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An L&E Defense of the First Amendment’s Protection of Private Ordering

Ben Sperry —  23 April 2021

In his recent concurrence in Biden v. Knight, Justice Clarence Thomas sketched a roadmap for how to regulate social-media platforms. The animating factor for Thomas, much like for other conservatives, appears to be a sense that Big Tech has exhibited anti-conservative bias in its moderation decisions, most prominently by excluding former President Donald Trump from Twitter and Facebook. The opinion has predictably been greeted warmly by conservative champions of social-media regulation, who believe it shows how states and the federal government can proceed on this front.

While much of the commentary to date has been on whether Thomas got the legal analysis right, or on the uncomfortable fit of common-carriage law to social media, the deeper question of the First Amendment’s protection of private ordering has received relatively short shrift.

Conservatives’ main argument has been that Big Tech needs to be reined in because it is restricting the speech of private individuals. While conservatives traditionally have defended the state-action doctrine and the right to editorial discretion, they now readily find exceptions to both in order to justify regulating social-media companies. But those two First Amendment doctrines have long enshrined an important general principle: private actors can set the rules for speech on their own property. I intend to analyze this principle from a law & economics perspective and show how it benefits society.

Who Balances the Benefits and Costs of Speech?

Like virtually any other human activity, there are benefits and costs to speech and it is ultimately subjective individual preference that determines the value that speech has. The First Amendment protects speech from governmental regulation, with only limited exceptions, but that does not mean all speech is acceptable or must be tolerated. Under the state-action doctrine, the First Amendment only prevents the government from restricting speech.

Some purported defenders of the principle of free speech no longer appear to see a distinction between restraints on speech imposed by the government and those imposed by private actors. But this is surely mistaken, as no one truly believes all speech protected by the First Amendment should be without consequence. In truth, most regulation of speech has always come by informal means—social mores enforced by dirty looks or responsive speech from others.

Moreover, property rights have long played a crucial role in determining speech rules within any given space. If a man were to come into my house and start calling my wife racial epithets, I would not only ask that person to leave but would exercise my right as a property owner to eject the trespasser—if necessary, calling the police to assist me. I similarly could not expect to go to a restaurant and yell at the top of my lungs about political issues and expect them—even as “common carriers” or places of public accommodation—to allow me to continue.

As Thomas Sowell wrote in Knowledge and Decisions:

The fact that different costs and benefits must be balanced does not in itself imply who must balance them―or even that there must be a single balance for all, or a unitary viewpoint (one “we”) from which the issue is categorically resolved.

Knowledge and Decisions, p. 240

When it comes to speech, the balance that must be struck is between one individual’s desire for an audience and that prospective audience’s willingness to play the role. Asking government to use regulation to make categorical decisions for all of society is substituting centralized evaluation of the costs and benefits of access to communications for the individual decisions of many actors. Rather than incremental decisions regarding how and under what terms individuals may relate to one another—which can evolve over time in response to changes in what individuals find acceptable—government by its nature can only hand down categorical guidelines: “you must allow x, y, and z speech.”

This is particularly relevant in the sphere of social media. Social-media companies are multi-sided platforms. They are profit-seeking, to be sure, but the way they generate profits is by acting as intermediaries between users and advertisers. If they fail to serve their users well, those users could abandon the platform. Without users, advertisers would have no interest in buying ads. And without advertisers, there is no profit to be made. Social-media companies thus need to maximize the value of their platform by setting rules that keep users engaged.

In the cases of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, the platforms have set content-moderation standards that restrict many kinds of speech that are generally viewed negatively by users, even if the First Amendment would foreclose the government from regulating those same types of content. This is a good thing. Social-media companies balance the speech interests of different kinds of users to maximize the value of the platform and, in turn, to maximize benefits to all.

Herein lies the fundamental difference between private action and state action: one is voluntary, and the other based on coercion. If Facebook or Twitter suspends a user for violating community rules, it represents termination of a previously voluntary association. If the government kicks someone out of a public forum for expressing legal speech, that is coercion. The state-action doctrine recognizes this fundamental difference and creates a bright-line rule that courts may police when it comes to speech claims. As Sowell put it:

The courts’ role as watchdogs patrolling the boundaries of governmental power is essential in order that others may be secure and free on the other side of those boundaries. But what makes watchdogs valuable is precisely their ability to distinguish those people who are to be kept at bay and those who are to be left alone. A watchdog who could not make that distinction would not be a watchdog at all, but simply a general menace.

Knowledge and Decisions, p. 244

Markets Produce the Best Moderation Policies

The First Amendment also protects the right of editorial discretion, which means publishers, platforms, and other speakers are free from carrying or transmitting government-compelled speech. Even a newspaper with near-monopoly power cannot be compelled by a right-of-reply statute to carry responses by political candidates to editorials it has published. In other words, not only is private regulation of speech not state action, but in many cases, private regulation is protected by the First Amendment.

