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Comments, NC & TN Petitions Restricting Municipal Broadband Networks

Regulatory Comments "On July 24th, 2014, the Electric Power Board (EPB) of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and the City of Wilson, north Carolina, filed separate petitions with the Federal Communications Commission..."

Summary

“On July 24th, 2014, the Electric Power Board (EPB) of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and the City of Wilson, north Carolina, filed separate petitions with the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC” or “Commission”), each asking the FCC to use the authority the FCC has claimed under Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to preempt state laws in Tennessee and North Carolina restricting the deployment of municipally-owned broadband networks. Just four days later,the Commission released a Public Notice establishing the current comment cycle, giving interested parties scantly over a month’s time to review and respond to the complex and voluminous petitions, despite the litany of other important and intricate issues currently before the FCC.

TechFreedom, ICLE, and seven other organizations – many of which are small operations with limited resources – filed a request seeking to have the comment deadline in this proceeding extended, but this request was summarily denied. Thus, due to time and resource constraints, the following comments will not address each and every point raised by the two petitions. Rather, these comments will address a few discrete points – including (1) the legal authority for Federal preemption in this case, and (2) the policy implications raised by the two petitions – before offering some general advice to the Commission: Deny the petitions of EPB and Wilson; issue a Notice of Inquiry to gather further data on the efficacy of government-run broadband networks; and, in the meantime, focus on broadband deployment initiatives that have gathered more consensus (e.g., promoting “Dig Once” policies, extending pole-attachment rights to broadband-only providers, and encouraging intermodal facilities-based competition, such as by maximizing the reallocation of spectrum for wireless broadband). We also note the unique dangers posed by increasing control over broadband, particularly in terms of censorship, surveillance, and other kinds of privacy invasions.”

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Telecommunications & Regulated Utilities

Intellectual Property, Innovation and Economic Growth: Mercatus Gets it Wrong

Popular Media [Cross posted at the CPIP Blog.] By Mark Schultz & Adam Mossoff A handful of increasingly noisy critics of intellectual property (IP) have emerged within . . .

[Cross posted at the CPIP Blog.]

By Mark Schultz & Adam Mossoff

A handful of increasingly noisy critics of intellectual property (IP) have emerged within free market organizations. Both the emergence and vehemence of this group has surprised most observers, since free market advocates generally support property rights. It’s true that there has long been a strain of IP skepticism among some libertarian intellectuals. However, the surprised observer would be correct to think that the latest critique is something new. In our experience, most free market advocates see the benefit and importance of protecting the property rights of all who perform productive labor – whether the results are tangible or intangible.

How do the claims of this emerging critique stand up? We have had occasion to examine the arguments of free market IP skeptics before. (For example, see here, here, here.) So far, we have largely found their claims wanting.

We have yet another occasion to examine their arguments, and once again we are underwhelmed and disappointed. We recently posted an essay at AEI’s Tech Policy Daily prompted by an odd report recently released by the Mercatus Center, a free-market think tank. The Mercatus report attacks recent research that supposedly asserts, in the words of the authors of the Mercatus report, that “the existence of intellectual property in an industry creates the jobs in that industry.” They contend that this research “provide[s] no theoretical or empirical evidence to support” its claims of the importance of intellectual property to the U.S. economy.

Our AEI essay responds to these claims by explaining how these IP skeptics both mischaracterize the studies that they are attacking and fail to acknowledge the actual historical and economic evidence on the connections between IP, innovation, and economic prosperity. We recommend that anyone who may be confused by the assertions of any IP skeptics waving the banner of property rights and the free market read our essay at AEI, as well as our previous essays in which we have called out similarly odd statements from Mercatus about IP rights.

The Mercatus report, though, exemplifies many of the concerns we raise about these IP skeptics, and so it deserves to be considered at greater length.

For instance, something we touched on briefly in our AEI essay is the fact that the authors of this Mercatus report offer no empirical evidence of their own within their lengthy critique of several empirical studies, and at best they invoke thin theoretical support for their contentions.

This is odd if only because they are critiquing several empirical studies that develop careful, balanced and rigorous models for testing one of the biggest economic questions in innovation policy: What is the relationship between intellectual property and jobs and economic growth?

Apparently, the authors of the Mercatus report presume that the burden of proof is entirely on the proponents of IP, and that a bit of hand waving using abstract economic concepts and generalized theory is enough to defeat arguments supported by empirical data and plausible methodology.

This move raises a foundational question that frames all debates about IP rights today: On whom should the burden rest? On those who claim that IP has beneficial economic effects? Or on those who claim otherwise, such as the authors of the Mercatus report?

The burden of proof here is an important issue. Too often, recent debates about IP rights have started from an assumption that the entire burden of proof rests on those investigating or defending IP rights. Quite often, IP skeptics appear to believe that their criticism of IP rights needs little empirical or theoretical validation, beyond talismanic invocations of “monopoly” and anachronistic assertions that the Framers of the US Constitution were utilitarians.

As we detail in our AEI essay, though, the problem with arguments like those made in the Mercatus report is that they contradict history and empirics. For the evidence that supports this claim, including citations to the many studies that are ignored by the IP skeptics at Mercatus and elsewhere, check out the essay.

