Summary

Regulatory and legal approaches that make the collection and use of data more expensive along certain dimensions must, at least marginally, induce some companies to alter their behavior to avoid those costs and, consequently, to eschew potentially more beneficial business arrangements in favor of ones that correlate with lower regulatory risk, lower regulatory cost, and/or greater regulatory predictability. “However, regulation often influences behavior in ways that differ from the initially stated rationale.” By disrupting organizational structures designed to work with data, firms will respond to these regulations not only by altering their data collection and use practices, but also the organizational structures that complement them. Such consequences are often unobserved and unintended. The hypothesis presented here is that the actions of over-eager regulatory agencies will have a host of unintended effects not just on data use directly, but on how firms are organized, how business is done, and on corporate governance more broadly. The goal of this project is to discover and elucidate as much of this unseen ground as possible, and to determine the extent to which particular information regulation rules affect these outcomes.

 

On December 9, 2015, Geoffrey Manne, Executive Director of the International Center for Law & Economics was a panelist at the Cato Institute’s Policy Forum, The ITC and Digital Trade: The ClearCorrect Decision He was joined by Sapna Kumar, Associate Professor, University of Houston Law Center and Shara Aranoff, Of Counsel, Covington and Burling LLP, and former Chairman of the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC).

The forum was focused on a recent Federal Circuit decision, ClearCorrect v. ITC, in which a divided three judge panel overturned a 5-1 majority decision of the ITC holding that the Tariff Act granted it the power to prevent the importation of digital articles that infringe a valid U.S. patent. Key to the Federal Circuit’s decision was a hyper-textualist parsing of the term article as understood in 1929“a move that stands in stark contrast to the Federal Circuit’s recent en banc decision in Suprema, which was crucially based on a wider reading of the context of the Tariff Act in order to understand the the full meaning of the phrase articles ¦ that infringe as contained therein.

Critics of the ITC’s interpretation in this matter contend that such jurisdiction would somehow grant the ITC the power to regulate the Internet. However, far from being an expansive power grab, the ITC’s decision was in fact well reasoned and completely consistent with the Tariff Act and Congressional intent. Nonetheless, this remains an important case because the cost of the Federal Circuit’s error could be very high given the importance of IP to the national economy.

Geoff’s slides from the event are available here. Video of the event is embedded below. 

Last week, FCC General Counsel Jonathan Sallet pulled back the curtain on the FCC staff’s analysis behind its decision to block Comcast’s acquisition of Time Warner Cable. As the FCC staff sets out on its reported Rainbow Tour to reassure regulated companies that it’s not “hostile to the industries it regulates,” Sallet’s remarks suggest it will have an uphill climb. Unfortunately, the staff’s analysis appears to have been unduly speculative, disconnected from critical market realities, and decidedly biased — not characteristics in a regulator that tend to offer much reassurance.

Merger analysis is inherently speculative, but, as courts have repeatedly had occasion to find, the FCC has a penchant for stretching speculation beyond the breaking point, adopting theories of harm that are vaguely possible, even if unlikely and inconsistent with past practice, and poorly supported by empirical evidence. The FCC’s approach here seems to fit this description.

The FCC’s fundamental theory of anticompetitive harm

To begin with, as he must, Sallet acknowledged that there was no direct competitive overlap in the areas served by Comcast and Time Warner Cable, and no consumer would have seen the number of providers available to her changed by the deal.

But the FCC staff viewed this critical fact as “not outcome determinative.” Instead, Sallet explained that the staff’s opposition was based primarily on a concern that the deal might enable Comcast to harm “nascent” OVD competitors in order to protect its video (MVPD) business:

Simply put, the core concern came down to whether the merged firm would have an increased incentive and ability to safeguard its integrated Pay TV business model and video revenues by limiting the ability of OVDs to compete effectively, especially through the use of new business models.

The justification for the concern boiled down to an assumption that the addition of TWC’s subscriber base would be sufficient to render an otherwise too-costly anticompetitive campaign against OVDs worthwhile:

Without the merger, a company taking action against OVDs for the benefit of the Pay TV system as a whole would incur costs but gain additional sales – or protect existing sales — only within its footprint. But the combined entity, having a larger footprint, would internalize more of the external “benefits” provided to other industry members.

The FCC theorized that, by acquiring a larger footprint, Comcast would gain enough bargaining power and leverage, as well as the means to profit from an exclusionary strategy, leading it to employ a range of harmful tactics — such as impairing the quality/speed of OVD streams, imposing data caps, limiting OVD access to TV-connected devices, imposing higher interconnection fees, and saddling OVDs with higher programming costs. It’s difficult to see how such conduct would be permitted under the FCC’s Open Internet Order/Title II regime, but, nevertheless, the staff apparently believed that Comcast would possess a powerful “toolkit” with which to harm OVDs post-transaction.

Comcast’s share of the MVPD market wouldn’t have changed enough to justify the FCC’s purported fears

First, the analysis turned on what Comcast could and would do if it were larger. But Comcast was already the largest ISP and MVPD (now second largest MVPD, post AT&T/DIRECTV) in the nation, and presumably it has approximately the same incentives and ability to disadvantage OVDs today.

