represented by innovation.

Patent law is designed to maintain a careful balance between the costs of short-term static losses and the benefits of long-term gains that result from new technology. The FTC should present a sound theoretical or empirical basis for believing that the proposed relief sufficiently rewards inventors and allows them to capture a reasonable share of the whole value their innovations bring to consumers, lest such antitrust intervention deter investments in innovation.

In antitrust, economics, exclusionary conduct, federal trade commission, FTC v Qualcomm Series, intellectual property, law and economics, monopolization, patent, technology, vertical restraints , , , , , , , ,
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More Evidence Against the Common Ownership Problem

Michael Sykuta —  14 September 2018

I posted this originally on my own blog, but decided to cross-post here since Thom and I have been blogging on this topic.

“The U.S. stock market is having another solid year. You wouldn’t know it by looking at the shares of companies that manage money.”

That’s the lead from Charles Stein on Bloomberg’s Markets’ page today. Stein goes on to offer three possible explanations: 1) a weary bull market, 2) a move toward more active stock-picking by individual investors, and 3) increasing pressure on fees.

So what has any of that to do with the common ownership issue? A few things.

First, it shows that large institutional investors must not be very good at harvesting the benefits of the non-competitive behavior they encourage among the firms the invest in–if you believe they actually do that in the first place. In other words, if you believe common ownership is a problem because CEOs are enriching institutional investors by softening competition, you must admit they’re doing a pretty lousy job of capturing that value.

Second, and more importantly–as well as more relevant–the pressure on fees has led money managers to emphasis low-cost passive index funds. Indeed, among the firms doing well according to the article is BlackRock, “whose iShares exchange-traded fund business tracks indexes, won $20 billion.” In an aggressive move, Fidelity has introduced a total of four zero-fee index funds as a way to draw fee-conscious investors. These index tracking funds are exactly the type of inter-industry diversified funds that negate any incentive for competition softening in any one industry.

Finally, this also illustrates the cost to the investing public of the limits on common ownership proposed by the likes of Einer Elhague, Eric Posner, and Glen Weyl. Were these types of proposals in place, investment managers could not offer diversified index funds that include more than one firm’s stock from any industry with even a moderate level of market concentration. Given competitive forces are pushing investment companies to increase the offerings of such low-cost index funds, any regulatory proposal that precludes those possibilities is sure to harm the investing public.

Just one more piece of real evidence that common ownership is not only not a problem, but that the proposed “fixes” are.

In common ownerhsip, competition advocacy, corporate governance, ftc, mutual funds, truth on the market , , ,
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What To Make of MHHI? A policy problem

Michael Sykuta —  27 August 2018

At the heart of the common ownership issue in the current antitrust debate is an empirical measure, the Modified Herfindahl-Hirschmann Index, researchers have used to correlate patterns of common ownership with measures of firm behavior and performance. In an accompanying post, Thom Lambert provides a great summary of just what the MHHI, and more specifically the MHHIΔ, is and how it can be calculated. I’m going to free-ride off Thom’s effort, so if you’re not very familiar with the measure, I suggest you start here and here.

There are multiple problems with the common ownership story and with the empirical evidence proponents of stricter antitrust enforcement point to in order to justify their calls to action. Thom and I address a number of those problems in our recent paper on “The Case for Doing Nothing About Institutional Investors’ Common Ownership of Small Stakes in Competing Firms.” However, one problem we don’t take on in that paper is the nature of the MHHIΔ itself. More specifically, what is one to make of it and how should it be interpreted, especially from a policy perspective?

