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The Apple E-Books Antitrust Case: Implications for Antitrust Law and for the Economy — Day 2

February 16, 2016

truthonthemarket.com

We will have a few more posts today to round out the Apple e-books case symposium started yesterday.

You can find all of the current posts, and eventually all of the symposium posts, here. Yesterdays’ posts, in order of posting:

• William Kolasky
• Richard Epstein
• Alden Abbott
• Jon Jacobson
• Geoffrey Manne
• Andrew Albanese
• Keith Hylton
• David Balto

Look for posts a little later today from:

• Tom Hazlett
• Morgan Reed
• Chris Sagers

And possibly a follow-up post or two from some of yesterday’s participants.

Filed under: announcements, antitrust, e-books, e-books symposium, MFNs, monopolization, Supreme Court, technology, vertical restraints Tagged: agency model, Amazon, antitrust, Apple, doj, e-books, entry, iBookstore, Leegin, major publishers, MFN, most favored nations clause, per se, price-fixing, publishing industry, Rule of reason, Supreme Court, vertical restraints

The Apple e-books case is throwback to Dr. Miles, the 1911 Supreme Court decision that managed to misinterpret the economics of competition and so thwart productive activity for over a century. The active debate here at TOTM reveals why.

Read the full piece here.

By Andrew Albanese

In October of last year, I had the chance to interview Hachette CEO Arnaud Nourry from the stage at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and I asked him whether his 2009 concerns that low e-book prices would devalue the book—the driving factor behind the alleged e-book price-fixing conspiracy—were in the the past. After all, much has changed over the last six years.

Nourry was resolute in his response.

When you lose control over your price point you are on the way to death. We have to be very careful and never think it is behind us. We are still concerned. And I am glad that there is a consensus among major publishers that we should keep control.

As the non-lawyer here, I’m necessarily going to take a slightly different approach to today’s symposium. But I want to be clear, right up front: However the Supreme Court dispatches with Apple’s appeal in it e-book price-fixing case, whether the court declines to take up the appeal, or ultimately reverses, it is going to have little effect on the e-book market.

Even though it triggered a high profile antitrust case, and two years of market sanctions, Apple’s 2010 scheme with publishers to eliminate retail price competition from the e-book market ultimately succeeded. Today, the Big Five publishers (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House) now control the consumer prices of their e-books. Apple does not have to worry about the iBookstore being undercut on price by Amazon. And Amazon’s main competitive advantage has been blunted—its $9.99 price on bestselling new release e-books—“that pitiful, paltry price,” as Daily Beast co-founder Tina Brown once called it—is history. Frontlist e-books now retail for as high as $14.99.

So, how is the e-book market faring, post-Apple? It’s been a mixed bag. On one hand, e-book sales from the Big Five publishers declined in 2015. For Nourry’s company, Hachette, digital sales (including digital audio) accounted for 22% of trade sales last year, down from 26% in 2014. So much for Steve Jobs’ 2010 prediction that Apple would usher in a “mainstream e-book revolution.”

On the other hand, print sales are up. Publishers say the dip in e-book sales and the rebound of print is a sign that the book market that is beginning to find its balance. And while they concede that higher e-book prices are clearly playing a role in the market’s re-balancing act, it is still too early to tell to what degree price or other factors are driving format choices in the publishing market.  

For me, the interesting question is where we go from here. In 2016, for the first time in the modern e-book market’s short history, there are no major disruptions on the horizon: no game-changing device like the iPad; no fundamental changes coming in the retail market (like the agency model); no looming negotiations with Amazon (for now); no court-imposed e-book discounting. With fewer thumbs on the scale, the next two years are poised to present the clearest picture yet of the demand for e-books, what prices work, or don’t, the viability of emerging new channels such as subscription access, where the competitive fault lines truly lie.

In that light, the narrow legal question before the Supreme Court in Apple’s appeal—whether a vertical firm that organizes a price-fixing conspiracy among its suppliers can be condemned as per se liable—feels anticlimactic, and largely academic. Sure, there is $400 million in consumer refunds at stake, per Apple’s settlement with the states and consumer class. But here’s what’s not at stake: the future of innovation.

Despite some outstanding work by Apple’s counsel, and some outraged editorials and amicus briefs, this case has never been about innovation, new technology, or novel business arrangements in emerging markets. When the publishers first agreed to Apple’s terms, they had yet to even see an iPad, or the iBookstore. And there is no dispute that the iPad was going to be used as an e-reading device regardless of whether or not Apple got into e-book retailing.

