Archives For SEP

Patent Pools, Innovation, and Antitrust Policy

Alden Abbott — 7 December 2022

Late last month, 25 former judges and government officials, legal academics and economists who are experts in antitrust and intellectual property law submitted a letter to Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter in support of the U.S. Justice Department’s (DOJ) July 2020 Avanci business-review letter (ABRL) dealing with patent pools. The pro-Avanci letter was offered in response to an October 2022 letter to Kanter from ABRL critics that called for reconsideration of the ABRL. A good summary account of the “battle of the scholarly letters” may be found here.

The University of Pennsylvania’s Herbert Hovenkamp defines a patent pool as “an arrangement under which patent holders in a common technology or market commit their patents to a single holder, who then licenses them out to the original patentees and perhaps to outsiders.” Although the U.S. antitrust treatment of patent pools might appear a rather arcane topic, it has major implications for U.S. innovation. As AAG Kanter ponders whether to dive into patent-pool policy, a brief review of this timely topic is in order. That review reveals that Kanter should reject the anti-Avanci letter and reaffirm the ABRL.

Background on Patent Pool Analysis

The 2017 DOJ-FTC IP Licensing Guidelines

Section 5.5 of joint DOJ-Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Antitrust Guidelines for the Licensing of Intellectual Property (2017 Guidelines, which revised a prior 1995 version) provides an overview of the agencies’ competitive assessment of patent pools. The 2017 Guidelines explain that, depending on how pools are designed and operated, they may have procompetitive (and efficiency-enhancing) or anticompetitive features.

On the positive side of the ledger, Section 5.5 states:

Cross-licensing and pooling arrangements are agreements of two or more owners of different items of intellectual property to license one another or third parties. These arrangements may provide procompetitive benefits by integrating complementary technologies, reducing transaction costs, clearing blocking positions, and avoiding costly infringement litigation. By promoting the dissemination of technology, cross-licensing and pooling arrangements are often procompetitive.

On the negative side of the ledger, Section 5.5 states (citations omitted):

Cross-licensing and pooling arrangements can have anticompetitive effects in certain circumstances. For example, collective price or output restraints in pooling arrangements, such as the joint marketing of pooled intellectual property rights with collective price setting or coordinated output restrictions, may be deemed unlawful if they do not contribute to an efficiency-enhancing integration of economic activity among the participants. When cross-licensing or pooling arrangements are mechanisms to accomplish naked price-fixing or market division, they are subject to challenge under the per se rule.

Other aspects of pool behavior may be either procompetitive or anticompetitive, depending upon the circumstances, as Section 5.5 explains. The antitrust rule of reason would apply to pool restraints that may have both procompetitive and anticompetitive features.

For example, requirements that pool members grant licenses to each other for current and future technology at minimal cost could disincentivize research and development. Such requirements, however, could also promote competition by exploiting economies of scale and integrating complementary capabilities of the pool members. According to the 2017 Guidelines, such requirements are likely to cause competitive problems only when they include a large fraction of the potential research and development in an R&D market.

Section 5.5 also applies rule-of-reason case-specific treatment to exclusion from pools. It notes that, although pooling arrangements generally need not be open to all who wish to join (indeed, exclusion of certain parties may be designed to prevent potential free riding), they may be anticompetitive under certain circumstances (citations omitted):

[E]xclusion from a pooling or cross-licensing arrangement among competing technologies is unlikely to have anticompetitive effects unless (1) excluded firms cannot effectively compete in the relevant market for the good incorporating the licensed technologies and (2) the pool participants collectively possess market power in the relevant market. If these circumstances exist, the [federal antitrust] [a]gencies will evaluate whether the arrangement’s limitations on participation are reasonably related to the efficient development and exploitation of the pooled technologies and will assess the net effect of those limitations in the relevant market.

The 2017 Guidelines are informed by the analysis of prior agency-enforcement actions and prior DOJ business-review letters. Through the business-review-letter procedure, an organization may submit a proposed action to the DOJ Antitrust Division and receive a statement as to whether the Division currently intends to challenge the action under the antitrust laws, based on the information provided. Historically, DOJ has used these letters as a vehicle to discuss current agency thinking about safeguards that may be included in particular forms of business arrangements to alleviate DOJ competitive concerns.

DOJ patent-pool letters, in particular, have prompted DOJ to highlight specific sorts of provisions in pool agreements that forestalled competitive problems. To this point, DOJ has never commented favorably on patent-pool safeguards in a letter and then subsequently reversed course to find the safeguards inadequate.

Subsequent to issuance of the 2017 Guidelines, DOJ issued two business-review letters on patent pools: the July 2020 ABRL letter and the January 2021 University Technology Licensing Program business-review letter (UTLP letter). Those two letters favorably discussed competitive safeguards proffered by the entities requesting favorable DOJ reviews.

ABRL Letter

The ABRL letter explains (citations omitted):

[Avanci] proposed [a] joint patent-licensing pool . . . to . . . license patent claims that have been declared “essential” to implementing 5G cellular wireless standards for use in automobile vehicles and distribute royalty income among the Platform’s licensors. Avanci currently operates a licensing platform related to 4G cellular standards and offers licenses to 2G, 3G, and 4G standards-essential patents used in vehicles and smart meters.

After consulting telecommunications and automobile-industry stakeholders, conducing an independent review, and considering prior guidance to other patent pools, “DOJ conclude[d] that, on balance, Avanci’s proposed 5G Platform is unlikely to harm competition.” As such, DOJ announced it had no present intention to challenge the platform.

The DOJ press release accompanying the ABRL letter provides additional valuable information on Avanci’s potential procompetitive efficiencies; its plan to charge fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) rates; and its proposed safeguards:

Avanci’s 5G Platform may make licensing standard essential patents related to vehicle connectivity more efficient by providing automakers with a “one stop shop” for licensing 5G technology. The Platform also has the potential to reduce patent infringement and ensure that patent owners who have made significant contributions to the development of 5G “Release 15” specifications are compensated for their innovation. Avanci represents that the Platform will charge FRAND rates for the patented technologies, with input from both licensors and licensees.

In addition, Avanci has incorporated a number of safeguards into its 5G Platform that can help protect competition, including licensing only technically essential patents; providing for independent evaluation of essential patents; permitting licensing outside the Platform, including in other fields of use, bilateral or multi-lateral licensing by pool members, and the formation of other pools at levels of the automotive supply chain; and by including mechanisms to prevent the sharing of competitively sensitive information. The Department’s review found that the Platform’s essentiality review may help automakers license the patents they actually need to make connected vehicles. In addition, the Platform license includes “Have Made” rights that creates new access to cellular standard essential patents for licensed automakers’ third-party component suppliers, permitting them to make non-infringing components for 5G connected vehicles.

UTLP Letter

The United Technology Licensing Program business-review letter (issued less than a year after the ABRL letter, at the end of the Trump administration) discussed a proposal by participating universities to offer licenses to their physical-science patents relating to specified emerging technologies. According to DOJ:

[Fifteen universities agreed to cooperate] in licensing certain complementary patents through UTLP, which will be organized into curated portfolios relating to specific technology applications for autonomous vehicles, the “Internet of Things,” and “Big Data.” The overarching goal of UTLP is to centralize the administrative costs associated with commercializing university research and help participating universities to overcome the budget, institutional relationship, and other constraints that make licensing in these areas particularly challenging for them.

The UTLP letter concluded, based on representations made in UTLP’s letter request, that the pool was on balance unlikely to harm competition. Specifically:

UTLP has incorporated a number of safeguards into its program to help protect competition, including admitting only non-substitutable patents, with a “safety valve” if a patent to accomplish a particular task is inadvertently included in a portfolio with another, substitutable patent. The program also will allow potential sublicensees to choose an individual patent, a group of patents, or UTLP’s entire portfolio, thereby mitigating the risk that a licensee will be required to license more technology than it needs. The department’s letter notes that UTLP is a mechanism that is intended to address licensing inefficiencies and institutional challenges unique to universities in the physical science context, and makes no assessment about whether this mechanism if set up in another context would have similar procompetitive benefits.

Patent-Pool Guidance in Context

DOJ and FTC patent-pool guidance has been bipartisan. It has remained generally consistent in character from the mid-1990s (when the first 1995 IP licensing guidelines were issued) to early 2021 (the end of the Trump administration, when the UTLP letter was issued). The overarching concern expressed in agency guidance has been to prevent a pool from facilitating collusion among competitors, from discouraging innovation, and from inefficiently excluding competitors.

As technology has advanced over the last quarter century, U.S. antitrust enforcers—and, in particular, DOJ, through a series of business-review letters beginning in 1997 (see the pro-Avanci letter at pages 9-10)—consistently have emphasized the procompetitive efficiencies that pools can generate, while also noting the importance of avoiding anticompetitive harms.

Those letters have “given a pass” to pools whose rules contained safeguards against collusion among pool members (e.g., by limiting pool patents to complementary, not substitute, technologies) and against anticompetitive exclusion (e.g., by protecting pool members’ independence of action outside the pool). In assessing safeguards, DOJ has paid attention to the particular market context in which a pool arises.

Notably, economic research generally supports the conclusion that, in recent decades, patent pools have been an important factor in promoting procompetitive welfare-enhancing innovation and technology diffusion.

For example, a 2015 study by Justus Baron and Tim Pohlmann found that a significant number of pools were created following antitrust authorities’ “more permissive stance toward pooling of patents” beginning in the late 1990s. Studying these new pools, they found “a significant increase in patenting rates after pool announcement” that was “primarily attributable to future members of the pool”.

A 2009 analysis by Richard Gilbert of the University of California, Berkeley (who served as chief economist of the DOJ Antitrust Division during the Clinton administration) concluded that (consistent with the approach adopted in DOJ business-review letters) “antitrust authorities and the courts should encourage policies that promote the formation and durability of beneficial pools that combine complementary patents.”

