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Relevant Market in the Google AdTech Case

ICLE Issue Brief Digital advertising is the economic backbone of much of the Internet. But complaints have recently emerged from a number of quarters alleging the digital advertising market is monopolized by its largest participant: Google.

Executive Summary

Digital advertising is the economic backbone of much of the Internet. But complaints have recently emerged from a number of quarters alleging the digital advertising market is monopolized by its largest participant: Google. Most significantly, a lawsuit first filed by the State of Texas and 17 other U.S. states in 2020 alleges anticompetitive conduct related to Google’s online display advertising business. The U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) reportedly may bring a lawsuit similarly focused on Google’s online display advertising business sometime in 2022. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority undertook a lengthy investigation of digital advertising, ultimately recommending implementation of a code of conduct and “pro-competitive interventions” into the market, as well as a new regulatory body to oversee these measures. Most recently, a group of U.S. senators introduced a bill that would break up Google’s advertising business (as well as that of other large display advertising intermediaries such as Facebook and Amazon).

All of these actions rely on a crucial underlying assumption: that Google’s display advertising business enjoys market power in one or more competitively relevant markets. To understand what market power a company has within the market for a given type of digital advertising, it is crucial to evaluate what constitutes the relevant market in which it operates. If the market is defined broadly to include many kinds of online and/or offline advertising, then even complete dominance of a single segment may not be enough to confer market power. On the other hand, if the relevant market is defined narrowly, it may be easier to reach the legal conclusion that market power exists, even in the absence of economic power over price.

Determining the economically appropriate market turns importantly on whether advertisers and publishers can switch to other forms of advertising, either online or offline. This includes the specific ad-buying and placement tools that the Texas Complaint alleges exist within distinct antitrust markets—each of which, it claims, is monopolized by Google. The Texas Complaint identifies at least five relevant markets that it alleges Google is monopolizing or attempting to monopolize: publisher ad servers for web display; ad-buying tools for web display; ad exchanges for web display; mediation of in-app ads; and in-app ad networks.

As we discuss, however, these market definitions put forth by the Texas Complaint and other critics of Google’s adtech business appear to be overly narrow, and risk finding market dominance where it doesn’t exist.

Digital advertising takes numerous forms, such as ads presented along with search results, static and video display ads, in-game ads, and ads presented in music streams and podcasts. Within digital advertising of all kinds, Google accounted for a little less than one-third of spending in 2020; Facebook accounted for about one-quarter, Amazon for 10%, and other ad services like Microsoft and Verizon accounted for the remaining third. Open-display advertising on third-party websites—the type of advertising at issue in the Texas Complaint and the primary critiques of Google’s adtech business—is a smaller subset of total digital advertising, with one estimate finding that it accounts for about 18% of U.S. digital advertising spending.

U.S. digital advertising grew from $26 billion in 2010 to $152 billion in 2020, an average annual increase of 19%, even as the Producer Price Index for Internet advertising sales declined by an annual average of 5% over the same period. The rise in spending in the face of falling prices indicates that the number of ads bought and sold increased by approximately 26% a year. The combination of increasing quantity, decreasing cost, and increasing total revenues is consistent with a growing and increasingly competitive market, rather than one of rising concentration and reduced competition.

But digital advertising is just one kind of advertising, and advertising more generally is just one piece of a much larger group of marketing activities. According to the market research company eMarketer, about $130 billion was spent on digital advertising in the United States in 2019, comprising half of the total U.S. media advertising market. Advertising occurs across a wide range of media, including television, radio, newspapers, magazines, trade publications, billboards, and the Internet.

An organization considering running ads has numerous choices about where and how to run them, including whether to advertise online or via other “offline” media, such as on television or radio or in newspapers or magazines, among many other options. If it chooses online advertising, it faces another range of alternatives, including search ads, in which the ad is displayed as a search-engine result; display ads on a site owned and operated by the firm that sells the ad space; “open” display ads on a third-party’s site; or display ads served on mobile apps.

Although advertising technology and both supplier and consumer preferences continue to evolve, the weight of evidence suggests a far more unified and integrated economically relevant market be-tween offline and online advertising than their common semantic separation would suggest. What publishers sell to advertisers is access to consumers’ attention. While there is no dearth of advertising space, consumer attention is a finite and limited resource. If the same or similar consumers are variously to be found in each channel, all else being equal, there is every reason to expect advertisers to substitute between them, as well.

