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Commentators who see Trinko as an impediment to the claim that antitrust law can take care of harmful platform access problems (and thus that prospective rate regulation (i.e., net neutrality) is not necessary), commit an important error in making their claim–and it is a similar error committed by those who advocate for search neutrality regulation, as well.  In both cases, proponents are advocating for a particular remedy to an undemonstrated problem, rather than attempting to assess whether there is really a problem in the first place.  In the net neutrality context, it may be true that Trinko would prevent the application of antitrust laws to mandate neutral access as envisioned by Free Press, et al.  But that is not the same as saying Trinko precludes the application of antitrust laws.  In fact, there is nothing in Trinko that would prevent regulators and courts from assessing the anticompetitive consequences of particular network management decisions undertaken by a dominant network provider.  This is where the concerns do and should lie–not with an aesthetic preference for a particular form of regulation putatively justified as a response to this concern.  Indeed, “net neutrality” as an antitrust remedy, to the extent that it emanates from essential facilities arguments, is and should be precluded by Trinko.

But the Court seems to me to be pretty clear in Trinko that an antitrust case can be made, even against a firm regulated under the Telecommunications Act:

Section 601(b)(1) of the 1996 Act is an antitrust-specific saving clause providing that “nothing in this Act or the amendments made by this Act shall be construed to modify, impair, or supersede the applicability of any of the antitrust laws.”  This bars a finding of implied immunity. As the FCC has put the point, the saving clause preserves those “claims that satisfy established antitrust standards.”

But just as the 1996 Act preserves claims that satisfy existing antitrust standards, it does not create new claims that go beyond existing antitrust standards; that would be equally inconsistent with the saving clause’s mandate that nothing in the Act “modify, impair, or supersede the applicability” of the antitrust laws.

There is no problem assessing run of the mill anticompetitive conduct using “established antitrust standards.”  But that doesn’t mean that a net neutrality remedy can be constructed from such a case, nor does it mean that precisely the same issues that proponents of net neutrality seek to resolve with net neutrality are necessarily cognizable anticompetitive concerns.

For example, as Josh noted the other day, quoting Tom Hazlett, proponents of net neutrality seem to think that it should apply indiscriminately against even firms with no monopoly power (and thus no ability to inflict consumer harm in the traditional antitrust sense).  Trinko (along with a vast quantity of other antitrust precedent) would prevent the application of antitrust laws to reach this conduct–and thus, indeed, antitrust and net neutrality as imagined by its proponents are not coextensive.  I think this is very much to the good.  But, again, nothing in Trinko or elsewhere in the antitrust laws would prohibit an antitrust case against a dominant firm engaged in anticompetitive conduct just because it was also regulated by the FCC.

Critics point to language like this in Trinko to support their contrary claim:

One factor of particular importance is the existence of a regulatory structure designed to deter and remedy anticompetitive harm. Where such a structure exists, the additional benefit to competition provided by antitrust enforcement will tend to be small, and it will be less plausible that the antitrust laws contemplate such additional scrutiny.

But I don’t think that helps them at all.  What the Court is saying is not that one regulatory scheme precludes the other, but rather that if a regulatory scheme mandates conduct that makes the actuality of anticompetitive harm less likely, then the application of necessarily-imperfect antitrust law is likely to do more harm than good.  Thus the Court notes that

The regulatory framework that exists in this case demonstrates how, in certain circumstances, “regulation significantly diminishes the likelihood of major antitrust harm.”

But this does not say that regulation precludes the application of antitrust law.  Nor does it preclude the possibility that antitrust harm can still exist; nor does it suggest that any given regulatory regime reduces the likelihood of any given anticompetitive harm–and if net neutrality proponents could show that the regulatory regime did not in fact diminish the likelihood of antitrust harm, nothing in Trinko would suggest that antitrust should not apply.

So let’s get out there and repeal that FCC net neutrality order and let antitrust deal with any problems that might arise.