The 117th Congress closed out without a floor vote on either of the major pieces of antitrust legislation introduced in both chambers: the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) and the Open Apps Market Act (OAMA). But it was evident at yesterday’s hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee that at least some advocates—both in academia and among the committee leadership—hope to raise those bills from the dead.
Of the committee’s five carefully chosen witnesses, only New York University School of Law’s Daniel Francis appeared to appreciate the competitive risks posed by AICOA and OAMA—noting, among other things, that the bills’ failure to distinguish between harm to competition and harm to certain competitors was a critical defect.
Yale School of Management’s Fiona Scott Morton acknowledged that ideal antitrust reforms were not on the table, and appeared open to amendments. But she also suggested that current antitrust standards were deficient and, without much explanation or attention to the bills’ particulars, that AICOA and OAMA were both steps in the right direction.
Subcommittee Chair Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who sponsored AICOA in the last Congress, seems keen to reintroduce it without modification. In her introductory remarks, she lamented the power, wealth (if that’s different), and influence of Big Tech in helping to sink her bill last year.
Apparently, firms targeted by anticompetitive legislation would rather they weren’t. Folks outside the Beltway should sit down for this: it seems those firms hire people to help them explain, to Congress and the public, both the fact that they don’t like the bills and why. The people they hire are called “lobbyists.” It appears that, sometimes, that strategy works or is at least an input into a process that sometimes ends, more or less, as they prefer. Dirty pool, indeed.
There are, of course, other reasons why AICOA and OAMA might have stalled. Had they been enacted, it’s very likely that they would have chilled innovation, harmed consumers, and provided a level of regulatory discretion that would have been very hard, if not impossible, to dial back. If reintroduced and enacted, the bills would be more likely to “rein in” competition and innovation in the American digital sector and, specifically, targeted tech firms’ ability to deliver innovative products and services to tens of millions of (hitherto very satisfied) consumers.
Our colleagues at the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) and its affiliated scholars, among others, have explained why. For a selected bit of self-plagiarism, AICOA and OAMA received considerable attention in our symposium on Antitrust’s Uncertain Future; ICLE’s Dirk Auer had a Truth on the Market post on AICOA; and Lazar Radic wrote a piece on OAMA that’s currently up for a Concurrences award.
To revisit just a few critical points:
AICOA and OAMA both suppose that “self-preferencing” is generally harmful. Not so. A firm might invest in developing a successful platform and ecosystem because it expects to recoup some of that investment through, among other means, preferred treatment for some of its own products. Exercising a measure of control over downstream or adjacent products might drive the platform’s development in the first place (see here and here for some potential advantages). To cite just a few examples from the empirical literature, Li and Agarwal (2017) find that Facebook’s integration of Instagram led to a significant increase in user demand, not just for Instagram, but for the entire category of photography apps; Foerderer, et al. (2018) find that Google’s 2015 entry into the market for photography apps on Android created additional user attention and demand for such apps generally; and Cennamo, et al. (2018) find that video games offered by console firms often become blockbusters and expanded the consoles’ installed base. As a result, they increase the potential for independent game developers, even in the face of competition from first-party games.
AICOA and OAMA, in somewhat different ways, favor open systems, interoperability, and/or data portability. All of these have potential advantages but, equally, potential costs or disadvantages. Whether any is procompetitive or anticompetitive depends on particular facts and circumstances. In the abstract, each represents a business model that might well be procompetitive or benign, and that consumers might well favor or disfavor. For example, interoperability has potential benefits and costs, and, as Sam Bowman has observed, those costs sometimes exceed the benefits. For instance, interoperability can be exceedingly costly to implement or maintain, and it can generate vulnerabilities that challenge or undermine data security. Data portability can be handy, but it can also harm the interests of third parties—say, friends willing to be named, or depicted in certain photos on a certain platform, but not just anywhere. And while recent commentary suggests that the absence of “open” systems signals a competition problem, it’s hard to understand why. There are many reasons that consumers might prefer “closed” systems, even when they have to pay a premium for them.
AICOA and OAMA both embody dubious assumptions. For example, underlying AICOA is a supposition that vertical integration is generally (or at least typically) harmful. Critics of established antitrust law can point to a few recent studies that cast doubt on the ubiquity of benefits from vertical integration. And it is, in fact, possible for vertical mergers or other vertical conduct to harm competition. But that possibility, and the findings of these few studies, are routinely overstated. The weight of the empirical evidence shows that vertical integration tends to be competitively benign. For example, widely acclaimed meta-analysis by economists Francine Lafontaine (former director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Economics under President Barack Obama) and Margaret Slade led them to conclude:
“[U]nder most circumstances, profit-maximizing vertical integration decisions are efficient, not just from the firms’ but also from the consumers’ points of view. Although there are isolated studies that contradict this claim, the vast majority support it. . . . We therefore conclude that, faced with a vertical arrangement, the burden of evidence should be placed on competition authorities to demonstrate that that arrangement is harmful before the practice is attacked.”
Network effects and data advantages are not insurmountable, nor even necessarily harmful. Advantages of scope and scale for data sets vary according to the data at issue; the context and analytic sophistication of those with access to the data and application; and are subject to diminishing returns, in any case. Simple measures of market share or other numerical thresholds may signal very little of competitive import. See, e.g., this on the contestable platform paradox; Carl Shapiro on the putative decline of competition and irrelevance of certain metrics; and, more generally, antitrust’s well-grounded and wholesale repudiation of the Structure-Conduct-Performance paradigm.
These points are not new. As we note above, they’ve been made more carefully, and in more detail, before. What’s new is that the failure of AICOA and OAMA to reach floor votes in the last Congress leaves their sponsors, and many of their advocates, unchastened.
Conclusion
At yesterday’s hearing, Sen. Klobuchar noted that nations around the world are adopting regulatory frameworks aimed at “reining in” American digital platforms. True enough, but that’s exactly what AICOA and OAMA promise; they will not foster competition or competitiveness.
Novel industries may pose novel challenges, not least to antitrust. But it does not follow that the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), proposed policies in Australia and the United Kingdom, or AICOA and OAMA represent beneficial, much less optimal, policy reforms. As Francis noted, the central commitments of OAMA and AICOA, like the DMA and other proposals, aim to help certain firms at the expense of other firms and consumers. This is not procompetitive reform; it is rent-seeking by less-successful competitors.
AICOA and OAMA were laid to rest with the 117th Congress. They should be left to rest in peace.
With just a week to go until the U.S. midterm elections, which potentially herald a change in control of one or both houses of Congress, speculation is mounting that congressional Democrats may seek to use the lame-duck session following the election to move one or more pieces of legislation targeting the so-called “Big Tech” companies.
