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Biweekly FTC Roundup: Total Drama Island Edition

Daniel J. Gilman — 17 February 2023

In a Feb. 14 column in the Wall Street Journal, Commissioner Christine Wilson announced her intent to resign her position on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). For those curious to know why, she beat you to the punch in the title and subtitle of her column: “Why I’m Resigning as an FTC Commissioner: Lina Khan’s disregard for the rule of law and due process make it impossible for me to continue serving.”

This is the seventh FTC roundup I’ve posted to Truth on the Market since joining the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) last September, having left the FTC at the end of August. Relentlessly astute readers of this column may have observed that I cited (and linked to) Commissioner Wilson’s dissents in five of my six previous efforts—actually, to three of them in my Nov. 4 post alone.

As anyone might guess, I’ve linked to Wilson’s dissents (and concurrences, etc.) for the same reason I’ve linked to other sources: I found them instructive in some significant regard. Priors and particular conclusions of law aside, I generally found Wilson’s statements to be well-grounded in established principles of antitrust law and economics. I cannot say the same about statements from the current majority.

Commission dissents are not merely the bases for blog posts or venues for venting. They can provide a valuable window into agency matters for lawmakers and, especially, for the courts. And I would suggest that they serve an important institutional role at the FTC, whatever one thinks of the merits of any specific matter. There’s really no point to having a five-member commission if all its votes are unanimous and all its opinions uniform. Moreover, establishing the realistic possibility of dissent can lend credence to those commission opinions that are unanimous. And even in these fractious times, there are such opinions.

Wilson did not spring forth fully formed from the forehead of the U.S. Senate. She began her FTC career as a Georgetown student, serving as a law clerk in the Bureau of Competition; she returned some years later to serve as chief of staff to Chairman Tim Muris; and she returned again when confirmed as a commissioner in April 2018 (later sworn in in September 2018). In between stints at the FTC, she gained antitrust experience in private practice, both in law firms and as in-house counsel. I would suggest that her agency experience, combined with her work in the private sector, provided a firm foundation for the judgments required of a commissioner.

Daniel Kaufman, former acting director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, reflected on Wilson’s departure here. Personally, with apologies for the platitude, I would like to thank Commissioner Wilson for her service. And, not incidentally, for her consistent support for agency staff.

Her three Democratic colleagues on the commission also thanked her for her service, if only collectively, and tersely: “While we often disagreed with Commissioner Wilson, we respect her devotion to her beliefs and are grateful for her public service. We wish her well in her next endeavor.” That was that. No doubt heartfelt. Wilson’s departure column was a stern rebuke to the Commission, so there’s that. But then, stern rebukes fly in all directions nowadays.

While I’ve never been a commissioner, I recall a far nicer and more collegial sendoff when I departed from my lowly staff position. Come to think of it, I had a nicer sendoff when I left a large D.C. law firm as a third-year associate bound for a teaching position, way back when.

So, what else is new?

In January, I noted that “the big news at the FTC is all about noncompetes”; that is, about the FTC’s proposed rule to ban the use of noncompetes more-or-less across the board The rule would cover all occupations and all income levels, with a narrow exception for the sale of the business in which the “employee” has at least a 25% ownership stake (why 25%?), and a brief nod to statutory limits on the commission’s regulatory authority with regard to nonprofits, common carriers, and some other entities.

Colleagues Brian Albrecht (and here), Alden Abbott, Gus Hurwitz, and Corbin K. Barthold also have had things to say about it. I suggested that there were legitimate reasons to be concerned about noncompetes in certain contexts—sometimes on antitrust grounds, and sometimes for other reasons. But certain contexts are far from all contexts, and a mixed and developing body of economic literature, coupled with limited FTC experience in the subject, did not militate in favor of nearly so sweeping a regulatory proposal. This is true even before we ask practical questions about staffing for enforcement or, say, whether the FTC Act conferred the requisite jurisdiction on the agency.

This is the first or second FTC competition rulemaking ever, depending on how one counts, and it is the first this century, in any case. Here’s administrative scholar Thomas Merrill on FTC competition rulemaking. Given the Supreme Court’s recent articulation of the major questions doctrine in West Virginia v. EPA, a more modest and bipartisan proposal might have been far more prudent. A bad turn at the court can lose more than the matter at hand. Comments are due March 20, by the way.

Now comes a missive from the House Judiciary Committee, along with multiple subcommittees, about the noncompete NPRM. The letter opens by stating that “The Proposed Rule exceeds its delegated authority and imposes a top-down one-size-fits-all approach that violates basic American principles of federalism and free markets.” And “[t]he Biden FTC’s proposed rule on non-compete clauses shows the radicalness of the so-called ‘hipster’ antitrust movement that values progressive outcomes over long-held legal and economic principles.”

Ouch. Other than that Mr. Jordan, how did you like the play?

There are several single-spaced pages on the “FTC’s power grab” before the letter gets to a specific, and substantial, formal document request in the service of congressional oversight. That does not stop the rulemaking process, but it does not bode well either.

Part of why this matters is that there’s still solid, empirically grounded, pro-consumer work that’s at risk. In my first Truth on the Market post, I applauded FTC staff comments urging New York State to reject a certificate of public advantage (COPA) application. As I noted there, COPAs are rent-seeking mechanisms chiefly aimed at insulating anticompetitive mergers (and sometimes conduct) from federal antitrust scrutiny. Commission and staff opposition to COPAs was developed across several administrations on well-established competition principles and a significant body of research regarding hospital consolidation, health care prices, and quality of care.

Office of Policy Planning (OPP) Director Elizabeth Wilkins has now announced that the parties in question have abandoned their proposed merger. Wilkins thanks the staff of OPP, the Bureau of Economics, and the Bureau of Competition for their work on the matter, and rightly so. There’s no new-fangled notion of Section 5 or mergers at play. The work has developed over decades and it’s the sort of work that should continue. Notwithstanding numerous (if not legion) departures, good and experienced staff and established methods remain, and ought not to be repudiated, much less put at risk.

Oh, right, Meta/Within. On Jan. 31, U.S. District Court Judge Edward J. Davila denied FTC’s request for a preliminary injunction blocking Meta’s proposed acquisition of Within. On Feb. 9, the commission announced “that this matter in its entirety be and it hereby is withdrawn from adjudication, and that all proceedings before the Administrative Law Judge be and they hereby are stayed.”

So, what happened? Much ink has been spilled on the weakness of the FTC’s case, both within ToTM (you see what I did there?) and without. ToTM posts by Dirk Auer, Alden Abbott, Gus Hurwitz, Gus again, and I enjoyed no monopoly on skepticism. Ashley Gold called the case “a stretch”; Gary Shapiro, in Fortune, called it “laughable.” And as Gus had pointed out, even the New York Times seemed skeptical.

I won’t recapitulate the much-discussed case, but on the somewhat-less-discussed matter of the withdrawal, I’ll consider why the FTC announced that the matter “is withdrawn from adjudication, and that all proceedings before the Administrative Law Judge be and they hereby are stayed.” While the matter was not litigated to its conclusion in federal court, the substantial and workmanlike opinion denying the preliminary injunction made it clear that the FTC had lost on the facts under both of the theories of harm to potential competition that they’d advanced.

“Having reviewed and considered the objective evidence of Meta’s capabilities and incentives, the Court is not persuaded that this evidence establishes that it was ‘reasonably probable’ Meta would enter the relevant market.”

An appeal in the 9^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals likely seemed fruitless. Stopping short of a final judgment, the FTC could have tried for a do-over in its internal administrative Part 3 process, and might have fared well before itself, but that would have demanded considerable additional resources in a case that, in the long run, was bound to be a loser. Bloomberg had previously reported that the commission voted to proceed with the case against the merger contra the staff’s recommendation. Here, the commission noted that “Complaint Counsel [the Commission’s own staff] has not registered any objection” to Meta’s motion to withdraw proceedings from adjudication.

There are novel approaches to antitrust. And there are the courts and the law. And, as noted above, many among the staff are well-versed in that law and experienced at investigations. You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you get what you deserve.

In Antitrust & Competition, Antitrust at the Agencies Roundup, Economic Theory, Facebook, Federal Trade Commission, Platforms, Section 5, Truth on the Market antitrust, Christine Wilson, dissent, ftc, mergers, Meta-Within, noncompete, politics, section 5, unfair methods of competition

Biweekly FTC Roundup: Grail-Shaped Beacon Edition

Daniel J. Gilman — 9 December 2022

The lame duck is not yet dead, and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is supposed to be an independent agency. Work continues. The Commission has announced a partly open oral argument in the Illumina-Grail matter. That is, parts of the argument will be open to the public, via webcast, and parts won’t. This is what’s known as translucency in government.

Enquiring minds: I have several questions about Illumina-Grail. First, for anyone reading this column, am I the only one who cannot think of the case without thinking of Monty Python’s grail-shaped beacon? Asking for a friend who worries about me.

Second, why seek to unwind this merger? My ICLE colleagues Geoff Manne and Gus Hurwitz are members of a distinguished group of law & economics scholars who filed a motion for leave to file an amicus brief in the matter. They question the merits of the case on a number of grounds.

Pertinent, not dispositive: this is a vertical merger. Certainly, it’s possible for vertical mergers to harm competition but theory suggests that they entail at least some efficiencies, and the empirical evidence from Francine Lafontaine and others tends to suggest that most have been beneficial for firms and consumers alike. One might wonder about the extent to which this case is built on analysis of the facts and circumstances rather than on Chair Lina Khan’s well-publicized antipathy to vertical mergers.

Recall that the FTC and U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) jointly issued updated vertical-merger guidelines in June 2020. (The Global Antitrust Institute’s 2018 comments are worth review). The FTC—but not DOJ—promptly withdrew them in 2021, with a new majority, a partisan vote, and a questionable rationale for going it alone. Carl Shapiro and Herbert Hovenkamp minced no words, saying that the Commission’s justification rested on “specious economic arguments.”

There’s also a question of whether FTC’s likely foreclosure argument is all that likely. Illumina, which created Grail and had retained a substantial interest in it all along, would have strong commercial incentives against barring Grail’s future competitors from its platform. Moreover, Illumina made an open offer—contractually binding—to continue providing access for 12 years to its NGS platform and other products, on terms substantially similar to those available pre-merger. That would seem to undercut the possibility of foreclosure. Complaint counsel discounts this as a remedy (with behavioral remedies disfavored), but it is relatively straightforward and not really a remedy at all, with terms both private parties and the FTC might enforce. Thom Lambert and Jonathan Barnett both have interesting posts on the matter.