The fact that offline and online advertising employ distinct processes does not consign them to separate markets. The economic question is whether one set of products or services acts as a competitive constraint on another; not whether they appear to be descriptively similar. Indeed, online advertising has manifestly drawn advertisers from offline markets, as previous technological innovations drew advertisers from other channels before them. Moreover, while there is evidence that, in some cases, offline and online advertising may be complements (as well as substitutes), the dis-tinction between these is becoming less and less meaningful as the revolution in measurability has changed how marketers approach different levels of what is known as the “marketing funnel.”

The classic marketing funnel begins with brand-building-type advertising at the top, aimed at a wide audience and intended to promote awareness of a product or brand. This is followed by increasingly targeted advertising that aims to give would-be customers a more and more favorable view of the product. At the bottom of this funnel is an advertisement that leads the customer to purchase the item. In this conception, for example, display advertising (to promote brand aware-ness) and search advertising (to facilitate a purchase) are entirely distinct from one another.

But the longstanding notion of the “marketing funnel” is rapidly becoming outdated. As the ability to measure ad effectiveness has increased, distinctions among types of advertising that were once dictated by where the ad would fall in the marketing funnel have blurred. This raises the question whether online display advertising constitutes a distinct, economically relevant market from online search advertising, as the Federal Trade Commission, for example, claimed in its 2017 review of the Google/DoubleClick merger.

The Texas Complaint adopts a non-economic approach to market definition, defining the relevant market according to similarity between product functions, not by economic substitutability. It thus ignores the potential substitutability between different kinds of advertising, both online and offline, and hence the constraint these other forms of advertising impose on the display advertising market.

If advertisers faced with higher advertising costs for open-display ads would shift to owned-and-operated display ads or to search ads or to other media altogether—rendering small but significant advertising price increases unprofitable—then these alternatives must be included in the relevant antitrust market. Similarly, if publishers faced with declining open-display ad revenues would quickly shift to alternative such as direct placement of ads or sponsorships, then these alternatives must be included in the relevant market, as well.

If advertisers and publishers are faced with a wide range of viable alternatives and the market is broadly defined to include these alternatives, then it is not clear that any single firm can profitably exercise monopoly power—no matter what its market share is in one piece of the broader market. Similarly, it is not clear whether “consumers” (e.g., advertisers, publishers, or users) have suffered any economic harm.

With a narrow focus on “open display,” it is quite possible that Google’s dominance can be technically demonstrated. But if, as suggested here, “open display” is really just a small piece of larger relevant market, then any fines and remedies resulting from an erroneously narrow market definition are as likely to raise the cost of business for advertisers, publishers, and intermediaries as they would be to increase competition that benefits market participants.

Read the full issue brief here.

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Antitrust & Consumer Protection

ICLE Comments on FTC/DOJ Merger Enforcement RFI

Regulatory Comments The FTC and DOJ's RFI on whether and how to update the antitrust agencies’ merger-enforcement guidelines is based on several faulty premises and appears to presuppose a preferred outcome.

Executive Summary

Our comments in response to the agencies’ merger guidelines RFI are broken into two parts. The first raises concerns regarding the agencies’ ultimate intentions as reflected in the RFI, the authority of the assumptions undergirding it, and the agencies’ (mis)understanding of the role of merger guidelines. The second part responds to several of the most pressing and problematic substantive questions raised in the RFI.

With respect to the (for lack of a better term) “process” elements of the agencies’ apparent intended course of action, we argue that the RFI is based on several faulty premises which, if left unchecked, will taint any subsequent soft law proposals based thereon:

First, the RFI seems to presuppose a particular, preferred outcome and does not generally read like an objective request for the best information necessary to reach optimal results. Although some of the language is superficially neutral, the overarching tone is (as Doug Melamed put it) “very tendentious”: the RFI seeks information to support a broad invigoration of merger enforcement. While some certainly contend that strengthening merger-enforcement standards is appropriate, merger guidelines that start from that position can hardly be relied upon by courts as a source of information to differentiate in difficult cases, if and when that may be warranted.

Indeed, the RFI misconstrues the role of merger guidelines, which is to reflect the state of the art in a certain area of antitrust and not to artificially push the accepted scope of knowledge and practice toward a politically preferred and tenuous frontier. The RFI telegraphs an attempt by the agencies to pronounce as settled what are hotly disputed, sometimes stubbornly unresolved issues among experts, all to fit a preconceived political agenda. This not only overreaches the FTC’s and DOJ’s powers, but it also risks galvanizing opposition from the courts, thereby undermining the utility of adopting guidelines in the first place.