Gaining particular notice—on grounds that it is the least controversial of the measures—is S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act (OAMA). Introduced by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), the Senate bill has garnered 14 cosponsors: exactly seven Republicans and seven Democrats. It would, among other things, force certain mobile app stores and operating systems to allow “sideloading” and open their platforms to rival in-app payment systems.
Unfortunately, even this relatively restrained legislation—at least, when compared to Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s (D-Minn.) American Innovation and Choice Online Act or the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA)—is highly problematic in its own right. Here, I will offer seven major questions the legislation leaves unresolved.
1. Are Quantitative Thresholds a Good Indicator of ‘Gatekeeper Power’?
It is no secret that OAMA has been tailor-made to regulate two specific app stores: Android’s Google Play Store and Apple’s Apple App Store (see here, here, and, yes, even Wikipedia knows it).The text makes this clear by limiting the bill’s scope to app stores with more than 50 million users, a threshold that only Google Play and the Apple App Store currently satisfy.
However, purely quantitative thresholds are a poor indicator of a company’s potential “gatekeeper power.” An app store might have much fewer than 50 million users but cater to a relevant niche market. By the bill’s own logic, why shouldn’t that app store likewise be compelled to be open to competing app distributors? Conversely, it may be easy for users of very large app stores to multi-home or switch seamlessly to competing stores. In either case, raw user data paints a distorted picture of the market’s realities.
As it stands, the bill’s thresholds appear arbitrary and pre-committed to “disciplining” just two companies: Google and Apple. In principle, good laws should be abstract and general and not intentionally crafted to apply only to a few select actors. In OAMA’s case, the law’s specific thresholds are also factually misguided, as purely quantitative criteria are not a good proxy for the sort of market power the bill purportedly seeks to curtail.
2. Why Does the Bill not Apply to all App Stores?
Rather than applying to app stores across the board, OAMA targets only those associated with mobile devices and “general purpose computing devices.” It’s not clear why.
For example, why doesn’t it cover app stores on gaming platforms, such as Microsoft’s Xbox or Sony’s PlayStation?
Currently, a PlayStation user can only buy digital games through the PlayStation Store, where Sony reportedly takes a 30% cut of all sales—although its pricing schedule is less transparent than that of mobile rivals such as Apple or Google.
Clearly, this bothers some developers. Much like Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney’s ongoing crusade against the Apple App Store, indie-game publisher Iain Garner of Neon Doctrine recently took to Twitter to complain about Sony’s restrictive practices. According to Garner, “Platform X” (clearly PlayStation) charges developers up to $25,000 and 30% of subsequent earnings to give games a modicum of visibility on the platform, in addition to requiring them to jump through such hoops as making a PlayStation-specific trailer and writing a blog post. Garner further alleges that Sony severely circumscribes developers’ ability to offer discounts, “meaning that Platform X owners will always get the worst deal!” (see also here).
Microsoft’s Xbox Game Store similarly takes a 30% cut of sales. Presumably, Microsoft and Sony both have the same type of gatekeeper power in the gaming-console market that Apple and Google are said to have on their respective platforms, leading to precisely those issues that OAMA ostensibly purports to combat. Namely, that consumers are not allowed to choose alternative app stores through which to buy games on their respective consoles, and developers must acquiesce to Sony’s and Microsoft’s terms if they want their games to reach those players.
More broadly, dozens of online platforms also charge commissions on the sales made by their creators. To cite but a few: OnlyFans takes a 20% cut of sales; Facebook gets 30% of the revenue that creators earn from their followers; YouTube takes 45% of ad revenue generated by users; and Twitch reportedly rakes in 50% of subscription fees.
This is not to say that all these services are monopolies that should be regulated. To the contrary, it seems like fees in the 20-30% range are common even in highly competitive environments. Rather, it is merely to observe that there are dozens of online platforms that demand a percentage of the revenue that creators generate and that prevent those creators from bypassing the platform. As well they should, after all, because creating and improving a platform is not free.
It is nonetheless difficult to see why legislation regulating online marketplaces should focus solely on two mobile app stores. Ultimately, the inability of OAMA’s sponsors to properly account for this carveout diminishes the law’s credibility.
3. Should Picking Among Legitimate Business Models Be up to Lawmakers or Consumers?
“Open” and “closed” platforms posit two different business models, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Some consumers may prefer more open platforms because they grant them more flexibility to customize their mobile devices and operating systems. But there are also compelling reasons to prefer closed systems. As Sam Bowman observed, narrowing choice through a more curated system frees users from having to research every possible option every time they buy or use some product. Instead, they can defer to the platform’s expertise in determining whether an app or app store is trustworthy or whether it contains, say, objectionable content.
Currently, users can choose to opt for Apple’s semi-closed “walled garden” iOS or Google’s relatively more open Android OS (which OAMA wants to pry open even further). Ironically, under the pretext of giving users more “choice,” OAMA would take away the possibility of choice where it matters the most—i.e., at the platform level. As Mikolaj Barczentewicz has written:
A sideloading mandate aims to give users more choice. It can only achieve this, however, by taking away the option of choosing a device with a “walled garden” approach to privacy and security (such as is taken by Apple with iOS).
This obviates the nuances between the two and pushes Android and iOS to converge around a single model. But if consumers unequivocally preferred open platforms, Apple would have no customers, because everyone would already be on Android.
Contrary to regulators’ simplistic assumptions, “open” and “closed” are not synonyms for “good” and “bad.” Instead, as Boston University’s Andrei Hagiu has shown, there are fundamental welfare tradeoffs at play between these two perfectly valid business models that belie simplistic characterizations of one being inherently superior to the other.
It is debatable whether courts, regulators, or legislators are well-situated to resolve these complex tradeoffs by substituting businesses’ product-design decisions and consumers’ revealed preferences with their own. After all, if regulators had such perfect information, we wouldn’t need markets or competition in the first place.
4. Does OAMA Account for the Security Risks of Sideloading?
Both Apple and Google do this, albeit to varying degrees. For instance, Android already allows sideloading and third-party in-app payment systems to some extent, while Apple runs a tighter ship. However, studies have shown that it is precisely the iOS “walled garden” model which gives it an edge over Android in terms of privacy and security. Even vocal Apple critic Tim Sweeney recently acknowledged that increased safety and privacy were competitive advantages for Apple.
The problem is that far-reaching sideloading mandates—such as the ones contemplated under OAMA—are fundamentally at odds with current privacy and security capabilities (see here and here).