Despite these historical and economic facts, one may still believe that the US would enjoy even greater prosperity without IP. But IP skeptics who believe in this counterfactual world face a challenge. As a preliminary matter, they ought to acknowledge that they are the ones swimming against the tide of history and prevailing belief. More important, the burden of proof is on them – the IP skeptics – to explain why the U.S. has long prospered under an IP system they find so odious and destructive of property rights and economic progress, while countries that largely eschew IP have languished. This obligation is especially heavy for one who seeks to undermine empirical work such as the USPTO Report and other studies.

In sum, you can’t beat something with nothing. For IP skeptics to contest this evidence, they should offer more than polemical and theoretical broadsides. They ought to stop making faux originalist arguments that misstate basic legal facts about property and IP, and instead offer their own empirical evidence. The Mercatus report, however, is content to confine its empirics to critiques of others’ methodology – including claims their targets did not make.

For example, in addition to the several strawman attacks identified in our AEI essay, the Mercatus report constructs another strawman in its discussion of studies of copyright piracy done by Stephen Siwek for the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI). Mercatus inaccurately and unfairly implies that Siwek’s studies on the impact of piracy in film and music assumed that every copy pirated was a sale lost – this is known as “the substitution rate problem.” In fact, Siwek’s methodology tackled that exact problem.

IPI and Siwek never seem to get credit for this, but Siwek was careful to avoid the one-to-one substitution rate estimate that Mercatus and others foist on him and then critique as empirically unsound. If one actually reads his report, it is clear that Siwek assumes that bootleg physical copies resulted in a 65.7% substitution rate, while illegal downloads resulted in a 20% substitution rate. Siwek’s methodology anticipates and renders moot the critique that Mercatus makes anyway.

After mischaracterizing these studies and their claims, the Mercatus report goes further in attacking them as supporting advocacy on behalf of IP rights. Yes, the empirical results have been used by think tanks, trade associations and others to support advocacy on behalf of IP rights. But does that advocacy make the questions asked and resulting research invalid? IP skeptics would have trumpeted results showing that IP-intensive industries had a minimal economic impact, just as Mercatus policy analysts have done with alleged empirical claims about IP in other contexts. In fact, IP skeptics at free-market institutions repeatedly invoke studies in policy advocacy that allegedly show harm from patent litigation, despite these studies suffering from far worse problems than anything alleged in their critiques of the USPTO and other studies.

Finally, we noted in our AEI essay how it was odd to hear a well-known libertarian think tank like Mercatus advocate for more government-funded programs, such as direct grants or prizes, as viable alternatives to individual property rights secured to inventors and creators. There is even more economic work being done beyond the empirical studies we cited in our AEI essay on the critical role that property rights in innovation serve in a flourishing free market, as well as work on the economic benefits of IP rights over other governmental programs like prizes.

Today, we are in the midst of a full-blown moral panic about the alleged evils of IP. It’s alarming that libertarians – the very people who should be defending all property rights – have jumped on this populist bandwagon. Imagine if free market advocates at the turn of the Twentieth Century had asserted that there was no evidence that property rights had contributed to the Industrial Revolution. Imagine them joining in common cause with the populist Progressives to suppress the enforcement of private rights and the enjoyment of economic liberty. It’s a bizarre image, but we are seeing its modern-day equivalent, as these libertarians join the chorus of voices arguing against property and private ordering in markets for innovation and creativity.

It’s also disconcerting that Mercatus appears to abandon its exceptionally high standards for scholarly work-product when it comes to IP rights. Its economic analyses and policy briefs on such subjects as telecommunications regulation, financial and healthcare markets, and the regulatory state have rightly made Mercatus a respected free-market institution. It’s unfortunate that it has lent this justly earned prestige and legitimacy to stale and derivative arguments against property and private ordering in the innovation and creative industries. It’s time to embrace the sound evidence and back off the rhetoric.

Filed under: copyright, intellectual property, law and economics, patent Tagged: Chamber of Commerce, copyright, creativity, Dan Spulber, economic prosperity, economics, Eli Dourado, empirical study, ian robinson, innovation, Institute for Policy Innovation, Intellectual property, jobs, Mercatus Center, Patent, prizes, Stephen Siwek, trademark, USPTO

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Intellectual Property & Licensing

Swimming Against the Tide: The FTC’s Misguided Antagonism to Health Care Integration

TOTM There is a consensus in America that we need to control health care costs and improve the delivery of health care. After a long debate . . .

There is a consensus in America that we need to control health care costs and improve the delivery of health care. After a long debate on health care reform and careful scrutiny of health care markets, there seems to be agreement that the unintegrated, “siloed approach” to health care is inefficient, costly, and contrary to the goal of improving care. But some antitrust enforcers — most notably the FTC — are standing in the way.

Read the full piece here.

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Antitrust & Consumer Protection

New Paper on SSOs, SEP and Antitrust by Joanna Tsai & Joshua Wright

Popular Media An important new paper was recently posted to SSRN by Commissioner Joshua Wright and Joanna Tsai.  It addresses a very hot topic in the innovation industries: . . .

