Archives For private antitrust litigation

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.

The Supreme Court Misses the Big Consumer Welfare Picture in NCAA v. Alston

Alden Abbott — 21 June 2021

In its June 21 opinion in NCAA v. Alston, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and thereby upheld a district court injunction finding unlawful certain National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) rules limiting the education-related benefits schools may make available to student athletes. The decision will come as no surprise to antitrust lawyers who heard the oral argument; the NCAA was portrayed as a monopsony cartel whose rules undermined competition by restricting compensation paid to athletes.

Alas, however, Alston demonstrates that seemingly “good facts” (including an apparently Scrooge-like defendant) can make very bad law. While superficially appearing to be a relatively straightforward application of Sherman Act rule of reason principles, the decision fails to come to grips with the relationship of the restraints before it to the successful provision of the NCAA’s joint venture product – amateur intercollegiate sports. What’s worse, Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion further muddies the court’s murky jurisprudential waters by signaling his view that the NCAA’s remaining compensation rules are anticompetitive and could be struck down in an appropriate case (“it is not clear how the NCAA can defend its remaining compensation rules”). Prospective plaintiffs may be expected to take the hint.

The Court’s Flawed Analysis

I previously commented on this then-pending case a few months ago:

In sum, the claim that antitrust may properly be applied to combat the alleged “exploitation” of college athletes by NCAA compensation regulations does not stand up to scrutiny. The NCAA’s rules that define the scope of amateurism may be imperfect, but there is no reason to think that empowering federal judges to second guess and reformulate NCAA athletic compensation rules would yield a more socially beneficial (let alone optimal) outcome. (Believing that the federal judiciary can optimally reengineer core NCAA amateurism rules is a prime example of the Nirvana fallacy at work.) Furthermore, a Supreme Court decision affirming the 9th Circuit could do broad mischief by undermining case law that has accorded joint venturers substantial latitude to design the core features of their collective enterprise without judicial second-guessing.

Unfortunately, my concerns about a Supreme Court affirmance of the 9^th Circuit were realized. Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion for the court in Alston manifests a blinkered approach to the NCAA “monopsony” joint venture. To be sure, it cites and briefly discusses key Supreme Court joint venture holdings, including 2006’s Texaco v. Dagher. Nonetheless, it gives short shrift to the efficiency-based considerations that counsel presumptive deference to joint venture design rules that are key to the nature of a joint venture’s product.

As a legal matter, the court felt obliged to defer to key district court findings not contested by the NCAA—including that the NCAA enjoys “monopsony power” in the student athlete labor market, and that the NCAA’s restrictions in fact decrease student athlete compensation “below the competitive level.”

However, even conceding these points, the court could have, but did not, take note of and assess the role of the restrictions under review in helping engender the enormous consumer benefits the NCAA confers upon consumers of its collegiate sports product. There is good reason to view those restrictions as an effort by the NCAA to address a negative externality that could diminish the attractiveness of the NCAA’s product for ultimate consumers, a result that would in turn reduce inter-brand competition.

As the amicus brief by antitrust economists (“Antitrust Economists Brief”) pointed out:

[T]he NCAA’s consistent and growing popularity reflects a product—”amateur sports” played by students and identified with the academic tradition—that continues to generate enormous consumer interest. Moreover, it appears without dispute that the NCAA, while in control of the design of its own athletic products, has preserved their integrity as amateur sports, notwithstanding the commercial success of some of them, particularly Division I basketball and Football Subdivision football. . . . Over many years, the NCAA has continually adjusted its eligibility and participation rules to prevent colleges from pursuing their own interests—which certainly can involve “pay to play”—in ways that would conflict with the procompetitive aims of the collaboration. In this sense, the NCAA’s amateurism rules are a classic example of addressing negative externalities and free riding that often are inherent or arise in the collaboration context.

The use of contractual restrictions (vertical restraints) to counteract free riding and other negative externalities generated in manufacturer-distributor interactions are well-recognized by antitrust courts. Although the restraints at issue in NCAA (and many other joint venture situations) are horizontal in nature, not vertical, they may be just as important as other nonstandard contracts in aligning the incentives of member institutions to best satisfy ultimate consumers. Satisfying consumers, in turn, enhances inter-brand competition between the NCAA’s product and other rival forms of entertainment, including professional sports offerings.

Alan Meese made a similar point in a recent paper (discussing a possible analytical framework for the court’s then-imminent Alston analysis):

[U]nchecked bidding for the services of student athletes could result in a market failure and suboptimal product quality, proof that the restraint reduces student athlete compensation below what an unbridled market would produce should not itself establish a prima facie case. Such evidence would instead be equally consistent with a conclusion that the restraint eliminates this market failure and restores compensation to optimal levels.

The court’s failure to address the externality justification was compounded by its handling of the rule of reason. First, in rejecting a truncated rule of reason with an initial presumption that the NCAA’s restraints involving student compensation are procompetitive, the court accepted that the NCAA’s monopsony power showed that its restraints “can (and in fact do) harm competition.” This assertion ignored the efficiency justification discussed above. As the Antitrust Economists’ Brief emphasized:

[A]cting more like regulators, the lower courts treated the NCAA’s basic product design as inherently anticompetitive [so did the Supreme Court], pushing forward with a full rule of reason that sent the parties into a morass of inquiries that were not (and were never intended to be) structured to scrutinize basic product design decisions and their hypothetical alternatives. Because that inquiry was unrestrained and untethered to any input or output restraint, the application of the rule of reason in this case necessarily devolved into a quasi-regulatory inquiry, which antitrust law eschews.

Having decided that a “full” rule of reason analysis is appropriate, the Supreme Court, in effect, imposed a “least restrictive means” test on the restrictions under review, while purporting not to do so. (“We agree with the NCAA’s premise that antitrust law does not require businesses to use anything like the least restrictive means of achieving legitimate business purposes.”) The court concluded that “it was only after finding the NCAA’s restraints ‘patently and inexplicably stricter than is necessary’ to achieve the procompetitive benefits the league had demonstrated that the district court proceeded to declare a violation of the Sherman Act.” Effectively, however, this statement deferred to the lower court’s second-guessing of the means employed by the NCAA to preserve consumer demand, which the lower court did without any empirical basis.

The Supreme Court also approved the district court’s rejection of the NCAA’s view of what amateurism requires. It stressed the district court’s findings that “the NCAA’s rules and restrictions on compensation have shifted markedly over time” (seemingly a reasonable reaction to changes in market conditions) and that the NCAA developed the restrictions at issue without any reference to “considerations of consumer demand” (a de facto regulatory mandate directed at the NCAA). The Supreme Court inexplicably dubbed these lower court actions “a straightforward application of the rule of reason.” These actions seem more like blind deference to rather arbitrary judicial second-guessing of the expert party with the greatest interest in satisfying consumer demand.

The Supreme Court ended its misbegotten commentary on “less restrictive alternatives” by first claiming that it agreed that “antitrust courts must give wide berth to business judgments before finding liability.” The court asserted that the district court honored this and other principles of judicial humility because it enjoined restraints on education-related benefits “only after finding that relaxing these restrictions would not blur the distinction between college and professional sports and thus impair demand – and only finding that this course represented a significantly (not marginally) less restrictive means of achieving the same procompetitive benefits as the NCAA’s current rules.” This lower court finding once again was not based on an empirical analysis of procompetitive benefits under different sets of rules. It was little more than the personal opinion of a judge, who lacked the NCAA’s knowledge of relevant markets and expertise. That the Supreme Court accepted it as an exercise in restrained judicial analysis is well nigh inexplicable.

The Antitrust Economists’ Brief, unlike the Supreme Court, enunciated the correct approach to judicial rewriting of core NCAA joint venture rules:

The institutions that are members of the NCAA want to offer a particular type of athletic product—an amateur athletic product that they believe is consonant with their primary academic missions. By doing so, as th[e] [Supreme] Court has [previously] recognized [in its 1984 NCAA v. Board of Regents decision], they create a differentiated offering that widens consumer choice and enhances opportunities for student-athletes. NCAA, 468 U.S. at 102. These same institutions have drawn lines that they believe balance their desire to foster intercollegiate athletic competition with their overarching academic missions. Both the district court and the Ninth Circuit have now said that they may not do so, unless they draw those lines differently. Yet neither the district court nor the Ninth Circuit determined that the lines drawn reduce the output of intercollegiate athletics or ascertained whether their judicially-created lines would expand that output. That is not the function of antitrust courts, but of legislatures.

Other Harms the Court Failed to Consider

Finally, the court failed to consider other harms that stem from a presumptive suspicion of NCAA restrictions on athletic compensation in general. The elimination of compensation rules should favor large well-funded athletic programs over others, potentially undermining “competitive balance” among schools. (Think of an NCAA March Madness tournament where “Cinderella stories” are eliminated, as virtually all the talented players have been snapped up by big name schools.) It could also, through the reallocation of income to “big name big sports” athletes who command a bidding premium, potentially reduce funding support for “minor college sports” that provide opportunities to a wide variety of student-athletes. This would disadvantage those athletes, undermine the future of “minor” sports, and quite possibly contribute to consumer disillusionment and unhappiness (think of the millions of parents of “minor sports” athletes).

