[TOTM: The following is part of a digital symposium by TOTM guests and authors on Antitrust’s Uncertain Future: Visions of Competition in the New Regulatory Landscape. Information on the authors and the entire series of posts is available here.]
In Free to Choose, Milton Friedman famously noted that there are four ways to spend money[1]:
Spending your own money on yourself. For example, buying groceries or lunch. There is a strong incentive to economize and to get full value.
Spending your own money on someone else. For example, buying a gift for another. There is a strong incentive to economize, but perhaps less to achieve full value from the other person’s point of view. Altruism is admirable, but it differs from value maximization, since—strictly speaking—giving cash would maximize the other’s value. Perhaps the point of a gift is that it does not amount to cash and the maximization of the other person’s welfare from their point of view.
Spending someone else’s money on yourself. For example, an expensed business lunch. “Pass me the filet mignon and Chateau Lafite! Do you have one of those menus without any prices?” There is a strong incentive to get maximum utility, but there is little incentive to economize.
Spending someone else’s money on someone else. For example, applying the proceeds of taxes or donations. There may be an indirect desire to see utility, but incentives for quality and cost management are often diminished.
This framework can be criticized. Altruism has a role. Not all motives are selfish. There is an important role for action to help those less fortunate, which might mean, for instance, that a charity gains more utility from category (4) (assisting the needy) than from category (3) (the charity’s holiday party). It always depends on the facts and the context. However, there is certainly a grain of truth in the observation that charity begins at home and that, in the final analysis, people are best at managing their own affairs.
How would this insight apply to data interoperability? The difficult cases of assisting the needy do not arise here: there is no serious sense in which data interoperability does, or does not, result in destitution. Thus, Friedman’s observations seem to ring true: when spending data, those whose data it is seem most likely to maximize its value. This is especially so where collection of data responds to incentives—that is, the amount of data collected and processed responds to how much control over the data is possible.
The obvious exception to this would be a case of market power. If there is a monopoly with persistent barriers to entry, then the incentive may not be to maximize total utility, and therefore to limit data handling to the extent that a higher price can be charged for the lesser amount of data that does remain available. This has arguably been seen with some data-handling rules: the “Jedi Blue” agreement on advertising bidding, Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention and App Tracking Transparency, and Google’s proposed Privacy Sandbox, all restrict the ability of others to handle data. Indeed, they may fail Friedman’s framework, since they amount to the platform deciding how to spend others’ data—in this case, by not allowing them to collect and process it at all.
It should be emphasized, though, that this is a special case. It depends on market power, and existing antitrust and competition laws speak to it. The courts will decide whether cases like Daily Mail v Google and Texas et al. v Google show illegal monopolization of data flows, so as to fall within this special case of market power. Outside the United States, cases like the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority’s Google Privacy Sandbox commitments and the European Union’s proposed commitments with Amazon seek to allow others to continue to handle their data and to prevent exclusivity from arising from platform dynamics, which could happen if a large platform prevents others from deciding how to account for data they are collecting. It will be recalled that even Robert Bork thought that there was risk of market power harms from the large Microsoft Windows platform a generation ago.[2] Where market power risks are proven, there is a strong case that data exclusivity raises concerns because of an artificial barrier to entry. It would only be if the benefits of centralized data control were to outweigh the deadweight loss from data restrictions that this would be untrue (though query how well the legal processes verify this).
Yet the latest proposals go well beyond this. A broad interoperability right amounts to “open season” for spending others’ data. This makes perfect sense in the European Union, where there is no large domestic technology platform, meaning that the data is essentially owned via foreign entities (mostly, the shareholders of successful U.S. and Chinese companies). It must be very tempting to run an industrial policy on the basis that “we’ll never be Google” and thus to embrace “sharing is caring” as to others’ data.
But this would transgress the warning from Friedman: would people optimize data collection if it is open to mandatory sharing even without proof of market power? It is deeply concerning that the EU’s DATA Act is accompanied by an infographic that suggests that coffee-machine data might be subject to mandatory sharing, to allow competition in services related to the data (e.g., sales of pods; spare-parts automation). There being no monopoly in coffee machines, this simply forces vertical disintegration of data collection and handling. Why put a data-collection system into a coffee maker at all, if it is to be a common resource? Friedman’s category (4) would apply: the data is taken and spent by another. There is no guarantee that there would be sensible decision making surrounding the resource.
It will be interesting to see how common-law jurisdictions approach this issue. At the risk of stating the obvious, the polity in continental Europe differs from that in the English-speaking democracies when it comes to whether the collective, or the individual, should be in the driving seat. A close read of the UK CMA’s Google commitments is interesting, in that paragraph 30 requires no self-preferencing in data collection and requires future data-handling systems to be designed with impacts on competition in mind. No doubt the CMA is seeking to prevent data-handling exclusivity on the basis that this prevents companies from using their data collection to compete. This is far from the EU DATA Act’s position in that it is certainly not a right to handle Google’s data: it is simply a right to continue to process one’s own data.
U.S. proposals are at an earlier stage. It would seem important, as a matter of principle, not to make arbitrary decisions about vertical integration in data systems, and to identify specific market-power concerns instead, in line with common-law approaches to antitrust.
It might be very attractive to the EU to spend others’ data on their behalf, but that does not make it right. Those working on the U.S. proposals would do well to ensure that there is a meaningful market-power gate to avoid unintended consequences.
Disclaimer: The author was engaged for expert advice relating to the UK CMA’s Privacy Sandbox case on behalf of the complainant Marketers for an Open Web.
[1] Milton Friedman, Free to Choose, 1980, pp.115-119
[2] Comments at the Yale Law School conference, Robert H. Bork’s influence on Antitrust Law, Sep. 27-28, 2013.
Antitrust policymakers around the world have taken a page out of the Silicon Valley playbook and decided to “move fast and break things.” While the slogan is certainly catchy, applying it to the policymaking world is unfortunate and, ultimately, threatens to harm consumers.
