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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.

Read the full piece here.

As regulatory review of the merger between Aetna and Humana hits the homestretch, merger critics have become increasingly vocal in their opposition to the deal. This is particularly true of a subset of healthcare providers concerned about losing bargaining power over insurers.

Fortunately for consumers, the merger appears to be well on its way to approval. California recently became the 16th of 20 state insurance commissions that will eventually review the merger to approve it. The U.S. Department of Justice is currently reviewing the merger and may issue its determination as early as July.

Read the full piece here.

Last week, FCC General Counsel Jonathan Sallet pulled back the curtain on the FCC staff’s analysis behind its decision to block Comcast’s acquisition of Time Warner Cable. As the FCC staff sets out on its reported Rainbow Tour to reassure regulated companies that it’s not “hostile to the industries it regulates,” Sallet’s remarks suggest it will have an uphill climb. Unfortunately, the staff’s analysis appears to have been unduly speculative, disconnected from critical market realities, and decidedly biased — not characteristics in a regulator that tend to offer much reassurance.

Merger analysis is inherently speculative, but, as courts have repeatedly had occasion to find, the FCC has a penchant for stretching speculation beyond the breaking point, adopting theories of harm that are vaguely possible, even if unlikely and inconsistent with past practice, and poorly supported by empirical evidence. The FCC’s approach here seems to fit this description.

The FCC’s fundamental theory of anticompetitive harm

To begin with, as he must, Sallet acknowledged that there was no direct competitive overlap in the areas served by Comcast and Time Warner Cable, and no consumer would have seen the number of providers available to her changed by the deal.

But the FCC staff viewed this critical fact as “not outcome determinative.” Instead, Sallet explained that the staff’s opposition was based primarily on a concern that the deal might enable Comcast to harm “nascent” OVD competitors in order to protect its video (MVPD) business:

Simply put, the core concern came down to whether the merged firm would have an increased incentive and ability to safeguard its integrated Pay TV business model and video revenues by limiting the ability of OVDs to compete effectively, especially through the use of new business models.

The justification for the concern boiled down to an assumption that the addition of TWC’s subscriber base would be sufficient to render an otherwise too-costly anticompetitive campaign against OVDs worthwhile:

Without the merger, a company taking action against OVDs for the benefit of the Pay TV system as a whole would incur costs but gain additional sales – or protect existing sales — only within its footprint. But the combined entity, having a larger footprint, would internalize more of the external “benefits” provided to other industry members.

The FCC theorized that, by acquiring a larger footprint, Comcast would gain enough bargaining power and leverage, as well as the means to profit from an exclusionary strategy, leading it to employ a range of harmful tactics — such as impairing the quality/speed of OVD streams, imposing data caps, limiting OVD access to TV-connected devices, imposing higher interconnection fees, and saddling OVDs with higher programming costs. It’s difficult to see how such conduct would be permitted under the FCC’s Open Internet Order/Title II regime, but, nevertheless, the staff apparently believed that Comcast would possess a powerful “toolkit” with which to harm OVDs post-transaction.

Comcast’s share of the MVPD market wouldn’t have changed enough to justify the FCC’s purported fears

First, the analysis turned on what Comcast could and would do if it were larger. But Comcast was already the largest ISP and MVPD (now second largest MVPD, post AT&T/DIRECTV) in the nation, and presumably it has approximately the same incentives and ability to disadvantage OVDs today.

In fact, there’s no reason to believe that the growth of Comcast’s MVPD business would cause any material change in its incentives with respect to OVDs. Whatever nefarious incentives the merger allegedly would have created by increasing Comcast’s share of the MVPD market (which is where the purported benefits in the FCC staff’s anticompetitive story would be realized), those incentives would be proportional to the size of increase in Comcast’s national MVPD market share — which, here, would be about eight percentage points: from 22% to under 30% of the national market.

It’s difficult to believe that Comcast would gain the wherewithal to engage in this costly strategy by adding such a relatively small fraction of the MVPD market (which would still leave other MVPDs serving fully 70% of the market to reap the purported benefits instead of Comcast), but wouldn’t have it at its current size – and there’s no evidence that it has ever employed such strategies with its current market share.

It bears highlighting that the D.C. Circuit has already twice rejected FCC efforts to impose a 30% market cap on MVPDs, based on the Commission’s inability to demonstrate that a greater-than-30% share would create competitive problems, especially given the highly dynamic nature of the MVPD market. In vacating the FCC’s most recent effort to do so in 2009, the D.C. Circuit was resolute in its condemnation of the agency, noting:

In sum, the Commission has failed to demonstrate that allowing a cable operator to serve more than 30% of all [MVPD] subscribers would threaten to reduce either competition or diversity in programming.

The extent of competition and the amount of available programming (including original programming distributed by OVDs themselves) has increased substantially since 2009; this makes the FCC’s competitive claims even less sustainable today.

It’s damning enough to the FCC’s case that there is no marketplace evidence of such conduct or its anticompetitive effects in today’s market. But it’s truly impossible to square the FCC’s assertions about Comcast’s anticompetitive incentives with the fact that, over the past decade, Comcast has made massive investments in broadband, steadily increased broadband speeds, and freely licensed its programming, among other things that have served to enhance OVDs’ long-term viability and growth. Chalk it up to the threat of regulatory intervention or corporate incompetence if you can’t believe that competition alone could be responsible for this largesse, but, whatever the reason, the FCC staff’s fears appear completely unfounded in a marketplace not significantly different than the landscape that would have existed post-merger.

