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Written Comments for July 1, 2021 FTC Open Meeting

Written Testimonies & Filings The following comments were submitted to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for consideration in the commission’s scheduled July 1 vote on whether to rescind the . . .

The following comments were submitted to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for consideration in the commission’s scheduled July 1 vote on whether to rescind the 2015 Statement of Enforcement Principles Regarding “Unfair Methods of Competition” Under Section 5 of the FTC Act.


In antitrust law, the Consumer Welfare Standard (CWS) directs courts to focus on the effects that challenged business practices have on consumers, rather than on alleged harms to specific competitors. 

Critics of the standard claim this focus on consumer welfare fails to capture a wide variety of harmful conduct. In addition to believing that harm to competitors is itself a valid concern, critics of the CWS believe it leads to harmful concentrations of political and economic power by biasing antitrust enforcement against intervention. Under this view, the CWS contributes to such harms as environmental degradation, income inequality, and bargaining disparities for labor.

But returning to a pre-CWS state of the law would lead antitrust enforcement to become confused, contradictory, and ineffective at promoting competition. The CWS makes antitrust economically coherent and democratically accountable.

The CWS is agnostic about how much antitrust enforcement is necessary. Indeed, many advocates of more vigorous antitrust enforcement are also defenders of the CWS. The standard uses objective economic analysis to identify actual harms and to recommend remedies when those harms are not outweighed by countervailing benefits to consumers. While the issues the CWS critics care about may be important, antitrust law is a bad way to address them.

Competition usually has to hurt competitors. Prioritizing competitor welfare over consumer welfare, as some proposals would, means abandoning competition as the goal of antitrust. Businesses want a quiet life and large profits. If one firm outcompetes another with a better product or a lower price, it disadvantages that competitor by lowering its profits or forcing it to work harder to maintain them. The consumer ultimately wins in this struggle. Basing antitrust liability on conduct that “materially disadvantages” competitors would impose liability for the act of competing itself. 

The old model of antitrust was incoherent and unaccountable. Before the rise of the CWS, antitrust enforcement was incoherent and lacked underlying neutral principles. In the words of Justice Potter Stewart, the only consistency was that “the government always wins.” Competitive practices could be condemned because they hurt the profitability of some businesses. Sometimes, courts would worry that prices were too low and would therefore permit “price floors” to protect small business. This lack of consistency led to a body of law that was contradictory and unpredictable, and that regularly undermined competition. By entrusting enforcement and antitrust policy to the discretion of unelected enforcement officials, competition policy was effectively removed from democratic oversight.

The CWS grounds antitrust in objective economics and tractable evidence. Adherence to the CWS renders antitrust judgments transparent and quantifiable by giving a clear benchmark for economic analysis. Without the CWS, courts might trade reduced competition and consumer welfare for a reduction in, for example, a business’s political influence. While achieving the latter may (or may not) be a worthy goal, there is no objective way to assess trade-offs between the two priorities. The CWS requires testable claims and counterclaims as part of a competition case. It allows antitrust cases to focus on a question that can be answered objectively: “Is the challenged conduct likely to make consumers better or worse off?”

The CWS considers innovation and quality, as well as price. The CWS has always encompassed aspects of competition beyond price, including innovation, quality, and product variety. The CWS is thus fully compatible with markets where products are offered at a zero price to consumers, or where the alleged source of harm is the loss of innovation. United States v. Microsoft, for example, hinged on an innovation theory of harm, as did the U.S. Justice Department’s lawsuit against the Visa/Plaid merger, which led to the merger being abandoned. As in other supply markets, anticompetitive conduct by businesses in the labor market has been ruled illegal under the CWS and both of the federal antitrust agencies have brought cases against this kind of conduct.

