Today at 12:30 at the Capitol Visitor Center, TechFreedom is hosting a discussion on the regulation of search engines:  “Search Engine Regulation: A Solution in Search of a Problem?”

The basics:

Allegations of “search bias” have led to increased scrutiny of Google, including active investigations in the European Union and Texas, a possible FTC investigation, and sharply-worded inquiries from members of Congress. But what does “search bias” really mean? Does it demand preemptive “search neutrality” regulation, requiring government oversight of how search results are ranked? Is antitrust intervention required to protect competition? Or can market forces deal with these concerns?

A panel of leading thinkers on Internet law will explore these questions at a luncheon hosted by TechFreedom, a new digital policy think tank. The event will take place at the Capitol Visitor Center room SVC-210/212 onTuesday, June 14 from 12:30 to 2:30pm, and include a complimentary lunch. CNET’s Declan McCullagh, a veteran tech policy journalist, will moderate a panel of four legal experts:

• Prof. Frank Pasquale, Seton Hall University School of Law, author of Federal Search Commission? Access, Fairness and Accountability in the Law of Search
• Prof. Geoffrey Manne, Lewis & Clark Law School, TechFreedom Adjunct Fellow, and Director of the International Center for Law & Economics, author of If Search Neutrality Is the Answer, What’s the Question?
• Prof. James Grimmelman, New York Law School, author of The Structure of Search Engine Law
• Prof. Eric Goldman, Santa Clara University School of Law, author of Search Engine Bias and the Demise of Search Engine Utopianism

More details are here, and the event will be streaming live from that link as well.  If all goes well, it will also be accessible right here:

http://www.ustream.tv/flash/viewer.swf

Live Broadcasting by Ustream

Filed under: administrative, announcements, essential facilities, google, law and economics, monopolization, regulation, technology Tagged: Declan McCullagh, Eric Goldman, frank pasquale, geoffrey manne, google, james grimmelmann, techfreedom, Web search engine

Tom Barnett (Covington & Burling) represents Expedia in, among other things, its efforts to persuade a US antitrust agency to bring a case against Google involving the alleged use of its search engine results to harm competition.  In that role, in a recent piece in Bloomberg, Barnett wrote the following things:

• “The U.S. Justice Department stood up for consumers last month by requiring Google Inc. to submit to significant conditions on its takeover of ITA Software Inc., a company that specializes in organizing airline data.”
• “According to the department, without the judicially monitored restrictions, Google’s control over this key asset “would have substantially lessened competition among providers of comparative flight search websites in the United States, resulting in reduced choice and less innovation for consumers.”
• “Now Google also offers services that compete with other sites to provide specialized “vertical” search services in particular segments (such as books, videos, maps and, soon, travel) and information sought by users (such as hotel and restaurant reviews in Google Places).  So Google now has an incentive to use its control over search traffic to steer users to its own services and to foreclose the visibility of competing websites.”
• “Search Display: Google has led users to expect that the top results it displays are those that its search algorithm indicates are most likely to be relevant to their query. This is why the vast majority of user clicks are on the top three or four results.  Google now steers users to its own pages by inserting links to its services at the top of the search results page, often without disclosing what it has done. If you search for hotels in a particular city, for example, Google frequently inserts links to its Places pages.”
• “All of these activities by Google warrant serious antitrust scrutiny. … It’s important for consumers that antitrust enforcers thoroughly investigate Google’s activities to ensure that competition and innovation on the Internet remain vibrant. The ITA decision is a great win for consumers; even bigger issues and threats remain.”

The themes are fairly straightforward: (1) Google is a dominant search engine, and its size and share of the search market warrants concern, (2) Google is becoming vertically integrated, which also warrants concern, (3) Google uses its search engine results in manner that harms rivals through actions that “warrant serious antitrust scrutiny,” and (4) Barnett appears to applaud judicial monitoring of Google’s contracts involving one of its “key assets.”   Sigh.

The notion of firms “coming full circle” in antitrust, a la Microsoft’s journey from antitrust defendant to complainant, is nothing new.   Neither is it too surprising or noteworthy when an antitrust lawyer, including very good ones like Barnett, say things when representing a client that are at tension with prior statements made when representing other clients.  By itself, that is not really worth a post.  What I think is interesting here is that the prior statements from Barnett about the appropriate scope of antitrust enforcement generally, and monopolization in the specific, were made as Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division — and thus, I think are more likely to reflect Barnett’s actual views on the law, economics, and competition policy than the statements that appear in Bloomberg.  The comments also expose some shortcomings in the current debate over competition policy and the search market.

But lets get to it.  Here is a list of statements that Barnett made in a variety of contexts while at the Antitrust Division.

