Since the European Commission (EC) announced its first inquiry into Google’s business practices in 2010, the company has been the subject of lengthy investigations by courts and competition agencies around the globe. Regulatory authorities in the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, and South Korea have all opened and rejected similar antitrust claims.

And yet the EC marches on, bolstered by Google’s myriad competitors, who continue to agitate for further investigations and enforcement actions, even as we — companies and consumers alike — enjoy the benefits of an increasingly dynamic online marketplace.

Indeed, while the EC has spent more than half a decade casting about for some plausible antitrust claim, the online economy has thundered ahead. Since 2010, Facebook has tripled its active users and multiplied its revenue ninefold; the number of apps available in the Amazon app store has grown from less than 4000 to over 400,000 today; and there are almost 1.5 billion more Internet users globally than there were in 2010. And consumers are increasingly using new and different ways to search for information: Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Facebook’s Messenger are a few of the many new innovations challenging traditional search engines.

Advertisers have adapted to this evolution, moving increasingly online, and from search to display ads as mobile adoption has skyrocketed. Social networks like Twitter and Snapchat have come into their own, competing for the same (and ever-increasing) advertising dollars. For marketers, advertising on social networks is now just as important as advertising in search. No wonder e-commerce sales have more than doubled, to almost $2 trillion worldwide; for the first time, consumers purchased more online than in stores this past year.

To paraphrase Louis C.K.: Everything is amazing — and no one at the European Commission is happy.

The EC’s market definition is fatally flawed

Like its previous claims, the Commission’s most recent charges are rooted in the assertion that Google abuses its alleged dominance in “general search” advertising to unfairly benefit itself and to monopolize other markets. But European regulators continue to miss the critical paradigm shift among online advertisers and consumers that has upended this stale view of competition on the Internet. The reality is that Google’s competition may not, and need not, look exactly like Google itself, but it is competition nonetheless. And it’s happening in spades.

The key to understanding why the European Commission’s case is fundamentally flawed lies in an examination of how it defines the relevant market. Through a series of economically and factually unjustified assumptions, the Commission defines search as a distinct market in which Google faces limited competition and enjoys an 80% market share. In other words, for the EC, “general search” apparently means only nominal search providers like Google and Bing; it doesn’t mean companies like Amazon, Facebook and Twitter — Google’s biggest competitors.  

But the reality is that “general search” is just one technology among many for serving information and ads to consumers online. Defining the relevant market or limiting the definition of competition in terms of the particular mechanism that Google happens to use to match consumers and advertisers doesn’t reflect the substitutability of other mechanisms that do the same thing — merely because these mechanisms aren’t called “search.”

Properly defined, the market in which Google competes online is not search, but something more like online “matchmaking” between advertisers, retailers and consumers. And this market is enormously competitive.

Consumers today are increasingly using platforms like Amazon and Facebook as substitutes for the searches they might have run on Google or Bing. “Closed” platforms like the iTunes store and innumerable apps handle copious search traffic but also don’t figure in the EC’s market calculations. And so-called “dark social” interactions like email, text messages, and IMs, drive huge amounts of some of the most valuable traffic on the Internet. This, in turn, has led to a competitive scramble to roll out completely new technologies like chatbots to meet consumers’ informational (and merchants’ advertising) needs.

Properly construed, Google’s market position is precarious

Like Facebook and Twitter (and practically every other Internet platform), advertising is Google’s primary source of revenue. Instead of charging for fancy hardware or offering services to users for a fee, Google offers search, the Android operating system, and a near-endless array of other valuable services for free to users. The company’s very existence relies on attracting Internet users and consumers to its properties in order to effectively connect them with advertisers.

But being an online matchmaker is a difficult and competitive enterprise. Among other things, the ability to generate revenue turns crucially on the quality of the match: All else equal, an advertiser interested in selling widgets will pay more for an ad viewed by a user who can be reliably identified as being interested in buying widgets.

Google’s primary mechanism for attracting users to match with advertisers — general search — is substantially about information, not commerce, and the distinction between product and informational searches is crucially important to understanding Google’s market and the surprisingly limited and tenuous market power it possesses.

General informational queries aren’t nearly as valuable to advertisers: Significantly, only about 30 percent of Google’s searches even trigger any advertising at all. Meanwhile, as of 2012, one-third of product searches started on Amazon while only 13% started on a general search engine.

As economist Hal Singer aptly noted in 2012,

[the data] suggest that Google lacks market power in a critical segment of search — namely, product searches. Even though searches for items such as power tools or designer jeans account for only 10 to 20 percent of all searches, they are clearly some of the most important queries for search engines from a business perspective, as they are far easier to monetize than informational queries like “Kate Middleton.”

While Google Search clearly offers substantial value to advertisers, its ability to continue to do so is precarious when confronted with the diverse array of competitors that, like Facebook, offer a level of granularity in audience targeting that general search can’t match, or that, like Amazon, systematically offer up the most valuable searchers.

In order to compete in this market — one properly defined to include actual competitors — Google has had to constantly innovate to maintain its position. Unlike a complacent monopolist, it has evolved to meet changing consumer demand, shifting technology and inventive competitors. Thus, Google’s search algorithm has changed substantially over the years to make more effective use of the information available to ensure relevance; search results have evolved to give consumers answers to queries rather than just links, and to provide more-direct access to products and services; and, as users have shifted more and more of their time and attention to mobile devices, search has incorporated more-localized results.

Competitors want a free lunch

Critics complain, nevertheless, that these developments have made it harder, in one way or another, for rivals to compete. And the EC has provided a willing ear. According to Commissioner Vestager last week:

Google has come up with many innovative products that have made a difference to our lives. But that doesn’t give Google the right to deny other companies the chance to compete and innovate. Today, we have further strengthened our case that Google has unduly favoured its own comparison shopping service in its general search result pages…. (Emphasis added).

Implicit in this statement is the remarkable assertion that by favoring its own comparison shopping services, Google “den[ies] other companies the chance to compete and innovate.” Even assuming Google does “favor” its own results, this is an astounding claim.

First, it is not a violation of competition law simply to treat competitors’ offerings differently than one’s own, even for a dominant firm. Instead, conduct must actually exclude competitors from the market, without offering countervailing advantages to consumers. But Google’s conduct is not exclusionary, and there are many benefits to consumers.

As it has from the start of its investigations of Google, the EC begins with a flawed assumption: that Google’s competitors both require, and may be entitled to, unfettered access to Google’s property in order to compete. But this is patently absurd. Google is not an essential facility: Billions of users reach millions of companies everyday through direct browser navigation, apps, email links, review sites and blogs, and countless other means — all without once touching Google.com.

Google Search results do not exclude competitors, whether comparison shopping sites or others. For example, 72% of TripAdvisor’s U.S. traffic comes from search, and almost all of that from organic results; other specialized search sites see similar traffic volumes.

More important, however, in addition to continuing to reach rival sites through Google Search, billions of consumers access rival services directly through their mobile apps. In fact, for Yelp,

Approximately 21 million unique devices accessed Yelp via the mobile app on a monthly average basis in the first quarter of 2016, an increase of 32% compared to the same period in 2015. App users viewed approximately 70% of page views in the first quarter and were more than 10 times as engaged as website users, as measured by number of pages viewed. (Emphasis added).

And a staggering 40 percent of mobile browsing is now happening inside the Facebook app, competing with the browsers and search engines pre-loaded on smartphones.

Millions of consumers also directly navigate to Google’s rivals via their browser by simply typing, for example, “Yelp.com” in their address bar. And as noted above, consumers are increasingly using Google rivals’ new disruptive information engines like Alexa and Siri for their search needs. Even the traditional search engine space is competitive — in fact, according to Wired, as of July 2016:

Microsoft has now captured more than one-third of Internet searches. Microsoft’s transformation from a company that sells boxed software to one that sells services in the cloud is well underway. (Emphasis added).

With such numbers, it’s difficult to see how rivals are being foreclosed from reaching consumers in any meaningful way.

Meanwhile, the benefits to consumers are obvious: Google is directly answering questions for consumers rather than giving them a set of possible links to click through and further search. In some cases its results present entirely new and valuable forms of information (e.g., search trends and structured data); in others they serve to hone searches by suggesting further queries, or to help users determine which organic results (including those of its competitors) may be most useful. And, of course, consumers aren’t forced to endure these innovations if they don’t find them useful, as they can quickly switch to other providers.  