In a 2014 assessment of the role of patent pools in combatting “patent thickets,” Jonathan Barnett of the USC Gould School of Law concluded:

Using network visualization software, I show that information and communication technology markets rely on patent pools and other cross-licensing structures to mitigate or avoid patent thickets and associated inefficiencies. Based on the composition, structure, terms and pricing of selected leading patent pools in the ICT market, I argue that those pools are best understood as mechanisms by which vertically integrated firms mitigate transactional frictions and reduce the cost of accessing technology inputs.

Admittedly, a few studies of some old patents pools (e.g., the 19^th century sewing-machine pool and certain early 20^th century New Deal pools) found them to be associated with a decline in patenting. Setting aside possible questions of those studies’ methodologies, the old pooling arrangements bear little resemblance to the carefully crafted pool structures today. In particular, unlike the old pools, the more recent pools embody competitive safeguards (the old pools may have combined substitute patents, for example).

Business-review letters dealing with pools have provided a degree of legal certainty that has helped encourage their formation, to the benefit of innovation in key industries. The anti-Avanci letter ignores that salient fact, focusing instead on allegedly “abusive” SEP-licensing tactics by the Avanci 5G pool—such as refusal to automatically grant a license to all comers—without considering that the pool may have had legitimate reasons not to license particular parties (who may, for instance, have made bad faith unreasonable licensing demands). In sum, this blinkered approach is wrong as a matter of SEP law and policy (as explained in the pro-Avanci letter) and wrong in its implicit undermining of the socially beneficial patent-pool business-review process.

The pro-Avanci letter ably describes the serious potential harm generated by the anti-Avanci letter:

In evaluating the carefully crafted Avanci pool structure, the 2020 business review letter appropriately concluded that the pool’s design conformed to the well-established, fact-intensive inquiry concerning actual market practices and efficiencies set forth in previous business review letters. Any reconsideration of the 2020 business review letter, as proposed in the October 17 letter, would give rise to significant uncertainty concerning the Antitrust Division’s commitment to the aforementioned sequence of business review letters that have been issued concerning other patent pools in the information technology industry, as well as the larger group of patent pools that did not specifically seek guidance through the business review letter process but relied on the legal template that had been set forth in those previously issued letters.

This is a point of great consequence. Pooling arrangements in the information technology industry have provided an efficient market-driven solution to the transaction costs that are inherent to patent-intensive industries and, when structured appropriately in light of agency guidance and applicable case law, do not raise undue antitrust concerns. Thanks to pooling and related collective licensing arrangements, the innovations embodied in tens of thousands of patents have been made available to hundreds of device producers and other intermediate users, while innovators have been able to earn a commensurate return on the costs and risks that they undertook to develop new technologies that have transformed entire fields and industries to the benefit of consumers.

Conclusion

President Joe Biden’s 2021 Executive Order on Competition commits the Biden administration to “the promotion of competition and innovation by firms small and large, at home and worldwide.” One factor in promoting competition and innovation has been the legal certainty flowing from well-reasoned DOJ business-review letters on patent pools, issued on a bipartisan basis for more than a quarter of a century.

A DOJ decision to reconsider (in other words, to withdraw) the sound guidance embodied in the ABRL would detract from this certainty and thereby threaten to undermine innovation promoted by patent pools. Accordingly, AAG Kanter should reject the advice proffered by the anti-Avanci letter and publicly reaffirm his support for the ABRL—and, more generally, for the DOJ business-review process.

Unpacking the Flawed 2021 Draft USPTO, NIST, & DOJ Policy Statement on Standard-Essential Patents (SEPs)

Geoffrey Manne — 8 February 2022

Responding to a new draft policy statement from the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the U.S. Department of Justice, Antitrust Division (DOJ) regarding remedies for infringement of standard-essential patents (SEPs), a group of 19 distinguished law, economics, and business scholars convened by the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) submitted comments arguing that the guidance would improperly tilt the balance of power between implementers and inventors, and could undermine incentives for innovation.

As explained in the scholars’ comments, the draft policy statement misunderstands many aspects of patent and antitrust policy. The draft notably underestimates the value of injunctions and the circumstances in which they are a necessary remedy. It also overlooks important features of the standardization process that make opportunistic behavior much less likely than policymakers typically recognize. These points are discussed in even more detail in previous work by ICLE scholars, including here and here.

These first-order considerations are only the tip of the iceberg, however. Patent policy has a huge range of second-order effects that the draft policy statement and policymakers more generally tend to overlook. Indeed, reducing patent protection has more detrimental effects on economic welfare than the conventional wisdom typically assumes.

The comments highlight three important areas affected by SEP policy that would be undermined by the draft statement.

First, SEPs are established through an industry-wide, collaborative process that develops and protects innovations considered essential to an industry’s core functioning. This process enables firms to specialize in various functions throughout an industry, rather than vertically integrate to ensure compatibility.
Second, strong patent protection, especially of SEPs, boosts startup creation via a broader set of mechanisms than is typically recognized.
Finally, strong SEP protection is essential to safeguard U.S. technology leadership and sovereignty.

As explained in the scholars’ comments, the draft policy statement would be detrimental on all three of these dimensions.

To be clear, the comments do not argue that addressing these secondary effects should be a central focus of patent and antitrust policy. Instead, the point is that policymakers must deal with a far more complex set of issues than is commonly recognized; the effects of SEP policy aren’t limited to the allocation of rents among inventors and implementers (as they are sometimes framed in policy debates). Accordingly, policymakers should proceed with caution and resist the temptation to alter by fiat terms that have emerged through careful negotiation among inventors and implementers, and which have been governed for centuries by the common law of contract.

Collaborative Standard-Setting and Specialization as Substitutes for Proprietary Standards and Vertical Integration

Intellectual property in general—and patents, more specifically—is often described as a means to increase the monetary returns from the creation and distribution of innovations. While this is undeniably the case, this framing overlooks the essential role that IP also plays in promoting specialization throughout the economy.

As Ronald Coase famously showed in his Nobel-winning work, firms must constantly decide whether to perform functions in-house (by vertically integrating), or contract them out to third parties (via the market mechanism). Coase concluded that these decisions hinge on whether the transaction costs associated with the market mechanism outweigh the cost of organizing production internally. Decades later, Oliver Williamson added a key finding to this insight. He found that among the most important transaction costs that firms encounter are those that stem from incomplete contracts and the scope for opportunistic behavior they entail.

This leads to a simple rule of thumb: as the scope for opportunistic behavior increases, firms are less likely to use the market mechanism and will instead perform tasks in-house, leading to increased vertical integration.

IP plays a key role in this process. Patents drastically reduce the transaction costs associated with the transfer of knowledge. This gives firms the opportunity to develop innovations collaboratively and without fear that trading partners might opportunistically appropriate their inventions. In turn, this leads to increased specialization. As Robert Merges observes:

Patents facilitate arms-length trade of a technology-intensive input, leading to entry and specialization.

More specifically, it is worth noting that the development and commercialization of inventions can lead to two important sources of opportunistic behavior: patent holdup and patent holdout. As the assembled scholars explain in their comments, while patent holdup has drawn the lion’s share of policymaker attention, empirical and anecdotal evidence suggest that holdout is the more salient problem.

Policies that reduce these costs—especially patent holdout—in a cost-effective manner are worthwhile, with the immediate result that technologies are more widely distributed than would otherwise be the case. Inventors also see more intense and extensive incentives to produce those technologies in the first place.

The Importance of Intellectual Property Rights for Startup Activity

Strong patent rights are essential to monetize innovation, thus enabling new firms to gain a foothold in the marketplace. As the scholars’ comments explain, this is even more true for startup companies. There are three main reasons for this:

Patent rights protected by injunctions prevent established companies from simply copying innovative startups, with the expectation that they will be able to afford court-set royalties;
Patent rights can be the basis for securitization, facilitating access to startup funding; and
Patent rights drive venture capital (VC) investment.

While point (1) is widely acknowledged, many fail to recognize it is particularly important for startup companies. There is abundant literature on firms’ appropriability mechanisms (these are essentially the strategies firms employ to prevent rivals from copying their inventions). The literature tells us that patent protection is far from the only strategy firms use to protect their inventions (see. e.g., here, here and here).

The alternative appropriability mechanisms identified by these studies tend to be easier to implement for well-established firms. For instance, many firms earn returns on their inventions by incorporating them into physical products that cannot be reverse engineered. This is much easier for firms that already have a large industry presence and advanced manufacturing capabilities. In contrast, startup companies—almost by definition—must outsource production.

Second, property rights could drive startup activity through the collateralization of IP. By offering security interests in patents, trademarks, and copyrights, startups with little or no tangible assets can obtain funding without surrendering significant equity. As Gaétan de Rassenfosse puts it:

SMEs can leverage their IP to facilitate R&D financing…. [P]atents materialize the value of knowledge stock: they codify the knowledge and make it tradable, such that they can be used as collaterals. Recent theoretical evidence by Amable et al. (2010) suggests that a systematic use of patents as collateral would allow a high growth rate of innovations despite financial constraints.

Finally, there is reason to believe intellectual-property protection is an important driver of venture capital activity. Beyond simply enabling firms to earn returns on their investments, patents might signal to potential investors that a company is successful and/or valuable. Empirical research by Hsu and Ziedonis, for instance, supports this hypothesis:

[W]e find a statistically significant and economically large effect of patent filings on investor estimates of start-up value…. A doubling in the patent application stock of a new venture [in] this sector is associated with a 28 percent increase in valuation, representing an upward funding-round adjustment of approximately $16.8 million for the average start-up in our sample.

In short, intellectual property can stimulate startup activity through various mechanisms. There is thus a sense that, at the margin, weakening patent protection will make it harder for entrepreneurs to embark on new business ventures.

The Role of Strong SEP Rights in Guarding Against China’s ‘Cyber Great Power’ Ambitions

The United States, due in large measure to its strong intellectual-property protections, is a nation of innovators, and its production of IP is one of its most important comparative advantages.

IP and its legal protections become even more important, however, when dealing with international jurisdictions, like China, that don’t offer similar levels of legal protection. By making it harder for patent holders to obtain injunctions, licensees and implementers gain the advantage in the short term, because they are able to use patented technology without having to engage in negotiations to pay the full market price.

