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Aparticularly unsettling aspect of the FTC’s case against McWane is the complaint counsel’s heavy (and seemingly exclusive) reliance on structural factors to prove its case. The FTC has little or no direct evidence of price communications and no econometric evidence suggesting collusion, and has instead spent a good deal of time trying to show that the market is susceptible to collusion. What makes the FTC’s administrative case so unsettling is that the structural factors they rely on are true of any oligopoly and, in federal courts across the country, are insufficient as a matter of law to raise an inference of conspiracy.

Read the full piece here.

Two modest offices on the first floor of the FTC building are occupied by the FTC Administrative Law Judge and his staff.  Of all of the agencies with an ALJ, the FTC’s operation must be the smallest.  The ALJ handles only a handful of trials each year.  In the past, the FTC ALJ operation has gathered little to no attention.  But in recent years, with renewed focus on administrative litigation and tight litigation deadlines, FTC administrative litigation has become a rocket docket of sorts.

Read the full piece here.

Anyone familiar with the antitrust newstream realizes there is a tremendous amount of controversy about the Federal Trade Commission’s administrative litigation process. Unlike the Antitrust Division which fights its litigation battles in Federal Court, the FTC has a distinct home court advantage. FTC antitrust cases are typically litigated administratively with a trial conducted before an FTC administrative law judge, who issues an initial decision, followed with an appeal to the full Commission for a final decision. I have authored a couple of recent articles as have others that question the fairness of the FTC acting as both prosecutor and judge. These concerns have only been amplified since for the last 19 years the FTC has always found a violation of law. As one Congressman noted the FTC has “an unbeaten streak that Perry Mason would envy.”

Read the full piece here.

In our recent blog symposium on Section 5 of the FTC Act, Latham & Watkins partner Tad Lipsky exposed one of antitrust’s dark little secrets: Nobody really knows what Sherman Act Section 2 forbids.  The provision bans monopolization, attempted monopolization, and conspiracies to monopolize, and courts have articulated formal elements for each claim.  But the element common to the two unilateral offenses—“exclusionary conduct”—remains essentially undefined.  Lipsky writes:

123 years of Section 2 enforcement and the best our Supreme Court can do is the Grinnell standard, defining [exclusionary conduct] as the “willful acquisition or maintenance of [monopoly] power as distinguished from growth or development as a consequence of a superior product, business acumen, or historic accident.”  Is this Grinnell definition that much better than [Section 5’s reference to] “unfair methods of competition”?

No, it’s not.  Nor are any of the other commonly cited judicial definitions of exclusionary conduct, such as “competition not on the merits.”  As Einer Elhauge has observed, such judicial definitions are not just vague but vacuous.

This is problematic because business planners need clarity.  On some specific unilateral practices—straightforward price cuts and aggressive input-bidding, for example—courts have provided clear liability rules and safe harbors.  But in a dynamic economy, business people are constantly coming up with new ideas for sales-enhancing practices that might have the effect of disadvantaging rivals, of “excluding” them from the market.  Absent some general understanding of what constitutes an “unreasonably exclusionary” act, business people are likely to forego novel but efficient sales-enhancing practices, to the detriment of consumers.

In the last decade or so, commentators have proposed four generally applicable definitions of unreasonably exclusionary conduct.  Judge Posner suggested that such conduct be defined as acts that could exclude an “equally efficient rival” from the perpetrator’s market (the “EER” approach).  Post-Chicago theorists would equate unreasonably exclusionary conduct with unjustifiably “raising rivals’ costs” (the “RRC” approach).  The Areeda-Hovenkamp treatise prescribes a balancing of the “consumer welfare effects” resulting from the practice at issue (“CWE-balancing”).  And the U.S. Department of Justice has called for defining unreasonably exclusionary conduct as that which would make “no economic sense” apart from its tendency to enhance market power (the “NES” test, or “NEST”).