Rather, as Macmillan CEO John Sargent once suggested in an email, the benefit of the iPad was that its launch presented a singular opportunity to change the business model for e-books—to wrest pricing control from Amazon, and to raise e-book prices to levels they considered “rational.” 

While it is a compelling narrative, it seems highly unlikely to me that upholding per se liability in this case would discourage tech companies from innovating or striking novel new arrangements in emerging digital markets. Again, I am no lawyer. But isn’t the greater concern that, if vindicated, Apple’s scheme would essentially serve as a blueprint for large vertical players to work with major suppliers to eliminate retail price competition from nascent markets?

I keep going back to U.S. attorney Mark Ryan’s closing argument at Apple’s trial. Who knows, Ryan argued, how the market would have solved Amazon’s $9.99 problem? That, it seems to me, remains the key question.

Andrew Richard Albanese is Senior Writer for Publishers Weekly and the author of The Battle of $9.99: How Apple, Amazon, and the Big Six Publishers Changed the E-Book Business Overnight.

Try as one may, it is hard to find an easier antitrust case than United States v. Apple.

Consider: The six leading publishers all wanted to prevent Amazon and others from offering best seller e-books at $9.99 (or other similar low prices). The problem, however, was that they had no mechanism for accomplishing that result. Then came Apple. Apple figured out that the “Amazon problem” could be fixed if the publishers changed their customer relationships from sale/resale to “agency,” all subject to an MFN with Apple that would prohibit any of the publishers – and, through the MFN, Amazon – from underselling the (higher) prices on Apple’s iBookstore. Loving this “aikido move” (in Steve Jobs’ words), all the publishers but Random House happily agreed. Prices for best seller e-books increased 30% almost overnight.

So what is this? The fact of a horizontal conspiracy among the five publishers is largely undisputed. Is it any less per se illegal because Apple was involved? Hardly; especially on these facts, where the participation by the “vertical” player was essential to make the whole scheme work. Apple’s role in no way made the conspiracy benign. It made it worse – and it couldn’t have been achieved without Apple’s active role.

Truly, all one needs to know about the case is in the attached video clip from the iPad launch event. Asked by the Wall Street Journal why anyone would pay $14.99 for a book from the iBookstore when it could be had for $9.99 on Amazon, Steve Jobs said: “Well, that won’t be the case.” Asked to explain, he added: “The prices will be the same.”

So we have a horizontal conspiracy to fix and raise e-book prices, made operational only through Apple’s aggressive involvement, that immediately raised prices by 30%. If that’s not an antitrust violation, we’re all in trouble.

As Judge (and Professor) Frank Easterbrook famously explained over three decades ago (in his seminal article The Limits of Antitrust), antitrust is an inherently limited body of law. In crafting and enforcing liability rules to combat market power and encourage competition, courts and regulators may err in two directions: they may wrongly forbid output-enhancing behavior or wrongly fail to condemn output-reducing conduct. The social losses from false convictions and false acquittals, taken together, comprise antitrust’s “error costs.” While it may be possible to reduce error costs by making liability rules more nuanced, added complexity raises the “decision costs” incurred by business planners (ex ante) and adjudicators (ex post). In light of all these costs, Easterbrook advocated an approach that would optimize antitrust’s effectiveness: interpret and enforce the antitrust laws so as to minimize the sum of error and decision costs.

Judge Easterbrook’s approach is consistent with the widely accepted proposition that antitrust enforcement should be viewed as an exercise in consumer welfare maximization. In order to maximize welfare, enforcers must have an understanding of – and seek to maximize the difference between – the aggregate costs and benefits that are likely to flow from their policies.  Specifically, antitrust enforcers first should ensure that the rules they propagate create net welfare benefits. Next, they should (to the extent possible) seek to calibrate those rules so as to maximize net welfare. This is achieved by employing an error cost (decision theoretic) framework, which seeks to minimize the sum of the costs attributable to false positives, false negatives, antitrust administrative costs, and disincentive costs imposed on third parties (the latter may also be viewed as a subset of false positives).

Perhaps the most glaring flaw of the Second Circuit’s 2015 decision in United States v. Apple Inc., is the failure to pay heed to error costs and the limits of antitrust as an administrative system.

