Archives For section 6(b)

The FTC’s Privacy Report Fails to Justify Asymmetric Regulation of ISPs

Ben Sperry —  24 November 2021

Others already have noted that the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) recently released 6(b) report on the privacy practices of Internet service providers (ISPs) fails to comprehend that widespread adoption of privacy-enabling technology—in particular, Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) and DNS over HTTPS (DoH), but also the use of virtual private networks (VPNs)—largely precludes ISPs from seeing what their customers do online.

But a more fundamental problem with the report lies in its underlying assumption that targeted advertising is inherently nefarious. Indeed, much of the report highlights not actual violations of the law by the ISPs, but “concerns” that they could use customer data for targeted advertising much like Google and Facebook already do. The final subheading before the report’s conclusion declares: “Many ISPs in Our Study Can Be At Least As Privacy-Intrusive as Large Advertising Platforms.”

The report does not elaborate on why it would be bad for ISPs to enter the targeted advertising market, which is particularly strange given the public focus regulators have shone in recent months on the supposed dominance of Google, Facebook, and Amazon in online advertising. As the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) has argued in past filings on the issue, there simply is no justification to apply sector-specific regulations to ISPs for the mere possibility that they will use customer data for targeted advertising.

ISPs Could be Competition for the Digital Advertising Market

It is ironic to witness FTC warnings about ISPs engaging in targeted advertising even as there are open antitrust cases against Google for its alleged dominance of the digital advertising market. In fact, news reports suggest the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) is preparing to join the antitrust suits against Google brought by state attorneys general. An obvious upshot of ISPs engaging in a larger amount of targeted advertising if that they could serve as a potential source of competition for Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

Despite the fears raised in the 6(b) report of rampant data collection for targeted ads, ISPs are, in fact, just a very small part of the $152.7 billion U.S. digital advertising market. As the report itself notes: “in 2020, the three largest players, Google, Facebook, and Amazon, received almost two-third of all U.S. digital advertising,” while Verizon pulled in just 3.4% of U.S. digital advertising revenues in 2018.

If the 6(b) report is correct that ISPs have access to troves of consumer data, it raises the question of why they don’t enjoy a bigger share of the digital advertising market. It could be that ISPs have other reasons not to engage in extensive advertising. Internet service provision is a two-sided market. ISPs could (and, over the years in various markets, some have) rely on advertising to subsidize Internet access. That they instead rely primarily on charging users directly for subscriptions may tell us something about prevailing demand on either side of the market.

Regardless of the reasons, the fact that ISPs have little presence in digital advertising suggests that it would be a misplaced focus for regulators to pursue industry-specific privacy regulation to crack down on ISP data collection for targeted advertising.

What’s the Harm in Targeted Advertising, Anyway?

At the heart of the FTC report is the commission’s contention that “advertising-driven surveillance of consumers’ online activity presents serious risks to the privacy of consumer data.” In Part V.B of the report, five of the six risks the FTC lists as associated with ISP data collection are related to advertising. But the only argument the report puts forth for why targeted advertising would be inherently pernicious is the assertion that it is contrary to user expectations and preferences.

As noted earlier, in a two-sided market, targeted ads could allow one side of the market to subsidize the other side. In other words, ISPs could engage in targeted advertising in order to reduce the price of access to consumers on the other side of the market. This is, indeed, one of the dominant models throughout the Internet ecosystem, so it wouldn’t be terribly unusual.

Taking away ISPs’ ability to engage in targeted advertising—particularly if it is paired with rumored net neutrality regulations from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)—would necessarily put upward pricing pressure on the sector’s remaining revenue stream: subscriber fees. With bridging the so-called “digital divide” (i.e., building out broadband to rural and other unserved and underserved markets) a major focus of the recently enacted infrastructure spending package, it would be counterproductive to simultaneously take steps that would make Internet access more expensive and less accessible.

Even if the FTC were right that data collection for targeted advertising poses the risk of consumer harm, the report fails to justify why a regulatory scheme should apply solely to ISPs when they are such a small part of the digital advertising marketplace. Sector-specific regulation only makes sense if the FTC believes that ISPs are uniquely opaque among data collectors with respect to their collection practices.