Nostalgia makes for bad regulatory policy

Google is not the unstoppable monopolist of the EU competition regulators’ imagining. Rather, it is a continual innovator, forced to adapt to shifting consumer demand, changing technology, and competitive industry dynamics. And, instead of trying to hamstring Google, if they are to survive, Google’s competitors (and complainants) must innovate as well.

Dominance in technology markets — especially online — has always been ephemeral. Once upon a time, MySpace, AOL, and Yahoo were the dominant Internet platforms. Kodak, once practically synonymous with “instant camera” let the digital revolution pass it by. The invincible Sony Walkman was upended by mp3s and the iPod. Staid, keyboard-operated Blackberries and Nokias simply couldn’t compete with app-driven, graphical platforms from Apple and Samsung. Even today, startups like Snapchat, Slack, and Spotify gain massive scale and upend entire industries with innovative new technology that can leave less-nimble incumbents in the dustbin of tech history.

Put differently, companies that innovate are able to thrive, while those that remain dependent on yesterday’s technology and outdated business models usually fail — and deservedly so. It should never be up to regulators to pick winners and losers in a highly dynamic and competitive market, particularly if doing so constrains the market’s very dynamism. As Alfonso Lamadrid has pointed out:

It is companies and not competition enforcers which will strive or fail in the adoption of their business models, and it is therefore companies and not competition enforcers who are to decide on what business models to use. Some will prove successful and others will not; some companies will thrive and some will disappear, but with experimentation with business models, success and failure are and have always been part of the game.

In other words, we should not forget that competition law is, or should be, business-model agnostic, and that regulators are – like anyone else – far from omniscient.

Like every other technology company before them, Google and its competitors must be willing and able to adapt in order to keep up with evolving markets — just as for Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen, “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” Google confronts a near-constantly evolving marketplace and fierce competition from unanticipated quarters; companies that build their businesses around Google face a near-constantly evolving Google. In the face of such relentless market dynamism, neither consumers nor firms are well served by regulatory policy rooted in nostalgia.  

Filed under: antitrust, essential facilities, exclusionary conduct, google, law and economics, market definition, markets, monopolization, technology Tagged: abuse of dominance, antitrust, competition, EC, European Commission, google, market definition, search, Vestager

Brand drug manufacturers are no strangers to antitrust accusations when it comes to their complicated relationship with generic competitors — most obviously with respect to reverse payment settlements. But the massive and massively complex regulatory scheme under which drugs are regulated has provided other opportunities for regulatory legerdemain with potentially anticompetitive effect, as well.

In particular, some FTC Commissioners have raised concerns that brand drug companies have been taking advantage of an FDA drug safety program — the Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies program, or “REMS” — to delay or prevent generic entry.

Drugs subject to a REMS restricted distribution program are difficult to obtain through market channels and not otherwise readily available, even for would-be generic manufacturers that need samples in order to perform the tests required to receive FDA approval to market their products. REMS allows (requires, in fact) brand manufacturers to restrict the distribution of certain drugs that present safety or abuse risks, creating an opportunity for branded drug manufacturers to take advantage of imprecise regulatory requirements by inappropriately limiting access by generic manufacturers.

The FTC has not (yet) brought an enforcement action, but it has opened several investigations, and filed an amicus brief in a private-party litigation. Generic drug companies have filed several antitrust claims against branded drug companies and raised concerns with the FDA.

The problem, however, is that even if these companies are using REMS to delay generics, such a practice makes for a terrible antitrust case. Not only does the existence of a regulatory scheme arguably set Trinko squarely in the way of a successful antitrust case, but the sort of refusal to deal claims at issue here (as in Trinko) are rightly difficult to win because, as the DOJ’s Section 2 Report notes, “there likely are few circumstances where forced sharing would help consumers in the long run.”

But just because there isn’t a viable antitrust case doesn’t mean there isn’t still a competition problem. But in this case, it’s a problem of regulatory failure. Companies rationally take advantage of poorly written federal laws and regulations in order to tilt the market to their own advantage. It’s no less problematic for the market, but its solution is much more straightforward, if politically more difficult.

Thus it’s heartening to see that Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), along with three of his colleagues (Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)), has proposed a novel but efficient way to correct these bureaucracy-generated distortions in the pharmaceutical market without resorting to the “blunt instrument” of antitrust law. As the bill notes:

While the antitrust laws may address actions by license holders who impede the prompt negotiation and development on commercially reasonable terms of a single, shared system of elements to assure safe use, a more tailored legal pathway would help ensure that license holders negotiate such agreements in good faith and in a timely manner, facilitating competition in the marketplace for drugs and biological products.

The legislative solution put forward by the Creating and Restoring Equal Access to Equivalent Samples (CREATES) Act of 2016 targets the right culprit: the poor regulatory drafting that permits possibly anticompetitive conduct to take place. Moreover, the bill refrains from creating a per se rule, instead implementing several features that should still enable brand manufacturers to legitimately restrict access to drug samples when appropriate.

In essence, Senator Lee’s bill introduces a third party (in this case, the Secretary of Health and Human Services) who is capable of determining whether an eligible generic manufacturer is able to comply with REMS restrictions — thus bypassing any bias on the part of the brand manufacturer. Where the Secretary determines that a generic firm meets the REMS requirements, the bill also creates a narrow cause of action for this narrow class of plaintiffs, allowing suits against certain brand manufacturers who — despite the prohibition on using REMS to delay generics — nevertheless misuse the process to delay competitive entry.

Background on REMS

The REMS program was introduced as part of the Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act of 2007 (FDAAA). Following the withdrawal of Vioxx, an arthritis pain reliever, from the market because of a post-approval linkage of the drug to heart attacks, the FDA was under considerable fire, and there was a serious risk that fewer and fewer net beneficial drugs would be approved. The REMS program was introduced by Congress as a mechanism to ensure that society could reap the benefits from particularly risky drugs and biologics — rather than the FDA preventing them from entering the market at all. It accomplishes this by ensuring (among other things) that brands and generics adopt appropriate safety protocols for distribution and use of drugs — particularly when a drug has the potential to cause serious side effects, or has an unusually high abuse profile.

The FDA-determined REMS protocols can range from the simple (e.g., requiring a medication guide or a package insert about potential risks) to the more burdensome (including restrictions on a drug’s sale and distribution, or what the FDA calls “Elements to Assure Safe Use” (“ETASU”)). Most relevant here, the REMS process seems to allow brands considerable leeway to determine whether generic manufacturers are compliant or able to comply with ETASUs. Given this discretion, it is no surprise that brand manufacturers may be tempted to block competition by citing “safety concerns.”

Although the FDA specifically forbids the use of REMS to block lower-cost, generic alternatives from entering the market (of course), almost immediately following the law’s enactment, certain less-scrupulous branded pharmaceutical companies began using REMS for just that purpose (also, of course).

REMS abuse

To enter into pharmaceutical markets that no longer have any underlying IP protections, manufactures must submit to the FDA an Abbreviated New Drug Application (ANDA) for a generic, or an Abbreviated Biologic License Application (ABLA) for a biosimilar, of the brand drug. The purpose is to prove to the FDA that the competing product is as safe and effective as the branded reference product. In order to perform the testing sufficient to prove efficacy and safety, generic and biosimilar drug manufacturers must acquire a sample (many samples, in fact) of the reference product they are trying to replicate.

For the narrow class of dangerous or highly abused drugs, generic manufacturers are forced to comply with any REMS restrictions placed upon the brand manufacturer — even when the terms require the brand manufacturer to tightly control the distribution of its product.

And therein lies the problem. Because the brand manufacturer controls access to its products, it can refuse to provide the needed samples, using REMS as an excuse. In theory, it may be true in certain cases that a brand manufacturer is justified in refusing to distribute samples of its product, of course; some would-be generic manufacturers certainly may not meet the requisite standards for safety and security.

But in practice it turns out that most of the (known) examples of brands refusing to provide samples happen across the board — they preclude essentially all generic competition, not just the few firms that might have insufficient safeguards. It’s extremely difficult to justify such refusals on the basis of a generic manufacturer’s suitability when all would-be generic competitors are denied access, including well-established, high-quality manufacturers.

But, for a few brand manufacturers, at least, that seems to be how the REMS program is implemented. Thus, for example, Jon Haas, director of patient access at Turing Pharmaceuticals, referred to the practice of denying generics samples this way:

Most likely I would block that purchase… We spent a lot of money for this drug. We would like to do our best to avoid generic competition. It’s inevitable. They seem to figure out a way [to make generics], no matter what. But I’m certainly not going to make it easier for them. We’re spending millions and millions in research to find a better Daraprim, if you will.