In condemning Apple’s vertical contracts as illegal per se, because they allegedly were used to facilitate a horizontal price-fixing conspiracy among publishers, the Second Circuit ignored the vast literature on the efficiencies associated with vertical restraints. (They also failed to heed Supreme Court precedent, see here). Moreover, the vertical restraints employed by Apple in this case, such as most-favored nation (MFN) clauses, clearly had substantial efficiency potential – they were particularly well-suited to facilitate Apple’s competition with Amazon’s established e-book platform and thereby enhance competition in the emerging e-book market. (This theme is explained and developed here). Accordingly, the Second Circuit’s failure to examine the restraints in detail under the antitrust rule of reason created a strong potential for wrongly condemning procompetitive behavior (false positives). In contrast, the likelihood of wrongly failing to condemn anticompetitive practices (false negatives) under a rule of reason assessment in this case (involving a substantial record, an emerging dynamic market, and the use of typically efficient vertical contracts by a new entrant) would have been comparatively small. Furthermore, the Second Circuit’s per se condemnation of vertical restraints in Apple creates substantial disincentive costs, by discouraging other businesses from developing innovative distribution models employing vertical restraints in emerging markets.

In sum, the Second Circuit’s approach is plainly at odds with a welfare-enhancing, decision theoretic approach to antitrust. It also runs counter to the general thrust of the Supreme Court’s recent antitrust jurisprudence, which implicitly has adopted an error cost framework (see the article by Thom Lambert and me, here) with a focus on false positives. As the late Justice Scalia pithily explained, “[m]istaken inferences and the resulting false condemnations are ‘especially costly, because they chill the very conduct the antitrust laws are designed to protect.’” Verizon v. Trinko (citing Matsushita Elec. Indus. Co. v. Zenith Radio Corp.). It would be fitting tribute to the great Justice for the Supreme Court to heed this teaching and grant certiorari in the Apple case.

For a few months I have thought that the Apple eBooks case would find an easy fit within the Supreme Court’s antitrust decisions. The case that seems closest to me is Business Electronics v. Sharp Electronics, an unfortunately under-appreciated piece of antitrust precedent. One sign of its under-appreciation is its absence in some recent editions of antitrust casebooks.

Read the full piece here.

Nearly all economists from across the political spectrum agree: free trade is good. Yet free trade agreements are not always the same thing as free trade. Whether we’re talking about the Trans-Pacific Partnership or the European Union’s Digital Single Market (DSM) initiative, the question is always whether the agreement in question is reducing barriers to trade, or actually enacting barriers to trade into law.

Read the full piece here. 

Summary

Increasingly, people use the internet to connect with one another, access information, and purchase products and services. Along with the growth in the online marketplace have come concerns, as well, particularly regarding both the privacy of personal information as well as competition issues surrounding this and other data.

While concerns about privacy and data are not unique to the internet ecosystem, they are in some ways heightened due to the ubiquitous nature of information sharing online. While much of the sharing is voluntary, a group of scholars and activists have argued that several powerful online companies have overstepped their bounds in gathering and using data from internet users. These privacy advocates have pushed the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) and regulators in Europe to incorporate privacy concerns into antitrust analysis.

We have undertaken a classification of the various proposed approaches to incorporating privacy into antitrust law elsewhere. Here, we focus on the two most-developed theories: first, that privacy should be considered in mergers and other antitrust contexts as a non-price factor of competition; and second, that the collection and use of data can be used to facilitate anticompetitive price discrimination. In addition, we analyze the underlying conception of data as a barrier to entry that is a necessary precondition for supporting either proposed theory of harm.

 

Last year, Microsoft’s new CEO, Satya Nadella, seemed to break with the company’s longstanding “complain instead of compete” strategy to acknowledge that:

We’re going to innovate with a challenger mindset…. We’re not coming at this as some incumbent.

Among the first items on his agenda? Treating competing platforms like opportunities for innovation and expansion rather than obstacles to be torn down by any means possible:

We are absolutely committed to making our applications run what most people describe as cross platform…. There is no holding back of anything.

Earlier this week, at its Build Developer Conference, Microsoft announced its most significant initiative yet to bring about this reality: code built into its Windows 10 OS that will enable Android and iOS developers to port apps into the Windows ecosystem more easily.

To make this possible… Windows phones “will include an Android subsystem” meant to play nice with the Java and C++ code developers have already crafted to run on a rival’s operating system…. iOS developers can compile their Objective C code right from Microsoft’s Visual Studio, and turn it into a full-fledged Windows 10 app.