There is no reason to think that social-media companies today are in a different position than was the newspaper in Miami Herald v. Tornillo. These companies must determine what, how, and where content is presented within their platform. While this right of editorial discretion protects the moderation decisions of social-media companies, its benefits accrue to society at-large.

Social-media companies’ abilities to differentiate themselves based on functionality and moderation policies are important aspects of competition among them. How each platform is used may differ depending on those factors. In fact, many consumers use multiple social-media platforms throughout the day for different purposes. Market competition, not government power, has enabled internet users (including conservatives!) to have more avenues than ever to get their message out.

Many conservatives remain unpersuaded by the power of markets in this case. They see multiple platforms all engaging in very similar content-moderation policies when it comes to certain touchpoint issues, and thus allege widespread anti-conservative bias and collusion. Neither of those claims have much factual support, but more importantly, the similarity of content-moderation standards may simply be common responses to similar demand structures—not some nefarious and conspiratorial plot.

In other words, if social-media users demand less of the kinds of content commonly considered to be hate speech, or less misinformation on certain important issues, platforms will do their best to weed those things out. Platforms won’t always get these determinations right, but it is by no means clear that forcing them to carry all “legal” speech—which would include not just misinformation and hate speech, but pornographic material, as well—would better serve social-media users. There are always alternative means to debate contestable issues of the day, even if it may be more costly to access them.

Indeed, that content-moderation policies make it more difficult to communicate some messages is precisely the point of having them. There is a subset of protected speech to which many users do not wish to be subject. Moreover, there is no inherent right to have an audience on a social-media platform.

Conclusion

Much of the First Amendment’s economic value lies in how it defines roles in the market for speech. As a general matter, it is not the government’s place to determine what speech should be allowed in private spaces. Instead, the private ordering of speech emerges through the application of social mores and property rights. This benefits society, as it allows individuals to create voluntary relationships built on marginal decisions about what speech is acceptable when and where, rather than centralized decisions made by a governing few and that are difficult to change over time.

In Amazon, Constitutional Law, Facebook, First Amendment, Google, Law & Economics, Platforms, Supreme Court, Truth on the Market, Twitter , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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The (Conventional) 5G Chairman

Harold Feld —  15 January 2021

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

Harold Feld is senior vice president of Public Knowledge.]

Chairman Ajit Pai prioritized making new spectrum available for 5G. To his credit, he succeeded. Over the course of four years, Chairman Pai made available more high-band and mid-band spectrum, for licensed use and unlicensed use, than any other Federal Communications Commission chairman. He did so in the face of unprecedented opposition from other federal agencies, navigating the chaotic currents of the Trump administration with political acumen and courage. The Pai FCC will go down in history as the 5G FCC, and as the chairman who protected the primacy of FCC control over commercial spectrum policy.

At the same time, the Pai FCC will also go down in history as the most conventional FCC on spectrum policy in the modern era. Chairman Pai undertook no sweeping review of spectrum policy in the manner of former Chairman Michael Powell and no introduction of new and radically different spectrum technologies such as the introduction of unlicensed spectrum and spread spectrum in the 1980s, or the introduction of auctions in the 1990s. To the contrary, Chairman Pai actually rolled back the experimental short-term license structure adopted in the 3.5 GHz Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) band and replaced it with the conventional long-term with renewal expectation license. He missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to dramatically expand the availability of unlicensed use of the TV white spaces (TVWS) via repacking after the television incentive auction. In reworking the rules for the 2.5 GHz band, although Pai laudably embraced the recommendation to create an application window for rural tribal lands, he rejected the proposal to allow nonprofits a chance to use the band for broadband in favor of conventional auction policy.

Ajit Pai’s Spectrum Policy Gave the US a Strong Position for 5G and Wi-Fi 6

To fully appreciate Chairman Pai’s accomplishments, we must first fully appreciate the urgency of opening new spectrum, and the challenges Pai faced from within the Trump administration itself. While providers can (and should) repurpose spectrum from older technologies to newer technologies, successful widespread deployment can only take place when sufficient amounts of new spectrum become available. This “green field” spectrum allows providers to build out new technologies with the most up-to-date equipment without disrupting existing subscriber services. The protocols developed for mobile 5G services work best with “mid-band” spectrum (generally considered to be frequencies between 2 GHz and 6 GHz). At the time Pai became chairman, the FCC did not have any mid-band spectrum identified for auction.

In addition, spectrum available for unlicensed use has become increasingly congested as more and more services depend on Wi-Fi and other unlicensed applications. Indeed, we have become so dependent on Wi-Fi for home broadband and networking that people routinely talk about buying “Wi-Fi” from commercial broadband providers rather than buying “internet access.” The United States further suffered a serious disadvantage moving forward to next generation Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi 6, because the U.S. lacked a contiguous block of spectrum large enough to take advantage of Wi-Fi 6’s gigabit capabilities. Without gigabit Wi-Fi, Americans will increasingly be unable to use the applications that gigabit broadband to the home makes possible.