What’s more, the existing rules allow many promising but non-superstar athletes to develop their skills over time, enhancing their ability to eventually compete at the professional level. (This may even be the case for some superstars, who may obtain greater long-term financial rewards by refining their talents and showcasing their skills for a year or two in college.) In addition, the current rules climate allows many student athletes who do not turn professional to develop personal connections that serve them well in their professional and personal lives, including connections derived from the “brand” of their university. (Think of wealthy and well-connected alumni who are ardent fans of their colleges’ athletic programs.) In a world without NCAA amateurism rules, the value of these experiences and connections could wither, to the detriment of athletes and consumers alike. (Consistent with my conclusion, economists Richard McKenzie and Dwight Lee have argued against the proposition that “college athletes are materially ‘underpaid’ and are ‘exploited’”.)

This “parade of horribles” might appear unlikely in the short term. Nevertheless, in the course of time, the inability of the NCAA to control the attributes of its product, due to a changed legal climate, make it all too real. This is especially the case in light of Justice Kavanaugh’s strong warning that other NCAA compensation restrictions are likely indefensible. (As he bluntly put it, venerable college sports “traditions alone cannot justify the NCAA’s decision to build a massive money-raising enterprise on the backs of student athletes who are not fairly compensated. . . . The NCAA is not above the law.”)

Conclusion

The Supreme Court’s misguided Alston decision fails to weigh the powerful efficiency justifications for the NCAA’s amateurism rules. This holding virtually invites other lower courts to ignore efficiencies and to second guess decisions that go to the heart of the NCAA’s joint venture product offering. The end result is likely to reduce consumer welfare and, quite possibly, the welfare of many student athletes as well. One would hope that Congress, if it chooses to address NCAA rules, will keep these dangers well in mind. A statutory change not directed solely at the NCAA, creating a rebuttable presumption of legality for restraints that go to the heart of a lawful joint venture, may merit serious consideration.

Antitrust by Fiat

Jonathan M. Barnett — 23 February 2021

The Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act (CALERA), recently introduced in the U.S. Senate, exhibits a remarkable willingness to cast aside decades of evidentiary standards that courts have developed to uphold the rule of law by precluding factually and economically ungrounded applications of antitrust law. Without those safeguards, antitrust enforcement is prone to be driven by a combination of prosecutorial and judicial fiat. That would place at risk the free play of competitive forces that the antitrust laws are designed to protect.

Antitrust law inherently lends itself to the risk of erroneous interpretations of ambiguous evidence. Outside clear cases of interfirm collusion, virtually all conduct that might appear anti-competitive might just as easily be proven, after significant factual inquiry, to be pro-competitive. This fundamental risk of a false diagnosis has guided antitrust case law and regulatory policy since at least the Supreme Court’s landmark Continental Television v. GTE Sylvania decision in 1977 and arguably earlier. Judicial and regulatory efforts to mitigate this ambiguity, while preserving the deterrent power of the antitrust laws, have resulted in the evidentiary requirements that are targeted by the proposed bill.

Proponents of the legislative “reforms” might argue that modern antitrust case law’s careful avoidance of enforcement error yields excessive caution. To relieve regulators and courts from having to do their homework before disrupting a targeted business and its employees, shareholders, customers and suppliers, the proposed bill empowers plaintiffs to allege and courts to “find” anti-competitive conduct without having to be bound to the reasonably objective metrics upon which courts and regulators have relied for decades. That runs the risk of substituting rhetoric and intuition for fact and analysis as the guiding principles of antitrust enforcement and adjudication.

This dismissal of even a rudimentary commitment to rule-of-law principles is illustrated by two dramatic departures from existing case law in the proposed bill. Each constitutes a largely unrestrained “blank check” for regulatory and judicial overreach.

Blank Check #1

The bill includes a broad prohibition on “exclusionary” conduct, which is defined to include any conduct that “materially disadvantages 1 or more actual or potential competitors” and “presents an appreciable risk of harming competition.” That amorphous language arguably enables litigants to target a firm that offers consumers lower prices but “disadvantages” less efficient competitors that cannot match that price.

In fact, the proposed legislation specifically facilitates this litigation strategy by relieving predatory pricing claims from having to show that pricing is below cost or likely to result ultimately in profits for the defendant. While the bill permits a defendant to escape liability by showing sufficiently countervailing “procompetitive benefits,” the onus rests on the defendant to show otherwise. This burden-shifting strategy encourages lagging firms to shift competition from the marketplace to the courthouse.

Blank Check #2

The bill then removes another evidentiary safeguard by relieving plaintiffs from always having to define a relevant market. Rather, it may be sufficient to show that the contested practice gives rise to an “appreciable risk of harming competition … based on the totality of the circumstances.” It is hard to miss the high degree of subjectivity in this standard.

This ambiguous threshold runs counter to antitrust principles that require a credible showing of market power in virtually all cases except horizontal collusion. Those principles make perfect sense. Market power is the gateway concept that enables courts to distinguish between claims that plausibly target alleged harms to competition and those that do not. Without a well-defined market, it is difficult to know whether a particular practice reflects market power or market competition. Removing the market power requirement can remove any meaningful grounds on which a defendant could avoid a nuisance lawsuit or contest or appeal a conclusory allegation or finding of anticompetitive conduct.

Anti-Market Antitrust

The bill’s transparently outcome-driven approach is likely to give rise to a cloud of liability that penalizes businesses that benefit consumers through price and quality combinations that competitors cannot replicate. This obviously runs directly counter to the purpose of the antitrust laws. Certainly, winners can and sometimes do entrench themselves through potentially anticompetitive practices that should be closely scrutinized. However, the proposed legislation seems to reflect a presumption that successful businesses usually win by employing illegitimate tactics, rather than simply being the most efficient firm in the market. Under that assumption, competition law becomes a tool for redoing, rather than enabling, competitive outcomes.

While this populist approach may be popular, it is neither economically sound nor consistent with a market-driven economy in which resources are mostly allocated through pricing mechanisms and government intervention is the exception, not the rule. It would appear that some legislators would like to reverse that presumption. Far from being a victory for consumers, that outcome would constitute a resounding loss.

The Epic Flaws of Epic’s Antitrust Gambit

Dirk Auer — 27 August 2020

Much has already been said about the twin antitrust suits filed by Epic Games against Apple and Google. For those who are not familiar with the cases, the game developer – most famous for its hit title Fortnite and the “Unreal Engine” that underpins much of the game (and movie) industry – is complaining that Apple and Google are thwarting competition from rival app stores and in-app payment processors.

Supporters have been quick to see in these suits a long-overdue challenge against the 30% commissions that Apple and Google charge. Some have even portrayed Epic as a modern-day Robin Hood, leading the fight against Big Tech to the benefit of small app developers and consumers alike. Epic itself has been keen to stoke this image, comparing its litigation to a fight for basic freedoms in the face of Big Brother:

However, upon closer inspection, cracks rapidly appear in this rosy picture. What is left is a company partaking in blatant rent-seeking that threatens to harm the sprawling ecosystems that have emerged around both Apple and Google’s app stores.

Two issues are particularly salient. First, Epic is trying to protect its own interests at the expense of the broader industry. If successful, its suit would merely lead to alternative revenue schemes that – although more beneficial to itself – would leave smaller developers to shoulder higher fees. Second, the fees that Epic portrays as extortionate were in fact key to the emergence of mobile gaming.

Epic’s utopia is not an equilibrium

Central to Epic’s claims is the idea that both Apple and Google: (i) thwart competition from rival app stores, and implement a series of measures that prevent developers from reaching gamers through alternative means (such as pre-installing apps, or sideloading them in the case of Apple’s platforms); and (ii) tie their proprietary payment processing services to their app stores. According to Epic, this ultimately enables both Apple and Google to extract “extortionate” commissions (30%) from app developers.

But Epic’s whole case is based on the unrealistic assumption that both Apple and Google will sit idly by while rival play stores and payment systems take a free-ride on the vast investments they have ploughed into their respective smartphone platforms. In other words, removing Apple and Google’s ability to charge commissions on in-app purchases does not prevent them from monetizing their platforms elsewhere.

Indeed, economic and strategic management theory tells us that so long as Apple and Google single-handedly control one of the necessary points of access to their respective ecosystems, they should be able to extract a sizable share of the revenue generated on their platforms. One can only speculate, but it is easy to imagine Apple and Google charging rival app stores for access to their respective platforms, or charging developers for access to critical APIs.

Epic itself seems to concede this point. In a recent Verge article, it argued that Apple was threatening to cut off its access to iOS and Mac developer tools, which Apple currently offers at little to no cost:

Apple will terminate Epic’s inclusion in the Apple Developer Program, a membership that’s necessary to distribute apps on iOS devices or use Apple developer tools, if the company does not “cure your breaches” to the agreement within two weeks, according to a letter from Apple that was shared by Epic. Epic won’t be able to notarize Mac apps either, a process that could make installing Epic’s software more difficult or block it altogether. Apple requires that all apps are notarized before they can be run on newer versions of macOS, even if they’re distributed outside the App Store.

There is little to prevent Apple from more heavily monetizing these tools – should Epic’s antitrust case successfully prevent it from charging commissions via its app store.

All of this raises the question: why is Epic bringing a suit that, if successful, would merely result in the emergence of alternative fee schedules (as opposed to a significant reduction of the overall fees paid by developers).

One potential answer is that the current system is highly favorable to small apps that earn little to no revenue from purchases and who benefit most from the trust created by Apple and Google’s curation of their stores. It is, however, much less favorable to developers like Epic who no longer require any curation to garner the necessary trust from consumers and who earn a large share of their revenue from in-app purchases.