In the case of many SEPs—particularly those in the telecommunications sector—a great many patent holders are U.S.-based, while the lion’s share of implementers are Chinese. The anti-injunction policy espoused in the draft policy statement thus amounts to a subsidy to Chinese infringers of U.S. technology.

At the same time, China routinely undermines U.S. intellectual property protections through its industrial policy. The government’s stated goal is to promote “fair and reasonable” international rules, but it is clear that China stretches its power over intellectual property around the world by granting “anti-suit injunctions” on behalf of Chinese smartphone makers, designed to curtail enforcement of foreign companies’ patent rights.

This is part of the Chinese government’s larger approach to industrial policy, which seeks to expand Chinese power in international trade negotiations and in global standards bodies. As one Chinese Communist Party official put it:

Standards are the commanding heights, the right to speak, and the right to control. Therefore, the one who obtains the standards gains the world.

Insufficient protections for intellectual property will hasten China’s objective of dominating collaborative standard development in the medium to long term. Simultaneously, this will engender a switch to greater reliance on proprietary, closed standards rather than collaborative, open standards. These harmful consequences are magnified in the context of the global technology landscape, and in light of China’s strategic effort to shape international technology standards. Chinese companies, directed by their government authorities, will gain significant control of the technologies that will underpin tomorrow’s digital goods and services.

The scholars convened by ICLE were not alone in voicing these fears. David Teece (also a signatory to the ICLE-convened comments), for example, surmises in his comments that:

The US government, in reviewing competition policy issues that might impact standards, therefore needs to be aware that the issues at hand have tremendous geopolitical consequences and cannot be looked at in isolation…. Success in this regard will promote competition and is our best chance to maintain technological leadership—and, along with it, long-term economic growth and consumer welfare and national security.

Similarly, comments from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (signed by, among others, former USPTO Director Anrei Iancu, former NIST Director Walter Copan, and former Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre) argue that the draft policy statement would benefit Chinese firms at U.S. firms’ expense:

What is more, the largest short-term and long-term beneficiaries of the 2021 Draft Policy Statement are firms based in China. Currently, China is the world’s largest consumer of SEP-based technology, so weakening protection of American owned patents directly benefits Chinese manufacturers. The unintended effect of the 2021 Draft Policy Statement will be to support Chinese efforts to dominate critical technology standards and other advanced technologies, such as 5G. Put simply, devaluing U.S. patents is akin to a subsidized tech transfer to China.

With Chinese authorities joining standardization bodies and increasingly claiming jurisdiction over F/RAND disputes, there should be careful reevaluation of the ways the draft policy statement would further weaken the United States’ comparative advantage in IP-dependent technological innovation.

Conclusion

In short, weakening patent protection could have detrimental ramifications that are routinely overlooked by policymakers. These include increasing inventors’ incentives to vertically integrate rather than develop innovations collaboratively; reducing startup activity (especially when combined with antitrust enforcers’ newfound proclivity to challenge startup acquisitions); and eroding America’s global technology leadership, particularly with respect to China.

For these reasons (and others), the text of the draft policy statement should be reconsidered and either revised substantially to better reflect these concerns or withdrawn entirely.

The signatories to the comments are:

Alden F. Abbott	Senior Research Fellow, Mercatus Center George Mason University Former General Counsel, U.S. Federal Trade Commission
Jonathan Barnett	Torrey H. Webb Professor of Law University of Southern California
Ronald A. Cass	Dean Emeritus, School of Law Boston University Former Commissioner and Vice-Chairman, U.S. International Trade Commission
Giuseppe Colangelo	Jean Monnet Chair in European Innovation Policy and Associate Professor of Competition Law & Economics University of Basilicata and LUISS (Italy)
Richard A. Epstein	Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law New York University
Bowman Heiden	Executive Director, Tusher Initiative at the Haas School of Business University of California, Berkeley
Justin (Gus) Hurwitz	Professor of Law University of Nebraska
Thomas A. Lambert	Wall Chair in Corporate Law and Governance University of Missouri
Stan J. Liebowitz	Ashbel Smith Professor of Economics University of Texas at Dallas
John E. Lopatka	A. Robert Noll Distinguished Professor of Law Penn State University
Keith Mallinson	Founder and Managing Partner WiseHarbor
Geoffrey A. Manne	President and Founder International Center for Law & Economics
Adam Mossoff	Professor of Law George Mason University
Kristen Osenga	Austin E. Owen Research Scholar and Professor of Law University of Richmond
Vernon L. Smith	George L. Argyros Endowed Chair in Finance and Economics Chapman University Nobel Laureate in Economics (2002)
Daniel F. Spulber	Elinor Hobbs Distinguished Professor of International Business Northwestern University
David J. Teece	Thomas W. Tusher Professor in Global Business University of California, Berkeley
Joshua D. Wright	University Professor of Law George Mason University Former Commissioner, U.S. Federal Trade Commission
John M. Yun	Associate Professor of Law George Mason University Former Acting Deputy Assistant Director, Bureau of Economics, U.S. Federal Trade Commission

Antitrustifying Contract: Thoughts on Epic Games v. Apple and Apple v. Qualcomm

Jonathan M. Barnett — 26 October 2020

In the hands of a wise philosopher-king, the Sherman Act’s hard-to-define prohibitions of “restraints of trade” and “monopolization” are tools that will operate inevitably to advance the public interest in competitive markets. In the hands of real-world litigators, regulators and judges, those same words can operate to advance competitors’ private interests in securing commercial advantages through litigation that could not be secured through competition in the marketplace. If successful, this strategy may yield outcomes that run counter to antitrust law’s very purpose.

The antitrust lawsuit filed by Epic Games against Apple in August 2020, and Apple’s antitrust lawsuit against Qualcomm (settled in April 2019), suggest that antitrust law is heading in this unfortunate direction.

From rent-minimization to rent-maximization

The first step in converting antitrust law from an instrument to minimize rents to an instrument to maximize rents lies in expanding the statute’s field of application on the apparently uncontroversial grounds of advancing the public interest in “vigorous” enforcement. In surprisingly short order, this largely unbounded vision of antitrust’s proper scope has become the dominant fashion in policy discussions, at least as expressed by some legislators, regulators, and commentators.

Following the new conventional wisdom, antitrust law has pursued over the past decades an overly narrow path, consequently overlooking and exacerbating a panoply of social ills that extend well beyond the mission to “merely” protect the operation of the market pricing mechanism. This line of argument is typically coupled with the assertion that courts, regulators and scholars have been led down this path by incumbents that welcome the relaxed scrutiny of a purportedly deferential antitrust policy.

This argument, and related theory of regulatory capture, has things roughly backwards.

Placing antitrust law at the service of a largely undefined range of social purposes set by judicial and regulatory fiat threatens to render antitrust a tool that can be easily deployed to favor the private interests of competitors rather than the public interest in competition. Without the intellectual discipline imposed by the consumer welfare standard (and, outside of per se illegal restraints, operationalized through the evidentiary requirement of competitive harm), the rhetoric of antitrust provides excellent cover for efforts to re-engineer the rules of the game in lieu of seeking to win the game as it has been played.

Epic Games v. Apple

A nascent symptom of this expansive form of antitrust is provided by the much-publicized lawsuit brought by Epic Games, the maker of the wildly popular video game, Fortnite, against Apple, the operator of the even more wildly popular App Store. On August 13, 2020, Epic added a “direct” payment processing services option to its Fortnite game, which violated the developer terms of use that govern the App Store. In response, Apple exercised its contractual right to remove Fortnite from the App Store, triggering Fortnite’s antitrust suit. The same sequence has ensued between Epic Games and Google in connection with the Google Play Store. Both litigations are best understood as a breach of contract dispute cloaked in the guise of an antitrust cause of action.

In suggesting that a jury trial would be appropriate in Epic Games’ suit against Apple, the district court judge reportedly stated that the case is “on the frontier of antitrust law” and [i]t is important enough to understand what real people think.” That statement seems to suggest that this is a close case under antitrust law. I respectfully disagree. Based on currently available information and applicable law, Epic’s argument suffers from two serious vulnerabilities that would seem to be difficult for the plaintiff to overcome.

A contestably narrow market definition

Epic states three related claims: (1) Apple has a monopoly in the relevant market, defined as the App Store, (2) Apple maintains its monopoly by contractually precluding developers from distributing iOS-compatible versions of their apps outside the App Store, and (3) Apple maintains a related monopoly in the payment processing services market for the App Store by contractually requiring developers to use Apple’s processing service.

This market definition, and the associated chain of reasoning, is subject to significant doubt, both as a legal and factual matter.

Epic’s narrow definition of the relevant market as the App Store (rather than app distribution platforms generally) conveniently results in a 100% market share for Apple. Inconveniently, federal case law is generally reluctant to adopt single-brand market definitions. While the Supreme Court recognized in 1992 a single-brand market in Eastman Kodak Co. v. Image Technical Services, the case is widely considered to be an outlier in light of subsequent case law. As a federal district court observed in Spahr v. Leegin Creative Leather Products (E.D. Tenn. 2008): “Courts have consistently refused to consider one brand to be a relevant market of its own when the brand competes with other potential substitutes.”

The App Store would seem to fall into this typical category. The customer base of existing and new Fortnite users can still accessthe gamethrough multiple platforms and on multiple devices other than the iPhone, including a PC, laptop, game console, and non-Apple mobile devices. (While Google has also removed Fortnite from the Google Play store due to the added direct payment feature, users can, at some inconvenience, access the game manually on Android phones.)

Given these alternative distribution channels, it is at a minimum unclear whether Epic is foreclosed from reaching a substantial portion of its consumer base, which may already access the game on alternative platforms or could potentially do so at moderate incremental transaction costs. In the language of platform economics, it appears to be technologically and economically feasible for the target consumer base to “multi-home.” If multi-homing and related switching costs are low, even a 100% share of the App Store submarket would not translate into market power in the broader and potentially more economically relevant market for app distribution generally.

