Excerpt

Google made headlines this month when the tech giant agreed to pay $19 million to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that the company had made it too easy for children to make unauthorized purchases in the Android app store. That wasn’t all: The FTC effectively gave itself the right to oversee Google’s app-store design decisions for the next two decades. This is the latest in a series of legal settlements that threaten to hobble innovation in the fast-paced technology industry.

In 2011 the FTC began investigating Google’s “in-app purchases,” which are transactions a user makes on a smartphone while, say, playing a game. Children’s apps sometimes have in-app purchase options such as buying gold coins to reach the next level of a game. The FTC accused Google of not properly warning parents that children could run up a bill for such in-app purchases, although since 2012 Google has required a password to do so.

The agency claims the authority to second-guess product-design decisions under Section 5 of the 1914 Federal Trade Commission Act. The FTC may deem a product design “unfair” if it causes “substantial injury” to consumers that cannot reasonably be avoided. One caveat: The FTC by law must show that the consumer harm outweighs the design’s countervailing benefits.

When the FTC files a complaint, companies often settle out of court to avoid expensive legal hassle and prolonged public exposure. But under Section 5, the FTC has especially broad discretion to decide what practices are “unfair.” And because nearly all high-tech enforcement actions end in settlements, there is almost no case law to rein in the agency.

Continue reading on WSJ.com

 

Summary

“Any new rules issued by the Commission should not be based on Title II. For the reasons we explained in our comments, we believe re-opening Title II would be a disaster in ways that Title II proponents do not seem to understand – or, at least, have not been willing to seriously discuss.”

“First, subjecting broadband to Title II would not even allow the FCC to do the one thing the D.C. Circuit’s Verizon decision clearly bars the FCC from doing under Section 706: banning “paid prioritization.”…Second, the Commission cannot simply “reclassify” broadband in the sense that that term has been used by Title II proponents; the FCC can only re-open the interpretation of the key definitions of the 1996 Telecommunications Act…Third, Title II proponents invariably assert that any problems created by Title II can be solved by the FCC
through various forbearance proceedings…”

The free market position on telecom reform has become rather confused of late. Erstwhile conservative Senator Thune is now cosponsoring a version of Senator Rockefeller’s previously proposed video reform bill, bundled into satellite legislation (the Satellite Television Access and Viewer Rights Act or “STAVRA”) that would also include a provision dubbed “Local Choice.” Some free marketeers have defended the bill as a step in the right direction.

Although it looks as if the proposal may be losing steam this Congress, the legislation has been described as a “big and bold idea,” and it’s by no means off the menu. But it should be.

It has been said that politics makes for strange bedfellows. Indeed, people who disagree on just about everything can sometimes unite around a common perceived enemy. Take carriage disputes, for instance. Perhaps because, for some people, a day without The Bachelor is simply a day lost, an unlikely alliance of pro-regulation activists like Public Knowledge and industry stalwarts like Dish has emerged to oppose the ability of copyright holders to withhold content as part of carriage negotiations.

Senator Rockefeller’s Online Video Bill was the catalyst for the Local Choice amendments to STAVRA. Rockefeller’s bill did, well, a lot of terrible things, from imposing certain net neutrality requirements, to overturning the Supreme Court’s Aereo decision, to adding even more complications to the already Byzantine morass of video programming regulations.

But putting Senator Thune’s lipstick on Rockefeller’s pig can’t save the bill, and some of the worst problems from Senator Rockefeller’s original proposal remain.

Among other things, the new bill is designed to weaken the ability of copyright owners to negotiate with distributors, most notably by taking away their ability to withhold content during carriage disputes and by forcing TV stations to sell content on an a la carte basis.

Video distribution issues are complicated — at least under current law. But at root these are just commercial contracts and, like any contracts, they rely on a couple of fundamental principles.

First is the basic property right. The Supreme Court (at least somewhat) settled this for now (in Aereo), by protecting the right of copyright holders to be compensated for carriage of their content. With this baseline, distributors must engage in negotiations to obtain content, rather than employing technological workarounds and exploiting legal loopholes.

Second is the related ability of contracts to govern the terms of trade. A property right isn’t worth much if its owner can’t control how it is used, governed or exchanged.

Finally, and derived from these, is the issue of bargaining power. Good-faith negotiations require both sides not to act strategically by intentionally causing negotiations to break down. But if negotiations do break down, parties need to be able to protect their rights. When content owners are not able to withhold content in carriage disputes, they are put in an untenable bargaining position. This invites bad faith negotiations by distributors.