In more technical terms, the fact that all in-game payments are made through Apple and Google’s payment processing enables both platforms to more easily price-discriminate. Unlike fixed fees (but just like royalties), percentage commissions are necessarily state-contingent (i.e. the same commission will lead to vastly different revenue depending on an underlying app’s success). The most successful apps thus contribute far more to a platform’s fixed costs. For instance, it is estimated that mobile games account for 72% of all app store spend. Likewise, more than 80% of the apps on Apple’s store pay no commission at all.

This likely expands app store output by getting lower value developers on board. In that sense, it is akin to Ramsey pricing (where a firm/utility expands social welfare by allocating a higher share of fixed costs to the most inelastic consumers). Unfortunately, this would be much harder to accomplish if high value developers could easily bypass Apple or Google’s payment systems.

The bottom line is that Epic appears to be fighting to change Apple and Google’s app store business models in order to obtain fee schedules that are better aligned with its own interests. This is all the more important for Epic Games, given that mobile gaming is becoming increasingly popular relative to other gaming mediums (also here).

The emergence of new gaming platforms

Up to this point, I have mostly presented a zero-sum view of Epic’s lawsuit – i.e. developers and platforms are fighting over the distribution app store profits (though some smaller developers may lose out). But this ignores what is likely the chief virtue of Apple and Google’s “closed” distribution model. Namely, that it has greatly expanded the market for mobile gaming (and other mobile software), and will likely continue to do so in the future.

Much has already been said about the significant security and trust benefits that Apple and Google’s curation of their app stores (including their control of in-app payments) provide to users. Benedict Evans and Ben Thompson have both written excellent pieces on this very topic.

In a nutshell, the closed model allows previously unknown developers to rapidly expand because (i) users do not have to fear their apps contain some form of malware, and (ii) they greatly reduce payments frictions, most notably security related ones. But while these are indeed tremendous benefits, another important upside seems to have gone relatively unnoticed.

The “closed” business model also gives Apple and Google (as well as other platforms) significant incentives to develop new distribution mediums (smart TVs spring to mind) and improve existing ones. In turn, this greatly expands the audience that software developers can reach. In short, developers get a smaller share of a much larger pie.

The economics of two-sided markets are enlightening in this respect. Apple and Google’s stores are what Armstrong and Wright (here and here) refer to as “competitive bottlenecks”. That is, they compete aggressively (amongst themselves, and with other gaming platforms) to attract exclusive users. They can then charge developers a premium to access those users (note, however, that in the case at hand the incidence of those platform fees is unclear).

This gives platforms significant incentives to continuously attract and retain new users. For instance, if Steve Jobs is to be believed, giving consumers better access to media such as eBooks, video and games was one of the driving forces behind the launch of the iPad.

This model of innovation would be seriously undermined if developers and consumers could easily bypass platforms (as Epic games is seeking to do).

In response, some commentators have countered that platforms may use their strong market positions to squeeze developers, thereby undermining software investments. But such a course of action may ultimately be self-defeating. For instance, writing about retail platforms imitating third-party sellers, Anfrei Hagiu, Tat-How Teh and Julian Wright have argued that:

[T]he platform has an incentive to commit itself not to imitate highly innovative third-party products in order to preserve their incentives to innovate.

Seen in this light, Apple and Google’s 30% commissions can be seen as a soft commitment not to expropriate developers, thus leaving them with a sizable share of the revenue generated on each platform. This may explain why the 30% commission has become a standard in the games industry (and beyond).

Furthermore, from an evolutionary perspective, it is hard to argue that the 30% commission is somehow extortionate. If game developers were systematically expropriated, then the gaming industry – in particular its mobile segment – would not have grown so drastically over the past years:

All of this this likely explains why a recent survey found that 81% of app developers believed regulatory intervention would be misguided:

81% of developers and publishers believe that the relationship between them and platforms is best handled within the industry, rather than through government intervention. Competition and choice mean that developers will use platforms that they work with best.

The upshot is that the “closed” model employed by Apple and Google has served the gaming industry well. There is little compelling reason to overhaul that model today.

Final thoughts

When all is said and done, there is no escaping the fact that Epic games is currently playing a high-stakes rent-seeking game. As Apple noted in its opposition to Epic’s motion for a temporary restraining order:

Epic did not, and has not, contested that it is in breach of the App Store Guidelines and the License Agreement. Epic’s plan was to violate the agreements intentionally in order to manufacture an emergency. The moment Fortnite was removed from the App Store, Epic launched an extensive PR smear campaign against Apple and a litigation plan was orchestrated to the minute; within hours, Epic had filed a 56-page complaint, and within a few days, filed nearly 200 pages with this Court in a pre-packaged “emergency” motion. And just yesterday, it even sought to leverage its request to this Court for a sales promotion, announcing a “#FreeFortniteCup” to take place on August 23, inviting players for one last “Battle Royale” across “all platforms” this Sunday, with prizes targeting Apple.

Epic is ultimately seeking to introduce its own app store on both Apple and Google’s platforms, or at least bypass their payment processing services (as Spotify is seeking to do in the EU).

Unfortunately, as this post has argued, condoning this type of free-riding could prove highly detrimental to the entire mobile software industry. Smaller companies would almost inevitably be left to foot a larger share of the bill, existing platforms would become less secure, and the development of new ones could be hindered. At the end of the day, 30% might actually be a small price to pay.

In Antitrust & Competition, Apple, European Union, Google, International, Platforms, Truth on the Market Android, antitrust, Apple App Store, Contract, contracts, Google Play, iOS, private antitrust litigation

Private Antitrust: What Hipsters Can Learn from Hulk Hogan

Eric Fruits — 21 November 2019

Antitrust populists have a long list of complaints about competition policy, including: laws aren’t broad enough or tough enough, enforcers are lax, and judges tend to favor defendants over plaintiffs or government agencies. The populist push got a bump with the New York Times coverage of Lina Khan’s “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” in which she advocated breaking up Amazon and applying public utility regulation to platforms. Khan’s ideas were picked up by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has a plan for similar public utility regulation and promised to unwind earlier acquisitions by Amazon (Whole Foods and Zappos), Facebook (WhatsApp and Instagram), and Google (Waze, Nest, and DoubleClick).

Khan, Warren, and the other Break Up Big Tech populists don’t clearly articulate how consumers, suppliers — or anyone for that matter — would be better off with their mandated spinoffs. The Khan/Warren plan, however, requires a unique alignment of many factors: Warren must win the White House, Democrats must control both houses of Congress, and judges must substantially shift their thinking. It’s like turning a supertanker on a dime in the middle of a storm. Instead of publishing manifestos and engaging in antitrust hashtag hipsterism, maybe — just maybe — the populists can do something.

The populists seem to have three main grievances:

Small firms cannot enter the market or cannot thrive once they enter;
Suppliers, including workers, are getting squeezed; and
Speculation that someday firms will wake up, realize they have a monopoly, and begin charging noncompetitive prices to consumers.

Each of these grievances can be, and has been, already addressed by antitrust and competition litigation. And, in many cases these grievances were addressed in private antitrust litigation. For example:

Leegin v. PSKS, private antitrust litigation alleging anticompetitive vertical price restraints ;
Weyerhaeuser v. Ross-Simmons, private antitrust litigation alleging predatory bidding of inputs;
Apple v. Pepper, private antitrust litigation that chipped away at Illinois Brick’s indirect purchaser doctrine; and
The European Commission’s Google Search investigation was prompted by complaints filed by a private party, Foundem.

In the US, private actions are available for a wide range of alleged anticompetitive conduct, including coordinated conduct (e.g., price-fixing), single-firm conduct (e.g., predatory pricing), and mergers that would substantially lessen competition.

If the antitrust populists are so confident that concentration is rising and firms are behaving anticompetitively and consumers/suppliers/workers are being harmed, then why don’t they organize an antitrust lawsuit against the worst of the worst violators? If anticompetitive activity is so obvious and so pervasive, finding compelling cases should be easy.

For example, earlier this year, Shaoul Sussman, a law student at Fordham University, published “Prime Predator: Amazon and the Rationale of Below Average Variable Cost Pricing Strategies Among Negative-Cash Flow Firms” in the Journal of Antitrust Enforcement. Why not put Sussman’s theory to the test by building an antitrust case around it? The discovery process would unleash a treasure trove of cost data and probably more than a few “hot docs.”

Khan argues:

While predatory pricing technically remains illegal, it is extremely difficult to win predatory pricing claims because courts now require proof that the alleged predator would be able to raise prices and recoup its losses.

However, in her criticism of the court in the Apple e-books litigation, she lays out a clear rationale for courts to revise their thinking on predatory pricing [emphasis added]:

Judge Cote, who presided over the district court trial, refrained from affirming the government’s conclusion. Still, the government’s argument illustrates the dominant framework that courts and enforcers use to analyze predation—and how it falls short. Specifically, the government erred by analyzing the profitability of Amazon’s e-book business in the aggregate and by characterizing the conduct as “loss leading” rather than potentially predatory pricing. These missteps suggest a failure to appreciate two critical aspects of Amazon’s practices: (1) how steep discounting by a firm on a platform-based product creates a higher risk that the firm will generate monopoly power than discounting on non-platform goods and (2) the multiple ways Amazon could recoup losses in ways other than raising the price of the same e-books that it discounted.

Why not put Khan’s cross-subsidy theory to the test by building an antitrust case around it? Surely there’d be a document explaining how the firm expects to recoup its losses. Or, maybe not. Maybe by the firm’s accounting, it’s not losing money on the discounted products. Without evidence, it’s just speculation.