In fact, there’s no reason to believe that the growth of Comcast’s MVPD business would cause any material change in its incentives with respect to OVDs. Whatever nefarious incentives the merger allegedly would have created by increasing Comcast’s share of the MVPD market (which is where the purported benefits in the FCC staff’s anticompetitive story would be realized), those incentives would be proportional to the size of increase in Comcast’s national MVPD market share — which, here, would be about eight percentage points: from 22% to under 30% of the national market.

It’s difficult to believe that Comcast would gain the wherewithal to engage in this costly strategy by adding such a relatively small fraction of the MVPD market (which would still leave other MVPDs serving fully 70% of the market to reap the purported benefits instead of Comcast), but wouldn’t have it at its current size – and there’s no evidence that it has ever employed such strategies with its current market share.

It bears highlighting that the D.C. Circuit has already twice rejected FCC efforts to impose a 30% market cap on MVPDs, based on the Commission’s inability to demonstrate that a greater-than-30% share would create competitive problems, especially given the highly dynamic nature of the MVPD market. In vacating the FCC’s most recent effort to do so in 2009, the D.C. Circuit was resolute in its condemnation of the agency, noting:

In sum, the Commission has failed to demonstrate that allowing a cable operator to serve more than 30% of all [MVPD] subscribers would threaten to reduce either competition or diversity in programming.

The extent of competition and the amount of available programming (including original programming distributed by OVDs themselves) has increased substantially since 2009; this makes the FCC’s competitive claims even less sustainable today.

It’s damning enough to the FCC’s case that there is no marketplace evidence of such conduct or its anticompetitive effects in today’s market. But it’s truly impossible to square the FCC’s assertions about Comcast’s anticompetitive incentives with the fact that, over the past decade, Comcast has made massive investments in broadband, steadily increased broadband speeds, and freely licensed its programming, among other things that have served to enhance OVDs’ long-term viability and growth. Chalk it up to the threat of regulatory intervention or corporate incompetence if you can’t believe that competition alone could be responsible for this largesse, but, whatever the reason, the FCC staff’s fears appear completely unfounded in a marketplace not significantly different than the landscape that would have existed post-merger.

OVDs aren’t vulnerable, and don’t need the FCC’s “help”

After describing the “new entrants” in the market — such unfamiliar and powerless players as Dish, Sony, HBO, and CBS — Sallet claimed that the staff was principally animated by the understanding that

Entrants are particularly vulnerable when competition is nascent. Thus, staff was particularly concerned that this transaction could damage competition in the video distribution industry.

Sallet’s description of OVDs makes them sound like struggling entrepreneurs working in garages. But, in fact, OVDs have radically reshaped the media business and wield enormous clout in the marketplace.

Netflix, for example, describes itself as “the world’s leading Internet television network with over 65 million members in over 50 countries.” New services like Sony Vue and Sling TV are affiliated with giant, well-established media conglomerates. And whatever new offerings emerge from the FCC-approved AT&T/DIRECTV merger will be as well-positioned as any in the market.

In fact, we already know that the concerns of the FCC are off-base because they are of a piece with the misguided assumptions that underlie the Chairman’s recent NPRM to rewrite the MVPD rules to “protect” just these sorts of companies. But the OVDs themselves — the ones with real money and their competitive futures on the line — don’t see the world the way the FCC does, and they’ve resolutely rejected the Chairman’s proposal. Notably, the proposed rules would “protect” these services from exactly the sort of conduct that Sallet claims would have been a consequence of the Comcast-TWC merger.

If they don’t want or need broad protection from such “harms” in the form of revised industry-wide rules, there is surely no justification for the FCC to throttle a merger based on speculation that the same conduct could conceivably arise in the future.

The realities of the broadband market post-merger wouldn’t have supported the FCC’s argument, either

While a larger Comcast might be in a position to realize more of the benefits from the exclusionary strategy Sallet described, it would also incur more of the costs — likely in direct proportion to the increased size of its subscriber base.

Think of it this way: To the extent that an MVPD can possibly constrain an OVD’s scope of distribution for programming, doing so also necessarily makes the MVPD’s own broadband offering less attractive, forcing it to incur a cost that would increase in proportion to the size of the distributor’s broadband market. In this case, as noted, Comcast would have gained MVPD subscribers — but it would have also gained broadband subscribers. In a world where cable is consistently losing video subscribers (as Sallet acknowledged), and where broadband offers higher margins and faster growth, it makes no economic sense that Comcast would have valued the trade-off the way the FCC claims it would have.

Moreover, in light of the existing conditions imposed on Comcast under the Comcast/NBCU merger order from 2011 (which last for a few more years) and the restrictions adopted in the Open Internet Order, Comcast’s ability to engage in the sort of exclusionary conduct described by Sallet would be severely limited, if not non-existent. Nor, of course, is there any guarantee that former or would-be OVD subscribers would choose to subscribe to, or pay more for, any MVPD in lieu of OVDs. Meanwhile, many of the relevant substitutes in the MVPD market (like AT&T and Verizon FiOS) also offer broadband services – thereby increasing the costs that would be incurred in the broadband market even more, as many subscribers would shift not only their MVPD, but also their broadband service, in response to Comcast degrading OVDs.