Several antitrust authorities in recent months have announced their intention to block (or, at least, challenge) a spate of mergers that, under normal circumstances, would warrant only limited scrutiny and face little prospect of outright prohibition. This is notably the case of several vertical mergers, as well as mergers between firms that are only potential competitors (sometimes framed as “killer acquisitions”). These include Facebook’s acquisition of Giphy (U.K.); Nvidia’s ARM Ltd. deal (U.S., EU, and U.K.), and Illumina’s purchase of GRAIL (EU). It is also the case for horizontal mergers in non-concentrated markets, such as WarnerMedia’s proposed merger with Discovery, which has faced significant political backlash.
Some of these deals fail even to implicate “traditional” merger-notification thresholds. Facebook’s purchase of Giphy was only notifiable because of the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority’s broad interpretation of its “share of supply test” (which eschews traditional revenue thresholds). Likewise, the European Commission relied on a highly controversial interpretation of the so-called “Article 22 referral” procedure in order to review Illumina’s GRAIL purchase.
Some have praised these interventions, claiming antitrust authorities should take their chances and prosecute high-profile deals. It certainly appears that authorities are pressing their luck because they face few penalties for wrongful prosecutions. Overly aggressive merger enforcement might even reinforce their bargaining position in subsequent cases. In other words, enforcers risk imposing social costs on firms and consumers because their incentives to prosecute mergers are not aligned with those of society as a whole.
None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who has been following this space. As my ICLE colleagues and I have been arguing for quite a while, weakening the guardrails that surround merger-review proceedings opens the door to arbitrary interventions that are difficult (though certainly not impossible) to remediate before courts.
A Simplified Model of Legal Disputes
The negotiations that surround merger-review proceedings involve firms and authorities bargaining in the shadow of potential litigation. Whether and which concessions are made will depend chiefly on what the parties believe will be the outcome of litigation. If firms think courts will safeguard their merger, they will offer authorities few potential remedies. Conversely, if authorities believe courts will support their decision to block a merger, they are unlikely to accept concessions that stop short of the parties withdrawing their deal.
This simplified model suggests that neither enforcers nor merging parties are in position to “exploit” the merger-review process, so long as courts review decisions effectively. Under this model, overly aggressive enforcement would merely lead to defeat in court (and, expecting this, merging parties would offer few concessions to authorities).
Put differently, court proceedings are both a dispute-resolution mechanism and a source of rulemaking. The result is that only marginal cases should lead to actual disputes. Most harmful mergers will be deterred, and clearly beneficial ones will be cleared rapidly. So long as courts apply the consumer welfare standard consistently, firms’ merger decisions—along with any rulings or remedies—all should primarily serve consumers’ interests.
At least, that is the theory. But there are factors that can serve to undermine this efficient outcome. In the field of merger control, this is notably the case with court delays that prevent parties from effectively challenging merger decisions.
While delays between when a legal claim is filed and a judgment is rendered aren’t always detrimental (as Richard Posner observes, speed can be costly), it is essential that these delays be accounted for in any subsequent damages and penalties. Parties that prevail in court might otherwise only obtain reparations that are below the market rate, reducing the incentive to seek judicial review in the first place.
The problem is particularly acute when it comes to merger reviews. Merger challenges might lead the parties to abandon a deal because they estimate the transaction will no longer be commercially viable by the time courts have decided the matter. This is a problem, insofar as neither U.S. nor EU antitrust law generally requires authorities to compensate parties for wrongful merger decisions. For example, courts in the EU have declined to fully compensate aggrieved companies (e.g., the CFI in Schneider) and have set an exceedingly high bar for such claims to succeed at all.
In short, parties have little incentive to challenge merger decisions if the only positive outcome is for their deals to be posthumously sanctified. This smaller incentive to litigate may be insufficient to create enough cases that would potentially helpful precedent for future merging firms. Ultimately, the balance of bargaining power is tilted in favor of competition authorities.
Some Data on Mergers
While not necessarily dispositive, there is qualitative evidence to suggest that parties often drop their deals when authorities either block them (as in the EU) or challenge them in court (in the United States).
U.S. merging parties nearly always either reach a settlement or scrap their deal when their merger is challenged. There were 43 transactions challenged by either the U.S. Justice Department (15) or the Federal Trade Commission (28) in 2020. Of these, 15 were abandoned and almost all the remaining cases led to settlements.
The EU picture is similar. The European Commission blocks, on average, about one merger every year (30 over the last 31 years). Most in-depth investigations are settled in exchange for remedies offered by the merging firms (141 out of 239). While the EU does not publish detailed statistics concerning abandoned mergers, it is rare for firms to appeal merger-prohibition decisions. The European Court of Justice’s database lists only six such appeals over a similar timespan. The vast majority of blocked mergers are scrapped, with the parties declining to appeal.
This proclivity to abandon mergers is surprising, given firms’ high success rate in court. Of the six merger-annulment appeals in the ECJ’s database (CK Hutchison Holdings Ltd.’s acquisition of Telefónica Europe Plc; Ryanair’s acquisition of a controlling stake in Aer Lingus; a proposed merger between Deutsche Börse and NYSE Euronext; Tetra Laval’s takeover of Sidel Group; a merger between Schneider Electric SA and Legrand SA; and Airtours’ acquisition of First Choice) merging firms won four of them. While precise numbers are harder to come by in the United States, it is also reportedly rare for U.S. antitrust enforcers to win merger-challenge cases.
One explanation is that only marginal cases ever make it to court. In other words, firms with weak cases are, all else being equal, less likely to litigate. However, that is unlikely to explain all abandoned deals.
There are documented cases in which it was clearly delays, rather than self-selection, that caused firms to scrap planned mergers. In the EU’s Airtours proceedings, the merging parties dropped their transaction even though they went on to prevail in court (and First Choice, the target firm, was acquired by another rival). This is inconsistent with the notion that proposed mergers are abandoned only when the parties have a weak case to challenge (the Commission’s decision was widely seen as controversial).
Antitrust policymakers also generally acknowledge that mergers are often time-sensitive. That’s why merger rules on both sides of the Atlantic tend to impose strict timelines within which antitrust authorities must review deals.
In the end, if self-selection based on case strength were the only criteria merging firms used in deciding to appeal a merger challenge, one would not expect an equilibrium in which firms prevail in more than two-thirds of cases. If firms anticipated that a successful court case would preserve a multi-billion dollar merger, the relatively small burden of legal fees should not dissuade them from litigating, even if their chance of success was tiny. We would expect to see more firms losing in court.