OAMA’s defenders might argue that the law does allow covered platforms to raise safety and security defenses, thus making the tradeoffs between openness and security unnecessary. But the bill places such stringent conditions on those defenses that platform operators will almost certainly be deterred from risking running afoul of the law’s terms. To invoke the safety and security defenses, covered companies must demonstrate that provisions are applied on a “demonstrably consistent basis”; are “narrowly tailored and could not be achieved through less discriminatory means”; and are not used as a “pretext to exclude or impose unnecessary or discriminatory terms.”
Implementing these stringent requirements will drag enforcers into a micromanagement quagmire. There are thousands of potential spyware, malware, rootkit, backdoor, and phishing (to name just a few) software-security issues—all of which pose distinct threats to an operating system. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the federal courts will almost certainly struggle to control the “consistency” requirement across such varied types.
Likewise, OAMA’s reference to “least discriminatory means” suggests there is only one valid answer to any given security-access tradeoff. Further, depending on one’s preferred balance between security and “openness,” a claimed security risk may or may not be “pretextual,” and thus may or may not be legal.
Finally, the bill text appears to preclude the possibility of denying access to a third-party app or app store for reasons other than safety and privacy. This would undermine Apple’s and Google’s two-tiered quality-control systems, which also control for “objectionable” content such as (child) pornography and social engineering.
5. How Will OAMA Safeguard the Rights of Covered Platforms?
OAMA is also deeply flawed from a procedural standpoint. Most importantly, there is no meaningful way to contest the law’s designation as “covered company,” or the harms associated with it.
Once a company is “covered,” it is presumed to hold gatekeeper power, with all the associated risks for competition, innovation, and consumer choice. Remarkably, this presumption does not admit any qualitative or quantitative evidence to the contrary. The only thing a covered company can do to rebut the designation is to demonstrate that it, in fact, has fewer than 50 million users.
By preventing companies from showing that they do not hold the kind of gatekeeper power that harms competition, decreases innovation, raises prices, and reduces choice (the bill’s stated objectives), OAMA severely tilts the playing field in the FTC’s favor. Even the EU’s enforcer-friendly DMA incorporated a last-minute amendment allowing firms to dispute their status as “gatekeepers.” While this defense is not perfect (companies cannot rely on the same qualitative evidence that the European Commission can use against them), at least gatekeeper status can be contested under the DMA.
6. Should Legislation Protect Competitors at the Expense of Consumers?
Like most of the new wave of regulatory initiatives against Big Tech (but unlike antitrust law), OAMA is explicitly designed to help competitors, with consumers footing the bill.
For example, OAMA prohibits covered companies from using or combining nonpublic data obtained from third-party apps or app stores operating on their platforms in competition with those third parties. While this may have the short-term effect of redistributing rents away from these platforms and toward competitors, it risks harming consumers and third-party developers in the long run.
Platforms’ ability to integrate such data is part of what allows them to bring better and improved products and services to consumers in the first place. OAMA tacitly admits this by recognizing that the use of nonpublic data grants covered companies a competitive advantage. In other words, it allows them to deliver a product that is better than competitors’.
Prohibiting self-preferencing raises similar concerns. Why wouldn’t a company that has invested billions in developing a successful platform and ecosystem not give preference to its own products to recoup some of that investment? After all, the possibility of exercising some control over downstream and adjacent products is what might have driven the platform’s development in the first place. In other words, self-preferencing may be a symptom of competition, and not the absence thereof. Third-party companies also would have weaker incentives to develop their own platforms if they can free-ride on the investments of others. And platforms that favor their own downstream products might simply be better positioned to guarantee their quality and reliability (see here and here).
In all of these cases, OAMA’s myopic focus on improving the lot of competitors for easy political points will upend the mobile ecosystems from which both users and developers derive significant benefit.
7. Shouldn’t the EU Bear the Risks of Bad Tech Regulation?
Finally, U.S. lawmakers should ask themselves whether the European Union, which has no tech leaders of its own, is really a model to emulate. Today, after all, marks the day the long-awaited Digital Markets Act— the EU’s response to perceived contestability and fairness problems in the digital economy—officially takes effect. In anticipation of the law entering into force, I summarized some of the outstanding issues that will define implementation moving forward in this recent tweet thread.
We have been critical of the DMA here at Truth on the Market on several factual, legal, economic, and procedural grounds. The law’s problems range from it essentially being a tool to redistribute rents away from platforms and to third-parties, despite it being unclear why the latter group is inherently more deserving (Pablo Ibañez Colomo has raised a similar point); to its opacity and lack of clarity, a process that appears tilted in the Commission’s favor; to the awkward way it interacts with EU competition law, ignoring the welfare tradeoffs between the models it seeks to impose and perfectly valid alternatives (see here and here); to its flawed assumptions (see, e.g., here on contestability under the DMA); to the dubious legal and economic value of the theory of harm known as “self-preferencing”; to the very real possibility of unintended consequences (e.g., in relation to security and interoperability mandates).
In other words, that the United States lags the EU in seeking to regulate this area might not be a bad thing, after all. Despite the EU’s insistence on being a trailblazing agenda-setter at all costs, the wiser thing in tech regulation might be to remain at a safe distance. This is particularly true when one considers the potentially large costs of legislative missteps and the difficulty of recalibrating once a course has been set.
U.S. lawmakers should take advantage of this dynamic and learn from some of the Old Continent’s mistakes. If they play their cards right and take the time to read the writing on the wall, they might just succeed in averting antitrust’s uncertain future.
[TOTM: The following is part of a digital symposium by TOTM guests and authors on Antitrust’s Uncertain Future: Visions of Competition in the New Regulatory Landscape. Information on the authors and the entire series of posts is available here.]
Philip K Dick’s novella “The Minority Report” describes a futuristic world without crime. This state of the world is achieved thanks to the visions of three mutants—so-called “precogs”—who predict crimes before they occur, thereby enabling law enforcement to incarcerate people for crimes they were going to commit.
This utopia unravels when the protagonist—the head of the police Precrime division, who is himself predicted to commit a murder—learns that the precogs often produce “minority reports”: i.e., visions of the future that differ from one another. The existence of these alternate potential futures undermine the very foundations of Precrime. For every crime that is averted, an innocent person may be convicted of a crime they were not going to commit.
You might be wondering what any of this has to do with antitrust and last week’s Truth on the Marketsymposium on Antitrust’s Uncertain Future. Given the recent adoption of the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the prospect that Congress could soon vote on the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA), we asked contributors to write short pieces describing what the future might look like—for better or worse—under these digital-market regulations, or in their absence.
The resulting blog posts offer a “minority report” of sorts. Together, they dispel the myth that these regulations would necessarily give rise to a brighter future of intensified competition, innovation, and improved online services. To the contrary, our contributors cautioned—albeit with varying degrees of severity—that these regulations create risks that policymakers should not ignore.