Second, underlying the RFI and the agencies’ apparently intended course of action is the uncritical acceptance of a popular, but highly contentious, narrative positing that there is an inexorable trend toward increased concentration, caused by lax antitrust enforcement, that has caused significant harm to the economy. As we explain, however, every element of this narrative withers under closer scrutiny. Rather, the root causes of increased concentration (if it is happening in the first place) are decidedly uncertain; concentration is decreasing in the local markets in which consumers actually make consumption decisions; and there is evidence that, because much increased concentration has been caused by productivity advances rather than anticompetitive conduct, consumers likely benefit from it.

Lastly, the RFI assumes that the current merger-control laws and tools are no longer fit for purpose. Specifically, the agencies imply that current enforcement thresholds and longstanding presumptions, such as the HHI levels that trigger enforcement, allow too many anticompetitive mergers to slip through the cracks. We contend that this kind of myopic thinking fails to apply the relevant error-cost framework. In merger enforcement, as in antitrust law, it is not appropriate to focus narrowly on one set of errors in guiding legal and policy reform.  Instead, general-purpose tools and presumptions should be assessed with an eye toward reducing the totality of errors, rather than those arising in one segment at the expense of another.

Substantively, our comments address the following issues:

First, the RFI is concerned with the state of merger enforcement in labor markets (and “monopsony” markets more broadly). While some discussion may be welcome regarding new guidelines for how agencies and courts might begin to approach mergers that affect labor markets, the paucity of past actions in this area (the vast bulk of which have been in a single industry: hospitals); the significant dearth of scholarly analysis of relevant market definition in labor markets; and, above all, the fundamental complexities it raises for the proper metrics of harm in mergers that affect multiple markets, all raise the specter that aiming for specific outcomes in labor markets may undermine the standards that support proper merger enforcement overall. If the agencies are to apply merger-control rules to monopsony markets, they must make clear that the relevant market to analyze is the output market, and not (only) the input market. Ultimately, this is the only way to separate mergers that generate efficiencies from those that create monopsony power, since both have the effect of depressing input prices. If antitrust law is to stay grounded in the consumer welfare standard, as it should, it must avoid blocking mergers that are consumer-facing simply because they decrease the price of an input. The issue of monopsony is further complicated by the fact that many inputs are highly substitutable across a wide range of industries, rendering the relevant market even more difficult to pin down than in traditional product markets.

Second, there is not enough evidence to create the presumption of a negative relationship between market concentration and innovation, or between market concentration and investment. In fact, as we show, it may often be the case that the opposite is true. The agencies should thus be wary of drawing any premature conclusions—let alone establishing any legal presumptions—on the connection between market structure and non-price effects, such as innovation and investment.

Third, the RFI blurs what has hitherto been a clear demarcation—and rightly so—between vertical and horizontal mergers by stretching the meaning of “potential competition” beyond any reasonable limits.  In doing, it ascribes stringent theories of harm based on far-fetched hypotheticals to otherwise neutral or benign business conduct. This “horizontalization” of vertical mergers, if allowed to translate into policy, is likely to have chilling effects on procompetitive merger activity to the detriment of consumers and, ultimately, society as a whole.  As we show, there is no legal or empirical justification to abandon the time-honed differentiation between horizontal and vertical mergers, or to impose a heightened burden of proof on the latter. The 2018 AT&T merger illustrates this.

Fourth, and despite some facially attractive rhetoric, data should not receive any special treatment under the merger rules. Instead, it should be treated as any other intangible asset, such as reputation, IP, know-how, etc.

Finally, the notion of “attention markets” is not ready to be applied in a merger-control context, as the attention-market scholarship fails to offer objective, let alone quantifiable, criteria that might enable authorities to identify firms that are unique competitors for user attention.

Read the full comments here.

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Antitrust & Consumer Protection

The Concentration of Digital Markets: How To Preserve the Conditions for Effective and Undistorted Competition?

Scholarship Abstract The policy initiatives announced on both sides of the Atlantic to complement competition rules focus on two key dimensions: the contestability of markets on . . .