In fairness, one can argue that recent court decisions have made pursuing private antitrust litigation more difficult. For example, the Supreme Court’s decision in Twombly requires an antitrust plaintiff to show more than mere speculation based on circumstantial evidence in order to move forward to discovery. Decisions in matters such as Ashcroft v. Iqbal have made it more difficult for plaintiffs to maintain antitrust claims. Wal-Mart v. Dukes and Comcast Corp v Behrend subject antitrust class actions to more rigorous analysis. In Ohio v. Amex the court ruled antitrust plaintiffs can’t meet the burden of proof by showing only some effect on some part of a two-sided market.

At the same time Jeld-Wen indicates third party plaintiffs can be awarded damages and obtain divestitures, even after mergers clear. In Jeld-Wen, a competitor filed suit to challenge the consummated Jeld-Wen/Craftmaster merger four years after the DOJ approved the merger without conditions. The challenge was lengthy, but successful, and a district court ordered damages and the divestiture of one of the combined firm’s manufacturing facilities six years after the merger was closed.

Despite the possible challenges of pursuing a private antitrust suit, Daniel Crane’s review of US federal court workload statistics concludes the incidence of private antitrust enforcement in the United States has been relatively stable since the mid-1980s — in the range of 600 to 900 new private antitrust filings a year. He also finds resolution by trial has been relatively stable at an average of less than 1 percent a year. Thus, it’s not clear that recent decisions have erected insurmountable barriers to antitrust plaintiffs.

In the US, third parties may fund private antitrust litigation and plaintiffs’ attorneys are allowed to work under a contingency fee arrangement, subject to court approval. A compelling case could be funded by deep-pocketed supporters of the populists’ agenda, big tech haters, or even investors. Perhaps the most well-known example is Peter Thiel’s bankrolling of Hulk Hogan’s takedown of Gawker. Before that, the savings and loan crisis led to a number of forced mergers which were later challenged in court, with the costs partially funded by the issuance of litigation tracking warrants.

The antitrust populist ranks are chock-a-block with economists, policy wonks, and go-getter attorneys. If they are so confident in their claims of rising concentration, bad behavior, and harm to consumers, suppliers, and workers, then they should put those ideas to the test with some slam dunk litigation. The fact that they haven’t suggests they may not have a case.

In Amazon, Antitrust & Competition, Apple, European Union, Facebook, Google, International, Justice Department, Platforms, Truth on the Market, Twitter antitrust, antitrust populism, e-books, Instagram, neo-Brandeisian, New York Times, private antitrust litigation

This Too Shall Pass: Unassailable Monopolies That Were, in Hindsight, Eminently Assailable

Geoffrey Manne & Alec Stapp — 1 April 2019

[N]ew combinations are, as a rule, embodied, as it were, in new firms which generally do not arise out of the old ones but start producing beside them; … in general it is not the owner of stagecoaches who builds railways. – Joseph Schumpeter, January 1934

Elizabeth Warren wants to break up the tech giants — Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple — claiming they have too much power and represent a danger to our democracy. As part of our response to her proposal, we shared a couple of headlines from 2007 claiming that MySpace had an unassailable monopoly in the social media market.

Tommaso Valletti, the chief economist of the Directorate-General for Competition (DG COMP) of the European Commission, said, in what we assume was a reference to our posts, “they go on and on with that single example to claim that [Facebook] and [Google] are not a problem 15 years later … That’s not what I would call an empirical regularity.”

We appreciate the invitation to show that prematurely dubbing companies “unassailable monopolies” is indeed an empirical regularity.

It’s Tough to Make Predictions, Especially About the Future of Competition in Tech

No one is immune to this phenomenon. Antitrust regulators often take a static view of competition, failing to anticipate dynamic technological forces that will upend market structure and competition.

Scientists and academics make a different kind of error. They are driven by the need to satisfy their curiosity rather than shareholders. Upon inventing a new technology or discovering a new scientific truth, academics often fail to see the commercial implications of their findings.

Maybe the titans of industry don’t make these kinds of mistakes because they have skin in the game? The profit and loss statement is certainly a merciless master. But it does not give CEOs the power of premonition. Corporate executives hailed as visionaries in one era often become blinded by their success, failing to see impending threats to their company’s core value propositions.

Furthermore, it’s often hard as outside observers to tell after the fact whether business leaders just didn’t see a tidal wave of disruption coming or, worse, they did see it coming and were unable to steer their bureaucratic, slow-moving ships to safety. Either way, the outcome is the same.

Here’s the pattern we observe over and over: extreme success in one context makes it difficult to predict how and when the next paradigm shift will occur in the market. Incumbents become less innovative as they get lulled into stagnation by high profit margins in established lines of business. (This is essentially the thesis of Clay Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma).

Even if the anti-tech populists are powerless to make predictions, history does offer us some guidance about the future. We have seen time and again that apparently unassailable monopolists are quite effectively assailed by technological forces beyond their control.

PCs

Jan 1977: Commodore PET released

Jun 1977: Apple II released

Aug 1977: TRS-80 released

Feb 1978: “I.B.M. Says F.T.C. Has Ended Its Typewriter Monopoly Study” (NYT)

Mobile

Mar 2000: Palm Pilot IPO’s at $53 billion

Sep 2006: “Everyone’s always asking me when Apple will come out with a cellphone. My answer is, ‘Probably never.’” – David Pogue (NYT)

Apr 2007: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.” Ballmer (USA TODAY)

Jun 2007: iPhone released

Nov 2007: “Nokia: One Billion Customers—Can Anyone Catch the Cell Phone King?” (Forbes)

Sep 2013: “Microsoft CEO Ballmer Bids Emotional Farewell to Wall Street” (Reuters)

If there’s one thing I regret, there was a period in the early 2000s when we were so focused on what we had to do around Windows that we weren’t able to redeploy talent to the new device form factor called the phone.

Search

Mar 1998: “How Yahoo! Won the Search Wars” (Fortune)

Once upon a time, Yahoo! was an Internet search site with mediocre technology. Now it has a market cap of $2.8 billion. Some people say it’s the next America Online.

Sep 1998: Google founded

Instant Messaging

Sep 2000: “AOL Quietly Linking AIM, ICQ” (ZDNet)

AOL’s dominance of instant messaging technology, the kind of real-time e-mail that also lets users know when others are online, has emerged as a major concern of regulators scrutinizing the company’s planned merger with Time Warner Inc. (twx). Competitors to Instant Messenger, such as Microsoft Corp. (msft) and Yahoo! Inc. (yhoo), have been pressing the Federal Communications Commission to force AOL to make its services compatible with competitors’.

Dec 2000: “AOL’s Instant Messaging Monopoly?” (Wired)

Dec 2015: Report for the European Parliament

There have been isolated examples, as in the case of obligations of the merged AOL / Time Warner to make AOL Instant Messenger interoperable with competing messaging services. These obligations on AOL are widely viewed as having been a dismal failure.

Oct 2017: AOL shuts down AIM

Jan 2019: “Zuckerberg Plans to Integrate WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger” (NYT)

Retail

May 1997: Amazon IPO

Mar 1998: American Booksellers Association files antitrust suit against Borders, B&N

Feb 2005: Amazon Prime launches

Jul 2006: “Breaking the Chain: The Antitrust Case Against Wal-Mart” (Harper’s)

Feb 2011: “Borders Files for Bankruptcy” (NYT)

Social

Feb 2004: Facebook founded

Jan 2007: “MySpace Is a Natural Monopoly” (TechNewsWorld)

Seventy percent of Yahoo 360 users, for example, also use other social networking sites — MySpace in particular. Ditto for Facebook, Windows Live Spaces and Friendster … This presents an obvious, long-term business challenge to the competitors. If they cannot build up a large base of unique users, they will always be on MySpace’s periphery.

Feb 2007: “Will Myspace Ever Lose Its Monopoly?” (Guardian)

Jun 2011: “Myspace Sold for $35m in Spectacular Fall from $12bn Heyday” (Guardian)

Music

Dec 2003: “The subscription model of buying music is bankrupt. I think you could make available the Second Coming in a subscription model, and it might not be successful.” – Steve Jobs (Rolling Stone)

Apr 2006: Spotify founded

Jul 2009: “Apple’s iPhone and iPod Monopolies Must Go” (PC World)

Jun 2015: Apple Music announced

Video

Apr 2003: Netflix reaches one million subscribers for its DVD-by-mail service

Mar 2005: FTC blocks Blockbuster/Hollywood Video merger

Sep 2006: Amazon launches Prime Video

Jan 2007: Netflix streaming launches

Oct 2007: Hulu launches

May 2010: Hollywood Video’s parent company files for bankruptcy

Sep 2010: Blockbuster files for bankruptcy

The Only Winning Move Is Not to Play

Predicting the future of competition in the tech industry is such a fraught endeavor that even articles about how hard it is to make predictions include incorrect predictions. The authors just cannot help themselves. A March 2012 BBC article “The Future of Technology… Who Knows?” derided the naysayers who predicted doom for Apple’s retail store strategy. Its kicker?

And that is why when you read that the Blackberry is doomed, or that Microsoft will never make an impression on mobile phones, or that Apple will soon dominate the connected TV market, you need to take it all with a pinch of salt.

But Blackberry was doomed and Microsoft never made an impression on mobile phones. (Half credit for Apple TV, which currently has a 15% market share).

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote a piece for Red Herring magazine (seriously) in June 1998 with the title “Why most economists’ predictions are wrong.” Headline-be-damned, near the end of the article he made the following prediction:

The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in “Metcalfe’s law”—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.

Robert Metcalfe himself predicted in a 1995 column that the Internet would “go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.” After pledging to “eat his words” if the prediction did not come true, “in front of an audience, he put that particular column into a blender, poured in some water, and proceeded to eat the resulting frappe with a spoon.”