OVDs aren’t vulnerable, and don’t need the FCC’s “help”

After describing the “new entrants” in the market — such unfamiliar and powerless players as Dish, Sony, HBO, and CBS — Sallet claimed that the staff was principally animated by the understanding that

Entrants are particularly vulnerable when competition is nascent. Thus, staff was particularly concerned that this transaction could damage competition in the video distribution industry.

Sallet’s description of OVDs makes them sound like struggling entrepreneurs working in garages. But, in fact, OVDs have radically reshaped the media business and wield enormous clout in the marketplace.

Netflix, for example, describes itself as “the world’s leading Internet television network with over 65 million members in over 50 countries.” New services like Sony Vue and Sling TV are affiliated with giant, well-established media conglomerates. And whatever new offerings emerge from the FCC-approved AT&T/DIRECTV merger will be as well-positioned as any in the market.

In fact, we already know that the concerns of the FCC are off-base because they are of a piece with the misguided assumptions that underlie the Chairman’s recent NPRM to rewrite the MVPD rules to “protect” just these sorts of companies. But the OVDs themselves — the ones with real money and their competitive futures on the line — don’t see the world the way the FCC does, and they’ve resolutely rejected the Chairman’s proposal. Notably, the proposed rules would “protect” these services from exactly the sort of conduct that Sallet claims would have been a consequence of the Comcast-TWC merger.

If they don’t want or need broad protection from such “harms” in the form of revised industry-wide rules, there is surely no justification for the FCC to throttle a merger based on speculation that the same conduct could conceivably arise in the future.

The realities of the broadband market post-merger wouldn’t have supported the FCC’s argument, either

While a larger Comcast might be in a position to realize more of the benefits from the exclusionary strategy Sallet described, it would also incur more of the costs — likely in direct proportion to the increased size of its subscriber base.

Think of it this way: To the extent that an MVPD can possibly constrain an OVD’s scope of distribution for programming, doing so also necessarily makes the MVPD’s own broadband offering less attractive, forcing it to incur a cost that would increase in proportion to the size of the distributor’s broadband market. In this case, as noted, Comcast would have gained MVPD subscribers — but it would have also gained broadband subscribers. In a world where cable is consistently losing video subscribers (as Sallet acknowledged), and where broadband offers higher margins and faster growth, it makes no economic sense that Comcast would have valued the trade-off the way the FCC claims it would have.

Moreover, in light of the existing conditions imposed on Comcast under the Comcast/NBCU merger order from 2011 (which last for a few more years) and the restrictions adopted in the Open Internet Order, Comcast’s ability to engage in the sort of exclusionary conduct described by Sallet would be severely limited, if not non-existent. Nor, of course, is there any guarantee that former or would-be OVD subscribers would choose to subscribe to, or pay more for, any MVPD in lieu of OVDs. Meanwhile, many of the relevant substitutes in the MVPD market (like AT&T and Verizon FiOS) also offer broadband services – thereby increasing the costs that would be incurred in the broadband market even more, as many subscribers would shift not only their MVPD, but also their broadband service, in response to Comcast degrading OVDs.

And speaking of the Open Internet Order — wasn’t that supposed to prevent ISPs like Comcast from acting on their alleged incentives to impede the quality of, or access to, edge providers like OVDs? Why is merger enforcement necessary to accomplish the same thing once Title II and the rest of the Open Internet Order are in place? And if the argument is that the Open Internet Order might be defeated, aside from the completely speculative nature of such a claim, why wouldn’t a merger condition that imposed the same constraints on Comcast – as was done in the Comcast/NBCU merger order by imposing the former net neutrality rules on Comcast – be perfectly sufficient?

While the FCC staff analysis accepted as true (again, contrary to current marketplace evidence) that a bigger Comcast would have more incentive to harm OVDs post-merger, it rejected arguments that there could be countervailing benefits to OVDs and others from this same increase in scale. Thus, things like incremental broadband investments and speed increases, a larger Wi-Fi network, and greater business services market competition – things that Comcast is already doing and would have done on a greater and more-accelerated scale in the acquired territories post-transaction – were deemed insufficient to outweigh the expected costs of the staff’s entirely speculative anticompetitive theory.

In reality, however, not only OVDs, but consumers – and especially TWC subscribers – would have benefitted from the merger by access to Comcast’s faster broadband speeds, its new investments, and its superior video offerings on the X1 platform, among other things. Many low-income families would have benefitted from expansion of Comcast’s Internet Essentials program, and many businesses would have benefited from the addition of a more effective competitor to the incumbent providers that currently dominate the business services market. Yet these and other verifiable benefits were given short shrift in the agency’s analysis because they “were viewed by staff as incapable of outweighing the potential harms.”

The assumptions underlying the FCC staff’s analysis of the broadband market are arbitrary and unsupportable

Sallet’s claim that the combined firm would have 60% of all high-speed broadband subscribers in the U.S. necessarily assumes a national broadband market measured at 25 Mbps or higher, which is a red herring.