The STAVRA/Local Choice proposal would undermine the property rights and freedom of contract that bring The Bachelor to your TV, and the proposed bill does real damage by curtailing the scope of the property right in TV programming and restricting the range of contracts available for networks to license their content.

The bill would require that essentially all broadcast stations that elect retrans make their content available a la carte — thus unbundling some of the proverbial sticks that make up the traditional property right. It would also establish MVPD pass-through of each local affiliate. Subscribers would pay a fee determined by the affiliate, and the station must be offered on an unbundled basis, without any minimum tier required – meaning an MVPD has to offer local stations to its customers with no markup, on an a la carte basis, if the station doesn’t elect must-carry. It would also direct the FCC to open a rulemaking to determine whether broadcasters should be prohibited from withholding their content online during a dispute with an MPVD.

“Free market” supporters of the bill assert something like “if we don’t do this to stop blackouts, we won’t be able to stem the tide of regulation of broadcasters.” Presumably this would end blackouts of broadcast programming: If you’re an MVPD subscriber, and you pay the $1.40 (or whatever) for CBS, you get it, period. The broadcaster sets an annual per-subscriber rate; MVPDs pass it on and retransmit only to subscribers who opt in.

But none of this is good for consumers.

When transaction costs are positive, negotiations sometimes break down. If the original right is placed in the wrong hands, then contracting may not assure the most efficient outcome. I think it was Coase who said that.

But taking away the ability of content owners to restrict access to their content during a bargaining dispute effectively places the right to content in the hands of distributors. Obviously, this change in bargaining position will depress the value of content. Placing the rights in the hands of distributors reduces the incentive to create content in the first place; this is why the law protects copyright to begin with. But it also reduces the ability of content owners and distributors to reach innovative agreements and contractual arrangements (like certain promotional deals) that benefit consumers, distributors and content owners alike.

The mandating of a la carte licensing doesn’t benefit consumers, either. Bundling is generally pro-competitive and actually gives consumers more content than they would otherwise have. The bill’s proposal to force programmers to sell content to consumers a la carte may actually lead to higher overall prices for less content. Not much of a bargain.

There are plenty of other ways this is bad for consumers, even if it narrowly “protects” them from blackouts. For example, the bill would prohibit a network from making a deal with an MVPD that provides a discount on a bundle including carriage of both its owned broadcast stations as well as the network’s affiliated cable programming. This is not a worthwhile — or free market — trade-off; it is an ill-advised and economically indefensible attack on vertical distribution arrangements — exactly the same thing that animates many net neutrality defenders.

Just as net neutrality’s meddling in commercial arrangements between ISPs and edge providers will ensure a host of unintended consequences, so will the Rockefeller/Thune bill foreclose a host of welfare-increasing deals. In the end, in exchange for never having to go three days without CBS content, the bill will make that content more expensive, limit the range of programming offered, and lock video distribution into a prescribed business model.

Former FCC Commissioner Rob McDowell sees the same hypocritical connection between net neutrality and broadcast regulation like the Local Choice bill:

According to comments filed with the FCC by Time Warner Cable and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, broadcasters should not be allowed to take down or withhold the content they produce and own from online distribution even if subscribers have not paid for it—as a matter of federal law. In other words, edge providers should be forced to stream their online content no matter what. Such an overreach, of course, would lay waste to the economics of the Internet. It would also violate the First Amendment’s prohibition against state-mandated, or forced, speech—the flip side of censorship.

It is possible that the cable companies figure that subjecting powerful broadcasters to anti-free speech rules will shift the political momentum in the FCC and among the public away from net neutrality. But cable’s anti-free speech arguments play right into the hands of the net-neutrality crowd. They want to place the entire Internet ecosystem, physical networks, content and apps, in the hands of federal bureaucrats.

While cable providers have generally opposed net neutrality regulation, there is, apparently, some support among them for regulations that would apply to the edge. The Rockefeller/Thune proposal is just a replay of this constraint — this time by forcing programmers to allow retransmission of broadcast content under terms set by Congress. While “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander” sounds appealing in theory, here it is simply doubling down on a terrible idea.

What it reveals most of all is that true neutrality advocates don’t want government control to be limited to ISPs — rather, progressives like Rockefeller (and apparently some conservatives, like Thune) want to subject the whole apparatus — distribution and content alike — to intrusive government oversight in order to “protect” consumers (a point Fred Campbell deftly expands upon here and here).