A Change Is Gonna Come

Benedict Evans, a venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz, has the best summary of why competition in tech is especially difficult to predict:

IBM, Microsoft and Nokia were not beaten by companies doing what they did, but better. They were beaten by companies that moved the playing field and made their core competitive assets irrelevant. The same will apply to Facebook (and Google, Amazon and Apple).

Elsewhere, Evans tried to reassure his audience that we will not be stuck with the current crop of tech giants forever:

With each cycle in tech, companies find ways to build a moat and make a monopoly. Then people look at the moat and think it’s invulnerable. They’re generally right. IBM still dominates mainframes and Microsoft still dominates PC operating systems and productivity software. But… It’s not that someone works out how to cross the moat. It’s that the castle becomes irrelevant. IBM didn’t lose mainframes and Microsoft didn’t lose PC operating systems. Instead, those stopped being ways to dominate tech. PCs made IBM just another big tech company. Mobile and the web made Microsoft just another big tech company. This will happen to Google or Amazon as well. Unless you think tech progress is over and there’ll be no more cycles … It is deeply counter-intuitive to say ‘something we cannot predict is certain to happen’. But this is nonetheless what’s happened to overturn pretty much every tech monopoly so far.

If this time is different — or if there are more false negatives than false positives in the monopoly prediction game — then the advocates for breaking up Big Tech should try to make that argument instead of falling back on “big is bad” rhetoric. As for us, we’ll bet that we have not yet reached the end of history — tech progress is far from over.

The Tariff Act is indeed protectionist — and that’s how Congress wants it

Geoffrey Manne & Kristian Stout — 11 May 2018

Although not always front page news, International Trade Commission (“ITC”) decisions can have major impacts on trade policy and antitrust law. Scott Kieff, a former ITC Commissioner, recently published a thoughtful analysis of Certain Carbon and Alloy Steel Products — a potentially important ITC investigation that implicates the intersection of these two policy areas. Scott was on the ITC when the investigation was initiated in 2016, but left in 2017 before the decision was finally issued in March of this year.

Perhaps most important, the case highlights an uncomfortable truth:

Sometimes (often?) Congress writes really bad laws and promotes really bad policies, but administrative agencies can do more harm to the integrity of our legal system by abusing their authority in an effort to override those bad policies.

In this case, that “uncomfortable truth” plays out in the context of the ITC majority’s effort to override Section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930 by limiting the ability of the ITC to investigate alleged violations of the Act rooted in antitrust.

While we’re all for limiting the ability of competitors to use antitrust claims in order to impede competition (as one of us has noted: “Erecting barriers to entry and raising rivals’ costs through regulation are time-honored American political traditions”), it is inappropriate to make an end-run around valid and unambiguous legislation in order to do so — no matter how desirable the end result. (As the other of us has noted: “Attempts to [effect preferred policies] through any means possible are rational actions at an individual level, but writ large they may undermine the legal fabric of our system and should be resisted.”)

Brief background

Under Section 337, the ITC is empowered to, among other things, remedy

Unfair methods of competition and unfair acts in the importation of articles… into the United States… the threat or effect of which is to destroy or substantially injure an industry in the United States… or to restrain or monopolize trade and commerce in the United States.

In Certain Carbon and Alloy Steel Products, the ITC undertook an investigation — at the behest of U.S. Steel Corporation — into alleged violations of Section 337 by the Chinese steel industry. The complaint was based upon a number of claims, including allegations of price fixing.

As ALJ Lord succinctly summarizes in her Initial Determination:

For many years, the United States steel industry has complained of unfair trade practices by manufacturers of Chinese steel. While such practices have resulted in the imposition of high tariffs on certain Chinese steel products, U.S. Steel seeks additional remedies. The complaint by U.S. Steel in this case attempts to use section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930 to block all Chinese carbon and alloy steel from coming into the United States. One of the grounds that U.S. Steel relies on is the allegation that the Chinese steel industry violates U.S. antitrust laws.

The ALJ dismissed the antitrust claims (alleging violations of the Sherman Act), however, concluding that they failed to allege antitrust injury as required by US courts deciding Sherman Act cases brought by private parties under the Clayton Act’s remedial provisions:

Under federal antitrust law, it is firmly established that a private complainant must show antitrust standing [by demonstrating antitrust injury]. U.S. Steel has not alleged that it has antitrust standing or the facts necessary to establish antitrust standing and erroneously contends it need not have antitrust standing to allege the unfair trade practice of restraining trade….

In its decision earlier this year, a majority of ITC commissioners agreed, and upheld the ALJ’s Initial Determination.

In comments filed with the ITC following the ALJ’s Initial Determination, we argued that the ALJ erred in her analysis:

Because antitrust injury is not an express requirement imposed by Congress, because ITC processes differ substantially from those of Article III courts, and because Section 337 is designed to serve different aims than private antitrust litigation, the Commission should reinstate the price fixing claims and allow the case to proceed.

Unfortunately, in upholding the Initial Determination, the Commission compounded this error, and also failed to properly understand the goals of the Tariff Act, and, by extension, its own role as arbiter of “unfair” trade practices.

A tale of two statutes

The case appears to turn on an arcane issue of adjudicative process in antitrust claims brought under the antitrust laws in federal court, on the one hand, versus antitrust claims brought under the Section 337 of the Tariff Act at the ITC, on the other. But it is actually about much more: the very purposes and structures of those laws.

The ALJ notes that

[The Chinese steel manufacturers contend that] under antitrust law as currently applied in federal courts, it has become very difficult for a private party like U.S. Steel to bring an antitrust suit against its competitors. Steel accepts this but says the law under section 337 should be different than in federal courts.

And as the ALJ further notes, this highlights the differences between the two regimes:

The dispute between U.S. Steel and the Chinese steel industry shows the conflict between section 337, which is intended to protect American industry from unfair competition, and U.S. antitrust laws, which are intended to promote competition for the benefit of consumers, even if such competition harms competitors.

Nevertheless, the ALJ (and the Commission) holds that antitrust laws must be applied in the same way in federal court as under Section 337 at the ITC.

It is this conclusion that is in error.

Judging from his article, it’s clear that Kieff agrees and would have dissented from the Commission’s decision. As he writes:

Unlike the focus in Section 16 of the Clayton Act on harm to the plaintiff, the provisions in the ITC’s statute — Section 337 — explicitly require the ITC to deal directly with harms to the industry or the market (rather than to the particular plaintiff)…. Where the statute protects the market rather than the individual complainant, the antitrust injury doctrine’s own internal logic does not compel the imposition of a burden to show harm to the particular private actor bringing the complaint. (Emphasis added)

Somewhat similar to the antitrust laws, the overall purpose of Section 337 focuses on broader, competitive harm — injury to “an industry in the United States” — not specific competitors. But unlike the Clayton Act, the Tariff Act does not accomplish this by providing a remedy for private parties alleging injury to themselves as a proxy for this broader, competitive harm.

As Kieff writes:

One stark difference between the two statutory regimes relates to the explicit goals that the statutes state for themselves…. [T]he Clayton Act explicitly states it is to remedy harm to only the plaintiff itself. This difference has particular significance for [the Commission’s decision in Certain Carbon and Alloy Steel Products] because the Supreme Court’s source of the private antitrust injury doctrine, its decision in Brunswick, explicitly tied the doctrine to this particular goal.

More particularly, much of the Court’s discussion in Brunswick focuses on the role the [antitrust injury] doctrine plays in mitigating the risk of unjustly enriching the plaintiff with damages awards beyond the amount of the particular antitrust harm that plaintiff actually suffered. The doctrine makes sense in the context of the Clayton Act proceedings in federal court because it keeps the cause of action focused on that statute’s stated goal of protecting a particular litigant only in so far as that party itself is a proxy for the harm to the market.

By contrast, since the goal of the ITC’s statute is to remedy for harm to the industry or to trade and commerce… there is no need to closely tie such broader harms to the market to the precise amounts of harms suffered by the particular complainant. (Emphasis and paragraph breaks added)

The mechanism by which the Clayton Act works is decidedly to remedy injury to competitors (including with treble damages). But because its larger goal is the promotion of competition, it cabins that remedy in order to ensure that it functions as an appropriate proxy for broader harms, and not simply a tool by which competitors may bludgeon each other. As Kieff writes:

The remedy provisions of the Clayton Act benefit much more than just the private plaintiff. They are designed to benefit the public, echoing the view that the private plaintiff is serving, indirectly, as a proxy for the market as a whole.

The larger purpose of Section 337 is somewhat different, and its remedial mechanism is decidedly different:

By contrast, the provisions in Section 337[] are much more direct in that they protect against injury to the industry or to trade and commerce more broadly. Harm to the particular complainant is essentially only relevant in so far as it shows harm to the industry or to trade and commerce more broadly. In turn, the remedies the ITC’s statute provides are more modest and direct in stopping any such broader harm that is determined to exist through a complete investigation.

The distinction between antitrust laws and trade laws is firmly established in the case law. And, in particular, trade laws not only focus on effects on industry rather than consumers or competition, per se, but they also contemplate a different kind of economic injury:

The “injury to industry” causation standard… focuses explicitly upon conditions in the U.S. industry…. In effect, Congress has made a judgment that causally related injury to the domestic industry may be severe enough to justify relief from less than fair value imports even if from another viewpoint the economy could be said to be better served by providing no relief. (Emphasis added)

Importantly, under Section 337 such harms to industry would ultimately have to be shown before a remedy would be imposed. In other words, demonstration of injury to competition is a constituent part of a case under Section 337. By contrast, such a demonstration is brought into an action under the antitrust laws by the antitrust injury doctrine as a function of establishing that the plaintiff has standing to sue as a proxy for broader harm to the market.