An implausible theory of platform lock-in

Even if it were conceded that the App Store is the relevant market, Epic’s claim is not especially persuasive, both as an economic and a legal matter. That is because there is no evidence that Apple is exploiting any such hypothetically attributed market power to increase the rents extracted from developers and indirectly impose deadweight losses on consumers.

In the classic scenario of platform lock-in, a three-step sequence is observed: (1) a new firm acquires a high market share in a race for platform dominance, (2) the platform winner is protected by network effects and switching costs, and (3) the entrenched platform “exploits” consumers by inflating prices (or imposing other adverse terms) to capture monopoly rents. This economic model is reflected in the case law on lock-in claims, which typically requires that the plaintiff identify an adverse change by the defendant in pricing or other terms after users were allegedly locked-in.

The history of the App Store does not conform to this model. Apple has always assessed a 30% fee and the same is true of every other leading distributor of games for the mobile and PC market, including Google Play Store, App Store’s rival in the mobile market, and Steam, the dominant distributor of video games in the PC market. This long-standing market practice suggests that the 30% fee is most likely motivated by an efficiency-driven business motivation, rather than seeking to entrench a monopoly position that Apple did not enjoy when the practice was first adopted. That is: even if Apple is deemed to be a “monopolist” for Section 2 purposes, it is not taking any “illegitimate” actions that could constitute monopolization or attempted monopolization.

The logic of the 70/30 split

Uncovering the business logic behind the 70/30 split in the app distribution market is not too difficult.

The 30% fee appears to be a low transaction-cost practice that enables the distributor to fund a variety of services, including app development tools, marketing support, and security and privacy protections, all of which are supplied at no separately priced fee and therefore do not require service-by-service negotiation and renegotiation. The same rationale credibly applies to the integrated payment processing services that Apple supplies for purposes of in-app purchases.

These services deliver significant value and would otherwise be difficult to replicate cost-effectively, protect the App Store’s valuable stock of brand capital (which yields positive spillovers for app developers on the site), and lower the costs of joining and participating in the App Store. Additionally, the 30% fee cross-subsidizes the delivery of these services to the approximately 80% of apps on the App Store that are ad-based and for which no fee is assessed, which in turn lowers entry costs and expands the number and variety of product options for platform users. These would all seem to be attractive outcomes from a competition policy perspective.

Epic’s objection

Epic would object to this line of argument by observing that it only charges a 12% fee to distribute other developers’ games on its own Epic Games Store.

Yet Epic’s lower fee is reportedly conditioned, at least in some cases, on the developer offering the game exclusively on the Epic Games Store for a certain period of time. Moreover, the services provided on the Epic Games Store may not be comparable to the extensive suite of services provided on the App Store and other leading distributors that follow the 30% standard. Additionally, the user base a developer can expect to access through the Epic Games Store is in all likelihood substantially smaller than the audience that can be reached through the App Store and other leading app and game distributors, which is then reflected in the higher fees charged by those platforms.

Hence, even the large fee differential may simply reflect the higher services and larger audiences available on the App Store, Google Play Store and other leading platforms, as compared to the Epic Games Store, rather than the unilateral extraction of market rents at developers’ and consumers’ expense.

Antitrust is about efficiency, not distribution

Epic says the standard 70/30 split between game publishers and app distributors is “excessive” while others argue that it is historically outdated.

Neither of these are credible antitrust arguments. Renegotiating the division of economic surplus between game suppliers and distributors is not the concern of antitrust law, which (as properly defined) should only take an interest if either (i) Apple is colluding on the 30% fee with other app distributors, or (ii) Apple is taking steps that preclude entry into the apps distribution market and lack any legitimate business justification. No one claims evidence for the former possibility and, without further evidence, the latter possibility is not especially compelling given the uniform use of the 70/30 split across the industry (which, as noted, can be derived from a related set of credible efficiency justifications). It is even less compelling in the face of evidence that output is rapidly accelerating, not declining, in the gaming app market: in the first half of 2020, approximately 24,500 new games were added to the App Store.

If this conclusion is right, then Epic’s lawsuit against Apple does not seem to have much to do with the public interest in preserving market competition.

But it clearly has much to do with the business interest of an input supplier in minimizing its distribution costs and maximizing its profit margin. That category includes not only Epic Games but Tencent, the world’s largest video game publisher and the holder of a 40% equity stake in Epic. Tencent also owns Riot Games (the publisher of “League of Legends”), an 84% stake in Supercell (the publisher of “Clash of Clans”), and a 5% stake in Activision Blizzard (the publisher of “Call of Duty”). It is unclear how an antitrust claim that, if successful, would simply redistribute economic value from leading game distributors to leading game developers has any necessary relevance to antitrust’s objective to promote consumer welfare.

The prequel: Apple v. Qualcomm

Ironically (and, as Dirk Auer has similarly observed), there is a symmetry between Epic’s claims against Apple and the claims previously pursued by Apple (and, concurrently, the Federal Trade Commission) against Qualcomm.

In that litigation, Apple contested the terms of the licensing arrangements under which Qualcomm made available its wireless communications patents to Apple (more precisely, Foxconn, Apple’s contract manufacturer), arguing that the terms were incompatible with Qualcomm’s commitment to “fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory” (“FRAND”) licensing of its “standard-essential” patents (“SEPs”). Like Epic v. Apple, Apple v. Qualcomm was fundamentally a contract dispute, with the difference that Apple was in the position of a third-party beneficiary of the commitment that Qualcomm had made to the governing standard-setting organization. Like Epic, Apple sought to recharacterize this contractual dispute as an antitrust question, arguing that Qualcomm’s licensing practices constituted anticompetitive actions to “monopolize” the market for smartphone modem chipsets.

Theory meets evidence

The rhetoric used by Epic in its complaint echoes the rhetoric used by Apple in its briefs and other filings in the Qualcomm litigation. Apple (like the FTC) had argued that Qualcomm imposed a “tax” on competitors by requiring that any purchaser of Qualcomm’s chipsets concurrently enter into a license for Qualcomm’s SEP portfolio relating to 3G and 4G/LTE-enabled mobile communications devices.

Yet the history and performance of the mobile communications market simply did not track Apple’s (and the FTC’s continuing) characterization of Qualcomm’s licensing fee as a socially costly drag on market growth and, by implication, consumer welfare.

If this assertion had merit, then the decades-old wireless market should have exhibited a dismal history of increasing prices, slow user adoption and lagging innovation. In actuality, the wireless market since its inception has grown relentlessly, characterized by declining quality-adjusted prices, expanding output, relentless innovation, and rapid adoption across a broad range of income segments.

Given this compelling real-world evidence, the only remaining line of argument (still being pursued by the FTC) that could justify antitrust intervention is a theoretical conjecture that the wireless market might have grown even faster under some alternative IP licensing arrangement. This assertion rests precariously on the speculative assumption that any such arrangement would have induced the same or higher level of aggregate investment in innovation and commercialization activities. That fragile chain of “what if” arguments hardly seems a sound basis on which to rewrite the legal infrastructure behind the billions of dollars of licensing transactions that support the economically thriving smartphone market and the even larger ecosystem that has grown around it.

Antitrust litigation as business strategy

Given the absence of compelling evidence of competitive harm from Qualcomm’s allegedly anticompetitive licensing practices, Apple’s litigation would seem to be best interpreted as an economically rational attempt by a downstream producer to renegotiate a downward adjustment in the fees paid to an upstream supplier of critical technology inputs. (In fact, those are precisely the terms on which Qualcomm in 2015 settled the antitrust action brought against it by China’s competition regulator, to the obvious benefit of local device producers.) The Epic Games litigation is a mirror image fact pattern in which an upstream supplier of content inputs seeks to deploy antitrust law strategically for the purposes of minimizing the fees it pays to a leading downstream distributor.

Both litigations suffer from the same flaw. Private interests concerning the division of an existing economic value stream—a business question that is matter of indifference from an efficiency perspective—are erroneously (or, at least, reflexively) conflated with the public interest in preserving the free play of competitive forces that maximizes the size of the economic value stream.

Conclusion: Remaking the case for “narrow” antitrust

The Epic v. Apple and Apple v. Qualcomm disputes illustrate the unproductive rent-seeking outcomes to which antitrust law will inevitably be led if, as is being widely advocated, it is decoupled from its well-established foundation in promoting consumer welfare—and not competitor welfare.

Some proponents of a more expansive approach to antitrust enforcement are convinced that expanding the law’s scope of application will improve market efficiency by providing greater latitude for expert regulators and courts to reengineer market structures to the public benefit. Yet any substitution of top-down expert wisdom for the bottom-up trial-and-error process of market competition can easily yield “false positives” in which courts and regulators take actions that counterproductively intervene in markets that are already operating under reasonably competitive conditions. Additionally, an overly expansive approach toward the scope of antitrust law will induce private firms to shift resources toward securing advantages over competitors through lobbying and litigation, rather than seeking to win the race to deliver lower-cost and higher-quality products and services. Neither outcome promotes the public’s interest in a competitive marketplace.

Debating the FTC v Qualcomm Amicus Brief, a Summary

Geoffrey Manne & Dirk Auer — 22 January 2020

Qualcomm is currently in the midst of a high-profile antitrust case against the FTC. At the heart of these proceedings lies Qualcomm’s so-called “No License, No Chips” (NLNC) policy, whereby it purportedly refuses to sell chips to OEMs that have not concluded a license agreement covering its underlying intellectual property. According to the FTC and Qualcomm’s opponents, this ultimately thwarts competition in the chipset market.

Against this backdrop, Mark Lemley, Douglas Melamed, and Steven Salop penned a high-profile amicus brief supporting the FTC’s stance.

We responded to their brief in a Truth on the Market blog post, and this led to a series of blog exchanges between the amici and ourselves.

This post summarizes these exchanges.

1. Amicus brief supporting the FTC’s stance, and ICLE brief in support of Qualcomm’s position

The starting point of this blog exchange was an Amicus brief written by Mark Lemley, Douglas Melamed, and Steven Salop (“the amici”) , and signed by 40 law and economics scholars.