This is about a future market and potential (presumed) competitors. And it’s an area of biologics commerce where the deep pockets and regulatory sophistication necessary for development and approval frequently militate in favor of acquisition of a small innovator by a larger, established firm. As I noted in a prior column, “[p]otential competition cases are viable given the right facts, and in areas where good grounds to predict significant entry are well-established.” It can be hard to second-guess rule-of-reason cases from the outside, but there are reasons to think this is one of those matters where the preconditions to a strong potential competition argument are absent, but merger-related efficiencies real.

What else is going on at the FTC? Law360 reports on a staff brief urging the Commission not to pitch a new standard of review in Altria-Juul on what look to be sensible grounds, independent of the merits of their Section I case. The Commission had asked to be briefed on the possibility of switching to a claim of a per se violation or, in the alternative, quick look, and the staff brief recommends maintaining the rule-of-reason approach that the Commission’s ALJ found unpersuasive in dismissing the Commission’s case, which will now be heard by the Commission itself. I have no non-public information on the matter. There’s a question of whether this signals any real tension between the staff’s analysis and the Commission’s preferred approach or simply the Commission’s interest in asking questions about pushing boundaries and the staff providing good counsel. I don’t know, but it could be business as usual.

And just this week, FTC announced that it is bringing a case to block Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision. More on that to follow.

What’s pressing is not so clear. The Commission announced the agenda for a Dec. 14 open meeting. On it is a vote on regulatory review of the “green guides,” which provide guidance on environmental-marketing claims. But there’s nothing further on the various ANPRs announced in September, or about rulemaking that the Chair has hinted at for noncompete clauses in employment contracts. And, of course, we’re still waiting for merger guidelines to replace the ones that have been withdrawn—likely joint FTC/DOJ guidelines that will likely range over both horizontal and vertical mergers.

There’s the Altria matter, Meta, Meta-Within, the forthcoming Supreme Court opinion in Axon, etc. The FTC’s request for an injunction in Meta-Within will be heard in federal district court in California over the next couple of weeks. It’s a novel (read, speculative) complaint. I had a few paragraphs on Meta-Within in my first roundup column; Gus Hurwitz covered it, as well. We shall see.

Wandering up Pennsylvania Avenue onto the Hill, various bills seem not so much lame ducks as dead ones. But perhaps one or more is not dead yet. The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) might be one such bill, its conspicuous defects notwithstanding. “Might be.” First, a bit of FTC history. Way back in 2010, the FTC held a series of workshops on the Future of Journalism. There were many interesting issues there, if no obvious room for antitrust. I reveal no secrets in saying THOSE WORKSHOPS WERE NOT THE STAFF’S IDEA. We failed to recommend any intervention, although the staff did publish a clarification of its discussion draft:

The FTC has not endorsed the idea of making any policy recommendation or recommended any of the proposals in the discussion draft

My own take at the time: many newspapers were struggling, and that was unfortunate, but much of the struggle had to do with the papers’ loss of local print-advertising monopolies, which tended to offer high advertising prices but not high quality. Remember the price of classified ads? For decades, many of the holders of market power happened to turn large portions of their rents over to their news divisions. Then came the internet, then Craigslist, etc., etc., and down went the rents. Antitrust intervention seemed no answer at all.

Back to the bill. In brief, as currently drafted, the JCPA would permit certain “digital journalism providers” to form cartels to negotiate prices with large online platforms, and to engage in group boycotts, without being liable to the federal antitrust laws, at least for four years. Dirk Auer and Ben Sperry have an overview here.

This would be an exemption for some sources of journalism, but not all, and its benefits would not be equally distributed. I am a paying consumer of digital (and even print) journalism. On the one hand, I enjoy it when others subsidize my preferences. On the other, I’m not sure why they should. As I said in a prior column, “antitrust exemptions help the special interests receiving them but not a living soul besides those special interests. That’s it, full stop.”

Moreover, as Brian Albrecht points out, the bill’s mandatory final arbitration provision is likely to lead to a form of price regulation.

England v. France on Saturday. Allez les bleus or we few, we happy few? Cheers.

The Catch-22 of AICOA’s Guidelines

Geoffrey Manne — 25 July 2022

[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.]

If S.2992—the American Innovation and Choice Online Act or AICOA—were to become law, it would be, at the very least, an incomplete law. By design—and not for good reason, but for political expediency—AICOA is riddled with intentional uncertainty. In theory, the law’s glaring definitional deficiencies are meant to be rectified by “expert” agencies (i.e., the DOJ and FTC) after passage. But in actuality, no such certainty would ever emerge, and the law would stand as a testament to the crass political machinations and absence of rigor that undergird it. Among many other troubling outcomes, this is what the future under AICOA would hold.

Guidelines Cannot Substitute for the Law’s Lack of Legal Certainty

Two months ago, the American Bar Association’s (ABA) Antitrust Section published a searing critique of AICOA in which it denounced the bill for being poorly written, vague, and departing from established antitrust-law principles. As Lazar Radic and I discussed in a previous post, what made the ABA’s letter to Congress so eye-opening was that it was penned by a typically staid group with a reputation for independence, professionalism, and ideational heterogeneity.

One of the main issues the ABA flagged in its letter is that the introduction of vague new concepts—like “materially harm competition,” which does not exist anywhere in current antitrust law—into the antitrust mainstream will risk substantial legal uncertainty and produce swathes of unintended consequences.

According to some, however, the bill’s inherent uncertainty is a feature, not a bug. It leaves enough space for specialist agencies to define the precise meaning of key terms without unduly narrowing the scope of the bill ex ante.

In particular, supporters of the bill have pointed to the prospect of agency guidelines under the law to rescue it from the starkest of the fundamental issues identified by the ABA. Section 4 of AICOA requires the DOJ and FTC to issue “agency enforcement guidelines” no later than 270 days after the date of enactment:

outlining policies and practices relating to conduct that may materially harm competition under section 3(a), agency interpretations of the affirmative defenses under section 3(b), and policies for determining the appropriate amount of a civil penalty to be sought under section 3(c).

In pointing to the prospect of guidelines, however, supporters are inadvertently admitting defeat—and proving the ABA’s point: AICOA is not ready for prime time.

This thinking is misguided for at least three reasons:

Guidelines are not rules

As section 4(d) of AICOA recognizes, guidelines are emphatically nonbinding:

The joint guidelines issued under this section do not … operate to bind the Commission, Department of Justice, or any person, State, or locality to the approach recommended in the guidelines.

As such, the value of guidelines in dispelling legal uncertainty is modest, at best.

This is even more so in today’s highly politicized atmosphere, where guidelines can be withdrawn at the tip of the ballot (we’ve just seen the FTC rescind the Vertical Merger Guidelines it put in place less than a year ago). Given how politicized the issuing agencies themselves have become, it’s a virtual certainty that the guidelines produced in response to AICOA would be steeped in partisan politics and immediately changed with a change in administration, thus providing no more lasting legal certainty than speculation by a member of Congress.

Guidelines are not the appropriate tool to define novel concepts

Regardless of this political reality, however, the mixture of vagueness and novelty inherent in the key concepts that underpin the infringements and affirmative defenses under AICOA—such as “fairness,” “preferencing,” “materiality”, or the “intrinsic” value of a product—undermine the usefulness (and legitimacy) of guidelines.

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.

The operative terms of AICOA don’t have definitive meanings under antitrust law, either because they are wholly foreign to accepted antitrust law (as in the case of “self-preferencing”) or because the courts have never agreed on an accepted definition (as in the case of “fairness”). Nor are they technical standards, which are better left to specialized agencies rather than to legislators to define, such as in the case of, e.g., pollution (by contrast: what is the technical standard for “fairness”?).

Indeed, as Elyse Dorsey has noted, the only certainty that would emerge from this state of affairs is the certainty of pervasive rent-seeking by non-altruistic players seeking to define the rules in their favor.

As we’ve pointed out elsewhere, the purpose of guidelines is to reflect the state of the art in a certain area of antitrust law and not to push the accepted scope of knowledge and practice in a new direction. This not only overreaches the FTC’s and DOJ’s powers, but also risks galvanizing opposition from the courts, thereby undermining the utility of adopting guidelines in the first place.

Guidelines can’t fix a fundamentally flawed law

Expecting guidelines to provide sensible, administrable content for the bill sets the bar overly high for guidelines, and unduly low for AICOA.

The alleged harms at the heart of AICOA are foreign to antitrust law, and even to the economic underpinnings of competition policy more broadly. Indeed, as Sean Sullivan has pointed out, the law doesn’t even purport to define “harms,” but only serves to make specific conduct illegal:

Even if the conduct has no effect, it’s made illegal, unless an affirmative defense is raised. And the affirmative defense requires that it doesn’t ‘harm competition.’ But ‘harm competition’ is undefined…. You have to prove that harm doesn’t result, but it’s not really ever made clear what the harm is in the first place.”

“Self-preferencing” is not a competitive defect, and simply declaring it to be so does not make it one. As I’ve noted elsewhere:

The notion that platform entry into competition with edge providers is harmful to innovation is entirely speculative. Moreover, it is flatly contrary to a range of studies showing that the opposite is likely true…. The theory of vertical discrimination harm is at odds not only with this platform-specific empirical evidence, it is also contrary to the long-standing evidence on the welfare effects of vertical restraints more broadly …
… [M]andating openness is not without costs, most importantly in terms of the effective operation of the platform and its own incentives for innovation.

Asking agencies with an expertise in competition policy to enact economically sensible guidelines to direct enforcement against such conduct is a fool’s errand. It is a recipe for purely political legislation adopted by competition agencies that does nothing to further their competition missions.

AICOA’s Catch-22 Is Its Own Doing, and Will Be Its Downfall

AICOA’s Catch-22 is that, by making the law so vague that it needs enforcement guidelines to flesh it out, AICOA renders both itself and those same guidelines irrelevant and misses the point of both legal instruments.

Ultimately, guidelines cannot resolve the fundamental rule-of-law issues raised by the bill and highlighted by the ABA in its letter. To the contrary, they confirm the ABA’s concerns that AICOA is a poorly written and indeterminate bill. Further, the contentious elements of the bill that need clarification are inherently legislative ones that—paradoxically—shouldn’t be left to competition-agency guidelines to elucidate.

The upshot is that any future under AICOA will be one marked by endless uncertainty and the extreme politicization of both competition policy and the agencies that enforce it.

The FTC UMC Roundup–A Weekly Review

Gus Hurwitz — 20 May 2022

Welcome to the FTC UMC Roundup, our new weekly update of news and events relating to antitrust and, more specifically, to the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) newfound interest in “revitalizing” the field. Each week we will bring you a brief recap of the week that was and a preview of the week to come. All with a bit of commentary and news of interest to regular readers of Truth on the Market mixed in.