Conclusion

The sector-specific approach implicitly endorsed by the 6(b) report would limit competition in the digital advertising market, even as there are already legal and regulatory inquiries into whether that market is sufficiently competitive. The report also fails to make the case the data collection for target advertising is inherently bad, or uniquely bad when done by an ISP.

There may or may not be cause for comprehensive federal privacy legislation, depending on whether it would pass cost-benefit analysis, but there is no reason to focus on ISPs alone. The FTC needs to go back to the drawing board.

In Amazon, Antitrust & Competition, Antitrust Division, Data Privacy & Security, Facebook, Federal Trade Commission, Google, International Center for Law & Economics, Justice Department, Market Definition, Monopolization, Platforms, Telecommunications, Truth on the Market , , , , ,
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Acknowledging the Limitations of the FTC’s “PAE” Study

Adam Mossoff —  4 May 2016

[Below is an excellent essay by Devlin Hartline that was first posted at the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property blog last week, and I’m sharing it here.]

ACKNOWLEDGING THE LIMITATIONS OF THE FTC’S “PAE” STUDY

By Devlin Hartline

The FTC’s long-awaited case study of patent assertion entities (PAEs) is expected to be released this spring. Using its subpoena power under Section 6(b) to gather information from a handful of firms, the study promises us a glimpse at their inner workings. But while the results may be interesting, they’ll also be too narrow to support any informed policy changes. And you don’t have to take my word for it—the FTC admits as much. In one submission to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which ultimately decided whether the study should move forward, the FTC acknowledges that its findings “will not be generalizable to the universe of all PAE activity.” In another submission to the OMB, the FTC recognizes that “the case study should be viewed as descriptive and probative for future studies seeking to explore the relationships between organizational form and assertion behavior.”

However, this doesn’t mean that no one will use the study to advocate for drastic changes to the patent system. Even before the study’s release, many people—including some FTC Commissioners themselves—have already jumped to conclusions when it comes to PAEs, arguing that they are a drag on innovation and competition. Yet these same people say that we need this study because there’s no good empirical data analyzing the systemic costs and benefits of PAEs. They can’t have it both ways. The uproar about PAEs is emblematic of the broader movement that advocates for the next big change to the patent system before we’ve even seen how the last one panned out. In this environment, it’s unlikely that the FTC and other critics will responsibly acknowledge that the study simply cannot give us an accurate assessment of the bigger picture.

Limitations of the FTC Study 

Many scholars have written about the study’s fundamental limitations. As statistician Fritz Scheuren points out, there are two kinds of studies: exploratory and confirmatory. An exploratory study is a starting point that asks general questions in order to generate testable hypotheses, while a confirmatory study is then used to test the validity of those hypotheses. The FTC study, with its open-ended questions to a handful of firms, is a classic exploratory study. At best, the study will generate answers that could help researchers begin to form theories and design another round of questions for further research. Scheuren notes that while the “FTC study may well be useful at generating exploratory data with respect to PAE activity,” it “is not designed to confirm supportable subject matter conclusions.”

One significant constraint with the FTC study is that the sample size is small—only twenty-five PAEs—and the control group is even smaller—a mixture of fifteen manufacturers and non-practicing entities (NPEs) in the wireless chipset industry. Scheuren reasons that there “is also the risk of non-representative sampling and potential selection bias due to the fact that the universe of PAEs is largely unknown and likely quite diverse.” And the fact that the control group comes from one narrow industry further prevents any generalization of the results. Scheuren concludes that the FTC study “may result in potentially valuable information worthy of further study,” but that it is “not designed in a way as to support public policy decisions.”

Professor Michael Risch questions the FTC’s entire approach: “If the FTC is going to the trouble of doing a study, why not get it done right the first time and a) sample a larger number of manufacturers, in b) a more diverse area of manufacturing, and c) get identical information?” He points out that the FTC won’t be well-positioned to draw conclusions because the control group is not even being asked the same questions as the PAEs. Risch concludes that “any report risks looking like so many others: a static look at an industry with no benchmark to compare it to.” Professor Kristen Osenga echoes these same sentiments and notes that “the study has been shaped in a way that will simply add fuel to the anti–‘patent troll’ fire without providing any data that would explain the best way to fix the real problems in the patent field today.”