As currently drafted, the REMS program gives branded manufacturers the ability to limit competition by stringing along negotiations for product samples for months, if not years. Although access to a few samples for testing is seemingly such a small, trivial thing, the ability to block this access allows a brand manufacturer to limit competition (at least from bioequivalent and generic drugs; obviously competition between competing branded drugs remains).

And even if a generic competitor manages to get ahold of samples, the law creates an additional wrinkle by imposing a requirement that brand and generic manufacturers enter into a single shared REMS plan for bioequivalent and generic drugs. But negotiating the particulars of the single, shared program can drag on for years. Consequently, even when a generic manufacturer has received the necessary samples, performed the requisite testing, and been approved by the FDA to sell a competing drug, it still may effectively be barred from entering the marketplace because of REMS.

The number of drugs covered by REMS is small: fewer than 100 in a universe of several thousand FDA-approved drugs. And the number of these alleged to be subject to abuse is much smaller still. Nonetheless, abuse of this regulation by certain brand manufacturers has likely limited competition and increased prices.

Antitrust is not the answer

Whether the complex, underlying regulatory scheme that allocates the relative rights of brands and generics — and that balances safety against access — gets the balance correct or not is an open question, to be sure. But given the regulatory framework we have and the perceived need for some sort of safety controls around access to samples and for shared REMS plans, the law should at least work to do what it intends, without creating an opportunity for harmful manipulation. Yet it appears that the ambiguity of the current law has allowed some brand manufacturers to exploit these safety protections to limit competition.

As noted above, some are quite keen to make this an antitrust issue. But, as also noted, antitrust is a poor fit for handling such abuses.

First, antitrust law has an uneasy relationship with other regulatory schemes. Not least because of Trinko, it is a tough case to make that brand manufacturers are violating antitrust laws when they rely upon legal obligations under a safety program that is essentially designed to limit generic entry on safety grounds. The issue is all the more properly removed from the realm of antitrust enforcement given that the problem is actually one of regulatory failure, not market failure.

Second, antitrust law doesn’t impose a duty to deal with rivals except in very limited circumstances. In Trinko, for example, the Court rejected the invitation to extend a duty to deal to situations where an existing, voluntary economic relationship wasn’t terminated. By definition this is unlikely to be the case here where the alleged refusal to deal is what prevents the generic from entering the market in the first place. The logic behind Trinko (and a host of other cases that have limited competitors’ obligations to assist their rivals) was to restrict duty to deal cases to those rare circumstances where it reliably leads to long-term competitive harm — not where it amounts to a perfectly legitimate effort to compete without giving rivals a leg-up.

But antitrust is such a powerful tool and such a flexible “catch-all” regulation, that there are always efforts to thwart reasonable limits on its use. As several of us at TOTM have written about at length in the past, former FTC Commissioner Rosch and former FTC Chairman Leibowitz were vocal proponents of using Section 5 of the FTC Act to circumvent sensible judicial limits on making out and winning antitrust claims, arguing that the limits were meant only for private plaintiffs — not (implicitly infallible) government enforcers. Although no one at the FTC has yet (publicly) suggested bringing a REMS case as a standalone Section 5 case, such a case would be consistent with the sorts of theories that animated past standalone Section 5 cases.

Again, this approach serves as an end-run around the reasonable judicial constraints that evolved as a result of judges actually examining the facts of individual cases over time, and is a misguided way of dealing with what is, after all, fundamentally a regulatory design problem.

The CREATES Act

Senator Lee’s bill, on the other hand, aims to solve the problem with a more straightforward approach by improving the existing regulatory mechanism and by adding a limited judicial remedy to incentivize compliance under the amended regulatory scheme. In summary:

• The bill creates a cause of action for a refusal to deal only where plaintiff can prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, that certain well-defined conditions are met.
• For samples, if a drug is not covered by a REMS, or if the generic manufacturer is specifically authorized, then the generic can sue if it doesn’t receive sufficient quantities of samples on commercially reasonable terms. This is not a per se offense subject to outsized antitrust damages. Instead, the remedy is a limited injunction ensuring the sale of samples on commercially reasonable terms, reasonable attorneys’ fees, and a monetary fine limited to revenue earned from sale of the drug during the refusal period.
• The bill also gives a brand manufacturer an affirmative defense if it can prove by a preponderance of the evidence that, regardless of its own refusal to supply them, samples were nevertheless available elsewhere on commercially reasonable terms, or where the brand manufacturer is unable to supply the samples because it does not actually produce or market the drug.
• In order to deal with the REMS process problems, the bill creates similar rights with similar limitations when the license holders and generics cannot come to an agreement about a shared REMS on commercially reasonable terms within 120 days of first contact by an eligible developer.
• The bill also explicitly limits brand manufacturers’ liability for claims “arising out of the failure of an [eligible generic manufacturer] to follow adequate safeguards,” thus removing one of the (perfectly legitimate) objections to the bill pressed by brand manufacturers.

The primary remedy is limited, injunctive relief to end the delay. And brands are protected from frivolous litigation by an affirmative defense under which they need only show that the product is available for purchase on reasonable terms elsewhere. Damages are similarly limited and are awarded only if a court finds that the brand manufacturer lacked a legitimate business justification for its conduct (which, under the drug safety regime, means essentially a reasonable belief that its own REMS plan would be violated by dealing with the generic entrant). And monetary damages do not include punitive damages.

Finally, the proposed bill completely avoids the question of whether antitrust laws are applicable, leaving that possibility open to determination by courts — as is appropriate. Moreover, by establishing even more clearly the comprehensive regulatory regime governing potential generic entrants’ access to dangerous drugs, the bill would, given the holding in Trinko, probably make application of antitrust laws here considerably less likely.

Ultimately Senator Lee’s bill is a well-thought-out and targeted fix to an imperfect regulation that seems to be facilitating anticompetitive conduct by a few bad actors. It does so without trampling on the courts’ well-established antitrust jurisprudence, and without imposing excessive cost or risk on the majority of brand manufacturers that behave perfectly appropriately under the law.

Filed under: anticompetitive market distortions, antitrust, consumer protection, error costs, exclusionary conduct, ftc, health care, law and economics, regulation, regulatory reform, section 5 Tagged: antitrust, branded drugs, CREATES Act, FDA, FDAAA, generic drugs, refusals to deal, REMS, Senator Mike Lee

Today’s Canadian Competition Bureau (CCB) Google decision marks yet another regulator joining the chorus of competition agencies around the world that have already dismissed similar complaints relating to Google’s Search or Android businesses (including the US FTC, the Korea FTC, the Taiwan FTC, and AG offices in Texas and Ohio).

A number of courts around the world have also rejected competition complaints against the company, including courts in the US, France, the UK, Germany, and Brazil.

After an extensive, three-year investigation into Google’s business practices in Canada, the CCB

did not find sufficient evidence that Google engaged in for an anti-competitive purpose, and/or that the practices resulted in a substantial lessening or prevention of competition in any relevant market.

Like the US FTC, the CCB did find fault with Google’s use of restriction on its AdWords API — but Google had already revised those terms worldwide following the FTC investigation, and has committed to the CCB to maintain the revised terms for at least another 5 years.

Other than a negative ruling from Russia’s competition agency last year in favor of Yandex — essentially “the Russian Google,” and one of only a handful of Russian tech companies of significance (surely a coincidence…) — no regulator has found against Google on the core claims brought against it.

True, investigations in a few jurisdictions, including the EU and India, are ongoing. And a Statement of Objections in the EU’s Android competition investigation appears imminent. But at some point, regulators are going to have to take a serious look at the motivations of the entities that bring complaints before wasting more investigatory resources on their behalf.

Competitor after competitor has filed complaints against Google that amount to, essentially, a claim that Google’s superior services make it too hard to compete. But competition law doesn’t require that Google or any other large firm make life easier for competitors. Without a finding of exclusionary harm/abuse of dominance (and, often, injury to consumers), this just isn’t anticompetitive conduct — it’s competition. And the overwhelming majority of competition authorities that have examined the company have agreed.

Exactly when will regulators be a little more skeptical of competitors trying to game the antitrust laws for their own advantage?

Canada joins the chorus

The Canadian decision mirrors the reasoning that regulators around the world have employed in reaching the decision that Google hasn’t engaged in anticompetitive conduct.

Two of the more important results in the CCB’s decision relate to preferential treatment of Google’s services (e.g., promotion of its own Map or Shopping results, instead of links to third-party aggregators of the same services) — the tired “search bias” claim that started all of this — and the distribution agreements that Google enters into with device manufacturers requiring inclusion of Google search as a default installation on Google Android phones.