• “Mere size does not demonstrate competitive harm.”  (Section 2 of the Sherman Act Presentation, June 20, 2006)
• “…if the government is too willing to step in as a regulator, rivals will devote their resources to legal challenges rather than business innovation. This is entirely rational from an individual rival’s perspective: seeking government help to grab a share of your competitor’s profit is likely to be low cost and low risk, whereas innovating on your own is a risky, expensive proposition. But it is entirely irrational as a matter of antitrust policy to encourage such efforts.
  (Interoperability Between Antitrust and Intellectual Property, George Mason University School of Law Symposium, September 13, 2006)
• “Rather, rivals should be encouraged to innovate on their own – to engage in leapfrog or Schumpeterian competition. New innovation expands the pie for rivals and consumers alike. We would do well to heed Justice Scalia’s observation in Trinko, that creating a legal avenue for such challenges can ‘distort investment’ of both the dominant and the rival firms.” (emphasis added)
  (Interoperability Between Antitrust and Intellectual Property, George Mason University School of Law Symposium, September 13, 2006)
• “Because a Section 2 violation hurts competitors, they are often the focus of section 2 remedial efforts.  But competitor well-being, in itself, is not the purpose of our antitrust laws.  The Darwinian process of natural selection described by Judge Easterbrook and Professor Schumpeter cannot drive growth and innovation unless tigers and other denizens of the jungle are forced to survive the crucible of competition.”  (Cite).
• “Implementing a remedy that is too broad runs the risk of distorting markets, impairing competition, and prohibiting perfectly legal and efficient conduct.” (same)
• “Access remedies also raise efficiency and innovation concerns.  By forcing a firm to share the benefits of its investments and relieving its rivals of the incentive to develop comparable assets of their own, access remedies can reduce the competitive vitality of an industry.” (same)
• “The extensively discussed problems with behavioral remedies need not be repeated in detail here.  Suffice it to say that agencies and courts lack the resources and expertise to run businesses in an efficient manner. … [R]emedies that require government entities to make business decisions or that require extensive monitoring or other government activity should be avoided wherever possible.”  (Cite).
• “We need to recognize the incentive created by imposing a duty on a defendant to provide competitors access to its assets.  Such a remedy can undermine the incentive of those other competitors to develop their own assets as well as undermine the incentive for the defendant competitor to develop the assets in the first instance.  If, for example, you compel access to the single bridge across the Missouri River, you might improve competitive options in the short term but harm competition in the longer term by ending up with only one bridge as opposed to two or three.” (same)
• “There seems to be consensus that we should prohibit unilateral conduct only where it is demonstrated through rigorous economic analysis to harm competition and thereby harm consumer welfare.” (same)

I’ll take Barnett (2006-08) over Barnett (2011) in a technical knockout.  Concerns about administrable antitrust remedies, unintended consequences of those remedies, error costs, helping consumers and restoring competition rather than merely giving a handout to rivals, and maintaining the incentive to compete and innovate are all serious issues in the Section 2 context.  Antitrust scholars from Epstein and Posner to Areeda and Hovenkamp and others have all recognized these issues — as did Barnett when he was at the DOJ (and no doubt still).  I do not fault him for the inconsistency.  But on the merits, the current claims about the role of Section 2 in altering competition in the search engine space, and the applause for judicially monitored business activities, runs afoul of the well grounded views on Section 2 and remedies that Barnett espoused while at the DOJ.

Let me end with one illustration that I think drives the point home.   When one compares Barnett’s column in Bloomberg to his speeches at DOJ, there is one difference that jumps off the page and I think is illustrative of a real problem in the search engine antitrust debate.  Barnett’s focus in the Bloomberg piece, as counsel for Expedia, is largely harm to rivals.  Google is big.  Google has engaged in practices that might harm various Internet businesses.  The focus is not consumers, i.e. the users.  They are mentioned here and there — but in the context of Google’s practices that might “steer” users toward their own sites.  As Barnett (2006-08) well knew, and no doubt continues to know, is that vertical integration and vertical contracts with preferential placement of this sort can well be (and often are) pro-competitive.  This is precisely why Barnett (2006-08) counseled requiring hard proof of harm to consumers before he would recommend much less applaud an antitrust remedy tinkering with the way search business is conducted and running the risk of violating the “do no harm” principle.  By way of contrast, Barnett’s speeches at the DOJ frequently made clear that the notion that the antitrust laws “protection competition, not competitors,” was not just a mantra, but a serious core of sensible Section 2 enforcement.

The focus can and should remain upon consumers rather than rivals.  The economic question is whether, when and if Google uses search results to favor its own content, that conduct is efficient and pro-consumer or can plausibly cause antitrust injury.  Those leaping from “harm to rivals” to harm to consumers should proceed with caution.  Neither economic theory nor empirical evidence indicate that the leap is an easy one.  Quite the contrary, the evidence suggests these arrangements are generally pro-consumer and efficient.  On a case-by-case analysis, the facts might suggest a competitive problem in any given case.