The FCC has not explained why 25 Mbps is a meaningful benchmark for antitrust analysis. The FCC itself endorsed a 10 Mbps baseline for its Connect America fund last December, noting that over 70% of current broadband users subscribe to speeds less than 25 Mbps, even in areas where faster speeds are available. And streaming online video, the most oft-cited reason for needing high bandwidth, doesn’t require 25 Mbps: Netflix says that 5 Mbps is the most that’s required for an HD stream, and the same goes for Amazon (3.5 Mbps) and Hulu (1.5 Mbps).

What’s more, by choosing an arbitrary, faster speed to define the scope of the broadband market (in an effort to assert the non-competitiveness of the market, and thereby justify its broadband regulations), the agency has – without proper analysis or grounding, in my view – unjustifiably shrunk the size of the relevant market. But, as it happens, doing so also shrinks the size of the increase in “national market share” that the merger would have brought about.

Recall that the staff’s theory was premised on the idea that the merger would give Comcast control over enough of the broadband market that it could unilaterally impose costs on OVDs sufficient to impair their ability to reach or sustain minimum viable scale. But Comcast would have added only one percent of this invented “market” as a result of the merger. It strains credulity to assert that there could be any transaction-specific harm from an increase in market share equivalent to a rounding error.

In any case, basing its rejection of the merger on a manufactured 25 Mbps relevant market creates perverse incentives and will likely do far more to harm OVDs than realization of even the staff’s worst fears about the merger ever could have.

The FCC says it wants higher speeds, and it wants firms to invest in faster broadband. But here Comcast did just that, and then was punished for it. Rather than acknowledging Comcast’s ongoing broadband investments as strong indication that the FCC staff’s analysis might be on the wrong track, the FCC leadership simply sidestepped that inconvenient truth by redefining the market.

The lesson is that if you make your product too good, you’ll end up with an impermissibly high share of the market you create and be punished for it. This can’t possibly promote the public interest.

Furthermore, the staff’s analysis of competitive effects even in this ersatz market aren’t likely supportable. As noted, most subscribers access OVDs on connections that deliver content at speeds well below the invented 25 Mbps benchmark, and they pay the same prices for OVD subscriptions as subscribers who receive their content at 25 Mbps. Confronted with the choice to consume content at 25 Mbps or 10 Mbps (or less), the majority of consumers voluntarily opt for slower speeds — and they purchase service from Netflix and other OVDs in droves, nonetheless.

The upshot? Contrary to the implications on which the staff’s analysis rests, if Comcast were to somehow “degrade” OVD content on the 25 Mbps networks so that it was delivered with characteristics of video content delivered over a 10-Mbps network, real-world, observed consumer preferences suggest it wouldn’t harm OVDs’ access to consumers at all. This is especially true given that OVDs often have a global focus and reach (again, Netflix has 65 million subscribers in over 50 countries), making any claims that Comcast could successfully foreclose them from the relevant market even more suspect.

At the same time, while the staff apparently viewed the broadband alternatives as “limited,” the reality is that Comcast, as well as other broadband providers, are surrounded by capable competitors, including, among others, AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, Google Fiber, many advanced VDSL and fiber-based Internet service providers, and high-speed mobile wireless providers. The FCC understated the complex impact of this robust, dynamic, and ever-increasing competition, and its analysis entirely ignored rapidly growing mobile wireless broadband competition.

Finally, as noted, Sallet claimed that the staff determined that merger conditions would be insufficient to remedy its concerns, without any further explanation. Yet the Commission identified similar concerns about OVDs in both the Comcast/NBCUniversal and AT&T/DIRECTV transactions, and adopted remedies to address those concerns. We know the agency is capable of drafting behavioral conditions, and we know they have teeth, as demonstrated by prior FCC enforcement actions. It’s hard to understand why similar, adequate conditions could not have been fashioned for this transaction.

In the end, while I appreciate Sallet’s attempt to explain the FCC’s decision to reject the Comcast/TWC merger, based on the foregoing I’m not sure that Comcast could have made any argument or showing that would have dissuaded the FCC from challenging the merger. Comcast presented a strong economic analysis answering the staff’s concerns discussed above, all to no avail. It’s difficult to escape the conclusion that this was a politically-driven result, and not one rigorously based on the facts or marketplace reality.

Filed under: antitrust, Efficiencies, exclusionary conduct, federal communications commission, internet, law and economics, market definition, merger guidelines, mergers & acquisitions, net neutrality, regulation, technology, telecommunications, television Tagged: antitrust, Broadband, Comcast, FCC, Jonathan Sallet, merger, merger review, MVPD, Netflix, OVD, Time Warner Cable, TWC

FTC Commissioner Josh Wright has some wise thoughts on how to handle a small GUPPI. I don’t mean the fish. Dissenting in part in the Commission’s disposition of the Family Dollar/Dollar Tree merger, Commissioner Wright calls for creating a safe harbor for mergers where the competitive concern is unilateral effects and the merger generates a low score on the “Gross Upward Pricing Pressure Index,” or “GUPPI.”