The Majority Report
If policymakers like European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager, Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) are to be believed, a combination of tougher regulations and heightened antitrust enforcement is the only way to revitalize competition in digital markets. As Klobuchar argues on her website:
To ensure our future economic prosperity, America must confront its monopoly power problem and restore competitive markets. … [W]e must update our antitrust laws for the twenty-first century to protect the competitive markets that are the lifeblood of our economy.
Speaking of the recently passed DMA, Vestager suggested the regulation could spark an economic boom, drawing parallels with the Renaissance:
The work we put into preserving and strengthening our Single Market will equip us with the means to show the world that our path based on open trade and fair competition is truly better. After all, Bruges did not become great by conquest and ruthless occupation. It became great through commerce and industry.
Several antitrust scholars have been similarly bullish about the likely benefits of such regulations. For instance, Fiona Scott Morton, Steven Salop, and David Dinielli write that:
It is an appropriate expression of democracy for Congress to enact pro-competitive statutes to maintain the vibrancy of the online economy and allow for continued innovation that benefits non-platform businesses as well as end users.
In short, there is a widespread belief that such regulations would make the online world more competitive and innovative, to the benefit of consumers.
The Minority Reports
To varying degrees, the responses to our symposium suggest proponents of such regulations may be falling prey to what Harold Demsetz called “the nirvana fallacy.” In other words, it is wrong to assume that the resulting enforcement would be costless and painless for consumers.
Even the symposium’s pieces belonging to the literary realms of sci-fi and poetry shed a powerful light on the deep-seated problems that underlie contemporary efforts to make online industries “more contestable and fair.” As several scholars highlighted, such regulations may prevent firms from designing new and improved products, or from maintaining existing ones. Among my favorite passages was this excerpt from Daniel Crane’s fictional piece about a software engineer in Helsinki trying to integrate restaurant and hotel ratings into a vertical search engine:
“We’ve been watching how you’re coding the new walking tour search vertical. It seems that you are designing it to give preference to restaurants, cafès, and hotels that have been highly rated by the Tourism Board.”
“Yes, that’s right. Restaurants, cafès, and hotels that have been rated by the Tourism Board are cleaner, safer, and more convenient. That’s why they have been rated.”
“But you are forgetting that the Tourism Board is one of our investors. This will be considered self-preferencing.”
Even if a covered platform could establish that a challenged practice would maintain or substantially enhance the platform’s core functionality, it would also have to prove that the conduct was “narrowly tailored” and “reasonably necessary” to achieve the desired end, and, for many behaviors, the “le[ast] discriminatory means” of doing so. That is a remarkably heavy burden…. It is likely, then, that AICOA would break existing products and services and discourage future innovation.
Several of our contributors voiced fears that bans on self-preferencing would prevent platforms from acquiring startups that complement their core businesses, thus making it harder to launch new services and deterring startup investment. For instance, in my alternate history post, I argued that such bans might have prevented Google’s purchase of Android, thus reducing competition in the mobile phone industry.
A second important objection was that self-preferencing bans are hard to apply consistently. Policymakers would notably have to draw lines between the different components that make up an economic good. As Ramsi Woodcock wrote in a poem:
You: The meaning of component, We can always redefine. From batteries to molecules, We can draw most any line.
This lack of legal certainty will prove hard to resolve. Geoffrey Manne noted that regulatory guidelines were unlikely to be helpful in this regard:
Indeed, while laws are sometimes purposefully vague—operating as standards rather than prescriptive rules—to allow for more flexibility, the concepts introduced by AICOA don’t even offer any cognizable standards suitable for fine-tuning.
Alden Abbott was similarly concerned about the vague language that underpins AICOA:
There is, however, one inescapable reality—as night follows day, passage of AICOA would usher in an extended period of costly litigation over the meaning of a host of AICOA terms. … The history of antitrust illustrates the difficulties inherent in clarifying the meaning of novel federal statutory language. It was not until 21 years after passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act that the Supreme Court held that Section 1 of the act’s prohibition on contracts, combinations, and conspiracies “in restraint of trade” only covered unreasonable restraints of trade.
Our contributors also argued that bans on self-preferencing and interoperability mandates might be detrimental to users’ online experience. Lazar Radic and Friso Bostoen both wrote pieces taking readers through a typical day in worlds where self-preferencing is prohibited. Neither was particularly utopian. In his satirical piece, Lazar Radic imagined an online shopping experience where all products are given equal display:
“Time to do my part,” I sigh. My eyes—trained by years of practice—dart from left to right and from right to left, carefully scrutinizing each coffee capsule on offer for an equal number of seconds. … After 13 brands and at least as many flavors, I select the platforms own brand, “Basic”… and then answer a series of questions to make sure I have actually given competitors’ products fair consideration.
Closer to the world we live in, Friso Bostoen described how going through a succession of choice screens—a likely outcome of regulations such as AICOA and the DMA—would be tiresome for consumers:
A new fee structure… God, save me from having to tap ‘learn more’ to find out what that means. I’ve had to learn more about the app ecosystem than is good for me already.
Finally, our symposium highlighted several other ways in which poorly designed online regulations may harm consumers. Stephen Dnes concluded that mandatory data-sharing regimes will deter companies from producing valuable data in the first place. Julie Carlson argued that prohibiting platforms from preferencing their own goods would disproportionately harm low-income consumers. And Aurelien Portuese surmised that, if passed into law, AICOA would dampen firms’ incentives to invest in new services. Last, but not least, in a co-authored piece, Filip Lubinski and Lazar Radic joked that self-preferencing bans could be extended to the offline world:
The success of AICOA has opened our eyes to an even more ancient and perverse evil: self-preferencing in offline markets. It revealed to us that—for centuries, if not millennia—companies in various industries—from togas to wine, from cosmetics to insurance—had, in fact, always preferred their own initiatives over those of their rivals!
The Problems of Online Precrime
Online regulations like AICOA and the DMA mark a radical shift from existing antitrust laws. They move competition policy from a paradigm of ex post enforcement, based upon a detailed case-by-case analysis of effects, to one of ex ante prohibitions.
Despite obvious and superficial differences, there are clear parallels between this new paradigm and the world of “The Minority Report”: firms would be punished for behavior that has not yet transpired or is not proven to harm consumers.
This might be fine if we knew for certain that the prohibited conduct would harm consumers (i.e., if there were no “minority reports,” to use our previous analogy). But every entry in our symposium suggests things are not that simple. There are a wide range of outcomes and potential harms associated with the regulation of digital markets. This calls for a more calibrated approach to digital-competition policy, as opposed to the precrime of AICOA and the DMA.