An important new paper was recently posted to SSRN by Commissioner Joshua Wright and Joanna Tsai.  It addresses a very hot topic in the innovation industries: the role of patented innovation in standard setting organizations (SSO), what are known as standard essential patents (SEP), and whether the nature of the contractual commitment that adheres to a SEP — specifically, a licensing commitment known by another acronym, FRAND (Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory) — represents a breakdown in private ordering in the efficient commercialization of new technology.  This is an important contribution to the growing literature on patented innovation and SSOs, if only due to the heightened interest in these issues by the FTC and the Antitrust Division at the DOJ.

http://ssrn.com/abstract=2467939.

“Standard Setting, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Role of Antitrust in Regulating Incomplete Contracts”

JOANNA TSAI, Government of the United States of America – Federal Trade Commission
Email:
JOSHUA D. WRIGHT, Federal Trade Commission, George Mason University School of Law
Email:

A large and growing number of regulators and academics, while recognizing the benefits of standardization, view skeptically the role standard setting organizations (SSOs) play in facilitating standardization and commercialization of intellectual property rights (IPRs). Competition agencies and commentators suggest specific changes to current SSO IPR policies to reduce incompleteness and favor an expanded role for antitrust law in deterring patent holdup. These criticisms and policy proposals are based upon the premise that the incompleteness of SSO contracts is inefficient and the result of market failure rather than an efficient outcome reflecting the costs and benefits of adding greater specificity to SSO contracts and emerging from a competitive contracting environment. We explore conceptually and empirically that presumption. We also document and analyze changes to eleven SSO IPR policies over time. We find that SSOs and their IPR policies appear to be responsive to changes in perceived patent holdup risks and other factors. We find the SSOs’ responses to these changes are varied across SSOs, and that contractual incompleteness and ambiguity for certain terms persist both across SSOs and over time, despite many revisions and improvements to IPR policies. We interpret this evidence as consistent with a competitive contracting process. We conclude by exploring the implications of these findings for identifying the appropriate role of antitrust law in governing ex post opportunism in the SSO setting.

Filed under: antitrust, contracts, doj, federal trade commission, intellectual property, licensing, markets, patent, SSRN, technology Tagged: ETSI, FRAND, high tech, IEEE, Joanna Tsai, joshua wright, licensing, Patent, patent holdup, SEP, SSO, standards

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Antitrust & Consumer Protection

Microsoft’s Android Anathema

Popular Media Microsoft wants you to believe that Google’s business practices stifle competition and harm consumers. Again. The latest volley in its tiresome and ironic campaign to bludgeon . . .

Microsoft wants you to believe that Google’s business practices stifle competition and harm consumers. Again.

The latest volley in its tiresome and ironic campaign to bludgeon Google with the same regulatory club once used against Microsoft itself is the company’s effort to foment an Android-related antitrust case in Europe.

In a recent polemicMicrosoft consultant (and business school professor) Ben Edelman denounces Google for requiring that, if device manufacturers want to pre-install key Google apps on Android devices, they “must install all the apps Google specifies, with the prominence Google requires, including setting these apps as defaults where Google instructs.” Edelman trots out gasp-worthy “secret” licensing agreements that he claims support his allegation (more on this later).

Similarly, a recent Wall Street Journal article, “Android’s ‘Open’ System Has Limits,” cites Edelman’s claim that limits on the licensing of Google’s proprietary apps mean that the Android operating system isn’t truly open source and comes with “strings attached.”

In fact, along with the Microsoft-funded trade organization FairSearch, Edelman has gone so far as to charge that this “tying” constitutes an antitrust violation. It is this claim that Microsoft and a network of proxies brought to the Commission when their efforts to manufacture a search-neutrality-based competition case against Google failed.

But before getting too caught up in the latest round of anti-Google hysteria, it’s worth noting that the Federal Trade Commission has already reviewed these claims. After a thorough, two-year inquiry, the FTC found the antitrust arguments against Google to be without merit. The South Korea Fair Trade Commission conducted its own two year investigation into Google’s Android business practices and dismissed the claims before it as meritless, as well.

Taking on Edelman and FairSearch with an exhaustive scholarly analysis, German law professor Torsten Koerber recently assessed the nature of competition among mobile operating systems and concluded that:

(T)he (EU) Fairsearch complaint ultimately does not aim to protect competition or consumers, as it pretends to. It rather strives to shelter Microsoft from competition by abusing competition law to attack Google’s business model and subvert competition.

It’s time to take a step back and consider the real issues at play.

In order to argue that Google has an iron grip on Android, Edelman’s analysis relies heavily on ”secret” Google licensing agreements — “MADAs” (Mobile Application Distribution Agreements) — trotted out with such fanfare one might think it was the first time two companies ever had a written contract (or tried to keep it confidential).

For Edelman, these agreements “suppress competition” with “no plausible pro-consumer benefits.” He writes, “I see no way to reconcile the MADA restrictions with [Android openness].”

Conveniently, however, Edelman neglects to cite to Section 2.6 of the MADA:

The parties will create an open environment for the Devices by making all Android Products and Android Application Programming Interfaces available and open on the Devices and will take no action to limit or restrict the Android platform.

Professor Korber’s analysis provides a straight-forward explanation of the relationship between Android and its OEM licensees:

Google offers Android to OEMs on a royalty-free basis. The licensees are free to download, distribute and even modify the Android code as they like. OEMs can create mobile devices that run “pure” Android…or they can apply their own user interfaces (IO) and thereby hide most of the underlying Android system (e.g. Samsung’s “TouchWiz” or HTC’s “Sense”). OEMs make ample use of this option.