Each of these approaches, it turns out, is troubling.  The EER approach is underdeterrent in that it fails to condemn practices that cause rivals to be less efficient than the perpetrator.  The RRC, CWE-balancing, and NEST approaches turn out to be difficult to apply—and largely indeterminate—for any exclusion-causing conduct involving “degrees.” For example, a 15% loyalty rebate conditioned upon purchasing 70% of one’s requirements from the defendant requires a certain “degree” of loyalty and provides a certain “degree” of price reduction.  It might well turn out that some degree of required loyalty (e.g., the increment from 60% to 70%) or some degree of discount (e.g., the increment from 10% to 15%) either (1) raised rivals’ costs unjustifiably (RRC) or (2) created greater consumer harm than benefit (CWE-balancing) or (3) made no economic sense but for its ability to enhance market power (NEST).  Because the RRC, CWE-balancing, and NEST approaches appear to require marginal analysis of exclusion-causing conduct, they become fairly inadministrable and indeterminate when applied to conduct involving degrees, a category that includes most of the novel conduct for which a generally applicable exclusionary conduct definition would be useful.  Because they provide little guidance and no reliable safe harbors, the RRC, CWE-balancing, and NEST approaches are likely to overdeter efficient, but novel, business practices.

In light of these and other difficulties with the proposed exclusionary conduct definitions, a number of scholars now advocate abandoning the search for a generally applicable definition and applying different liability standards to different types of behavior.  Eschewal of universal standards, though, is also troubling.  To the extent non-universalists are saying that there is no single definition of unreasonably exclusionary conduct—no common thread that runs through all instances of unreasonable exclusion—their position seems to violate rule of law norms.  After all, the Court has told us that unreasonably exclusionary conduct is an element of monopolization and attempted monopolization.  That means that the exclusionary conduct component of all Section 2 offenses must share something in common; otherwise, the “element” would consist of a non-exhaustive menu of unrelated features and would cease to be an element.

A less extreme “non-universalist” approach would concede that there is a single definition of unreasonably exclusionary conduct—that which reduces overall consumer welfare—but hold that there should be no universal test for identifying when a particular practice runs afoul of the definition.  This more defensible position resembles “rule utilitarianism” in ethical theory.  Rule utilitarians concede that morality is ultimately concerned with utility-maximization, but they would judge the morality of any particular act not on the basis of its actual consequences but instead according to whether it complies with a rule selected to maximize utility.  Similarly, “soft” non-universalists would select liability tests for particular business practices on the basis of whether those tests maximize overall consumer welfare, but they would evaluate particular instances of exclusion-causing behavior on the basis of whether they comply with applicable liability tests, not whether they actually enhance consumer welfare.

Because it reduces to a version of CWE-balancing (though at the rule level rather than the act level), “soft” non-universalism is subject to the same criticisms as CWE-balancing in general: it is difficult to apply and indeterminate.  Indeed, under a soft non-universal approach, a business planner considering a novel but efficient exclusion-causing practice would first have to predict the liability rule a reviewing court would adopt for the practice under consideration and then apply that rule.  Talk about a lack of clarity and reliable safe harbors!

I have recently authored a paper that critiques the proposed definitions of unreasonably exclusionary conduct as well as the non-universalist approaches discussed above and, finding each position deficient, proposes an alternative approach.  My approach would deem conduct to be unreasonably exclusionary if it would likely exclude from the perpetrator’s market a “competitive rival,” defined as a rival that is both as determined as the perpetrator and capable, at minimum efficient scale, of matching the perpetrator’s efficiency.  This “exclusion of a competitive rival” approach, the paper demonstrates, identifies a common thread running through instances of unreasonable exclusion, comports with prevailing intuitions about what constitutes appropriate competition, generates clear guidance and reliable safe harbors, and would minimize the sum of decision and error costs resulting from monopolization doctrine.

A draft of the paper, which is slated to appear as an article in the North Carolina Law Review, is available on SSRN.  Please download, and let me know if you have any comments.

Filed under: antitrust, exclusionary conduct, law and economics, monopolization, regulation

In this posting, I sketch out a sensible limitation to the FTC’s Section 5 authority.   This domain should be narrow, focusing only on harmful conduct that but for the application of Section 5 would remain un-remedied.

As a threshold matter, the FTC explicitly should renounce its reliance on early Section 5 case law like S&H and Brown Shoe and write from a clean slate.  No serious antitrust enforcer today would consider challenging the conduct at issue in these cases, yet, in each of its recent standard-setting cases, the Commission dutifully invokes the language in S&H and Brown Shoe like a sacred talisman that will conjure the authority to act beyond the “letter and spirit of the antitrust laws.”   This dicta, however, comes from seriously outmoded cases. For example, S&H upheld the Commission’s challenge to the practice of preventing unauthorized green-stamp exchanges, and cited approvingly a Section 5 decision from 1934 that condemned the practice of selling penny candy to children in “break and take” packs, because “it tempted children to gamble and compelled those who would successful compete with Keppel to abandon their scruples by similarly tempting children.”