But virtually all spectrum—particularly mid-band spectrum—have significant incumbents. These incumbents include federal users, particularly the U.S. Department of Defense. Finding new spectrum optimal for 5G required reclaiming spectrum from these incumbents. Unlicensed services do not require relocating incumbent users but creating such “underlay” unlicensed spectrum access requires rules to prevent unlicensed operations from causing harmful interference to licensed services. Needless to say, incumbent services fiercely resist any change in spectrum-allocation rules, claiming that reducing their spectrum allocation or permitting unlicensed services will compromise valuable existing services, while simultaneously causing harmful interference.

The need to reallocate unprecedented amounts of spectrum to ensure successful 5G and Wi-Fi 6 deployment in the United States created an unholy alliance of powerful incumbents, commercial and federal, dedicated to blocking FCC action. Federal agencies—in violation of established federal spectrum policy—publicly challenged the FCC’s spectrum-allocation decisions. Powerful industry incumbents—such as the auto industry, the power industry, and defense contractors—aggressively lobbied Congress to reverse the FCC’s spectrum action by legislation. The National Telecommunications and Information Agency (NTIA), the federal agency tasked with formulating federal spectrum policy, was missing in action as it rotated among different acting agency heads. As the chair and ranking member of the House Commerce Committee noted, this unprecedented and very public opposition by federal agencies to FCC spectrum policy threatened U.S. wireless interests both domestically and internationally.

Navigating this hostile terrain required Pai to exercise both political acumen and political will. Pai accomplished his goal of reallocating 600 MHz of spectrum for auction, opening over 1200 MHz of contiguous spectrum for unlicensed use, and authorized the new entrant Ligado Networks over the objections of the DOD. He did so by a combination of persuading President Donald Trump of the importance of maintaining U.S. leadership in 5G, and insisting on impeccable analysis by the FCC’s engineers to provide support for the reallocation and underlay decisions. On the most significant votes, Pai secured support (or partial support) from the Democrats. Perhaps most importantly, Pai successfully defended the institutional role of the FCC as the ultimate decisionmaker on commercial spectrum use, not subject to a “heckler’s veto” by other federal agencies.

Missed Innovation, ‘Command and Control Lite‘

While acknowledging Pai’s accomplishments, a fair consideration of Pai’s legacy must also consider his shortcomings. As chairman, Pai proved the most conservative FCC chair on spectrum policy since the 1980s. The Reagan FCC produced unlicensed and spread spectrum rules. The Clinton FCC created the spectrum auction regime. The Bush FCC included a spectrum task force and produced the concept of database management for unlicensed services, creating the TVWS and laying the groundwork for CBRS in the 3.5 GHz band. The Obama FCC recommended and created the world’s first incentive auction.

The Trump FCC does more than lack comparable accomplishments; it actively rolled back previous innovations. Within the first year of his chairmanship, Pai began a rulemaking designed to roll back the innovative priority access licensing (PALs). Under the rules adopted under the previous chairman, PALs provided exclusive use on a census block basis for three years with no expectation of renewal. Pai delayed the rollout of CBRS for two years to replace this approach with a standard license structure of 10 years with an expectation of renewal, explicitly to facilitate traditional carrier investment in traditional networks. Pai followed the same path when restructuring the 2.5 GHz band. While laudably creating a window for Native Americans to apply for 2.5 GHz licenses on rural tribal lands, Pai rejected proposals from nonprofits to adopt a window for non-commercial providers to offer broadband. Instead, he simply eliminated the educational requirement and adopted a standard auction for distribution of remaining licenses.

Similarly, in the unlicensed space, Pai consistently declined to promote innovation. In the repacking following the broadcast incentive auction, Pai rejected the proposal of structuring the repacking to ensure usable TVWS in every market. Instead, under Pai, the FCC managed the repacking so as to minimize the burden on incumbent primary and secondary licensees. As a result, major markets such as Los Angeles have zero channels available for unlicensed TVWS operation. This effectively relegates the service to a niche rural service, augmenting existing rural wireless ISPs.

The result is a modified form of “command and control,” the now-discredited system where the FCC would allocate licenses to provide specific services such as “FM radio” or “mobile pager service.” While preserving license flexibility in name, the licensing rules are explicitly structured to promote certain types of investment and business cases. The result is to encourage the same types of licensees to offer improved and more powerful versions of the same types of services, while discouraging more radical innovations.

Conclusion

Chairman Pai can rightly take pride in his overall 5G legacy. He preserved the institutional role of the FCC as the agency responsible for expanding our nation’s access to wireless services against sustained attack by federal agencies determined to protect their own spectrum interests. He provided enough green field spectrum for both licensed services and unlicensed services to permit the successful deployment of 5G and Wi-Fi 6. At the same time, however, he failed to encourage more radical spectrum policies that have made the United States the birthplace of such technologies as mobile broadband and Wi-Fi. We have won the “race” to next generation wireless, but the players and services are likely to stay the same.