Barnett (2006-08) has got Expedia’s antitrust lawyer dead to rights on this one.  Consumers would be better off if the antitrust agencies took the advice of the former and ignored the latter.

Filed under: antitrust, doj, economics, error costs, essential facilities, exclusionary conduct, federal trade commission, google, monopolization, technology

Josh and I have just completed a white paper on search neutrality/search bias and the regulation of search engines.  The paper is this year’s first in the ICLE Antitrust & Consumer Protection White Paper Series:

If Search Neutrality Is the Answer, What’s the Question?

 

Geoffrey A. Manne

(Lewis & Clark Law School and ICLE)

and

Joshua D. Wright

(George Mason Law School & Department of Economics and ICLE)

In this paper we evaluate both the economic and non-economic costs and benefits of search bias. In Part I we define search bias and search neutrality, terms that have taken on any number of meanings in the literature, and survey recent regulatory concerns surrounding search bias. In Part II we discuss the economics and technology of search. In Part III we evaluate the economic costs and benefits of search bias. We demonstrate that search bias is the product of the competitive process and link the search bias debate to the economic and empirical literature on vertical integration and the generally-efficient and pro-competitive incentives for a vertically integrated firm to discriminate in favor of its own content. Building upon this literature and its application to the search engine market, we conclude that neither an ex ante regulatory restriction on search engine bias nor the imposition of an antitrust duty to deal upon Google would benefit consumers. In Part V we evaluate the frequent claim that search engine bias causes other serious, though less tangible, social and cultural harms. As with the economic case for search neutrality, we find these non-economic justifications for restricting search engine bias unconvincing, and particularly susceptible to the well-known Nirvana Fallacy of comparing imperfect real world institutions with romanticized and unrealistic alternatives

Search bias is not a function of Google’s large share of overall searches. Rather, it is a feature of competition in the search engine market, as evidenced by the fact that its rivals also exercise editorial and algorithmic control over what information is provided to consumers and in what manner. Consumers rightly value competition between search engine providers on this margin; this fact alone suggests caution in regulating search bias at all, much less with an ex ante regulatory schema which defines the margins upon which search providers can compete. The strength of economic theory and evidence demonstrating that regulatory restrictions on vertical integration are costly to consumers, impede innovation, and discourage experimentation in a dynamic marketplace support the conclusion that neither regulation of search bias nor antitrust intervention can be justified on economic terms. Search neutrality advocates touting the non-economic virtues of their proposed regime should bear the burden of demonstrating that they exist beyond the Nirvana Fallacy of comparing an imperfect private actor to a perfect government decision-maker, and further, that any such benefits outweigh the economic costs.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE PAPER

 

Filed under: announcements, antitrust, economics, error costs, essential facilities, exclusionary conduct, google, law and economics, markets, monopolization, technology, truth on the market Tagged: antitrust, foundem, google, search, search bias, Search Engines, search neutrality, tradecomet, Vertical integration

Filed under: antitrust, essential facilities, exclusionary conduct, monopolization, net neutrality, technology Tagged: Competition law, FCC, Federal Communications Commission, Free Press, Monopoly, net neutrality, Network neutrality, regulation, Telecommunications Act

Here we go again.  The European Commission is after Google more formally than a few months ago (but not yet having issued a Statement of Objections).

Read the full piece here. 

First of all, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Josh Wright. Only because of Josh’s creativity and tireless, flawless execution did this blog symposium come about and run so smoothly. I also would like to thank Dennis Crouch, who has generously cross-posted the symposium at PatentlyO. And I am grateful for the attention of the communities at TOTM and PatentlyO, which have patiently scrolled through countless pages and posts to learn about my book.

Read the full piece here.

The opinion is available here.  Yet another super-majority Roberts Court antitrust decision applying consensus economic theory.  No more price squeeze claims.  Alcoa is not overturned.  The Court declares that the price-squeeze claim in the absence of a duty to deal can be handled jointly by a straightforward application of Trinko and Brooke Group to the wholesale and retail prices at issue, respectively.  There is also an extended discussion of the common pitfalls of the application of antitrust as price regulation.

Read the full piece here. 

Predicting what antitrust enforcement regimes in the current economic environment is a tricky business.  I’ve done my best here.  One probably cannot think of a better source for such predictions than those from the soon-to-be AAG Christine Varney, who recently spoke at an American Antitrust Institute panel on Section 2 enforcement (you can hear the panel audio at the link).  I had an RA transcribe Varney’s remarks so please note that all remarks attributed as quotations here may not be exact.

Read the full piece here. 

Barak Richman (Duke) has posted The Antitrust of Reputation Mechanisms: Institutional Economics and Concerted Refusals to Deal to SSRN (forthcoming in the Virginia Law Review).

Read the full piece here.