This week’s headline? Of course it’s that Alvaro Bedoya has been confirmed as the FTC’s fifth commissioner—notably breaking the commission’s 2-2 tie between Democrats and Republicans and giving FTC Chair Lina Khan the majority she has been lacking. Politico and Gibson Dunn both offer some thoughts on what to expect next—though none of the predictions are surprising: more aggressive merger review and litigation; UMC rulemakings on a range of topics, including labor, right-to-repair, and pharmaceuticals; and privacy-related consumer protection. The real question is how quickly and aggressively the FTC will implement this agenda. Will we see a flurry of rulemakings in the next week, or will they be rolled out over a period of months or years? Will the FTC risk major litigation questions with a “go big or go home” attitude, or will it take a more incrementalist approach to boiling the frog?

Much of the rest of this week’s action happened on the Hill. Khan, joined by Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Gary Gensler, made the regular trip to Congress to ask for a bigger budget to support more hires. (FTC, Law360) Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) asked for unanimous consent on his State Antitrust Enforcement Venue Act, but met resistance from Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who wants that bill paired with her own American Innovation and Choice Online Act. This follows reports that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is pushing Klobuchar to get support in line for both AICOA and the Open App Markets Act to be brought to the Senate floor. Of course, if they had the needed support, we probably wouldn’t be talking so much about whether they have the needed support.

Questions about the climate at the FTC continue following release of the Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey. Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) wants to know what has caused staff satisfaction at the agency to fall precipitously. And former senior FTC staffer Eileen Harrington issued a stern rebuke of the agency at this week’s open meeting, saying of the relationship between leadership and staff that: “The FTC is not a failed agency but it’s on the road to becoming one. This is a crisis.”

Perhaps the only thing experiencing greater inflation than the dollar is interest in the FTC doing something about inflation. Alden Abbott and Andrew Mercado remind us that these calls are misplaced. But that won’t stop politicians from demanding the FTC do something about high gas prices. Or beef production. Or utilities. Or baby formula.

A little further afield, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an opinion this week in a case involving SEC administrative-law judges that took broad issue with them on delegation, due process, and “take care” grounds. It may come as a surprise that this has led to much overwrought consternation that the opinion would dismantle the administrative state. But given that it is often the case that the SEC and FTC face similar constitutional issues (recall that Kokesh v. SEC was the precursor to AMG Capital), the 5th Circuit case could portend future problems for FTC adjudication. Add this to the queue with the Supreme Court’s pending review of whether federal district courts can consider constitutional challenges to an agency’s structure. The court was already scheduled to consider this question with respect to the FTC this next term in Axon, and agreed this week to hear a similar SEC-focused case next term as well.

Some Navel-Gazing News!

Congratulations to recent University of Michigan Law School graduate Kacyn Fujii, winner of our New Voices competition for contributions to our recent symposium on FTC UMC Rulemaking (hey, this post is actually part of that symposium, as well!). Kacyn’s contribution looked at the statutory basis for FTC UMC rulemaking authority and evaluated the use of such authority as a way to address problematic use of non-compete clauses.

And, one for the academics (and others who enjoy writing academic articles): you might be interested in this call for proposals for a research roundtable on Market Structuring Regulation that the International Center for Law & Economics will host in September. If you are interested in writing on topics that include conglomerate business models, market-structuring regulation, vertical integration, or other topics relating to the regulation and economics of contemporary markets, we hope to hear from you!

Suggested Redline Edits to the DOJ’s Letter to Judiciary Committee Leadership

Alden Abbott — 30 March 2022

The Biden administration finally has taken a public position on parallel House (H.R. 3816) and Senate (S. 2992) bills that would impose new welfare-reducing regulatory constraints on the ability of large digital platforms to engage in innovative business practices that benefit consumers and the economy.

The administration’s articulation of its position—set forth in a March 28 U.S. Justice Department (DOJ letter to House and Senate Judiciary Committee leadership—is a fine example of draftsmanship. With just a few very minor redline edits, which I suggest below, the letter would advance sound and enlightened procompetitive policy.

I hope the DOJ will accept my modest redlines and incorporate them into a new letter to Congress, superseding the March 28 draft. My edited redline and clean revisions of the current draft follow (redline draft is in italics, clean draft in bold italics):

Redline Version

Dear Chairman Nadler, Chairman Cicilline, Representative Jordan, and Representative Buck:

The Department of Justice (Department) appreciates the considerable attention and resources devoted by the House and Senate Committees on the Judiciary over the past several years to ensuring the competitiveness of our digital economy, and writes today to ~~express support for~~ oppose the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, Senate bill S. 2992, and the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, House bill H.R. 3816, which contain similar prohibitions on discriminatory conduct by dominant platforms (the “bills”). Unfortunately, the legislative efforts expended on these bills have been a waste of time.

The Department views the rise of major digital~~dominant~~ platforms as presenting a great boon to~~threat to~~ open markets and competition, ~~with~~ bestowing benefits on~~risks~~ ~~for~~ consumers, businesses, innovation, resiliency, global competitiveness, and our democracy. By enhancing value ~~controlling~~transmitted through key arteries of the nation’s commerce and communications, such platforms have promoted a more vibrant and innovative ~~can exercise outsized market power~~ ~~in our~~ modern economy. Vesting in government the power to pick winners and losers across markets through legislative regulation as found in the bills ~~in a small number of corporations~~ contravenes the foundations of our capitalist system, and given the increasing importance of these markets, the economic benefits flowing from~~power~~ ~~of such~~ platforms activity areis likely to be curtailed if the bills are passed ~~continue to grow unless checked~~. Enactment of the bills would~~This~~ puts at risk the nation’s economic progress and prosperity, ultimately threatening the economic liberty that undergirds our democracy.

The legislation, if enacted, would emphasize causes of action prohibiting the largest digital platforms from “discriminating” in favor of their own products or services, or among third parties. In so doing, it would eliminate and disincentivize many ~~provide important clarification from~~ ~~Congress on types of discriminatory conduct~~ efficient business arrangements that can materially enhance~~harm~~ competition. This would thereby undermine~~improve~~ ~~upon~~ the system of ex ante enforcement through which the United States maintains competitive markets with legal prohibitions on competitively harmful corporate conduct. By mistakenly characterizing ~~confirming~~ ~~the illegality of~~ as anticompetitive platform behaviors that in reality enhance~~reduce~~ incentives for vigorous innovation and dynamic competition, ~~smaller or newer firms to innovate and compete,~~ the legislation would undermine~~supplement~~ the existing antitrust laws. Specifically, the legislation would in prevent~~ing~~ the largest digital companies from managing their business transactions in an efficient welfare-enhancing manner, ~~abusing and exploiting their dominant positions~~ to the detriment of competition and the competitive process. The Department is strongly concerned about~~supportive of~~ these harmful effects.~~objectives~~ ~~and~~ As such, it encourages both the Committees and Congress ~~to work~~ to abandon all efforts to finalize this legislation~~finalize this legislation~~[1] and pass it into law.

The Department views the legislation’s new prohibitions on discrimination as a harmful detriment~~helpful complement~~ to, and interference with~~clarification of~~, existing antitrust authority. In our view, the most significant harm~~benefits~~ would arise where the legislation seeks to elucidates Congress’ views of anticompetitive conduct—particularly with respect to harmful types of discrimination and self-preferencing by dominant platforms. Enumerating specific “discriminatory” and “self-preferencing” conduct that Congress views as anticompetitive and therefore illegal would undermine the economically informed, fact-specific evaluation of business conduct that lies at the heart of modern antitrust analysis, centered on consumer welfare. Modern economic analysis demonstrates that a great deal of superficially “discriminatory” and “self-preferencing” conduct often represents consumer welfare-enhancing behavior that adds to economic surplus. Deciding whether such conduct is procompetitive (welfare-enhancing) or anticompetitive in a particular instance is the role of existing case-by-case antitrust enforcement. This approach vindicates competition while avoiding the wrongful condemnation of economically beneficial behavior. In contrast, by creating a new class of antitrust “wrongs,” the bills would lead to the incorrect condemnation of many business practices that enhance market efficiency and strengthen the economy.~~clarify~~ the antitrust laws and supplement the available causes of action and legal frameworks to pursue that conduct. Doing so would enhance the ability of the DOJ and FTC to challenge that conduct efficiently and effectively and better enable them to promote competition in digital markets. The legislation also has the potential to effectively harmonize broad prohibitions with the particularized needs and business practices of individual platforms over time.

If enacted, we believe that this legislation has the potential to have a major negative~~positive~~ effect on dynamism in digital markets going forward. Our future global competitiveness depends on innovators and entrepreneurs having the ability to access markets, free from counterproductive inflexible government market regulation~~dominant incumbents~~ that impede innovation, competition, resiliency, and widespread prosperity. “Discriminatory” conduct by major~~dominant~~ platforms, properly understood, often benefits ~~can sap the rewards from other~~ innovators and entrepreneurs, increasing~~reducing~~ the incentives for entrepreneurship and innovation. Even more importantly, the legislation may undercut~~support~~ the creation and growth of new tech businesses adjacent to the platforms., Such an unfortunate result would reduce the welfare-enhancing initiatives of new businesses that are complementary to the economically beneficial activity (to consumers and producers) generated by the platforms. ~~which~~ ~~may ultimately~~ ~~pose a~~ ~~critically needed competitive check to the covered platforms themselves.~~ We view reduction of these new business initiatives ~~benefits~~ as a significant harm that would stem from passage of the bills. For these reasons, the Department strongly ~~supports the principles and goals animating~~ opposes the legislation and looks forward to working with Congress to further explain why this undoubtedly well-meaning legislative initiative is detrimental to vigorous competition and a strong American economy.~~ensure that the final legislation enacted meets these goals.~~

Thank you for the opportunity to present our views. We hope this information is helpful. Please do not hesitate to contact this office if we may be of additional assistance to you.

[1] In other words,As , the Department respectfully recommends that members of Congress stop wasting time seeking to revise and enact this legislation.~~members continue to revise the legislation, the Department will provide under separate cover additional assistance to ensure that the bills achieve their goals.~~

Clean Version (incorporating all redline edits)

Dear Chairman Nadler, Chairman Cicilline, Representative Jordan, and Representative Buck:

The Department of Justice (Department) appreciates the considerable attention and resources devoted by the House and Senate Committees on the Judiciary over the past several years to ensuring the competitiveness of our digital economy, and writes today to oppose the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, Senate bill S. 2992, and the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, House bill H.R. 3816, which contain similar prohibitions on discriminatory conduct by dominant platforms (the “bills”). Unfortunately, the legislative efforts expended on these bills have been a waste of time.

