The Searle Center at Northwestern University School of Law will be holding a conference on this subject starting a week from today on Thursday, November 15th.  I’m very much looking forward to participating.

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The results are in: Radiohead did . . . ok.  Before I share the specifics, let me remind you of what one seemingly prescient prognosticator said a few weeks ago:

My prediction: They will receive an average price of $2 and a median price of $0. 

So what happened?

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From the NY Times:

Federal regulators on Wednesday approved a rule that would ban exclusive agreements that cable television operators have with apartment buildings, opening up competition for other video providers that could eventually lead to lower prices.

The Federal Communications Commission unanimously approved the change, which Chairman Kevin Martin said would help lower cable rates for millions of subscribers who live in apartment buildings and other multi-unit dwellings, or about 25 million households. He said the move would particularly help minorities who disproportionately live in multi-unit dwellings.

What is at issue here is the exclusive contracts between cable operators and the owners of “multiple dwelling units” (MDUs). From what I understand, the FCC order appears to prohibit the enforcement of both existing and new exclusive arrangements with MDUs as anticompetitive contracts. It is well known in the economics literature that exclusive contracts, and competition for access to consumers through the use of exclusives, can generate significant pro-competitive benefits.

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I’ve done some more thinking about my recent post on the problems associated with claims that infer greater antitrust enforcement quality solely from enforcement activity and come to the conclusion that my post oversimplified matters. I remain rather skeptical about this inference but wanted to highlight some of the nuances in the debate that I skimmed over in the previous post. In the spirit of highlighting some of these issues, and because I’ve always wanted to try one of these posts, here’s a hypothetical dialogue between myself (JW) and an anonymous economist with a more interventionist bent (AE) in the spirit of highlighting some of the complexities of the potential link between enforcement activity and consumer welfare…

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So says Scott Adams, creater of Dilbert and now author, in today’s WSJ.

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The New York Times isn’t the only one calling for the FTC to go after Intel for its purportedly exclusionary discounting. The reliably interventionist American Antitrust Institute concurs. In a recent letter to the FTC, it wrote…

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This time from Paste Magazine (HT: Peter Schwartz via Wired Blog Magazine), and motivated by the Radiohead Experiment, and with an interesting twist…

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I just wandered down to the local Panera Bread for lunch and picked up someone’s discarded copy of today’s New York Times. One of today’s editorials, F.T.C. Goes AWOL, claims that the Federal Trade Commission “clearly shares the ‘starve the regulators and coddle industry’ philosophy that has driven the Bush administration for seven years.” The evidence? The FTC’s refusal to open a formal investigation into Intel’s loyalty discounts, which are offered to computer makers that minimize the use of processors made by Intel’s rivals.

Read the full piece here. 

From the Economic Times:

The European Union’s antitrust agency is becoming more influential just as its US counterparts have grown more cautious and inactive, experts say. The European Commission’s recent success in forcing Microsoft to carry out antitrust sanctions underscores the differences, and academic researchers say the US is also hanging back in merger challenges. That makes Brussels, more than Washington, the place where companies must go to get their deal through and where companies must ready themselves against possible antitrust action. It also means competition agencies around the world look to Brussels.

“Influential” v. “cautious” and “inactive.” I get it. The implication is that EU antitrust enforcement is good and US enforcement is bad. The proof? One is allegedly more interventionist than the other. As a general matter, I do not find “more is better” arguments (see, e.g., here) causally linking agency activity to the quality of antitrust policy to be very persuasive.

Read the full piece here.