The truth is that the Android operating system remains, as ever, definitively open source — but Android’s openness isn’t really what the fuss is about. In this case, the confusion (or obfuscation) stems from the casual confounding of Google Apps with the Android Operating System. As we’ll see, they aren’t the same thing.

Consider Amazon, which pre-loads no Google applications at all on its Kindle Fire and Fire Phone. Amazon’s version of Android uses Microsoft’s Bing as the default search engineNokia provides mapping services, and the app store is Amazon’s own.

Still, Microsoft’s apologists continue to claim that Android licensees can’t choose to opt out of Google’s applications suite — even though, according to a new report from ABI Research, 20 percent of smartphones shipped between May and July 2014 were based on a “Google-less” version of the Android OS. And that number is consistently increasing: Analysts predict that by 2015, 30 percent of Android phones won’t access Google Services.

It’s true that equipment manufacturers who choose the Android operating system have the option to include the suite of integrated, proprietary Google apps and services licensed (royalty-free) under the name Google Mobile Services (GMS). GMS includes Google Search, Maps, Calendar, YouTube and other apps that together define the “Google Android experience” that users know and love.

But Google Android is far from the only Android experience.

Even if a manufacturer chooses to license Google’s apps suite, Google’s terms are not exclusive. Handset makers are free to install competing applications, including other search engines, map applications or app stores.

Although Google requires that Google Search be made easily accessible (hardly a bad thing for consumers, as it is Google Search that finances the development and maintenance of all of the other (free) apps from which Google otherwise earns little to no revenue), OEMs and users alike can (and do) easily install and access other search engines in numerous ways. As Professor Korber notes:

The standard MADA does not entail any exclusivity for Google Search nor does it mandate a search default for the web browser.

Regardless, integrating key Google apps (like Google Search and YouTube) with other apps the company offers (like Gmail and Google+) is an antitrust problem only if it significantly forecloses competitors from these apps’ markets compared to a world without integrated Google apps, and without pro-competitive justification. Neither is true, despite the unsubstantiated claims to the contrary from Edelman, FairSearch and others.

Consumers and developers expect and demand consistency across devices so they know what they’re getting and don’t have to re-learn basic functions or program multiple versions of the same application. Indeed, Apple’s devices are popular in part because Apple’s closed iOS provides a predictable, seamless experience for users and developers.

But making Android competitive with its tightly controlled competitors requires special efforts from Google to maintain a uniform and consistent experience for users. Google has tried to achieve this uniformity by increasingly disentangling its apps from the operating system (the opposite of tying) and giving OEMs the option (but not the requirement) of licensing GMS — a “suite” of technically integrated Google applications (integrated with each other, not the OS).  Devices with these proprietary apps thus ensure that both consumers and developers know what they’re getting.

Unlike Android, Apple prohibits modifications of its operating system by downstream partners and users, and completely controls the pre-installation of apps on iOS devices. It deeply integrates applications into iOS, including Apple Maps, iTunes, Siri, Safari, its App Store and others. Microsoft has copied Apple’s model to a large degree, hard-coding its own applications (including Bing, Windows Store, Skype, Internet Explorer, Bing Maps and Office) into the Windows Phone operating system.

In the service of creating and maintaining a competitive platform, each of these closed OS’s bakes into its operating system significant limitations on which third-party apps can be installed and what they can (and can’t) do. For example, neither platform permits installation of a third-party app store, and neither can be significantly customized. Apple’s iOS also prohibits users from changing default applications — although the soon-to-be released iOS 8 appears to be somewhat more flexible than previous versions.

In addition to pre-installing a raft of their own apps and limiting installation of other apps, both Apple and Microsoft enable greater functionality for their own apps than they do the third-party apps they allow.

For example, Apple doesn’t make available for other browsers (like Google’s Chrome) all the JavaScript functionality that it does for Safari, and it requires other browsers to use iOS Webkit instead of their own web engines. As a result there are things that Chrome can’t do on iOS that Safari and only Safari can do, and Chrome itself is hamstrung in implementing its own software on iOS. This approach has led Mozilla to refuse to offer its popular Firefox browser for iOS devices (while it has no such reluctance about offering it on Android).

On Windows Phone, meanwhile, Bing is integrated into the OS and can’t be removed. Only in markets where Bing is not supported (and with Microsoft’s prior approval) can OEMs change the default search app from Bing. While it was once possible to change the default search engine that opens in Internet Explorer (although never from the hardware search button), the Windows 8.1 Hardware Development Notes, updated July 22, 2014, state:

By default, the only search provider included on the phone is Bing. The search provider used in the browser is always the same as the one launched by the hardware search button.

Both Apple iOS and Windows Phone tightly control the ability to use non-default apps to open intents sent from other apps and, in Windows especially, often these linkages can’t be changed.

As a result of these sorts of policies, maintaining the integrity — and thus the brand — of the platform is (relatively) easy for closed systems. While plenty of browsers are perfectly capable of answering an intent to open a web page, Windows Phone can better ensure a consistent and reliable experience by forcing Internet Explorer to handle the operation.