Osenga further argues that the study is flawed since the FTC’s definition of PAEs perpetuates the myth that patent licensing firms are all the same. The reality is that many different types of businesses fall under the “PAE” umbrella, and it makes no sense to impute the actions of a small subset to the entire group when making policy recommendations. Moreover, Osenga questions the FTC’s “shortsighted viewpoint” of the potential benefits of PAEs, and she doubts how the “impact on innovation and competition” will be ascertainable given the questions being asked. Anne Layne-Farrar expresses similar doubts about the conclusions that can be drawn from the FTC study since only licensors are being surveyed. She posits that it “cannot generate a full dataset for understanding the conduct of the parties in patent license negotiation or the reasons for the failure of negotiations.”

Layne-Farrar concludes that the FTC study “can point us in fruitful directions for further inquiry and may offer context for interpreting quantitative studies of PAE litigation, but should not be used to justify any policy changes.” Consistent with the FTC’s own admissions of the study’s limitations, this is the real bottom line of what we should expect. The study will have no predictive power because it only looks at how a small sample of firms affect a few other players within the patent ecosystem. It does not quantify how that activity ultimately affects innovation and competition—the very information needed to support policy recommendations. The FTC study is not intended to produce the sort of compelling statistical data that can be extrapolated to the larger universe of firms.

FTC Commissioners Put Cart Before Horse

The FTC has a history of bias against PAEs, as demonstrated in its 2011 report that skeptically questioned the “uncertain benefits” of PAEs while assuming their “detrimental effects” in undermining innovation. That report recommended special remedy rules for PAEs, even as the FTC acknowledged the lack of objective evidence of systemic failure and the difficulty of distinguishing “patent transactions that harm innovation from those that promote it.” With its new study, the FTC concedes to the OMB that much is still not known about PAEs and that the findings will be preliminary and non-generalizable. However, this hasn’t prevented some Commissioners from putting the cart before the horse with PAEs.

In fact, the very call for the FTC to institute the PAE study started with its conclusion. In her 2013 speech suggesting the study, FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez recognized that “we still have only snapshots of the costs and benefits of PAE activity” and that “we will need to learn a lot more” in order “to see the full competitive picture.” While acknowledging the vast potential benefits of PAEs in rewarding invention, benefiting competition and consumers, reducing enforcement hurdles, increasing liquidity, encouraging venture capital investment, and funding R&D, she nevertheless concluded that “PAEs exploit underlying problems in the patent system to the detriment of innovation and consumers.” And despite the admitted lack of data, Ramirez stressed “the critical importance of continuing the effort on patent reform to limit the costs associated with some types of PAE activity.”

This position is duplicitous: If the costs and benefits of PAEs are still unknown, what justifies Ramirez’s rushed call for immediate action? While benefits have to be weighed against costs, it’s clear that she’s already jumped to the conclusion that the costs outweigh the benefits. In another speech a few months later, Ramirez noted that the “troubling stories” about PAEs “don’t tell us much about the competitive costs and benefits of PAE activity.” Despite this admission, Ramirez called for “a much broader response to flaws in the patent system that fuel inefficient behavior by PAEs.” And while Ramirez said that understanding “the PAE business model will inform the policy dialogue,” she stated that “it will not change the pressing need for additional progress on patent reform.”

Likewise, in an early 2014 speech, Commissioner Julie Brill ignored the study’s inherent limitations and exploratory nature. She predicted that the study “will provide a fuller and more accurate picture of PAE activity” that “will be put to good use by Congress and others who examine closely the activities of PAEs.” Remarkably, Brill stated that “the FTC and other law enforcement agencies” should not “wait on the results of the 6(b) study before undertaking enforcement actions against PAE activity that crosses the line.” Even without the study’s results, she thought that “reforms to the patent system are clearly warranted.” In Brill’s view, the study would only be useful for determining whether “additional reforms are warranted” to curb the activities of PAEs.

It appears that these Commissioners have already decided—in the absence of any reliable data on the systemic effects of PAE activity—that drastic changes to the patent system are necessary. Given their clear bias in this area, there is little hope that they will acknowledge the deep limitations of the study once it is released.