On these key issues the CCB was unequivocal in its conclusions.

On search bias:

The Bureau sought evidence of the harm allegedly caused to market participants in Canada as a result of any alleged preferential treatment of Google’s services. The Bureau did not find adequate evidence to support the conclusion that this conduct has had an exclusionary effect on rivals, or that it has resulted in a substantial lessening or prevention of competition in a market.

And on search distribution agreements:

Google competes with other search engines for the business of hardware manufacturers and software developers. Other search engines can and do compete for these agreements so they appear as the default search engine…. Consumers can and do change the default search engine on their desktop and mobile devices if they prefer a different one to the pre-loaded default…. Google’s distribution agreements have not resulted in a substantial lessening or prevention of competition in Canada.

And here is the crucial point of the CCB’s insight (which, so far, everyone but Russia seems to appreciate): Despite breathless claims from rivals alleging they can’t compete in the face of their placement in Google’s search results, data barriers to entry, or default Google search on mobile devices, Google does actually face significant competition. Both the search bias and Android distribution claims were dismissed essentially because, whatever competitors may prefer Google do, its conduct doesn’t actually preclude access to competing services.

The True North strong and free [of meritless competitor complaints]

Exclusionary conduct must, well, exclude. But surfacing Google’s own “subjective” search results, even if they aren’t as high quality, doesn’t exclude competitors, according to the CCB and the other regulatory agencies that have also dismissed such claims. Similarly, consumers’ ability to switch search engines (“competition is just a click away,” remember), as well as OEMs’ ability to ship devices with different search engine defaults, ensure that search competitors can access consumers.

Former FTC Commissioner Josh Wright’s analysis of “search bias” in Google’s results applies with equal force to these complaints:

It is critical to recognize that bias alone is not evidence of competitive harm and it must be evaluated in the appropriate antitrust economic context of competition and consumers, rather [than] individual competitors and websites… [but these results] are not useful from an antitrust policy perspective because they erroneously—and contrary to economic theory and evidence—presume natural and procompetitive product differentiation in search rankings to be inherently harmful.

The competitors that bring complaints to antitrust authorities seek to make a demand of Google that is rarely made of any company: that it must provide access to its competitors on equal terms. But one can hardly imagine a valid antitrust complaint arising because McDonald’s refuses to sell a Whopper. The law on duties to deal is heavily circumscribed for good reason, as Josh Wright and I have pointed out:

The [US Supreme] Court [in Trinko] warned that the imposition of a duty to deal would threaten to “lessen the incentive for the monopolist, the rival, or both to invest in… economically beneficial facilities.”… Because imposition of a duty to deal with rivals threatens to decrease the incentive to innovate by creating new ways of producing goods at lower costs, satisfying consumer demand, or creating new markets altogether, courts and antitrust agencies have been reluctant to expand the duty.

Requiring Google to link to other powerful and sophisticated online search companies, or to provide them with placement on Google Android mobile devices, on the precise terms it does its own products would reduce the incentives of everyone to invest in their underlying businesses to begin with.

This is the real threat to competition. And kudos to the CCB for recognizing it.

The CCB’s investigation was certainly thorough, and its decision appears to be well-reasoned. Other regulators should take note before moving forward with yet more costly investigations.

Filed under: antitrust, essential facilities, european commission, exclusionary conduct, federal trade commission, ftc, international competition, Internet search, law and economics, technology, tying Tagged: Android, antitrust, canadian competition bureau, CCB, competition, European Commission, exclusionary conduct, google, search bias, tying

It appears that White House’s zeal for progressive-era legal theory has … progressed (or regressed?) further. Late last week President Obama signed an Executive Order that nominally claims to direct executive agencies (and “strongly encourages” independent agencies) to adopt “pro-competitive” policies. It’s called Steps to Increase Competition and Better Inform Consumers and Workers to Support Continued Growth of the American Economy, and was produced alongside an issue brief from the Council of Economic Advisors titled Benefits of Competition and Indicators of Market Power.

TL;DR version: the Order and its brief do not appear so much aimed at protecting consumers or competition, as they are at providing justification for favored regulatory adventures.

In truth, it’s not exactly clear what problem the President is trying to solve. And there is language in both the Order and the brief that could be interpreted in a positive light, and, likewise, language that could be more of a shot across the bow of “unruly” corporate citizens who have not gotten in line with the President’s agenda. Most of the Order and the corresponding CEA brief read as a rote recital of basic antitrust principles: price fixing bad, collusion bad, competition good. That said, there were two items in the Order that particularly stood out.

The (Maybe) Good

Section 2 of the Order states that

Executive departments … with authorities that could be used to enhance competition (agencies) shall … use those authorities to promote competition, arm consumers and workers with the information they need to make informed choices, and eliminate regulations that restrict competition without corresponding benefits to the American public. (emphasis added)

Obviously this is music to the ears of anyone who has thought that agencies should be required to do a basic economic analysis before undertaking brave voyages of regulatory adventure. And this is what the Supreme Court was getting at in Michigan v. EPA when it examined the meaning of the phrase “appropriate” in connection with environmental regulations:

One would not say that it is even rational, never mind “appropriate,” to impose billions of dollars in economic costs in return for a few dollars in health or environmental benefits.

Thus, if this Order follows the direction of Michigan v. EPA, and it becomes the standard for agencies to conduct cost-benefit analyses before issuing regulation (and to review old regulations through such an analysis), then wonderful! Moreover, this mandate to agencies to reduce regulations that restrict competition could lead to an unexpected reformation of a variety of regulations – even outside of the agencies themselves. For instance, the FTC is laudable in its ongoing efforts both to correct anticompetitive state licensing laws as well as to resist state-protected incumbents, such as taxi-cab companies.

Still, I have trouble believing that the President — and this goes for any president, really, regardless of party — would truly intend for agencies under his control to actually cede regulatory ground when a little thing like economic reality points in a different direction than official policy. After all, there was ample information available that the Title II requirements on broadband providers would be both costly and result in reduced capital expenditures, and the White House nonetheless encouraged the FCC to go ahead with reclassification.

And this isn’t the first time that the President has directed agencies to perform retrospective review of regulation (see the Identifying and Reducing Regulatory Burdens Order of 2012). To date, however, there appears to be little evidence that the burdens of the regulatory state have lessened. Last year set a record for the page count of the Federal Register (80k+ pages), and the data suggest that the cost of the regulatory state is only increasing. Thus, despite the pleasant noises the Order makes with regard to imposing economic discipline on agencies – and despite the good example Canada has set for us in this regard – I am not optimistic of the actual result.

And the (maybe) good builds an important bridge to the (probably) bad of the Order. It is well and good to direct agencies to engage in economic calculation when they write and administer regulations, but such calculation must be in earnest, and must be directed by the learning that was hard earned over the course of the development of antitrust jurisprudence in the US. As Geoffrey Manne and Josh Wright have noted:

Without a serious methodological commitment to economic science, the incorporation of economics into antitrust is merely a façade, allowing regulators and judges to select whichever economic model fits their earlier beliefs or policy preferences rather than the model that best fits the real?world data. Still, economic theory remains essential to antitrust law. Economic analysis constrains and harnesses antitrust law so that it protects consumers rather than competitors.

Unfortunately, the brief does not indicate that it is interested in more than a façade of economic rigor. For instance, it relies on the outmoded 50 firm revenue concentration numbers gathered by the Census Bureau to support the proposition that the industries themselves are highly concentrated and, therefore, are anticompetitive. But, it’s been fairly well understood since the 1970s that concentration says nothing directly about monopoly power and its exercise. In fact, concentration can often be seen as an indicator of superior efficiency that results in better outcomes for consumers (depending on the industry).

The (Probably) Bad

Apart from general concerns (such as having a host of federal agencies with no antitrust expertise now engaging in competition turf wars) there is one specific area that could have a dramatically bad result for long term policy, and that moreover reflects either ignorance or willful blindness of antitrust jurisprudence. Specifically, the Order directs agencies to

identify specific actions that they can take in their areas of responsibility to build upon efforts to detect abuses such as price fixing, anticompetitive behavior in labor and other input markets, exclusionary conduct, and blocking access to critical resources that are needed for competitive entry. (emphasis added).