The Policy Benchmark

The benchmark for discussion is the original Herfindahl-Hirschmann Index (HHI), which has been part of antitrust for decades. The HHI is calculated by summing the squared value of each firm’s market share. Depending on whether you use percents or percentages, the value of the sum may be multiplied by 10,000. For instance, for two firms that split the market evenly, the HHI could be calculated either as:

HHI = 502 + 502 = 5.000, or
HHI = (.502 + .502)*10,000 = 5,000

It’s a pretty simple exercise to see that one of the useful properties of HHI is that it is naturally bounded between 0 and 10,000. In the case of a pure monopoly that commands the entire market, the value of HHI is 10,000 (1002). As the number of firms increases and market shares approach very small fractions, the value of HHI asymptotically approaches 0. For a market with 10 firms firms that evenly share the market, for instance, HHI is 1,000; for 100 identical firms, HHI is 100; for 1,000 identical firms, HHI is 1. As a result, we know that when HHI is close to 10,000, the industry is highly concentrated in one firm; and when the HHI is close to zero, there is no meaningful concentration at all. Indeed, the Department of Justice’s Horizontal Merger Guidelines make use of this property of the HHI:

Based on their experience, the Agencies generally classify markets into three types:

  • Unconcentrated Markets: HHI below 1500
  • Moderately Concentrated Markets: HHI between 1500 and 2500
  • Highly Concentrated Markets: HHI above 2500

The Agencies employ the following general standards for the relevant markets they have defined:

  • Small Change in Concentration: Mergers involving an increase in the HHI of less than 100 points are unlikely to have adverse competitive effects and ordinarily require no further analysis.
  • Unconcentrated Markets: Mergers resulting in unconcentrated markets are unlikely to have adverse competitive effects and ordinarily require no further analysis.
  • Moderately Concentrated Markets: Mergers resulting in moderately concentrated markets that involve an increase in the HHI of more than 100 points potentially raise significant competitive concerns and often warrant scrutiny.
  • Highly Concentrated Markets: Mergers resulting in highly concentrated markets that involve an increase in the HHI of between 100 points and 200 points potentially raise significant competitive concerns and often warrant scrutiny. Mergers resulting in highly concentrated markets that involve an increase in the HHI of more than 200 points will be presumed to be likely to enhance market power. The presumption may be rebutted by persuasive evidence showing that the merger is unlikely to enhance market power.

Just by way of reference, an HHI of 2500 could reflect four firms sharing the market equally (i.e., 25% each), or it could be one firm with roughly 49% of the market and 51 identical small firms sharing the rest evenly.

Injecting MHHIΔ Into the Mix

MHHI is intended to account for both the product market concentration among firms captured by the HHI, and the common ownership concentration across firms in the market measured by the MHHIΔ. In short, MHHI = HHI + MHHIΔ.

As Thom explains in great detail, MHHIΔ attempts to measure the combined effects of the relative influence of shareholders that own positions across competing firms on management’s strategic decision-making and the combined market shares of the commonly-owned firms. MHHIΔ is the measure used in the various empirical studies allegedly demonstrating a causal relationship between common ownership (higher MHHIΔs) and the supposed anti-competitive behavior of choice.

Some common ownership critics, such as Einer Elhague, have taken those results and suggested modifying antitrust rules to incorporate the MHHIΔ in the HHI guidelines above. For instance, Elhague writes (p 1303):

Accordingly, the federal agencies can and should challenge any stock acquisitions that have produced, or are likely to produce, anti-competitive horizontal shareholdings. Given their own guidelines and the empirical results summarized in Part I, they should investigate any horizontal stock acquisitions that have created, or would create, a ΔMHHI of over 200 in a market with an MHHI over 2500, in order to determine whether those horizontal stock acquisitions raised prices or are likely to do so.

Elhague, like many others, couch their discussion of MHHI and MHHIΔ in the context of HHI values as though the additive nature of MHHI means such a context make sense. And if the examples are carefully chosen, the numbers even seem to make sense. For instance, even in our paper (page 30), we give a few examples to illustrate some of the endogeneity problems with MHHIΔ:

For example, suppose again that five institutional investors hold equal stakes (say, 3%) of each airline servicing a market and that the airlines have no other significant shareholders.  If there are two airlines servicing the market and their market shares are equivalent, HHI will be 5000, MHHI∆ will be 5000, and MHHI (HHI + MHHI∆) will be 10000.  If a third airline enters and grows so that the three airlines have equal market shares, HHI will drop to 3333, MHHI∆ will rise to 6667, and MHHI will remain constant at 10000.  If a fourth airline enters and the airlines split the market evenly, HHI will fall to 2500, MHHI∆ will rise further to 7500, and MHHI will again total 10000.