By comparison, Android, with or without Google Mobile Services, is dramatically more open, more flexible and customizable, and more amenable to third-party competition. Even the APIs that it uses to integrate its apps are open to all developers, ensuring that there is nothing that Google apps are able to do that non-Google apps with the same functionality are prevented from doing.

In other words, not just Gmail, but any email app is permitted to handle requests from any other app to send emails; not just Google Calendar but any calendar app is permitted to handle requests from any other app to accept invitations.

In no small part because of this openness and flexibility, current reports indicate that Android OS runs 85 percent of mobile devices worldwide. But it is OEM giant Samsung, not Google, that dominates the market, with a 65 percent share of all Android devices. Competition is rife, however, especially in emerging markets. In fact, according to one report, “Chinese and Indian vendors accounted for the majority of smartphone shipments for the first time with a 51% share” in 2Q 2014.

As he has not been in the past, Edelman is at least nominally circumspect in his unsubstantiated legal conclusions about Android’s anticompetitive effect:

Applicable antitrust law can be complicated: Some ties yield useful efficiencies, and not all ties reduce welfare.

Given Edelman’s connections to Microsoft and the realities of the market he is discussing, it could hardly be otherwise. If every integration were an antitrust violation, every element of every operating system — including Apple’s iOS as well as every variant of Microsoft’s Windows — should arguably be the subject of a government investigation.

In truth, Google has done nothing more than ensure that its own suite of apps functions on top of Android to maintain what Google sees as seamless interconnectivity, a high-quality experience for users, and consistency for application developers — while still allowing handset manufacturers room to innovate in a way that is impossible on other platforms. This is the very definition of pro-competitive, and ultimately this is what allows the platform as a whole to compete against its far more vertically integrated alternatives.

Which brings us back to Microsoft. On the conclusion of the FTC investigation in January 2013, a GigaOm exposé on the case had this to say:

Critics who say Google is too powerful have nagged the government for years to regulate the company’s search listings. But today the critics came up dry….

The biggest loser is Microsoft, which funded a long-running cloak-and-dagger lobbying campaign to convince the public and government that its arch-enemy had to be regulated….

The FTC is also a loser because it ran a high profile two-year investigation but came up dry.

EU regulators, take note.

Filed under: antitrust, contracts, exclusionary conduct, google, law and economics, monopolization, technology, tying, tying Tagged: Android, antitrust, Apple, competition, google, Google Apps, iOS, Kindle Fire, microsoft, Samsung, tying, Windows Phone

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Antitrust & Consumer Protection

Beneficence Is Beside the Point: The Antitrust Realities of the Comcast/Time Warner Cable Merger

Popular Media While the Comcast/TWC merger is significant in size, it doesn’t give rise to any plausible theory of anticompetitive harm under modern antitrust analysis. Comcast and . . .

While the Comcast/TWC merger is significant in size, it doesn’t give rise to any plausible theory of anticompetitive harm under modern antitrust analysis.

Comcast and TWC don’t compete directly for subscribers in any relevant market; in terms of concentration and horizontal effects, the transaction will neither reduce competition nor restrict consumer choice.

Critics repeatedly assert that the combined entity will gain bargaining leverage against content providers from the merger, resulting in lower content prices to programmers. But after the transaction, Comcast will serve fewer than 30 percent of total MVPD subscribers — a share insufficient to give it market power over sellers of video programming. Moreover, recent exponential growth in OVDs gives content providers even more ways to distribute their programming. Programmers with valuable content have significant bargaining power, and have been able to extract the prices to prove it.

The argument that the merger will increase Comcast’s incentive and ability to impair online video content or other edge providers is similarly without merit. On a national level, the combined firm would have only about 40 percent of broadband customers, at most. This leaves at least 60 percent of customers available to purchase content and support edge providers reaching minimum viable scale, even if Comcast were to attempt to foreclose access.

Some have also argued that because Comcast has a monopoly on access to its customers, transit providers are beholden to it. But edge providers can access Comcast’s network through multiple channels, undermining Comcast’s ability to deny access or degrade service to such providers.

Finally, critics have alleged that the vertically integrated Comcast may withhold its content from MVPDs or OVDs, or deny carriage to unaffiliated programming. But the transaction has no effect on Comcast’s share of national programming, and a trivial effect on its share of national distribution. Comcast already has no ownership interest in the overwhelming majority of content it distributes. This will not measurably change post-transaction.

At the same time, the transaction will bring significant scale efficiencies in a marketplace that requires large, fixed-cost investments in network infrastructure and technology. And bringing a more vertical structure to TWC will likely be beneficial, as well.

Download: Beneficence Is Beside the Point

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Antitrust & Consumer Protection

Teslas’s New Patent Policy: Long Live the Patent System!

Popular Media [First posted to the CPIP Blog on June 17, 2014] Last Thursday, Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of Tesla Motors, issued an announcement on . . .

[First posted to the CPIP Blog on June 17, 2014]

Last Thursday, Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of Tesla Motors, issued an announcement on the company’s blog with a catchy title: “All Our Patent Are Belong to You.” Commentary in social media and on blogs, as well as in traditional newspapers, jumped to the conclusion that Tesla is abandoning its patents and making them “freely” available to the public for whomever wants to use them. As with all things involving patented innovation these days, the reality of Tesla’s new patent policy does not match the PR spin or the buzz on the Internet.