Finally, it should be noted, as ITC Commissioner Broadbent points out in her dissent from the Commission’s majority opinion, that U.S. Steel alleged in its complaint a violation of the Sherman Act, not the Clayton Act. Although its ability to enforce the Sherman Act arises from the remedial provisions of the Clayton Act, the substantive analysis of its claims is a Sherman Act matter. And the Sherman Act does not contain any explicit antitrust injury requirement. This is a crucial distinction because, as Commissioner Broadbent notes (quoting the Federal Circuit’s Tianrui case):

The “antitrust injury” standing requirement stems, not from the substantive antitrust statutes like the Sherman Act, but rather from the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the injury elements that must be proven under sections 4 and 16 of the Clayton Act.

* * *

Absent [] express Congressional limitation, restricting the Commission’s consideration of unfair methods of competition and unfair acts in international trade “would be inconsistent with the congressional purpose of protecting domestic commerce from unfair competition in importation….”

* * *

Where, as here, no such express limitation in the Sherman Act has been shown, I find no legal justification for imposing the insurmountable hurdle of demonstrating antitrust injury upon a typical U.S. company that is grappling with imports that benefit from the international unfair methods of competition that have been alleged in this case.

Section 337 is not a stand-in for other federal laws, even where it protects against similar conduct, and its aims diverge in important ways from those of other federal laws. It is, in other words, a trade protection provision, first and foremost, not an antitrust law, patent law, or even precisely a consumer protection statute.

The ITC hamstrings Itself

Kieff lays out a number of compelling points in his paper, including an argument that the ITC was statutorily designed as a convenient forum with broad powers in order to enable trade harms to be remedied without resort to expensive and protracted litigation in federal district court.

But, perhaps even more important, he points to a contradiction in the ITC’s decision that is directly related to its statutory design.

Under the Tariff Act, the Commission is entitled to self-initiate a Section 337 investigation identical to the one in Certain Alloy and Carbon Steel Products. And, as in this case, private parties are also entitled to file complaints with the Commission that can serve as the trigger for an investigation. In both instances, the ITC itself decides whether there is sufficient basis for proceeding, and, although an investigation unfolds much like litigation in federal court, it is, in fact, an investigation (and decision) undertaken by the ITC itself.

Although the Commission is statutorily mandated to initiate an investigation once a complaint is properly filed, this is subject to a provision requiring the Commission to “examine the complaint for sufficiency and compliance with the applicable sections of this Chapter.” Thus, the Commission conducts a preliminary investigation to determine if the complaint provides a sound basis for institution of an investigation, not unlike an assessment of standing and evaluation of the sufficiency of a complaint in federal court — all of which happens before an official investigation is initiated.

Yet despite the fact that, before an investigation begins, the ITC either 1) decides for itself that there is sufficient basis to initiate its own action, or else 2) evaluates the sufficiency of a private complaint to determine if the Commission should initiate an action, the logic of the decision in Certain Alloy and Carbon Steel Products would apply different standards in each case. Writes Kieff:

There appears to be broad consensus that the ITC can self-initiate an antitrust case under Section 337 and in such a proceeding would not be required to apply the antitrust injury doctrine to itself or to anyone else…. [I]t seems odd to make [this] legal distinction… After all, if it turned out there really were harm to a domestic industry or trade and commerce in this case, it would be strange for the ITC to have to dismiss this action and deprive itself of the benefit of the advance work and ongoing work of the private party [just because it was brought to the ITC’s attention by a private party complaint], only to either sit idle or expend the resources to — flying solo that time — reinitiate and proceed to completion.

Odd indeed, because, in the end, what is instituted is an investigation undertaken by the ITC — whether it originates from a private party or from its own initiative. The role of a complaining party before the ITC is quite distinct from that of a plaintiff in an Article III court.

In trade these days, it always comes down to China

We are hesitant to offer justifications for Congress’ decision to grant the ITC a sweeping administrative authority to prohibit the “unfair” importation of articles into the US, but there could be good reasons that Congress enacted the Tariff Act as a protectionist statute.

In a recent Law360 article, Kieff noted that analyzing anticompetitive behavior in the trade context is more complicated than in the domestic context. To take the current example: By limiting the complainant’s ability to initiate an ITC action based on a claim that foreign competitors are conspiring to keep prices artificially low, the ITC majority decision may be short-sighted insofar as keeping prices low might actually be part of a larger industrial and military policy for the Chinese government:

The overlooked problem is that, as the ITC petitioners claim, the Chinese government is using its control over many Chinese steel producers to accomplish full-spectrum coordination on both price and quantity. Mere allegations of course would have to be proven; but it’s not hard to imagine that such coordination could afford the Chinese government effective surveillance and control over almost the entire worldwide supply chain for steel products.

This access would help the Chinese government run significant intelligence operations…. China is allegedly gaining immense access to practically every bid and ask up and down the supply chain across the global steel market in general, and our domestic market in particular. That much real-time visibility across steel markets can in turn give visibility into defense, critical infrastructure and finance.

Thus, by taking it upon itself to artificially narrow its scope of authority, the ITC could be undermining a valid congressional concern: that trade distortions not be used as a way to allow a foreign government to gain a more pervasive advantage over diplomatic and military operations.

No one seriously doubts that China is, at the very least, a supportive partner to much of its industry in a way that gives that industry some potential advantage over competitors operating in countries that receive relatively less assistance from national governments.

In certain industries — notably semiconductors and patent-intensive industries more broadly — the Chinese government regularly imposes onerous conditions (including mandatory IP licensing and joint ventures with Chinese firms, invasive audits, and obligatory software and hardware “backdoors”) on foreign tech companies doing business in China. It has long been an open secret that these efforts, ostensibly undertaken for the sake of national security, are actually aimed at protecting or bolstering China’s domestic industry.

And China could certainly leverage these partnerships to obtain information on a significant share of important industries and their participants throughout the world. After all, we are well familiar with this business model: cheap or highly subsidized access to a desired good or service in exchange for user data is the basic description of modern tech platform companies.

Only Congress can fix Congress

Stepping back from the ITC context, a key inquiry when examining antitrust through a trade lens is the extent to which countries will use antitrust as a non-tariff barrier to restrain trade. It is certainly the case that a sort of “mutually assured destruction” can arise where every country chooses to enforce its own ambiguously worded competition statute in a way that can favor its domestic producers to the detriment of importers. In the face of that concern, the impetus to try to apply procedural constraints on open-ended competition laws operating in the trade context is understandable.

And as a general matter, it also makes sense to be concerned when producers like U.S. Steel try to use our domestic antitrust laws to disadvantage Chinese competitors or keep them out of the market entirely.

But in this instance the analysis is more complicated. Like it or not, what amounts to injury in the international trade context, even with respect to anticompetitive conduct, is different than what’s contemplated under the antitrust laws. When the Tariff Act of 1922 was passed (which later became Section 337) the Senate Finance Committee Report that accompanied it described the scope of its unfair methods of competition authority as “broad enough to prevent every type and form of unfair practice” involving international trade. At the same time, Congress pretty clearly gave the ITC the discretion to proceed on a much less-constrained basis than that on which Article III courts operate.

If these are problems, Congress needs to fix them, not the ITC acting sua sponte.

Moreover, as Kieff’s paper (and our own comments in the Certain Alloy and Carbon Steel Products investigation) make clear, there are also a number of relevant, practical distinctions between enforcement of the antitrust laws in a federal court in a case brought by a private plaintiff and an investigation of alleged anticompetitive conduct by the ITC under Section 337. Every one of these cuts against importing an antitrust injury requirement from federal court into ITC adjudication.

Instead, understandable as its motivation may be, the ITC majority’s approach in Certain Alloy and Carbon Steel Products requires disregarding Congressional intent, and that’s simply not a tenable interpretive approach for administrative agencies to take.

Protectionism is a terrible idea, but if that’s how Congress wrote the Tariff Act, the ITC is legally obligated to enforce the protectionist law it is given.

The Case for Doing Nothing About Common Ownership of Small Stakes in Competing Firms

Thom Lambert — 9 May 2018

One of the hottest antitrust topics of late has been institutional investors’ “common ownership” of minority stakes in competing firms. Writing in the Harvard Law Review, Einer Elhauge proclaimed that “[a]n economic blockbuster has recently been exposed”—namely, “[a] small group of institutions has acquired large shareholdings in horizontal competitors throughout our economy, causing them to compete less vigorously with each other.” In the Antitrust Law Journal, Eric Posner, Fiona Scott Morton, and Glen Weyl contended that “the concentration of markets through large institutional investors is the major new antitrust challenge of our time.” Those same authors took to the pages of the New York Times to argue that “[t]he great, but mostly unknown, antitrust story of our time is the astonishing rise of the institutional investor … and the challenge that it poses to market competition.”

Not surprisingly, these scholars have gone beyond just identifying a potential problem; they have also advocated policy solutions. Elhauge has called for allowing government enforcers and private parties to use Section 7 of the Clayton Act, the provision primarily used to prevent anticompetitive mergers, to police institutional investors’ ownership of minority positions in competing firms. Posner et al., concerned “that private litigation or unguided public litigation could cause problems because of the interactive nature of institutional holdings on competition,” have proposed that federal antitrust enforcers adopt an enforcement policy that would encourage institutional investors either to avoid common ownership of firms in concentrated industries or to limit their influence over such firms by refraining from voting their shares.