Microsoft also announced that its new browser, rebranded as “Edge,” will run Chrome and Firefox extensions, and that its Office suite would enable a range of third-party services to integrate with Office on Windows, iOS, Android and Mac.

Consumers, developers and Microsoft itself should all benefit from the increased competition that these moves are certain to facilitate.

Most obviously, more consumers may be willing to switch to phones and tablets with the Windows 10 operating system if they can continue to enjoy the apps and extensions they’ve come to rely on when using Google and Apple products. As one commenter said of the move:

I left Windows phone due to the lack of apps. I love the OS though, so if this means all my favorite apps will be on the platform I’ll jump back onto the WP bandwagon in a heartbeat.

And developers should invest more in development when they can expect additional revenue from yet another platform running their apps and extensions, with minimal additional development required.

It’s win-win-win. Except perhaps for Microsoft’s lingering regulatory strategy to hobble Google.

That strategy is built primarily on antitrust claims, most recently rooted in arguments that consumers, developers and competitors alike are harmed by Google’s conduct around Android which, it is alleged, makes it difficult for OS makers (like Cyanogen) and app developers (like Microsoft Bing) to compete.

But Microsoft’s interoperability announcements (along with a host of other rapidly evolving market characteristics) actually serve to undermine the antitrust arguments that Microsoft, through groups like FairSearch and ICOMP, has largely been responsible for pushing in the EU against Google/Android.

The reality is that, with innovations like the one Microsoft announced this week, Microsoft, Google and Apple (and Samsung, Nokia, Tizen, Cyanogen…) are competing more vigorously on several fronts. Such competition is evidence of a vibrant marketplace that is simply not in need of antitrust intervention.

The supreme irony in this is that such a move represents a (further) nail in the coffin of the supposed “applications barrier to entry” that was central to the US DOJ’s antitrust suit against Microsoft and that factors into the contemporary Android antitrust arguments against Google.

Frankly, the argument was never very convincing. Absent unjustified and anticompetitive efforts to prop up such a barrier, the “applications barrier to entry” is just a synonym for “big.” Admittedly, the DC Court of Appeals in Microsoft was careful — far more careful than the district court — to locate specific, narrow conduct beyond the mere existence of the alleged barrier that it believed amounted to anticompetitive monopoly maintenance. But central to the imposition of liability was the finding that some of Microsoft’s conduct deterred application developers from effectively accessing other platforms, without procompetitive justification.

With the implementation of initiatives like the one Microsoft has now undertaken in Windows 10, however, it appears that such concerns regarding Google and mobile app developers are unsupportable.

Of greatest significance to the current Android-related accusations against Google, the appeals court in Microsoft also reversed the district court’s finding of liability based on tying, noting in particular that:

If OS vendors without market power also sell their software bundled with a browser, the natural inference is that sale of the items as a bundle serves consumer demand and that unbundled sale would not.

Of course this is exactly what Microsoft Windows Phone (which decidedly does not have market power) does, suggesting that the bundling of mobile OS’s with proprietary apps is procompetitive.

Similarly, in reviewing the eventual consent decree in Microsoft, the appeals court upheld the conditions that allowed the integration of OS and browser code, and rejected the plaintiff’s assertion that a prohibition on such technological commingling was required by law.

The appeals court praised the district court’s recognition that an appropriate remedy “must place paramount significance upon addressing the exclusionary effect of the commingling, rather than the mere conduct which gives rise to the effect,” as well as the district court’s acknowledgement that “it is not a proper task for the Court to undertake to redesign products.”  Said the appeals court, “addressing the applications barrier to entry in a manner likely to harm consumers is not self-evidently an appropriate way to remedy an antitrust violation.”

Today, claims that the integration of Google Mobile Services (GMS) into Google’s version of the Android OS is anticompetitive are misplaced for the same reason:

But making Android competitive with its tightly controlled competitors [e.g., Apple iOS and Windows Phone] 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.

In fact, some commenters have even suggested that, by effectively making the OS more “open,” Microsoft’s new Windows 10 initiative might undermine the Windows experience in exactly this fashion:

As a Windows Phone developer, I think this could easily turn into a horrible idea…. [I]t might break the whole Windows user experience Microsoft has been building in the past few years. Modern UI design is a different approach from both Android and iOS. We risk having a very unhomogenic [sic] store with lots of apps using different design patterns, and Modern UI is in my opinion, one of the strongest points of Windows Phone.