It then goes on to say that

agencies shall submit … an initial list of … any specific practices, such as blocking access to critical resources, that potentially restrict meaningful consumer or worker choice or unduly stifle new market entrants (emphasis added)

The generally uncontroversial language regarding price fixing and exclusionary conduct are bromides – after all, as the Order notes, we already have the FTC and DOJ very actively policing this sort of conduct. What’s novel here, however, is that the highlighted language above seems to amount to a mandate to executive agencies (and a strong suggestion to independent agencies) that they begin to seek out “essential facilities” within their regulated industries.

But “critical resources … needed for competitive entry” could mean nearly anything, depending on how you define competition and relevant markets. And asking non-antitrust agencies to integrate one of the more esoteric (and controversial) parts of antitrust law into their mission is going to be a recipe for disaster.

In fact, this may be one of the reasons why the Supreme Court declined to recognize the essential facilities doctrine as a distinct rule in Trinko, where it instead characterized the exclusionary conduct in Aspen Skiing as ‘at or near the outer boundary’ of Sherman Act § 2 liability.

In short, the essential facilities doctrine is widely criticized, by pretty much everyone. In their respected treatise, Antitrust Law, Herbert Hovenkamp and Philip Areeda have said that “the essential facility doctrine is both harmful and unnecessary and should be abandoned”; Michael Boudin has noted that the doctrine is full of “embarrassing weaknesses”; and Gregory Werden has opined that “Courts should reject the doctrine.” One important reason for the broad criticism is because

At bottom, a plaintiff … is saying that the defendant has a valuable facility that it would be difficult to reproduce … But … the fact that the defendant has a highly valued facility is a reason to reject sharing, not to require it, since forced sharing “may lessen the incentive for the monopolist, the rival, or both to invest in those economically beneficial facilities.” (quoting Trinko)

Further, it’s really hard to say when one business is so critical to a particular market that its own internal functions need to be exposed for competitors’ advantage. For instance, is Big Data – which the CEA brief specifically notes as a potential “critical resource” — an essential facility when one company serves so many consumers that it has effectively developed an entire market that it dominates? ( In case you are wondering, it’s actually not). When exactly does a firm so outcompete its rivals that access to its business infrastructure can be seen by regulators as “essential” to competition? And is this just a set-up for punishing success — which hardly promotes competition, innovation or consumer welfare?

And, let’s be honest here, when the CEA is considering Big Data as an essential facility they are at least partially focused on Google and its various search properties. Google is frequently the target for “essentialist” critics who argue, among other things, that Google’s prioritization of its own properties in its own search results violates antitrust rules. The story goes that Google search is so valuable that when Google publishes its own shopping results ahead of its various competitors, it is engaging in anticompetitive conduct. But this is a terribly myopic view of what the choices are for search services because, as Geoffrey Manne has so ably noted before, “competitors denied access to the top few search results at Google’s site are still able to advertise their existence and attract users through a wide range of other advertising outlets[.]”

Moreover, as more and more users migrate to specialized apps on their mobile devices for a variety of content, Google’s desktop search becomes just one choice among many for finding information. All of this leaves to one side, of course, the fact that for some categories, Google has incredibly stiff competition.

Thus it is that

to the extent that inclusion in Google search results is about “Stiglerian” search-cost reduction for websites (and it can hardly be anything else), the range of alternate facilities for this function is nearly limitless.

The troubling thing here is that, given the breezy analysis of the Order and the CEA brief, I don’t think the White House is really considering the long-term legal and economic implications of its command; the Order appears to be much more about political support for favored agency actions already under way.

Indeed, despite the length of the CEA brief and the variety of antitrust principles recited in the Order itself, an accompanying release points to what is really going on (at least in part). The White House, along with the FCC, seems to think that the embedded streams in a cable or satellite broadcast should be considered a form of essential facility that is an indispensable component of video consumers’ choice (which is laughable given the magnitude of choice in video consumption options that consumers enjoy today).

And, to the extent that courts might apply the (controversial) essential facilities doctrine, an “indispensable requirement … is the unavailability of access to the ‘essential facilities’[.]” This is clearly not the case with much of what the CEA brief points to as examples of ostensibly laudable pro-competitive regulation.

The doctrine wouldn’t apply, for instance, to the FCC’s Open Internet Order since edge providers have access to customers over networks, even where network providers want to zero-rate, employ usage-based billing or otherwise negotiate connection fees and prioritization. And it also doesn’t apply to the set-top box kerfuffle; while third-parties aren’t able to access the video streams that make-up a cable broadcast, the market for consuming those streams is a single part of the entire video ecosystem. What really matters there is access to viewers, and the ability to provide services to consumers and compete for their business.

Yet, according to the White House, “the set-top box is the mascot” for the administration’s competition Order, because, apparently, cable boxes represent “what happens when you don’t have the choice to go elsewhere.” ( “Elsewhere” to the White House, I assume, cannot include Roku, Apple TV, Hulu, Netflix, and a myriad of other video options  that consumers can currently choose among.)

The set-top box is, according to the White House, a prime example of the problem that

[a]cross our economy, too many consumers are dealing with inferior or overpriced products, too many workers aren’t getting the wage increases they deserve, too many entrepreneurs and small businesses are getting squeezed out unfairly by their bigger competitors, and overall we are not seeing the level of innovative growth we would like to see.

This is, of course, nonsense. Consumers enjoy an incredible amount of low-cost, high quality goods (including video options) – far more than at any point in history.  After all:

From cable to Netflix to Roku boxes to Apple TV to Amazon FireStick, we have more ways to find and watch TV than ever — and we can do so in our living rooms, on our phones and tablets, and on seat-back screens at 30,000 feet. Oddly enough, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler … agrees: “American consumers enjoy unprecedented choice in how they view entertainment, news and sports programming. You can pretty much watch what you want, where you want, when you want.”

Thus, I suspect that the White House has its eye on a broader regulatory agenda.

For instance, the Department of Labor recently announced that it would be extending its reach in the financial services industry by changing the standard for when financial advice might give rise to a fiduciary relationship under ERISA. It seems obvious that the SEC or FINRA could have taken up the slack for any financial services regulatory issues – it’s certainly within their respective wheelhouses. But that’s not the direction the administration took, possibly because SEC and FINRA are independent agencies. Thus, the DOL – an agency with substantially less financial and consumer protection experience than either the SEC or FINRA — has expansive new authority.

And that’s where more of the language in the Order comes into focus. It directs agencies to “ensur[e] that consumers and workers have access to the information needed to make informed choices[.]” The text of the DOL rule develops for itself a basis in competition law as well:

The current proposal’s defined boundaries between fiduciary advice, education, and sales activity directed at large plans, may bring greater clarity to the IRA and plan services markets. Innovation in new advice business models, including technology-driven models, may be accelerated, and nudged away from conflicts and toward transparency, thereby promoting healthy competition in the fiduciary advice market.

Thus, it’s hard to see what the White House is doing in the Order, other than laying the groundwork for expansive authority of non-independent executive agencies under the thin guise of promoting competition. Perhaps the President believes that couching this expansion in free market terms ( i.e. that its “pro-competition”) will somehow help the initiatives go through with minimal friction. But there is nothing in the Order or the CEA brief to provide any confidence that competition will, in fact, be promoted. And in the end I have trouble seeing how this sort of regulatory adventurism does not run afoul of separation of powers issues, as well as assorted other legal challenges.

Finally, conjuring up a regulatory version of the essential facilities doctrine as a support for this expansion is simply a terrible idea — one that smacks much more of industrial policy than of sound regulatory reform or consumer protection.

Filed under: antitrust, consumer protection, cost-benefit analysis, economics, essential facilities, exclusionary conduct, fiduciary duties, monopolization, regulation, regulatory reform, truth on the market Tagged: antitrust, consumer protection, regulation, regulatory overreach

Tad Lipsky is a partner in the law firm of Latham & Watkins LLP.

The FTC’s struggle to provide guidance for its enforcement of Section 5’s Unfair Methods of Competition (UMC) clause (or not – some oppose the provision of forward guidance by the agency, much as one occasionally heard opposition to the concept of merger guidelines in 1968 and again in 1982) could evoke a much broader long-run issue: is a federal law regulating single-firm conduct worth the trouble?  Antitrust law has its hard spots and its soft spots: I imagine that most antitrust lawyers think they can define “naked” price-fixing and other hard-core cartel conduct, and they would defend having a law that prohibits it.  Similarly with a law that prohibits anticompetitive mergers.  Monopolization perhaps not so much: 123 years of Section 2 enforcement and the best our Supreme Court can do is the Grinnell standard, defining monopolization 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 “unfair methods of competition”?