Antitrust is not a public policy Swiss Army knife. Antitrust is a bad tool to achieve goals other than increased competition, because it is often impossible to objectively compare the value of different competing ends. Where difficult trade-offs must be made between competing social goals, such as balancing economic growth with the environment or workers’ welfare, the legislative process is a better mechanism to weigh society’s preferences than the judgement of a court. Trying to use antitrust to achieve these ends is often an attempt to bypass the democratic process when that process does not deliver the outcomes that advocates want.

For further information, see ICLE’s submission to the FTC’s Hearings on Competition & Consumer Protection in the 21st Century: https://laweconcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Antitrust-Principles-and-Evidence-Based-Antitrust-Under-the-Consumer-Welfare-Standard-FTC-Hearings-ICLE-Comment-5.pdf 

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Antitrust & Consumer Protection

What Lina Khan’s appointment means for the House antitrust bills

TOTM Lina Khan’s appointment as chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is a remarkable accomplishment. At 32 years old, she is the youngest chair ever. Her . . .

Lina Khan’s appointment as chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is a remarkable accomplishment. At 32 years old, she is the youngest chair ever. Her longstanding criticisms of the Consumer Welfare Standard and alignment with the neo-Brandeisean school of thought make her appointment a significant achievement for proponents of those viewpoints.

Read the full piece here.

 

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Antitrust & Consumer Protection

Sam Bowman on foreign aid

Presentations & Interviews ICLE Director of Competition Policy Sam Bowman took part in the Institute for Economic Affairs’ Markets and Morality videocast in a segment on the U.K.’s . . .

ICLE Director of Competition Policy Sam Bowman took part in the Institute for Economic Affairs’ Markets and Morality videocast in a segment on the U.K.’s foreign aid budget. The full episode is embedded below.

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Sam Bowman on Corporate Mergers

Presentations & Interviews ICLE Director of Competition Policy Sam Bowman joined the Cato Institute’s Cato Daily Podcast to discuss mergers and U.S. and U.K. antitrust law. The full episode . . .

ICLE Director of Competition Policy Sam Bowman joined the Cato Institute’s Cato Daily Podcast to discuss mergers and U.S. and U.K. antitrust law. The full episode is embedded below.

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Antitrust & Consumer Protection

Breaking Down House Democrats’ Forthcoming Competition Bills

Democratic leadership of the House Judiciary Committee have leaked the approach they plan to take to revise U.S. antitrust law and enforcement, with a particular focus on . . .

Democratic leadership of the House Judiciary Committee have leaked the approach they plan to take to revise U.S. antitrust law and enforcement, with a particular focus on digital platforms.

Broadly speaking, the bills would: raise fees for larger mergers and increase appropriations to the FTC and DOJ; require data portability and interoperability; declare that large platforms can’t own businesses that compete with other businesses that use the platform; effectively ban large platforms from making any acquisitions; and generally declare that large platforms cannot preference their own products or services.

All of these are ideas that have been discussed before. They are very much in line with the EU’s approach to competition, which places more regulation-like burdens on big businesses, and which is introducing a Digital Markets Act that mirrors the Democrats’ proposals. Some Republicans are reportedly supportive of the proposals, which is surprising since they mean giving broad, discretionary powers to antitrust authorities that are controlled by Democrats who take an expansive view of antitrust enforcement as a way to achieve their other social and political goals. The proposals may also be unpopular with consumers if, for example, they would mean that popular features like integrating Maps into relevant Google Search results becomes prohibited.

The multi-bill approach here suggests that the committee is trying to throw as much at the wall as possible to see what sticks. It may reflect a lack of confidence among the proposers in their ability to get their proposals through wholesale, especially given that Amy Klobuchar’s CALERA bill in the Senate creates an alternative that, while still highly interventionist, does not create ex ante regulation of the Internet the same way these proposals do.

In general, the bills are misguided for three main reasons.

One, they seek to make digital platforms into narrow conduits for other firms to operate on, ignoring the value created by platforms curating their own services by, for example, creating quality controls on entry (as Apple does on its App Store) or by integrating their services with related products (like, say, Google adding events from Gmail to users’ Google Calendars).