You can be sure that, if the GOP supports broadcast a la carte, it will pave the way for Democrats (and moderates like McCain who back a la carte) to expand anti-consumer unbundling requirements to cable next. Nearly every economic analysis has concluded that mandated a la carte pricing of cable programming would be harmful to consumers. There is no reason to think that applying it to broadcast channels would be any different.

What’s more, the logical extension of the bill is to apply unbundling to all MVPD channels and to saddle them with contract restraints, as well — and while we’re at it, why not unbundle House of Cards from Orange is the New Black? The Rockefeller bill may have started in part as an effort to “protect” OVDs, but there’ll be no limiting this camel once its nose is under the tent. Like it or not, channel unbundling is arbitrary — why not unbundle by program, episode, studio, production company, etc.?

There is simply no principled basis for the restraints in this bill, and thus there will be no limit to its reach. Indeed, “free market” defenders of the Rockefeller/Thune approach may well be supporting a bill that ultimately leads to something like compulsory, a la carte licensing of all video programming. As I noted in my testimony last year before the House Commerce Committee on the satellite video bill:

Unless we are prepared to bear the consumer harm from reduced variety, weakened competition and possibly even higher prices (and absolutely higher prices for some content), there is no economic justification for interfering in these business decisions.

So much for property rights — and so much for vibrant video programming.

That there is something wrong with the current system is evident to anyone who looks at it. As Gus Hurwitz noted in recent testimony on Rockefeller’s original bill,

The problems with the existing regulatory regime cannot be understated. It involves multiple statutes implemented by multiple agencies to govern technologies developed in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, according to policy goals from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. We are no longer living in a world where the Rube Goldberg of compulsory licenses, must carry and retransmission consent, financial interest and syndication exclusivity rules, and the panoply of Federal, state, and local regulations makes sense – yet these are the rules that govern the video industry.

While video regulation is in need of reform, this bill is not an improvement. In the short run it may ameliorate some carriage disputes, but it will do so at the expense of continued programming vibrancy and distribution innovations. The better way to effect change would be to abolish the Byzantine regulations that simultaneously attempt to place thumbs of both sides of the scale, and to rely on free market negotiations with a copyright baseline and antitrust review for actual abuses.

But STAVRA/Local Choice is about as far from that as you can get.

Cross-posted from Truth on the Market

The Wall Street Journal dropped an FCC bombshell last week, although I’m not sure anyone noticed. In an article ostensibly about the possible role that MFNs might play in the Comcast/Time-Warner Cable merger, the Journal noted that…

Read the full piece here.

Excerpt

At the beginning of this millennium, two tech giants, Microsoft Inc. and Sun Microsystems, Inc., waged a savage, seven-year war. Their patent infringement lawsuits and countersuits squandered hundreds of millions of dollars, dominated headlines, and consumed the time and attention of leaders at both companies.

It wasn’t until 2004 that the two companies reached a settlement. At the time, that agreement was heralded by chief executives at both companies as a win for consumers; it would finally shift focus from their legal squabbling to the production and delivery of new, more collaborative products.

But by then, some would argue, the damage was done.

Roll film forward to the mobile device industry of today. Key players, currently embroiled in seemingly endless patent litigation, risk putting their legal battles ahead of the ceaseless innovation required to compete in a dynamic global market. Observers, tired of the bloody charade and hungry for novelty, call out for patent reform to weaken patents and end the infighting.

But the real solution is more nuanced.

Continue reading on Bloomberg BNA

Summary

“On July 24th, 2014, the Electric Power Board (EPB) of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and the City of Wilson, north Carolina, filed separate petitions with the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC” or “Commission”), each asking the FCC to use the authority the FCC has claimed under Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to preempt state laws in Tennessee and North Carolina restricting the deployment of municipally-owned broadband networks. Just four days later,the Commission released a Public Notice establishing the current comment cycle, giving interested parties scantly over a month’s time to review and respond to the complex and voluminous petitions, despite the litany of other important and intricate issues currently before the FCC.

TechFreedom, ICLE, and seven other organizations – many of which are small operations with limited resources – filed a request seeking to have the comment deadline in this proceeding extended, but this request was summarily denied. Thus, due to time and resource constraints, the following comments will not address each and every point raised by the two petitions. Rather, these comments will address a few discrete points – including (1) the legal authority for Federal preemption in this case, and (2) the policy implications raised by the two petitions – before offering some general advice to the Commission: Deny the petitions of EPB and Wilson; issue a Notice of Inquiry to gather further data on the efficacy of government-run broadband networks; and, in the meantime, focus on broadband deployment initiatives that have gathered more consensus (e.g., promoting “Dig Once” policies, extending pole-attachment rights to broadband-only providers, and encouraging intermodal facilities-based competition, such as by maximizing the reallocation of spectrum for wireless broadband). We also note the unique dangers posed by increasing control over broadband, particularly in terms of censorship, surveillance, and other kinds of privacy invasions.”