The Court has created a few specific conduct categories within the Grinnell rubric: sham petitioning (objectively and subjectively baseless appeals for government action), predatory pricing (pricing below cost with a reasonable prospect of recoupment through the exercise of power obtained by achieving monopoly or disciplining competitors), and unlawful tying (using market power over one product to force the purchase of a distinct product – you probably know the rest).  These categories are neither perfectly clear (what measure of cost indicates a predatory price?) nor guaranteed to last (the presumption that a patent bestows market power within the meaning of the tying rule was abandoned in 2005).  At least the more specific categories give some guidance to lower courts, prosecutors, litigants and – most important of all – compliance-inclined businesses.  They provide more useful guidance than Grinnell.

The scope for differences of opinion regarding the definition of monopolization is at an historical zenith.  Some of the least civilized disagreements between the FTC and the Antitrust Division – the Justice Department’s visible contempt for the FTC’s ReaLemon decision in the early 1980’s, or the three-Commissioner vilification of the Justice Department’s 2008 report on unilateral conduct – concern these differences.  The 2009 Justice Department theatrically withdrew the 2008 Justice Department’s report, claiming (against clear objective evidence to the contrary) that the issue was settled in its favor by Lorain Journal, Aspen Skiing, and the D.C. Circuit decision in the main case involving Microsoft.

Although less noted in the copious scholarly output concerning UMC, disputes about the meaning of Section 5 are encouraged by the lack of definitive guidance on monopolization.  For every clarification provided by the Supreme Court, the FTC’s room for maneuver under UMC is reduced.  The FTC could not define sham litigation inconsistently with Professional Real Estate Investors v. Columbia Pictures Industries; it could not read recoupment out of the Brooke Group v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Co. definition of predatory pricing.

The fact remains that there has been less-than-satisfactory clarification of single-firm conduct standards under either statute.  Grinnell remains the only “guideline” for the vast territory of Section 2 enforcement (aside from the specific mentioned categories), especially since the Supreme Court has shown no enthusiasm for either of the two main appellate-court approaches to a general test for unlawful unilateral conduct under Section 2, the “intent test” and the “essential facilities doctrine.”  (It has not rejected them, either.)  The current differences of opinion – even within the Commission itself, leave aside the appellate courts – are emblematic of a similar failure with regard to UMC.  Failure to clarify rules of such universal applicability has obvious costs and adverse impacts: creative and competitively benign business conduct is deterred (with corresponding losses in innovation, productivity and welfare), and the costs, delays, disruption and other burdens of litigation are amplified.  Are these costs worth bearing?

Years ago I heard it said that a certain old-line law firm had tightened its standards of partner performance: whereas formerly the firm would expel a partner who remained drunk for ten years, the new rule was that a partner could remain drunk only for five years.  The antitrust standards for unilateral conduct have vacillated for over a century.  For a time (as exemplified by United States v. United Shoe Machinery Corp.) any act of self-preservation by a monopolist – even if “honestly industrial” – was presumptively unlawful if not compelled by outside circumstances.  Even Grinnell looks good compared to that, but Grinnell still fails to provide much help in most Section 2 cases; and the debate over UMC says the same about Section 5.  I do not advocate the repeal of either statute, but shouldn’t we expect that someone might want to tighten our standards?  Maybe we can allow a statute a hundred years to be clarified through common-law application.  Section 2 passed that milepost twenty-three years ago, and Section 5 reaches that point next year.  We shouldn’t be surprised if someone wants to pull the plug beyond that point.

As has become customary with just about every new product announcement by Google these days, the company’s introduction on Tuesday of its new “Search, plus Your World” (SPYW) program, which aims to incorporate a user’s Google+ content into her organic search results, has met with cries of antitrust foul play. All the usual blustering and speculation in the latest Google antitrust debate has obscured what should, however, be the two key prior questions: (1) Did Google violate the antitrust laws by not including data from Facebook, Twitter and other social networks in its new SPYW program alongside Google+ content; and (2) How might antitrust restrain Google in conditioning participation in this program in the future?

Read the full piece here.

Summary

In recent months a veritable legal and policy frenzy has erupted around Google generally, and more specifically concerning how its search activities should be regulated by government authorities throughout the world in the name of ensuring “search neutrality.”  Concerns with search engine bias have led to a menu of proposed regulatory reactions.  Although the debate has focused upon possible remedies to the “problem” presented by a range of Google’s business decisions, it has largely missed the predicate question of whether search engine bias is the product of market failure or otherwise generates significant economic or social harms meriting regulatory intervention in the first place.  “Search neutrality” by its very name presupposes that mandatory neutrality or some imposition of restrictions on search engine bias is desirable, but it is an open question whether advocates of search neutrality have demonstrated that there is a problem necessitating any of the various prescribed remedies. This paper attempts to answer that question, and we evaluate both the economic and non-economic costs and benefits of search bias, as well as the solutions proposed to remedy perceived costs. We demonstrate that search bias is the product of the competitive process and link the search bias debate to the economic and empirical literature on vertical integration and the generally-efficient and pro-competitive incentives for a vertically integrated firm to favor its own content. We conclude that neither an ex ante regulatory restriction on search engine bias nor the imposition of an antitrust duty to deal upon Google would benefit consumers. Moreover, in considering the proposed remedies, we find that by they substitute away from the traditional antitrust consumer welfare standard, and would impose costs exceeding any potential benefits.

In the last post, I discussed possible characterizations of Google’s conduct for purposes of antitrust analysis.  A firm grasp of the economic implications of the different conceptualizations of Google’s conduct is a necessary – but not sufficient – precondition for appreciating the inconsistencies underlying the proposed remedies for Google’s alleged competitive harms.  In this post, I want to turn to a different question: assuming arguendo a competitive problem associated with Google’s algorithmic rankings – an assumption I do not think is warranted, supported by the evidence, or even consistent with the relevant literature on vertical contractual relationships – how might antitrust enforcers conceive of an appropriate and consumer-welfare-conscious remedy?  Antitrust agencies, economists, and competition policy scholars have all appropriately stressed the importance of considering a potential remedy prior to, rather than following, an antitrust investigation; this is good advice not only because of the benefits of thinking rigorously and realistically about remedial design, but also because clear thinking about remedies upfront might illuminate something about the competitive nature of the conduct at issue.

Somewhat ironically, former DOJ Antitrust Division Assistant Attorney General Tom Barnett – now counsel for Expedia, one of the most prominent would-be antitrust plaintiffs against Google – warned (in his prior, rather than his present, role) that “[i]mplementing a remedy that is too broad runs the risk of distorting markets, impairing competition, and prohibiting perfectly legal and efficient conduct,” and that “forcing a firm to share the benefits of its investments and relieving its rivals of the incentive to develop comparable assets of their own, access remedies can reduce the competitive vitality of an industry.”  Barnett also noted that “[t]here seems to be consensus that we should prohibit unilateral conduct only where it is demonstrated through rigorous economic analysis to harm competition and thereby harm consumer welfare.”  Well said.  With these warnings well in-hand, we must turn to two inter-related concerns necessary to appreciating the potential consequences of a remedy for Google’s conduct: (1) the menu of potential remedies available for an antitrust suit against Google, and (2) the efficacy of these potential remedies from a consumer-welfare, rather than firm-welfare, perspective.

What are the potential remedies?

The burgeoning search neutrality crowd presents no lack of proposed remedies; indeed, if there is one segment in which Google’s critics have proven themselves prolific, it is in their constant ingenuity conceiving ways to bring governmental intervention to bear upon Google.  Professor Ben Edelman has usefully aggregated and discussed several of the alternatives, four of which bear mention:  (1) a la Frank Pasquale and Oren Bracha, the creation of a “Federal Search Commission,” (2) a la the regulations surrounding the Customer Reservation Systems (CRS) in the 1990s, a prohibition on rankings that order listings “us[ing] any factors directly or indirectly relating to” whether the search engine is affiliated with the link, (3) mandatory disclosure of all manual adjustments to algorithmic search, and (4) transfer of the “browser choice” menu of the EC Microsoft litigation to the Google search context, requiring Google to offer users a choice of five or so rivals whenever a user enters particular queries.