Before explaining why Wright is right on this one, some quick background on the GUPPI. In 2010, the DOJ and FTC revised their Horizontal Merger Guidelines to reflect better the actual practices the agencies follow in conducting pre-merger investigations. Perhaps the most notable new emphasis in the revised guidelines was a move away from market definition, the traditional starting point for merger analysis, and toward consideration of potentially adverse “unilateral” effects—i.e., anticompetitive harms that, unlike collusion or even non-collusive oligopolistic pricing, need not involve participation of any non-merging firms in the market. The primary unilateral effect emphasized by the new guidelines is that the merger may put “upward pricing pressure” on brand-differentiated but otherwise similar products sold by the merging firms. The guidelines maintain that when upward pricing pressure seems significant, it may be unnecessary to define the relevant market before concluding that an anticompetitive effect is likely.

The logic of upward pricing pressure is straightforward. Suppose five firms sell competing products (Products A-E) that, while largely substitutable, are differentiated by brand. Given the brand differentiation, some of the products are closer substitutes than others. If the closest substitute to Product A is Product B and vice-versa, then a merger between Producer A and Producer B may result in higher prices even if the remaining producers (C, D, and E) neither raise their prices nor reduce their output. The merged firm will know that if it raises the price of Product A, most of the lost sales will be diverted to Product B, which that firm also produces. Similarly, sales diverted from Product B will largely flow to Product A. Thus, the merged company, seeking to maximize its profits, may face pressure to raise the prices of Products A and/or B.

The GUPPI seeks to assess the likelihood, absent countervailing efficiencies, that the merged firm (e.g., Producer A combined with Producer B) would raise the price of one of its competing products (e.g., Product A), causing some of the lost sales on that product to be diverted to its substitute (e.g., Product B). The GUPPI on Product A would thus consist of:

The Value of Sales Diverted to Product B
Foregone Revenues on Lost Product A Sales.

The value of sales diverted to Product B, the numerator, is equal to the number of units diverted from Product A to Product B times the profit margin (price minus marginal cost) on Product B. The foregone revenues on lost Product A sales, the denominator, is equal to the number of lost Product A sales times the price of Product A. Thus, the fraction set forth above is equal to:

Number of A Sales Diverted to B * Unit Margin on B
Number of A Sales Lost * Price of A.

The Guidelines do not specify how high the GUPPI for a particular product must be before competitive concerns are raised, but they do suggest that at some point, the GUPPI is so small that adverse unilateral effects are unlikely. (“If the value of diverted sales is proportionately small, significant unilateral price effects are unlikely.”) Consistent with this observation, DOJ’s Antitrust Division has concluded that a GUPPI of less than 5% will not give rise to a merger challenge.

Commissioner Wright has split with his fellow commissioners over whether the FTC should similarly adopt a safe harbor for horizontal mergers where the adverse competitive concern is unilateral effects and the GUPPIs are less than 5%. Of the 330 markets in which the Commission is requiring divestiture of stores, 27 involve GUPPIs of less than 5%. Commissioner Wright’s position is that the combinations in those markets should be deemed to fall within a safe harbor. At the very least, he says, there should be some safe harbor for very small GUPPIs, even if it kicks in somewhere below the 5% level. The Commission has taken the position that there should be no safe harbor for mergers where the competitive concern is unilateral effects, no matter how low the GUPPI. Instead, the Commission majority says, GUPPI is just a starting point; once the GUPPIs are calculated, each market should be assessed in light of qualitative factors, and a gestalt-like, “all things considered” determination should be made.

The Commission majority purports to have taken this approach in the Family Dollar/Dollar Tree case. It claims that having used GUPPI to identify some markets that were presumptively troubling (markets where GUPPIs were above a certain level) and others that were presumptively not troubling (low-GUPPI markets), it went back and considered qualitative evidence for each, allowing the presumption to be rebutted where appropriate. As Commissioner Wright observes, though, the actual outcome of this purported process is curious: almost none of the “presumptively anticompetitive” markets were cleared based on qualitative evidence, whereas 27 of the “presumptively competitive” markets were slated for a divestiture despite the low GUPPI. In practice, the Commission seems to be using high GUPPIs to condemn unilateral effects mergers, while not allowing low GUPPIs to acquit them. Wright, by contrast, contends that a low-enough GUPPI should be sufficient to acquit a merger where the only plausible competitive concern is adverse unilateral effects.

He’s right on this, for at least five reasons.

