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The Lund Report – ICLE Chief Economist Eric Fruits was cited by The Lund Report in a story about Oregon’s public-employee pensions crisis. You can read the full piece here.

“No one wants to talk about the biggest problem facing Oregon. It’s not the pandemic. It’s not homelessness. It’s not racial justice. The biggest crisis facing Oregon is its public employee retirement system, or PERS,” asserted Eric Fruits, vice president of research at the Cascade Policy Institute, in a June opinion piece that ran in many news outlets.

ClimateWire – ICLE Editor-in-Chief R.J. Lehmann was quoted by ClimateWire about a congressional proposal to forgive the National Flood Insurance Program’s more than $20 billion in debt to the U.S. Treasury. The full story is available here.

“It’s a reasonable thing to seek to address. There are people who cannot pay risk-based rates,” said R.J. Lehmann, a flood insurance expert at the International Center for Law & Economics.

…Some people such as Lehmann, the insurance expert, wanted the debt to force FEMA to make its insurance program better able to sustain itself.

The proposed debt forgiveness “is significant in that it amounts to declaring surrender on significant NFIP reform that looks to address the structural issues of the program — that it does not raise enough money and subsidizes developments in risky, environmentally sensitive regions,” Lehmann said.

Washington Policy Center – ICLE Editor-in-Chief Ian Adams was mentioned in a blog post by the Washington Policy Center about his panel appearance at the recent State Policy Network conference in Orlando. The full post is available here.

The event started with “The Techlash,” a session moderated by former Congresswoman Mia Love (Center for Growth and Opportunity) interviewing Ian Adams (International Center for Law and Economics), Jessica Melugin (Competitive Entterprise Institute), and Will Rinehart (Center for Growth and Opportunity).

PORTLAND, Ore. (Sept. 14, 2021) — As the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) considers at its Sept. 15 open meeting whether to withdraw guidelines for vertical mergers that the commission adopted in June 2020, antitrust and competition experts from the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) are available to discuss the weak theoretical grounding of efforts to expand vertical merger enforcement.

In comments submitted to the commission in February 2020 regarding the then-proposed guidelines, ICLE President Geoffrey Manne and then-Associate Director Kristian Stout noted that, while there may have been a need to update the FTC’s 1984 Nonhorizontal Merger Guidelines, it was not in any way clear that “errors in judicial decisions or enforcement practices have led to widespread problems that are addressed by the proposed changes.”

“We certainly advocate for clarity in the agencies’ enforcement practice with respect to vertical integration, but caution that the agencies carefully consider whether the status quo—as out of date as it may be—is truly inferior to updates that introduce more ambiguity,” Manne and Stout wrote at the time. 

Manne and Stout, along with ICLE Chief Economist Eric Fruits, also published a 2020 paper in the the University of Kansas Law Review examining popular and academic complaints about vertical integration, including vertical mergers. The ICLE scholars ultimately found that the “possibility theorems offered by opponents of vertical mergers to justify invigorated enforcement against them rely on fragile claims that ignore the meaningful distinction between contracts and mergers, and between harms that are likely to arise via horizontal integration and those by vertical integration.”

We invite those following the FTC decision to refer to these resources, as well as to the digital symposium that ICLE hosted in February 2020 at the Truth on the Market website that invited numerous respected Law & Economics scholars to weigh in on the then-draft FTC vertical merger guidelines.

Media interested in interviewing or booking Geoffrey Manne to discuss the subject of vertical mergers may reach him at [email protected] or (503) 780-8515. ICLE Director of Competition Policy Sam Bowman is also available to respond to the FTC decision, and can be reached at [email protected] or +07-59-682-6323.

Law360 – ICLE Director of Competition Policy Sam Bowman was quoted by Law360 in a story about a federal district court order enjoining Apple from enforcing its anti-steering policy. The full story is available (behind a subscriber firewall) here.

The International Center for Law & Economics issued a statement Friday praising the ruling for finding that Apple did not violate antitrust law but blasted the injunction banning the anti-steering rules. The group’s director of competition policy, Sam Bowman, said the order is vaguely written and is likely to be interpreted differently by the different parties involved.

“If it allows app developers to link users outside of the in-app payments flow, and bypass Apple’s … fees, it would enable free riding and undermine the incentive for Apple to invest” in its mobile devices, Bowman said, adding that it also reduces incentives for Apple’s competitors to invest “in whatever product might someday displace it through competition.”

“The winners are likely to be large companies like Epic, Amazon, and Match, who will be able to keep more profit for themselves, but it is hard to see how either consumers or innovation will benefit,” Bowman said.