The upshot is that antitrust challenges and prohibition decisions likely cause at least some firms to abandon their deals because court proceedings are not seen as an effective remedy. This perception, in turn, reinforces authorities’ bargaining position and thus encourages firms to offer excessive remedies in hopes of staving off lengthy litigation.
Conclusion
A general rule of policymaking is that rules should seek to ensure that agents internalize both the positive and negative effects of their decisions. This, in turn, should ensure that they behave efficiently.
In the field of merger control, those incentives are misaligned. Given the prevailing political climate on both sides of the Atlantic, challenging large corporate acquisitions likely generates important political capital for antitrust authorities. But wrongful merger prohibitions are unlikely to elicit the kinds of judicial rebukes that would compel authorities to proceed more carefully.
Put differently, in the field of antitrust law, court proceedings ought to serve as a guardrail to ensure that enforcement decisions ultimately benefit consumers. When that shield is removed, it is no longer a given that authorities—who, in theory, act as agents of society—will act in the best interests of that society, rather than maximize their own preferences.
Ideally, we should ensure that antitrust authorities bear the social costs of faulty decisions, by compensating, at least, the direct victims of their actions (i.e., the merging firms). However, this would likely require new legislation to that effect, as there currently are too many obstacles to such cases. It is thus unlikely to represent a short-term solution.
In the meantime, regulatory restraint appears to be the only realistic solution. Or, one might say, authorities should “move carefully and avoid breaking stuff.”
Recent antitrust forays on both sides of the Atlantic have unfortunate echoes of the oldie-but-baddie “efficiencies offense” that once plagued American and European merger analysis (and, more broadly, reflected a “big is bad” theory of antitrust). After a very short overview of the history of merger efficiencies analysis under American and European competition law, we briefly examine two current enforcement matters “on both sides of the pond” that impliedly give rise to such a concern. Those cases may regrettably foreshadow a move by enforcers to downplay the importance of efficiencies, if not openly reject them.
Background: The Grudging Acceptance of Merger Efficiencies
Not long ago, economically literate antitrust teachers in the United States enjoyed poking fun at such benighted 1960s Supreme Court decisions as Procter & Gamble (following in the wake of Brown ShoeandPhiladelphia National Bank). Those holdings—which not only rejected efficiencies justifications for mergers, but indeed “treated efficiencies more as an offense”—seemed a thing of the past, put to rest by the rise of an economic approach to antitrust. Several early European Commission merger-control decisions also arguably embraced an “efficiencies offense.”
Starting in the 1980s, the promulgation of increasingly economically sophisticated merger guidelines in the United States led to the acceptance of efficiencies (albeit less then perfectly) as an important aspect of integrated merger analysis. Several practitioners have claimed, nevertheless, that “efficiencies are seldom credited and almost never influence the outcome of mergers that are otherwise deemed anticompetitive.” Commissioner Christine Wilson has argued that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) still have work to do in “establish[ing] clear and reasonable expectations for what types of efficiency analysis will and will not pass muster.”
In its first few years of merger review, which was authorized in 1989, the European Commission was hostile to merger-efficiency arguments. In 2004, however, the EC promulgated horizontal merger guidelines that allow for the consideration of efficiencies, but only if three cumulative conditions (consumer benefit, merger specificity, and verifiability) are satisfied. A leading European competition practitioner has characterized several key European Commission merger decisions in the last decade as giving rather short shrift to efficiencies. In light of that observation, the practitioner has advocated that “the efficiency offence theory should, once again, be repudiated by the Commission, in order to avoid deterring notifying parties from bringing forward perfectly valid efficiency claims.”
In short, although the actual weight enforcers accord to efficiency claims is a matter of debate, efficiency justifications are cognizable, subject to constraints, as a matter of U.S. and European Union merger-enforcement policy. Whether that will remain the case is, unfortunately, uncertain, given DOJ and FTC plans to revise merger guidelines, as well as EU talk of convergence with U.S. competition law.
Two Enforcement Matters with ‘Efficiencies Offense’ Overtones
Two Facebook-related matters currently before competition enforcers—one in the United States and one in the United Kingdom—have implications for the possible revival of an antitrust “efficiencies offense” as a “respectable” element of antitrust policy. (I use the term Facebook to reference both the platform company and its corporate parent, Meta.)
FTC v. Facebook
The FTC’s 2020 federal district court monopolization complaint against Facebook, still in the motion to dismiss the amended complaint phase (see here for an overview of the initial complaint and the judge’s dismissal of it), rests substantially on claims that Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp harmed competition. As Facebook points out in its recent reply brief supporting its motion to dismiss the FTC’s amended complaint, Facebook appears to be touting merger-related efficiencies in critiquing those acquisitions. Specifically:
[The amended complaint] depends on the allegation that Facebook’s expansion of both Instagram and WhatsApp created a “protective ‘moat’” that made it harder for rivals to compete because Facebook operated these services at “scale” and made them attractive to consumers post-acquisition. . . . The FTC does not allege facts that, left on their own, Instagram and WhatsApp would be less expensive (both are free; Facebook made WhatsApp free); or that output would have been greater (their dramatic expansion at “scale” is the linchpin of the FTC’s “moat” theory); or that the products would be better in any specific way.
The FTC’s concerns about a scale-based merger-related output expansion that benefited consumers and thereby allegedly enhanced Facebook’s market position eerily echoes the commission’s concerns in Procter & Gamble that merger-related cost-reducing joint efficiencies in advertising had an anticompetitive “entrenchment” effect. Both positions, in essence, characterize output-increasing efficiencies as harmful to competition: in other words, as “efficiencies offenses.”
UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) v. Facebook
The CMA announced Dec. 1 that it had decided to block retrospectively Facebook’s 2020 acquisition of Giphy, which is “a company that provides social media and messaging platforms with animated GIF images that users can embed in posts and messages. . . . These platforms license the use of Giphy for its users.”
The CMA theorized that Facebook could harm competition by (1) restricting access to Giphy’s digital libraries to Facebook’s competitors; and (2) prevent Giphy from developing into a potential competitor to Facebook’s display advertising business.