Geoff and I discuss several of these potential remedies in our paper, If Search Neutrality is the Answer, What’s the Question?  It suffices to say that we find significant consumer welfare threats from the creation of a new regulatory agency designed to impose “neutral” search results.  For now, I prefer to focus on the second of these remedies – analogized to CRS technology in the 1990s – here; Professor Edelman not only explains proposed CRS-inspired regulation, but does so in effusive terms:

A first insight comes from recognizing that regulators have already – successfully! – addressed the problem of bias in information services. One key area of intervention was customer reservation systems (CRS’s), the computer networks that let travel agents see flight availability and pricing for various major airlines. Three decades ago, when CRS’s were largely owned by the various airlines, some airlines favored their own flights. For example, when a travel agent searched for flights through Apollo, a CRS then owned by United Airlines, United flights would come up first – even if other carriers offered lower prices or nonstop service. The Department of Justice intervened, culminating in rules prohibiting any CRS owned by an airline from ordering listings “us[ing] any factors directly or indirectly relating to carrier identity” (14 CFR 255.4). Certainly one could argue that these rules were an undue intrusion: A travel agent was always free to find a different CRS, and further additional searches could have uncovered alternative flights. Yet most travel agents hesitated to switch CRS’s, and extra searches would be both time-consuming and error-prone. Prohibiting biased listings was the better approach.

The same principle applies in the context of web search. On this theory, Google ought not rank results by any metric that distinctively favors Google. I credit that web search considers myriad web sites – far more than the number of airlines, flights, or fares. And I credit that web search considers more attributes of each web page – not just airfare price, transit time, and number of stops. But these differences only grant a search engine more room to innovate. These differences don’t change the underlying reasoning, so compelling in the CRS context, that a system provider must not design its rules to systematically put itself first.

The analogy is a superficially attractive one, and we’re tempted to entertain it, so far as it goes.  Organizational questions inhere in both settings, and similarly so: both flights and search results must be ordinally ranked, and before CRS regulation, a host airline’s flights often appeared before those of rival airlines.  Indeed, we will take Edelman’s analogy at face value.  Problematically for Professor Edelman and others pushing the CRS-style remedy, a fuller exploration of CRS regulation reveals this market intervention – well, put simply, wasn’t so successful after all.  Not for consumers anyway.  It did, however, generate (economically) predictable consequences: reduced consumer welfare through reduced innovation. Let’s explore the consequences of Edelman’s analogy further below the fold.

History of CRS Antitrust Suits and Regulation

Early air travel primarily consisted of “interline” flights – flights on more than one carrier to reach a final destination.  CRSs arose to enable airlines to coordinate these trips for their customers across multiple airlines, which necessitated compiling information about rival airlines, their routes, fares, and other price- and quality-relevant information.  Major airlines predominantly owned CRSs at this time, which served both competitive and cooperative ends; this combination of economic forces naturally drew antitrust advocates’ attention.

CRS regulation proponents proffered numerous arguments as to the potentially anticompetitive nature and behavior of CRS-owning airlines.  For example, they claimed that CRS-owning airlines engaged in “dirty tricks,” such as using their CRSs to terminate passengers’ reservations on smaller, rival airlines and to rebook customers on their own flights, and refusing to allow smaller airlines to become CRS co-hosts, thereby preventing these smaller airlines from being listed in search results.  CRS-owning airlines faced further allegations of excluding rivals through contractual provisions, such as long-term commitments from travel agents.  Proponents of antitrust enforcement alleged that the nature of the CRS market created significant barriers to entry and provided CRS-owning airlines with significant cost advantages to selling their own flights.  These cost advantages purportedly derived from two main sources: (1) quality advantages that airline-owned CRSs enjoyed, as they could commit to providing comprehensive and accurate information about the owner airline’s flight schedule, and (2) joint ownership of CRSs, which facilitated coordination between airlines and CRSs, thereby decreasing the distribution and information costs.

These claims suffered from serious shortcomings including both a failure to demonstrate harm to competition rather than injury to specific rivals as well as insufficient appreciation for the value of dynamic efficiency and innovation to consumer welfare.  These latter concerns were especially pertinent in the CRS context, as CRSs arose at a time of incredible change – the deregulated airline industry, joined with novel computer technology, necessitated significant and constant innovation.  Courts accordingly generally denied antitrust remedies in these cases – rejecting claims that CRSs imposed unreasonable restraints on competition, denied access to an essential facility, or facilitated monopoly leverage.

Yet, particularly relevant for present purposes, one of the most popular anticompetitive stories was that CRSs practiced “display bias,” defined as ranking the owner airline’s flights above those of all other airlines.  Proponents claimed display bias was particularly harmful in the CRS setting, because only the travel agent, and not the customer, could see the search results, and travel agents might have incentives to book passengers on more expensive flights for which they receive more commission.  Fred Smith describes the investigations surrounding this claim:

These initial CRS services were used mostly by sophisticated travel agents, who could quickly scroll down to a customer’s preferred airline.  But this extra “effort” was considered discriminatory by some at the DOJ and the DOT, and hearings were held to investigate this threat to competition.  Great attention was paid to the “time” required to execute only a few keystrokes, to the “complexity” of re-designing first screens by computer-proficient travel agents, and to the “barriers” placed on such practices by the host CRS provider.

CRS Rules

While courts declined to intervene in the CRS market, the Department of Transportation (DOT) eagerly crafted rules to govern CRS operations.  The DOT’s two primary goals in enacting the 1984 CRS regulations were (1) to incentivize entry into the CRS market and (2) to prevent airline ownership of CRSs from decreasing competition in the downstream passenger air travel market.  One of the most notable rules introduced in the 1984 CRS regulations prohibited display bias.  The DOT changed both this rule and CRS rules as a whole significantly, and by 1997, the DOT required each CRS “(i) to offer at least one integrated display that uses the same criteria for both online and interline connections and (ii) to use elapsed time or non-stop itinerary as a significant factor in selecting the flight options from the database” (Alexander, 2004).  However, the DOT did not categorically forbid display bias; rather, it created several exceptions to this rule – and even allowed airlines to disseminate software that introduced bias into displays.  Additionally, the DOT expressly refused to enforce its anti-bias rules against travel agent displays.

Other CRS rules attempted to reinforce these two goals of additional market entry and preservation of downstream competition.  CRS rules specifically focused on mitigating travel agent switching costs between CRS vendors and reducing any quality advantage incumbent CRSs allegedly had.  Rules prohibited discriminatory booking fees and the tying of travel agent commissions to CRS use, limited contract lengths, prohibited minimum uses and rollover clauses, and required CRSs to give all participating carriers equal service upgrades.

Evidence of CRS Regulation “Success”?

The CRS regulatory experiment had years to run its course; despite the extent and commitment of its regulatory sweep, these rules failed to improve consumer outcomes in any meaningful way.  CRS regulations precipitated neither innovation nor entry, and likely incurred serious allocative efficiency and consumer welfare losses by attempting to prohibit display bias.

First, CRS regulations unambiguously failed in their goal of increasing ease of entry:

Only six CRS vendors offered their services to domestic airlines and travel agents in the mid-1980s. . . If the rules had actually facilitated entry, the number of CRS vendors should have grown or some new entrants should have been seen during the past twenty years.  The evidence, however, is to the contrary.  It remains that ‘[s]ince the [CAB] first adopted CRS rules, no firm has entered the CRS business.’  Meanwhile, there has been a series of mergers coupled with introduction of multinational CRS; the cumulative effect was to reduce the number of CRSs. . . Even if a regulation could successfully facilitate entry by a supplier of CRS services, the gain from such entry would at this point be relatively small, and possibly negative. (Alexander and Lee, 2004) (emphasis added).

As such, CRS regulations did not achieve one of their primary objectives – a fact which stands in stark contrast to Edelman’s declaration that CRS rules represent an unequivocal regulatory success.

Most relevant to the search engine bias analogy, the CRS regulations prohibiting bias did not positively affect consumer welfare.  To the contrary, by ignoring the reality that most travel agents took consumer interests into account in their initial choice of CRS operator (even if they do so to a lesser extent in each individual search they conduct for consumers), and that even if residual bias remained, consumers were “informed and repeat players who have their own preferences,” CRS regulations imposed unjustified costs.  As Alexander and Lee describe it

[T]he social value of prohibiting display . . . bias solely to improve the quality of information that consumers receive about travel options appears to be low and may be negative.  Travel agents have strong incentives to protect consumers from poor information, through how they customize their internal display screens, and in their choices of CRS vendors.