In Administrative Law, Broadband, Federal Communications Commission, Regulation, Regulatory Reform, Retrospective on Ajit Pai’s Tenure as FCC Chairman, Symposia, Telecommunications, Truth on the Market, Wireless , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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There’s nothing “conservative” about Trump’s views on free speech and the regulation of social media

Ben Sperry —  12 July 2019

Yesterday was President Trump’s big “Social Media Summit” where he got together with a number of right-wing firebrands to decry the power of Big Tech to censor conservatives online. According to the Wall Street Journal: 

Mr. Trump attacked social-media companies he says are trying to silence individuals and groups with right-leaning views, without presenting specific evidence. He said he was directing his administration to “explore all legislative and regulatory solutions to protect free speech and the free speech of all Americans.”

“Big Tech must not censor the voices of the American people,” Mr. Trump told a crowd of more than 100 allies who cheered him on. “This new technology is so important and it has to be used fairly.”

Despite the simplistic narrative tying President Trump’s vision of the world to conservatism, there is nothing conservative about his views on the First Amendment and how it applies to social media companies.

I have noted in several places before that there is a conflict of visions when it comes to whether the First Amendment protects a negative or positive conception of free speech. For those unfamiliar with the distinction: it comes from philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who identified negative liberty as freedom from external interference, and positive liberty as freedom to do something, including having the power and resources necessary to do that thing. Discussions of the First Amendment’s protection of free speech often elide over this distinction.

With respect to speech, the negative conception of liberty recognizes that individual property owners can control what is said on their property, for example. To force property owners to allow speakers/speech on their property that they don’t desire would actually be a violation of their liberty — what the Supreme Court calls “compelled speech.” The First Amendment, consistent with this view, generally protects speech from government interference (with very few, narrow exceptions), while allowing private regulation of speech (again, with very few, narrow exceptions).

Contrary to the original meaning of the First Amendment and the weight of Supreme Court precedent, President Trump’s view of the First Amendment is that it protects a positive conception of liberty — one under which the government, in order to facilitate its conception of “free speech,” has the right and even the duty to impose restrictions on how private actors regulate speech on their property (in this case, social media companies). 

But if Trump’s view were adopted, discretion as to what is necessary to facilitate free speech would be left to future presidents and congresses, undermining the bedrock conservative principle of the Constitution as a shield against government regulation, all falsely in the name of protecting speech. This is counter to the general approach of modern conservatism (but not, of course, necessarily Republicanism) in the United States, including that of many of President Trump’s own judicial and agency appointees. Indeed, it is actually more consistent with the views of modern progressives — especially within the FCC.

For instance, the current conservative bloc on the Supreme Court (over the dissent of the four liberal Justices) recently reaffirmed the view that the First Amendment applies only to state action in Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck. The opinion, written by Trump-appointee, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, states plainly that:

Ratified in 1791, the First Amendment provides in relevant part that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.” Ratified in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment makes the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause applicable against the States: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law . . . .” §1. The text and original meaning of those Amendments, as well as this Court’s longstanding precedents, establish that the Free Speech Clause prohibits only governmental abridgment of speech. The Free Speech Clause does not prohibit private abridgment of speech… In accord with the text and structure of the Constitution, this Court’s state-action doctrine distinguishes the government from individuals and private entities. By enforcing that constitutional boundary between the governmental and the private, the state-action doctrine protects a robust sphere of individual liberty. (Emphasis added).

Former Stanford Law dean and First Amendment scholar, Kathleen Sullivan, has summed up the very different approaches to free speech pursued by conservatives and progressives (insofar as they are represented by the “conservative” and “liberal” blocs on the Supreme Court): 

In the first vision…, free speech rights serve an overarching interest in political equality. Free speech as equality embraces first an antidiscrimination principle: in upholding the speech rights of anarchists, syndicalists, communists, civil rights marchers, Maoist flag burners, and other marginal, dissident, or unorthodox speakers, the Court protects members of ideological minorities who are likely to be the target of the majority’s animus or selective indifference…. By invalidating conditions on speakers’ use of public land, facilities, and funds, a long line of speech cases in the free-speech-as-equality tradition ensures public subvention of speech expressing “the poorly financed causes of little people.” On the equality-based view of free speech, it follows that the well-financed causes of big people (or big corporations) do not merit special judicial protection from political regulation. And because, in this view, the value of equality is prior to the value of speech, politically disadvantaged speech prevails over regulation but regulation promoting political equality prevails over speech.

The second vision of free speech, by contrast, sees free speech as serving the interest of political liberty. On this view…, the First Amendment is a negative check on government tyranny, and treats with skepticism all government efforts at speech suppression that might skew the private ordering of ideas. And on this view, members of the public are trusted to make their own individual evaluations of speech, and government is forbidden to intervene for paternalistic or redistributive reasons. Government intervention might be warranted to correct certain allocative inefficiencies in the way that speech transactions take place, but otherwise, ideas are best left to a freely competitive ideological market.