As a CapX analysis explains, the CMA’s theory of harm to competition, based on theoretical speculation, is problematic. First, a behavioral remedy short of divestiture, such as requiring Facebook to maintain open access to its gif libraries, would deal with the threat of restricted access. Indeed, Facebook promised at the time of the acquisition that Giphy would maintain its library and make it widely available. Second, “loss of a single, relatively small, potential competitor out of many cannot be counted as a significant loss for competition, since so many other potential and actual competitors remain.” Third, given the purely theoretical and questionable danger to future competition, the CMA “has blocked this deal on relatively speculative potential competition grounds.”
Apart from the weakness of the CMA’s case for harm to competition, the CMA appears to ignore a substantial potential dynamic integrative efficiency flowing from Facebook’s acquisition of Giphy. As David Teece explains:
Facebook’s acquisition of Giphy maintained Giphy’s assets and furthered its innovation in Facebook’s ecosystem, strengthening that ecosystem in competition with others; and via Giphy’s APIs, strengthening the ecosystems of other service providers as well.
There is no evidence that CMA seriously took account of this integrative efficiency, which benefits consumers by offering them a richer experience from Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram, and which spurs competing ecosystems to enhance their offerings to consumers as well. This is a failure to properly account for an efficiency. Moreover, to the extent that the CMA viewed these integrative benefits as somehow anticompetitive (to the extent that it enhanced Facebook’s competitive position) the improvement of Facebook’s ecosystem could have been deemed a type of “efficiencies offense.”
Are the Facebook Cases Merely Random Straws in the Wind?
It might appear at first blush to be reading too much into the apparent slighting of efficiencies in the two current Facebook cases. Nevertheless, recent policy rhetoric suggests that economic efficiencies arguments (whose status was tenuous at enforcement agencies to begin with) may actually be viewed as “offensive” by the new breed of enforcers.
In her Sept. 22 policy statement on “Vision and Priorities for the FTC,” Chair Lina Khan advocated focusing on the possible competitive harm flowing from actions of “gatekeepers and dominant middlemen,” and from “one-sided [vertical] contract provisions” that are “imposed by dominant firms.” No suggestion can be found in the statement that such vertical relationships often confer substantial benefits on consumers. This hints at a new campaign by the FTC against vertical restraints (as opposed to an emphasis on clearly welfare-inimical conduct) that could discourage a wide range of efficiency-producing contracts.
Chair Khan also sponsored the FTC’s July 2021 rescission of its Section 5 Policy Statement on Unfair Methods of Competition, which had emphasized the primacy of consumer welfare as the guiding principle underlying FTC antitrust enforcement. A willingness to set aside (or place a lower priority on) consumer welfare considerations suggests a readiness to ignore efficiency justifications that benefit consumers.
The statement by the FTC majority . . . notes that the 2020 Vertical Merger Guidelines had improperly contravened the Clayton Act’s language with its approach to efficiencies, which are not recognized by the statute as a defense to an unlawful merger. The majority statement explains that the guidelines adopted a particularly flawed economic theory regarding purported pro-competitive benefits of mergers, despite having no basis of support in the law or market reality.
Also noteworthy is Khan’s seeming interest (found in her writings here, here, and here) in reviving Robinson-Patman Act enforcement. What’s worse, President Joe Biden’s July 2021 Executive Order on Competition explicitly endorses FTC investigation of “retailers’ practices on the conditions of competition in the food industries, including any practices that may violate [the] Robinson-Patman Act” (emphasis added). Those troubling statements from the administration ignore the widespread scholarly disdain for Robinson-Patman, which is almost unanimously viewed as an attack on efficiencies in distribution. For example, in recommending the act’s repeal in 2007, the congressionally established Antitrust Modernization Commission stressed that the act “protects competitors against competition and punishes the very price discounting and innovation and distribution methods that the antitrust otherwise encourage.”
Finally, newly confirmed Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Jonathan Kanter (who is widely known as a Big Tech critic) has expressed his concerns about the consumer welfare standard and the emphasis on economics in antitrust analysis. Such concerns also suggest, at least by implication, that the Antitrust Division under Kanter’s leadership may manifest a heightened skepticism toward efficiencies justifications.
Conclusion
Recent straws in the wind suggest that an anti-efficiencies hay pile is in the works. Although antitrust agencies have not yet officially rejected the consideration of efficiencies, nor endorsed an “efficiencies offense,” the signs are troubling. Newly minted agency leaders’ skepticism toward antitrust economics, combined with their de-emphasis of the consumer welfare standard and efficiencies (at least in the merger context), suggest that even strongly grounded efficiency explanations may be summarily rejected at the agency level. In foreign jurisdictions, where efficiencies are even less well-established, and enforcement based on mere theory (as opposed to empiricism) is more widely accepted, the outlook for efficiencies stories appears to be no better.
One powerful factor, however, should continue to constrain the anti-efficiencies movement, at least in the United States: the federal courts. As demonstrated most recently in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ FTC v. Qualcomm decision, American courts remain committed to insisting on empirical support for theories of harm and on seriously considering business justifications for allegedly suspect contractual provisions. (The role of foreign courts in curbing prosecutorial excesses not grounded in economics, and in weighing efficiencies, depends upon the jurisdiction, but in general such courts are far less of a constraint on enforcers than American tribunals.)
While the DOJ and FTC (and, perhaps to a lesser extent, foreign enforcers) will have to keep the judiciary in mind in deciding to bring enforcement actions, the denigration of efficiencies by the agencies still will have an unfortunate demonstration effect on the private sector. Given the cost (both in resources and in reputational capital) associated with antitrust investigations, and the inevitable discounting for the risk of projects caught up in such inquiries, a publicly proclaimed anti-efficiencies enforcement philosophy will do damage. On the margin, it will lead businesses to introduce fewer efficiency-seeking improvements that could be (wrongly) characterized as “strengthening” or “entrenching” market dominance. Such business decisions, in turn, will be welfare-inimical; they will deny consumers the benefit of efficiencies-driven product and service enhancements, and slow the rate of business innovation.
As such, it is to be hoped that, upon further reflection, U.S. and foreign competition enforcers will see the light and publicly proclaim that they will fully weigh efficiencies in analyzing business conduct. The “efficiencies offense” was a lousy tune. That “oldie-but-baddie” should not be replayed.