But do MHHI and MHHI∆ really fit so neatly into the HHI framework? Sadly–and worringly–no, not at all.

The Policy Problem

There seems to be a significant problem with simply imposing MHHIΔ into the HHI framework. Unlike HHI, from which we can infer something about the market based on the nominal value of the measure, MHHIΔ has no established intuitive or theoretical grounding. In fact, MHHIΔ has no intuitively meaningful mathematical boundaries from which to draw inferences about “how big is big?”, a fundamental problem for antitrust policy.

This is especially true within the range of cross-shareholding values we’re talking about in the common ownership debate. To illustrate just how big a problem this is, consider a constrained optimization of MHHI based on parameters that are not at all unreasonable relative to hypothetical examples cited in the literature:

  • Four competing firms in the market, each of which is constrained to having at least 5% market share, and their collective sum must equal 1 (or 100%).
  • Five institutional investors each of which can own no more than 5% of the outstanding shares of any individual airline, with no restrictions across airlines.
  • The remaining outstanding shares are assumed to be diffusely owned (i.e., no other large shareholder in any firm).

With only these modest restrictions on market share and common ownership, what’s the maximum potential value of MHHI? A mere 26,864,516,491, with an MHHI∆ of 26,864,513,774 and HHI of 2,717.

That’s right, over 26.8 billion. To reach such an astronomical number, what are the parameter values? The four firms split the market with 33, 31.7, 18.3, and 17% shares, respectively. Investor 1 owns 2.6% of the largest firm (by market share) while Investors 2-5 each own between 4.5 and 5% of the largest firm. Investors 1 and 2 own 5% of the smallest firm, while Investors 3 and 4 own 3.9% and Investor 5 owns a minuscule (0.0006%) share. Investor 2 is the only investor with any holdings (a tiny 0.0000004% each) in the two middling firms. These are not unreasonable numbers by any means, but the MHHI∆ surely is–especially from a policy perspective.

So if MHHI∆ can range from near zero to as much as 28.6 billion within reasonable ranges of market share and shareholdings, what should we make of Elhague’s proposal that mergers be scrutinized for increasing MHHI∆ by 200 points if the MHHI is 2,500 or more? We argue that such an arbitrary policy model is not only unfounded empirically, but is completely void of substantive reason or relevance.

The DOJ’s Horizontal Merger Guidelines above indicate that antitrust agencies adopted the HHI benchmarks for review “[b]ased on their experience”.  In the 1982 and 1984 Guidelines, the agencies adopted HHI standards 1,000 and 1,800, compared to the current 1,500 and 2,500 levels, in determining whether the industry is concentrated and a merger deserves additional scrutiny. These changes reflect decades of case reviews relating market structure to likely competitive behavior and consumer harm.

We simply do not know enough yet empirically about the relation between MHHI∆ and benchmarks of competitive behavior and consumer welfare to make any intelligent policies based on that metric–even if the underlying argument had any substantive theoretical basis, which we doubt. This is just one more reason we believe the best response to the common ownership problem is to do nothing, at least until we have a theoretically, and empirically, sound basis on which to make intelligent and informed policy decisions and frameworks.

In antitrust, common ownerhsip, common ownership, doj, federal trade commission, mergers & acquisitions , , , , ,
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FCC-FTC Plans for Welfare-Enhancing Cooperation on Online Consumer Protection

Alden Abbott —  12 December 2017

As the Federal Communications (FCC) prepares to revoke its economically harmful “net neutrality” order and replace it with a free market-oriented “Restoring Internet Freedom Order,” the FCC and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) commendably have announced a joint policy for cooperation on online consumer protection.  According to a December 11 FTC press release:

The Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced their intent to enter into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) under which the two agencies would coordinate online consumer protection efforts following the adoption of the Restoring Internet Freedom Order.

“The Memorandum of Understanding will be a critical benefit for online consumers because it outlines the robust process by which the FCC and FTC will safeguard the public interest,” said FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. “Instead of saddling the Internet with heavy-handed regulations, we will work together to take targeted action against bad actors. This approach protected a free and open Internet for many years prior to the FCC’s 2015 Title II Order and it will once again following the adoption of the Restoring Internet Freedom Order.”