The outcome of Citizens United is best explained as representing a triumph of the libertarian over the egalitarian vision of free speech. Justice Kennedy’s opinion for the Court, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, articulates a robust vision of free speech as serving political liberty; the dissenting opinion by Justice Stevens, joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor, sets forth in depth the countervailing egalitarian view. (Emphasis added).

President Trump’s views on the regulation of private speech are alarmingly consistent with those embraced by the Court’s progressives to “protect[] members of ideological minorities who are likely to be the target of the majority’s animus or selective indifference” — exactly the sort of conservative “victimhood” that Trump and his online supporters have somehow concocted to describe themselves. 

Trump’s views are also consistent with those of progressives who, since the Reagan FCC abolished it in 1987, have consistently angled for a resurrection of some form of fairness doctrine, as well as other policies inconsistent with the “free-speech-as-liberty” view. Thus Democratic commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel takes a far more interventionist approach to private speech:

The First Amendment does more than protect the interests of corporations. As courts have long recognized, it is a force to support individual interest in self-expression and the right of the public to receive information and ideas. As Justice Black so eloquently put it, “the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public.” Our leased access rules provide opportunity for civic participation. They enhance the marketplace of ideas by increasing the number of speakers and the variety of viewpoints. They help preserve the possibility of a diverse, pluralistic medium—just as Congress called for the Cable Communications Policy Act… The proper inquiry then, is not simply whether corporations providing channel capacity have First Amendment rights, but whether this law abridges expression that the First Amendment was meant to protect. Here, our leased access rules are not content-based and their purpose and effect is to promote free speech. Moreover, they accomplish this in a narrowly-tailored way that does not substantially burden more speech than is necessary to further important interests. In other words, they are not at odds with the First Amendment, but instead help effectuate its purpose for all of us. (Emphasis added).

Consistent with the progressive approach, this leaves discretion in the hands of “experts” (like Rosenworcel) to determine what needs to be done in order to protect the underlying value of free speech in the First Amendment through government regulation, even if it means compelling speech upon private actors. 

Trump’s view of what the First Amendment’s free speech protections entail when it comes to social media companies is inconsistent with the conception of the Constitution-as-guarantor-of-negative-liberty that conservatives have long embraced. 

Of course, this is not merely a “conservative” position; it is fundamental to the longstanding bipartisan approach to free speech generally and to the regulation of online platforms specifically. As a diverse group of 75 scholars and civil society groups (including ICLE) wrote yesterday in their “Principles for Lawmakers on Liability for User-Generated Content Online”:

Principle #2: Any new intermediary liability law must not target constitutionally protected speech.

The government shouldn’t require—or coerce—intermediaries to remove constitutionally protected speech that the government cannot prohibit directly. Such demands violate the First Amendment. Also, imposing broad liability for user speech incentivizes services to err on the side of taking down speech, resulting in overbroad censorship—or even avoid offering speech forums altogether.

As those principles suggest, the sort of platform regulation that Trump, et al. advocate — essentially a “fairness doctrine” for the Internet — is the opposite of free speech:

Principle #4: Section 230 does not, and should not, require “neutrality.”

Publishing third-party content online never can be “neutral.” Indeed, every publication decision will necessarily prioritize some content at the expense of other content. Even an “objective” approach, such as presenting content in reverse chronological order, isn’t neutral because it prioritizes recency over other values. By protecting the prioritization, de-prioritization, and removal of content, Section 230 provides Internet services with the legal certainty they need to do the socially beneficial work of minimizing harmful content.

The idea that social media should be subject to a nondiscrimination requirement — for which President Trump and others like Senator Josh Hawley have been arguing lately — is flatly contrary to Section 230 — as well as to the First Amendment.

Conservatives upset about “social media discrimination” need to think hard about whether they really want to adopt this sort of position out of convenience, when the tradition with which they align rejects it — rightly — in nearly all other venues. Even if you believe that Facebook, Google, and Twitter are trying to make it harder for conservative voices to be heard (despite all evidence to the contrary), it is imprudent to reject constitutional first principles for a temporary policy victory. In fact, there’s nothing at all “conservative” about an abdication of the traditional principle linking freedom to property for the sake of political expediency.

In Amazon, Antitrust & Competition, Constitutional Law, Facebook, First Amendment, Google, Platforms, Regulation, Truth on the Market, Twitter, Tying , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Amazon and the Unwisdom of the Populist Crowd

Kristian Stout —  1 May 2018

There are some who view a host of claimed negative social ills allegedly related to the large size of firms like Amazon as an occasion to call for the company’s break up. And, unfortunately, these critics find an unlikely ally in President Trump, whose tweet storms claim that tech platforms are too big and extract unfair rents at the expense of small businesses. But these critics are wrong: Amazon is not a dangerous monopoly, and it certainly should not be broken up.  

Of course, no one really spells out what it means for these companies to be “too big.” Even Barry Lynn, a champion of the neo-Brandeisian antitrust movement, has shied away from specifics. The best that emerges when probing his writings is that he favors something like a return to Joe Bain’s “Structure-Conduct-Performance” paradigm (but even here, the details are fuzzy).