[Judge Douglas Ginsburg was invited to respond to the Beesley Lecture given by Andrea Coscelli, chief executive of the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). Both the lecture and Judge Ginsburg’s response were broadcast by the BBC on Oct. 28, 2021. The text of Mr. Coscelli’s Beesley lecture is available on the CMA’s website. Judge Ginsburg’s response follows below.]
Thank you, Victoria, for the invitation to respond to Mr. Coscelli and his proposal for a legislatively founded Digital Markets Unit. Mr. Coscelli is one of the most talented, successful, and creative heads a competition agency has ever had. In the case of the DMU [ed., Digital Markets Unit], however, I think he has let hope triumph over experience and prudence. This is often the case with proposals for governmental reform: Indeed, it has a name, the Nirvana Fallacy, which comes from comparing the imperfectly functioning marketplace with the perfectly functioning government agency. Everything we know about the regulation of competition tells us the unintended consequences may dwarf the intended benefits and the result may be a less, not more, competitive economy. The precautionary principle counsels skepticism about such a major and inherently risky intervention.
Mr. Coscelli made a point in passing that highlights the difference in our perspectives: He said the SMS [ed.,strategic market status] merger regime would entail “a more cautious standard of proof.” In our shared Anglo-American legal culture, a more cautious standard of proof means the government would intervene in fewer, not more, market activities; proof beyond a reasonable doubt in criminal cases is a more cautious standard than a mere preponderance of the evidence. I, too, urge caution, but of the traditional kind.
I will highlight five areas of concern with the DMU proposal.
I. Chilling Effects
The DMU’s ability to designate a firm as being of strategic market significance—or SMS—will place a potential cloud over innovative activity in far more sectors than Mr. Coscelli could mention in his lecture. He views the DMU’s reach as limited to a small number of SMS-designated firms; and that may prove true, but there is nothing in the proposal limiting DMU’s reach.
Indeed, the DMU’s authority to regulate digital markets is surely going to be difficult to confine. Almost every major retail activity or consumer-facing firm involves an increasingly significant digital component, particularly after the pandemic forced many more firms online. Deciding which firms the DMU should cover seems easy in theory, but will prove ever more difficult and cumbersome in practice as digital technology continues to evolve. For instance, now that money has gone digital, a bank is little more than a digital platform bringing together lenders (called depositors) and borrowers, much as Amazon brings together buyers and sellers; so, is every bank with market power and an entrenched position to be subject to rules and remedies laid down by the DMU as well as supervision by the bank regulators? Is Aldi in the crosshairs now that it has developed an online retail platform? Match.com, too? In short, the number of SMS firms will likely grow apace in the next few years.
II. SMS Designations Should Not Apply to the Whole Firm
The CMA’s proposal would apply each SMS designation firm-wide, even if the firm has market power in a single line of business. This will inhibit investment in further diversification and put an SMS firm at a competitive disadvantage across all its businesses.
Perhaps company-wide SMS designations could be justified if the unintended costs were balanced by expected benefits to consumers, but this will not likely be the case. First, there is little evidence linking consumer harm to lines of business in which large digital firms do not have market power. On the contrary, despite the discussion of Amazon’s supposed threat to competition, consumers enjoy lower prices from many more retailers because of the competitive pressure Amazon brings to bear upon them.
Second, the benefits Mr. Coscelli expects the economy to reap from faster government enforcement are, at best, a mixed blessing. The proposal, you see, reverses the usual legal norm, instead making interim relief the rule rather than the exception. If a firm appeals its SMS designation, then under the CMA’s proposal, the DMU’s SMS designations and pro-competition interventions, or PCIs, will not be stayed pending appeal, raising the prospect that a firm’s activities could be regulated for a significant period even though it was improperly designated. Even prevailing in the courts may be a Pyrrhic victory because opportunities will have slipped away. Making matters worse, the DMU’s designation of a firm as SMS will likely receive a high degree of judicial deference, so that errors may never be corrected.
III. The DMU Cannot Be Evidence-based Given its Goals and Objectives
The DMU’s stated goal is to “further the interests of consumers and citizens in digital markets by promoting competition and innovation.”[1] DMU’s objectives for developing codes of conduct are: fair trading, open choices, and trust and transparency.[2] Fairness, openness, trust, and transparency are all concepts that are difficult to define and probably impossible to quantify. Therefore, I fear Mr. Coscelli’s aspiration that the DMU will be an evidence-based, tailored, and predictable regime seem unrealistic. The CMA’s idea of “an evidence-based regime” seems destined to rely mostly upon qualitative conjecture about the potential for the code of conduct to set “rules of the game” that encourage fair trading, open choices, trust, and transparency. Even if the DMU commits to considering empirical evidence at every step of its process, these fuzzy, qualitative objectives will allow it to come to virtually any conclusion about how a firm should be regulated.
Implementing those broad goals also throws into relief the inevitable tensions among them. Some potential conflicts between DMU’s objectives for developing codes of conduct are clear from the EU’s experience. For example, one of the things DMU has considered already is stronger protection for personal data. The EU’s experience with the GDPR shows that data protection is costly and, like any costly requirement, tends to advantage incumbents and thereby discourage new entry. In other words, greater data protections may come at the expense of start-ups or other new entrants and the contribution they would otherwise have made to competition, undermining open choices in the name of data transparency.
Another example of tension is clear from the distinction between Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android ecosystems. They take different approaches to the trade-off between data privacy and flexibility in app development. Apple emphasizes consumer privacy at the expense of allowing developers flexibility in their design choices and offers its products at higher prices. Android devices have fewer consumer-data protections but allow app developers greater freedom to design their apps to satisfy users and are offered at lower prices. The case of Epic Games v. Apple put on display the purportedly pro-competitive arguments the DMU could use to justify shutting down Apple’s “walled garden,” whereas the EU’s GDPR would cut against Google’s open ecosystem with limited consumer protections. Apple’s model encourages consumer trust and adoption of a single, transparent model for app development, but Google’s model encourages app developers to choose from a broader array of design and payment options and allows consumers to choose between the options; no matter how the DMU designs its code of conduct, it will be creating winners and losers at the cost of either “open choices” or “trust and transparency.” As experience teaches is always the case, it is simply not possible for an agency with multiple goals to serve them all at the same time. The result is an unreviewable discretion to choose among them ad hoc.