Microsoft wants you to believe that Google’s business practices stifle competition and harm consumers. Again.

The latest volley in its tiresome and ironic campaign to bludgeon Google with the same regulatory club once used against Microsoft itself is the company’s effort to foment an Android-related antitrust case in Europe.

In a recent polemic, Microsoft consultant (and business school professor) Ben Edelman denounces Google for requiring that, if device manufacturers want to pre-install key Google apps on Android devices, they “must install all the apps Google specifies, with the prominence Google requires, including setting these apps as defaults where Google instructs.” Edelman trots out gasp-worthy “secret” licensing agreements that he claims support his allegation (more on this later).

Similarly, a recent Wall Street Journal article, “Android’s ‘Open’ System Has Limits,” cites Edelman’s claim that limits on the licensing of Google’s proprietary apps mean that the Android operating system isn’t truly open source and comes with “strings attached.”

In fact, along with the Microsoft-funded trade organization FairSearch, Edelman has gone so far as to charge that this “tying” constitutes an antitrust violation. It is this claim that Microsoft and a network of proxies brought to the Commission when their efforts to manufacture a search-neutrality-based competition case against Google failed.

But before getting too caught up in the latest round of anti-Google hysteria, it’s worth noting that the Federal Trade Commission has already reviewed these claims. After a thorough, two-year inquiry, the FTC found the antitrust arguments against Google to be without merit. The South Korea Fair Trade Commission conducted its own two year investigation into Google’s Android business practices and dismissed the claims before it as meritless, as well.

Taking on Edelman and FairSearch with an exhaustive scholarly analysis, German law professor Torsten Koerber recently assessed the nature of competition among mobile operating systems and concluded that:

(T)he (EU) Fairsearch complaint ultimately does not aim to protect competition or consumers, as it pretends to. It rather strives to shelter Microsoft from competition by abusing competition law to attack Google’s business model and subvert competition.

It’s time to take a step back and consider the real issues at play.

In order to argue that Google has an iron grip on Android, Edelman’s analysis relies heavily on ”secret” Google licensing agreements — “MADAs” (Mobile Application Distribution Agreements) — trotted out with such fanfare one might think it was the first time two companies ever had a written contract (or tried to keep it confidential).

For Edelman, these agreements “suppress competition” with “no plausible pro-consumer benefits.” He writes, “I see no way to reconcile the MADA restrictions with [Android openness].”

Conveniently, however, Edelman neglects to cite to Section 2.6 of the MADA:

The parties will create an open environment for the Devices by making all Android Products and Android Application Programming Interfaces available and open on the Devices and will take no action to limit or restrict the Android platform.

Professor Korber’s analysis provides a straight-forward explanation of the relationship between Android and its OEM licensees:

Google offers Android to OEMs on a royalty-free basis. The licensees are free to download, distribute and even modify the Android code as they like. OEMs can create mobile devices that run “pure” Android…or they can apply their own user interfaces (IO) and thereby hide most of the underlying Android system (e.g. Samsung’s “TouchWiz” or HTC’s “Sense”). OEMs make ample use of this option.

The truth is that the Android operating system remains, as ever, definitively open source — but Android’s openness isn’t really what the fuss is about. In this case, the confusion (or obfuscation) stems from the casual confounding of Google Apps with the Android Operating System. As we’ll see, they aren’t the same thing.

Consider Amazon, which pre-loads no Google applications at all on its Kindle Fire and Fire Phone. Amazon’s version of Android uses Microsoft’s Bing as the default search engine; Nokia provides mapping services, and the app store is Amazon’s own.

Still, Microsoft’s apologists continue to claim that Android licensees can’t choose to opt out of Google’s applications suite — even though, according to a new report from ABI Research, 20 percent of smartphones shipped between May and July 2014 were based on a “Google-less” version of the Android OS. And that number is consistently increasing: Analysts predict that by 2015, 30 percent of Android phones won’t access Google Services.

It’s true that equipment manufacturers who choose the Android operating system have the option to include the suite of integrated, proprietary Google apps and services licensed (royalty-free) under the name Google Mobile Services (GMS). GMS includes Google Search, Maps, Calendar, YouTube and other apps that together define the “Google Android experience” that users know and love.