1. Virtually every merger involves a positive GUPPI. As long as any sales would be diverted from one merging firm to the other and the firms are pricing above cost (so that there is some profit margin on their products), a merger will involve a positive GUPPI. (Recall that the numerator in the GUPPI is “number of diverted sales * profit margin on the product to which sales are diverted.”) If qualitative evidence must be considered and a gestalt-like decision made in even low-GUPPI cases, then that’s the approach that will always be taken and GUPPI data will be essentially irrelevant.
2. Calculating GUPPIs is hard. Figuring the GUPPI requires the agencies to make some difficult determinations. Calculating the “diversion ratio” (the percentage of lost A sales that are diverted to B when the price of A is raised) requires determinations of A’s “own-price elasticity of demand” as well as the “cross-price elasticity of demand” between A and B. Calculating the profit margin on B requires determining B’s marginal cost. Assessing elasticity of demand and marginal cost is notoriously difficult. This difficulty matters here for a couple of reasons:
   • First, why go through the difficult task of calculating GUPPIs if they won’t simplify the process of evaluating a merger? Under the Commission’s purported approach, once GUPPI is calculated, enforcers still have to consider all the other evidence and make an “all things considered” judgment. A better approach would be to cut off the additional analysis if the GUPPI is sufficiently small.
   • Second, given the difficulty of assessing marginal cost (which is necessary to determine the profit margin on the product to which sales are diverted), enforcers are likely to use a proxy, and the most commonly used proxy for marginal cost is average variable cost (i.e., the total non-fixed costs of producing the products at issue divided by the number of units produced). Average variable cost, though, tends to be smaller than marginal cost over the relevant range of output, which will cause the profit margin (price – “marginal” cost) on the product to which sales are diverted to appear higher than it actually is. And that will tend to overstate the GUPPI. Thus, at some point, a positive but low GUPPI should be deemed insignificant.
3. The GUPPI is biased toward an indication of anticompetitive effect. GUPPI attempts to assess gross upward pricing pressure. It takes no account of factors that tend to prevent prices from rising. In particular, it ignores entry and repositioning by other product-differentiated firms, factors that constrain the merged firm’s ability to raise prices. It also ignores merger-induced efficiencies, which tend to put downward pressure on the merged firm’s prices. (Granted, the merger guidelines call for these factors to be considered eventually, but the factors are generally subject to higher proof standards. Efficiencies, in particular, are pretty difficulty to establish under the guidelines.) The upshot is that the GUPPI is inherently biased toward an indication of anticompetitive harm. A safe harbor for mergers involving low GUPPIs would help counter-balance this built-in bias.
4. Divergence from DOJ’s approach will create an arbitrary result. The FTC and DOJ’s Antitrust Division share responsibility for assessing proposed mergers. Having the two enforcement agencies use different standards in their evaluations injects a measure of arbitrariness into the law. In the interest of consistency, predictability, and other basic rule of law values, the agencies should get on the same page. (And, for reasons set forth above, DOJ’s is the better one.)
5. A safe harbor is consistent with the Supreme Court’s decision-theoretic antitrust jurisprudence. In recent years, the Supreme Court has generally crafted antitrust rules to optimize the costs of errors and of making liability judgments (or, put differently, to “minimize the sum of error and decision costs”). On a number of occasions, the Court has explicitly observed that it is better to adopt a rule that will allow the occasional false acquittal if doing so will prevent greater costs from false convictions and administration. The Brooke Group rule that there can be no predatory pricing liability absent below-cost pricing, for example, is expressly not premised on the belief that low, but above-cost, pricing can never be anticompetitive; rather, the rule is justified on the ground that the false negatives it allows are less costly than the false positives and administrative difficulties a more “theoretically perfect” rule would generate. Indeed, the Supreme Court’s antitrust jurisprudence seems to have wholeheartedly endorsed Voltaire’s prudent aphorism, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” It is thus no answer for the Commission to observe that adverse unilateral effects can sometimes occur when a combination involves a low (<5%) GUPPI. Low but above-cost pricing can sometimes be anticompetitive, but Brooke Group’s safe harbor is sensible and representative of the approach the Supreme Court thinks antitrust should take. The FTC should get on board.

One final point. It is important to note that Commissioner Wright is not saying—and would be wrong to say—that a high GUPPI should be sufficient to condemn a merger. The GUPPI has never been empirically verified as a means of identifying anticompetitive mergers. As Dennis Carlton observed, “[T]he use of UPP as a merger screen is untested; to my knowledge, there has been no empirical analysis that has been performed to validate its predictive value in assessing the competitive effects of mergers.” Dennis W. Carlton, Revising the Horizontal Merger Guidelines, 10 J. Competition L. & Econ. 1, 24 (2010). This dearth of empirical evidence seems especially problematic in light of the enforcement agencies’ spotty track record in predicting the effects of mergers. Craig Peters, for example, found that the agencies’ merger simulations produced wildly inaccurate predictions about the price effects of airline mergers. See Craig Peters, Evaluating the Performance of Merger Simulation: Evidence from the U.S. Airline Industry, 49 J.L. & Econ. 627 (2006). Professor Carlton thus warns (Carlton, supra, at 32):

UPP is effectively a simplified version of merger simulation. As such, Peters’s findings tell a cautionary tale—more such studies should be conducted before one treats UPP, or any other potential merger review method, as a consistently reliable methodology by which to identify anticompetitive mergers.

The Commission majority claims to agree that a high GUPPI alone should be insufficient to condemn a merger. But the actual outcome of the analysis in the case at hand—i.e., finding almost all combinations involving high GUPPIs to be anticompetitive, while deeming the procompetitive presumption to be rebutted in 27 low-GUPPI cases—suggests that the Commission is really allowing high GUPPIs to “prove” that anticompetitive harm is likely.

The point of dispute between Wright and the other commissioners, though, is about how to handle low GUPPIs. On that question, the Commission should either join the DOJ in recognizing a safe harbor for low-GUPPI mergers or play it straight with the public and delete the Horizontal Merger Guidelines’ observation that “[i]f the value of diverted sales is proportionately small, significant unilateral price effects are unlikely.” The better approach would be to affirm the Guidelines and recognize a safe harbor.