Finally, notice that none of the DMU’s objectives—fair trading, open choices, and trust and transparency—revolves around quantitative evidence; at bottom, these goals are not amenable to the kind of rigor Mr. Coscelli hopes for.
IV. Speed of Proposals
Mr. Coscelli has emphasized the slow pace of competition law matters; while I empathize, surely forcing merging parties to prove a negative and truncating their due process rights is not the answer.
As I mentioned earlier, it seems a more cautious standard of proof to Mr. Coscelli is one in which an SMS firm’s proposal to acquire another firm is presumed, or all but presumed, to be anticompetitive and unlawful. That is, the DMU would block the transaction unless the firms can prove their deal would not be anticompetitive—an extremely difficult task. The most self-serving version of the CMA’s proposal would require it to prove only that the merger poses a “realistic prospect” of lessening competition, which is vague, but may in practice be well below a 50% chance. Proving that the merged entity does not harm competition will still require a predictive forward-looking assessment with inherent uncertainty, but the CMA wants the costs of uncertainty placed upon firms, rather than it. Given the inherent uncertainty in merger analysis, the CMA’s proposal would pose an unprecedented burden of proof on merging parties.
But it is not only merging parties the CMA would deprive of due process; the DMU’s so-called pro-competitive interventions, or PCI, SMS designations, and code-of-conduct requirements generally would not be stayed pending appeal. Further, an SMS firm could overturn the CMA’s designation only if it could overcome substantial deference to the DMU’s fact-finding. It is difficult to discern, then, the difference between agency decisions and final orders.
The DMU would not have to show or even assert an extraordinary need for immediate relief. This is the opposite of current practice in every jurisdiction with which I am familiar. Interim orders should take immediate effect only in exceptional circumstances, when there would otherwise be significant and irreversible harm to consumers, not in the ordinary course of agency decision making.
V. Antitrust Is Not Always the Answer
Although one can hardly disagree with Mr. Coscelli’s premise that the digital economy raises new legal questions and practical challenges, it is far from clear that competition law is the answer to them all. Some commentators of late are proposing to use competition law to solve consumer protection and even labor market problems. Unfortunately, this theme also recurs in Mr. Coscelli’s lecture. He discusses concerns with data privacy and fair and reasonable contract terms, but those have long been the province of consumer protection and contract law; a government does not need to step in and regulate all realms of activity by digital firms and call it competition law. Nor is there reason to confine needed protections of data privacy or fair terms of use to SMS firms.
Competition law remedies are sometimes poorly matched to the problems a government is trying to correct. Mr. Coscelli discusses the possibility of strong interventions, such as forcing the separation of a platform from its participation in retail markets; for example, the DMU could order Amazon to spin off its online business selling and shipping its own brand of products. Such powerful remedies can be a sledgehammer; consider forced data sharing or interoperability to make it easier for new competitors to enter. For example, if Apple’s App Store is required to host all apps submitted to it in the interest of consumer choice, then Apple loses its ability to screen for security, privacy, and other consumer benefits, as its refusal to deal is its only way to prevent participation in its store. Further, it is not clear consumers want Apple’s store to change; indeed, many prefer Apple products because of their enhanced security.
Forced data sharing would also be problematic; the hiQ v. LinkedIn case in the United States should serve as a cautionary tale. The trial court granted a preliminary injunction forcing LinkedIn to allow hiQ to scrape its users’ profiles while the suit was ongoing. LinkedIn ultimately won the suit because it did not have market power, much less a monopoly, in any relevant market. The court concluded each theory of anticompetitive conduct was implausible, but meanwhile LinkedIn had been forced to allow hiQ to scrape its data for an extended period before the final decision. There is no simple mechanism to “unshare” the data now that LinkedIn has prevailed. This type of case could be common under the CMA proposal because the DMU’s orders will go into immediate effect.
There is potentially much redeeming power in the Digital Regulation Co-operation Forum as Mr. Coscelli described it, but I take a different lesson from this admirable attempt to coordinate across agencies: Perhaps it is time to look beyond antitrust to solve problems that are not based upon market power. As the DRCF highlights, there are multiple agencies with overlapping authority in the digital market space. ICO and Ofcom each have authority to take action against a firm that disseminates fake news or false advertisements. Mr. Coscelli says it would be too cumbersome to take down individual bad actors, but, if so, then the solution is to adopt broader consumer protection rules, not apply an ill-fitting set of competition law rules. For example, the U.K. could change its notice-and-takedown rules to subject platforms to strict liability if they host fake news, even without knowledge that they are doing so, or perhaps only if they are negligent in discharging their obligation to police against it.
Alternatively, the government could shrink the amount of time platforms have to take down information; France gives platforms only about an hour to remove harmful information. That sort of solution does not raise the same prospect of broadly chilling market activity, but still addresses one of the concerns Mr. Coscelli raises with digital markets.
In sum, although Mr. Coscelli is of course correct that competition authorities and governments worldwide are considering whether to adopt broad reforms to their competition laws, the case against broadening remains strong. Instead of relying upon the self-corrective potential of markets, which is admittedly sometimes slower than anyone would like, the CMA assumes markets need regulation until firms prove otherwise. Although clearly well-intentioned, the DMU proposal is in too many respects not met to the task of protecting competition in digital markets; at worst, it will inhibit innovation in digital markets to the point of driving startups and other innovators out of the U.K.
[2] Sam Bowman, Sam Dumitriu & Aria Babu, Conflicting Missions:The Risks of the Digital Markets Unit to Competition and Innovation, Int’l Center for L. & Econ., June 2021, at 13.
The recent launch of the international Multilateral Pharmaceutical Merger Task Force (MPMTF) is just the latest example of burgeoning cooperative efforts by leading competition agencies to promote convergence in antitrust enforcement. (See my recent paper on the globalization of antitrust, which assesses multinational cooperation and convergence initiatives in greater detail.) In what is a first, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the U.S. Justice Department’s (DOJ) Antitrust Division, offices of state Attorneys General, the European Commission’s Competition Directorate, Canada’s Competition Bureau, and the U.K.’s Competition and Market Authority (CMA) jointly created the MPMTF in March 2021 “to update their approach to analyzing the effects of pharmaceutical mergers.”