[TOTM: The following is part of a digital symposium by TOTM guests and authors on Antitrust’s Uncertain Future: Visions of Competition in the New Regulatory Landscape. Information on the authors and the entire series of posts is available here.]
Things are heating up in the antitrust world. There is considerable pressure to pass the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) before the congressional recess in August—a short legislative window before members of Congress shift their focus almost entirely to campaigning for the mid-term elections. While it would not be impossible to advance the bill after the August recess, it would be a steep uphill climb.
But whether it passes or not, some of the damage from AICOA may already be done. The bill has moved the antitrust dialogue that will harm innovation and consumers. In this post, I will first explain AICOA’s fundamental flaws. Next, I discuss the negative impact that the legislation is likely to have if passed, even if courts and agencies do not aggressively enforce its provisions. Finally, I show how AICOA has already provided an intellectual victory for the approach articulated in the European Union (EU)’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). It has built momentum for a dystopian regulatory framework to break up and break into U.S. superstar firms designated as “gatekeepers” at the expense of innovation and consumers.
The Unseen of AICOA
AICOA’s drafters argue that, once passed, it will deliver numerous economic benefits. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.)—the bill’s main sponsor—has stated that it will “ensure small businesses and entrepreneurs still have the opportunity to succeed in the digital marketplace. This bill will do just that while also providing consumers with the benefit of greater choice online.”
Section 3 of the bill would provide “business users” of the designated “covered platforms” with a wide range of entitlements. This includes preventing the covered platform from offering any services or products that a business user could provide (the so-called “self-preferencing” prohibition); allowing a business user access to the covered platform’s proprietary data; and an entitlement for business users to have “preferred placement” on a covered platform without having to use any of that platform’s services.
These entitlements would provide non-platform businesses what are effectively claims on the platform’s proprietary assets, notwithstanding the covered platform’s own investments to collect data, create services, and invent products—in short, the platform’s innovative efforts. As such, AICOA is redistributive legislation that creates the conditions for unfair competition in the name of “fair” and “open” competition. It treats the behavior of “covered platforms” differently than identical behavior by their competitors, without considering the deterrent effect such a framework will have on consumers and innovation. Thus, AICOA offers rent-seeking rivals a formidable avenue to reap considerable benefits at the expense of the innovators thanks to the weaponization of antitrust to subvert, not improve, competition.
In mandating that covered platforms make their data and proprietary assets freely available to “business users” and rivals, AICOA undermines the underpinning of free markets to pursue the misguided goal of “open markets.” The inevitable result will be the tragedy of the commons. Absent the covered platforms having the ability to benefit from their entrepreneurial endeavors, the law no longer encourages innovation. As Joseph Schumpeter seminally predicted: “perfect competition implies free entry into every industry … But perfectly free entry into a new field may make it impossible to enter it at all.”
To illustrate, if business users can freely access, say, a special status on the covered platforms’ ancillary services without having to use any of the covered platform’s services (as required under Section 3(a)(5)), then platforms are disincentivized from inventing zero-priced services, since they cannot cross-monetize these services with existing services. Similarly, if, under Section 3(a)(1) of the bill, business users can stop covered platforms from pre-installing or preferencing an app whenever they happen to offer a similar app, then covered platforms will be discouraged from investing in or creating new apps. Thus, the bill would generate a considerable deterrent effect for covered platforms to invest, invent, and innovate.
AICOA’s most detrimental consequences may not be immediately apparent; they could instead manifest in larger and broader downstream impacts that will be difficult to undo. As the 19th century French economist Frederic Bastiat wrote: “a law gives birth not only to an effect but to a series of effects. Of these effects, the first only is immediate; it manifests itself simultaneously with its cause—it is seen. The others unfold in succession—they are not seen it is well for, if they are foreseen … it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good, which will be followed by a great evil to come, while the true economist pursues a great good to come,—at the risk of a small present evil.”
To paraphrase Bastiat, AICOA offers ill-intentioned rivals a “small present good”–i.e., unconditional access to the platforms’ proprietary assets–while society suffers the loss of a greater good–i.e., incentives to innovate and welfare gains to consumers. The logic is akin to those who advocate the abolition of intellectual-property rights: The immediate (and seen) gain is obvious, concerning the dissemination of innovation and a reduction of the price of innovation, while the subsequent (and unseen) evil remains opaque, as the destruction of the institutional premises for innovation will generate considerable long-term innovation costs.
Fundamentally, AICOA weakens the benefits of scale by pursuing vertical disintegration of the covered platforms to the benefit of short-term static competition. In the long term, however, the bill would dampen dynamic competition, ultimately harming consumer welfare and the capacity for innovation. Themeasure’s opportunity costs will prevent covered platforms’ innovations from benefiting other business users or consumers. They personify the “unseen,” as Bastiat put it: “[they are] always in the shadow, and who, personifying what is not seen, [are] an essential element of the problem. [They make] us understand how absurd it is to see a profit in destruction.”
The costs could well amount to hundreds of billions of dollars for the U.S. economy, even before accounting for the costs of deterred innovation. The unseen is costly, the seen is cheap.
A New Robinson-Patman Act?
Most antitrust laws are terse, vague, and old: The Sherman Act of 1890, the Federal Trade Commission Act, and the Clayton Act of 1914 deal largely in generalities, with considerable deference for courts to elaborate in a common-law tradition on the specificities of what “restraints of trade,” “monopolization,” or “unfair methods of competition” mean.
In 1936, Congress passed the Robinson-Patman Act, designed to protect competitors from the then-disruptive competition of large firms who—thanks to scale and practices such as price differentiation—upended traditional incumbents to the benefit of consumers. Passed after “Congress made no factual investigation of its own, and ignored evidence that conflicted with accepted rhetoric,” the law prohibits price differentials that would benefit buyers, and ultimately consumers, in the name of less vigorous competition from more efficient, more productive firms. Indeed, under the Robinson-Patman Act, manufacturers cannot give a bigger discount to a distributor who would pass these savings onto consumers, even if the distributor performs extra services relative to others.
Former President Gerald Ford declared in 1975 that the Robinson-Patman Act “is a leading example of [a law] which restrain[s] competition and den[ies] buyers’ substantial savings…It discourages both large and small firms from cutting prices, making it harder for them to expand into new markets and pass on to customers the cost-savings on large orders.” Despite this, calls to amend or repeal the Robinson-Patman Act—supported by, among others, competition scholars like Herbert Hovenkamp and Robert Bork—have failed.
In the 1983 Abbott decision, Justice Lewis Powell wrote: “The Robinson-Patman Act has been widely criticized, both for its effects and for the policies that it seeks to promote. Although Congress is aware of these criticisms, the Act has remained in effect for almost half a century.”