“The FTC is committed to ensuring that Internet service providers live up to the promises they make to consumers,” said Acting FTC Chairman Maureen K. Ohlhausen. “The MOU we are developing with the FCC, in addition to the decades of FTC law enforcement experience in this area, will help us carry out this important work.”

The draft MOU, which is being released today, outlines a number of ways in which the FCC and FTC will work together to protect consumers, including:

The FCC will review informal complaints concerning the compliance of Internet service providers (ISPs) with the disclosure obligations set forth in the new transparency rule. Those obligations include publicly providing information concerning an ISP’s practices with respect to blocking, throttling, paid prioritization, and congestion management. Should an ISP fail to make the required disclosures—either in whole or in part—the FCC will take enforcement action.

The FTC will investigate and take enforcement action as appropriate against ISPs concerning the accuracy of those disclosures, as well as other deceptive or unfair acts or practices involving their broadband services.

The FCC and the FTC will broadly share legal and technical expertise, including the secure sharing of informal complaints regarding the subject matter of the Restoring Internet Freedom Order. The two agencies also will collaborate on consumer and industry outreach and education.

The FCC’s proposed Restoring Internet Freedom Order, which the agency is expected to vote on at its December 14 meeting, would reverse a 2015 agency decision to reclassify broadband Internet access service as a Title II common carrier service. This previous decision stripped the FTC of its authority to protect consumers and promote competition with respect to Internet service providers because the FTC does not have jurisdiction over common carrier activities.

The FCC’s Restoring Internet Freedom Order would return jurisdiction to the FTC to police the conduct of ISPs, including with respect to their privacy practices. Once adopted, the order will also require broadband Internet access service providers to disclose their network management practices, performance, and commercial terms of service. As the nation’s top consumer protection agency, the FTC will be responsible for holding these providers to the promises they make to consumers.

Particularly noteworthy is the suggestion that the FCC and FTC will work to curb regulatory duplication and competitive empire building – a boon to Internet-related businesses that would be harmed by regulatory excess and uncertainty.  Stay tuned for future developments.

In advertising, consumer protection, data security, federal communications commission, federal trade commission, privacy, truth on the market , , , ,
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An ambitious AG, a disgruntled competitor, and the contrived antitrust case against Google in Missouri

Geoffrey Manne —  30 November 2017

The populists are on the march, and as the 2018 campaign season gets rolling we’re witnessing more examples of political opportunism bolstered by economic illiteracy aimed at increasingly unpopular big tech firms.

The latest example comes in the form of a new investigation of Google opened by Missouri’s Attorney General, Josh Hawley. Mr. Hawley — a Republican who, not coincidentally, is running for Senate in 2018 — alleges various consumer protection violations and unfair competition practices.

But while Hawley’s investigation may jump start his campaign and help a few vocal Google rivals intent on mobilizing the machinery of the state against the company, it is unlikely to enhance consumer welfare — in Missouri or anywhere else.  

According to the press release issued by the AG’s office:

[T]he investigation will seek to determine if Google has violated the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act—Missouri’s principal consumer-protection statute—and Missouri’s antitrust laws.  

The business practices in question are Google’s collection, use, and disclosure of information about Google users and their online activities; Google’s alleged misappropriation of online content from the websites of its competitors; and Google’s alleged manipulation of search results to preference websites owned by Google and to demote websites that compete with Google.

Mr. Hawley’s justification for his investigation is a flourish of populist rhetoric:

We should not just accept the word of these corporate giants that they have our best interests at heart. We need to make sure that they are actually following the law, we need to make sure that consumers are protected, and we need to hold them accountable.

But Hawley’s “strong” concern is based on tired retreads of the same faulty arguments that Google’s competitors (Yelp chief among them), have been plying for the better part of a decade. In fact, all of his apparent grievances against Google were exhaustively scrutinized by the FTC and ultimately rejected or settled in separate federal investigations in 2012 and 2013.