And speaking of the Open Internet Order — wasn’t that supposed to prevent ISPs like Comcast from acting on their alleged incentives to impede the quality of, or access to, edge providers like OVDs? Why is merger enforcement necessary to accomplish the same thing once Title II and the rest of the Open Internet Order are in place? And if the argument is that the Open Internet Order might be defeated, aside from the completely speculative nature of such a claim, why wouldn’t a merger condition that imposed the same constraints on Comcast – as was done in the Comcast/NBCU merger order by imposing the former net neutrality rules on Comcast – be perfectly sufficient?

While the FCC staff analysis accepted as true (again, contrary to current marketplace evidence) that a bigger Comcast would have more incentive to harm OVDs post-merger, it rejected arguments that there could be countervailing benefits to OVDs and others from this same increase in scale. Thus, things like incremental broadband investments and speed increases, a larger Wi-Fi network, and greater business services market competition – things that Comcast is already doing and would have done on a greater and more-accelerated scale in the acquired territories post-transaction – were deemed insufficient to outweigh the expected costs of the staff’s entirely speculative anticompetitive theory.

In reality, however, not only OVDs, but consumers – and especially TWC subscribers – would have benefitted from the merger by access to Comcast’s faster broadband speeds, its new investments, and its superior video offerings on the X1 platform, among other things. Many low-income families would have benefitted from expansion of Comcast’s Internet Essentials program, and many businesses would have benefited from the addition of a more effective competitor to the incumbent providers that currently dominate the business services market. Yet these and other verifiable benefits were given short shrift in the agency’s analysis because they “were viewed by staff as incapable of outweighing the potential harms.”

The assumptions underlying the FCC staff’s analysis of the broadband market are arbitrary and unsupportable

Sallet’s claim that the combined firm would have 60% of all high-speed broadband subscribers in the U.S. necessarily assumes a national broadband market measured at 25 Mbps or higher, which is a red herring.

The FCC has not explained why 25 Mbps is a meaningful benchmark for antitrust analysis. The FCC itself endorsed a 10 Mbps baseline for its Connect America fund last December, noting that over 70% of current broadband users subscribe to speeds less than 25 Mbps, even in areas where faster speeds are available. And streaming online video, the most oft-cited reason for needing high bandwidth, doesn’t require 25 Mbps: Netflix says that 5 Mbps is the most that’s required for an HD stream, and the same goes for Amazon (3.5 Mbps) and Hulu (1.5 Mbps).

What’s more, by choosing an arbitrary, faster speed to define the scope of the broadband market (in an effort to assert the non-competitiveness of the market, and thereby justify its broadband regulations), the agency has – without proper analysis or grounding, in my view – unjustifiably shrunk the size of the relevant market. But, as it happens, doing so also shrinks the size of the increase in “national market share” that the merger would have brought about.

Recall that the staff’s theory was premised on the idea that the merger would give Comcast control over enough of the broadband market that it could unilaterally impose costs on OVDs sufficient to impair their ability to reach or sustain minimum viable scale. But Comcast would have added only one percent of this invented “market” as a result of the merger. It strains credulity to assert that there could be any transaction-specific harm from an increase in market share equivalent to a rounding error.

In any case, basing its rejection of the merger on a manufactured 25 Mbps relevant market creates perverse incentives and will likely do far more to harm OVDs than realization of even the staff’s worst fears about the merger ever could have.

The FCC says it wants higher speeds, and it wants firms to invest in faster broadband. But here Comcast did just that, and then was punished for it. Rather than acknowledging Comcast’s ongoing broadband investments as strong indication that the FCC staff’s analysis might be on the wrong track, the FCC leadership simply sidestepped that inconvenient truth by redefining the market.

The lesson is that if you make your product too good, you’ll end up with an impermissibly high share of the market you create and be punished for it. This can’t possibly promote the public interest.

Furthermore, the staff’s analysis of competitive effects even in this ersatz market aren’t likely supportable. As noted, most subscribers access OVDs on connections that deliver content at speeds well below the invented 25 Mbps benchmark, and they pay the same prices for OVD subscriptions as subscribers who receive their content at 25 Mbps. Confronted with the choice to consume content at 25 Mbps or 10 Mbps (or less), the majority of consumers voluntarily opt for slower speeds — and they purchase service from Netflix and other OVDs in droves, nonetheless.

The upshot? Contrary to the implications on which the staff’s analysis rests, if Comcast were to somehow “degrade” OVD content on the 25 Mbps networks so that it was delivered with characteristics of video content delivered over a 10-Mbps network, real-world, observed consumer preferences suggest it wouldn’t harm OVDs’ access to consumers at all. This is especially true given that OVDs often have a global focus and reach (again, Netflix has 65 million subscribers in over 50 countries), making any claims that Comcast could successfully foreclose them from the relevant market even more suspect.

At the same time, while the staff apparently viewed the broadband alternatives as “limited,” the reality is that Comcast, as well as other broadband providers, are surrounded by capable competitors, including, among others, AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, Google Fiber, many advanced VDSL and fiber-based Internet service providers, and high-speed mobile wireless providers. The FCC understated the complex impact of this robust, dynamic, and ever-increasing competition, and its analysis entirely ignored rapidly growing mobile wireless broadband competition.