The reality of Amazon’s impact on the market is quite different than that asserted by its critics. Amazon has had decades to fulfill a nefarious scheme to suddenly raise prices and reap the benefits of anticompetive behavior. Yet it keeps putting downward pressure on prices in a way that seems to be commoditizing goods instead of building anticompetitive moats.

Amazon Does Not Anticompetitively Exercise Market Power

Twitter rants aside, more serious attempts to attack Amazon on antitrust grounds argue that it is engaging in pricing that is “predatory.” But “predatory pricing” requires a specific demonstration of factors — which, to date, have not been demonstrated — in order to justify legal action. Absent a showing of these factors, it has long been understood that seemingly “predatory” conduct is unlikely to harm consumers and often actually benefits consumers.

One important requirement that has gone unsatisfied is that a firm engaging in predatory pricing must have market power. Contrary to common characterizations of Amazon as a retail monopolist, its market power is less than it seems. By no means does it control retail in general. Rather, less than half of all online commerce (44%) takes place on its platform (and that number represents only 4% of total US retail commerce). Of that 44 percent, a significant portion is attributable to the merchants who use Amazon as a platform for their own online retail sales. Rather than abusing a monopoly market position to predatorily harm its retail competitors, at worst Amazon has created a retail business model that puts pressure on other firms to offer more convenience and lower prices to their customers. This is what we want and expect of competitive markets.

The claims leveled at Amazon are the intellectual kin of the ones made against Walmart during its ascendancy that it was destroying main street throughout the nation. In 1993, it was feared that Walmart’s quest to vertically integrate its offerings through Sam’s Club warehouse operations meant that “[r]etailers could simply bypass their distributors in favor of Sam’s — and Sam’s could take revenues from local merchants on two levels: as a supplier at the wholesale level, and as a competitor at retail.” This is a strikingly similar accusation to those leveled against Amazon’s use of its Seller Marketplace to aggregate smaller retailers on its platform.

But, just as in 1993 with Walmart, and now with Amazon, the basic fact remains that consumer preferences shift. Firms need to alter their behavior to satisfy their customers, not pretend they can change consumer preferences to suit their own needs. Preferring small, local retailers to Amazon or Walmart is a decision for individual consumers interacting in their communities, not for federal officials figuring out how best to pattern the economy.

All of this is not to say that Amazon is not large, or important, or that, as a consequence of its success it does not exert influence over the markets it operates in. But having influence through success is not the same as anticompetitively asserting market power.

Other criticisms of Amazon focus on its conduct in specific vertical markets in which it does have more significant market share. For instance, a UK Liberal Democratic leader recently claimed that “[j]ust as Standard Oil once cornered 85% of the refined oil market, today… Amazon accounts for 75% of ebook sales … .”

The problem with this concern is that Amazon’s conduct in the ebook market has had, on net, pro-competitive, not anti-competitive, effects. Amazon’s behavior in the ebook market has actually increased demand for books overall (and expanded output), increased the amount that consumers read, and decreased the price of theses books. Amazon is now even opening physical bookstores. Lina Khan made much hay in her widely cited article last year that this was all part of a grand strategy to predatorily push competitors out of the market:

The fact that Amazon has been willing to forego profits for growth undercuts a central premise of contemporary predatory pricing doctrine, which assumes that predation is irrational precisely because firms prioritize profits over growth. In this way, Amazon’s strategy has enabled it to use predatory pricing tactics without triggering the scrutiny of predatory pricing laws.

But it’s hard to allege predation in a market when over the past twenty years Amazon has consistently expanded output and lowered overall prices in the book market. Courts and lawmakers have sought to craft laws that encourage firms to provide consumers with more choices at lower prices — a feat that Amazon repeatedly accomplishes. To describe this conduct as anticompetitive is asking for a legal requirement that is at odds with the goal of benefiting consumers. It is to claim that Amazon has a contradictory duty to both benefit consumers and its shareholders, while also making sure that all of its less successful competitors also stay in business.

But far from creating a monopoly, the empirical reality appears to be that Amazon is driving categories of goods, like books, closer to the textbook model of commodities in a perfectly competitive market. Hardly an antitrust violation.

Amazon Should Not Be Broken Up

“Big is bad” may roll off the tongue, but, as a guiding ethic, it makes for terrible public policy. Amazon’s size and success are a direct result of its ability to enter relevant markets and to innovate. To break up Amazon, or any other large firm, is to punish it for serving the needs of its consumers.

None of this is to say that large firms are incapable of causing harm or acting anticompetitively. But we should accept calls for dramatic regulatory intervention  — especially from those in a position to influence regulatory or market reactions to such calls — to be supported by substantial factual evidence and legal and economic theory.