The antitrust issues

To begin with, AG Hawley references the EU antitrust investigation as evidence that

this is not the first-time Google’s business practices have come into question. In June, the European Union issued Google a record $2.7 billion antitrust fine.

True enough — and yet, misleadingly incomplete. Missing from Hawley’s recitation of Google’s antitrust rap sheet are the following investigations, which were closed without any finding of liability related to Google Search, Android, Google’s advertising practices, etc.:

  • United States FTC, 2013. The FTC found no basis to pursue a case after a two-year investigation: “Challenging Google’s product design decisions in this case would require the Commission — or a court — to second-guess a firm’s product design decisions where plausible procompetitive justifications have been offered, and where those justifications are supported by ample evidence.” The investigation did result in a consent order regarding patent licensing unrelated in any way to search and a voluntary commitment by Google not to engage in certain search-advertising-related conduct.
  • South Korea FTC, 2013. The KFTC cleared Google after a two-year investigation. It opened a new investigation in 2016, but, as I have discussed, “[i]f anything, the economic conditions supporting [the KFTC’s 2013] conclusion have only gotten stronger since.”
  • Canada Competition Bureau, 2016. The CCB closed a three-year long investigation into Google’s search practices without taking any action.

Similar investigations have been closed without findings of liability (or simply lie fallow) in a handful of other countries (e.g., Taiwan and Brazil) and even several states (e.g., Ohio and Texas). In fact, of all the jurisdictions that have investigated Google, only the EU and Russia have actually assessed liability.

As Beth Wilkinson, outside counsel to the FTC during the Google antitrust investigation, noted upon closing the case:

Undoubtedly, Google took aggressive actions to gain advantage over rival search providers. However, the FTC’s mission is to protect competition, and not individual competitors. The evidence did not demonstrate that Google’s actions in this area stifled competition in violation of U.S. law.

The CCB was similarly unequivocal in its dismissal of the very same antitrust claims Missouri’s AG seems intent on pursuing against Google:

The Bureau sought evidence of the harm allegedly caused to market participants in Canada as a result of any alleged preferential treatment of Google’s services. The Bureau did not find adequate evidence to support the conclusion that this conduct has had an exclusionary effect on rivals, or that it has resulted in a substantial lessening or prevention of competition in a market.

Unfortunately, rather than follow the lead of these agencies, Missouri’s investigation appears to have more in common with Russia’s effort to prop up a favored competitor (Yandex) at the expense of consumer welfare.

The Yelp Claim

Take Mr. Hawley’s focus on “Google’s alleged misappropriation of online content from the websites of its competitors,” for example, which cleaves closely to what should become known henceforth as “The Yelp Claim.”

While the sordid history of Yelp’s regulatory crusade against Google is too long to canvas in its entirety here, the primary elements are these:

Once upon a time (in 2005), Google licensed Yelp’s content for inclusion in its local search results. In 2007 Yelp ended the deal. By 2010, and without a license from Yelp (asserting fair use), Google displayed small snippets of Yelp’s reviews that, if clicked on, led to Yelp’s site. Even though Yelp received more user traffic from those links as a result, Yelp complained, and Google removed Yelp snippets from its local results.

In its 2013 agreement with the FTC, Google guaranteed that Yelp could opt-out of having even snippets displayed in local search results by committing Google to:

make available a web-based notice form that provides website owners with the option to opt out from display on Google’s Covered Webpages of content from their website that has been crawled by Google. When a website owner exercises this option, Google will cease displaying crawled content from the domain name designated by the website owner….

The commitments also ensured that websites (like Yelp) that opt out would nevertheless remain in Google’s general index.

Ironically, Yelp now claims in a recent study that Google should show not only snippets of Yelp reviews, but even more of Yelp’s content. (For those interested, my colleagues and I have a paper explaining why the study’s claims are spurious).

The key bit here, of course, is that Google stopped pulling content from Yelp’s pages to use in its local search results, and that it implemented a simple mechanism for any other site wishing to opt out of the practice to do so.

It’s difficult to imagine why Missouri’s citizens might require more than this to redress alleged anticompetitive harms arising from the practice.