Filed under: antitrust, federal trade commission, ftc, merger guidelines

On Thursday I will be participating in an ABA panel discussion on the Apple e-books case, along with Mark Ryan (former DOJ attorney) and Fiona Scott-Morton (former DOJ economist), both of whom were key members of the DOJ team that brought the case. Details are below. Judging from the prep call, it should be a spirited discussion!

Readers looking for background on the case (as well as my own views — decidedly in opposition to those of the DOJ) can find my previous commentary on the case and some of the issues involved here:

• Why I think the Apple e-books antitrust decision will (or at least should) be overturned
• Why I think the government will have a tough time winning the Apple e-books antitrust case
• The procompetitive story that could undermine the DOJ’s e-books antitrust case against Apple
• How Apple can defeat the DOJ’s e-book antitrust suit
• The US e-books case against Apple: The procompetitive story (in a special issue of Concurrences on “E-books and the boundaries of antitrust” that includes several other essays worth reading)
• Amazon vs. Macmillan: It’s all about control

Other TOTM authors have also weighed in. See, e.g.:

• Alden Abbott: The Second Circuit Misapplies the Per Se Rule in U.S. v. Apple
• Josh Wright: The Apple E-Book Kerfuffle Meets Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics
• Josh Wright: Apple and Amazon E-Book Most Favored Nation Clauses

DETAILS:

ABA Section of Antitrust Law

Federal Civil Enforcement Committee, Joint Conduct, Unilateral Conduct, and Media & Tech Committees Present:

“The 2d Cir.’s Apple E-Books decision: Debating the merits and the meaning”

July 16, 2015
12:00 noon to 1:30 pm Eastern / 9:00 am to 10:30 am Pacific

On June 30, the Second Circuit affirmed DOJ’s trial victory over Apple in the Ebooks Case. The three-judge panel fractured in an interesting way: two judges affirmed the finding that Apple’s role in a “hub and spokes” conspiracy was unlawful per se; one judge also would have found a rule-of-reason violation; and the dissent — stating Apple had a “vertical” position and was challenging the leading seller’s “monopoly” — would have found no liability at all. What is the reasoning and precedent of the decision? Is “marketplace vigilantism” (the concurring judge’s phrase) ever justified? Our panel — which includes the former DOJ head of litigation involved in the case — will debate the issues.

Moderator

• Ken Ewing, Steptoe & Johnson LLP

Panelists

• Geoff Manne, International Center for Law & Economics
• Fiona Scott Morton, Yale School of Management
• Mark Ryan, Mayer Brown LLP

Register HERE

Filed under: administrative, antitrust, cartels, contracts, doj, e-books, economics, Efficiencies, error costs, law and economics, litigation, market definition, MFNs, monopolization, resale price maintenance, technology, vertical restraints Tagged: agency model, Amazon, antitrust, Apple, doj, e-books, iBookstore, major publishers, MFN, most favored nations clause, per se, price-fixing, publishing industry, Rule of reason, vertical restraints

Last year, Microsoft’s new CEO, Satya Nadella, seemed to break with the company’s longstanding “complain instead of compete” strategy to acknowledge that:

We’re going to innovate with a challenger mindset…. We’re not coming at this as some incumbent.

Among the first items on his agenda? Treating competing platforms like opportunities for innovation and expansion rather than obstacles to be torn down by any means possible:

We are absolutely committed to making our applications run what most people describe as cross platform…. There is no holding back of anything.

Earlier this week, at its Build Developer Conference, Microsoft announced its most significant initiative yet to bring about this reality: code built into its Windows 10 OS that will enable Android and iOS developers to port apps into the Windows ecosystem more easily.

To make this possible… Windows phones “will include an Android subsystem” meant to play nice with the Java and C++ code developers have already crafted to run on a rival’s operating system…. iOS developers can compile their Objective C code right from Microsoft’s Visual Studio, and turn it into a full-fledged Windows 10 app.

Microsoft also announced that its new browser, rebranded as “Edge,” will run Chrome and Firefox extensions, and that its Office suite would enable a range of third-party services to integrate with Office on Windows, iOS, Android and Mac.

Consumers, developers and Microsoft itself should all benefit from the increased competition that these moves are certain to facilitate.

Most obviously, more consumers may be willing to switch to phones and tablets with the Windows 10 operating system if they can continue to enjoy the apps and extensions they’ve come to rely on when using Google and Apple products. As one commenter said of the move:

I left Windows phone due to the lack of apps. I love the OS though, so if this means all my favorite apps will be on the platform I’ll jump back onto the WP bandwagon in a heartbeat.

And developers should invest more in development when they can expect additional revenue from yet another platform running their apps and extensions, with minimal additional development required.

It’s win-win-win. Except perhaps for Microsoft’s lingering regulatory strategy to hobble Google.

That strategy is built primarily on antitrust claims, most recently rooted in arguments that consumers, developers and competitors alike are harmed by Google’s conduct around Android which, it is alleged, makes it difficult for OS makers (like Cyanogen) and app developers (like Microsoft Bing) to compete.