The FTC has long been on a quest to find the elusive species of conduct that Section 5 alone can tackle.  A series of early Supreme Court cases interpreting the FTC Act – the most recent and widely cited of which is more than forty years old (FTC v. Sperry & Hutchinson Co., 405 U.S. 233 (1972)) –appeared to grant the FTC wide ranging powers to condemn methods of competition as “unfair.”  A series of judicial setbacks in the 1980s and early 1990s, however, scaled back Section 5’s domain.

On July 10 a federal judge ruled that Apple violated antitrust law by conspiring to raise prices of e-books when it negotiated deals with five major publishers. I’ve written on the case and the issues involved in it several times, including here, here, here and here. The most recent of these was titled, “Why I think the government will have a tough time winning the Apple e-books antitrust case.” I’m hedging my bets with the title this time, but it’s fairly clear to me that the court got this case wrong.

The predominant sentiment among pundits following the decision seems to be approval (among authors, however, the response to the suit has been decidedly different). Supporters believe it will lower e-book prices and instigate a shift in the electronic publishing industry toward some more-preferred business model. This sort of reasoning is dangerous and inconsistent with principled, restrained antitrust. Neither the government nor its supporting commentators should use, or applaud the use, of antitrust to impose the government’s (or anyone else’s) preferred business model on industry. And lower prices in the short run, while often an indication of increased competition, are not, by themselves, sufficient to determine that a business model is efficient in the long run.

For example, in a recent article, Mark Lemley is quoted supporting the outcome, noting that it may spur a shift toward his preferred model of electronic publishing:

It also makes no sense that publishers, not authors, capture most of the revenue from e-books, when they do very little of the work. I understand why publishers are reluctant to give up their old business model, but if they want to survive in the digital world, it’s time to make some changes.

As noted, there is no basis for using antitrust enforcement to coerce an industry to shift to a particular distribution of profits simply because “it’s time to make some changes.” Lemley’s characterization of the market’s dynamics is also seriously lacking in economic grounding (and the Authors Guild response to the suit linked above suggests the same). The economics of entrepreneurship has an impressive intellectual pedigree that began with Frank Knight, was further developed by Joseph Schumpeter, Israel Kirzner and Harold Demsetz, among others, and continues to today with its inclusion as a factor of production. (On the development of this tradition and especially Harold Demsetz’s important contribution to it, see here). The implicit claim that publishers’ and authors’ interests (to say nothing of consumers’ interests) are simply at odds, and that the “right” distribution of profits would favor authors over publishers based on the amount of “work” they do is economically baseless. Although it is a common claim, reflecting either idiosyncratic preferences or ignorance about the role of content publishers and distributors in the e-book marketplace and the role of entrepreneurship more generally, it is nonetheless mistaken and has no place in a consumer-welfare-based assessment of the market or antitrust intervention in it.

It’s also utterly unclear how the antitrust suit would do anything to change the relative distribution of profits between publishers and authors. In fact, the availability of direct publishing (offered by both Amazon and Apple) is the most likely disruptor of that dynamic, and authors could only be helped by an increase in competition among platforms—in other words, by Apple’s successful entry into the market.

Apple entered the e-books market as a relatively small upstart battling a dominant incumbent. That it did so by offering publishers (suppliers) attractive terms to deal with its new iBookstore is no different than a new competitor in any industry offering novel products or loss-leader prices to attract customers and build market share. When new entry then induces an industry-wide shift toward the new entrants’ products, prices or business model it’s usually called “competition,” and lauded as the aim of properly functioning markets. The same should be true here.

Despite the court’s claim that

there is overwhelming evidence that the Publisher Defendants joined with each other in a horizontal price-fixing conspiracy,

that evidence is actually extremely weak. What is unclear is why the publishers would need a conspiracy when they rarely compete against each other directly.

The court states that

To protect their then-existing business model, the Publisher Defendants agreed to raise the prices of e-books by taking control of retail pricing.

But despite the use of the antitrust trigger-words, “agreed to raise prices,” this agreement is not remotely clear, and rests entirely on circumstantial evidence (more on this later). None of the evidence suggests actual agreement over price, and none of the evidence demonstrates conclusively any real incentive for the publishers to reach “agreement” at all. In actuality, publishers rarely compete against each other directly (least of all on price); instead, for each individual publisher (and really for each individual title), the most relevant competition for this case is between the e-book version of a particular title and its physical counterpart. In this situation it should matter little to any particular e-book’s sales whether every other e-book in the world is sold at the same price or even a lower price.