Perhaps AG Hawley thinks consumers would be better served by an opt-in mechanism? Of course, this is absurd, particularly if any of Missouri’s citizens — and their businesses — have websites. Most websites want at least some of their content to appear on Google’s search results pages as prominently as possible — see this and this, for example — and making this information more accessible to users is why Google exists.

To be sure, some websites may take issue with how much of their content Google features and where it places that content. But the easy opt out enables them to prevent Google from showing their content in a manner they disapprove of. Yelp is an outlier in this regard because it views Google as a direct competitor, especially to the extent it enables users to read some of Yelp’s reviews without visiting Yelp’s pages.

For Yelp and a few similarly situated companies the opt out suffices. But for almost everyone else the opt out is presumably rarely exercised, and any more-burdensome requirement would just impose unnecessary costs, harming instead of helping their websites.

The privacy issues

The Missouri investigation also applies to “Google’s collection, use, and disclosure of information about Google users and their online activities.” More pointedly, Hawley claims that “Google may be collecting more information from users than the company was telling consumers….”

Presumably this would come as news to the FTC, which, with a much larger staff and far greater expertise, currently has Google under a 20 year consent order (with some 15 years left to go) governing its privacy disclosures and information-sharing practices, thus ensuring that the agency engages in continual — and well-informed — oversight of precisely these issues.

The FTC’s consent order with Google (the result of an investigation into conduct involving Google’s short-lived Buzz social network, allegedly in violation of Google’s privacy policies), requires the company to:

  • “[N]ot misrepresent in any manner, expressly or by implication… the extent to which respondent maintains and protects the privacy and confidentiality of any [user] information…”;
  • “Obtain express affirmative consent from” users “prior to any new or additional sharing… of the Google user’s identified information with any third party” if doing so would in any way deviate from previously disclosed practices;
  • “[E]stablish and implement, and thereafter maintain, a comprehensive privacy program that is reasonably designed to [] address privacy risks related to the development and management of new and existing products and services for consumers, and (2) protect the privacy and confidentiality of [users’] information”; and
  • Along with a laundry list of other reporting requirements, “[submit] biennial assessments and reports [] from a qualified, objective, independent third-party professional…, approved by the [FTC] Associate Director for Enforcement, Bureau of Consumer Protection… in his or her sole discretion.”

What, beyond the incredibly broad scope of the FTC’s consent order, could the Missouri AG’s office possibly hope to obtain from an investigation?

Google is already expressly required to provide privacy reports to the FTC every two years. It must provide several of the items Hawley demands in his CID to the FTC; others are required to be made available to the FTC upon demand. What materials could the Missouri AG collect beyond those the FTC already receives, or has the authority to demand, under its consent order?

And what manpower and expertise could Hawley apply to those materials that would even begin to equal, let alone exceed, those of the FTC?

Lest anyone think the FTC is falling down on the job, a year after it issued that original consent order the Commission fined Google $22.5 million for violating the order in a questionable decision that was signed on to by all of the FTC’s Commissioners (both Republican and Democrat) — except the one who thought it didn’t go far enough.

That penalty is of undeniable import, not only for its amount (at the time it was the largest in FTC history) and for stemming from alleged problems completely unrelated to the issue underlying the initial action, but also because it was so easy to obtain. Having put Google under a 20-year consent order, the FTC need only prove (or threaten to prove) contempt of the consent order, rather than the specific elements of a new violation of the FTC Act, to bring the company to heel. The former is far easier to prove, and comes with the ability to impose (significant) damages.

So what’s really going on in Jefferson City?

While states are, of course, free to enforce their own consumer protection laws to protect their citizens, there is little to be gained — other than cold hard cash, perhaps — from pursuing cases that, at best, duplicate enforcement efforts already undertaken by the federal government (to say nothing of innumerable other jurisdictions).

To take just one relevant example, in 2013 — almost a year to the day following the court’s approval of the settlement in the FTC’s case alleging Google’s violation of the Buzz consent order — 37 states plus DC (not including Missouri) settled their own, follow-on litigation against Google on the same facts. Significantly, the terms of the settlement did not impose upon Google any obligation not already a part of the Buzz consent order or the subsequent FTC settlement — but it did require Google to fork over an additional $17 million.  