The reality is that Tesla is not disclaiming its patent rights, despite Musk’s title to his announcement or his invocation in his announcement of the tread-worn cliché today that patents impede innovation. In fact, Tesla’s new policy is an example of Musk exercising patent rights, not abandoning them.

If you’re not puzzled by Tesla’s announcement, you should be. This is because patents are a type of property right that secures the exclusive rights to make, use, or sell an invention for a limited period of time. These rights do not come cheap — inventions cost time, effort, and money to create and companies like Tesla then exploit these property rights in spending even more time, effort and money in converting inventions into viable commercial products and services sold in the marketplace. Thus, if Tesla’s intention is to make its ideas available for public use, why, one may wonder, did it bother to expend the tremendous resources in acquiring the patents in the first place?

The key to understanding this important question lies in a single phrase in Musk’s announcement that almost everyone has failed to notice: “Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.” (emphasis added)

What does “in good faith” mean in this context? Fortunately, one intrepid reporter at the L.A. Times asked this question, and the answer from Musk makes clear that this new policy is not an abandonment of patent rights in favor of some fuzzy notion of the public domain, but rather it’s an exercise of his company’s patent rights: “Tesla will allow other manufacturers to use its patents in “good faith” – essentially barring those users from filing patent-infringement lawsuits against [Tesla] or trying to produce knockoffs of Tesla’s cars.” In the legalese known to patent lawyers and inventors the world over, this is not an abandonment of Tesla’s patents, this is what is known as a cross license.

In plain English, here’s the deal that Tesla is offering to manufacturers and users of its electrical car technology: in exchange for using Tesla’s patents, the users of Tesla’s patents cannot file patent infringement lawsuits against Tesla if Tesla uses their other patents. In other words, this is a classic deal made between businesses all of the time — you can use my property and I can use your property, and we cannot sue each other. It’s a similar deal to that made between two neighbors who agree to permit each other to cross each other’s backyard. In the context of patented innovation, this agreement is more complicated, but it is in principle the same thing: if automobile manufacturer X decides to use Tesla’s patents, and Tesla begins infringing X’s patents on other technology, then X has agreed through its prior use of Tesla’s patents that it cannot sue Tesla. Thus, each party has licensed the other to make, use and sell their respective patented technologies; in patent law parlance, it’s a “cross license.”

The only thing unique about this cross licensing offer is that Tesla publicly announced it as an open offer for anyone willing to accept it. This is not a patent “free for all,” and it certainly is not tantamount to Tesla “taking down the patent wall.” These are catchy sound bites, but they in fact obfuscate the clear business-minded nature of this commercial decision.

For anyone perhaps still doubting what is happening here, the same L.A Times story further confirms that Tesla is not abandoning the patent system. As stated to the reporter: “Tesla will continue to seek patents for its new technology to prevent others from poaching its advancements.” So much for the much ballyhooed pronouncements last week of how Tesla’s new patent (licensing) policy “reminds us of the urgent need for patent reform”! Musk clearly believes that the patent system is working just great for the new technological innovation his engineers are creating at Tesla right now.

For those working in the innovation industries, Tesla’s decision to cross license its old patents makes sense. Tesla Motors has already extracted much of the value from these old patents: Musk was able to secure venture capital funding for his startup company and he was able to secure for Tesla a dominant position in the electrical car market through his exclusive use of this patented innovation. (Venture capitalists consistently rely on patents in making investment decisions, and for anyone who doubts this need to watch only a few episodes of Shark Tank.) Now that everyone associates radical, cutting-edge innovation with Tesla, Musk can shift in his strategic use of his company’s assets, including his intellectual property rights, such as relying more heavily on the goodwill associated with the Tesla trademark. This is clear, for instance, from the statement to the LA Times that companies or individuals agreeing to the “good faith” terms of Tesla’s license agree not to make “knockoffs of Tesla’s cars.”

There are other equally important commercial reasons for Tesla adopting its new cross-licensing policy, but the point has been made. Tesla’s new cross-licensing policy for its old patents is not Musk embracing “the open source philosophy” (as he asserts in his announcement). This may make good PR given the overheated rhetoric today about the so-called “broken patent system,” but it’s time people recognize the difference between PR and a reasonable business decision that reflects a company that has used (old) patents to acquire a dominant market position and is now changing its business model given these successful developments.

At a minimum, people should recognize that Tesla is not declaring that it will not bring patent infringement lawsuits, but only that it will not sue people with whom it has licensed its patented innovation. This is not, contrary to one law professor’s statement, a company “refrain[ing] from exercising their patent rights to the fullest extent of the law.” In licensing its patented technology, Tesla is in fact exercising its patent rights to the fullest extent of the law, and that is exactly what the patent system promotes in the myriad business models and innovative

Filed under: intellectual property, licensing, litigation, patent Tagged: Elon Musk, innovation, open source, Patent, patent enforcement, Patent infringement, patent licensing, patent reform, Patents, property rights, Tesla

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Intellectual Property & Licensing

Highlights from Josh Wright’s Interview in The Antitrust Source

Popular Media Anyone interested in antitrust enforcement policy (and what TOTM reader isn’t?) should read FTC Commissioner Josh Wright’s interview in the latest issue of The Antitrust . . .