Finally, as noted, Sallet claimed that the staff determined that merger conditions would be insufficient to remedy its concerns, without any further explanation. Yet the Commission identified similar concerns about OVDs in both the Comcast/NBCUniversal and AT&T/DIRECTV transactions, and adopted remedies to address those concerns. We know the agency is capable of drafting behavioral conditions, and we know they have teeth, as demonstrated by prior FCC enforcement actions. It’s hard to understand why similar, adequate conditions could not have been fashioned for this transaction.

In the end, while I appreciate Sallet’s attempt to explain the FCC’s decision to reject the Comcast/TWC merger, based on the foregoing I’m not sure that Comcast could have made any argument or showing that would have dissuaded the FCC from challenging the merger. Comcast presented a strong economic analysis answering the staff’s concerns discussed above, all to no avail. It’s difficult to escape the conclusion that this was a politically-driven result, and not one rigorously based on the facts or marketplace reality.

Filed under: antitrust, Efficiencies, exclusionary conduct, federal communications commission, internet, law and economics, market definition, merger guidelines, mergers & acquisitions, net neutrality, regulation, technology, telecommunications, television Tagged: antitrust, Broadband, Comcast, FCC, Jonathan Sallet, merger, merger review, MVPD, Netflix, OVD, Time Warner Cable, TWC

Summary

“This case is not about broadband deployment or competition, nor local autonomy. It is about the FCC’s claim of sweeping power and its essentially unchecked discretion to govern the Internet, including the supposed power to preempt decisions made by elected state lawmakers—without Congressional authorization.

To reject the FCC’s reinterpretation of Section 706 as an independent grant of authority is not to say that nothing more need be done to promote broadband deployment and competition—but to affirm two facts about the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (“1996 Act”). First, Congress intended Section 706 as a command to the FCC to use the abundant authority granted to it elsewhere in the 1934 Communications Act (“1934 Act”) to promote broadband deployment to all Americans. As the FCC said in 1998:

“After reviewing the language of section 706(a), its legislative history, the broader statutory scheme, and Congress’ policy objectives, we agree with numerous commenters that section 706(a) does not constitute an independent grant of forbearance authority or of authority to employ other regulating methods. Rather, we conclude that section 706(a) directs the Commission to use the authority granted in other provisions, including the forbearance authority under section 10(a), to encourage the deployment of advanced services. Advanced Services Order, ¶ 69 (emphasis added)”

Second, rejecting the FCC’s reinterpretation means affirming that Congress intended “to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet and other interactive computer services, unfettered by Federal or State regulation,” 47 U.S.C. § 230(b)(2); see also 47 U.S.C. § 230(a)(5) (“The Internet and other interactive computer services have flourished, . . . with a minimum of government regulation.”)…”

Recently, the en banc Federal Circuit decided in Suprema, Inc. v. ITC that the International Trade Commission could properly prevent the importation of articles that infringe under an indirect liability theory. The core of the dispute in Suprema was whether § 337 of the Tariff Act’s prohibition against “importing articles that . . . infringe a valid and enforceable United States patent” could be used to prevent the importation of articles that at the moment of importation were not (yet) directly infringing. In essence, is the ITC limited to acting only when there is a direct infringement, or can it also prohibit articles involved in an indirect infringement scheme — in this case under an inducement theory?

TOTM’s own Alden Abbott posted his view of the decision, and there are a couple of points we’d like to respond to, both embodied in this quote:

[The ITC’s Suprema decision] would likely be viewed unfavorably by the Supreme Court, which recently has shown reluctance about routinely invoking Chevron deference … Furthermore, the en banc majority’s willingness to find inducement liability at a time when direct patent infringement has not yet occurred (the point of importation) is very hard to square with the teachings of [Limelight v.] Akamai.

In truth, we are of two minds (four minds?) regarding this view. We’re deeply sympathetic with arguments that the Supreme Court has become — and should become — increasingly skeptical of blind Chevron deference. Recently, we filed a brief on the 2015 Open Internet Order that, in large part, argued that the FCC does not deserve Chevron deference under King v. Burwell, UARG v. EPA and Michigan v. EPA (among other important cases) along a very similar line of reasoning. However, much as we’d like to generally scale back Chevron deference, in this case we happen to think that the Federal Circuit got it right.

Put simply, “infringe” as used in § 337 plainly includes indirect infringement. Section 271 of the Patent Act makes it clear that indirect infringers are guilty of “infringement.” The legislative history of the section, as well as Supreme Court case law, makes it very clear that § 271 was a codification of both direct and indirect liability.

In taxonomic terms, § 271 codifies “infringement” as a top-level category, with “direct infringement” and “indirect infringement” as two distinct subcategories of infringement. The law further subdivides “indirect infringement” into sub-subcategories, “inducement” and “contributory infringement.” But all of these are “infringement.”

For instance, § 271(b) says that “[w]hoever actively induces infringement of a patent shall be liable as an infringer” (emphasis added). Thus, in terms of § 271, to induce infringement is to commit infringement within the meaning of the patent laws. And in § 337, assuming it follows § 271 (which seems appropriate given Congress’ stated purpose to “make it a more effective remedy for the protection of United States intellectual property rights” (emphasis added)), it must follow that when one imports “articles… that infringe” she can be liable for either (or both) § 271(a) direct infringement or § 271(b) inducement.