But Microsoft’s interoperability announcements (along with a host of other rapidly evolving market characteristics) actually serve to undermine the antitrust arguments that Microsoft, through groups like FairSearch and ICOMP, has largely been responsible for pushing in the EU against Google/Android.

The reality is that, with innovations like the one Microsoft announced this week, Microsoft, Google and Apple (and Samsung, Nokia, Tizen, Cyanogen…) are competing more vigorously on several fronts. Such competition is evidence of a vibrant marketplace that is simply not in need of antitrust intervention.

The supreme irony in this is that such a move represents a (further) nail in the coffin of the supposed “applications barrier to entry” that was central to the US DOJ’s antitrust suit against Microsoft and that factors into the contemporary Android antitrust arguments against Google.

Frankly, the argument was never very convincing. Absent unjustified and anticompetitive efforts to prop up such a barrier, the “applications barrier to entry” is just a synonym for “big.” Admittedly, the DC Court of Appeals in Microsoft was careful — far more careful than the district court — to locate specific, narrow conduct beyond the mere existence of the alleged barrier that it believed amounted to anticompetitive monopoly maintenance. But central to the imposition of liability was the finding that some of Microsoft’s conduct deterred application developers from effectively accessing other platforms, without procompetitive justification.

With the implementation of initiatives like the one Microsoft has now undertaken in Windows 10, however, it appears that such concerns regarding Google and mobile app developers are unsupportable.

Of greatest significance to the current Android-related accusations against Google, the appeals court in Microsoft also reversed the district court’s finding of liability based on tying, noting in particular that:

If OS vendors without market power also sell their software bundled with a browser, the natural inference is that sale of the items as a bundle serves consumer demand and that unbundled sale would not.

Of course this is exactly what Microsoft Windows Phone (which decidedly does not have market power) does, suggesting that the bundling of mobile OS’s with proprietary apps is procompetitive.

Similarly, in reviewing the eventual consent decree in Microsoft, the appeals court upheld the conditions that allowed the integration of OS and browser code, and rejected the plaintiff’s assertion that a prohibition on such technological commingling was required by law.

The appeals court praised the district court’s recognition that an appropriate remedy “must place paramount significance upon addressing the exclusionary effect of the commingling, rather than the mere conduct which gives rise to the effect,” as well as the district court’s acknowledgement that “it is not a proper task for the Court to undertake to redesign products.”  Said the appeals court, “addressing the applications barrier to entry in a manner likely to harm consumers is not self-evidently an appropriate way to remedy an antitrust violation.”

Today, claims that the integration of Google Mobile Services (GMS) into Google’s version of the Android OS is anticompetitive are misplaced for the same reason:

But making Android competitive with its tightly controlled competitors [e.g., Apple iOS and Windows Phone] 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.

In fact, some commenters have even suggested that, by effectively making the OS more “open,” Microsoft’s new Windows 10 initiative might undermine the Windows experience in exactly this fashion:

As a Windows Phone developer, I think this could easily turn into a horrible idea…. [I]t might break the whole Windows user experience Microsoft has been building in the past few years. Modern UI design is a different approach from both Android and iOS. We risk having a very unhomogenic [sic] store with lots of apps using different design patterns, and Modern UI is in my opinion, one of the strongest points of Windows Phone.

But just because Microsoft may be willing to take this risk doesn’t mean that any sensible conception of competition law and economics should require Google (or anyone else) to do so, as well.

Most significantly, Microsoft’s recent announcement is further evidence that both technological and contractual innovations can (potentially — the initiative is too new to know its effect) transform competition, undermine static market definitions and weaken theories of anticompetitive harm.

When apps and their functionality are routinely built into some OS’s or set as defaults; when mobile apps are also available for the desktop and are seamlessly integrated to permit identical functions to be performed on multiple platforms; and when new form factors like Apple MacBook Air and Microsoft Surface blur the lines between mobile and desktop, traditional, static anticompetitive theories are out the window (no pun intended).

Of course, it’s always been possible for new entrants to overcome network effects and scale impediments by a range of means. Microsoft itself has in the past offered to pay app developers to write for its mobile platform. Similarly, it offers inducements to attract users to its Bing search engine and it has devised several creative mechanisms to overcome its claimed scale inferiority in search.

A further irony (and market complication) is that now some of these apps — the ones with network effects of their own — threaten in turn to challenge the reigning mobile operating systems, exactly as Netscape was purported to threaten Microsoft’s OS (and lead to its anticompetitive conduct) back in the day. Facebook, for example, now offers not only its core social media function, but also search, messaging, video calls, mobile payments, photo editing and sharing, and other functionality that compete with many of the core functions built into mobile OS’s.

But the desire by apps like Facebook to expand their networks by being on multiple platforms, and the desire by these platforms to offer popular apps in order to attract users, ensure that Facebook is ubiquitous, even without any antitrust intervention. As Timothy Bresnahan, Joe Orsini and Pai-Ling Yin demonstrate:

(1) The distribution of app attractiveness to consumers is skewed, with a small minority of apps drawing the vast majority of consumer demand. (2) Apps which are highly demanded on one platform tend also to be highly demanded on the other platform. (3) These highly demanded apps have a strong tendency to multihome, writing for both platforms. As a result, the presence or absence of apps offers little reason for consumers to choose a platform. A consumer can choose either platform and have access to the most attractive apps.