Anyone interested in antitrust enforcement policy (and what TOTM reader isn’t?) should read FTC Commissioner Josh Wright’s interview in the latest issue of The Antitrust Source.  The extensive (22 page!) interview covers a number of topics and demonstrates the positive influence Commissioner Wright is having on antitrust enforcement and competition policy in general.

Commissioner Wright’s consistent concern with minimizing error costs will come as no surprise to TOTM regulars.  Here are a few related themes emphasized in the interview:

A commitment to evidence-based antitrust.

Asked about his prior writings on the superiority of “evidence-based” antitrust analysis, Commissioner Wright explains the concept as follows:

The central idea is to wherever possible shift away from casual empiricism and intuitions as the basis for decision-making and instead commit seriously to the decision-theoretic framework applied to minimize the costs of erroneous enforcement and policy decisions and powered by the best available theory and evidence.

This means, of course, that discrete enforcement decisions – should we bring a challenge or not? – should be based on the best available empirical evidence about the effects of the practice or transaction at issue. But it also encompasses a commitment to design institutions and structure liability rules on the basis of the best available evidence concerning a practice’s tendency to occasion procompetitive or anticompetitive effects. As Wright explains:

Evidence-based antitrust encompasses a commitment to using the best available economic theory and empirical evidence to make [a discrete enforcement] decision; but it also stands for a much broader commitment to structuring antitrust enforcement and policy decision-making. For example, evidence-based antitrust is a commitment that would require an enforcement agency seeking to design its policy with respect to a particular set of business arrangements – loyalty discounts, for example – to rely upon the existing theory and empirical evidence in calibrating that policy.

Of course, if the FTC is committed to evidence-based antitrust policy, then it will utilize its institutional advantages to enhance the empirical record on practices whose effects are unclear. Thus, Commissioner Wright lauds the FTC’s study of – rather than preemptive action against – patent assertion entities, calling it “precisely the type of activity that the FTC is well-suited to do.”

A commitment to evidence-based antitrust also means that the agency shouldn’t get ahead of itself in restricting conduct with known consumer benefits and only theoretical (i.e., not empirically established) harms. Accordingly, Commissioner Wright says he “divorced [him]self from a number of recommendations” in the FTC’s recent data broker report:

For the majority of these other recommendations [beyond basic disclosure requirements], I simply do not think that we have any evidence that the benefits from Congress adopting those recommendations would exceed the costs. … I would need to have some confidence based on evidence, especially about an area where evidence is scarce. I’m not comfortable relying on my priors about these activities, especially when confronted by something new that could be beneficial. … The danger would be that we recommend actions that either chill some of the beneficial activity the data brokers engage in or just impose compliance costs that we all recognize get passed on to consumers.

Similarly, Commissioner Wright has opposed “fencing-in” relief in consent decrees absent evidence that the practice being restricted threatens more harm than good. As an example, he points to the consent decree in the Graco case, which we discussed here:

Graco employed exclusive dealing contracts, but we did not allege that the exclusive dealing contracts violated the antitrust laws or Section 5. However, as fencing-in relief for the consummated merger, the consent included prohibitions on exclusive dealing and loyalty discounts despite there being no evidence that the firm had employed either of those tactics to anticompetitive ends. When an FTC settlement bans a form of discounting as standard injunctive relief in a merger case without convincing evidence that the discounts themselves were a competitive problem, it raises significant concerns.

A commitment to clear enforcement principles.

At several points throughout the interview, Commissioner Wright emphasizes the value of articulating clear principles that can guide business planners’ behavior. But he’s not calling for a bunch of ex ante liability rules. The old per se rule against minimum resale price maintenance, for example, was clear – and bad! Embracing overly broad liability rules for the sake of clarity is inconsistent with the evidence-based, decision-theoretic approach Commissioner Wright prefers. The clarity he is advocating, then, is clarity on broad principles that will govern enforcement decisions.  He thus reiterates his call for a formal policy statement defining the Commission’s authority to prosecute unfair methods of competition under Section 5 of the FTC Act.  (TOTM hosted a blog symposium on that topic last summer.)  Wright also suggests that the Commission should “synthesize and offer high-level principles that would provide additional guidance” on how the Commission will use its Section 5 authority to address data security matters.

Extension, not extraction, should be the touchstone for Section 2 liability.

When asked about his prior criticism of FTC actions based on alleged violations of licensing commitments to standards development organizations (e.g., N-Data), Commissioner Wright emphasized that there should be no Section 2 liability in such cases, or similar cases involving alleged patent hold-up, absent an extension of monopoly power. In other words, it is not enough to show that the alleged bad act resulted in higher prices; it must also have led to the creation, maintenance, or enhancement of monopoly power.  Wright explains:

The logic is relatively straightforward. The antitrust laws do not apply to all increases of price. The Sherman Act is not a price regulation statute. The antitrust laws govern the competitive process. The Supreme Court said in Trinko that a lawful monopolist is allowed to charge the monopoly price. In NYNEX, the Supreme Court held that even if that monopolist raises its price through bad conduct, so long as that bad conduct does not harm the competitive process, it does not violate the antitrust laws. The bad conduct may violate other laws. It may be a fraud problem, it might violate regulatory rules, it may violate all sorts of other areas of law. In the patent context, it might give rise to doctrines like equitable estoppel. But it is not an antitrust problem; antitrust cannot be the hammer for each and every one of the nails that implicate price changes.