Frankly, we think this should end the analysis: There is no Chevron question here because the Tariff Act isn’t ambiguous.

But although it seems clear on the face of § 337 that “infringe” must include indirect infringement, at the very least § 337 is ambiguous and cannot clearly mean only “direct infringement.” Moreover, the history of patent law as well as the structure of the ITC’s powers both cut in favor of the ITC enforcing the Tariff Act against indirect infringers. The ITC’s interpretation of any ambiguity in the term “articles… that infringe” is surely reasonable.

The Ambiguity and History of § 337 Allows for Inducement Liability

Assuming for argument’s sake that § 337’s lack of specificity leaves room for debate as to what “infringe” means, there is nothing that militates definitively against indirect liability being included in § 337. The majority handles any ambiguity of this sort well:

[T]he shorthand phrase “articles that infringe” does not unambiguously exclude inducement of post-importation infringement… By using the word “infringe,” § 337 refers to 35 U.S.C. § 271, the statutory provision defining patent infringement. The word “infringe” does not narrow § 337’s scope to any particular subsections of § 271. As reflected in § 271 and the case law from before and after 1952, “infringement” is a term that encompasses both direct and indirect infringement, including infringement by importation that induces direct infringement of a method claim… Section 337 refers not just to infringement, but to “articles that infringe.” That phrase does not narrow the provision to exclude inducement of post-importation infringement. Rather, the phrase introduces textual uncertainty.

Further, the court notes that it has consistently held that inducement is a valid theory of liability on which to base § 337 cases.

And lest you think that this interpretation would give some new, expansive powers to the ITC (perhaps meriting something like a Brown & Williamson exception to Chevron deference), the ITC is still bound by all the defenses and limitations on indirect liability under § 271. Saying it has authority to police indirect infringement doesn’t give it carte blanche, nor any more power than US district courts currently have in adjudicating indirect infringement. In this case, the court went nowhere near the limits of Chevron in giving deference to the ITC’s decision that “articles… that infringe” emcompasses the well-established (and statutorily defined) law of indirect infringement.

Inducement Liability Isn’t Precluded by Limelight

Nor does the Supreme Court’s Limelight v. Akamai decision present any problem. Limelight is often quoted for the proposition that there can be no inducement liability without direct infringement. And it does stand for that, as do many other cases; that point is not really in any doubt. But what Alden and others (including the dissenters in Suprema) have cited it for is the proposition that inducement liability cannot attach unless all of the elements of inducement have already been practiced at the time of importation. Limelight does not support that contention, however.

Inducement liability contemplates direct infringement, but the direct infringement need not have been practiced by the same entity liable for inducement, nor at the same time as inducement (see, e.g., Standard Oil. v. Nippon). Instead, the direct infringement may come at a later time — and there is no dispute in Suprema regarding whether there was direct infringement (there was, as Suprema notes: “the Commission found that record evidence demonstrated that Mentalix had already directly infringed claim 19 within the United States prior to the initiation of the investigation.”).

Limelight, on the other hand, is about what constitutes the direct infringement element in an inducement case. The sole issue in Limelight was whether this “direct infringement element” required that all of the steps of a method patent be carried out by a single entity or entities acting in concert. In Limelight’s network there was a division of labor, so to speak, between the company and its customers, such that each carried out some of the steps of the method patent at issue. In effect, plaintiffs argued that Limelight should be liable for inducement because it practised some of the steps of the patented method, with the requisite intent that others would carry out the rest of the steps necessary for direct infringement. But neither Limelight nor its customers separately carried out all of the steps necessary for direct infringement.

The Court held (actually, it simply reiterated established law) that the method patent could never be violated unless a single party (or parties acting in concert) carried out all of the steps of the method necessary for direct infringement. Thus it also held that Limelight could not be liable for inducement because, on the facts of that case, none of its customers could ever be liable for the necessary, underlying direct infringement. Again — what was really at issue in Limelight were the requirements to establish the direct infringement necessary to prove inducement.

On remand, the Federal Circuit reinforced the point that Limelight was really about direct infringement and, by extension, who must be involved in the direct infringement element of an inducement claim. According to the court:

We conclude that the facts Akamai presented at trial constitute substantial evidence from which a jury could find that Limelight directed or controlled its customers’ performance of each remaining method step. As such, substantial evidence supports the jury’s verdict that all steps of the claimed methods were performed by or attributable to Limelight. Therefore, Limelight is liable for direct infringement.

The holding of Limelight is simply inapposite to the facts of Suprema. The crux of Suprema is whether the appropriate mens rea existed to support a claim of inducement — not whether the requisite direct infringement occurred or not.

The Structure of § 337 Supports The ITC’s Ability to Block Inducement

Further, as the majority in Suprema notes, the very idea of inducement liability necessarily contemplates that there will be a temporal separation between the event that gives rise to indirect liability and the future direct infringement (required to prove inducement). As the Suprema court briefly noted “Section 337(a)(1)(B)’s ‘sale . . . after importation’ language confirms that the Commission is permitted to focus on post-importation activity to identify the completion of infringement.”