Not only is there little to be gained from yet another ill-conceived antitrust campaign, there is much to be lost. Such massive investigations require substantial resources to conduct, and the opportunity cost of doing so may mean real consumer issues go unaddressed. The Consumer Protection Section of the Missouri AG’s office says it receives some 100,000 consumer complaints a year. How many of those will have to be put on the back burner to accommodate an investigation like this one?

Even when not politically motivated, state enforcement of CPAs is not an unalloyed good. In fact, empirical studies of state consumer protection actions like the one contemplated by Mr. Hawley have shown that such actions tend toward overreach — good for lawyers, perhaps, but expensive for taxpayers and often detrimental to consumers. According to a recent study by economists James Cooper and Joanna Shepherd:

[I]n recent decades, this thoughtful balance [between protecting consumers and preventing the proliferation of lawsuits that harm both consumers and businesses] has yielded to damaging legislative and judicial overcorrections at the state level with a common theoretical mistake: the assumption that more CPA litigation automatically yields more consumer protection…. [C]ourts and legislatures gradually have abolished many of the procedural and remedial protections designed to cabin state CPAs to their original purpose: providing consumers with redress for actual harm in instances where tort and contract law may provide insufficient remedies. The result has been an explosion in consumer protection litigation, which serves no social function and for which consumers pay indirectly through higher prices and reduced innovation.

AG Hawley’s investigation seems almost tailored to duplicate the FTC’s extensive efforts — and to score political points. Or perhaps Mr. Hawley is just perturbed that Missouri missed out its share of the $17 million multistate settlement in 2013.

Which raises the spectre of a further problem with the Missouri case: “rent extraction.”

It’s no coincidence that Mr. Hawley’s investigation follows closely on the heels of Yelp’s recent letter to the FTC and every state AG (as well as four members of Congress and the EU’s chief competition enforcer, for good measure) alleging that Google had re-started scraping Yelp’s content, thus violating the terms of its voluntary commitments to the FTC.

It’s also no coincidence that Yelp “notified” Google of the problem only by lodging a complaint with every regulator who might listen rather than by actually notifying Google. But an action like the one Missouri is undertaking — not resolution of the issue — is almost certainly exactly what Yelp intended, and AG Hawley is playing right into Yelp’s hands.  

Google, for its part, strongly disputes Yelp’s allegation, and, indeed, has — even according to Yelp — complied fully with Yelp’s request to keep its content off Google Local and other “vertical” search pages since 18 months before Google entered into its commitments with the FTC. Google claims that the recent scraping was inadvertent, and that it would happily have rectified the problem if only Yelp had actually bothered to inform Google.

Indeed, Yelp’s allegations don’t really pass the smell test: That Google would suddenly change its practices now, in violation of its commitments to the FTC and at a time of extraordinarily heightened scrutiny by the media, politicians of all stripes, competitors like Yelp, the FTC, the EU, and a host of other antitrust or consumer protection authorities, strains belief.

But, again, identifying and resolving an actual commercial dispute was likely never the goal. As a recent, fawning New York Times article on “Yelp’s Six-Year Grudge Against Google” highlights (focusing in particular on Luther Lowe, now Yelp’s VP of Public Policy and the author of the letter):

Yelp elevated Mr. Lowe to the new position of director of government affairs, a job that more or less entails flying around the world trying to sic antitrust regulators on Google. Over the next few years, Yelp hired its first lobbyist and started a political action committee. Recently, it has started filing complaints in Brazil.

Missouri, in other words, may just be carrying Yelp’s water.

The one clear lesson of the decades-long Microsoft antitrust saga is that companies that struggle to compete in the market can profitably tax their rivals by instigating antitrust actions against them. As Milton Friedman admonished, decrying “the business community’s suicidal impulse” to invite regulation:

As a believer in the pursuit of self-interest in a competitive capitalist system, I can’t blame a businessman who goes to Washington [or is it Jefferson City?] and tries to get special privileges for his company.… Blame the rest of us for being so foolish as to let him get away with it.