Nonetheless, the act’s enforcement dwindled, thanks to wise reactions from antitrust agencies and the courts. While it is seldom enforced today, the act continues to create considerable legal uncertainty, as it raises regulatory risks for companies who engage in behavior that may conflict with its provisions. Indeed, many of the same so-called “neo-Brandeisians” who support passage of AICOA also advocate reinvigorating Robinson-Patman. More specifically, the new FTC majority has expressed that it is eager to revitalizeRobinson-Patman, even as the law protects less efficient competitors. In other words, the Robinson-Patman Act is a zombie law: dead, but still moving.
Even if the antitrust agencies and courts ultimately follow the same path of regulatory and judicial restraint on AICOA that they have on Robinson-Patman, the legal uncertainty its existence will engender will act as a powerful deterrent on disruptive competition that dynamically benefits consumers and innovation. In short, like the Robinson-Patman Act, antitrust agencies and courts will either enforce AICOA–thus, generating the law’s adverse effects on consumers and innovation–or they will refrain from enforcing AICOA–but then, the legal uncertainty shall lead to unseen, harmful effects on innovation and consumers.
For instance, the bill’s prohibition on “self-preferencing” in Section 3(a)(1) will prevent covered platforms from offering consumers new products and services that happen to compete with incumbents’ products and services. Self-preferencing often is a pro-competitive, pro-efficiency practice that companies widely adopt—a reality that AICOA seems to ignore.
Would AICOA prevent, e.g., Apple from offering a bundled subscription to Apple One, which includes Apple Music, so that the company can effectively compete with incumbents like Spotify? As with Robinson-Patman, antitrust agencies and courts will have to choose whether to enforce a productivity-decreasing law, or to ignore congressional intent but, in the process, generate significant legal uncertainties.
Judge Bork once wrote that Robinson-Patman was “antitrust’s least glorious hour” because, rather than improving competition and innovation, it reduced competition from firms who happen to be more productive, innovative, and efficient than their rivals. The law infamously protected inefficient competitors rather than competition. But from the perspective of legislative history perspective, AICOA may be antitrust’s new “least glorious hour.” If adopted, it will adversely affect innovation and consumers, as opportunistic rivals will be able to prevent cost-saving practices by the covered platforms.
As with Robinson-Patman, calls to amend or repeal AICOA may follow its passage. But Robinson-Patman Act illustrates the path dependency of bad antitrust laws. However costly and damaging, AICOA would likely stay in place, with regular calls for either stronger or weaker enforcement, depending on whether the momentum shifts from populist antitrust or antitrust more consistent with dynamic competition.
Victory of the Brussels Effect
The future of AICOA does not bode well for markets, either from a historical perspective or from a comparative-law perspective. The EU’s DMA similarly targets a few large tech platforms but it isbroader, harsher, and swifter. In the competition between these two examples of self-inflicted techlash, AICOA will pale in comparison with the DMA. Covered platforms will be forced to align with theDMA’s obligations and prohibitions.
Consequently, AICOA is a victory of the DMA and of the Brussels effect in general. AICOA effectively crowns the DMA as the all-encompassing regulatory assault on digital gatekeepers. While members of Congress have introduced numerous antitrust bills aimed at targeting gatekeepers, the DMA is the one-stop-shop regulation that encompasses multiple antitrust bills and imposes broader prohibitions and stronger obligations on gatekeepers. In other words, the DMA outcompetes AICOA.
Commentators seldom lament the extraterritorial impact of European regulations. Regarding regulating digital gatekeepers, U.S. officials should have pushed back against the innovation-stifling, welfare-decreasing effects of the DMA on U.S. tech companies, in particular, and on U.S. technological innovation, in general. To be fair, a few U.S. officials, such as Commerce Secretary Gina Raimundo, didvoice opposition to the DMA. Indeed, well-aware of the DMA’s protectionist intent and its potential tobreak up and break into tech platforms, Raimundoexpressed concerns that antitrust should not be about protecting competitors and deterring innovation but rather about protecting the process of competition, however disruptive may be.
The influential neo-Brandeisians and radical antitrust reformers, however,lashed out at Raimundo andeffectively shamed the Biden administration into embracing the DMA (and its sister regulation, AICOA). Brussels did not have to exert its regulatory overreach; the U.S. administration happily imports and emulates European overregulation. There is no better way for European officials to see their dreams come true: a techlash against U.S. digital platforms that enjoys the support of local officials.
In that regard, AICOA has already played a significant role in shaping the intellectual mood in Washington and in altering the course of U.S. antitrust. Members of Congress designed AICOA along the linespioneered by the DMA. Sen. Klobuchar has argued that America should emulate European competition policy regarding tech platforms. Lina Khan, now chair of the FTC, co-authoredthe U.S. House Antitrust Subcommittee report, which recommended adopting the European concept of “abuse of dominant position” in U.S. antitrust. In her current position, Khan nowpraises the DMA. Tim Wu, competition counsel for the White House,has praised European competition policy and officials. Indeed, the neo-Brandeisians’ have not only praised the European Commission’s fines against U.S. tech platforms (despiteearly criticisms from former President Barack Obama) but have more dramatically called for the United States to imitate the European regulatory framework.
In this regulatory race to inefficiency, the standard is set in Brussels with the blessings of U.S. officials. Not even the precedent set by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) fully captures the effects the DMA will have. Privacy laws passed by U.S. states’ privacy have mostly reacted to the reality of the GDPR. With AICOA, Congress is proactively anticipating, emulating, and welcoming the DMA before it has even been adopted. The intellectual and policy shift is historical, and so is the policy error.
AICOA and the Boulevard of Broken Dreams
AICOA is a failure similar to the Robinson-Patman Act and a victory for the Brussels effect and the DMA. Consumers will be the collateral damages, and the unseen effects on innovation will take years before they materialize. Calls for amendments and repeals of AICOA are likely to fail, so that the inevitable costs will forever bear upon consumers and innovation dynamics.
AICOA illustrates the neo-Brandeisian opposition to large innovative companies. Joseph Schumpeter warned against such hostility and its effect on disincentivizing entrepreneurs to innovate when he wrote:
Faced by the increasing hostility of the environment and by the legislative, administrative, and judicial practice born of that hostility, entrepreneurs and capitalists—in fact the whole stratum that accepts the bourgeois scheme of life—will eventually cease to function. Their standard aims are rapidly becoming unattainable, their efforts futile.
