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These days, lacking a coherent legal theory presents no challenge to the would-be antitrust crusader. In a previous post, we noted how Shaoul Sussman’s predatory pricing claims against Amazon lacked a serious legal foundation. Sussman has returned with a new post, trying to build out his fledgling theory, but fares little better under even casual scrutiny.

Read the full piece here.

In a submission to the Australian Treasury on 12 September 2019, a group of esteemed international scholars critiqued the recently published Final Report of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) Digital Platforms Inquiry. 

In its report, the ACCC claims that competition in the media, communications, advertising and other markets it investigated is “not working,”  and that substantial regulatory and legislative changes are necessary to solve—and would solve—the  problems caused by ineffective competition.  

But the premise that competition is not working is not well supported by evidence presented in the report. Meanwhile, the report’s conclusion misses the bigger picture: Government intervention is appropriate only if it produces net social benefits. Yet the ACCC almost entirely omits consideration of the adverse effects of its proposed interventions, which in many cases are likely worse than the alleged problems. As such, the report’s proposals should be treated with great caution.

The submission tackles three “significant oversights”: 

1. The ACCC’s recommendations on “platform neutrality” and the proposed creation of a “digital platforms branch” underestimate the limits of regulators’ ability to identify market failure and the major difficulties that regulators face when attempting to design markets. For instance, the ACCC recommends that Google be forced to introduce browser and search engine choice screens. Yet it is not clear that the introduction of such screens will either accelerate the entry of competitors or improve users’ experience. 
2. The ACCC’s attempts to prop up local media firms (through subsidies and other means) appears to be driven by nostalgia for a bygone, pre-modern era, rather than a rigorous assessment of the costs and benefits of media regulation. The ACCC is quick to assume that its recommendations would produce tangible benefits for consumers, but it overlooks the potential market distortions—and impediments to ongoing innovation—that might be generated in the process.
3. The report’s recommended extension of Australia’s privacy legislation completely ignores the tremendous compliance costs that doing so would impose on firms and, indirectly, on consumers. The recent introduction of privacy legislation in the EU and California suggests that these compliance costs might well outstrip the benefits to users.

The submission notes in conclusion that “The ACCC’s lackadaisical assessment of regulatory costs is all-the-more troubling given that its report focuses on an extremely dynamic industry. What is only a small regulatory cost today could severely hamper competition in the future.”

Click here to read the full submission.

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin recently claimed that Amazon has “destroyed the retail industry across the United States” and should be investigated for antitrust violations. The claim doesn’t pass the laugh test. What’s more, the allegation might more rightly be leveled at Mnuchin himself.

Read the full piece here.

In a remarkable ruling issued earlier this month, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals held in Oberdorf v. Amazon that, under Pennsylvania products liability law, Amazon could be found liable for a third party vendor’s sale of a defective product via Amazon Marketplace. This ruling comes in the context of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which is broadly understood as immunizing platforms against liability for harmful conduct posted to their platforms by third parties (Section 230 purists may object to myu use of “platform” as approximation for the statute’s term of “interactive computer services”; I address this concern by acknowledging it with this parenthetical). This immunity has long been a bedrock principle of Internet law; it has also long been controversial; and those controversies are very much at the fore of discussion today.

Read the full piece here.

This morning a diverse group of more than 75 academics, scholars, and civil society organizations — including ICLE and several of its academic affiliates — published a set of seven “Principles for Lawmakers” on liability for user-generated content online, aimed at guiding discussions around potential amendments to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

Read the full piece here.

It might surprise some readers to learn that we think the Court’s decision today in Apple v. Pepper reaches — superficially — the correct result. But, we hasten to add, the Court’s reasoning (and, for that matter, the dissent’s) is completely wrongheaded. It would be an understatement to say that the Court reached the right result for the wrong reason; in fact, the Court’s analysis wasn’t even in the same universe as the correct reasoning.

Read the full piece here.

Summary

Amazon has largely avoided the crosshairs of antitrust enforcers to date (leaving aside the embarrassing dangerous threats of arbitrary enforcement by some US presidential candidates). The reasons seem obvious: in the US it handles a mere 5% of all retail sales (with lower shares in the EU), and it consistently provides access to a wide array of affordable goods. Yet even with Amazon’s obvious lack of dominance in the general retail market, the EU and some of its member states are opening investigations.

This isn’t new: the EU and its member states have pursued many competition claims against the big tech platforms. In the last two years alone, the EU imposed over $9B USD in fines on Google for “harms” that were highly speculative and hard to square with concern for consumers.

The theories of harm in the pending investigations of Amazon demonstrate some of the same confused antitrust theories that cropped up in the EU Google Shopping case. Platforms like Amazon and Google are criticized for allegedly discriminating against certain platform users who are also competitors or potential competitors of one or more of the platform’s services (or, in some cases, the platform itself).

Commissioner Margarethe Vestager’s probe into Amazon came to light in September, and centers on whether Amazon is illegally using its dominant position vis-á-vis third party merchants on its platforms in order to obtain data that it then uses either to promote its own direct sales, or else to develop competing products under its private label brands. More recently, Austria and Germany have launched separate investigations of Amazon rooted in much the same concerns as those of the European Commission.

The Austrian investigation will examine “whether Amazon abused its dominant position against retailers, that are active on the Amazon market place.” According to Andreas Mundt, president of the German competition authority, “Amazon functions as a kind of ‘gatekeeper’ [for sellers’ access] to customers. Its double role as the largest retailer and largest marketplace has the potential to hinder other sellers on its platform.” The German investigation also focuses on whether the terms of the contractual relationships that third-party sellers enter into with Amazon are unfair because these sellers are “dependent” on it.

Claims of competitive harm arising from this so-called vertical discrimination or bias are light on both theory and empirics. One of the fundamental, erroneous assumptions upon which they are built is the alleged “essentiality” of the underlying platform or input. But these cases are more often based on stories of firms that, unfortunately, chose to build their businesses to rely on a specific platform. In other words, their own decisions — from which they substantially benefited — made their investments highly “asset specific” and thus vulnerable to otherwise avoidable risks. When a platform on which these businesses rely makes a disruptive move, the third parties cry foul, even though the platform was not — nor should have been — under any obligation to preserve the status quo on behalf of third parties.

This issue brief explores the flaws in designating Amazon as something like an “essential facility,” as well as the attendant errors of treating the distribution mechanism of Internet-based commerce as though it were a market definition, and the problems with failing to learn the innovation-damaging effects of the Microsoft case.

Click here to read the full issue brief.

Near the end of her new proposal to break up Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple, Senator Warren asks, “So what would the Internet look like after all these reforms?”

Read the full piece here.

With its $5 billion fine against Google, the European Commission (EC) just applied to the search giant an old U.S. political trick: gerrymandering; the idea that if antitrust watchdogs draw markets narrowly enough, every company can be made to look like an evil monopolist.

Read the full piece here.