The amici made two key normative claims:

Qualcomm’s no license, no chips policy is unlawful under well-established antitrust principles:
“Qualcomm uses the NLNC policy to make it more expensive for OEMs to purchase competitors’ chipsets, and thereby disadvantages rivals and creates artificial barriers to entry and competition in the chipset markets.”

Qualcomm’s refusal to license chip-set rivals reinforces the no license, no chips policy and violates the antitrust laws:
“Qualcomm’s refusal to license chipmakers is also unlawful, in part because it bolsters the NLNC policy.16 In addition, Qualcomm’s refusal to license chipmakers increases the costs of using rival chipsets, excludes rivals, and raises barriers to entry even if NLNC is not itself illegal.”

It is important to note that ICLE also filed an amicus brief in these proceedings. Contrary to the amici, ICLE’s scholars concluded that Qualcomm’s behavior did not raise any antitrust concerns and was ultimately a matter of contract law and .

2. ICLE response to the Lemley, Melamed and Salop Amicus brief.

We responded to the amici in a first blog post.

The post argued that the amici failed to convincingly show that Qualcomm’s NLNC policy was exclusionary. We notably highlighted two important factors.

First, Qualcomm could not use its chipset position and NLNC policy to avert the threat of FRAND litigation, thus extracting supracompetitve royalties:
“Qualcomm will be unable to charge a total price that is significantly above the price of rivals’ chips, plus the FRAND rate for its IP (and expected litigation costs).”

Second, Qualcomm’s behavior did not appear to fall within standard patterns of strategic behavior:
“The amici attempt to overcome this weakness by implicitly framing their argument in terms of exclusivity, strategic entry deterrence, and tying […]. But none of these arguments totally overcomes the flaw in their reasoning.”

3. Amici’s counterargument

The amici wrote a thoughtful response to our post. Their piece rested on two main arguments:

The Amici underlined that their theory of anticompetitive harm did not imply any form of profit sacrifice on Qualcomm’s part (in the chip segment):
“Manne and Auer seem to think that the concern with the no license/no chips policy is that it enables inflated patent royalties to subsidize a profit sacrifice in chip sales, as if the issue were predatory pricing in chips. But there is no such sacrifice.”

The deleterious effects of Qualcomm’s behavior were merely a function of its NLNC policy and strong chipset position. In conjunction, these two factors deterred OEMs from pursuing FRAND litigation:
“Qualcomm is able to charge more than $2 for the license only because it uses the power of its chip monopoly to coerce the OEMs to give up the option of negotiating in light of the otherwise applicable constraints on the royalties it can charge.”

4. ICLE rebuttal

We then responded to the amici with the following points:

We agreed that it would be a problem if Qualcomm could prevent OEMs from negotiating license agreements in the shadow of FRAND litigation:
“The critical question is whether there is a realistic threat of litigation to constrain the royalties commanded by Qualcomm (we believe that Lemley et al. agree with us on this point).”

However, Qualcomm’s behavior did not preclude OEMs from pursuing this type of strategy:
“We believe the following facts support our assertion:
OEMs have pursued various litigation strategies in order to obtain lower rates on Qualcomm’s IP. […]
For the most part, Qualcomm’s threats to cut off chip supplies were just that: threats. […]
OEMs also wield powerful threats. […]
Qualcomm’s chipsets might no longer be “must-buys” in the future.”

5. Amici’s surrebuttal

The amici sent us a final response (reproduced here in full) :

In their original post, Manne and Auer argued that the antitrust argument against Qualcomm’s no license/no chips policy was based on bad economics and bad law. They now seem to have abandoned that argument and claim instead – contrary to the extensive factual findings of the district court – that, while Qualcomm threatened to cut off chips, it was a paper tiger that OEMs could, and knew they could, ignore. The implication is that the Ninth Circuit should affirm the district court on the no license/ no chips issue unless it sets aside the court’s fact findings. That seems like agreement with the position of our amicus brief.
We will not in this post review the huge factual record. We do note, however, that Manne and Auer cite in support of their factual argument only that 3 industry giants brought and then settled litigation against Qualcomm. But all 3 brought antitrust litigation; their doing so hardly proves that contract litigation or what Manne and Auer call “holdout” were viable options for anyone, much less for smaller OEMs. The fact that Qualcomm found it necessary to actually cut off only one OEM – and then it only took the OEM only 7 days to capitulate – certainly does not prove that Qualcomm’s threats lacked credibility. Notably, Manne and Auer do not claim that any OEMs bought chips from competitors of Qualcomm (although Apple bought some chips from Intel for a short while). No license/no chips appears to have been a successful, coercive policy, not an easily ignored threat.

6. Concluding remarks

First and foremost, we would like to thank the Amici for thoughtfully engaging with us. This is what the law & economics tradition is all about: moving the ball forward by taking part in vigorous, multidisciplinary, debates.

With that said, we do feel compelled to leave readers with two short remarks.

First, contrary to what the amici claim, we believe that our position has remained the same throughout these debates.

Second, and more importantly, we think that everyone agrees that the critical question is whether OEMs were prevented from negotiating licenses in the shadow of FRAND litigation.

We leave it up to Truth on the Market readers to judge which side of this debate is correct.

The Facts Show That No License/No Chips Was A Successful Policy, Not an Empty Threat – A Reply to Manne and Auer’s New Argument

Lemley, Melamed, and Salop — 22 January 2020

[This guest post is authored by Mark A. Lemley, Professor of Law and the Director of Program in Law, Science & Technology at Stanford Law School; A. Douglas Melamed, Professor of the Practice of Law at Stanford Law School and Former Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Intel from 2009 to 2014; and Steven Salop, Professor of Economics and Law at Georgetown Law School. It is part of an ongoing debate between the authors, on one side, and Geoffrey Manne and Dirk Auer, on the other, and has been integrated into our ongoing series on the FTC v. Qualcomm case, where all of the posts in this exchange are collected.]

In their original post, Manne and Auer argued that the antitrust argument against Qualcomm’s no license/no chips policy was based on bad economics and bad law. They now seem to have abandoned that argument and claim instead – contrary to the extensive factual findings of the district court – that, while Qualcomm threatened to cut off chips, it was a paper tiger that OEMs could, and knew they could, ignore. The implication is that the Ninth Circuit should affirm the district court on the no license/ no chips issue unless it sets aside the court’s fact findings. That seems like agreement with the position of our amicus brief.

We will not in this post review the huge factual record. We do note, however, that Manne and Auer cite in support of their factual argument only that 3 industry giants brought and then settled litigation against Qualcomm. But all 3 brought antitrust litigation; their doing so hardly proves that contract litigation or what Manne and Auer call “holdout” were viable options for anyone, much less for smaller OEMs. The fact that Qualcomm found it necessary to actually cut off only one OEM – and then it only took the OEM only 7 days to capitulate – certainly does not prove that Qualcomm’s threats lacked credibility. Notably, Manne and Auer do not claim that any OEMs bought chips from competitors of Qualcomm (although Apple bought some chips from Intel for a short while). No license/no chips appears to have been a successful, coercive policy, not an easily ignored threat.

In Antitrust & Competition, Apple, Federal Trade Commission, FTC v. Qualcomm: Analyzing the theory of the case, Patent, Platforms, Standard Setting, Truth on the Market antitrust, Competition law, ftc, FTC v Qualcomm, SEP, SEPs, standard-essential patent

Is FRAND Litigation a Credible Threat?: A reply to Mark Lemley, Douglas Melamed and Steven Salop

Geoffrey Manne & Dirk Auer — 21 January 2020

Last week, we posted a piece on TOTM, criticizing the amicus brief written by Mark Lemley, Douglas Melamed and Steven Salop in the ongoing Qualcomm litigation. The authors prepared a thoughtful response to our piece, which we published today on TOTM.

In this post, we highlight the points where we agree with the amici (or at least we think so), as well as those where we differ.

Negotiating in the shadow of FRAND litigation

Let us imagine a hypothetical world, where an OEM must source one chipset from Qualcomm (i.e. this segment of the market is non-contestable) and one chipset from either Qualcomm or its rivals (i.e. this segment is contestable). For both of these chipsets, the OEM must also reach a license agreement with Qualcomm.

We use the same number as the amici:

The OEM has a reserve price of $20 for each chip/license combination.
Rivals can produce chips at a cost of $11.
The hypothetical FRAND benchmark is $2 per chip.

With these numbers in mind, the critical question is whether there is a realistic threat of litigation to constrain the royalties commanded by Qualcomm (we believe that Lemley et al. agree with us on this point). The following table shows the prices that a hypothetical OEM would be willing to pay in both of these scenarios:

Blue cells are segments where QC can increase its profits if the threat of litigation is removed.

When the threat of litigation is present, Qualcomm obtains a total of $20 for the combination of non-contestable chips and IP. Qualcomm can use its chipset position to evade FRAND and charges the combined monopoly price of $20. At a chipset cost of $11, it would thus make $9 worth of profits. However, it earns only $13 for contestable chips ($2 in profits). This is because competition brings the price of chips down to $11 and Qualcomm does not have a chipset advantage to earn more than the FRAND rate for its IP.

When the threat of litigation is taken off the table, all chipsets effectively become non-contestable. Qualcomm still earns $20 for its previously non-contestable chips. But it can now raise its IP rate above the FRAND benchmark in the previously contestable segment (for example, by charging $10 for the IP). This squeezes its chipset competitors.

If our understanding of the amici’s response is correct, they argue that the combination of Qualcomm’s strong chipset position and its “No License, No Chips” policy (“NLNC”) effectively nullifies the threat of litigation:

Qualcomm is able to charge more than $2 for the license only because it uses the power of its chip monopoly to coerce the OEMs to give up the option of negotiating in light of the otherwise applicable constraints on the royalties it can charge.

According to the amici, the market thus moves from a state of imperfect competition (where OEMs would pay $33 for two chips and QC’s license) to a world of monopoly (where they pay the full $40).

We beg to differ.

Our points of disagreement

From an economic standpoint, the critical question is the extent to which Qualcomm’s chipset position and its NLNC policy deter OEMs from obtaining closer-to-FRAND rates.