The position of these scholars is thus (1) that common ownership by institutional investors significantly diminishes competition in concentrated industries, and (2) that additional antitrust intervention—beyond generally applicable rules on, say, hub-and-spoke conspiracies and anticompetitive information exchanges—is appropriate to prevent competitive harm.

Mike Sykuta and I have recently posted a paper taking issue with this two-pronged view. With respect to the first prong, we contend that there are serious problems with both the theory of competitive harm stemming from institutional investors’ common ownership and the empirical evidence that has been marshalled in support of that theory. With respect to the second, we argue that even if competition were softened by institutional investors’ common ownership of small minority interests in competing firms, the unintended negative consequences of an antitrust fix would outweigh any benefits from such intervention.

Over the next few days, we plan to unpack some of the key arguments in our paper, The Case for Doing Nothing About Institutional Investors’ Common Ownership of Small Stakes in Competing Firms. In the meantime, we encourage readers to download the paper and send us any comments.

The paper’s abstract is below the fold. Continue Reading…

In Antitrust & Competition, Antitrust Division, Corporate & Securities Law, Error Costs, Federal Trade Commission, Justice Department, Law & Economics, Regulation Agency Costs, Clayton Act, common ownership, corporate governance, institutional investors, New York Times, private antitrust litigation

Competition Among Competition Regimes: Recent Developments in Europe and Welfare Implications

Alden Abbott — 10 September 2015

A basic premise of antitrust law (also called competition law) is that competition among private entities enhances economic welfare by reducing costs, increasing efficiency, and spurring innovation. Government competition agencies around the world also compete, by devising different substantive and procedural rules to constrain private conduct in the name of promoting competition. The welfare implications of that form of inter-jurisdictional competition are, however, ambiguous. Public choice considerations suggest that self-interested competition agency staff have a strong incentive to promote rules that spawn many investigations and cases, in order to increase their budgets and influence. Indeed, an agency may measure its success, both domestically and on the world stage, by the size of its budget and staff and the amount of enforcement activity it generates. That activity, however, imposes costs on the private sector, and may produce restrictive rules that deter vigorous, welfare-enhancing competition. Furthermore, and relatedly, it may generate substantial costs due to “false positives” – agency challenges to efficient conduct that should not have been brought. (There are also costs stemming from “false negatives,” the failure to bring welfare-enhancing enforcement actions. Decision theory indicates an agency should seek to minimize the sum of costs due to false positives and false negatives.) Private enforcement of competition laws, until recently largely relegated to the United States, brings additional costs and complications, to the extent it yields ill-advised lawsuits. Thus one should cast a wary eye at any increase in the scope of enforcement authority within a jurisdiction, and not assume automatically that it is desirable on public policy grounds.

These considerations should be brought to bear in assessing the implications of the 2014 European Union (EU) Damages Actions Directive (Directive), which is expected to yield a dramatic increase in private competition law enforcement in the EU. The Directive establishes standards EU nations must adopt for the bringing of private competition lawsuits, including class actions. The 28 EU member states have until December 27, 2016 to adopt national laws, regulations, and administrative provisions that implement the Directive. In short, the Directive (1) makes it easier for private plaintiffs to have access to evidence; (2) gives a final finding of violation by a national competition agency conclusive effect in private actions brought in national courts and prima facie presumptive effect in private actions brought in other EU nations; (3) establishes clear and uniform statutes of limitation; (4) allows both direct and indirect purchasers of overpriced goods to bring private actions; (5) clarifies that private victims are entitled to full compensation for losses suffered, including compensation for actual loss and for loss of profit, plus interest; (6) establishes a rebuttable presumption that cartels cause harm; and (7) provides for joint and several liability (any participant in a competition law infringement will be responsible towards the victims for the whole harm caused by the infringement, but may seek contribution from other infringers).

By facilitating the bringing of lawsuits for cartel overcharges by both direct and indirect purchasers (see here), the Directive should substantially expand private cartel litigation in Europe. (It may also redirect some cartel-related litigation from United States tribunals, which up to now have been the favorite venues for such actions. Potential treble damages recoveries still make U.S. antitrust courts an attractive venue, but limitations on indirect purchaser suits and Sherman Act jurisdictional constraints requiring a “direct, substantial and reasonably foreseeable effect” effect on U.S. commerce create complications for foreign plaintiffs.) Given the fact that cartels have no redeeming features, this feature may be expected to increase disincentives for cartel conduct and thereby raise welfare. (The degree of welfare enhancement depends on the extent to which legitimate activity may be misidentified as cartel conduct, yielding “false positive” damage actions.)

The outlook is less sanguine for non-cartel cases, however. The Directive applies equally to vertical restraints and abuse of dominance cases, which are far more likely to yield false positives. In my experience, EU enforcers are more comfortable than U.S. enforcers at pursuing cases based on attenuated theories of exclusionary conduct that have a weak empirical basis. (The EU’s continued investigation of Google, based on economically inappropriate theories that were rejected by the U.S. FTC, is a prime example.) In particular, the implementation of the Directive will raise the financial risks for “dominant” or “potentially dominant” firms operating in Europe, who may be further disincentivized from undertaking novel welfare-enhancing business practices that preserve or raise their market share. This could further harm the vitality of the European business sector.

Hopefully, individual EU states will seek to implement the Directive in a manner that takes into account the serious risk of false positives in non-cartel cases. The welfare implications of the Directive’s implementation are well worth further competition law scholarship.

In Antitrust & Competition, Cartels, Economic Theory, European Union, Exclusionary Conduct, Facebook, International, Jurisdictional Competition, Platforms, Regulation, Vertical Restraints antitrust, decision theory, European Commission, law enforcement, private antitrust litigation

The Microsoft-Google Antitrust Wars and Public Choice: There is Too An Argument Against Rival Involvement in Antitrust Enforcement

Josh Wright — 14 September 2010

How should an economist interpret the fact that Microsoft appears to be “behind” recent enforcement actions against Google in the United States and, especially, in Europe?

“With skepticism!” Is the answer I suspect many readers will offer upon first glance. There is a long public choice literature, and long history in antitrust itself, that suggests that one should be weary of private enforcement of the antitrust laws against rivals both in the form of litigation and attempts to delegate the enforcement effort (and costs) to the government.

In a recent post, economist (and blogger) Joshua Gans suggests that this conventional economic wisdom is wrong. Gans discusses the Microsoft-Google Wars and claims that Microsoft’s involvement in the recent actions against Google in Europe, Texas and elsewhere are feature of an antitrust policy that is working, rather than a bug of an antitrust system that funnels competitive activity away on the margin from dimensions that benefit consumers, i.e. competition on the merits, and toward rent-seeking.

Gans characterizes Microsoft’s recent reported involvement in the antitrust activity launched against Google in Europe, and now Texas, as the result of some sort of epiphany at the company:

I think the narrative that is appropriate is that the antitrust action against Microsoft, while it didn’t end up breaking it up, actually worked. Microsoft has largely behaved itself since. It no longer aggressively bundles or bullies OEMs into exclusives. What is more, in its more competitive segments, it is actually a strong consumer performer. Think about video games, for one. And it is improving in its traditional monopoly areas too where it is forced to compete on products rather than with heavy handed contracting.

Lets hold aside the issue, for a moment, of whether Microsoft is as much of an antitrust enforcement success as Gans’ characterization suggests. There remains significant debate on this issue, but I don’t want to re-hash that here, and do not need for the purposes of this post. There is also a lot of normative judgment in Gans’ post, e.g. “no longer aggressively bundles or bullies,” could be a good or bad thing from a consumer welfare perspective depending on whether the bundling or exclusive dealing with OEMs or IAPs provided consumer benefits. But it is at least worth noting that the possibility that Microsoft has been chilled from plausibly pro-competitive conduct ought to be recognized. But that is not the point.

The real question is what, if anything, Microsoft’s involvement tells us about how an economist should think about modern antitrust enforcement actions against Google?

Here is Gans’ answer:

Google’s new narrative in these actions is that this is a dynamic industry and they face lots of competition and potential competition — just look to Microsoft’s example! But if the correct story is that Microsoft faced real competition only because antitrust action tied its hands on anticompetitive acts, then Google’s line is incorrect and, what is worse, may lead to bad policy outcomes. Think to Google’s recent acquisitions in search in Japan that took it from a 70:30 duopoly to monopoly. This is not what we want.

In this regard, I can think of no better advocate for this narrative than Microsoft. Who better to tell the world that antitrust policy in high tech environments actually works. Yes, they are interested but it is not an argument against antitrust action to simply point to Microsoft involvement.

This answer did not move me from my initial skepticism. At least, not in the direction of less skepticism. There are some odd assumptions being made here. First, I’m tempted to ask about who we know that a 70:30 market structure is “not what we want”? Second, who is this “we” anyway? Perhaps it is consumers. Its unclear. But it sounds essentially like a classic structure-conduct-performance argument. The problems with such arguments in high-tech markets with rapid technological change (and even in more stable “brick and mortar” settings) are well known. Is there any evidence that Google’s recent transactions in Japan generated consumer harms? Did it generate benefits? If it didn’t harm consumers — what is the problem?

From an economic perspective, assuming that Microsoft’s underlying conduct was clearly anticompetitive, that the costs of enforcement are less than the benefits created for consumers, and that anything around a 70-30 market share structure in search harms competition and reduces consumer welfare assumes away all of the interesting economic questions in order to reach a policy conclusion: Microsoft’s involvement tells us to favor antitrust enforcement against Google — or at the very least, is neutral.