Moreover, and predictably, CRS regulations appear to have caused serious harm to the competitive process:

The major competitive advantage of the pre-regulation CRS was that it permitted the leading airlines to slightly disadvantage their leading competitors by placing them a bit farther down on the list of available flights.  United would place American slightly farther down the list, and American would return the favor for United flights.  The result, of course, was that the other airlines received slightly higher ranks than they would have otherwise.  When “bias” was eliminated, United moved up on the American system and vice versa, while all other airlines moved down somewhat.  The antitrust restriction on competitive use of the CRS, then, actually reduced competition.  Moreover, the rules ensured that the United/American market leadership would endure fewer challenges from creative newcomers, since any changes to the system would have to undergo DOT oversight, thus making “sneak attacks” impossible.  The resulting slowdown of CRS technology damaged the competitiveness of these systems.  Much of the innovative lead that these systems had enjoyed slowly eroded as the internet evolved.  Today, much of the air travel business has moved to the internet (as have the airlines themselves) (Smith, 1999).

These competitive losses occurred despite evidence suggesting that CRSs themselves enhanced competition and thus had the predictable positive impact for consumers.  For example, one study found that CRS usage increased travel agents’ productivity by an average of 41% and that in the early 1990s over 95% of travel agents used a CRS – indicating that travel agents were able to assist consumers far more effectively once CRSs became available (Ellig, 1991).  The rules governing contractual terms fared no better; indeed, these also likely reduced consumer welfare:

The prohibited contract practices–long-term contracting and exclusive dealing–that had been regarded as exclusionary might not have proved to be such a critical barrier to entry: entry did not occur, independently of those practices.  Evidence on the dealings between travel agents and CRS vendors, post-regulation, suggests that these practices may have enhanced overall allocative efficiency.  Travel agents appear to have agreed to some, if not all, restrictive contracts with CRS vendors as a means of providing those vendors with assurance that they would be repaid gradually, over time, for their up-front investments in the travel agent, such as investments in equipment or training (Alexander and Lee, 2004).

Accordingly, CRS regulations seem to have threatened innovation by decreasing the likelihood that CRS vendors would recover research and development expenditures without providing a commensurate consumer benefit.

Termination of Rules

The DOT terminated CRS regulations in 2004 in light of their failure to improve competitive outcomes in the CRS market and a growing sense that they were making things worse, not better – which Edelman fails to acknowledge and which certainly undermines his claim that regulators addressed this problem “successfully.”  From the time CRS regulations were first adopted in 1984 until 2004, the CRS market and the associated technology changed significantly, rapidly becoming more complex.  As the market increased in complexity, it became increasingly more difficult for the DOT to effectively regulate.  Two occurrences in particular precipitated de-regulation: (1) the major airlines divested themselves of CRS ownership (despite the absence of any CRS regulations requiring or encouraging divestiture!), and (2) the commercialization of the internet introduced novel forms of substitutes to the CRS system that the CRS regulations did not govern.  Online direct-to-traveler services, such as Travelocity, Expedia and Orbitz provide consumers with a method to choose their own flights, entirely absent travel agent assistance.  More importantly, Expedia and Orbitz each developed direct connection technologies that allow them to make reservations directly with an airline’s internal reservation system – bypassing CRS systems almost completely.  Moreover, Travelocity, Expedia, and Orbitz were never forced to comply with CRS regulations, which allowed them to adopt more consumer-friendly products and innovate in meaningful ways, obsoleting traditional CRSs.  It is unsurprising that Expedia has warned against overly broad regulations in the search engine bias debate – it has first-hand knowledge of how crucial the ability to innovate is.)

These developments, taken in harmony, mean that in order to cause any antitrust harm in the first instance, a hypothetical CRS monopolist must have been interacting with (1) airlines, (2) travel agents, and (3) consumers who all had an insufficient incentive to switch to another alternative in the face of a significant price increase.  Given this nearly insurmountable burden, and the failure of CRS regulations to improve consumer welfare in even the earlier and simpler state of the world, Alexander and Lee find that, by the time CRS regulations were terminated in 2004, they failed to pass a cost-benefit analysis.

Overall, CRS regulations incurred significant consumer welfare losses and rendered the entire CRS system nearly obsolete by stifling its ability to compete with dynamic and innovative online services.  As Ellig notes, “[t]he legal and economic debate over CRS. . . frequently overlooked the peculiar economics of innovation and entrepreneurship.”  Those who claim search engine bias exists (as distinct from valuable product differentiation between engines) and can be meaningfully regulated rely upon this same flawed analysis and expect the same flawed regulatory approach to “fix” whatever issues they perceive as ailing the search engine market.  Search engine regulation will make consumers worse off.  In the meantime, proponents of so-called search neutrality and heavy-handed regulation of organic search results battle over which of a menu of cumbersome and costly regulatory schemes should be adopted in the face of evidence that the approaches are more likely to harm consumers than help them, and even stronger evidence that there is no competitive problem with search in the first place.

Indeed, one benefit of thinking hard about remedies in the first instance is that it may illuminate something about the competitive nature of the conduct one seeks to regulate.  I defer to former AAG Barnett in explaining this point:

Put another way, a bad section 2 remedy risks hurting consumers and competition and thus is worse than no remedy at all. That is why it is important to consider remedies at the outset, before deciding whether a tiger needs catching. Doing so has a number of benefits.  …

Furthermore, contemplation of the remedy may reveal that there is no competitive harm in the first place.  Judge Posner has noted that “[t]he nature of the remedy sought in an antitrust case is often . . . an important clue to the soundness of the antitrust claim.”⁽⁴⁾ The classic non-section 2 example is Pueblo Bowl-O-Mat, where plaintiffs claimed that the antitrust laws prohibited a firm from buying and reinvigorating failing bowling alleys and prayed for an award of the “profits that would have been earned had the acquired centers closed.”⁽⁵⁾ The Supreme Court correctly noted that condemning conduct that increased competition “is inimical to the purposes of [the antitrust] laws”⁽⁶⁾–more competition is not a competitive harm to be remedied. In the section 2 context, one might wish that the Supreme Court had focused on the injunctive relief issued in Aspen Skiing–a compelled joint venture whose ability to enhance competition among ski resorts was not discussed⁽⁷⁾–in assessing whether discontinuing a similar joint venture harmed competition in the first place.⁽⁸⁾

A review of my paper with Geoff reveals several common themes among proposed remedies intimated by the above discussion of CRS regulations.  The proposed remedies consistently: (1) disadvantage Google, (2) advantage its rivals, and (3) have little if anything to do with consumers.  Neither economics nor antitrust history supports such a regulatory scheme; unfortunately, it is consumers that might again ultimately pay the inevitable tax for clumsy regulatory tinkering with product design and competition.

Filed under: antitrust, economics, federal trade commission, google, international center for law & economics, monopolization, technology Tagged: antitrust, Federal Trade Commission, google, search

Today at 12:30 at the Capitol Visitor Center, TechFreedom is hosting a discussion on the regulation of search engines:  “Search Engine Regulation: A Solution in Search of a Problem?”

The basics:

Allegations of “search bias” have led to increased scrutiny of Google, including active investigations in the European Union and Texas, a possible FTC investigation, and sharply-worded inquiries from members of Congress. But what does “search bias” really mean? Does it demand preemptive “search neutrality” regulation, requiring government oversight of how search results are ranked? Is antitrust intervention required to protect competition? Or can market forces deal with these concerns?

A panel of leading thinkers on Internet law will explore these questions at a luncheon hosted by TechFreedom, a new digital policy think tank. The event will take place at the Capitol Visitor Center room SVC-210/212 onTuesday, June 14 from 12:30 to 2:30pm, and include a complimentary lunch. CNET’s Declan McCullagh, a veteran tech policy journalist, will moderate a panel of four legal experts:

• Prof. Frank Pasquale, Seton Hall University School of Law, author of Federal Search Commission? Access, Fairness and Accountability in the Law of Search
• Prof. Geoffrey Manne, Lewis & Clark Law School, TechFreedom Adjunct Fellow, and Director of the International Center for Law & Economics, author of If Search Neutrality Is the Answer, What’s the Question?
• Prof. James Grimmelman, New York Law School, author of The Structure of Search Engine Law
• Prof. Eric Goldman, Santa Clara University School of Law, author of Search Engine Bias and the Demise of Search Engine Utopianism

More details are here, and the event will be streaming live from that link as well.  If all goes well, it will also be accessible right here:

http://www.ustream.tv/flash/viewer.swf

Live Broadcasting by Ustream

Filed under: administrative, announcements, essential facilities, google, law and economics, monopolization, regulation, technology Tagged: Declan McCullagh, Eric Goldman, frank pasquale, geoffrey manne, google, james grimmelmann, techfreedom, Web search engine