While the case record is mixed and contains some ambiguities, we think it strongly suggests that Qualcomm’s chipset position and its NLNC policy do not preclude OEMs from using litigation to obtain rates that are close to the FRAND benchmark. There is thus no reason to believe that it can exclude its chipset rivals.

We believe the following facts support our assertion:

OEMs have pursued various litigation strategies in order to obtain lower rates on Qualcomm’s IP. As we mentioned in our previous post, this was notably the case for Apple, Samsung and LG. All three companies ultimately reached settlements with Qualcomm (and these settlements were concluded in the shadow of litigation proceedings — indeed, in Apple’s case, on the second day of trial). If anything, this suggests that court proceedings are an integral part of negotiations between Qualcomm and its OEMs.
For the most part, Qualcomm’s threats to cut off chip supplies were just that: threats. In any negotiation, parties will try to convince their counterpart that they have a strong outside option. Qualcomm may have done so by posturing that it would not sell chips to OEMs before they concluded a license agreement.

However, it seems that only once did Qualcomm apparently follow through with its threats to withhold chips (against Sony). And even then, the supply cutoff lasted only seven days.

And while many OEMs did take Qualcomm to court in order to obtain more favorable license terms, this never resulted in Qualcomm cutting off their chipset supplies. Other OEMs thus had no reason to believe that litigation would entail disruptions to their chipset supplies.

OEMs also wield powerful threats. These include patent holdout, litigation, vertical integration, and purchasing chips from Qualcomm’s rivals. And of course they have aggressively pursued the bringing of this and other litigation around the world by antitrust authorities — even quite possibly manipulating the record to bolster their cases. Here’s how one observer sums up Apple’s activity in this regard:

“Although we really only managed to get a small glimpse of Qualcomm’s evidence demonstrating the extent of Apple’s coordinated strategy to manipulate the FRAND license rate, that glimpse was particularly enlightening. It demonstrated a decade-long coordinated effort within Apple to systematically engage in what can only fairly be described as manipulation (if not creation of evidence) and classic holdout.

Qualcomm showed during opening arguments that, dating back to at least 2009, Apple had been laying the foundation for challenging its longstanding relationship with Qualcomm.” (Emphasis added)

Moreover, the holdout and litigation paths have been strengthened by the eBay case, which significantly reduced the financial risks involved in pursuing a holdout and/or litigation strategy. Given all of this, it is far from obvious that it is Qualcomm who enjoys the stronger bargaining position here.

Qualcomm’s chipsets might no longer be “must-buys” in the future. Rivals have gained increasing traction over the past couple of years. And with 5G just around the corner, this momentum could conceivably accelerate. Whether or not one believes that this will ultimately be the case, the trend surely places additional constraints on Qualcomm’s conduct. Aggressive behavior today may spur disgruntled rivals to enter the chipset market or switch suppliers tomorrow.

To summarize, as we understand their response, the delta between supracompetitive and competitive prices is entirely a function of Qualcomm’s ability to charge supra-FRAND prices for its licenses. On this we agree. But, unlike Lemley et al., we do not agree that Qualcomm is in a position to evade its FRAND pledges by using its strong position in the chipset market and its NLNC policy.

Finally, it must be said again: To the extent that that is the problem — the charging of supra-FRAND prices for licenses — the issue is manifestly a contract issue, not an antitrust one. All of the complexity of the case would fall away, and the litigation would be straightforward. But the opponents of Qualcomm’s practices do not really want to ensure that Qualcomm lowers its royalties by this delta; if they did, they would be bringing/supporting FRAND litigation. What the amici and Qualcomm’s contracting partners appear to want is to use antitrust litigation to force Qualcomm to license its technology at even lower rates — to force Qualcomm into a different business model in order to reset the baseline from which FRAND prices are determined (i.e., at the chip level, rather than at the device level). That may be an intelligible business strategy from the perspective of Qualcomm’s competitors, but it certainly isn’t sensible antitrust policy.

Manne and Auer’s Defense of Qualcomm’s Licensing Policy Is Deeply Flawed

Lemley, Melamed, and Salop — 21 January 2020

[This guest post is authored by Mark A. Lemley, Professor of Law and the Director of Program in Law, Science & Technology at Stanford Law School; A. Douglas Melamed, Professor of the Practice of Law at Stanford Law School and Former Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Intel from 2009 to 2014; and Steven Salop, Professor of Economics and Law at Georgetown Law School. It is a response to the post, “Exclusionary Pricing Without the Exclusion: Unpacking Qualcomm’s No License, No Chips Policy,” by Geoffrey Manne and Dirk Auer, which is itself a response to Lemley, Melamed, and Salop’s amicus brief in FTC v. Qualcomm.]

Geoffrey Manne and Dirk Auer’s defense of Qualcomm’s no license/no chips policy is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how that policy harms competition. The harm is straightforward in light of facts proven at trial. In a nutshell, OEMs must buy some chips from Qualcomm or else exit the handset business, even if they would also like to buy additional chips from other suppliers. OEMs must also buy a license to Qualcomm’s standard essential patents, whether they use Qualcomm’s chips or other chips implementing the same industry standards. There is a monopoly price for the package of Qualcomm’s chips plus patent license. Assume that the monopoly price is $20. Assume further that, if Qualcomm’s patents were licensed in a standalone transaction, as they would be if they were owned by a firm that did not also make chips, the market price for the patent license would be $2. In that event, the monopoly price for the chip would be $18, and a chip competitor could undersell Qualcomm if Qualcomm charged the monopoly price of $18 and the competitor could profitably sell chips for a lower price. If the competitor’s cost of producing and selling chips was $11, for example, it could easily undersell Qualcomm and force Qualcomm to lower its chip prices below $18, thereby reducing the price for the package to a level below $20.

However, the no license/no chips policy enables Qualcomm to allocate the package price of $20 any way it wishes. Because the OEMs must buy some chips from Qualcomm, Qualcomm is able to coerce the OEMs to accept any such allocation by threatening not to sell them chips if they do not agree to a license at the specified terms. The prices could thus be $18 and $2; or, for example, they could be $10 for the chips and $10 for the license. If Qualcomm sets the license price at $10 and a chip price of $10, it would continue to realize the monopoly package price of $20. But in that case, a competitor could profitably undersell Qualcomm only if its chip cost were less than 10. A competitor with a cost of $11 would then not be able to successfully enter the market, and Qualcomm would not need to lower its chip prices. That is how the no license/no chip policy blocks entry of chip competitors and maintains Qualcomm’s chip monopoly.

Manne and Auer’s defense of the no license/no chips policy is deeply flawed. In the first place, Manne and Auer mischaracterize the problem as one in which “Qualcomm undercuts [chipset rivals] on chip prices and recoups its losses by charging supracompetitive royalty rates on its IP.” On the basis of this description of the issue, they argue that, if Qualcomm cannot charge more than $2 for the license, it cannot use license revenues to offset the chip price reduction. And if Qualcomm can charge more than $2 for the license, it does not need a chip monopoly in order to make supracompetitive licensing profits. This argument is wrong both factually and conceptually.

As a factual matter, there are constraints on Qualcomm’s ability to charge more than $2 for the license if the license is sold by itself. If sold by itself, the license would be negotiated in the shadow of infringement litigation and the royalty would be constrained by the value of the technology claimed by the patent, the risk that the patent would be found to be invalid or not infringed, the “reasonable royalty” contemplated by the patent laws, and the contractual commitment to license on FRAND terms. But Qualcomm is able to circumvent those constraints by coercing OEMs to pay a higher price or else lose access to essential Qualcomm chips. In other words, Qualcomm’s ability to charge more than $2 for the license is not exogenous. Qualcomm is able to charge more than $2 for the license only because it uses the power of its chip monopoly to coerce the OEMs to give up the option of negotiating in light of the otherwise applicable constraints on the royalties it can charge. It is a simple story of bundling with simultaneous recoupment.

As a conceptual matter, Manne and Auer seem to think that the concern with the no license/no chips policy is that it enables inflated patent royalties to subsidize a profit sacrifice in chip sales, as if the issue were predatory pricing in chips. But there is no such sacrifice. Money is fungible, and Manne and Auer have it backwards. The problem is that the no license/no chips policy enables Qualcomm to make purely nominal changes by allocating some of its monopoly chip price to the license price. Qualcomm offsets that nominal license price increase when the OEM buys chips from it by lowering the chip price by that amount in order to maintain the package price at the monopoly price. There is no profit sacrifice for Qualcomm because the lower chip price simply offsets the higher license price. Qualcomm offers no such offset when the OEM buys chips from other suppliers. To the contrary, by using its chip monopoly to increase the license price, it increases the cost to OEMs of using competitors’ chips and is thus able to perpetuate its chip monopoly and maintain its monopoly chip prices and profits. Absent this policy, OEMs would buy more chips from third parties; Qualcomm’s prices and profits would fall; and consumers would benefit.

At the end of the day, Manne and Auer rely on the old “single monopoly profit” or “double counting” idea that a monopolist cannot both charge a monopoly price and extract additional consideration as well. But, again, they have it backwards. Manne and Auer describe the issue as whether Qualcomm can leverage its patent position in the technology markets to increase its market power in chips. But that is not the issue. Qualcomm is not trying to increase profits by leveraging monopoly power from one market into a different market in order to gain additional monopoly profits in the second market. Instead, it is using its existing monopoly power in chips to maintain that monopoly power in the first place. Assuming Qualcomm has a chip monopoly, it is true that it earns the same revenue from OEMs regardless of how it allocates the all-in price of $20 to its chips versus its patents. But by allocating more of the all-in price to the patents (i.e., in our example, $10 instead of $2), Qualcomm is able to maintain its monopoly by preventing rival chipmakers from undercutting the $20 monopoly price of the package. That is how competition and consumers are harmed.