Two, they ignore the procompetitive effects of digital platforms extending into each other’s markets and competing with each other there, in ways that often lead to far more intense competition—and better outcomes for consumers—than if the only firms that could compete with the incumbent platform were small startups.

Three, they ignore the importance of incentives for innovation. Platforms invest in new and better products when they can make money from doing so, and limiting their ability to do that means weakened incentives to innovate. Startups and their founders and investors are driven, in part, by the prospect of being acquired, often by the platforms themselves. Making those acquisitions more difficult, or even impossible, means removing one of the key ways startup founders can exit their firms, and hence one of the key rewards and incentives for starting an innovative new business.

For more, our “Joint Submission of Antitrust Economists, Legal Scholars, and Practitioners” set out why many of the House Democrats’ assumptions about the state of the economy and antitrust enforcement were mistaken. And my post, “Buck’s “Third Way”: A Different Road to the Same Destination”, argued that House Republicans like Ken Buck were misguided in believing they could support some of the proposals and avoid the massive regulatory oversight that they said they rejected.

Platform Anti-Monopoly Act 

The flagship bill, introduced by Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline (D-R.I.), establishes a definition of “covered platform” used by several of the other bills. The measures would apply to platforms with at least 500,000 U.S.-based users, a market capitalization of more than $600 billion, and that is deemed a “critical trading partner” with the ability to restrict or impede the access that a “dependent business” has to its users or customers.

Cicilline’s bill would bar these covered platforms from being able to promote their own products and services over the products and services of competitors who use the platform. It also defines a number of other practices that would be regarded as discriminatory, including:

  • Restricting or impeding “dependent businesses” from being able to access the platform or its software on the same terms as the platform’s own lines of business;
  • Conditioning access or status on purchasing other products or services from the platform;
  • Using user data to support the platform’s own products in ways not extended to competitors;
  • Restricting the platform’s commercial users from using or accessing data generated on the platform from their own customers;
  • Restricting platform users from uninstalling software pre-installed on the platform;
  • Restricting platform users from providing links to facilitate business off of the platform;
  • Preferencing the platform’s own products or services in search results or rankings;
  • Interfering with how a dependent business prices its products;
  • Impeding a dependent business’ users from connecting to services or products that compete with those offered by the platform; and
  • Retaliating against users who raise concerns with law enforcement about potential violations of the act.

On a basic level, these would prohibit lots of behavior that is benign and that can improve the quality of digital services for users. Apple pre-installing a Weather app on the iPhone would, for example, run afoul of these rules, and the rules as proposed could prohibit iPhones from coming with pre-installed apps at all. Instead, users would have to manually download each app themselves, if indeed Apple was allowed to include the App Store itself pre-installed on the iPhone, given that this competes with other would-be app stores.

Apart from the obvious reduction in the quality of services and convenience for users that this would involve, this kind of conduct (known as “self-preferencing”) is usually procompetitive. For example, self-preferencing allows platforms to compete with one another by using their strength in one market to enter a different one; Google’s Shopping results in the Search page increase the competition that Amazon faces, because it presents consumers with a convenient alternative when they’re shopping online for products. Similarly, Amazon’s purchase of the video-game streaming service Twitch, and the self-preferencing it does to encourage Amazon customers to use Twitch and support content creators on that platform, strengthens the competition that rivals like YouTube face.

It also helps innovation, because it gives firms a reason to invest in services that would otherwise be unprofitable for them. Google invests in Android, and gives much of it away for free, because it can bundle Google Search into the OS, and make money from that. If Google could not self-preference Google Search on Android, the open source business model simply wouldn’t work—it wouldn’t be able to make money from Android, and would have to charge for it in other ways that may be less profitable and hence give it less reason to invest in the operating system.