While the opinion asserts that each publisher

could also expect to lose substantial sales if they unilaterally raised the prices of their own e-books and none of their competitors followed suit,

it also states that

there is no evidence that the Publisher Defendants have ever competed with each other on price. To the contrary, several of the Publishers’ CEOs explained that they have not competed with each other on that basis.

These statements are difficult to reconcile, but the evidence supports the latter statement, not the former.

The only explanation offered by the court for the publishers’ alleged need for concerted action is an ambiguous claim that Amazon would capitulate in shifting to the agency model only if every publisher pressured it to do so simultaneously. The court claims that

if the Publisher Defendants were going to take control of e-book pricing and move the price point above $9.99, they needed to act collectively; any other course would leave an individual Publisher vulnerable to retaliation from Amazon.

But it’s not clear why this would be so.

On the one hand, if Apple really were the electronic publishing juggernaut implied by this antitrust action, this concern should be minimal: Publishers wouldn’t need Amazon and could simply sell their e-books through Apple’s iBookstore. In this case the threat of even any individual publisher’s “retaliation” against Amazon (decamping to Apple) would suffice to shift relative bargaining power between the publishers and Amazon, and concerted action wouldn’t be necessary. On this theory, the fact that it was only after Apple’s entry that Amazon agreed to shift to the agency model—a fact cited by the court many times to support its conclusions—is utterly unremarkable.

That prices may have shifted as well is equally unremarkable: The agency model puts pricing decisions in publishers’ hands (who, as I’ve previously discussed, have very different incentives than Amazon) where before Amazon had control over prices. Moreover, even when Apple presented evidence that average e-book prices actually fell after its entrance into the market, the court demanded that Apple prove a causal relationship between its entrance and lower overall prices. (Even the DOJ’s own evidence shows, at worst, little change in price, despite its heated claims to the contrary.) But the burden of proof in such cases rests with the government to prove that Apple caused prices to rise, not for Apple to explain why they fell.

On the other hand, if the loss of Amazon as a retail outlet were really so significant for publishers, Apple’s ability to function as the lynchpin of the alleged conspiracy is seriously questionable. While the agency model coupled with the persistence of $9.99 pricing by Amazon would seem to mean reduced revenue for publishers on each book sold through Apple’s store, the relatively trivial number of Apple sales compared with Amazon’s, particularly at the outset, would be of little concern to publishers, and thus to Amazon. In this case it is difficult to believe that publishers would threaten their relationships with Amazon for the sake of preserving the return on their newly negotiated contracts with Apple (and even more difficult to believe that Amazon would capitulate), and the claimed coordinating effects of the MFN provisions is difficult to sustain.

The story with respect to Amazon is questionable for another reason. While the court claims that the publishers’ concern with Amazon’s $9.99 pricing was its effect on physical book sales, it is extremely hard to believe that somehow $12.99 for the electronic version of a $30 (or, often, even more expensive) physical book would be significantly less damaging to physical book sales. Moreover, the evidence put forth by the DOJ and found persuasive by the court all pointed to e-book revenues alone, not physical book sales, as the issue of most concern to publishers (thus, for example, Steve Jobs wrote to HarperCollins’ CEO that it could “[k]eep going with Amazon at $9.99. You will make a bit more money in the short term, but in the medium term Amazon will tell you they will be paying you 70% of $9.99. They have shareholders too.”).

Moreover, as Joshua Gans points out, the agency model that Amazon may have entered into with the publishers would have been particularly unhelpful in ensuring monopoly returns for the publishers (we don’t know the exact terms of their contracts, however, and there are reports from trial that Amazon’s terms were “identical” to Apple’s):

While Apple gave publishers a 70 percent share of book sales and the ability to set their own price, Amazon offered a menu. If you price below $9.99 for a book, Amazon’s share will be 70 percent but if you price above $10, Amazon only returns 35 percent to the publisher. Amazon also charged publishers a delivery fee based on the book’s size (in kb).

Thus publishers could, of course, raise prices to $12.99 in both Apple’s and Amazon’s e-book stores, but, if this effective price cap applied, doing so would result in a significant loss of revenue from Amazon. In other words, the court’s claim—that, having entered into MFNs with Apple, the publishers then had to move Amazon to the agency model to ensure that they didn’t end up being forced by the MFNs to sell books via Apple (on the less-attractive agency terms) at Amazon’s $9.99—is far-fetched. To the extent that raising Amazon’s prices above $10 may have cut royalties almost in half, the MFNs with Apple would be extremely unlikely to have such a powerful effect. But, as noted above, because of the relative sales volumes involved the same dynamic would have applied even under identical terms.