Taking a tough line on Silicon Valley firms in the midst of today’s anti-tech-company populist resurgence may help with the electioneering in Mr. Hawley’s upcoming bid for a US Senate seat and serve Yelp, but it doesn’t offer any clear, actual benefits to Missourians. As I’ve wondered before: “Exactly when will regulators be a little more skeptical of competitors trying to game the antitrust laws for their own advantage?”

In anticompetitive petitioning, antitrust, consumer protection, exclusionary conduct, federal trade commission, ftc, google, monopolization, political economy, politics, regulation, rent seeking, settlements, technology , , , , , , , , , ,
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The FTC should address how (and whether) it assesses causation as it looks to define “informational injury”

Geoffrey Manne & Kristian Stout —  8 November 2017

The FTC will hold an “Informational Injury Workshop” in December “to examine consumer injury in the context of privacy and data security.” Defining the scope of cognizable harm that may result from the unauthorized use or third-party hacking of consumer information is, to be sure, a crucial inquiry, particularly as ever-more information is stored digitally. But the Commission — rightly — is aiming at more than mere definition. As it notes, the ultimate objective of the workshop is to address questions like:

How do businesses evaluate the benefits, costs, and risks of collecting and using information in light of potential injuries? How do they make tradeoffs? How do they assess the risks of different kinds of data breach? What market and legal incentives do they face, and how do these incentives affect their decisions?

How do consumers perceive and evaluate the benefits, costs, and risks of sharing information in light of potential injuries? What obstacles do they face in conducting such an evaluation? How do they evaluate tradeoffs?

Understanding how businesses and consumers assess the risk and cost “when information about [consumers] is misused,” and how they conform their conduct to that risk, entails understanding not only the scope of the potential harm, but also the extent to which conduct affects the risk of harm. This, in turn, requires an understanding of the FTC’s approach to evaluating liability under Section 5 of the FTC Act.

The problem, as we discuss in comments submitted by the International Center for Law & Economics to the FTC for the workshop, is that the Commission’s current approach troublingly mixes the required separate analyses of risk and harm, with little elucidation of either.

The core of the problem arises from the Commission’s reliance on what it calls a “reasonableness” standard for its evaluation of data security. By its nature, a standard that assigns liability for only unreasonable conduct should incorporate concepts resembling those of a common law negligence analysis — e.g., establishing a standard of due care, determining causation, evaluating the costs of and benefits of conduct that would mitigate the risk of harm, etc. Unfortunately, the Commission’s approach to reasonableness diverges from the rigor of a negligence analysis. In fact, as it has developed, it operates more like a strict liability regime in which largely inscrutable prosecutorial discretion determines which conduct, which firms, and which outcomes will give rise to liability.

Most troublingly, coupled with the Commission’s untenably lax (read: virtually nonexistent) evidentiary standards, the extremely liberal notion of causation embodied in its “reasonableness” approach means that the mere storage of personal information, even absent any data breach, could amount to an unfair practice under the Act — clearly not a “reasonable” result.

The notion that a breach itself can constitute injury will, we hope, be taken up during the workshop. But even if injury is limited to a particular type of breach — say, one in which sensitive, personal information is exposed to a wide swath of people — unless the Commission’s definition of what it means for conduct to be “likely to cause” harm is fixed, it will virtually always be the case that storage of personal information could conceivably lead to the kind of breach that constitutes injury. In other words, better defining the scope of injury does little to cabin the scope of the agency’s discretion when conduct creating any risk of that injury is actionable.

Our comments elaborate on these issues, as well as providing our thoughts on how the subjective nature of informational injuries can fit into Section 5, with a particular focus on the problem of assessing informational injury given evolving social context, and the need for appropriately assessing benefits in any cost-benefit analysis of conduct leading to informational injury.

ICLE’s full comments are available here.

The comments draw upon our article, When ‘Reasonable’ Isn’t: The FTC’s Standard-Less Data Security Standard, forthcoming in the Journal of Law, Economics and Policy.

In consumer protection, cost-benefit analysis, data security, federal trade commission, ftc, international center for law & economics, law and economics, privacy, regulation, regulatory reform, section 5 , , , , ,
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