The Department views the rise of major digital platforms as presenting a great boon to open markets and competition, bestowing benefits on consumers, businesses, innovation, resiliency, global competitiveness, and our democracy. By enhancing value transmitted through key arteries of the nation’s commerce and communications, such platforms have promoted a more vibrant and innovative modern economy. Vesting in government the power to pick winners and losers across markets through legislative regulation as found in the bills contravenes the foundations of our capitalist system, and given the increasing importance of these markets, the economic benefits flowing from platform activity are likely to be curtailed if the bills are passed. Enactment of the bills would put at risk the nation’s economic progress and prosperity, ultimately threatening the economic liberty that undergirds our democracy.

The legislation, if enacted, would emphasize causes of action prohibiting the largest digital platforms from “discriminating” in favor of their own products or services, or among third parties. In so doing, it would eliminate and disincentivize many efficient business arrangements that can materially enhance competition. This would thereby undermine the system of ex ante enforcement through which the United States maintains competitive markets with legal prohibitions on competitively harmful corporate conduct. By mistakenly characterizing as anticompetitive platform behaviors that in reality enhance incentives for vigorous innovation and dynamic competition, the legislation would undermine the existing antitrust laws. Specifically, the legislation would prevent the largest digital companies from managing their business transactions in an efficient welfare-enhancing manner, to the detriment of competition and the competitive process. The Department is strongly concerned about these harmful effects. As such, it encourages both the Committees and Congress to abandon all efforts to finalize this legislation and pass it into law.[1]

The Department views the legislation’s new prohibitions on discrimination as a harmful detriment to, and interference with, existing antitrust authority. In our view, the most significant harm would arise where the legislation seeks to elucidate Congress’ views of anticompetitive conduct—particularly with respect to harmful types of discrimination and self-preferencing by dominant platforms. Enumerating specific “discriminatory” and “self-preferencing” conduct that Congress views as anticompetitive and therefore illegal would undermine the economically informed, fact-specific evaluation of business conduct that lies at the heart of modern antitrust analysis, centered on consumer welfare. Modern economic analysis demonstrates that a great deal of superficially “discriminatory” and “self-preferencing” conduct often represents consumer welfare-enhancing behavior that adds to economic surplus. Deciding whether such conduct is procompetitive (welfare-enhancing) or anticompetitive in a particular instance is the role of existing case-by-case antitrust enforcement. This approach vindicates competition while avoiding the wrongful condemnation of economically beneficial behavior. In contrast, by creating a new class of antitrust “wrongs,” the bills would lead to the incorrect condemnation of many business practices that enhance market efficiency and strengthen the economy.

If enacted, we believe that this legislation has the potential to have a major negative effect on dynamism in digital markets going forward. Our future global competitiveness depends on innovators and entrepreneurs having the ability to access markets, free from counterproductive inflexible government market regulation that impede innovation, competition, resiliency, and widespread prosperity. “Discriminatory” conduct by major platforms, properly understood, often benefits innovators and entrepreneurs, increasing the incentives for entrepreneurship and innovation. Even more importantly, the legislation may undercut the creation and growth of new tech businesses adjacent to the platforms. Such an unfortunate result would reduce the welfare-enhancing initiatives of new businesses that are complementary to the economically beneficial activity (to consumers and producers) generated by the platforms. We view reduction of these new business initiatives as a significant harm that would stem from passage of the bills. For these reasons, the Department strongly opposes the legislation and looks forward to working with Congress to further explain why this undoubtedly well-meaning legislative initiative is detrimental to vigorous competition and a strong American economy.

Thank you for the opportunity to present our views. We hope this information is helpful. Please do not hesitate to contact this office if we may be of additional assistance to you.

[1] In other words, the Department respectfully recommends that members of Congress stop wasting time seeking to revise and enact this legislation.

In Antitrust & Competition, Antitrust Division, Exclusionary Conduct, Exclusive Dealing, Federal Trade Commission, Justice Department, Platforms, Truth on the Market, Tying, Vertical Restraints antitrust, consumer protection, ftc, politics

The Klobuchar Bill’s Not-So-Bright Lines for Antitrust Scrutiny

Eric Fruits & Geoffrey Manne — 20 July 2021

In a recent op-ed, Robert Bork Jr. laments the Biden administration’s drive to jettison the Consumer Welfare Standard that has formed nearly half a century of antitrust jurisprudence. The move can be seen in the near-revolution at the Federal Trade Commission, in the president’s executive order on competition enforcement, and in several of the major antitrust bills currently before Congress.

Bork notes the Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act, introduced by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), would “outlaw any mergers or acquisitions for the more than 80 large U.S. companies valued over $100 billion.”

Bork is correct that it will be more than 80 companies, but it is likely to be way more. While the Klobuchar bill does not explicitly outlaw such mergers, under certain circumstances, it shifts the burden of proof to the merging parties, who must demonstrate that the benefits of the transaction outweigh the potential risks. Under current law, the burden is on the government to demonstrate the potential costs outweigh the potential benefits.

One of the measure’s specific triggers for this burden-shifting is if the acquiring party has a market capitalization, assets, or annual net revenue of more than $100 billion and seeks a merger or acquisition valued at $50 million or more. About 120 or more U.S. companies satisfy at least one of these conditions. The end of this post provides a list of publicly traded companies, according to Zacks’ stock screener, that would likely be subject to the shift in burden of proof.

If the goal is to go after Big Tech, the Klobuchar bill hits the mark. All of the FAANG companies—Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Alphabet (formerly known as Google)—satisfy one or more of the criteria. So do Microsoft and PayPal.

But even some smaller tech firms will be subject to the shift in burden of proof. Zoom and Square have market caps that would trigger under Klobuchar’s bill and Snap is hovering around $100 billion in market cap. Twitter and eBay, however, are well under any of the thresholds. Likewise, privately owned Advance Communications, owner of Reddit, would also likely fall short of any of the triggers.

Snapchat has a little more than 300 million monthly active users. Twitter and Reddit each have about 330 million monthly active users. Nevertheless, under the Klobuchar bill, Snapchat is presumed to have more market power than either Twitter or Reddit, simply because the market assigns a higher valuation to Snap.

But this bill is about more than Big Tech. Tesla, which sold its first car only 13 years ago, is now considered big enough that it will face the same antitrust scrutiny as the Big 3 automakers. Walmart, Costco, and Kroger would be subject to the shifted burden of proof, while Safeway and Publix would escape such scrutiny. An acquisition by U.S.-based Nike would be put under the microscope, but a similar acquisition by Germany’s Adidas would not fall under the Klobuchar bill’s thresholds.

Tesla accounts for less than 2% of the vehicles sold in the United States. I have no idea what Walmart, Costco, Kroger, or Nike’s market share is, or even what comprises “the” market these companies compete in. What we do know is that the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission excel at narrowly crafting market definitions so that just about any company can be defined as dominant.

So much of the recent interest in antitrust has focused on Big Tech. But even the biggest of Big Tech firms operate in dynamic and competitive markets. None of my four children use Facebook or Twitter. My wife and I don’t use Snapchat. We all use Netflix, but we also use Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, YouTube, and Amazon Prime Video. None of these services have a monopoly on our eyeballs, our attention, or our pocketbooks.

The antitrust bills currently working their way through Congress abandon the long-standing balancing of pro- versus anti-competitive effects of mergers in favor of a “big is bad” approach. While the Klobuchar bill appears to provide clear guidance on the thresholds triggering a shift in the burden of proof, the arbitrary nature of the thresholds will result in arbitrary application of the burden of proof. If passed, we will soon be faced with a case in which two firms who differ only in market cap, assets, or sales will be subject to very different antitrust scrutiny, resulting in regulatory chaos.

Publicly traded companies with more than $100 billion in market capitalization

3M	Danaher Corp.	PepsiCo
Abbott Laboratories	Deere & Co.	Pfizer
AbbVie	Eli Lilly and Co.	Philip Morris International
Adobe Inc.	ExxonMobil	Procter & Gamble
Advanced Micro Devices	Facebook Inc.	Qualcomm
Alphabet Inc.	General Electric Co.	Raytheon Technologies
Amazon	Goldman Sachs	Salesforce
American Express	Honeywell	ServiceNow
American Tower	IBM	Square Inc.
Amgen	Intel	Starbucks
Apple Inc.	Intuit	Target Corp.
Applied Materials	Intuitive Surgical	Tesla Inc.
AT&T	Johnson & Johnson	Texas Instruments
Bank of America	JPMorgan Chase	The Coca-Cola Co.
Berkshire Hathaway	Lockheed Martin	The Estée Lauder Cos.
BlackRock	Lowe’s	The Home Depot
Boeing	Mastercard	The Walt Disney Co.
Bristol Myers Squibb	McDonald’s	Thermo Fisher Scientific
Broadcom Inc.	Medtronic	T-Mobile US
Caterpillar Inc.	Merck & Co.	Union Pacific Corp.
Charles Schwab Corp.	Microsoft	United Parcel Service
Charter Communications	Morgan Stanley	UnitedHealth Group
Chevron Corp.	Netflix	Verizon Communications
Cisco Systems	NextEra Energy	Visa Inc.
Citigroup	Nike Inc.	Walmart
Comcast	Nvidia	Wells Fargo
Costco	Oracle Corp.	Zoom Video Communications
CVS Health	PayPal

Publicly traded companies with more than $100 billion in current assets

Ally Financial	Freddie Mac
American International Group	KeyBank
BNY Mellon	M&T Bank
Capital One	Northern Trust
Citizens Financial Group	PNC Financial Services
Fannie Mae	Regions Financial Corp.
Fifth Third Bank	State Street Corp.
First Republic Bank	Truist Financial
Ford Motor Co.	U.S. Bancorp

Publicly traded companies with more than $100 billion in sales

AmerisourceBergen	Dell Technologies
Anthem	General Motors
Cardinal Health	Kroger
Centene Corp.	McKesson Corp.
Cigna	Walgreens Boots Alliance

Antitrust Statutorification

Nicolas Petit — 15 July 2021

[TOTM: The following is part of a symposium by TOTM guests and authors marking the release of Nicolas Petit’s “Big Tech and the Digital Economy: The Moligopoly Scenario.” The entire series of posts is available here.

This post is authored by Nicolas Petit himself, the Joint Chair in Competition Law at the Department of Law at European University Institute in Fiesole, Italy, and at EUI’s Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies. He is also invited professor at the College of Europe in Bruges.]

A lot of water has gone under the bridge since my book was published last year. To close this symposium, I thought I would discuss the new phase of antirust statutorification taking place before our eyes. In the United States, Congress is working on five antitrust bills that propose to subject platforms to stringent obligations, including a ban on mergers and acquisitions, required data portability and interoperability, and line-of-business restrictions. In the European Union (EU), lawmakers are examining the proposed Digital Markets Act (“DMA”) that sets out a complicated regulatory system for digital “gatekeepers,” with per se behavioral limitations of their freedom over contractual terms, technological design, monetization, and ecosystem leadership.