In Antitrust & Competition, Federal Trade Commission, FTC v. Qualcomm: Analyzing the theory of the case, Intellectual Property, Patent, Standard Setting, Truth on the Market antitrust, Competition law, ftc, FTC v Qualcomm, Patents, SEP, SEPs, standard-essential patent

The District Court’s FTC v. Qualcomm Decision Rests on Impermissible Inferences and Should Be Reversed

Geoffrey Manne & Ben Sperry — 3 September 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

solution to a game in which players of different types adopt different strategies and thereby allow an uninformed player to draw inferences about an informed player’s type from that player’s actions.
Baird, Gertner & Picker, Game Theory and the Law

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The district court cites Microsoft for the proposition that

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

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

But Microsoft never suggested that anticompetitiveness itself may be inferred.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Josh Wright has noted:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

Joining ICLE on the brief are:

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

In FTC v. Qualcomm, Judge Koh Gets Lost in the Weeds

Dirk Auer — 28 August 2019

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

Samsung SGH-F480V – controller board – Qualcomm MSM6280

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

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

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

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

The elephant in the room

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

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

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

The misguided push for component level pricing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prices are almost impossible to reconstruct

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Concluding remarks

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

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

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

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

An Evidentiary Cornerstone of the FTC’s Antitrust Case Against Qualcomm May Have Rested on Manipulated Data

Geoffrey Manne — 13 May 2019

[TOTM: The following is the fourth in a series of posts by TOTM guests and authors on the FTC v. Qualcomm case, currently awaiting decision by Judge Lucy Koh in the Northern District of California. The entire series of posts is available here. This post originally appeared on the Federalist Society Blog.]

The courtroom trial in the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC’s) antitrust case against Qualcomm ended in January with a promise from the judge in the case, Judge Lucy Koh, to issue a ruling as quickly as possible — caveated by her acknowledgement that the case is complicated and the evidence voluminous. Well, things have only gotten more complicated since the end of the trial. Not only did Apple and Qualcomm reach a settlement in the antitrust case against Qualcomm that Apple filed just three days after the FTC brought its suit, but the abbreviated trial in that case saw the presentation by Qualcomm of some damning evidence that, if accurate, seriously calls into (further) question the merits of the FTC’s case.

Apple v. Qualcomm settles — and the DOJ takes notice

The Apple v. Qualcomm case, which was based on substantially the same arguments brought by the FTC in its case, ended abruptly last month after only a day and a half of trial — just enough time for the parties to make their opening statements — when Apple and Qualcomm reached an out-of-court settlement. The settlement includes a six-year global patent licensing deal, a multi-year chip supplier agreement, an end to all of the patent disputes around the world between the two companies, and a $4.5 billion settlement payment from Apple to Qualcomm.

That alone complicates the economic environment into which Judge Koh will issue her ruling. But the Apple v. Qualcomm trial also appears to have induced the Department of Justice Antitrust Division (DOJ) to weigh in on the FTC’s case with a Statement of Interest requesting Judge Koh to use caution in fashioning a remedy in the case should she side with the FTC, followed by a somewhat snarky Reply from the FTC arguing the DOJ’s filing was untimely (and, reading the not-so-hidden subtext, unwelcome).

But buried in the DOJ’s Statement is an important indication of why it filed its Statement when it did, just about a week after the end of the Apple v. Qualcomm case, and a pointer to a much larger issue that calls the FTC’s case against Qualcomm even further into question (I previously wrote about the lack of theoretical and evidentiary merit in the FTC’s case here).

Footnote 6 of the DOJ’s Statement reads:

Internal Apple documents that recently became public describe how, in an effort to “[r]educe Apple’s net royalty to Qualcomm,” Apple planned to “[h]urt Qualcomm financially” and “[p]ut Qualcomm’s licensing model at risk,” including by filing lawsuits raising claims similar to the FTC’s claims in this case …. One commentator has observed that these documents “potentially reveal[] that Apple was engaging in a bad faith argument both in front of antitrust enforcers as well as the legal courts about the actual value and nature of Qualcomm’s patented innovation.” (Emphasis added).

Indeed, the slides presented by Qualcomm during that single day of trial in Apple v. Qualcomm are significant, not only for what they say about Apple’s conduct, but, more importantly, for what they say about the evidentiary basis for the FTC’s claims against the company.

The evidence presented by Qualcomm in its opening statement suggests some troubling conduct by Apple

Others have pointed to Qualcomm’s opening slides and the Apple internal documents they present to note Apple’s apparent bad conduct. As one commentator sums it up:

Although we really only managed to get a small glimpse of Qualcomm’s evidence demonstrating the extent of Apple’s coordinated strategy to manipulate the FRAND license rate, that glimpse was particularly enlightening. It demonstrated a decade-long coordinated effort within Apple to systematically engage in what can only fairly be described as manipulation (if not creation of evidence) and classic holdout.
Qualcomm showed during opening arguments that, dating back to at least 2009, Apple had been laying the foundation for challenging its longstanding relationship with Qualcomm. (Emphasis added).

The internal Apple documents presented by Qualcomm to corroborate this claim appear quite damning. Of course, absent explanation and cross-examination, it’s impossible to know for certain what the documents mean. But on their face they suggest Apple knowingly undertook a deliberate scheme (and knowingly took upon itself significant legal risk in doing so) to devalue comparable patent portfolios to Qualcomm’s:

The apparent purpose of this scheme was to devalue comparable patent licensing agreements where Apple had the power to do so (through litigation or the threat of litigation) in order to then use those agreements to argue that Qualcomm’s royalty rates were above the allowable, FRAND level, and to undermine the royalties Qualcomm would be awarded in courts adjudicating its FRAND disputes with the company. As one commentator put it:

Apple embarked upon a coordinated scheme to challenge weaker patents in order to beat down licensing prices. Once the challenges to those weaker patents were successful, and the licensing rates paid to those with weaker patent portfolios were minimized, Apple would use the lower prices paid for weaker patent portfolios as proof that Qualcomm was charging a super-competitive licensing price; a licensing price that violated Qualcomm’s FRAND obligations. (Emphasis added).

That alone is a startling revelation, if accurate, and one that would seem to undermine claims that patent holdout isn’t a real problem. It also would undermine Apple’s claims that it is a “willing licensee,” engaging with SEP licensors in good faith. (Indeed, this has been called into question before, and one Federal Circuit judge has noted in dissent that “[t]he record in this case shows evidence that Apple may have been a hold out.”). If the implications drawn from the Apple documents shown in Qualcomm’s opening statement are accurate, there is good reason to doubt that Apple has been acting in good faith.

Even more troubling is what it means for the strength of the FTC’s case

But the evidence offered in Qualcomm’s opening argument point to another, more troubling implication, as well. We know that Apple has been coordinating with the FTC and was likely an important impetus for the FTC’s decision to bring an action in the first place. It seems reasonable to assume that Apple used these “manipulated” agreements to help make its case.

But what is most troubling is the extent to which it appears to have worked.

The FTC’s action against Qualcomm rested in substantial part on arguments that Qualcomm’s rates were too high (even though the FTC constructed its case without coming right out and saying this, at least until trial). In its opening statement the FTC said:

Qualcomm’s practices, including no license, no chips, skewed negotiations towards the outcomes that favor Qualcomm and lead to higher royalties. Qualcomm is committed to license its standard essential patents on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms. But even before doing market comparison, we know that the license rates charged by Qualcomm are too high and above FRAND because Qualcomm uses its chip power to require a license.
* * *
Mr. Michael Lasinski [the FTC’s patent valuation expert] compared the royalty rates received by Qualcomm to … the range of FRAND rates that ordinarily would form the boundaries of a negotiation … Mr. Lasinski’s expert opinion … is that Qualcomm’s royalty rates are far above any indicators of fair and reasonable rates. (Emphasis added).

The key question is what constitutes the “range of FRAND rates that ordinarily would form the boundaries of a negotiation”?

Because they were discussed under seal, we don’t know the precise agreements that the FTC’s expert, Mr. Lasinski, used for his analysis. But we do know something about them: His analysis entailed a study of only eight licensing agreements; in six of them, the licensee was either Apple or Samsung; and in all of them the licensor was either Interdigital, Nokia, or Ericsson. We also know that Mr. Lasinski’s valuation study did not include any Qualcomm licenses, and that the eight agreements he looked at were all executed after the district court’s decision in Microsoft vs. Motorola in 2013.

A curiously small number of agreements

Right off the bat there is a curiosity in the FTC’s valuation analysis. Even though there are hundreds of SEP license agreements involving the relevant standards, the FTC’s analysis relied on only eight, three-quarters of which involved licensing by only two companies: Apple and Samsung.

Indeed, even since 2013 (a date to which we will return) there have been scads of licenses (see, e.g., here, here, and here). Not only Apple and Samsung make CDMA and LTE devices; there are — quite literally — hundreds of other manufacturers out there, all of them licensing essentially the same technology — including global giants like LG, Huawei, HTC, Oppo, Lenovo, and Xiaomi. Why were none of their licenses included in the analysis?

At the same time, while Interdigital, Nokia, and Ericsson are among the largest holders of CDMA and LTE SEPs, several dozen companies have declared such patents, including Motorola (Alphabet), NEC, Huawei, Samsung, ZTE, NTT DOCOMO, etc. Again — why were none of their licenses included in the analysis?

All else equal, more data yields better results. This is particularly true where the data are complex license agreements which are often embedded in larger, even-more-complex commercial agreements and which incorporate widely varying patent portfolios, patent implementers, and terms.

Yet the FTC relied on just eight agreements in its comparability study, covering a tiny fraction of the industry’s licensors and licensees, and, notably, including primarily licenses taken by the two companies (Samsung and Apple) that have most aggressively litigated their way to lower royalty rates.

A curiously crabbed selection of licensors

And it is not just that the selected licensees represent a weirdly small and biased sample; it is also not necessarily even a particularly comparable sample.