This behavior can also increase innovation by the competitors of these companies, both by prompting them to improve their products (as, for example, Google Android did with Microsoft’s mobile operating system offerings) and by growing the size of the customer base for products of this kind. For example, video games published by console manufacturers (like Nintendo’s Zelda and Mario games) are often blockbusters that grow the overall size of the user base for the consoles, increasing demand for third-party titles as well.

For more, check out “Against the Vertical Discrimination Presumption” by Geoffrey Manne and Dirk Auer’s piece “On the Origin of Platforms: An Evolutionary Perspective”.

Ending Platform Monopolies Act 

Sponsored by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), this bill would make it illegal for covered platforms to control lines of business that pose “irreconcilable conflicts of interest,” enforced through civil litigation powers granted to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ).

Specifically, the bill targets lines of business that create “a substantial incentive” for the platform to advantage its own products or services over those of competitors that use the platform, or to exclude or disadvantage competing businesses from using the platform. The FTC and DOJ could potentially order that platforms divest lines of business that violate the act.

This targets similar conduct as the previous bill, but involves the forced separation of different lines of business. It also appears to go even further, seemingly implying that companies like Google could not even develop services like Google Maps or Chrome because their existence would create such “substantial incentives” to self-preference them over the products of their competitors.

Apart from the straightforward loss of innovation and product developments this would involve, requiring every tech company to be narrowly focused on a single line of business would substantially entrench Big Tech incumbents, because it would make it impossible for them to extend into adjacent markets to compete with one another. For example, Apple could not develop a search engine to compete with Google under these rules, and Amazon would be forced to sell its video-streaming services that compete with Netflix and Youtube.

For more, check out Geoffrey Manne’s written testimony to the House Antitrust Subcommittee and “Platform Self-Preferencing Can Be Good for Consumers and Even Competitors” by Geoffrey and me.

Platform Competition and Opportunity Act

Introduced by Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), this bill would bar covered platforms from making essentially any acquisitions at all. To be excluded from the ban on acquisitions, the platform would have to present “clear and convincing evidence” that the acquired business does not compete with the platform for any product or service, does not pose a potential competitive threat to the platform, and would not in any way enhance or help maintain the acquiring platform’s market position.

The two main ways that founders and investors can make a return on a successful startup are to float the company at IPO or to be acquired by another business. The latter of these, acquisitions, is extremely important. Between 2008 and 2019, 90 percent of U.S. start-up exits happened through acquisition. In a recent survey, half of current startup executives said they aimed to be acquired. One study found that countries that made it easier for firms to be taken over saw a 40-50 percent increase in VC activity, and that U.S. states that made acquisitions harder saw a 27 percent decrease in VC investment deals.

So this proposal would probably reduce investment in U.S. startups, since it makes it more difficult for them to be acquired. It would therefore reduce innovation as a result. It would also reduce inter-platform competition by banning deals that allow firms to move into new markets, like the acquisition of Beats that helped Apple to build a Spotify competitor, or the deals that helped Google, Microsoft, and Amazon build cloud-computing services that all compete with each other. It could also reduce competition faced by old industries, by preventing tech companies from buying firms that enable it to move into new markets—like Amazon’s acquisitions of health-care companies that it has used to build a health-care offering. Even Walmart’s acquisition of Jet.com, which it has used to build an Amazon competitor, could have been banned under this law if Walmart had had a higher market cap at the time.

For more, check out Dirk Auer’s piece “Facebook and the Pros and Cons of Ex Post Merger Reviews” and my piece “Cracking down on mergers would leave us all worse off”.

ACCESS Act

The Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching (ACCESS) Act, sponsored by Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.), would establish data portability and interoperability requirements for platforms.

Under terms of the legislation, covered platforms would be required to allow third parties to transfer data to their users or, with the user’s consent, to a competing business. It also would require platforms to facilitate compatible and interoperable communications with competing businesses. The law directs the FTC to establish technical committees to promulgate the standards for portability and interoperability.