Commentators Jump the Gun

Unsurprisingly, many supporters of the study have filed comments with the FTC arguing that the study is needed to fill the huge void in empirical data on the costs and benefits associated with PAEs. Some even simultaneously argue that the costs of PAEs far outweigh the benefits, suggesting that they have already jumped to their conclusion and just want the data to back it up. Despite the study’s serious limitations, these commentators appear primed to use it to justify their foregone policy recommendations.

For example, the Consumer Electronics Association applauded “the FTC’s efforts to assess the anticompetitive harms that PAEs cause on our economy as a whole,” and it argued that the study “will illuminate the many dimensions of PAEs’ conduct in a way that no other entity is capable.” At the same time, it stated that “completion of this FTC study should not stay or halt other actions by the administrative, legislative or judicial branches to address this serious issue.” The Internet Commerce Coalition stressed the importance of the study of “PAE activity in order to shed light on its effects on competition and innovation,” and it admitted that without the information, “the debate in this area cannot be empirically based.” Nonetheless, it presupposed that the study will uncover “hidden conduct of and abuses by PAEs” and that “it will still be important to reform the law in this area.”

Engine Advocacy admitted that “there is very little broad empirical data about the structure and conduct of patent assertion entities, and their effect on the economy.” It then argued that PAE activity “harms innovators, consumers, startups and the broader economy.” The Coalition for Patent Fairness called on the study “to contribute to the understanding of policymakers and the public” concerning PAEs, which it claimed “impose enormous costs on U.S. innovators, manufacturers, service providers, and, increasingly, consumers and end-users.” And to those suggesting “the potentially beneficial role of PAEs in the patent market,” it stressed that “reform be guided by the principle that the patent system is intended to incentivize and reward innovation,” not “rent-seeking” PAEs that are “exploiting problems.”

The joint comments of Public Knowledge, Electronic Frontier Foundation, & Engine Advocacyemphasized the fact that information about PAEs “currently remains limited” and that what is “publicly known largely consists of lawsuits filed in court and anecdotal information.” Despite admitting that “broad empirical data often remains lacking,” the groups also suggested that the study “does not mean that legislative efforts should be stalled” since “the harms of PAE activity are well known and already amenable to legislative reform.” In fact, they contended not only that “a problem exists,” but that there’s even “reason to believe the scope is even larger than what has already been reported.”

Given this pervasive and unfounded bias against PAEs, there’s little hope that these and other critics will acknowledge the study’s serious limitations. Instead, it’s far more likely that they will point to the study as concrete evidence that even more sweeping changes to the patent system are in order.

Conclusion

While the FTC study may generate interesting information about a handful of firms, it won’t tell us much about how PAEs affect competition and innovation in general. The study is simply not designed to do this. It instead is a fact-finding mission, the results of which could guide future missions. Such empirical research can be valuable, but it’s very important to recognize the limited utility of the information being collected. And it’s crucial not to draw policy conclusions from it. Unfortunately, if the comments of some of the Commissioners and supporters of the study are any indication, many critics have already made up their minds about the net effects of PAEs, and they will likely use the study to perpetuate the biased anti-patent fervor that has captured so much attention in recent years.

 

In Antitrust & Competition, Economic Theory, Federal Trade Commission, Intellectual Property, Patent, Regulation, Telecommunications, Truth on the Market, Wireless , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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The Myth of the “Patent Troll” Litigation Explosion

Adam Mossoff —  12 August 2013

[Cross posted at The Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property]

In a prior blog posting, I reported how reports of a so-called “patent litigation explosion” today are just wrong.  As I detailed in another blog posting, the percentage of patent lawsuits today are not only consistent with historical patent litigation rates in the nineteenth century, there is actually less litigation today than during some decades in the early nineteenth century. Between 1840 and 1849, for instance, patent litigation rates were 3.6% — more than twice the patent litigation rate today.

(As an aside, we have to hold constant for issued patents in computing litigation percentage rates because more patents are issued now per year than twice the total population of New York City (NYC) in 1820 — 253,315 patents issued in 2012 compared to 123,706 residents in NYC in 1820.  Yet before someone says that this just means we have too many patents today, as Judge Posner blithely asserts without any empirical evidence, one must also recognize that the NYC population in 2013 is 8.3 million, which is far beyond merely double its 1820 population — NYC’s population has grown by a factor of 67!  A simple comparison to population growth, especially taking into account the explosive growth in the innovation industries in the past several decades, could as easily justify the claim that we haven’t got enough patents issuing today.)