It is true, of course, that Apple cares about price differences between books sold through its iBookstore and the same titles sold through other electronic retailers—and thus it imposed MFN clauses on the publishers. But this is not anticompetitive. In fact, by facilitating Apple’s entry, the MFN clauses plainly increased competition by introducing a new competitor to the industry. What’s more, the terms of Apple’s agreements with the publishers exactly mirrors the terms it uses for apps and music sold through the iTunes store, as well. And as Gordon Crovitz noted:

As this column reported when the case was brought last year, Apple executive Eddy Cue in 2011 turned down my effort to negotiate different terms for apps by news publishers by telling me: “I don’t think you understand. We can’t treat newspapers or magazines any differently than we treat FarmVille.” His point was clear: The 30% revenue-share model is how Apple does business with everyone. It is not, as the government alleges, a scheme Apple concocted to fix prices with book publishers.

Another important error in the case — and, unfortunately, it is one to which Apple’s lawyers acceded—is the treatment of “trade e-books” as the relevant market. For antitrust purposes, there is no generalized e-book (or physical book, for that matter) market. As noted above, the court itself acknowledged that the publishers “have [n]ever competed with each other on price.” The price of Stephen King’s latest novel likely has, at best, a trivial effect on sales of…nearly every other fiction book published, and probably zero effect on sales of non-fiction books.

This is important because the court’s opinion turns on mostly circumstantial evidence of an alleged conspiracy among publishers to raise prices and on the role of concerted action in protecting publishers from being “undercut” by their competitors. But in a world where publishers don’t compete on price (and where the alleged agreement would have reduced the publishers’ revenues in the short run and done little if anything to shore up physical book sales in the long run), it is far-fetched to interpret this evidence as the court does—to infer a conspiracy to raise prices.

Meanwhile, by restricting itself to consideration of competitive effects in the e-book market alone, the court also inappropriately and without commentary dispenses with Apple’s pro-competitive justifications for its conduct. Put simply, Apple contends that its entry into the e-book retail and reader markets was facilitated by its contract terms. But the court ignores these arguments.

On the one hand, it does so because it treats this as a per se case, in which procompetitive effects are irrelevant. But the court’s determination to treat this as a per se case—with its lengthy recitation of relevant legal precedent and only cursory application of precedent to the facts of the case—is suspect. As I have noted before:

What would [justify per se treatment] is if the publishers engaged in concerted action to negotiate these more-favorable terms with other publishers, and what would be problematic for Apple is if its agreement with each publisher facilitated that collusion.

But I don’t see any persuasive evidence that the terms of Apple’s deals with each publisher did any such thing. For MFNs to perform the function alleged by the DOJ it seems to me that the MFNs would have to contribute to the alleged agreement between the publishers, just as the actions of the vertical co-conspirators in Interstate Circuit and Toys-R-Us were alleged to facilitate coordination. But neither the agency agreement itself nor the MFN and price cap terms in the contracts in any way affected the publishers’ incentive to compete with each other. Nor, as noted above, did they require any individual publisher to cause its books to be sold at higher prices through other distributors.

Even if it is true that the publishers participated in a per se illegal horizontal price fixing scheme (and despite the court’s assertion that this is beyond dispute, the evidence is not nearly so clear as the court suggests), Apple’s unique role in that alleged scheme can’t be analyzed in the same fashion. As Leegin notes (and the court in this case quotes), for conduct to merit per se treatment it must “always or almost always tend to restrict competition and decrease output.” But the conduct at issue here—whether somehow coupled with a horizontal price fixing scheme or not—doesn’t meet this standard. The agency model, the MFN terms in the publishers’ contracts with Apple, and the efforts by Apple to secure broad participation by the largest publishers before entering the market are all potentially—if not likely—procompetitive. And output seems to have increased substantially following Apple’s entry into the e-book retail market.

In short, I continue to believe that the facts of this case do not merit per se treatment, and there is a good chance the court’s opinion could be overturned on this ground. For this reason, its rejection of Apple’s procompetitive arguments was inappropriate.

But even in its brief “even under the rule of reason…” analysis, the court improperly rejects Apple’s procompetitive arguments. The court’s consideration of these arguments is basically summed up here:

The pro-competitive effects to which Apple has pointed, including its launch of the iBookstore, the technical novelties of the iPad, and the evolution of digital publishing more generally, are phenomena that are independent of the Agreements and therefore do not demonstrate any pro-competitive effects flowing from the Agreements.