This tendency to go after large players is nothing new. As noted above, Walmart triggered many similar concerns thirty years ago. Thinking about Walmart then, pundits feared that direct competition with Walmart was fruitless:

In the spring of 1992 Ken Stone came to Maine to address merchant groups from towns in the path of the Wal-Mart advance. His advice was simple and direct: don’t compete directly with Wal-Mart; specialize and carry harder-to-get and better-quality products; emphasize customer service; extend your hours; advertise more — not just your products but your business — and perhaps most pertinent of all to this group of Yankee individualists, work together.

And today, some think it would be similarly pointless to compete with Amazon:

Concentration means it is much harder for someone to start a new business that might, for example, try to take advantage of the cheap housing in Minneapolis. Why bother when you know that if you challenge Amazon, they will simply dump your product below cost and drive you out of business?

The interesting thing to note, of course, is that Walmart is now desperately trying to compete with Amazon. But despite being very successful in its own right, and having strong revenues, Walmart doesn’t seem able to keep up.

Some small businesses will close as new business models emerge and consumer preferences shift. This is to be expected in a market driven by creative destruction. Once upon a time Walmart changed retail and improved the lives of many Americans. If our lawmakers can resist the urge to intervene without real evidence of harm, Amazon just might do the same.

In Amazon, Antitrust & Competition, Economic Theory, Facebook, Google, Platforms, Taxes, Truth on the Market, Twitter , , , , , , , ,
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Understanding government negotiation of Medicare drug prices

Joanna Shepherd —  16 January 2017

In a weekend interview with the Washington Post, Donald Trump vowed to force drug companies to negotiate directly with the government on prices in Medicare and Medicaid.  It’s unclear what, if anything, Trump intends for Medicaid; drug makers are already required to sell drugs to Medicaid at the lowest price they negotiate with any other buyer.  For Medicare, Trump didn’t offer any more details about the intended negotiations, but he’s referring to his campaign proposals to allow the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to negotiate directly with manufacturers the prices of drugs covered under Medicare Part D.

Such proposals have been around for quite a while.  As soon as the Medicare Modernization Act (MMA) of 2003 was enacted, creating the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit, many lawmakers began advocating for government negotiation of drug prices. Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders favored this approach during their campaigns, and the Obama Administration’s proposed budget for fiscal years 2016 and 2017 included a provision that would have allowed the HHS to negotiate prices for a subset of drugs: biologics and certain high-cost prescription drugs.

However, federal law would have to change if there is to be any government negotiation of drug prices under Medicare Part D. Congress explicitly included a “noninterference” clause in the MMA that stipulates that HHS “may not interfere with the negotiations between drug manufacturers and pharmacies and PDP sponsors, and may not require a particular formulary or institute a price structure for the reimbursement of covered part D drugs.”

Most people don’t understand what it means for the government to “negotiate” drug prices and the implications of the various options.  Some proposals would simply eliminate the MMA’s noninterference clause and allow HHS to negotiate prices for a broad set of drugs on behalf of Medicare beneficiaries.  However, the Congressional Budget Office has already concluded that such a plan would have “a negligible effect on federal spending” because it is unlikely that HHS could achieve deeper discounts than the current private Part D plans (there are 746 such plans in 2017).  The private plans are currently able to negotiate significant discounts from drug manufacturers by offering preferred formulary status for their drugs and channeling enrollees to the formulary drugs with lower cost-sharing incentives. In most drug classes, manufacturers compete intensely for formulary status and offer considerable discounts to be included.

The private Part D plans are required to provide only two drugs in each of several drug classes, giving the plans significant bargaining power over manufacturers by threatening to exclude their drugs.  However, in six protected classes (immunosuppressant, anti-cancer, anti-retroviral, antidepressant, antipsychotic and anticonvulsant drugs), private Part D plans must include “all or substantially all” drugs, thereby eliminating their bargaining power and ability to achieve significant discounts.  Although the purpose of the limitation is to prevent plans from cherry-picking customers by denying coverage of certain high cost drugs, giving the private Part D plans more ability to exclude drugs in the protected classes should increase competition among manufacturers for formulary status and, in turn, lower prices.  And it’s important to note that these price reductions would not involve any government negotiation or intervention in Medicare Part D.  However, as discussed below, excluding more drugs in the protected classes would reduce the value of the Part D plans to many patients by limiting access to preferred drugs.

For government negotiation to make any real difference on Medicare drug prices, HHS must have the ability to not only negotiate prices, but also to put some pressure on drug makers to secure price concessions.  This could be achieved by allowing HHS to also establish a formulary, set prices administratively, or take other regulatory actions against manufacturers that don’t offer price reductions.  Setting prices administratively or penalizing manufacturers that don’t offer satisfactory reductions would be tantamount to a price control.  I’ve previously explained that price controls—whether direct or indirect—are a bad idea for prescription drugs for several reasons. Evidence shows that price controls lead to higher initial launch prices for drugs, increased drug prices for consumers with private insurance coverage,  drug shortages in certain markets, and reduced incentives for innovation.