Proponents of legislative reform on both sides of the Atlantic appear to share the common view that ongoing antitrust adjudication efforts are both instrumental and irrelevant. They are instrumental because government (or plaintiff) losses build the evidence needed to support the view that antitrust doctrine is exceedingly conservative, and that legal reform is needed. Two weeks ago, antitrust reform activists ran to Twitter to point out that the U.S. District Court dismissal of the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) complaint against Facebook was one more piece of evidence supporting the view that the antitrust pendulum needed to swing. They are instrumental because, again, government (or plaintiffs) wins will support scaling antitrust enforcement in the marginal case by adoption of governmental regulation. In the EU, antitrust cases follow each other almost like night the day, lending credence to the view that regulation will bring much needed coordination and economies of scale.

But both instrumentalities are, at the end of the line, irrelevant, because they lead to the same conclusion: legislative reform is long overdue. With this in mind, the logic of lawmakers is that they need not await the courts, and they can advance with haste and confidence toward the promulgation of new antitrust statutes.

The antitrust reform process that is unfolding is a cause for questioning. The issue is not legal reform in itself. There is no suggestion here that statutory reform is necessarily inferior, and no correlative reification of the judge-made-law method. Legislative intervention can occur for good reason, like when it breaks judicial inertia caused by ideological logjam.

The issue is rather one of precipitation. There is a lot of learning in the cases. The point, simply put, is that a supplementary court-legislative dialogue would yield additional information—or what Guido Calabresi has called “starting points” for regulation—that premature legislative intervention is sweeping under the rug. This issue is important because specification errors (see Doug Melamed’s symposium piece on this) in statutory legislation are not uncommon. Feedback from court cases create a factual record that will often be missing when lawmakers act too precipitously.

Moreover, a court-legislative iteration is useful when the issues in discussion are cross-cutting. The digital economy brings an abundance of them. As tech analysist Ben Evans has observed, data-sharing obligations raise tradeoffs between contestability and privacy. Chapter VI of my book shows that breakups of social networks or search engines might promote rivalry and, at the same time, increase the leverage of advertisers to extract more user data and conduct more targeted advertising. In such cases, Calabresi said, judges who know the legal topography are well-placed to elicit the preferences of society. He added that they are better placed than government agencies’ officials or delegated experts, who often attend to the immediate problem without the big picture in mind (all the more when officials are denied opportunities to engage with civil society and the press, as per the policy announced by the new FTC leadership).

Of course, there are three objections to this. The first consists of arguing that statutes are needed now because courts are too slow to deal with problems. The argument is not dissimilar to Frank Easterbrook’s concerns about irreversible harms to the economy, though with a tweak. Where Easterbook’s concern was one of ossification of Type I errors due to stare decisis, the concern here is one of entrenchment of durable monopoly power in the digital sector due to Type II errors. The concern, however, fails the test of evidence. The available data in both the United States and Europe shows unprecedented vitality in the digital sector. Venture capital funding cruises at historical heights, fueling new firm entry, business creation, and economic dynamism in the U.S. and EU digital sectors, topping all other industries. Unless we require higher levels of entry from digital markets than from other industries—or discount the social value of entry in the digital sector—this should give us reason to push pause on lawmaking efforts.

The second objection is that following an incremental process of updating the law through the courts creates intolerable uncertainty. But this objection, too, is unconvincing, at best. One may ask which of an abrupt legislative change of the law after decades of legal stability or of an experimental process of judicial renovation brings more uncertainty.

Besides, ad hoc statutes, such as the ones in discussion, are likely to pose quickly and dramatically the problem of their own legal obsolescence. Detailed and technical statutes specify rights, requirements, and procedures that often do not stand the test of time. For example, the DMA likely captures Windows as a core platform service subject to gatekeeping. But is the market power of Microsoft over Windows still relevant today, and isn’t it constrained in effect by existing antitrust rules? In antitrust, vagueness in critical statutory terms allows room for change.[1] The best way to give meaning to buzzwords like “smart” or “future-proof” regulation consists of building in first principles, not in creating discretionary opportunities for permanent adaptation of the law. In reality, it is hard to see how the methods of future-proof regulation currently discussed in the EU creates less uncertainty than a court process.

The third objection is that we do not need more information, because we now benefit from economic knowledge showing that existing antitrust laws are too permissive of anticompetitive business conduct. But is the economic literature actually supportive of stricter rules against defendants than the rule-of-reason framework that applies in many unilateral conduct cases and in merger law? The answer is surely no. The theoretical economic literature has travelled a lot in the past 50 years. Of particular interest are works on network externalities, switching costs, and multi-sided markets. But the progress achieved in the economic understanding of markets is more descriptive than normative.

Take the celebrated multi-sided market theory. The main contribution of the theory is its advice to decision-makers to take the periscope out, so as to consider all possible welfare tradeoffs, not to be more or less defendant friendly. Payment cards provide a good example. Economic research suggests that any antitrust or regulatory intervention on prices affect tradeoffs between, and payoffs to, cardholders and merchants, cardholders and cash users, cardholders and banks, and banks and card systems. Equally numerous tradeoffs arise in many sectors of the digital economy, like ridesharing, targeted advertisement, or social networks. Multi-sided market theory renders these tradeoffs visible. But it does not come with a clear recipe for how to solve them. For that, one needs to follow first principles. A system of measurement that is flexible and welfare-based helps, as Kelly Fayne observed in her critical symposium piece on the book.

Another example might be worth considering. The theory of increasing returns suggests that markets subject to network effects tend to converge around the selection of a single technology standard, and it is not a given that the selected technology is the best one. One policy implication is that social planners might be justified in keeping a second option on the table. As I discuss in Chapter V of my book, the theory may support an M&A ban against platforms in tipped markets, on the conjecture that the assets of fringe firms might be efficiently repositioned to offer product differentiation to consumers. But the theory of increasing returns does not say under what conditions we can know that the selected technology is suboptimal. Moreover, if the selected technology is the optimal one, or if the suboptimal technology quickly obsolesces, are policy efforts at all needed?

Last, as Bo Heiden’s thought provoking symposium piece argues, it is not a given that antitrust enforcement of rivalry in markets is the best way to maintain an alternative technology alive, let alone to supply the innovation needed to deliver economic prosperity. Government procurement, science and technology policy, and intellectual-property policy might be equally effective (note that the fathers of the theory, like Brian Arthur or Paul David, have been very silent on antitrust reform).

There are, of course, exceptions to the limited normative content of modern economic theory. In some areas, economic theory is more predictive of consumer harms, like in relation to algorithmic collusion, interlocking directorates, or “killer” acquisitions. But the applications are discrete and industry-specific. All are insufficient to declare that the antitrust apparatus is dated and that it requires a full overhaul. When modern economic research turns normative, it is often way more subtle in its implications than some wild policy claims derived from it. For example, the emerging studies that claim to identify broad patterns of rising market power in the economy in no way lead to an implication that there are no pro-competitive mergers.

Similarly, the empirical picture of digital markets is incomplete. The past few years have seen a proliferation of qualitative research reports on industry structure in the digital sectors. Most suggest that industry concentration has risen, particularly in the digital sector. As with any research exercise, these reports’ findings deserve to be subject to critical examination before they can be deemed supportive of a claim of “sufficient experience.” Moreover, there is no reason to subject these reports to a lower standard of accountability on grounds that they have often been drafted by experts upon demand from antitrust agencies. After all, we academics are ethically obliged to be at least equally exacting with policy-based research as we are with science-based research.

Now, with healthy skepticism at the back of one’s mind, one can see immediately that the findings of expert reports to date have tended to downplay behavioral observations that counterbalance findings of monopoly power—such as intense business anxiety, technological innovation, and demand-expansion investments in digital markets. This was, I believe, the main takeaway from Chapter IV of my book. And less than six months ago, The Economist ran its leading story on the new marketplace reality of “Tech’s Big Dust-Up.”

More importantly, the findings of the various expert reports never seriously contemplate the possibility of competition by differentiation in business models among the platforms. Take privacy, for example. As Peter Klein reasonably writes in his symposium article, we should not be quick to assume market failure. After all, we might have more choice than meets the eye, with Google free but ad-based, and Apple pricy but less-targeted. More generally, Richard Langlois makes a very convincing point that diversification is at the heart of competition between the large digital gatekeepers. We might just be too short-termist—here, digital communications technology might help create a false sense of urgency—to wait for the end state of the Big Tech moligopoly.

Similarly, the expert reports did not really question the real possibility of competition for the purchase of regulation. As in the classic George Stigler paper, where the railroad industry fought motor-trucking competition with state regulation, the businesses that stand to lose most from the digital transformation might be rationally jockeying to convince lawmakers that not all business models are equal, and to steer regulation toward specific business models. Again, though we do not know how to consider this issue, there are signs that a coalition of large news corporations and the publishing oligopoly are behind many antitrust initiatives against digital firms.

Now, as is now clear from these few lines, my cautionary note against antitrust statutorification might be more relevant to the U.S. market. In the EU, sunk investments have been made, expectations have been created, and regulation has now become inevitable. The United States, however, has a chance to get this right. Court cases are the way to go. And unlike what the popular coverage suggests, the recent District Court dismissal of the FTC case far from ruled out the applicability of U.S. antitrust laws to Facebook’s alleged killer acquisitions. On the contrary, the ruling actually contains an invitation to rework a rushed complaint. Perhaps, as Shane Greenstein observed in his retrospective analysis of the U.S. Microsoft case, we would all benefit if we studied more carefully the learning that lies in the cases, rather than haste to produce instant antitrust analysis on Twitter that fits within 280 characters.

[1] But some threshold conditions like agreement or dominance might also become dated.

Alston Decision Shows Consumer Welfare Standard Isn’t Broken

Jeffrey Ogar — 28 June 2021

From Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), populist calls to “fix” our antitrust laws and the underlying Consumer Welfare Standard have found a foothold on Capitol Hill. At the same time, there are calls to “fix” the Supreme Court by packing it with new justices. The court’s unanimous decision in NCAA v. Alston demonstrates that neither needs repair. To the contrary, clearly anti-competitive conduct—like the NCAA’s compensation rules—is proscribed under the Consumer Welfare Standard, and every justice from Samuel Alito to Sonia Sotomayor can agree on that.

In 1984, the court in NCAA v. Board of Regents suggested that “courts should take care when assessing the NCAA’s restraints on student-athlete compensation.” After all, joint ventures like sports leagues are entitled to rule-of-reason treatment. But while times change, the Consumer Welfare Standard is sufficiently flexible to meet those changes.