Data portability and interoperability involve trade-offs in terms of security and usability, and overseeing them can be extremely costly and difficult. In security terms, interoperability requirements prevent companies from using closed systems to protect users from hostile third parties. Mandatory openness means increasing—sometimes, substantially so—the risk of data breaches and leaks. In practice, that could mean users’ private messages or photos being leaked more frequently, or activity on a social media page that a user considers to be “their” private data, but that “belongs” to another user under the terms of use, can be exported and publicized as such.

It can also make digital services more buggy and unreliable, by requiring that they are built in a more “open” way that may be more prone to unanticipated software mismatches. A good example is that of Windows vs iOS; Windows is far more interoperable with third-party software than iOS is, but tends to be less stable as a result, and users often prefer the closed, stable system.

Interoperability requirements also entail ongoing regulatory oversight, to make sure data is being provided to third parties reliably. It’s difficult to build an app around another company’s data without assurance that the data will be available when users want it. For a requirement as broad as this bill’s, that could mean setting up quite a large new de facto regulator.

In the UK, Open Banking (an interoperability requirement imposed on British retail banks) has suffered from significant service outages, and targets a level of uptime that many developers complain is too low for them to build products around. Nor has Open Banking yet led to any obvious competition benefits.

For more, check out Gus Hurwitz’s piece “Portable Social Media Aren’t Like Portable Phone Numbers” and my piece “Why Data Interoperability Is Harder Than It Looks: The Open Banking Experience”.

Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act

A bill that mirrors language in the Endless Frontier Act recently passed by the U.S. Senate, would significantly raise filing fees for the largest mergers. Rather than the current cap of $280,000 for mergers valued at more than $500 million, the bill—sponsored by Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.)–the new schedule would assess fees of $2.25 million for mergers valued at more than $5 billion; $800,000 for those valued at between $2 billion and $5 billion; and $400,000 for those between $1 billion and $2 billion.

Smaller mergers would actually see their filing fees cut: from $280,000 to $250,000 for those between $500 million and $1 billion; from $125,000 to $100,000 for those between $161.5 million and $500 million; and from $45,000 to $30,000 for those less than $161.5 million.

In addition, the bill would appropriate $418 million to the FTC and $252 million to the DOJ’s Antitrust Division for Fiscal Year 2022. Most people in the antitrust world are generally supportive of more funding for the FTC and DOJ, although whether this is actually good or not depends both on how it’s spent at those places.

It’s hard to object if it goes towards deepening the agencies’ capacities and knowledge, by hiring and retaining higher quality staff with salaries that are more competitive with those offered by the private sector, and on greater efforts to study the effects of the antitrust laws and past cases on the economy. If it goes toward broadening the activities of the agencies, by doing more and enabling them to pursue a more aggressive enforcement agenda, and supporting whatever of the above proposals make it into law, then it could be very harmful.

For more, check out my post “Buck’s “Third Way”: A Different Road to the Same Destination” and Thom Lambert’s post “Bad Blood at the FTC”.

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Antitrust & Consumer Protection

Big Tech’s new regulator could end up hurting entrepreneurs

Popular Media Europe’s feeble digital economy is a blight on the Continent. It has no tech giants of its own and that shows little sign of changing. . . .

Europe’s feeble digital economy is a blight on the Continent. It has no tech giants of its own and that shows little sign of changing. Apple, alone, is worth as much as the top 30 companies in Germany’s DAX index, and the top 40 in France’s CAC index.

Read the full piece here.

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Antitrust & Consumer Protection

Beware the dead hand of the digital regulator

Popular Media Should bureaucrats decide how Google designs its search results page? The Government seems to think so. It plans to set up a new body that . . .

Should bureaucrats decide how Google designs its search results page? The Government seems to think so. It plans to set up a new body that will regulate tech companies in much the same way as British Gas and Thames Water, with all the box-ticking and drag on innovation that involves. What’s worse, over time, this regulator is likely to become an economy-wide super-regulator, overseeing the activities of many of the most successful companies in Britain. And, so far, almost nobody seems to have noticed.