In particular, each of the enforcement powers in § 337(a) contains a clause that, in addition to a prohibition against, e.g., infringing articles at the time of importation, also prohibits “the sale within the United States after importation by the owner, importer, or consignee, of articles[.]” Thus, Congress explicitly contemplated that the ITC would have the power to act upon articles at various points in time, not limiting it to a power effective only at the moment of importation.

Although the particular power to reach into the domestic market has to do with preventing the importer or its agent from making sales, this doesn’t undermine the larger point here: the ITC’s power to prevent infringing articles extends over a range of time. Given that “articles that … infringe” is at the very least ambiguous, and, as per the Federal Circuit (and our own position), this ambiguity allows for indirect infringement, it isn’t a stretch to infer that that Congress intended the ITC to have authority under § 337 to ban the import of articles that induce infringement that occurs only after the time of importation..

To interpret § 337 otherwise would be to render it absurd and to create a giant loophole that would enable infringers to easily circumvent the ITC’s enforcement powers.

A Dissent from the Dissent

The dissent also takes a curious approach to § 271 by mixing inducement and contributory infringement, and generally making a confusing mess of the two. For instance, Judge Dyk says

At the time of importation, the scanners neither directly infringe nor induce infringement… Instead, these staple articles may or may not ultimately be used to infringe… depending upon whether and how they are combined with domestically developed software after importation into the United States (emphasis added).

Whether or not the goods were “staples articles” (and thus potentially capable of substantial noninfringing uses) has nothing to do with whether or not there was inducement. Section 271 makes a very clear delineation between inducement in § 271(b) and contributory infringement in § 271(c). While a staple article of commerce capable of substantial noninfringing uses will not serve as the basis for a contributory infringement claim, it is irrelevant whether or not goods are such “staples” for purposes of establishing inducement.

The boundaries of inducement liability, by contrast, are focused on the intent of the actors: If there is an intent to induce, whether or not there is a substantial noninfringing use, there can be a violation of § 271. Contributory infringement and inducement receive treatment in separate paragraphs of § 271 and are separate doctrines comprising separate elements. This separation is so evident on the face of the law as well as in its history that the Supreme Court read the doctrine into copyright in Grokster — where, despite a potentially large number of non-infringing uses, the intent to induce infringement was sufficient to find liability.

Parting Thoughts on Chevron

We have some final thoughts on the Chevron question, because this is rightly a sore point in administrative law. In this case we think that the analysis should have ended at step one. Although the Federal Circuit began with an assumption of ambiguity, it was being generous to the appellants. Did Congress speak with clear intent? We think so. Section 271 very clearly includes direct infringement as well as indirect infringement within its definition of what constitutes infringement of a patent. When § 337 references “articles … that infringe” it seems fairly obvious that Congress intended the ITC to be able to enforce the prohibitions in § 271 in the context of imported goods.

But even if we advance to step two of the Chevron analysis, the ITC’s construction of § 337 is plainly permissible — and far from expansive. By asserting its authority here the ITC is simply policing the importation of infringing goods (which it clearly has the power to do), and doing so in the case of goods that indirectly infringe (a concept that has been part of US law for a very long time). If “infringe” as used in the Tariff Act is ambiguous, the ITC’s interpretation of it to include both indirect as well as direct infringement seems self-evidently reasonable.

Under the dissent’s (and Alden’s) interpretation of § 337, all that would be required to evade the ITC would be to import only the basic components of an article such that at the moment of importation there was no infringement. Once reassembled within the United States, the ITC’s power to prevent the sale of infringing goods would be nullified. Section 337 would thus be read to simply write out the entire “indirect infringement” subdivision of § 271 — an inference that seems like a much bigger stretch than that “infringement” under § 337 means all infringement under § 271. Congress was more than capable of referring only to “direct infringement” in § 337 if that’s what it intended.

Much as we would like to see Chevron limited, not every agency case is the place to fight this battle. If we are to have agencies, and we are to have a Chevron doctrine, there will be instances of valid deference to agency interpretations — regardless of how broadly or narrowly Chevron is interpreted. The ITC wasn’t making a power grab in Suprema, nor was its reading of the statute unexpected, inconsistent with its past practice, or expansive.

In short, Suprema doesn’t break any new statutory interpretation ground, nor present a novel question of “deep economic or political significance” akin to the question at issue in King v. Burwell. Like it or not, there will be no roots of an anti-Chevron-deference revolution growing out of Suprema.

Filed under: administrative law, intellectual property, international trade, International Trade Commission, patent, regulation, Supreme Court Tagged: Chevron, inducement, Intellectual property, international trade commission, ITC, Limelight, Patent infringement, regulation, Suprema

Excerpt

Futurists say that the total sum of human knowledge doubles every year or two—and that the rate is increasing. “There were five exabytes of information created by the entire world between the dawn of civilization and 2003,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said at a conference in 2010. “Now that same amount is created every two days.”

That’s part of the reason why “general search”—searching of all of the world’s accessible information and delivering results without differentiation—is fast becoming hopelessly outdated. In an era of exploding data, it is more efficient and more effective to presort information into categories. So it is hardly surprising that Google searches have evolved to emphasize specialized results better targeted to users’ queries.