To help inform its analysis, in May 2021 the MPMTF requested public comments concerning the effects of pharmaceutical mergers. The MPMTF sought submissions regarding (among other issues) seven sets of questions:
What theories of harm should enforcement agencies consider when evaluating pharmaceutical mergers, including theories of harm beyond those currently considered?
What is the full range of a pharmaceutical merger’s effects on innovation? What challenges arise when mergers involve proprietary drug discovery and manufacturing platforms?
In pharmaceutical merger review, how should we consider the risks or effects of conduct such as price-setting practices, reverse payments, and other ways in which pharmaceutical companies respond to or rely on regulatory processes?
How should we approach market definition in pharmaceutical mergers, and how is that implicated by new or evolving theories of harm?
What evidence may be relevant or necessary to assess and, if applicable, challenge a pharmaceutical merger based on any new or expanded theories of harm?
What types of remedies would work in the cases to which those theories are applied?
What factors, such as the scope of assets and characteristics of divestiture buyers, influence the likelihood and success of pharmaceutical divestitures to resolve competitive concerns?
My research assistant Andrew Mercado and I recently submitted comments for the record addressing the questions posed by the MPMTF. We concluded:
Federal merger enforcement in general and FTC pharmaceutical merger enforcement in particular have been effective in promoting competition and consumer welfare. Proposed statutory amendments to strengthen merger enforcement not only are unnecessary, but also would, if enacted, tend to undermine welfare and would thus be poor public policy. A brief analysis of seven questions propounded by the Multilateral Pharmaceutical Merger Task Force suggests that: (a) significant changes in enforcement policies are not warranted; and (b) investigators should employ sound law and economics analysis, taking full account of merger-related efficiencies, when evaluating pharmaceutical mergers.
While we leave it to interested readers to review our specific comments, this commentary highlights one key issue which we stressed—the importance of giving due weight to efficiencies (and, in particular, dynamic efficiencies) in evaluating pharma mergers. We also note an important critique by FTC Commissioner Christine Wilson of the treatment accorded merger-related efficiencies by U.S. antitrust enforcers.
Discussion
Innovation in pharmaceuticals and vaccines has immensely significant economic and social consequences, as demonstrated most recently in the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. As such, it is particularly important that public policy not stand in the way of realizing efficiencies that promote innovation in these markets. This observation applies directly, of course, to pharmaceutical antitrust enforcement, in general, and to pharma merger enforcement, in particular.
Regrettably, however, though general merger-enforcement policy has been generally sound, it has somewhat undervalued merger-related efficiencies.
Although U.S. antitrust enforcers give lip service to their serious consideration of efficiencies in merger reviews, the reality appears to be quite different, as documented by Commissioner Wilson in a 2020 speech.
Wilson’s General Merger-Efficiencies Critique: According to Wilson, the combination of finding narrow markets and refusing to weigh out-of-market efficiencies has created major “legal and evidentiary hurdles a defendant must clear when seeking to prove offsetting procompetitive efficiencies.” What’s more, the “courts [have] largely continue[d] to follow the Agencies’ lead in minimizing the importance of efficiencies.” Wilson shows that “the Horizontal Merger Guidelines text and case law appear to set different standards for demonstrating harms and efficiencies,” and argues that this “asymmetric approach has the obvious potential consequence of preventing some procompetitive mergers that increase consumer welfare.” Wilson concludes on a more positive note that this problem can be addressed by having enforcers: (1) treat harms and efficiencies symmetrically; and (2) establish clear and reasonable expectations for what types of efficiency analysis will and will not pass muster.
While our filing with the MPMTF did not discuss Wilson’s general treatment of merger efficiencies, one would hope that the task force will appropriately weigh it in its deliberations. Our filing instead briefly addressed two “informational efficiencies” that may arise in the context of pharmaceutical mergers. These include:
More Efficient Resource Reallocation: The theory of the firm teaches that mergers may be motivated by the underutilization or misallocation of assets, or the opportunity to create welfare-enhancing synergies. In the pharmaceutical industry, these synergies may come from joining complementary research and development programs, combining diverse and specialized expertise that may be leveraged for better, faster drug development and more innovation.
Enhanced R&D: Currently, much of the R&D for large pharmaceutical companies is achieved through partnerships or investment in small biotechnology and research firms specializing in a single type of therapy. Whereas large pharmaceutical companies have expertise in marketing, navigating regulation, and undertaking trials of new drugs, small, research-focused firms can achieve greater advancements in medicine with smaller budgets. Furthermore, changes within firms brought about by a merger may increase innovation.
With increases in intellectual property and proprietary data that come from the merging of two companies, smaller research firms that work with the merged entity may have access to greater pools of information, enhancing the potential for innovation without increasing spending. This change not only raises the efficiency of the research being conducted in these small firms, but also increases the probability of a breakthrough without an increase in risk.
Conclusion
U.S. pharmaceutical merger enforcement has been fairly effective in forestalling anticompetitive combinations while allowing consumer welfare-enhancing transactions to go forward. Policy in this area should remain generally the same. Enforcers should continue to base enforcement decisions on sound economic theory fully supported by case-specific facts. Enforcement agencies could benefit, however, by placing a greater emphasis on efficiencies analysis. In particular, they should treat harms and efficiencies symmetrically (as recommend by Commissioner Wilson), and fully take into account likely resource reallocation and innovation-related efficiencies.
The Furman Report recommended that the UK should overhaul its competition regime with some quite significant changes to regulate the conduct of large digital platforms and make it harder for them to acquire other companies. But, while the Report’s panel is accomplished and its tone is sober and even-handed, the evidence on which it is based does not justify the recommendations it makes.
Most of the citations in the Report are of news reports or simple reporting of data with no analysis, and there is very little discussion of the relevant academic literature in each area, even to give a summary of it. In some cases, evidence and logic are misused to justify intuitions that are just not supported by the facts.
Killer acquisitions
One particularly bad example is the report’s discussion of mergers in digital markets. The Report provides a single citation to support its proposals on the question of so-called “killer acquisitions” — acquisitions where incumbent firms acquire innovative startups to kill their rival product and avoid competing on the merits. The concern is that these mergers slip under the radar of current merger control either because the transaction is too small, or because the purchased firm is not yet in competition with the incumbent. But the paper the Report cites, by Colleen Cunningham, Florian Ederer and Song Ma, looks only at the pharmaceutical industry.