PORTLAND, Ore. (Sept. 10, 2021) — Antitrust and competition experts from the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) are available to discuss today’s decision by U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in litigation between Apple Inc. and Epic Games Inc. over certain App Store rules.

“The headline finding of the opinion—that Apple is not a monopolist in the market for digital mobile gaming transactions and that App Store rules do not violate federal antitrust law—was appropriate and should be regarded as a victory for competition,”  ICLE President and Founder Geoffrey Manne said. “That bottom line, however, does not convey all the nuance of the opinion’s analysis, which in numerous areas reaches troubling conclusions.”

Judge Gonzalez Rogers also separately enjoined Apple from enforcing “anti-steering” rules that prohibit apps from directing users to outside payment methods. On the injunction, ICLE Director of Competition Policy Sam Bowman added: “The court’s injunction is vaguely written and is likely to be interpreted quite differently by different parties involved. But if it allows app developers to link users outside of the in-app payments flow, and bypass Apple’s IAP fees, it would enable free riding and undermine the incentive for Apple to invest in iOS, the iPhone, or—for its competitors—in whatever product might someday displace it through competition.” 

“The winners are likely to be large companies like Epic, Amazon, and Match, who will be able to keep more profit for themselves, but it is hard to see how either consumers or innovation will benefit,” Bowman said.

In April, ICLE published a short explainer on the case, “Apple v. Epic: The Value of Closed Systems.” For more commentary on competition in the digital app store market, see Senior Fellow Dirk Auer’s earlier piece on the Epic lawsuit at the Truth on the Market website. Also on Truth on the Market, ICLE Associate Director Legal Research Ben Sperry looked at whether self-preferencing by Apple in the App Store harmed consumers. 

Manne wrote in the journal Concurrences about why actions to stop platform self-preferencing are misguided. And in an article published in the Nebraska Law Review, Manne and ICLE Director of Innovation Policy Kristian Stout examined the nature of the relationship between app stores, consumers, and app developers in the context of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2019 decision in Apple v. Pepper. 

Media interested in interviewing or booking Geoffrey Manne to discuss the decision may reach him at [email protected] or (503) 780-8515; Sam Bowman is available at +07-59-682-6323 or [email protected]; Senior Fellow Dirk Auer is available at [email protected] or +32-47-293-8401.

The Guardian – ICLE President Geoffrey Manne was quoted by The Guardian in a story about a federal district judge’s decision in private antitrust litigation between Apple and Epic Games. You can read the full piece here.

Geoffrey Manne, president of the US-based International Center for Law and Economics, an academic research body, said the ruling was not a resounding victory for Epic given that Apple had won on nine out of 10 counts, but it paved the way for further legal problems for the iPhone maker such as class action lawsuits. “The language in the ruling is not good for Apple. There are a lot of findings in this case that are going to open the door to further litigation.”

Manne added that the ruling could have been much worse for Apple. It left untouched the 30% cut and did not require Apple to allow alternative payment methods in its App Store.

Reason – ICLE Editor-in-Chief R.J. Lehmann was quoted by Reason magazine about a congressional proposal to forgive the National Flood Insurance Program’s more than $20 billion in debt to the U.S. Treasury. The full story is available here.

Typically bailouts of the NFIP have come when the program was about to hit the limits of its borrowing authority, says Ray Lehmann, a senior fellow at the International Center for Law and Economics. That’s not the case today, given that the NFIP still has about $10 billion in borrowing authority.

“This is just straight out deciding bygones will be bygones. We’re going to pretend there was never any debt to begin with,” Lehmann tells Reason. “It’s a shame that this is happening because there remain enormous structural problems with the program.”

…Come October, FEMA is supposed to roll out its Risk Rating 2.0 plan, which would raise premiums on some properties where the risk of flooding has increased. The rate at which these premiums can increase is nevertheless capped at 18 percent per year for most properties. Lehmann says this would mean it could take years until some properties are charged actuarially fair rates.

“The Democratic leadership is not shy about discussing the impacts of climate change and the things we need to do to adapt to climate change,” says Lehmann. “If you can’t even get [flood insurance reform] done, it’s hard to imagine how you’re going to get the Green New Deal done.”

Competition Policy International – ICLE President Geoffrey Manne sat down for an interview with Competition Policy International’s Antitrust Brainstorming Board on the state of competition law. You can read the full transcript here.

Below, we have provided the full transcript of the interview with Geoffrey Manne, Distinguished Fellow at Northwestern University’s Center for Law, Business, and Economic Development, recorded on August 25, 2021.

This interview was done as part of the Antitrust Brainstorming Board created by CPI with the support of the CCIA.

Thank you, Mr. Manne, for sharing your time for this interview with CPI.