In these harrowing times, it is a natural to fixate on the problem of testing—and how the United States got so far behind South Korea on this front—as a means to arrest the spread of Coronavirus. Under this remedy, once testing becomes ubiquitous, the government could track and isolate everyone who has been in recent contact with someone who has been diagnosed with Covid-19.

Read the full piece here.

Introduction and Summary of Argument

Building and maintaining a successful brand is no small task. First you must spot a widespread need or desire that no one else can see—or can even feel yet. “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them,” Steve Jobs said. An entrepreneur must aim, therefore, “to read things that are not yet on the page.” Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs 567 (2011). This, believe it or not, is sometimes the easy part.

Next, you must get people to notice you and your great idea. You must raise your voice above the modern din. This usually requires advertisements. Lots of advertisements. “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted,” nineteenth-century retailer John Wanamaker is supposed to have said; “the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

Finally, you must maintain your momentum. During a train ride, a friend asked William Wrigley why he spent so much advertising his chewing gum when he already dominated the market. “How fast do you think this train is going?” Wrigley replied. “About ninety miles an hour,” answered the friend. “Well,” said Wrigley, “do you suggest we unhitch the engine?” David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising 171-72 (1985).

All this assumes, of course, that after you have innovated, invested, and risked all to climb to the top, the antitrust laws will not thwart your efforts to recoup a reward commensurate to your sacrifices. To read the Sherman Act as “making everyone fight but forbidding anyone to be victorious” would, observed Justice Holmes, turn it into an “imbecile statute.” Ron Collins, Ask the Author: “The Great Oracle of American Legal Thought”—Revisiting the Life and Times of Justice Holmes, SCOTUSblog, http://bit.ly/2Phv3qh (Mar. 28, 2019).

With pluck, daring, and dedication, 1-800 Contacts built the online contact lens market. People had assumed that contact lenses were available only at an optometrist’s office or a brick-and-mortar store. Spending many millions of dollars on advertising, 1-800 raised awareness that contact lenses could be bought—and bought cheaply—on the web. And 1-800 did not stop there. Thanks in no small part to its continuing to advertise widely to this day, the online lens market remains a thriving one.

Many copycat firms wisely followed 1-800 into the online contact lens market. Unfortunately, however, some of these firms sought not just to share in the successful market 1-800 created, but also to directly piggyback on 1-800’s advertising. Instead of following 1-800’s lead by doing the hard and expensive work of advertising broadly—on television, in print, on the radio, and so on—these firms just bought the advertising space at the top of internet search results for terms like “1-800 Contacts.” Rather than attract new customers of their own, in other words, the firms just tried to divert 1-800’s.

1-800 sued (or threatened to sue) each of the free-riding firms for trademark infringement, and each lawsuit settled. As part of the settlements, the parties agreed not to buy advertisements keyed to navigational searches of brand names like “1-800 Contacts.” Generic search terms like “cheap contact lenses” remained fair game for all, as did advertising in all other forms of media.

The Federal Trade Commission examined whether the settlements are an antitrust violation under the Sherman Act (as applied through the FTC Act). Assuming the settlements are even a proper subject of antitrust scrutiny 1-800 argues they are not—the FTC needed at the outset to decide the standard under which to perform its review. It could choose to conduct either (a) a “quick look” analysis of the settlements’ effect on competition, or (b) a more complete “rule of reason” analysis of it. The FTC erred, we contend in this brief, in electing to take only a “quick look” before condemning the settlements:

A. The quick-look standard governs only when the conduct at issue is obviously anticompetitive. The Supreme Court has accordingly applied the quick-look standard only to agreements that explicitly suppress competition. The settlements here, which leave almost the entire universe of contact-lens advertising intact, do nothing like that. What is more, the Supreme Court has declined to apply the quick-look standard to conduct accompanied by suspicious elements, such as a de facto advertising ban or a payment to delay entry into a market, that do not exist here.

B. Even without the Supreme Court’s guidance, the need for a rule-of-reason analysis would still be clear. The FTC cited no case or research that finds behavior analogous to the settlements an unreasonable restraint of trade. This is hardly surprising given that, as the FTC itself acknowledged, search-engine keyword advertising is “relatively new.” The lack of consensus about the settlements’ effect on competition should have driven the FTC toward the rule-of-reason standard.

Not only do the settlements serve no anticompetitive ends; they serve procompetitive ones. As 1-800 and Commissioner Phillips, writing in dissent below, explain, the settlements save litigation costs and protect trademark rights.