But just because Microsoft may be willing to take this risk doesn’t mean that any sensible conception of competition law and economics should require Google (or anyone else) to do so, as well.

Most significantly, Microsoft’s recent announcement is further evidence that both technological and contractual innovations can (potentially — the initiative is too new to know its effect) transform competition, undermine static market definitions and weaken theories of anticompetitive harm.

When apps and their functionality are routinely built into some OS’s or set as defaults; when mobile apps are also available for the desktop and are seamlessly integrated to permit identical functions to be performed on multiple platforms; and when new form factors like Apple MacBook Air and Microsoft Surface blur the lines between mobile and desktop, traditional, static anticompetitive theories are out the window (no pun intended).

Of course, it’s always been possible for new entrants to overcome network effects and scale impediments by a range of means. Microsoft itself has in the past offered to pay app developers to write for its mobile platform. Similarly, it offers inducements to attract users to its Bing search engine and it has devised several creative mechanisms to overcome its claimed scale inferiority in search.

A further irony (and market complication) is that now some of these apps — the ones with network effects of their own — threaten in turn to challenge the reigning mobile operating systems, exactly as Netscape was purported to threaten Microsoft’s OS (and lead to its anticompetitive conduct) back in the day. Facebook, for example, now offers not only its core social media function, but also search, messaging, video calls, mobile payments, photo editing and sharing, and other functionality that compete with many of the core functions built into mobile OS’s.

But the desire by apps like Facebook to expand their networks by being on multiple platforms, and the desire by these platforms to offer popular apps in order to attract users, ensure that Facebook is ubiquitous, even without any antitrust intervention. As Timothy Bresnahan, Joe Orsini and Pai-Ling Yin demonstrate:

(1) The distribution of app attractiveness to consumers is skewed, with a small minority of apps drawing the vast majority of consumer demand. (2) Apps which are highly demanded on one platform tend also to be highly demanded on the other platform. (3) These highly demanded apps have a strong tendency to multihome, writing for both platforms. As a result, the presence or absence of apps offers little reason for consumers to choose a platform. A consumer can choose either platform and have access to the most attractive apps.

Of course, even before Microsoft’s announcement, cross-platform app development was common, and third-party platforms like Xamarin facilitated cross-platform development. As Daniel O’Connor noted last year:

Even if one ecosystem has a majority of the market share, software developers will release versions for different operating systems if it is cheap/easy enough to do so…. As [Torsten] Körber documents [here], building mobile applications is much easier and cheaper than building PC software. Therefore, it is more common for programmers to write programs for multiple OSes…. 73 percent of apps developers design apps for at least two different mobiles OSes, while 62 percent support 3 or more.

Whether Microsoft’s interoperability efforts prove to be “perfect” or not (and some commenters are skeptical), they seem destined to at least further decrease the cost of cross-platform development, thus reducing any “application barrier to entry” that might impede Microsoft’s ability to compete with its much larger rivals.

Moreover, one of the most interesting things about the announcement is that it will enable Android and iOS apps to run not only on Windows phones, but also on Windows computers. Some 1.3 billion PCs run Windows. Forget Windows’ tiny share of mobile phone OS’s; that massive potential PC market (of which Microsoft still has 91 percent) presents an enormous ready-made market for mobile app developers that won’t be ignored.

It also points up the increasing absurdity of compartmentalizing these markets for antitrust purposes. As the relevant distinctions between mobile and desktop markets break down, the idea of Google (or any other company) “leveraging its dominance” in one market to monopolize a “neighboring” or “related” market is increasingly unsustainable. As I wrote earlier this week:

Mobile and social media have transformed search, too…. This revolution has migrated to the computer, which has itself become “app-ified.” Now there are desktop apps and browser extensions that take users directly to Google competitors such as Kayak, eBay and Amazon, or that pull and present information from these sites.

In the end, intentionally or not, Microsoft is (again) undermining its own case. And it is doing so by innovating and competing — those Schumpeterian concepts that were always destined to undermine antitrust cases in the high-tech sector.

If we’re lucky, Microsoft’s new initiatives are the leading edge of a sea change for Microsoft — a different and welcome mindset built on competing in the marketplace rather than at regulators’ doors.

Filed under: antitrust, barriers to entry, exclusionary conduct, google, market definition, markets, monopolization, technology, tying, tying Tagged: Android, antitrust, competition, Cyanogen, google, Google Mobile Services, innovation, microsoft, Mobile, Satya Nadella, tying, Windows Phone