President William Howard Taft once said, “the world is not going to be saved by legislation.” AICOA will not save antitrust, nor will consumers. To paraphrase Schumpeter, the bill’s drafters “walked into our future as we walked into the war, blindfolded.” AICOA’s intentions to deliver greater competition, a fairer marketplace, greater consumer choice, and more consumer benefits will ultimately scatter across the boulevard of broken dreams.
The Baron de Montesquieu once wrote that legislators should only change laws with a “trembling hand”:
It is sometimes necessary to change certain laws. But the case is rare, and when it happens, they should be touched only with a trembling hand: such solemnities should be observed, and such precautions are taken that the people will naturally conclude that the laws are indeed sacred since it takes so many formalities to abrogate them.
AICOA’s drafters had a clumsy hand, coupled with what Friedrich Hayek would call “a pretense of knowledge.” They were certain to do social good and incapable of thinking of doing social harm. The future will remember AICOA as the new antitrust’s least glorious hour, where consumers and innovation were sacrificed on the altar of a revitalized populist view of antitrust.
[TOTM: The following is part of a digital symposium by TOTM guests and authors on Antitrust’s Uncertain Future: Visions of Competition in the New Regulatory Landscape. Information on the authors and the entire series of posts is available here.]
May 2007, Palo Alto
The California sun shone warmly on Eric Schmidt’s face as he stepped out of his car and made his way to have dinner at Madera, a chic Palo Alto restaurant.
Dining out was a welcome distraction from the endless succession of strategy meetings with the nitpickers of the law department, which had been Schmidt’s bread and butter for the last few months. The lawyers seemed to take issue with any new project that Google’s engineers came up with. “How would rivals compete with our maps?”; “Our placement should be no less favorable than rivals’’; etc. The objections were endless.
This is not how things were supposed to be. When Schmidt became Google’s chief executive officer in 2001, his mission was to take the company public and grow the firm into markets other than search. But then something unexpected happened. After campaigning on an anti-monopoly platform, a freshman senator from Minnesota managed to get her anti-discrimination bill through Congress in just her first few months in office. All companies with a market cap of more than $150 billion were now prohibited from favoring their own products. Google had recently crossed that Rubicon, putting a stop to years of carefree expansion into new markets.
But today was different. The waiter led Schmidt to his table overlooking Silicon Valley. His acquaintance was already seated.
With his tall and slender figure, Andy Rubin had garnered quite a reputation among Silicon Valley’s elite. After engineering stints at Apple and Motorola, developing various handheld devices, Rubin had set up his own shop. The idea was bold: develop the first open mobile platform—based on Linux, nonetheless. Rubin had pitched the project to Google in 2005 but given the regulatory uncertainty over the future of antitrust—the same wave of populist sentiment that would carry Klobuchar to office one year later—Schmidt and his team had passed.
“There’s no money in open source,” the company’s CFO ruled. Schmidt had initially objected, but with more pressing matters to deal with, he ultimately followed his CFO’s advice.
Schmidt and Rubin were exchanging pleasantries about Microsoft and Java when the meals arrived–sublime Wagyu short ribs and charred spring onions paired with a 1986 Chateau Margaux.
Rubin finally cut to the chase. “Our mobile operating system will rely on state-of-the-art touchscreen technology. Just like the device being developed by Apple. Buying Android today might be your only way to avoid paying monopoly prices to access Apple’s mobile users tomorrow.”
Schmidt knew this all too well: The future was mobile, and few companies were taking Apple’s upcoming iPhone seriously enough. Even better, as a firm, Android was treading water. Like many other startups, it had excellent software but no business model. And with the Klobuchar bill putting the brakes on startup investment—monetizing an ecosystem had become a delicate legal proposition, deterring established firms from acquiring startups–Schmidt was in the middle of a buyer’s market. “Android we could make us a force to reckon with” Schmidt thought to himself.
But he quickly shook that thought, remembering the words of his CFO: “There is no money in open source.” In an ideal world, Google would have used Android to promote its search engine—placing a search bar on Android users to draw users to its search engine—or maybe it could have tied a proprietary app store to the operating system, thus earning money from in-app purchases. But with the Klobuchar bill, these were no longer options. Not without endless haggling with Google’s planning committee of lawyers.
And they would have a point, of course. Google risked heavy fines and court-issued injunctions that would stop the project in its tracks. Such risks were not to be taken lightly. Schmidt needed a plan to make the Android platform profitable while accommodating Google’s rivals, but he had none.
The desserts were served, Schmidt steered the conversation to other topics, and the sun slowly set over Sand Hill Road.
Present Day, Cupertino
Apple continues to dominate the smartphone industry with little signs of significant competition on the horizon. While there are continuing rumors that Google, Facebook, or even TikTok might enter the market, these have so far failed to transpire.
Google’s failed partnership with Samsung, back in 2012, still looms large over the industry. After lengthy talks to create an open mobile platform failed to materialize, Google ultimately entered into an agreement with the longstanding mobile manufacturer. Unfortunately, the deal was mired by antitrust issues and clashing visions—Samsung was believed to favor a closed ecosystem, rather than the open platform envisioned by Google.
The sense that Apple is running away with the market is only reinforced by recent developments. Last week, Tim Cook unveiled the company’s new iPhone 11—the first ever mobile device to come with three cameras. With an eye-watering price tag of $1,199 for the top-of-the-line Pro model, it certainly is not cheap. In his presentation, Cook assured consumers Apple had solved the security issues that have been an important bugbear for the iPhone and its ecosystem of competing app stores.
Analysts expect the new range of devices will help Apple cement the iPhone’s 50% market share. This is especially likely given the important challenges that Apple’s main rivals continue to face.
The Windows Phone’s reputation for buggy software continues to undermine its competitive position, despite its comparatively low price point. Andy Rubin, the head of the Windows Phone, was reassuring in a press interview, but there is little tangible evidence he will manage to successfully rescue the flailing ship. Meanwhile, Huawei has come under increased scrutiny for the threats it may pose to U.S. national security. The Chinese manufacturer may face a U.S. sales ban, unless the company’s smartphone branch is sold to a U.S. buyer. Oracle is said to be a likely candidate.
The sorry state of mobile competition has become an increasingly prominent policy issue. President Klobuchar took to Twitter and called on mobile-device companies to refrain from acting as monopolists, intimating elsewhere that failure to do so might warrant tougher regulation than her anti-discrimination bill:
We will learn more in the coming weeks about the fate of the proposed American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA), legislation sponsored by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) that would, among other things, prohibit “self-preferencing” by large digital platforms like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. But while the bill has already been subject to significant scrutiny, a crucially important topic has been absent from that debate: the measure’s likely effect on startup acquisitions.