We home in on one vital benefit of trademark protection: the suppression of advertisement free riding. 1-800’s advertising attracted customers both to purchase contact lenses online and to purchase them from 1-800 specifically. The settlements did nothing to stop the general shoppers from finding the cheapest online contact lenses, but they did stop firms from diverting customers searching for 1-800. The settlements thus helped ensure that when 1-800’s broad (and expensive) advertising attracted new customers specifically to 1-800, competitors could not poach those customers on the cheap. By foreclosing a form of advertisement free riding, the settlements preserved the incentives that lead firms to invest in advertising in the first place. And because they therefore may have promoted, rather than suppressed, advertising, the settlements should not have been declared “obviously” anticompetitive and then subjected to a mere quick look.

C. The FTC claimed that, although it need not have done so, it ultimately conducted a rule-of-reason analysis. But the FTC never defined a market. And although it looked at prices, output, and quality, its analysis was abbreviated and defective. It plainly both adopted and applied the quick-look standard. This was error.

Read the full brief here.

Abstract

On November 14, 2018, the Federal Trade Commission (“Commission”) issued an opinion condemning as an antitrust violation trademark settlement agreements between 1-800 Contacts (“1-800”) and fourteen online sellers of contact lenses. The settlement agreements arise from trademark infringement claims brought by 1-800 against these online rivals. FTC Chairman Joseph Simons authored the Commission’s opinion, joined by the two Democratic Commissioners, Rohit Chopra and Rebecca Slaughter. In finding that the settlement agreements violated Section 1 of the Sherman Act, Chairman Simons and the majority commit two critical errors—one legal, the other economic—that render the Commission’s opinion, in our view, highly vulnerable to reversal upon its inevitable appeal. With respect to the legal infirmity, the Commission incorrectly concludes the challenged agreements are “inherently suspect,” and applies a truncated rule of reason analysis to assess whether the agreements harmed competition. As explained in Commissioner Noah Phillips’ dissent, a truncated analysis is not supported in this case either by judicial experience or economic learning, and was thus inappropriately applied. The second error is application of an economic analysis to claim the agreements have caused anticompetitive effects that falls woefully short of evidence of consumer injury. We predict reversal by an appellate court.

When the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) waved through Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods without batting an eye last August, some New Brandeisians predicted doom. But I was a bit more sanguine. And that’s still the case on the one-year anniversary of the deal. Here’s why.

Read the full piece here.

Last week, the FTC hired outside litigator Beth Wilkinson to lead an investigation into Google’s conduct, which some in the press have interpreted as a grave sign for the search company. The FTC is reportedly interested in pursuing Google under Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits a firm from engaging in “unfair methods of competition.” Along with Bob Litan, who served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Antitrust Division during the Microsoft investigation, I have penned a short paper on the FTC’s seemingly unorthodox Section 5 case against Google. (Disclosure: This paper was commissioned by Google.)

Read the full piece here.

Last month, the Federal Reserve released a study, titled “The U.S. Housing Market: Current Conditions and Policy Considerations,” which offers prescriptions on how to cure the housing mess. Given the importance of this issue to the nation’s economic wellbeing—a large portion of our assets are tied up in real estate, and the associated housing-wealth effects are large—I am surprised how little attention the housing market is getting in the Republican debates. Debate sponsors, presumably driven by ratings, seem more interested in Newt’s love life and Mitt’s finances than in economic policy.

Read the full piece here.

Economists recognize that the source of sustainable, private-sector jobs is investment. Due to measurement problems with investment data, however, it is sometimes easier to link a byproduct of investment—namely, adoption of the technology made possible by the investment—to job creation. This is precisely what economists Rob Shapiro and Kevin Hassett have done in their new study on the employment effects of wireless investments.

Read the full piece here.

Regulated firms and their Washington lawyers study agency reports and public statements carefully to figure out the rules of the road; the clearer the rules, the easier it is for regulated firms to understand how the rules affect their businesses and to plan accordingly. So long as the regulator and the regulated firm are on the same page, resources will be put to the most valuable use allowed under the regulations.

Read the full piece here.

For years the public has been clamoring for a playoff system to crown a champion in college football. Yet the geniuses at the BCS stubbornly defended—at least until now—their computer-knows-best system for inviting the two most worthy teams. By injecting doubt over the legitimacy of its invitees, the current system diminishes the meaning of the BCS title game, as evidenced by the abysmal Nielsen ratings for Monday night’s Alabama-LSU game (only 13.8 percent of U.S. television households tuned in to watch the television equivalent of paint drying) and last year’s Auburn-Oregon title game (15.3 percent). By comparison, the title game between Alabama and Texas just two years ago drew 17.2 percent of U.S. households; if this were a publicly traded firm, its shares would be falling fast.

Read the full piece here.