Of course, even before Microsoft’s announcement, cross-platform app development was common, and third-party platforms like Xamarin facilitated cross-platform development. As Daniel O’Connor noted last year:

Even if one ecosystem has a majority of the market share, software developers will release versions for different operating systems if it is cheap/easy enough to do so…. As [Torsten] Körber documents [here], building mobile applications is much easier and cheaper than building PC software. Therefore, it is more common for programmers to write programs for multiple OSes…. 73 percent of apps developers design apps for at least two different mobiles OSes, while 62 percent support 3 or more.

Whether Microsoft’s interoperability efforts prove to be “perfect” or not (and some commenters are skeptical), they seem destined to at least further decrease the cost of cross-platform development, thus reducing any “application barrier to entry” that might impede Microsoft’s ability to compete with its much larger rivals.

Moreover, one of the most interesting things about the announcement is that it will enable Android and iOS apps to run not only on Windows phones, but also on Windows computers. Some 1.3 billion PCs run Windows. Forget Windows’ tiny share of mobile phone OS’s; that massive potential PC market (of which Microsoft still has 91 percent) presents an enormous ready-made market for mobile app developers that won’t be ignored.

It also points up the increasing absurdity of compartmentalizing these markets for antitrust purposes. As the relevant distinctions between mobile and desktop markets break down, the idea of Google (or any other company) “leveraging its dominance” in one market to monopolize a “neighboring” or “related” market is increasingly unsustainable. As I wrote earlier this week:

Mobile and social media have transformed search, too…. This revolution has migrated to the computer, which has itself become “app-ified.” Now there are desktop apps and browser extensions that take users directly to Google competitors such as Kayak, eBay and Amazon, or that pull and present information from these sites.

In the end, intentionally or not, Microsoft is (again) undermining its own case. And it is doing so by innovating and competing — those Schumpeterian concepts that were always destined to undermine antitrust cases in the high-tech sector.

If we’re lucky, Microsoft’s new initiatives are the leading edge of a sea change for Microsoft — a different and welcome mindset built on competing in the marketplace rather than at regulators’ doors.

Filed under: antitrust, barriers to entry, exclusionary conduct, google, market definition, markets, monopolization, technology, tying, tying Tagged: Android, antitrust, competition, Cyanogen, google, Google Mobile Services, innovation, microsoft, Mobile, Satya Nadella, tying, Windows Phone

There is always a temptation for antitrust agencies and plaintiffs to center a case around so-called “hot” documents — typically company documents with a snippet or sound-bites extracted, some times out of context. Some practitioners argue that “[h]ot document can be crucial to the outcome of any antitrust matter.” Although “hot” documents can help catch the interest of the public, a busy judge or an unsophisticated jury, they often can lead to misleading results. But more times than not, antitrust cases are resolved on economics and what John Adams called “hard facts,” not snippets from emails or other corporate documents. Antitrust case books are littered with cases that initially looked promising based on some supposed hot documents, but ultimately failed because the foundations of a sound antitrust case were missing.

Read the full piece here.

Acentury ago Congress enacted the Clayton Act, which prohibits acquisitions that may substantially lessen competition. For years, the antitrust enforcement Agencies looked at only one part of the ledger – the potential for price increases. Agencies didn’t take into account the potential efficiencies in cost savings, better products, services, and innovation. One of the major reforms of the Clinton Administration was to fully incorporate efficiencies in merger analysis, helping to develop sound enforcement standards for the 21st Century.

Read the full piece here.

Credit where it’s due — the FTC has closed its investigation of the Men’s Warehouse/Jos. A. Bank merger. I previously wrote about the investigation here, where I said:

I would indeed be shocked if a legitimate economic analysis suggested that Jos. A. Banks and Men’s Warehouse occupied all or most of any relevant market. For the most part — and certainly for the marginal consumer — there is no meaningful difference between a basic, grey worsted wool suit bought at a big department store in the mall and a similar suit bought at a small retailer in the same mall or a “warehouse” store across the street. And the barriers to entry in such a market, if it existed, would be insignificant. Again, what I said of Whole Foods/Wild Oats is surely true here, too:

But because economically-relevant market definition turns on demand elasticity among consumers who are often free to purchase products from multiple distribution channels, a myopic focus on a single channel of distribution to the exclusion of others is dangerous.

Let’s hope the FTC gets it right this time.

The FTC’s blog post on closing the investigation notes that:

Despite limited competition from the Internet, the transaction is not likely to harm consumers because of significant competition from other sources. As in all transactions, FTC staff examined which product markets were likely to be affected and what the competitive landscape looks like in those markets. There were two such markets in this matter: (1) the retail sale of men’s suits and (2) tuxedo rentals. With respect to men’s suits, there are numerous competitors that sell suits across the range of prices of the suits the merging parties offer, including Macy’s, Kohl’s, JC Penney’s, Nordstrom, and Brooks Brothers, among others. The two firms also have different product assortments that reflect their different customer bases. Men’s Wearhouse, which sells branded and private-label suits, has a younger, trendier customer set, while Jos. A. Bank, which sells private-label suits only, has an older, more traditional customer base.

Sounds right — and good to see.

Cross-posted from Truth On the Market