But Google Android is far from the only Android experience.

Even if a manufacturer chooses to license Google’s apps suite, Google’s terms are not exclusive. Handset makers are free to install competing applications, including other search engines, map applications or app stores.

Although Google requires that Google Search be made easily accessible (hardly a bad thing for consumers, as it is Google Search that finances the development and maintenance of all of the other (free) apps from which Google otherwise earns little to no revenue), OEMs and users alike can (and do) easily install and access other search engines in numerous ways. As Professor Korber notes:

The standard MADA does not entail any exclusivity for Google Search nor does it mandate a search default for the web browser.

Regardless, integrating key Google apps (like Google Search and YouTube) with other apps the company offers (like Gmail and Google+) is an antitrust problem only if it significantly forecloses competitors from these apps’ markets compared to a world without integrated Google apps, and without pro-competitive justification. Neither is true, despite the unsubstantiated claims to the contrary from Edelman, FairSearch and others.

Consumers and developers expect and demand consistency across devices so they know what they’re getting and don’t have to re-learn basic functions or program multiple versions of the same application. Indeed, Apple’s devices are popular in part because Apple’s closed iOS provides a predictable, seamless experience for users and developers.

But making Android competitive with its tightly controlled competitors requires special efforts from Google to maintain a uniform and consistent experience for users. Google has tried to achieve this uniformity by increasingly disentangling its apps from the operating system (the opposite of tying) and giving OEMs the option (but not the requirement) of licensing GMS — a “suite” of technically integrated Google applications (integrated with each other, not the OS).  Devices with these proprietary apps thus ensure that both consumers and developers know what they’re getting.

Unlike Android, Apple prohibits modifications of its operating system by downstream partners and users, and completely controls the pre-installation of apps on iOS devices. It deeply integrates applications into iOS, including Apple Maps, iTunes, Siri, Safari, its App Store and others. Microsoft has copied Apple’s model to a large degree, hard-coding its own applications (including Bing, Windows Store, Skype, Internet Explorer, Bing Maps and Office) into the Windows Phone operating system.

In the service of creating and maintaining a competitive platform, each of these closed OS’s bakes into its operating system significant limitations on which third-party apps can be installed and what they can (and can’t) do. For example, neither platform permits installation of a third-party app store, and neither can be significantly customized. Apple’s iOS also prohibits users from changing default applications — although the soon-to-be released iOS 8 appears to be somewhat more flexible than previous versions.

In addition to pre-installing a raft of their own apps and limiting installation of other apps, both Apple and Microsoft enable greater functionality for their own apps than they do the third-party apps they allow.

For example, Apple doesn’t make available for other browsers (like Google’s Chrome) all the JavaScript functionality that it does for Safari, and it requires other browsers to use iOS Webkit instead of their own web engines. As a result there are things that Chrome can’t do on iOS that Safari and only Safari can do, and Chrome itself is hamstrung in implementing its own software on iOS. This approach has led Mozilla to refuse to offer its popular Firefox browser for iOS devices (while it has no such reluctance about offering it on Android).

On Windows Phone, meanwhile, Bing is integrated into the OS and can’t be removed. Only in markets where Bing is not supported (and with Microsoft’s prior approval) can OEMs change the default search app from Bing. While it was once possible to change the default search engine that opens in Internet Explorer (although never from the hardware search button), the Windows 8.1 Hardware Development Notes, updated July 22, 2014, state:

By default, the only search provider included on the phone is Bing. The search provider used in the browser is always the same as the one launched by the hardware search button.

Both Apple iOS and Windows Phone tightly control the ability to use non-default apps to open intents sent from other apps and, in Windows especially, often these linkages can’t be changed.

As a result of these sorts of policies, maintaining the integrity — and thus the brand — of the platform is (relatively) easy for closed systems. While plenty of browsers are perfectly capable of answering an intent to open a web page, Windows Phone can better ensure a consistent and reliable experience by forcing Internet Explorer to handle the operation.

By comparison, Android, with or without Google Mobile Services, is dramatically more open, more flexible and customizable, and more amenable to third-party competition. Even the APIs that it uses to integrate its apps are open to all developers, ensuring that there is nothing that Google apps are able to do that non-Google apps with the same functionality are prevented from doing.

In other words, not just Gmail, but any email app is permitted to handle requests from any other app to send emails; not just Google Calendar but any calendar app is permitted to handle requests from any other app to accept invitations.