But this is factually inaccurate. Apple has claimed that its entry—and thus at minimum its development and marketing of the iPad as an e-reader and its creation of the iBookstore—were indeed functions of the contract terms and the simultaneous acceptance by the largest publishers of these terms.

The court goes on to assert that, even if the claimed pro-competitive effect was the introduction of competition into the e-book market,

Apple demanded, as a precondition of its entry into the market, that it would not have to compete with Amazon on price. Thus, from the consumer’s perspective — a not unimportant perspective in the field of antitrust — the arrival of the iBookstore brought less price competition and higher prices.

In making this claim the court effectively—and improperly—condemns MFNs to per se illegal status. In doing so the court claims that its opinion’s reach is not so broad:

this Court has not found that any of these [agency agreements, MFN clauses, etc.]…components of Apple’s entry into the market were wrongful, either alone or in combination. What was wrongful was the use of those components to facilitate a conspiracy with the Publisher Defendants”

But the claimed absence of retail price competition that accompanied Apple’s entry is entirely a function of the MFN clauses: Whether at $9.99 or $12.99, the MFN clauses were what ensured that Apple’s and Amazon’s prices would be the same, and disclaimer or not they are swept in to the court’s holding.

This effective condemnation of MFN clauses, while plainly sought by the DOJ, is simply inappropriate as a matter of law. In order to condemn Apple’s conduct under the per se rule, the court relies on the operation of the MFNs in allegedly reducing competition and raising prices to make its case. But that these do not “always or almost always tend to restrict competition and reduce output” is clear. While the DOJ may view such terms otherwise (more on this here and here), courts have not done so, and Leegin’s holding that such vertical restraints are to be assessed under the rule of reason still holds. The court’s use of the per se standard and its refusal to consider Apple’s claimed pro-competitive effects are improper.

Thus I (somewhat more cautiously this time…) suggest that the court’s decision may be overturned on appeal, and I most certainly think it should be. It seems plainly troubling as a matter of economics, and inappropriate as a matter of law.

Filed under: antitrust, cartels, contracts, doj, e-books, economics, error costs, law and economics, litigation, market definition, markets, MFNs, monopolization, resale price maintenance, technology, vertical restraints Tagged: agency model, Amazon, antitrust, antitrust enforcement, Apple, doj, e-books, IBooks, iBookstore, major publishers, MFN, most favored nations clause, per se, price-fixing, Publishing, publishing industry, Rule of reason, vertical restraints

FTC Commissioner Wright issued today his Policy Statement on enforcement of Section 5 of the FTC Act against Unfair Methods of Competition (UMC)—the one he promised in April. Wright introduced the Statement in an important policy speech this morning before the Executive Committee Meeting of the New York State Bar Association’s Antitrust Section. Both the Statement and the speech are essential reading, and, collectively, they present a compelling and comprehensive vision for Section 5 UMC reform at the Commission.

Read the full piece here. 

Summary

“Today’s video marketplace is shaped by a byzantine set of rules from a bygone era. In the 1990s, cable was as mighty as the Byzantines themselves were at the height of their power: Cable’s control over the single physical conduit to the home gave cable providers gatekeeper power over video programming, much as the Byzantines’ control over the Eastern Mediterranean gave them control over commerce.

But cable today is simply one of several competing conduits for video programming distribution. Today’s regulations were intended to prevent cable from thwarting the rise of satellite DBS service. They have succeeded: Virtually the entire country has access to the two primary DBS providers in addition to a cable provider. Meanwhile, telcos like AT&T and Verizon have offered a fourth alternative to cable in a third of the country. Even more importantly, the MVPD paradigm is increasingly being challenged by consumers either switching to an OVD like Netflix, Hulu or Amazon (“cord-cutting”) or cutting back on their MVPD subscription and relying, in part, on an OVD (“cord-shaving”)….”

“Rather that continuing to try to tweak the laws of a bygone era, Congress should embrace the default tool for dealing with market power across the economy: antitrust law. Properly applied, antitrust is perfectly capable of governing a market in which programmers have clear property rights for their content. Indeed, antitrust is the best tool for policing market power in evolving (if not perfectly competitive) markets, to ensure that distributors with market power do not use their power to harm consumers, while recognizing the benefits that come from experimentation in new ways and business models for delivering video content to consumers….”