Abstract

The policy initiatives announced on both sides of the Atlantic to complement competition rules focus on two key dimensions: the contestability of markets on the one hand and fairness in their functioning on the other. The underlying idea is that the market positions of Big Tech would be inexpugnable – insofar as high barriers to entry protect them from self-regulating competition and insofar as they would have regulatory power over their respective ecosystems. Competition for the market would no longer be free, and competition in the market would be distorted. Our purpose in this working paper is to discuss these two dimensions. Are digital markets still contestable, and is the competition in them still competition on the merits? Finally, we discuss the remedies proposed to address these two alleged phenomena.

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Antitrust & Consumer Protection

European Commission Objection to App Store Rules Lack Empirical Support

TOTM The European Commission recently issued a formal Statement of Objections (SO) in which it charges Apple with antitrust breach. In a nutshell, the commission argues that Apple . . .

The European Commission recently issued a formal Statement of Objections (SO) in which it charges Apple with antitrust breach. In a nutshell, the commission argues that Apple prevents app developers—in this case, Spotify—from using alternative in-app purchase systems (IAPs) other than Apple’s own, or steering them towards other, cheaper payment methods on another site. This, the commission says, results in higher prices for consumers in the audio streaming and ebook/audiobook markets.

Read the full piece here.

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Antitrust & Consumer Protection

The FTC Did Not ‘Fumble the Future’ in Its Google Search Investigation

TOTM In the final analysis, what the revelations do not show is that the FTC’s market for ideas failed consumers a decade ago when it declined to bring an antitrust suit against Google.

Politico has released a cache of confidential Federal Trade Commission (FTC) documents in connection with a series of articles on the commission’s antitrust probe into Google Search a decade ago. The headline of the first piece in the series argues the FTC “fumbled the future” by failing to follow through on staff recommendations to pursue antitrust intervention against the company. 

Read the full piece here.

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Antitrust & Consumer Protection

The Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act

TL;DR Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) has introduced the Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act (CALERA), sweeping legislation that, if enacted, would change the antitrust rules not just for Big Tech, but for the whole economy.

Background…

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) has introduced the Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act (CALERA), sweeping legislation that, if enacted, would change the antitrust rules not just for Big Tech, but for the whole economy.

Read the full explainer here.

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Antitrust & Consumer Protection

The Case Against Google Advertising: What’s the Relevant Market and How Many Are There?

TOTM Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s complaint against Google’s advertising business, joined by the attorneys general of nine other states, continues a long tradition of narrowing market definition to shoehorn market dominance where it may not exist.

U.S. antitrust regulators have a history of narrowly defining relevant markets—often to the point of absurdity—in order to create market power out of thin air. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) famously declared that Whole Foods and Wild Oats operated in the “premium natural and organic supermarkets market”—a narrowly defined market designed to exclude other supermarkets carrying premium natural and organic foods, such as Walmart and Kroger. Similarly, for the Staples-Office Depot merger, the FTC narrowly defined the relevant market as “office superstore” chains, which excluded general merchandisers such as Walmart, K-Mart and Target, who at the time accounted for 80% of office supply sales.

Read the full piece here.

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Antitrust & Consumer Protection

Rolled by Rewheel, Redux

TOTM The Finnish consultancy Rewheel periodically issues reports using mobile wireless pricing information to make claims about which countries’ markets are competitive and which are not. . . .

The Finnish consultancy Rewheel periodically issues reports using mobile wireless pricing information to make claims about which countries’ markets are competitive and which are not. For example, Rewheel claims Canada and Greece have the “least competitive monthly prices” while the United Kingdom and Finland have the most competitive.

Read the full piece here.

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Telecommunications & Regulated Utilities

Competition in Digital Platform Markets: A Question of Definitions

TL;DR Competition is strong in digital markets, but traditional antitrust tools may miss competitive nuances in these markets.

Competition is strong in digital markets, but traditional antitrust tools may miss competitive nuances in these markets.

Background…

Critics argue that competition is weak in digital platform markets because each market tends to be dominated by a single player: Google in Search, Amazon in online retail, and so on.

But

Digital platforms overlap significantly and are constantly expanding into each other’s markets, and new entrants are a constant threat. Retrospective market definition, the tool that antitrust agencies use to determine the boundaries of competition, will frequently miss changes in the nature of the products and markets under review, and as a result miss much of the competition taking place. Features of that competition are discussed below.

Read the full tl;dr explainer here.

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Antitrust & Consumer Protection