Yet regulators seem perplexed. Consider what European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager said recently about the EU’s formal complaint against Google: “We find the conduct in one area where it has a very dominant position in one market, which is general search, has led to favorable treatment not based on the merits in another related market.”

This reflects a deep misunderstanding. It’s a mistake to consider “general search” and “comparison shopping” or “product search” to be distinct markets.

Continue reading on WSJ.com

As the organizer of this retrospective on Josh Wright’s tenure as FTC Commissioner, I have the (self-conferred) honor of closing out the symposium.

When Josh was confirmed I wrote that:

The FTC will benefit enormously from Josh’s expertise and his error cost approach to antitrust and consumer protection law will be a tremendous asset to the Commission — particularly as it delves further into the regulation of data and privacy. His work is rigorous, empirically grounded, and ever-mindful of the complexities of both business and regulation…. The Commissioners and staff at the FTC will surely… profit from his time there.

Whether others at the Commission have really learned from Josh is an open question, but there’s no doubt that Josh offered an enormous amount from which they could learn. As Tim Muris said, Josh “did not disappoint, having one of the most important and memorable tenures of any non-Chair” at the agency.

Within a month of his arrival at the Commission, in fact, Josh “laid down the cost-benefit-analysis gauntlet” in a little-noticed concurring statement regarding a proposed amendment to the Hart-Scott-Rodino Rules. The technical details of the proposed rule don’t matter for these purposes, but, as Josh noted in his statement, the situation intended to be avoided by the rule had never arisen:

The proposed rulemaking appears to be a solution in search of a problem. The Federal Register notice states that the proposed rules are necessary to prevent the FTC and DOJ from “expend[ing] scarce resources on hypothetical transactions.” Yet, I have not to date been presented with evidence that any of the over 68,000 transactions notified under the HSR rules have required Commission resources to be allocated to a truly hypothetical transaction.

What Josh asked for in his statement was not that the rule be scrapped, but simply that, before adopting the rule, the FTC weigh its costs and benefits.

As I noted at the time:

[I]t is the Commission’s responsibility to ensure that the rules it enacts will actually be beneficial (it is a consumer protection agency, after all). The staff, presumably, did a perfectly fine job writing the rule they were asked to write. Josh’s point is simply that it isn’t clear the rule should be adopted because it isn’t clear that the benefits of doing so would outweigh the costs.

As essentially everyone who has contributed to this symposium has noted, Josh was singularly focused on the rigorous application of the deceptively simple concept that the FTC should ensure that the benefits of any rule or enforcement action it adopts outweigh the costs. The rest, as they say, is commentary.

For Josh, this basic principle should permeate every aspect of the agency, and permeate the way it thinks about everything it does. Only an entirely new mindset can ensure that outcomes, from the most significant enforcement actions to the most trivial rule amendments, actually serve consumers.

While the FTC has a strong tradition of incorporating economic analysis in its antitrust decision-making, its record in using economics in other areas is decidedly mixed, as Berin points out. But even in competition policy, the Commission frequently uses economics — but it’s not clear it entirely understands economics. The approach that others have lauded Josh for is powerful, but it’s also subtle.

Inherent limitations on anyone’s knowledge about the future of technology, business and social norms caution skepticism, as regulators attempt to predict whether any given business conduct will, on net, improve or harm consumer welfare. In fact, a host of factors suggests that even the best-intentioned regulators tend toward overconfidence and the erroneous condemnation of novel conduct that benefits consumers in ways that are difficult for regulators to understand. Coase’s famous admonition in a 1972 paper has been quoted here before (frequently), but bears quoting again:

If an economist finds something – a business practice of one sort or another – that he does not understand, he looks for a monopoly explanation. And as in this field we are very ignorant, the number of ununderstandable practices tends to be very large, and the reliance on a monopoly explanation, frequent.

Simply “knowing” economics, and knowing that it is important to antitrust enforcement, aren’t enough. Reliance on economic formulae and theoretical models alone — to say nothing of “evidence-based” analysis that doesn’t or can’t differentiate between probative and prejudicial facts — doesn’t resolve the key limitations on regulatory decisionmaking that threaten consumer welfare, particularly when it comes to the modern, innovative economy.

As Josh and I have written:

[O]ur theoretical knowledge cannot yet confidently predict the direction of the impact of additional product market competition on innovation, much less the magnitude. Additionally, the multi-dimensional nature of competition implies that the magnitude of these impacts will be important as innovation and other forms of competition will frequently be inversely correlated as they relate to consumer welfare. Thus, weighing the magnitudes of opposing effects will be essential to most policy decisions relating to innovation. Again, at this stage, economic theory does not provide a reliable basis for predicting the conditions under which welfare gains associated with greater product market competition resulting from some regulatory intervention will outweigh losses associated with reduced innovation.

* * *

In sum, the theoretical and empirical literature reveals an undeniably complex interaction between product market competition, patent rules, innovation, and consumer welfare. While these complexities are well understood, in our view, their implications for the debate about the appropriate scale and form of regulation of innovation are not.

Along the most important dimensions, while our knowledge has expanded since 1972, the problem has not disappeared — and it may only have magnified. As Tim Muris noted in 2005,

[A] visitor from Mars who reads only the mathematical IO literature could mistakenly conclude that the U.S. economy is rife with monopoly power…. [Meanwhile, Section 2’s] history has mostly been one of mistaken enforcement.