The Furman Report says that “in the absence of any detailed analysis of the digital sector, these results can be roughly informative”. But there are several important differences between the drug markets the paper considers and the digital markets the Furman Report is focused on.
The scenario described in the Cunningham, et al. paper is of a patent holder buying a direct competitor that has come up with a drug that emulates the patent holder’s drug without infringing on the patent. As the Cunningham, et al. paper demonstrates, decreases in development rates are a feature of acquisitions where the acquiring company holds a patent for a similar product that is far from expiry. The closer a patent is to expiry, the less likely an associated “killer” acquisition is.
But tech typically doesn’t have the clear and predictable IP protections that would make such strategies reliable. The long and uncertain development and approval process involved in bringing a drug to market may also be a factor.
There are many more differences between tech acquisitions and the “killer acquisitions” in pharma that the Cunningham, et al. paper describes. SO-called “acqui-hires,” where a company is acquired in order to hire its workforce en masse, are common in tech and explicitly ruled out of being “killers” by this paper, for example: it is not harmful to overall innovation or output overall if a team is moved to a more productive project after an acquisition. And network effects, although sometimes troubling from a competition perspective, can also make mergers of platforms beneficial for users by growing the size of that platform (because, of course, one of the points of a network is its size).
The Cunningham, et al. paper estimates that 5.3% of pharma acquisitions are “killers”. While that may seem low, some might say it’s still 5.3% too much. However, it’s not obvious that a merger review authority could bring that number closer to zero without also rejecting more mergers that are good for consumers, making people worse off overall. Given the number of factors that are specific to pharma and that do not apply to tech, it is dubious whether the findings of this paper are useful to the Furman Report’s subject at all. Given how few acquisitions are found to be “killers” in pharma with all of these conditions present, it seems reasonable to assume that, even if this phenomenon does apply in some tech mergers, it is significantly rarer than the ~5.3% of mergers Cunningham, et al. find in pharma. As a result, the likelihood of erroneous condemnation of procompetitive mergers is significantly higher.
In any case, there’s a fundamental disconnect between the “killer acquisitions” in the Cunningham, et al. paper and the tech acquisitions described as “killers” in the popular media. Neither Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram nor Google’s acquisition of Youtube, which FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra recently highlighted, would count, because in neither case was the acquired company “killed.” Nor were any of the other commonly derided tech acquisitions — e.g., Facebook/Whatsapp, Google/Waze, Microsoft.LinkedIn, or Amazon/Whole Foods — “killers,” either.
In all these high-profile cases the acquiring companies expanded the service and invested more in them. One may object that these services would have competed with their acquirers had they remained independent, but this is a totally different argument to the scenarios described in the Cunningham, et al. paper, where development of a new drug is shut down by the acquirer ostensibly to protect their existing product. It is thus extremely difficult to see how the Cunningham, et al. paper is even relevant to the digital platform context, let alone how it could justify a wholesale revision of the merger regime as applied to digital platforms.
A recent paper (published after the Furman Report) does attempt to survey acquisitions by Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple. Out of 175 acquisitions in the 2015-17 period the paper surveys, only one satisfies the Cunningham, et al. paper’s criteria for being a potentially “killer” acquisition — Facebook’s acquisition of a photo sharing app called Masquerade, which had raised just $1 million in funding before being acquired.
In lieu of any actual analysis of mergers in digital markets, the Report falls back on a puzzling logic:
To date, there have been no false positives in mergers involving the major digital platforms, for the simple reason that all of them have been permitted. Meanwhile, it is likely that some false negatives will have occurred during this time. This suggests that there has been underenforcement of digital mergers, both in the UK and globally. Remedying this underenforcement is not just a matter of greater focus by the enforcer, as it will also need to be assisted by legislative change.
This is very poor reasoning. It does not logically follow that the (presumed) existence of false negatives implies that there has been underenforcement, because overenforcement carries costs as well. Moreover, there are strong reasons to think that false positives in these markets are more costly than false negatives. A well-run court system might still fail to convict a few criminals because the cost of accidentally convicting an innocent person was so high.
The UK’s competition authority did commission an ex post review of six historical mergers in digital markets, including Facebook/Instagram and Google/Waze, two of the most controversial in the UK. Although it did suggest that the review process could have been done differently, it also highlighted efficiencies that arose from each, and did not conclude that any has led to consumer detriment.
Recommendations
The Report is vague about which mergers it considers to have been uncompetitive, and apart from the aforementioned text it does not really attempt to justify its recommendations around merger control.
Despite this, the Report recommends a shift to a ‘balance of harms’ approach. Under the current regime, merger review focuses on the likelihood that a merger would reduce competition which, at least, gives clarity about the factors to be considered. A ‘balance of harms’ approach would require the potential scale (size) of the merged company to be considered as well.
This could give basis for blocking any merger at all on ‘scale’ grounds. After all, if a photo editing app with a sharing timeline can grow into the world’s second largest social network, how could a competition authority say with any confidence that some other acquisition might not prevent the emergence of a new platform on a similar scale, however unlikely? This could provide a basis for blocking almost any acquisition by an incumbent firm, and make merger review an even more opaque and uncertain process than it currently is, potentially deterring efficiency-raising mergers or leading startups that would like to be acquired to set up and operate overseas instead (or not to be started up in the first place).
The treatment of mergers is just one example of the shallowness of the Report. In many other cases — the discussions of concentration and barriers to entry in digital markets, for example — big changes are recommended on the basis of a handful of papers or less. Intuition repeatedly trumps evidence and academic research.
The Report’s subject is incredibly broad, of course, and one might argue that such a limited, casual approach is inevitable. In this sense the Report may function perfectly well as an opening brief introducing the potential range of problems in the digital economy that a rational competition authority might consider addressing. But the complexity and uncertainty of the issues is no reason to eschew rigorous, detailed analysis before determining that a compelling case has been made. Adopting the Report’s assumptions — and in many cases that is the very most one can say of them — of harm and remedial recommendations on the limited bases it offers is sure to lead to erroneous enforcement of competition law in a way that would reduce, rather than enhance, consumer welfare.
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