Where a competitive restraint exists primarily to ensure that “enormous sums of money flow to seemingly everyone except the student athletes,” the court rightly calls it out for what it is. As Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in his concurrence:

Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate. And under ordinary principles of antitrust law, it is not evident why college sports should be any different. The NCAA is not above the law.

Disturbing these “ordinary principles”—whether through legislation, administrative rulemaking, or the common law—is simply unnecessary. For example, the Open Markets Institute filed an amicus brief arguing that the rule of reason should be “bounded” and willfully blind to the pro-competitive benefits some joint ventures can create (an argument that has been used, unsuccessfully, to attack ridesharing services like Uber and Lyft). Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) has proposed shifting the burden of proof so that merging parties are guilty until proven innocent. Sen. Warren would go further, deeming Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods anti-competitive simply because the company is “big,” and ignoring the merger’s myriad pro-competitive benefits. Sen. Hawley has gone further still: calling on Amazon to be investigated criminally for the crime of being innovative and successful.

Several of the current proposals, including those from Sens. Klobuchar and Hawley (and those recently introduced in the House that essentially single out firms for disfavored treatment), would replace the Consumer Welfare Standard that has underpinned antitrust law for decades with a policy that effectively punishes firms for being politically unpopular.

These examples demonstrate we should be wary when those in power assert that things are so irreparably broken that they need a complete overhaul. The “solutions” peddled usually increase politicians’ power by enabling them to pick winners and losers through top-down approaches that stifle the bottom-up innovations that make consumers’ lives better.

Are antitrust law and the Supreme Court perfect? Hardly. But in a 9-0 decision, the court proved this week that there’s nothing broken about either.

Committee Prepares to Grill Tech CEOS, but It Is the First Amendment That Could Get Torched

Ben Sperry — 24 March 2021

In what has become regularly scheduled programming on Capitol Hill, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai will be subject to yet another round of congressional grilling—this time, about the platforms’ content-moderation policies—during a March 25 joint hearing of two subcommittees of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The stated purpose of this latest bit of political theatre is to explore, as made explicit in the hearing’s title, “social media’s role in promoting extremism and misinformation.” Specific topics are expected to include proposed changes to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, heightened scrutiny by the Federal Trade Commission, and misinformation about COVID-19—the subject of new legislation introduced by Rep. Jennifer Wexton (D-Va.) and Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii).

But while many in the Democratic majority argue that social media companies have not done enough to moderate misinformation or hate speech, it is a problem with no realistic legal fix. Any attempt to mandate removal of speech on grounds that it is misinformation or hate speech, either directly or indirectly, would run afoul of the First Amendment.

Misinformation Is Usually Legal

Much of the recent focus has been on misinformation spread on social media about the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic. The memorandum for the March 25 hearing sums it up:

Facebook, Google, and Twitter have long come under fire for their role in the dissemination and amplification of misinformation and extremist content. For instance, since the beginning of the coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, all three platforms have spread substantial amounts of misinformation about COVID-19. At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, disinformation regarding the severity of the virus and the effectiveness of alleged cures for COVID-19 was widespread. More recently, COVID-19 disinformation has misrepresented the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines.
Facebook, Google, and Twitter have also been distributors for years of election disinformation that appeared to be intended either to improperly influence or undermine the outcomes of free and fair elections. During the November 2016 election, social media platforms were used by foreign governments to disseminate information to manipulate public opinion. This trend continued during and after the November 2020 election, often fomented by domestic actors, with rampant disinformation about voter fraud, defective voting machines, and premature declarations of victory.

It is true that, despite social media companies’ efforts to label and remove false content and bar some of the biggest purveyors, there remains a considerable volume of false information on social media. But U.S. Supreme Court precedent consistently has limited government regulation of false speech to distinct categories like defamation, perjury, and fraud.

The Case of Stolen Valor

The court’s 2011 decision in United States v. Alvarez struck down as unconstitutional the Stolen Valor Act of 2005, which made it a federal crime to falsely claim to have earned a military medal. A four-justice plurality opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, along with a two-justice concurrence, both agreed that a statement being false did not, by itself, exclude it from First Amendment protection.

Kennedy’s opinion noted that while the government may impose penalties for false speech connected with the legal process (perjury or impersonating a government official); with receiving a benefit (fraud); or with harming someone’s reputation (defamation); the First Amendment does not sanction penalties for false speech, in and of itself. The plurality exhibited particular skepticism toward the notion that government actors could be entrusted as a “Ministry of Truth,” empowered to determine what categories of false speech should be made illegal:

Permitting the government to decree this speech to be a criminal offense, whether shouted from the rooftops or made in a barely audible whisper, would endorse government authority to compile a list of subjects about which false statements are punishable. That governmental power has no clear limiting principle. Our constitutional tradition stands against the idea that we need Oceania’s Ministry of Truth… Were this law to be sustained, there could be an endless list of subjects the National Government or the States could single out… Were the Court to hold that the interest in truthful discourse alone is sufficient to sustain a ban on speech, absent any evidence that the speech was used to gain a material advantage, it would give government a broad censorial power unprecedented in this Court’s cases or in our constitutional tradition. The mere potential for the exercise of that power casts a chill, a chill the First Amendment cannot permit if free speech, thought, and discourse are to remain a foundation of our freedom. [EMPHASIS ADDED]

As noted in the opinion, declaring false speech illegal constitutes a content-based restriction subject to “exacting scrutiny.” Applying that standard, the court found “the link between the Government’s interest in protecting the integrity of the military honors system and the Act’s restriction on the false claims of liars like respondent has not been shown.”

While finding that the government “has not shown, and cannot show, why counterspeech would not suffice to achieve its interest,” the plurality suggested a more narrowly tailored solution could be simply to publish Medal of Honor recipients in an online database. In other words, the government could overcome the problem of false speech by promoting true speech.

In 2012, President Barack Obama signed an updated version of the Stolen Valor Act that limited its penalties to situations where a misrepresentation is shown to result in receipt of some kind of benefit. That places the false speech in the category of fraud, consistent with the Alvarez opinion.

Applying the Alvarez standard to social media, the government could (and already does) promote its interest in public health or election integrity by publishing true speech through official channels. But there is little reason to believe the government at any level could regulate access to misinformation. Anything approaching an outright ban on accessing speech deemed false by the government not only would not be the most narrowly tailored way to deal with such speech, but it is bound to have chilling effects even on true speech.

The analysis doesn’t change if the government instead places Big Tech itself in the position of Ministry of Truth. Some propose making changes to Section 230, which currently immunizes social media companies from liability for user speech (with limited exceptions), regardless what moderation policies the platform adopts. A hypothetical change might condition Section 230’s liability shield on platforms agreeing to moderate certain categories of misinformation. But that would still place the government in the position of coercing platforms to take down speech.

Even the “fix” of making social media companies liable for user speech they amplify through promotions on the platform, as proposed by Sen. Mark Warner’s (D-Va.) SAFE TECH Act, runs into First Amendment concerns. The aim of the bill is to regard sponsored content as constituting speech made by the platform, thus opening the platform to liability for the underlying misinformation. But any such liability also would be limited to categories of speech that fall outside First Amendment protection, like fraud or defamation. This would not appear to include most of the types of misinformation on COVID-19 or election security that animate the current legislative push.

There is no way for the government to regulate misinformation, in and of itself, consistent with the First Amendment. Big Tech companies are free to develop their own policies against misinformation, but the government may not force them to do so.

Extremely Limited Room to Regulate Extremism

The Big Tech CEOs are also almost certain to be grilled about the use of social media to spread “hate speech” or “extremist content.” The memorandum for the March 25 hearing sums it up like this:

Facebook executives were repeatedly warned that extremist content was thriving on their platform, and that Facebook’s own algorithms and recommendation tools were responsible for the appeal of extremist groups and divisive content. Similarly, since 2015, videos from extremists have proliferated on YouTube; and YouTube’s algorithm often guides users from more innocuous or alternative content to more fringe channels and videos. Twitter has been criticized for being slow to stop white nationalists from organizing, fundraising, recruiting and spreading propaganda on Twitter.

Social media has often played host to racist, sexist, and other types of vile speech. While social media companies have community standards and other policies that restrict “hate speech” in some circumstances, there is demand from some public officials that they do more. But under a First Amendment analysis, regulating hate speech on social media would fare no better than the regulation of misinformation.

The First Amendment doesn’t allow for the regulation of “hate speech” as its own distinct category. Hate speech is, in fact, as protected as any other type of speech. There are some limited exceptions, as the First Amendment does not protect incitement, true threats of violence, or “fighting words.” Some of these flatly do not apply in the online context. “Fighting words,” for instance, applies only in face-to-face situations to “those personally abusive epithets which, when addressed to the ordinary citizen, are, as a matter of common knowledge, inherently likely to provoke violent reaction.”

One relevant precedent is the court’s 1992 decision in R.A.V. v. St. Paul, which considered a local ordinance in St. Paul, Minnesota, prohibiting public expressions that served to cause “outrage, alarm, or anger with respect to racial, gender or religious intolerance.” A juvenile was charged with violating the ordinance when he created a makeshift cross and lit it on fire in front of a black family’s home. The court unanimously struck down the ordinance as a violation of the First Amendment, finding it an impermissible content-based restraint that was not limited to incitement or true threats.

By contrast, in 2003’s Virginia v. Black, the Supreme Court upheld a Virginia law outlawing cross burnings done with the intent to intimidate. The court’s opinion distinguished R.A.V. on grounds that the Virginia statute didn’t single out speech regarding disfavored topics. Instead, it was aimed at speech that had the intent to intimidate regardless of the victim’s race, gender, religion, or other characteristic. But the court was careful to limit government regulation of hate speech to instances that involve true threats or incitement.

When it comes to incitement, the legal standard was set by the court’s landmark Brandenberg v. Ohio decision in 1969, which laid out that:

the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action. [EMPHASIS ADDED]

In other words, while “hate speech” is protected by the First Amendment, specific types of speech that convey true threats or fit under the related doctrine of incitement are not. The government may regulate those types of speech. And they do. In fact, social media users can be, and often are, charged with crimes for threats made online. But the government can’t issue a per se ban on hate speech or “extremist content.”

Just as with misinformation, the government also can’t condition Section 230 immunity on platforms removing hate speech. Insofar as speech is protected under the First Amendment, the government can’t specifically condition a government benefit on its removal. Even the SAFE TECH Act’s model for holding platforms accountable for amplifying hate speech or extremist content would have to be limited to speech that amounts to true threats or incitement. This is a far narrower category of hateful speech than the examples that concern legislators.

Social media companies do remain free under the law to moderate hateful content as they see fit under their terms of service. Section 230 immunity is not dependent on whether companies do or don’t moderate such content, or on how they define hate speech. But government efforts to step in and define hate speech would likely run into First Amendment problems unless they stay focused on unprotected threats and incitement.