Of course, AICOA doesn’t directly restrict startup acquisitions, but the activities it would restrict most certainly do dramatically affect the incentives that drive many startup acquisitions. If a platform is prohibited from engaging in cross-platform integration of acquired technologies, or if it can’t monetize its purchase by prioritizing its own technology, it may lose the motivation to make a purchase in the first place.
This would be a significant loss. As Dirk Auer, Sam Bowman, and I discuss in a recent article in the Missouri Law Review, acquisitions are arguably the most important component in providing vitality to the overall venture ecosystem:
Startups generally have two methods for achieving liquidity for their shareholders: IPOs or acquisitions. According to the latest data from Orrick and Crunchbase, between 2010 and 2018 there were 21,844 acquisitions of tech startups for a total deal value of $1.193 trillion. By comparison, according to data compiled by Jay R. Ritter, a professor at the University of Florida, there were 331 tech IPOs for a total market capitalization of $649.6 billion over the same period. As venture capitalist Scott Kupor said in his testimony during the FTC’s hearings on “Competition and Consumer Protection in the 21st Century,” “these large players play a significant role as acquirers of venture-backed startup companies, which is an important part of the overall health of the venture ecosystem.”
Moreover, acquisitions by large incumbents are known to provide a crucial channel for liquidity in the venture capital and startup communities: While at one time the source of the “liquidity events” required to yield sufficient returns to fuel venture capital was evenly divided between IPOs and mergers, “[t]oday that math is closer to about 80 percent M&A and about 20 percent IPOs—[with important implications for any] potential actions that [antitrust enforcers] might be considering with respect to the large platform players in this industry.” As investor and serial entrepreneur Leonard Speiser said recently, “if the DOJ starts going after tech companies for making acquisitions, venture investors will be much less likely to invest in new startups, thereby reducing competition in a far more harmful way.” (emphasis added)
Going after self-preferencing may have exactly the same harmful effect on venture investors and competition.
It’s unclear exactly how the legislation would be applied in any given context (indeed, this uncertainty is one of the most significant problems with the bill, as the ABA Antitrust Section has argued at length). But AICOA is designed, at least in part, to keep large online platforms in their own lanes—to keep them from “leveraging their dominance” to compete against more politically favored competitors in ancillary markets. Indeed, while covered platforms potentially could defend against application of the law by demonstrating that self-preferencing is necessary to “maintain or substantially enhance the core functionality” of the service, no such defense exists for non-core (whatever that means…) functionality, the enhancement of which through self-preferencing is strictly off limits under AICOA.
As I have written (and so have many, many, many, many others), this is terrible policy on its face. But it is also likely to have significant, adverse, indirect consequences for startup acquisitions, given the enormous number of such acquisitions that are outside the covered platforms’ “core functionality.”
Just take a quick look at a sample of the largest acquisitions made by Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet, for example. (These are screenshots of the first several acquisitions by size drawn from imperfect lists collected by Wikipedia, but for purposes of casual empiricism they are well-suited to give an idea of the diversity of acquisitions at issue):
Vanishingly few of these acquisitions go to the “core functionalities” of these platforms. Alphabet’s acquisitions, for example, involve (among many other things) cybersecurity; home automation; cloud computing; wearables, smart glasses, and AR hardware; GPS navigation software; communications security; satellite technology; and social gaming. Microsoft’s acquisitions include companies specializing in video games; social networking; software versioning; drawing software; cable television; cybersecurity; employee engagement; and e-commerce. The technologies and applications involved in acquisitions by Apple and Amazon are similarly varied.
Drilling down a bit, consider the companies Alphabet acquired and put to use in the service of Google Maps:
Which, if any, of these companies would Google have purchased if it knew it would be unable to prioritize Maps in its search results? Would Google have invested more than $1 billion in these companies—and likely significantly more in internal R&D to develop Maps—if it had to speculate whether it would be required (or even be able) to prove someday in the future that prioritizing Google Maps results would enhance its core functionality?
What about Xbox? As noted, AICOA’s terms aren’t perfectly clear, so I’m not certain it would apply to Xbox (is Xbox a “website, online or mobile application, operating system, digital assistant, or online service”?). Here are Microsoft’s video-gaming-related purchases:
The vast majority of these (and all of the acquisitions for which Wikipedia has purchase-price information, totaling some $80 billion of investment) involve video games, not the development of hardware or the functionality of the Xbox platform. Would Microsoft have made these investments if it knew it would be prohibited from prioritizing its own games or exclusively using data gleaned through these games to improve its platform? No one can say for certain, but, at the margin, it is absolutely certain that these self-preferencing bills would make such acquisitions less likely.
Perhaps the most obvious—and concerning—example of the problem arises in the context of Google’s Android platform. Google famously gives Android away for free, of course, and makes its operating system significantly open for bespoke use by all comers. In exchange, Google requires that implementers of the Android OS provide some modicum of favoritism to Google’s revenue-generating products, like Search. For all its uncertainty, there is no question that AICOA’s terms would prohibit this self-preferencing. Intentionally or not, it would thus prohibit the way in which Google monetizes Android and thus hopes to recoup some of the—literally—billions of dollars it has invested in the development and maintenance of Android.
Here are Google’s Android-related acquisitions:
Would Google have bought Android in the first place (to say nothing of subsequent acquisitions and its massive ongoing investment in Android) if it had been foreclosed from adopting its preferred business model to monetize its investment? In the absence of Google bidding for these companies, would they have earned as much from other potential bidders? Would they even have come into existence at all?
Of course, AICOA wouldn’t preclude Google chargingdevice makers for Android and thus raising the price of mobile devices. But that mechanism may not have been sufficient to support Google’s investment in Android, and it would certainly constrain its ability to compete. Even if rules like those proposed by AICOA didn’t undermine Google’s initial purchase of and investment in Android, it is manifestly unclear how forcing Google to adopt a business model that increases consumer prices and constrains its ability to compete head-to-head with Apple’s iOS ecosystem would benefit consumers. (This excellent series of posts—1, 2, 3, 4—by Dirk Auer on the European Commission’s misguided Android decision discusses in detail the significant costs of prohibiting self-preferencing on Android.)
There are innumerable further examples, as well. In all of these cases, it seems clear not only that an AICOA-like regime would diminish competition and reduce consumer welfare across important dimensions, but also that it would impoverish the startup ecosystem more broadly.
And that may be an even bigger problem. Even if you think, in the abstract, that it would be better for “Big Tech” not to own these startups, there is a real danger that putting that presumption into force would drive down acquisition prices, kill at least some tech-startup exits, and ultimately imperil the initial financing of tech startups. It should go without saying that this would be a troubling outcome. Yet there is no evidence to suggest that AICOA’s proponents have even considered whether the presumed benefits of the bill would be worth this immense cost.
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