One thing we can be fairly confident of, given what we know of the agreements used, is that at least one of the license agreements involved Nokia licensing to Apple, and another involved InterDigital licensing to Apple. But these companies’ patent portfolios are not exactly comparable to Qualcomm’s. About Nokia’s patents, Apple said:

And about InterDigital’s:

Meanwhile, Apple’s view of Qualcomm’s patent portfolio (despite its public comments to the contrary) was that it was considerably better than the others’:

The FTC’s choice of such a limited range of comparable license agreements is curious for another reason, as well: It includes no Qualcomm agreements. Qualcomm is certainly one of the biggest players in the cellular licensing space, and no doubt more than a few license agreements involve Qualcomm. While it might not make sense to include Qualcomm licenses that the FTC claims incorporate anticompetitive terms, that doesn’t describe the huge range of Qualcomm licenses with which the FTC has no quarrel. Among other things, Qualcomm licenses from before it began selling chips would not have been affected by its alleged “no license, no chips” scheme, nor would licenses granted to companies that didn’t also purchase Qualcomm chips. Furthermore, its licenses for technology reading on the WCDMA standard are not claimed to be anticompetitive by the FTC.

And yet none of these licenses were deemed “comparable” by the FTC’s expert, even though, on many dimensions — most notably, with respect to the underlying patent portfolio being valued — they would have been the most comparable (i.e., identical).

A curiously circumscribed timeframe

That the FTC’s expert should use the 2013 cut-off date is also questionable. According to Lasinski, he chose to use agreements after 2013 because it was in 2013 that the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington decided the Microsoft v. Motorola case. Among other things, the court in Microsoft v Motorola held that the proper value of a SEP is its “intrinsic” patent value, including its value to the standard, but not including the additional value it derives from being incorporated into a widely used standard.

According to the FTC’s expert,

prior to [Microsoft v. Motorola], people were trying to value … the standard and the license based on the value of the standard, not the value of the patents ….

Asked by Qualcomm’s counsel if his concern was that the “royalty rates derived in license agreements for cellular SEPs [before Microsoft v. Motorola] could very well have been above FRAND,” Mr. Lasinski concurred.

The problem with this approach is that it’s little better than arbitrary. The Motorola decision was an important one, to be sure, but the notion that sophisticated parties in a multi-billion dollar industry were systematically agreeing to improper terms until a single court in Washington suggested otherwise is absurd. To be sure, such agreements are negotiated in “the shadow of the law,” and judicial decisions like the one in Washington (later upheld by the Ninth Circuit) can affect the parties’ bargaining positions.

But even if it were true that the court’s decision had some effect on licensing rates, the decision would still have been only one of myriad factors determining parties’ relative bargaining power and their assessment of the proper valuation of SEPs. There is no basis to support the assertion that the Motorola decision marked a sea-change between “improper” and “proper” patent valuations. And, even if it did, it was certainly not alone in doing so, and the FTC’s expert offers no justification for determining that agreements reached before, say, the European Commission’s decision against Qualcomm in 2018 were “proper,” or that the Korea FTC’s decision against Qualcomm in 2009 didn’t have the same sort of corrective effect as the Motorola court’s decision in 2013.

At the same time, a review of a wider range of agreements suggested that Qualcomm’s licensing royalties weren’t inflated

Meanwhile, one of Qualcomm’s experts in the FTC case, former DOJ Chief Economist Aviv Nevo, looked at whether the FTC’s theory of anticompetitive harm was borne out by the data by looking at Qualcomm’s royalty rates across time periods and standards, and using a much larger set of agreements. Although his remit was different than Mr. Lasinski’s, and although he analyzed only Qualcomm licenses, his analysis still sheds light on Mr. Lasinski’s conclusions:

[S]pecifically what I looked at was the predictions from the theory to see if they’re actually borne in the data….
[O]ne of the clear predictions from the theory is that during periods of alleged market power, the theory predicts that we should see higher royalty rates.
So that’s a very clear prediction that you can take to data. You can look at the alleged market power period, you can look at the royalty rates and the agreements that were signed during that period and compare to other periods to see whether we actually see a difference in the rates.

Dr. Nevo’s analysis, which looked at royalty rates in Qualcomm’s SEP license agreements for CDMA, WCDMA, and LTE ranging from 1990 to 2017, found no differences in rates between periods when Qualcomm was alleged to have market power and when it was not alleged to have market power (or could not have market power, on the FTC’s theory, because it did not sell corresponding chips).

The reason this is relevant is that Mr. Lasinski’s assessment implies that Qualcomm’s higher royalty rates weren’t attributable to its superior patent portfolio, leaving either anticompetitive conduct or non-anticompetitive, superior bargaining ability as the explanation. No one thinks Qualcomm has cornered the market on exceptional negotiators, so really the only proffered explanation for the results of Mr. Lasinski’s analysis is anticompetitive conduct. But this assumes that his analysis is actually reliable. Prof. Nevo’s analysis offers some reason to think that it is not.

All of the agreements studied by Mr. Lasinski were drawn from the period when Qualcomm is alleged to have employed anticompetitive conduct to elevate its royalty rates above FRAND. But when the actual royalties charged by Qualcomm during its alleged exercise of market power are compared to those charged when and where it did not have market power, the evidence shows it received identical rates. Mr Lasinki’s results, then, would imply that Qualcomm’s royalties were “too high” not only while it was allegedly acting anticompetitively, but also when it was not. That simple fact suggests on its face that Mr. Lasinski’s analysis may have been flawed, and that it systematically under-valued Qualcomm’s patents.

Connecting the dots and calling into question the strength of the FTC’s case

In its closing argument, the FTC pulled together the implications of its allegations of anticompetitive conduct by pointing to Mr. Lasinski’s testimony:

Now, looking at the effect of all of this conduct, Qualcomm’s own documents show that it earned many times the licensing revenue of other major licensors, like Ericsson.
* * *
Mr. Lasinski analyzed whether this enormous difference in royalties could be explained by the relative quality and size of Qualcomm’s portfolio, but that massive disparity was not explained.
Qualcomm’s royalties are disproportionate to those of other SEP licensors and many times higher than any plausible calculation of a FRAND rate.
* * *
The overwhelming direct evidence, some of which is cited here, shows that Qualcomm’s conduct led licensees to pay higher royalties than they would have in fair negotiations.

It is possible, of course, that Lasinki’s methodology was flawed; indeed, at trial Qualcomm argued exactly this in challenging his testimony. But it is also possible that, whether his methodology was flawed or not, his underlying data was flawed.

It is impossible from the publicly available evidence to definitively draw this conclusion, but the subsequent revelation that Apple may well have manipulated at least a significant share of the eight agreements that constituted Mr. Lasinski’s data certainly increases the plausibility of this conclusion: We now know, following Qualcomm’s opening statement in Apple v. Qualcomm, that that stilted set of comparable agreements studied by the FTC’s expert also happens to be tailor-made to be dominated by agreements that Apple may have manipulated to reflect lower-than-FRAND rates.

What is most concerning is that the FTC may have built up its case on such questionable evidence, either by intentionally cherry picking the evidence upon which it relied, or inadvertently because it rested on such a needlessly limited range of data, some of which may have been tainted.

Intentionally or not, the FTC appears to have performed its valuation analysis using a needlessly circumscribed range of comparable agreements and justified its decision to do so using questionable assumptions. This seriously calls into question the strength of the FTC’s case.

Use and abuse of bargaining models in antitrust: AT&T/Time-Warner and FTC v. Qualcomm

Ginsburg & Wright — 14 March 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article does reject, however, the FTC’s attempt to make it easier for the government to prevail in Section 2 litigation. Although the case law is hardly a model of clarity, one point that is settled is that injury to competitors by itself is not a sufficient basis to assume injury to competition …. Inferences of competitive injury are, of course, the heart of per se condemnation under the rule of reason. Although long a staple of Section 1, such truncation has never been a part of Section 2. In an economy as dynamic as ours, now is hardly the time to short-circuit Section 2 cases. The long, and often sorry, history of monopolization in the courts reveals far too many mistakes even without truncation.
Timothy J. Muris, The FTC and the Law of Monopolization, 67 Antitrust L. J. 693 (2000)

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

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

Calling into Question the FTC’s Theory of the Case in FTC v. Qualcomm

Luke Froeb — 5 March 2019

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

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

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

Not everything is “hold-up”

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

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

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

The smallest component “principle”

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

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

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

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

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

The role of economics

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

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

Concluding policy thoughts

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

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

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

Archives For SEP

Background on Patent Pool Analysis

The 2017 DOJ-FTC IP Licensing Guidelines

ABRL Letter

UTLP Letter

Patent-Pool Guidance in Context

Conclusion

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Collaborative Standard-Setting and Specialization as Substitutes for Proprietary Standards and Vertical Integration

The Importance of Intellectual Property Rights for Startup Activity

The Role of Strong SEP Rights in Guarding Against China’s ‘Cyber Great Power’ Ambitions

Conclusion

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From rent-minimization to rent-maximization

Epic Games v. Apple

A contestably narrow market definition

An implausible theory of platform lock-in

The logic of the 70/30 split

Epic’s objection

Antitrust is about efficiency, not distribution

The prequel: Apple v. Qualcomm

Theory meets evidence

Antitrust litigation as business strategy

Conclusion: Remaking the case for “narrow” antitrust

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1. Amicus brief supporting the FTC’s stance, and ICLE brief in support of Qualcomm’s position

2. ICLE response to the Lemley, Melamed and Salop Amicus brief.

3. Amici’s counterargument

4. ICLE rebuttal

5. Amici’s surrebuttal

6. Concluding remarks

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Negotiating in the shadow of FRAND litigation

Our points of disagreement

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

Joining ICLE on the brief are:

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The elephant in the room

The misguided push for component level pricing

Prices are almost impossible to reconstruct

Concluding remarks

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Apple v. Qualcomm settles — and the DOJ takes notice

The evidence presented by Qualcomm in its opening statement suggests some troubling conduct by Apple

Even more troubling is what it means for the strength of the FTC’s case

A curiously small number of agreements

A curiously crabbed selection of licensors

A curiously circumscribed timeframe

At the same time, a review of a wider range of agreements suggested that Qualcomm’s licensing royalties weren’t inflated

Connecting the dots and calling into question the strength of the FTC’s case

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Not everything is “hold-up”

The smallest component “principle”

The role of economics

Concluding policy thoughts

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