What Can the Government Do?

One may fairly ask what it is that governments can do to combat misinformation and hate speech online. The answer may be a law that requires takedowns by court order of speech after it is declared illegal, as proposed by the PACT Act, sponsored in the last session by Sens. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and John Thune (R-S.D.). Such speech may, in some circumstances, include misinformation or hate speech.

But as outlined above, the misinformation that the government can regulate is limited to situations like fraud or defamation, while the hate speech it can regulate is limited to true threats and incitement. A narrowly tailored law that looked to address those specific categories may or may not be a good idea, but it would likely survive First Amendment scrutiny, and may even prove a productive line of discussion with the tech CEOs.

Chairman Pai Symposium: Wrap-Up and Thoughts for the Future FCC

Kristian Stout — 3 February 2021

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

Kristian Stout is director of innovation policy for the International Center for Law & Economics.]

One of the themes that has run throughout this symposium has been that, throughout his tenure as both a commissioner and as chairman, Ajit Pai has brought consistency and careful analysis to the Federal Communications Commission (McDowell, Wright). The reflections offered by the various authors in this symposium make one thing clear: the next administration would do well to learn from the considered, bipartisan, and transparent approach to policy that characterized Chairman Pai’s tenure at the FCC.

The following are some of the more specific lessons that can be learned from Chairman Pai. In an important sense, he laid the groundwork for his successful chairmanship when he was still a minority commissioner. His thoughtful dissents were rooted in consistent, clear policy arguments—a practice that both charted how he would look at future issues as chairman and would help the public to understand exactly how he would approach new challenges before the FCC (McDowell, Wright).

One of the most public instances of Chairman Pai’s consistency (and, as it turns out, his bravery) was with respect to net neutrality. From his dissent in the Title II Order, through his commission’s Restoring Internet Freedom Order, Chairman Pai focused on the actual welfare of consumers and the factors that drive network growth and adoption. As Brent Skorup noted, “Chairman Pai and the Republican commissioners recognized the threat that Title II posed, not only to free speech, but to the FCC’s goals of expanding telecommunications services and competition.” The result of giving in to the Title II advocates would have been to draw the FCC into a quagmire of mass-media regulation that would ultimately harm free expression and broadband deployment in the United States.

Chairman Pai’s vision worked out (Skorup, May, Manne, Hazlett). Despite prognostications of the “death of the internet” because of the Restoring Internet Freedom Order, available evidence suggests that industry investment grew over Chairman Pai’s term. More Americans are connected to broadband than ever before.

Relatedly, Chairman Pai was a strong supporter of liberalizing media-ownership rules that long had been rooted in 20th century notions of competition (Manne). Such rules systematically make it harder for smaller media outlets to compete with large news aggregators and social-media platforms. As Geoffrey Manne notes:

Consistent with his unwavering commitment to promote media competition… Chairman Pai put forward a proposal substantially updating the media-ownership rules to reflect the dramatically changed market realities facing traditional broadcasters and newspapers.

This was a bold move for Chairman Pai—in essence, he permitted more local concentration by, e.g., allowing the purchase of a newspaper by a local television station that previously would have been forbidden. By allowing such combinations, the FCC enabled failing local news outlets to shore up their losses and continue to compete against larger, better-resourced organizations. The rule changes are in a case pending before the Supreme Court; should the court find for the FCC, the competitive outlook for local media looks much better thanks to Chairman Pai’s vision.

Chairman Pai’s record on spectrum is likewise impressive (Cooper, Hazlett). The FCC’s auctions under Chairman Pai raised more money and freed more spectrum for higher value uses than any previous commission (Feld, Hazlett). But there is also a lesson in how subsequent administrations can continue what Chairman Pai started. Unlicensed use, for instance, is not free or costless in its maintenance, and Tom Hazlett believes that there is more work to be done in further liberalizing access to the related spectrum—liberalizing in the sense of allowing property rights and market processes to guide spectrum to its highest use:

The basic theme is that regulators do better when they seek to create new rights that enable social coordination and entrepreneurial innovation, rather than enacting rules that specify what they find to be the “best” technologies or business models.

And to a large extent this is the model that Chairman Pai set down, from the issuance of the 12 GHZ NPRM to consider whether those spectrum bands could be opened up for wireless use, to the L-Band Order, where the commission worked hard to reallocate spectrum rights in ways that would facilitate more productive uses.

The controversial L-Band Order was another example of where Chairman Pai displayed both political acumen as well as an apolitical focus on improving spectrum policy (Cooper). Political opposition was sharp and focused after the commission finalized its order in April 2020. Nonetheless, Chairman Pai was deftly able to shepherd the L-Band Order and guarantee that important spectrum was made available for commercial wireless use.

As a native of Kansas, rural broadband rollout ranked highly in the list of priorities at the Pai FCC, and his work over the last four years is demonstrative of this pride of place (Hurwitz, Wright). As Gus Hurwitz notes, “the commission completed the Connect America Fund Phase II Auction. More importantly, it initiated the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) and the 5G Fund for Rural America, both expressly targeting rural connectivity.”

Further, other work, like the recently completed Rural Digital Opportunity Fund auction and the 5G fund provide the necessary policy framework with which to extend greater connectivity to rural America. As Josh Wright notes, “Ajit has also made sure to keep an eye out for the little guy, and communities that have been historically left behind.” This focus on closing the digital divide yielded gains in connectivity in places outside of traditional rural American settings, such as tribal lands, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico (Wright).

But perhaps one of Chairman Pai’s best and (hopefully) most lasting contributions will be de-politicizing the FCC and increasing the transparency with which it operated. In contrast to previous administrations, the Pai FCC had an overwhelmingly bipartisan nature, with many bipartisan votes being regularly taken at monthly meetings (Jamison). In important respects, it was this bipartisan (or nonpartisan) nature that was directly implicated by Chairman Pai championing the Office of Economics and Analytics at the commission. As many of the commentators have noted (Jamison, Hazlett, Wright, Ellig) the OEA was a step forward in nonpolitical, careful cost-benefit analysis at the commission. As Wright notes, Chairman Pai was careful to not just hire a bunch of economists, but rather to learn from other agencies that have better integrated economics, and to establish a structure that would enable the commission’s economists to materially contribute to better policy.

We were honored to receive a post from Jerry Ellig just a day before he tragically passed away. As chief economist at the FCC from 2017-2018, he was in a unique position to evaluate past practice and participate in the creation of the OEA. According to Ellig, past practice tended to treat the work of the commission’s economists as a post-hoc gloss on the work of the agency’s attorneys. Once conclusions were reached, economics would often be backfilled in to support those conclusions. With the establishment of the OEA, economics took a front-seat role, with staff of that office becoming a primary source for information and policy analysis before conclusions were reached. As Wright noted, the Federal Trade Commission had adopted this approach. With the FCC moving to do this as well, communications policy in the United States is on much sounder footing thanks to Chairman Pai.

Not only did Chairman Pai push the commission in the direction of nonpolitical, sound economic analysis but, as many commentators note, he significantly improved the process at the commission (Cooper, Jamison, Lyons). Chief among his contributions was making it a practice to publish proposed orders weeks in advance, breaking with past traditions of secrecy around draft orders, and thereby giving the public an opportunity to see what the commission intended to do.

Critics of Chairman Pai’s approach to transparency feared that allowing more public view into the process would chill negotiations between the commissioners behind the scenes. But as Daniel Lyons notes, the chairman’s approach was a smashing success:

The Pai era proved to be the most productive in recent memory, averaging just over six items per month, which is double the average number under Pai’s immediate predecessors. Moreover, deliberations were more bipartisan than in years past: Nathan Leamer notes that 61.4% of the items adopted by the Pai FCC were unanimous and 92.1% were bipartisan compared to 33% and 69.9%, respectively, under Chairman Wheeler.

Other reforms from Chairman Pai helped open the FCC to greater scrutiny and a more transparent process, including limiting editorial privileges on staff on an order’s text, and by introducing the use of a simple “fact sheet” to explain orders (Lyons).

I found one of the most interesting insights into the character of Chairman Pai, was his willingness to reverse course and take risks to ensure that the FCC promoted innovation instead of obstructing it by relying on received wisdom (Nachbar). For instance, although he was initially skeptical of the prospects of Space X to introduce broadband through its low-Earth-orbit satellite systems, under Chairman Pai, the Starlink beta program was included in the RDOF auction. It is not clear whether this was a good bet, Thomas Nachbar notes, but it was a statement both of the chairman’s willingness to change his mind, as well as to not allow policy to remain in a comfortable zone that excludes potential innovation.

The next chair has an awfully big pair of shoes (or one oversized coffee mug) to fill. Chairman Pai established an important legacy of transparency and process improvement, as well as commitment to careful, economic analysis in the business of the agency. We will all be well-served if future commissions follow in his footsteps.

Chairman Pai’s Legacy of Transparency

Daniel Lyons — 21 January 2021

Daniel Lyons is a professor of law at Boston College Law School and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.]

For many, the chairmanship of Ajit Pai is notable for its many headline-grabbing substantive achievements, including the Restoring Internet Freedom order, 5G deployment, and rural buildout—many of which have been or will be discussed in this symposium. But that conversation is incomplete without also acknowledging Pai’s careful attention to the basic blocking and tackling of running a telecom agency. The last four years at the Federal Communications Commission were marked by small but significant improvements in how the commission functions, and few are more important than the chairman’s commitment to transparency.

Draft Orders: The Dark Ages Before 2017

This commitment is most notable in Pai’s revisions to the open meeting process. From time immemorial, the FCC chairman would set the agenda for the agency’s monthly meeting by circulating draft orders to the other commissioners three weeks in advance. But the public was deliberately excluded from that distribution list. During this period, the commissioners would read proposals, negotiate revisions behind the scenes, then meet publicly to vote on final agency action. But only after the meeting—often several days later—would the actual text of the order be made public.

The opacity of this process had several adverse consequences. Most obviously, the public lacked details about the substance of the commission’s deliberations. The Government in the Sunshine Act requires the agency’s meetings to be made public so the American people know what their government is doing. But without the text of the orders under consideration, the public had only a superficial understanding of what was happening each month. The process was reminiscent of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s famous gaffe that Congress needed to “pass the [Affordable Care Act] bill so that you can find out what’s in it.” During the high-profile deliberations over the Open Internet Order in 2015, then-Commissioner Pai made significant hay over this secrecy, repeatedly posting pictures of himself with the 300-plus-page order on Twitter with captions such as “I wish the public could see what’s inside” and “the public still can’t see it.”