Read the full piece here.

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Antitrust & Consumer Protection

Conflicting Missions: The Risks of the Digital Markets Unit to Competition and Innovation

Scholarship The UK's Digital Markets Unit will combine the powers and operating structure of a narrow sector regulator with a cross-sector purview that is much closer to the CMA’s economy-wide reach.

[This briefing paper was a joint publication of The Entrepreneurs Network and the International Center for Law & Economics.]

At the end of 2020, the UK government announced plans to create a Digital Markets Unit (DMU) charged with implementing an ex ante regulatory regime for certain digital platforms. Following the recommendations of the Digital Markets Taskforce, led by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), this DMU would serve as the de facto regulator of large tech companies that had been designated as having “strategic market status” (SMS). Accordingly, the DMU was formally established within the CMA in April 2021, although Parliament will need to legislate to give it the powers proposed by the Digital Markets Taskforce. That authorization is likely to come in 2022. Until then, the DMU will prepare draft codes of conduct, and potentially conduct further analysis to add more firms to its remit (so far, only Google and Facebook have been proposed as firms to be regulated, following the CMA’s Digital Advertising Market Study).

This announcement followed several official reviews claiming that some digital markets are not working properly because of the dominance of a few platforms. Based on these reports, the DMU would be given powers to designate dominant platforms as having “substantial, entrenched market power in at least one digital activity, providing the firm with a strategic position”, which would lead to their being given the SMS designation. This would make platforms subject to a bespoke code of conduct, potential procompetitive interventions (PCIs), and increased scrutiny of their merger and product expansion decisions.

At first glance, none of these powers may appear novel. Codes of conduct have been used in other sectors, such as groceries and energy markets, and PCIs were part of the package of remedies in the CMA’s 2015 retail banking market review.

But these interventions were limited to a small number of clearly delineated sectors, firms, activities, or products. By contrast, the DMU’s remit will cover all “digital markets”. This is an already large and growing proportion of the UK economy that comprises many different activities, from digital advertising and e-commerce to online search, social media, and news publishing (among others). And it increasingly encompasses markets like taxis, groceries, entertainment, and other sectors that are becoming significantly “digitalised”. What may seem to be a focused mandate now is, over the coming decades, likely to grow to encompass more and more of the economy.

The DMU will thus combine the powers and operating structure of a narrow sector regulator with a cross-sector purview that is much closer to the CMA’s economy-wide reach. And it will do so for one of the most vitally important parts of the economy, where entrepreneurialism is central and where misguided regulation of incumbents may have systemic effects. The implications of this—creating a de facto regulator with goals that are often conflicting, with powers that lack many of the checks and balances that the CMA usually faces, and with a remit that could be as broad as the economy itself have been given little scrutiny so far, with some assuming the DMU’s scope is much narrower and more focused than it really is.

Proponents might view this level of ambition as fit for the challenge presented by digital markets, where strong competition is vital and where markets may naturally gravitate toward a small number of large competitors. And given the broad variety of activities undertaken by digital platforms and the rapidity of technological change, they may argue that an effective regulator needs both a broad remit and extensive powers to act quickly. But there are also clear costs and risks in creating such a powerful new agency, and these have not yet been widely appreciated by many with an interest in economic policy in Britain.

To get the measure of those costs and risks, this paper evaluates the challenges that the DMU will face as a novel regulator tackling firms with complex and highly differentiated business models, whose actions have distinct effects in several markets and startup ecosystems. It focuses on the structure and goals of the DMU, the first pillar of its powers—the codes of conduct it is expected to write and enforce—and the checks and balances that the CMA’s proposals lack. The other two pillars of its powers—procompetitive interventions and changes to the mergers regime—are just as important substantively, but require further consideration in a future paper. We do discuss one element of the mergers proposals below, however, given its importance to startups.