But what about that policy argument? It is the bolded sentence that got my attention. Gans claims that Microsoft is the best advocate for antitrust enforcement in high-sectors because they know that enforcement “actually works.” Somewhat more provocatively, Gans claims that the fact that Microsoft is self-interested is not an argument against antitrust action. Au contraire.

That investment in private antitrust enforcement against one’s rivals is, ceteris paribus, a negative signal about the economic merits of an antitrust action is indeed an argument. And its a good one. And one that has been around a long time.

Posner (Antitrust Law, 2d at 281) writes about influence of rivals on state enforcement:

I would like to see the states, which have been growing increasingly active in antitrust enforcement since the 1980s, stripped of their authority to bring antitrust suits, federal or state, except under circumstances in which a private firm would be able to sue … . States are unwilling to devote the resources necessary to do more than free ride on federal antitrust litigation, complicating its resolution. In addition, they are excessively influenced by interest groups that may represent a potential antitrust defendant’s competitors. This is a particular concern when the defendant is located in one state and one of its competitors is located in another and that competitor, who is pressing his state’s attorney general to bring suit, is a major political force in that state.

Posner is not alone here in expressing concerns about the influence of rival firms on state and federal enforcement, as well as the use of private enforcement and the threat of treble damages to subvert competition. Indeed, a classic in the antitrust economics literature is Baumol & Ordover, Use of Antitrust to Subvert Competition, in which the authors argue that courts should presumptively deny standing to competitors seeking to block mergers. The idea that rivals can use the government agencies to do things to hinder rather than help competition is not new, and has deep roots in the public choice literature.

The argument appears in the Gavil, Kovacic and Baker Antitrust Law textbook (page 1088):

Despite their potential benefits, private enforcement schemes (including private antitrust enforcement) can have adverse consequences. Private enforcement can generate questionable claims, and can enable firms to use the courts to impede efficient behavior by their rivals. Although private enforcement reduces the need to enlarge public enforcement bodies, private suits can consume substantial social resources in the form of costs incurred to prosecute and defend such cases. Perhaps recognizing these adverse possibilities, courts have established limits on the ability of private plaintiffs to obtain relief under the Clayton Act.

Of course, those limits apply to litigation in court. No such limits apply when the rival knocks on the door at the FTC or DOJ or State AG’s office.

Fred McChesney writes, citing the Baumol & Ordover analysis and Salop & White (1986) on private antitrust litigation, that:

One of the most worrisome statistics in antitrust is that for every case brought by government, private plaintiffs bring ten. The majority of cases are filed to hinder, not help, competition. According to Steven Salop, formerly an antitrust official in the Carter administration, and Lawrence J. White, an economist at New York University, most private antitrust actions are filed by members of one of two groups. The most numerous private actions are brought by parties who are in a vertical arrangement with the defendant (e.g., dealers or franchisees) and who therefore are unlikely to have suffered from any truly anticompetitive offense. Usually, such cases are attempts to convert simple contract disputes (compensable by ordinary damages) into triple-damage payoffs under the Clayton Act.

The second most frequent private case is that brought by competitors. Because competitors are hurt only when a rival is acting procompetitively by increasing its sales and decreasing its price, the desire to hobble the defendant’s efficient practices must motivate at least some antitrust suits by competitors. Thus, case statistics suggest that the anticompetitive costs from “abuse of antitrust,” as New York University economists William Baumol and Janusz Ordover (1985) referred to it, may actually exceed any procompetitive benefits of antitrust laws.

Separately, McChesney provides an example:

Consider a case like that against Salton, Inc., for resale price maintenance of its George Foreman grills, provisionally settled in September 2002. The case is one in which the federal antitrust authorities would have no interest. Resale price maintenance is now understood to be an intrabrand practice that enhances interbrand competition. Economists almost unanimously applaud resale price maintenance as a way to enhance distributor efforts to market the product vis-à-vis competing brands in ways that almost never have any anticompetitive aspects. Resale price maintenance simply has no place in the modern, economics-based enforcement agenda.

However, resale price maintenance cases like that against Salton are a natural for the state attorneys general. First, anomalously, resale price maintenance remains per se illegal under the Sherman Act and thus is illegal under states’ antitrust acts. Therefore, victory is automatic — and cheap. All that need be shown is a contract to set resale prices, or something that a jury might so construe as such a contract.
Victory is even easier when the states sue for hundreds of millions of dollars (as in the Salton case) and then offer a settlement for cents on the dollar ($8 million in the Salton case). No company, particularly one with public shareholders, could refuse an offer to settle for so little. To do so would invite a shareholder suit. Salton’s George Foreman grill is one of the great success stories in kitchen appliance sales. With unit sales in the millions, its high profile is guaranteed by George Foreman’s name and
ability to promote it. Hanging the scalp of a brand-name retailer and a phenomenally successful product on an attorney general’s wall was not likely to discourage the two lead attorneys general in the Salton case, New York’s Eliot Spitzer and Illinois’s
James Ryan. The former has shown himself not averse to publicity; the latter was running for governor at the time the suit’s settlement was announced.

The suit certainly was valuable to the attorneys general. But what was in it for consumers, the supposed beneficiaries of antitrust? Nothing, apparently. Not only is resale price maintenance generally a beneficial practice socially, but the settlement
amount was laughable in terms of redressing any supposed consumer injury. The settlement amounted to just pennies per grill sold. The attorneys general did not even try to get the money to the actual sufferers of any higher prices. Instead — attorneys general are politicians and 2002 was an election year — the money was destined elsewhere, as the attorneys general announced:

“In view of the difficulty in identifying the millions of purchasers of the Salton grills covered by the settlement and relatively small alleged overcharge per grill purchased, the states propose to use the $8 million settlement
in the following manner: Each state shall direct that its share of the $8 million be distributed to the state, its political subdivisions, municipalities, not-for-profit
corporations, and/or charitable organizations for health or nutrition-related causes. In this manner, the purchasers covered by the lawsuits (persons who bought Salton George Foreman Grills) will benefit from the settlement.”

This statement is commendably candid. Not only will supposedly wronged consumers not get any money, but the supposed overcharge was “relatively small” to begin with. If the overcharge was “relatively small,” Salton could not have had
much market power. Thus, the case flunks one of the principal filter tests that Judge Easterbrook rightly would impose to evaluate the worth of a standard antitrust case.

Judge Easterbrook himself, as McChesney notes, was one of the earliest to note the potential for consumer welfare-reducing abuse of the antitrust laws, arguing in the Limits of Antitrust that rival enforcement actions:

Antitrust litigation is attractive as a method of raising rivals’ costs because of the asymmetrical structure of incentives. The plaintiffs costs of litigation will be smaller than the defendant’s. The plaintiff need only file the complaint and serve demands for discovery. If the plaintiff wins, the defendant will bear these legal costs. The defendant, on the other hand, faces treble damages and injunction, as well as its own (and even its rival’s) costs of litigation. The principal burden of discovery falls on the defendant. The defendant is apt to be larger, with more files to search, and to have control of more pertinent documents than the plaintiff. … The books are full of suits by rivals for the purpose, or with the effect, of reducing competition and increasing
price.

Of course, these points apply just as well (and sometimes doubly) to the actions of rivals that do not even require them to go to court, and instead knock on the door of the government enforcement agency. Easterbrook proposed significant restrictions on such suits.

The idea that Microsoft is an especially qualified party to “tell the world that antitrust policy in high tech environments actually works” is dubious even holding aside the debate over whether one can identify palpable consumer benefits from the enforcement action and demonstrate that they outweigh the costs. Given the long history in antitrust of abuse of the private action to impose costs on rivals engaging in efficient business practices — a piece of history that is central to any narrative of the history of modern antitrust — and the longstanding concern about this idea in the economics literature, the argument that identity of the plaintiff or interloper is irrelevant to the economic merits of the underlying claim in the Microsoft-Google context seems especially wrongheaded. If anything, the proliferation of national antitrust laws and availability of EU enforcement make the problems emphasized in that literature more important, not less.

In Antitrust & Competition, Economic Theory, Exclusive Dealing, Google, Justice Department, Monopolization, Platforms, Resale Price Maintenance Clayton Act, Fred McChesney, Joshua Gans, private antitrust litigation, Structure–conduct–performance paradigm

Some Links

Josh Wright — 27 August 2009

Alex Tabarrok reviews economic growth textbooks and recommends this one
Ribstein on the proxy access battles
Private antitrust litigation is increasing quickly (picture here) — I’m setting the over/under for 2010 at 1600 cases
Steve Salop on the appropriate Section 2 rule of reason standard for refusal to deal and price squeezes by unregulated, vertically integrated monopolists
Some economics of airline wi-fi including the interesting fact that the wi-fi service provider rather than the airline sets the price

In Amazon, Antitrust & Competition, Platforms private antitrust litigation

Archives For private antitrust litigation

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The Court’s Flawed Analysis

Other Harms the Court Failed to Consider

Conclusion

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Blank Check #1

Blank Check #2

Anti-Market Antitrust

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Epic’s utopia is not an equilibrium

The emergence of new gaming platforms

Final thoughts

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It’s Tough to Make Predictions, Especially About the Future of Competition in Tech

PCs

Mobile

Search

Instant Messaging

Retail

Social

Music

Video

The Only Winning Move Is Not to Play

A Change Is Gonna Come

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Brief background

A tale of two statutes

The ITC hamstrings Itself

In trade these days, it always comes down to China

Only Congress can fix Congress

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