It may not sound like much, but what is needed, what Josh brought to the agency, and what turns out to be absolutely essential to getting it right, is unflagging awareness of and attention to the institutional, political and microeconomic relationships that shape regulatory institutions and regulatory outcomes.

Regulators must do their best to constantly grapple with uncertainty, problems of operationalizing useful theory, and, perhaps most important, the social losses associated with error costs. It is not (just) technicians that the FTC needs; it’s regulators imbued with the “Economic Way of Thinking.” In short, what is needed, and what Josh brought to the Commission, is humility — the belief that, as Coase also wrote, sometimes the best answer is to “do nothing at all.”

The technocratic model of regulation is inconsistent with the regulatory humility required in the face of fast-changing, unexpected — and immeasurably valuable — technological advance. As Virginia Postrel warns in The Future and Its Enemies:

Technocrats are “for the future,” but only if someone is in charge of making it turn out according to plan. They greet every new idea with a “yes, but,” followed by legislation, regulation, and litigation…. By design, technocrats pick winners, establish standards, and impose a single set of values on the future.

For Josh, the first JD/Econ PhD appointed to the FTC,

economics provides a framework to organize the way I think about issues beyond analyzing the competitive effects in a particular case, including, for example, rulemaking, the various policy issues facing the Commission, and how I weigh evidence relative to the burdens of proof and production. Almost all the decisions I make as a Commissioner are made through the lens of economics and marginal analysis because that is the way I have been taught to think.

A representative example will serve to illuminate the distinction between merely using economics and evidence and understanding them — and their limitations.

In his Nielson/Arbitron dissent Josh wrote:

The Commission thus challenges the proposed transaction based upon what must be acknowledged as a novel theory—that is, that the merger will substantially lessen competition in a market that does not today exist.

[W]e… do not know how the market will evolve, what other potential competitors might exist, and whether and to what extent these competitors might impose competitive constraints upon the parties.

Josh’s straightforward statement of the basis for restraint stands in marked contrast to the majority’s decision to impose antitrust-based limits on economic activity that hasn’t even yet been contemplated. Such conduct is directly at odds with a sensible, evidence-based approach to enforcement, and the economic problems with it are considerable, as Josh also notes:

[I]t is an exceedingly difficult task to predict the competitive effects of a transaction where there is insufficient evidence to reliably answer the[] basic questions upon which proper merger analysis is based.

When the Commission’s antitrust analysis comes unmoored from such fact-based inquiry, tethered tightly to robust economic theory, there is a more significant risk that non-economic considerations, intuition, and policy preferences influence the outcome of cases.

Compare in this regard Josh’s words about Nielsen with Deborah Feinstein’s defense of the majority from such charges:

The Commission based its decision not on crystal-ball gazing about what might happen, but on evidence from the merging firms about what they were doing and from customers about their expectations of those development plans. From this fact-based analysis, the Commission concluded that each company could be considered a likely future entrant, and that the elimination of the future offering of one would likely result in a lessening of competition.

Instead of requiring rigorous economic analysis of the facts, couched in an acute awareness of our necessary ignorance about the future, for Feinstein the FTC fulfilled its obligation in Nielsen by considering the “facts” alone (not economic evidence, mind you, but customer statements and expressions of intent by the parties) and then, at best, casually applying to them the simplistic, outdated structural presumption – the conclusion that increased concentration would lead inexorably to anticompetitive harm. Her implicit claim is that all the Commission needed to know about the future was what the parties thought about what they were doing and what (hardy disinterested) customers thought they were doing. This shouldn’t be nearly enough.

Worst of all, Nielsen was “decided” with a consent order. As Josh wrote, strongly reflecting the essential awareness of the broader institutional environment that he brought to the Commission:

[w]here the Commission has endorsed by way of consent a willingness to challenge transactions where it might not be able to meet its burden of proving harm to competition, and which therefore at best are competitively innocuous, the Commission’s actions may alter private parties’ behavior in a manner that does not enhance consumer welfare.

Obviously in this regard his successful effort to get the Commission to adopt a UMC enforcement policy statement is a most welcome development.

In short, Josh is to be applauded not because he brought economics to the Commission, but because he brought the economic way of thinking. Such a thing is entirely too rare in the modern administrative state. Josh’s tenure at the FTC was relatively short, but he used every moment of it to assiduously advance his singular, and essential, mission. And, to paraphrase the last line of the movie The Right Stuff (it helps to have the rousing film score playing in the background as you read this): “for a brief moment, [Josh Wright] became the greatest [regulator] anyone had ever seen.”

I would like to extend my thanks to everyone who participated in this symposium. The contributions here will stand as a fitting and lasting tribute to Josh and his legacy at the Commission. And, of course, I’d also like to thank Josh for a tenure at the FTC very much worth honoring.

Filed under: antitrust, consumer protection, cost-benefit analysis, economics, error costs, federal trade commission, ftc, JDW Symposium, law and economics, merger guidelines, political economy, regulation Tagged: cost-benefit analysis, error costs, Federal Trade Commission, ftc, joshua wright, regulatory humility, Symposium