In no small part because of this openness and flexibility, current reports indicate that Android OS runs 85 percent of mobile devices worldwide. But it is OEM giant Samsung, not Google, that dominates the market, with a 65 percent share of all Android devices. Competition is rife, however, especially in emerging markets. In fact, according to one report, “Chinese and Indian vendors accounted for the majority of smartphone shipments for the first time with a 51% share” in 2Q 2014.

As he has not been in the past, Edelman is at least nominally circumspect in his unsubstantiated legal conclusions about Android’s anticompetitive effect:

Applicable antitrust law can be complicated: Some ties yield useful efficiencies, and not all ties reduce welfare.

Given Edelman’s connections to Microsoft and the realities of the market he is discussing, it could hardly be otherwise. If every integration were an antitrust violation, every element of every operating system — including Apple’s iOS as well as every variant of Microsoft’s Windows — should arguably be the subject of a government investigation.

In truth, Google has done nothing more than ensure that its own suite of apps functions on top of Android to maintain what Google sees as seamless interconnectivity, a high-quality experience for users, and consistency for application developers — while still allowing handset manufacturers room to innovate in a way that is impossible on other platforms. This is the very definition of pro-competitive, and ultimately this is what allows the platform as a whole to compete against its far more vertically integrated alternatives.

Which brings us back to Microsoft. On the conclusion of the FTC investigation in January 2013, a GigaOm exposé on the case had this to say:

Critics who say Google is too powerful have nagged the government for years to regulate the company’s search listings. But today the critics came up dry….

The biggest loser is Microsoft, which funded a long-running cloak-and-dagger lobbying campaign to convince the public and government that its arch-enemy had to be regulated….

The FTC is also a loser because it ran a high profile two-year investigation but came up dry.

EU regulators, take note.

Filed under: antitrust, contracts, exclusionary conduct, google, law and economics, monopolization, technology, tying, tying Tagged: Android, antitrust, Apple, competition, google, Google Apps, iOS, Kindle Fire, microsoft, Samsung, tying, Windows Phone

While the Comcast/TWC merger is significant in size, it doesn’t give rise to any plausible theory of anticompetitive harm under modern antitrust analysis.

Comcast and TWC don’t compete directly for subscribers in any relevant market; in terms of concentration and horizontal effects, the transaction will neither reduce competition nor restrict consumer choice.

Critics repeatedly assert that the combined entity will gain bargaining leverage against content providers from the merger, resulting in lower content prices to programmers. But after the transaction, Comcast will serve fewer than 30 percent of total MVPD subscribers — a share insufficient to give it market power over sellers of video programming. Moreover, recent exponential growth in OVDs gives content providers even more ways to distribute their programming. Programmers with valuable content have significant bargaining power, and have been able to extract the prices to prove it.

The argument that the merger will increase Comcast’s incentive and ability to impair online video content or other edge providers is similarly without merit. On a national level, the combined firm would have only about 40 percent of broadband customers, at most. This leaves at least 60 percent of customers available to purchase content and support edge providers reaching minimum viable scale, even if Comcast were to attempt to foreclose access.

Some have also argued that because Comcast has a monopoly on access to its customers, transit providers are beholden to it. But edge providers can access Comcast’s network through multiple channels, undermining Comcast’s ability to deny access or degrade service to such providers.

Finally, critics have alleged that the vertically integrated Comcast may withhold its content from MVPDs or OVDs, or deny carriage to unaffiliated programming. But the transaction has no effect on Comcast’s share of national programming, and a trivial effect on its share of national distribution. Comcast already has no ownership interest in the overwhelming majority of content it distributes. This will not measurably change post-transaction.

At the same time, the transaction will bring significant scale efficiencies in a marketplace that requires large, fixed-cost investments in network infrastructure and technology. And bringing a more vertical structure to TWC will likely be beneficial, as well.

Download: Beneficence Is Beside the Point

Summary

“…A serious assessment of the need for new privacy legislation, and the right way to frame it, would not begin by assuming the premise that a particular framework is necessary.
Specifically, before recommending any new legislation, the NTIA should do – or ensure that someone does – what the Federal Trade Commission has steadfastly refused to do: carefully
assess what is and is not already covered by existing U.S. laws…”

“Existing laws might well be inadequate to deal with some of the specific the challenges raised by Big Data. But until they are more carefully examined, we will not know where the
gaps are. Even those who might insist that there would be no harm to redundancy should agree that we must learn from the lessons of past experience with these laws. Moreover, it
is essential to understand what existing law covers because either (a) it will co-exist with any future privacy law, in which case companies will have potentially conflicting…”