Giving HHS the authority to establish a formulary for Medicare Part D coverage would provide leverage to obtain discounts from manufacturers, but it would produce other negative consequences.  Currently, private Medicare Part D plans cover an average of 85% of the 200 most popular drugs, with some plans covering as much as 93%.  In contrast, the drug benefit offered by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), one government program that is able to set its own formulary to achieve leverage over drug companies, covers only 59% of the 200 most popular drugs.  The VA’s ability to exclude drugs from the formulary has generated significant price reductions. Indeed, estimates suggest that if the Medicare Part D formulary was restricted to the VA offerings and obtained similar price reductions, it would save Medicare Part D $510 per beneficiary.  However, the loss of access to so many popular drugs would reduce the value of the Part D plans by $405 per enrollee, greatly narrowing the net gains.

History has shown that consumers don’t like their access to drugs reduced.  In 2014, Medicare proposed to take antidepressants, antipsychotic and immunosuppressant drugs off the protected list, thereby allowing the private Part D plans to reduce offerings of these drugs on the formulary and, in turn, reduce prices.  However, patients and their advocates were outraged at the possibility of losing access to their preferred drugs, and the proposal was quickly withdrawn.

Thus, allowing the government to negotiate prices under Medicare Part D could carry important negative consequences.  Policy-makers must fully understand what it means for government to negotiate directly with drug makers, and what the potential consequences are for price reductions, access to popular drugs, drug innovation, and drug prices for other consumers.

In Antitrust & Competition, Health Care, Truth on the Market , , , , , , ,
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What’s next for the pharmaceutical industry?

Joanna Shepherd —  5 December 2016

On November 9, pharmaceutical stocks soared as Donald Trump’s election victory eased concerns about government intervention in drug pricing. Shares of Pfizer rose 8.5%, Allergan PLC was up 8%, and biotech Celgene jumped 10.4%. Drug distributors also gained, with McKesson up 6.4% and Express Scripts climbing 3.4%. Throughout the campaign, Clinton had vowed to take on the pharmaceutical industry and proposed various reforms to reign in drug prices, from levying fines on drug companies that imposed unjustified price increases to capping patients’ annual expenditures on drugs. Pharmaceutical stocks had generally underperformed this year as the market, like much of America, awaited a Clinton victory.

In contrast, Trump generally had less to say on the subject of drug pricing, hence the market’s favorable response to his unexpected victory. Yet, as the end of the first post-election month draws near, we are still uncertain whether Trump is friend or foe to the pharmaceutical industry. Trump’s only proposal that directly impacts the industry would allow the government to negotiate the prices of Medicare Part D drugs with drug makers. Although this proposal would likely have little impact on prices because existing Part D plans already negotiate prices with drug makers, there is a risk that this “negotiation” could ultimately lead to price controls imposed on the industry. And as I have previously discussed, price controls—whether direct or indirect—are a bad idea for prescription drugs: they lead to higher initial launch prices for drugs, increased drug prices for consumers with private insurance coverage, drug shortages in certain markets, and reduced incentives for innovation.

Several of Trump’s other health proposals have mixed implications for the industry. For example, a repeal or overhaul of the Affordable Care Act could eliminate the current tax on drug makers and loosen requirements for Medicaid drug rebates and Medicare part D discounts. On the other hand, if repealing the ACA reduces the number of people insured, spending on pharmaceuticals would fall. Similarly, if Trump renegotiates international trade deals, pharmaceutical firms could benefit from stronger markets or longer patent exclusivity rights, or they could suffer if foreign countries abandon trade agreements altogether or retaliate with disadvantageous terms.

Yet, with drug spending up 8.5 percent last year and recent pricing scandals launched by 500+ percentage increases in individual drugs (i.e., Martin Shkreli, Valeant Pharmaceuticals, Mylan), the current debate over drug pricing is unlikely to fade. Even a Republican-led Congress and White House is likely to heed the public outcry and do something about drug prices.

Drug makers would be wise to stave off any government-imposed price restrictions by voluntarily limiting price increases on important drugs. Major pharmaceutical company Allergan has recently done just this by issuing a “social contract with patients” that made several drug pricing commitments to its customers. Among other assurances, Allergan has promised to limit price increases to single-digit percentage increases and no longer engage in the common industry tactic of dramatically increasing prices for branded drugs nearing patent expiry. Last year throughout the pharmaceutical industry, the prices of the most commonly-used brand drugs increased by over 16 percent and, in the last two years before patent expiry, drug makers increased the list prices of drugs by an average of 35 percent. Thus, Allergan’s commitment will produce significant savings over the life of a product, creating hundreds of millions of dollars in savings to health plans, patients, and the health care system.

If Allergan can make this commitment for its entire drug inventory—over 80+ drugs—why haven’t other companies done the same? Similar commitments by other drug makers might be enough to prevent lawmakers from turning to market-distorting reforms, such as price controls, that could end up doing more harm than good for consumers, the pharmaceutical industry, and long-term innovation.

In Antitrust & Competition, Health Care, Intellectual Property, International, International Trade, Patent, Pharmaceuticals, Truth on the Market , , , , , , , , ,
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