Unfortunately, the mythical claims about a “patent litigation explosion” have shifted in recent months (perhaps because the original assertion was untenable).  Now the assertion is that there has been an “explosion” in lawsuits brought by patent licensing companies.  I’ll note for the record here that patent licensing companies are often referred to today by the undefined and nonobjective rhetorical epithet of “patent troll.”  In a recent study of patent licensing companies that exposes many of the unsound and unproven claims about these much-maligned companies – such as that patents owned by these companies are of lower quality than those owned by manufacturing entities – Stephen Moore first explained that the “troll” slur is used today by academics, commentators and the public alike “without a universally accepted definition.” So, let’s dispense with nonobjective rhetoric and simply identify these companies factually by their business models: patent licensing.

As with all discriminatory slurs, it’s unsurprising that this new claim about an alleged “explosion” in so-called “patent troll” lawsuits is unproven rubbish.  Similar to the myth about patent litigation generally, this is just another example of overwrought and empirically unsound rhetoric being used to push a policy agenda in Congress and regulatory agencies. (Six bills have been on the Hill so far this year, and FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez has announced that the FTC intends to begin a formal § 6(b) investigation of patent licensing companies).

How do we know that patent licensing companies are not the sole driver of any increases in patent litigation?  Contrary to the much-hyped claim today that patent licensing companies are the primary cause of most patent lawsuits in district courts in 2012, other serious and more careful reviews of the litigation data have shown that the primary culprit is not patent licensing companies, but rather the America Invents Act of 2011(“AIA”). The AIA created numerous new administrative proceedings for invalidating patents at the Patent & Trademark Office, which created additional incentives to file lawsuits in certain contexts.  Moreover, the AIA expressly prohibited joinder of multiple defendants in single lawsuits.  Both of these significant changes to the patent system has produced the entirely logical and expected result of more lawsuits being filed after the AIA’s statutory provisions went into effect in 2011 and 2012. In basic statistics terms, the effect of these statutory provisions in any study of patent litigation rates that does not take them into account is referred to as a “confounding variable.”

Even more important, when the data used in one of the most-referenced studies asserting a patent litigation explosion by patent licensing companies was tested by a highly respected scholar who specializes in statistical and empirical analyses of the patent system, he reported that he found no statistically significant results. (See Dave Schwartz’s testimony at the DOJ-FTC Workshop (Dec. 10, 2012), starting at approximately 1:58 at this video. Transcript available here.)  At least the scholars of this disputed study made their data available for confirmation, according to basic scientific norms. Other prominently cited studies on patent licensing companies have relied on secret data from companies like RPX, Patent Freedom, and other firms who have a very large dog in the litigation and policy fight, and thus this data has all of the trappings of being unreliable and biased (see here and here)

The important role that the AIA is playing in increasing patent lawsuits by patent licensing companies is ironic if only because the people misreporting the patent litigation data are the same people who were big proponents of the AIA (some of them even attended the AIA’s signing ceremony with President Obama in September 2011).  Among non-patent scholars, this is called trying to have your cake and eat it, too.  Usually such efforts fail, especially when children always try to get away with this logical fallacy.  It shows the depths to which the patent policy debates have sunk that the press, Congress, the President and many others don’t seem to care about this one bit and instead are pushing ahead and repeating – and even drafting legislation based upon – bad “statistics” with serious methodological problems and compiled from secret, unreliable data.

With Congress rushing headlong to enact legislation that discriminates against patent licensing companies, it’s time to step back and start asking serious questions before the legal system that makes possible the innovation industries is changed and we discover too late that it’s for the worse.  It’s time to set aside rhetoric and made-up “statistics” based on secret data and to ask whether there really is a systemic problem.  It’s also time to start asking serious questions about why these myths were created in the first place, what does the raw data actually say, who is providing the data and funding these “troll” studies, and who is pushing this rhetoric into the public policy debates to the point that it has become a deafening roar that makes impossible all reasonable and sensible discussion.

[NOTE: minor grammatical and style changes were made after the initial posting]

 

In Antitrust & Competition, Federal Trade Commission, Intellectual Property, Justice Department, Patent , , , , , , , ,
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