Section 1 sets out the main findings of several official reviews that preceded the announcement of the DMU.

Section 2 summarises the duty and powers that the Digital Markets Taskforce proposes to give to this new regulator.

Section 3 considers the problems of operationalising the DMU’s primary duty, given its vague objectives and different constituencies. Without a clear vision for what success looks like and how to manage the trade-offs involved, the DMU could easily become a hindrance to competition and innovation, instead of a positive force. The number of firms subject to SMS designation, and the consequent interventions, could steadily increase without improving consumer outcomes, because there would be no straightforward way to decide whether regulation worked.

Further, because the determinants of innovation for any given firm or in any given market are so poorly understood, the heightened scrutiny of SMS firms contemplated by the Digital Markets Taskforce’s recommendations could inadvertently chill innovation, both by SMS firms themselves, as well as by small firms and startups, whose venture capital may depend in part on their prospects of being acquired by an incumbent.

Moreover, in its current proposed form, the DMU could influence the activities of companies beyond those found to have market power. This could create major barriers to inter-platform competition — a key part of competition in platform markets, as platforms vie with each other to keep users within their ecosystem and attract new ones. And, if it makes it harder for smaller firms to be acquired, it could reduce both the founding of, and investment in startups in the UK.

Because SMS firms will only be able to contest designations and the associated interventions via judicial review, there is also a bias in favour of intervention built in to the DMU’s design. Lacking meaningful checks and balances, the DMU’s mistakes could go uncorrected for years, further weakening innovation, competition, and startup formation in the UK to the detriment of consumers and the British economy itself.

All of these could combine to create significant unseen costs for British consumers, which go ignored and uncorrected even as they worsen consumer welfare and weaken competition and innovation in the markets the DMU is supposed to be working to improve.

Section 4 evaluates the Taskforce’s proposed participative approach. We consider existing models of conduct-based regulation in the UK, finding that these precedents have generally had much narrower goals and remits than those of the DMU, and that they therefore constitute a poor template for the new regulator. Where existing conduct-based regulation has had a broader remit, such as with the Financial Conduct Authority, it has been criticised by firms as unclear and unpredictable and by other stakeholders as ineffective. We also consider in this section whether co-regulation—mixing statutory objectives with private governance—might best achieve the government’s purpose for the DMU, given the need to optimise across many different margins and the difficulty of doing so from the top.

Section 5 concludes with high-level recommendations to help ensure that the DMU actually serves to promote competition and innovation in UK digital markets. Before moving forward, the government should focus the DMU on the CMA’s core objective, which is to promote competition for the benefit of British consumers. And it should be clear that the codes of conduct it is charged with drafting and enforcing should be done only to promote competition, not to regulate the conduct of incumbents for the purpose of promoting other social goals that may conflict with the goal of promoting competition.

The government should also narrow the scope and extent of the DMU’s powers so that it promotes competition in the specific markets in which it has determined a firm has “strategic market status”, and does not grow into a bloated regulator of these companies’ other activities in competitive markets, or of the wider economy wherever “digitalisation” is taking place. The DMU should be genuinely participative, allowing stakeholders to actively assist in decision-making instead of just offering advice. It should give special consideration to startups, and to the effects of its behaviour on entrepreneurs’ and venture capitalists’ incentives to start and fund a business. Finally, it should allow for appeals on the merits to allow the DMU to be held accountable by courts for its decisions.

Read the full briefing paper here.

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Antitrust & Consumer Protection

UK proposals on Big Tech M&A risk stifling competition

Popular Media These proposals threaten to go even further, and run the risk of causing significant harms that the CMA has ignored. It’s now up to the . . .

These proposals threaten to go even further, and run the risk of causing significant harms that the CMA has ignored. It’s now up to the government whether the agency gets these powers. It should stand up for dynamic, competitive markets by saying no.

Read the full piece here.

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Antitrust & Consumer Protection