In my view, the appropriate way to deal with patent holdup cases is to require what we require for all Section 2 cases. We do not need special antitrust rules for patent holdup; much less for patent assertion entities. The rule is simply that the plaintiff must demonstrate that the conduct results in the acquisition of market power, not merely the ability to extract existing monopoly rents. … That distinction between extracting lawfully acquired and existing monopoly rents and acquiring by unlawful conduct additional monopoly power is one that has run through Section 2 jurisprudence for quite some time.

In light of these remarks (which remind me of this excellent piece by Dennis Carlton and Ken Heyer), it is not surprising that Commissioner Wright also hopes and believes that the Roberts Court will overrule Jefferson Parish’s quasi-per se rule against tying. As Einer Elhauge has observed, that rule might make sense if the mere extraction of monopoly profits (via metering price discrimination or Loew’s-type bundling) was an “anticompetitive” effect of tying.  If, however, anticompetitive harm requires extension of monopoly power, as Wright contends, then a tie-in cannot be anticompetitive unless it results in substantial foreclosure of the tied product market, a necessary prerequisite for a tie-in to enhance market power in the tied or tying markets.  That means tying should not be evaluated under the quasi-per se rule but should instead be subject to a rule of reason similar to that governing exclusive dealing (i.e., some sort of “qualitative foreclosure” approach).  (I explain this point in great detail here.)

Optimal does not mean perfect.

Commissioner Wright makes this point in response to a question about whether the government should encourage “standards development organizations to provide greater clarity to their intellectual property policies to reduce the likelihood of holdup or other concerns.”  While Wright acknowledges that “more complete, more precise contracts” could limit the problem of patent holdup, he observes that there is a cost to greater precision and completeness and that the parties to these contracts already have an incentive to put the optimal amount of effort into minimizing the cost of holdup. He explains:

[M]inimizing the probability of holdup does not mean that it is zero. Holdup can happen. It will happen. It will be observed in the wild from time to time, and there is again an important question about whether antitrust has any role to play there. My answer to that question is yes in the case of deception that results in market power. Otherwise, we ought to leave the governance of what amount to contracts between SSO and their members to contract law and in some cases to patent doctrines like equitable estoppel that can be helpful in governing holdup.

…[I]t is quite an odd thing for an agency to be going out and giving advice to sophisticated parties on how to design their contracts. Perhaps I would be more comfortable if there were convincing and systematic evidence that the contracts were the result of market failure. But there is not such evidence.

Consumer welfare is the touchstone.

When asked whether “there [are] circumstances where non-competition concerns, such as privacy, should play a role in merger analysis,” Commissioner Wright is unwavering:

No. I think that there is a great danger when we allow competition law to be unmoored from its relatively narrow focus upon consumer welfare. It is the connection between the law and consumer welfare that allows antitrust to harness the power of economic theory and empirical methodologies. All of the gains that antitrust law and policy as a body have earned over the past fifty or sixty years have been from becoming more closely tethered to industrial organization economics, more closely integrating economic thought in the law, and in agency discretion and decision-making. I think that the tight link between the consumer welfare standard and antitrust law is what has allowed such remarkable improvements in what effectively amounts to a body of common law.

Calls to incorporate non-economic concerns into antitrust analysis, I think, threaten to undo some, if not all, of that progress. Antitrust law and enforcement in the United States has some experience with trying to incorporate various non-economic concerns, including the welfare of small dealers and worthy men and so forth. The results of the experiment were not good for consumers and did not generate sound antitrust policy. It is widely understood and recognized why that is the case.

***

Those are just some highlights. There’s lots more in the interview—in particular, some good stuff on the role of efficiencies in FTC investigations, the diverging standards for the FTC and DOJ to obtain injunctions against unconsummated mergers, and the proper way to analyze reverse payment settlements.  Do read the whole thing.  If you’re like me, it may make you feel a little more affinity for Mitch McConnell.

Filed under: antitrust, error costs, federal trade commission, section 5

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Antitrust & Consumer Protection

Comments, Big Data and Consumer Privacy in the Internet Economy

Regulatory Comments "...A serious assessment of the need for new privacy legislation, and the right way to frame it, would not begin by assuming the premise that a particular framework is necessary..."

Summary

“…A serious assessment of the need for new privacy legislation, and the right way to frame it, would not begin by assuming the premise that a particular framework is necessary.
Specifically, before recommending any new legislation, the NTIA should do – or ensure that someone does – what the Federal Trade Commission has steadfastly refused to do: carefully
assess what is and is not already covered by existing U.S. laws…”

“Existing laws might well be inadequate to deal with some of the specific the challenges raised by Big Data. But until they are more carefully examined, we will not know where the
gaps are. Even those who might insist that there would be no harm to redundancy should agree that we must learn from the lessons of past experience with these laws. Moreover, it
is essential to understand what existing law covers because either (a) it will co-exist with any future privacy law, in which case companies will have potentially conflicting…”

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Data Security & Privacy