Other consequences were less apparent, but more detrimental. Because the public lacked detail about key initiatives, the telecom media cycle could be manipulated by strategic leaks designed to shape the final vote. As then-Commissioner Pai testified to Congress in 2016:

[T]he public gets to see only what the Chairman’s Office deigns to release, so controversial policy proposals can be (and typically are) hidden in a wave of media adulation. That happened just last month when the agency proposed changes to its set-top-box rules but tried to mislead content producers and the public about whether set-top box manufacturers would be permitted to insert their own advertisements into programming streams.

Sometimes, this secrecy backfired on the chairman, such as when net-neutrality advocates used media pressure to shape the 2014 Open Internet NPRM. Then-Chairman Tom Wheeler’s proposed order sought to follow the roadmap laid out by the D.C. Circuit’s Verizon decision, which relied on Title I to prevent ISPs from blocking content or acting in a “commercially unreasonable manner.” Proponents of a more aggressive Title II approach leaked these details to the media in a negative light, prompting tech journalists and advocates to unleash a wave of criticism alleging the chairman was “killing off net neutrality to…let the big broadband providers double charge.” In full damage control mode, Wheeler attempted to “set the record straight” about “a great deal of misinformation that has recently surfaced regarding” the draft order. But the tempest created by these leaks continued, pressuring Wheeler into adding a Title II option to the NPRM—which, of course, became the basis of the 2015 final rule.

This secrecy also harmed agency bipartisanship, as minority commissioners sometimes felt as much in the dark as the general public. As Wheeler scrambled to address Title II advocates’ concerns, he reportedly shared revised drafts with fellow Democrats but did not circulate the final draft to Republicans until less than 48 hours before the vote—leading Pai to remark cheekily that “when it comes to the Chairman’s latest net neutrality proposal, the Democratic Commissioners are in the fast lane and the Republican Commissioners apparently are being throttled.” Similarly, Pai complained during the 2014 spectrum screen proceeding that “I was not provided a final version of the item until 11:50 p.m. the night before the vote and it was a substantially different document with substantively revised reasoning than the one that was previously circulated.”

Letting the Sunshine In

Eliminating this culture of secrecy was one of Pai’s first decisions as chairman. Less than a month after assuming the reins at the agency, he announced that the FCC would publish all draft items at the same time they are circulated to commissioners, typically three weeks before each monthly meeting. While this move was largely applauded, some were concerned that this transparency would hamper the agency’s operations. One critic suggested that pre-meeting publication would hamper negotiations among commissioners: “Usually, drafts created negotiating room…Now the chairman’s negotiating position looks like a final position, which undercuts negotiating ability.” Another, while supportive of the change, was concerned that the need to put a draft order in final form well before a meeting might add “a month or more to the FCC’s rulemaking adoption process.”

Fortunately, these concerns proved to be unfounded. The Pai era proved to be the most productive in recent memory, averaging just over six items per month, which is double the average number under Pai’s immediate predecessors. Moreover, deliberations were more bipartisan than in years past: Nathan Leamer notes that 61.4% of the items adopted by the Pai FCC were unanimous and 92.1% were bipartisan—compared to 33% and 69.9%, respectively, under Chairman Wheeler.

This increased transparency also improved the overall quality of the agency’s work product. In a 2018 speech before the Free State Foundation, Commissioner Mike O’Rielly explained that “drafts are now more complete and more polished prior to the public reveal, so edits prior to the meeting are coming from Commissioners, as opposed to there being last minute changes—or rewrites—from staff or the Office of General Counsel.” Publishing draft orders in advance allows the public to flag potential issues for revision before the meeting, which improves the quality of the final draft and reduces the risk of successful post-meeting challenges via motions for reconsideration or petitions for judicial review. O’Rielly went on to note that the agency seemed to be running more efficiently as well, as “[m]eetings are targeted to specific issues, unnecessary discussions of non-existent issues have been eliminated, [and] conversations are more productive.”

Other Reforms

While pre-meeting publication was the most visible improvement to agency transparency, there are other initiatives also worth mentioning.

Limiting Editorial Privileges: Chairman Pai dramatically limited “editorial privileges,” a longtime tradition that allowed agency staff to make changes to an order’s text even after the final vote. Under Pai, editorial privileges were limited to technical and conforming edits only; substantive changes were not permitted unless they were proposed directly by a commissioner and only in response to new arguments offered by a dissenting commissioner. This reduces the likelihood of a significant change being introduced outside the public eye.
Fact Sheet: Adopting a suggestion of Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, Pai made it a practice to preface each published draft order with a one-page fact sheet that summarized the item in lay terms, as much as possible. This made the agency’s monthly work more accessible and transparent to members of the public who lacked the time to wade through the full text of each draft order.
Online Transparency Dashboard: Pai also launched an online dashboard on the agency’s website. This dashboard offers metrics on the number of items currently pending at the commission by category, as well as quarterly trends over time.
Restricting Comment on Upcoming Items: As a gesture of respect to fellow commissioners, Pai committed that the chairman’s office would not brief the press or members of the public, or publish a blog, about an upcoming matter before it was shared with other commissioners. This was another step toward reducing the strategic use of leaks or selective access to guide the tech media news cycle.

And while it’s technically not a transparency reform, Pai also deserves credit for his willingness to engage the public as the face of the agency. He was the first FCC commissioner to join Twitter, and throughout his chairmanship he maintained an active social media presence that helped personalize the agency and make it more accessible. His commitment to this channel is all the more impressive when one considers the way some opponents used these platforms to hurl a steady stream of hateful, often violent and racist invective at him during his tenure.

Pai deserves tremendous credit for spearheading these efforts to bring the agency out of the shadows and into the sunlight. Of course, he was not working alone. Pai shares credit with other commissioners and staff who supported transparency and worked to bring these policies to fruition, most notably former Commissioner O’Rielly, who beat a steady drum for process reform throughout his tenure.

We do not yet know who President Joe Biden will appoint as Pai’s successor. It is fair to assume that whomever is chosen will seek to put his or her own stamp on the agency. But let’s hope that enhanced transparency and the other process reforms enacted over the past four years remain a staple of agency practice moving forward. They may not be flashy, but they may prove to be the most significant and long-lasting impact of the Pai chairmanship.

Pai Dedicated His Tenure to Improving US Broadband

Brent Skorup — 18 January 2021

Brent Skorup is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.]

Ajit Pai came into the Federal Communications Commission chairmanship with a single priority: to improve the coverage, cost, and competitiveness of U.S. broadband for the benefit of consumers. The 5G Fast Plan, the formation of the Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee, the large spectrum auctions, and other broadband infrastructure initiatives over the past four years have resulted in accelerated buildouts and higher-quality services. Millions more Americans have gotten connected because of agency action and industry investment.

That brings us to Chairman Pai’s most important action: restoring the deregulatory stance of the FCC toward broadband services and repealing the Title II “net neutrality” rules in 2018. Had he not done this, his and future FCCs would have been bogged down in inscrutable, never-ending net neutrality debates, reminiscent of the Fairness Doctrine disputes that consumed the agency 50 years ago. By doing that, he cleared the decks for the pro-deployment policies that followed and redirected the agency away from its roots in mass-media policy toward a future where the agency’s primary responsibilities are encouraging broadband deployment and adoption.

It took tremendous courage from Chairman Pai and Commissioners Michael O’Rielly and Brendan Carr to vote to repeal the 2015 Title II regulations, though they probably weren’t prepared for the public reaction to a seemingly arcane dispute over regulatory classification. The hysteria ginned up by net-neutrality advocates, members of Congress, celebrities, and too-credulous journalists was unlike anything I’ve seen in political advocacy. Advocates, of course, don’t intend to provoke disturbed individuals but the irresponsible predictions of “the end of the internet as we know it” and widespread internet service provider (ISP) content blocking drove one man to call in a bomb threat to the FCC, clearing the building in a desperate attempt to delay or derail the FCC’s Title II repeal. At least two other men pleaded guilty to federal charges after issuing vicious death threats to Chairman Pai, a New York congressman, and their families in the run-up to the regulation’s repeal. No public official should have to face anything resembling that over a policy dispute.

For all the furor, net-neutrality advocates promised a neutral internet that never was and never will be. ”Happy little bunny rabbit dreams” is how David Clark of MIT, an early chief protocol architect of the internet, derided the idea of treating all online traffic the same. Relatedly, the no-blocking rule—the sine na qua of net neutrality—was always a legally dubious requirement. Legal scholars for years had called into doubt the constitutionality of imposing must-carry requirements on ISPs. Unsurprisingly, a federal appellate judge pressed this point in oral arguments defending the net neutrality rules in 2016. The Obama FCC attorney conceded without a fight; even after the net neutrality order, ISPs were “absolutely” free to curate the internet.

Chairman Pai recognized that the fight wasn’t about website blocking and it wasn’t, strictly speaking, about net neutrality. This was the latest front in the long battle over whether the FCC should strictly regulate mass-media distribution. There is a long tradition of progressive distrust of new (unregulated) media. The media access movement that pushed for broadcast TV and radio and cable regulations from the 1960s to 1980s never went away, but the terminology has changed: disinformation, net neutrality, hate speech, gatekeeper.

The decline in power of regulated media—broadcast radio and TV—and the rising power of unregulated internet-based media—social media, Netflix, and podcasts—meant that the FCC and Congress had few ways to shape American news and media consumption. In the words of Tim Wu, the law professor who coined the term “net neutrality,” the internet rules are about giving the agency the continuing ability to shape “media policy, social policy, oversight of the political process, [and] issues of free speech.”

Title II was the only tool available to bring this powerful new media—broadband access—under intense regulatory scrutiny by regulators and the political class. As net-neutrality advocate and Public Knowledge CEO Gene Kimmelman has said, the 2015 Order was about threatening the industry with vague but severe rules: “Legal risk and some ambiguity around what practices will be deemed ‘unreasonably discriminatory’ have been effective tools to instill fear for the last 20 years” for the telecom industry. Internet regulation advocates, he said at the time, “have to have fight after fight over every claim of discrimination, of new service or not.”

Chairman Pai and the Republican commissioners recognized the threat that Title II posed, not only to free speech, but to the FCC’s goals of expanding telecommunications services and competition. Net neutrality would draw the agency into contentious mass-media regulation once again, distracting it from universal service efforts, spectrum access and auctions, and cleaning up the regulatory detritus that had slowly accumulated since the passage of the agency’s guiding statutes: the 1934 Communications Act and the 1996 Telecommunications Act.

There are probably items that Chairman Pai wish he’d finished or had done slightly differently. He’s left a proud legacy, however, and his politically risky decision to repeal the Title II rules redirected agency energies away from no-win net-neutrality battles and toward broadband deployment and infrastructure. Great progress was made and one hopes the Biden FCC chairperson will continue that trajectory that Pai set.

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