An oft-repeated claim of conferences, media, and left-wing think tanks is that lax antitrust enforcement has led to a substantial increase in concentration in the US economy of late, strangling the economy, harming workers, and saddling consumers with greater markups in the process. But what if rising concentration (and the current level of antitrust enforcement) were an indication of more competition, not less?

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In a previous post, I argued that the Commission failed to adequately define the relevant market in its recently published Google Android decision.

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Antitrust populists have a long list of complaints about competition policy, including: laws aren’t broad enough or tough enough, enforcers are lax, and judges tend to favor defendants over plaintiffs or government agencies. The populist push got a bump with the New York Times coverage of Lina Khan’s “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” in which she advocated breaking up Amazon and applying public utility regulation to platforms. Khan’s ideas were picked up by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has a plan for similar public utility regulation and promised to unwind earlier acquisitions by Amazon (Whole Foods and Zappos), Facebook (WhatsApp and Instagram), and Google (Waze, Nest, and DoubleClick).

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The European Commission’s recent Google Android decision will surely go down as one of the most important competition proceedings of the past decade. And yet, an in-depth reading of the 328 page decision should leave attentive readers with a bitter taste.

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John Maynard Keynes wrote in his famous General Theory that “[t]he ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”

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This study examines the heightened scrutiny of four to three mergers by competition authorities in the current regulatory environment, using the potential merger of two of the world’s largest elevator and escalator businesses — Germany’s ThyssenKrupp and Finland’s Kone — as a case study.

In recent years, regulators have become more aggressive in merger enforcement in response to populist criticisms that lax merger enforcement has led to the rise of anticompetitive “big business.”  In this environment, it is easy to imagine regulators intensely scrutinizing and challenging or conditioning virtually any merger that substantially increases concentration.

The next opportunity for antitrust authorities to dispel criticism by flexing their muscles in a four to three merger review may be just around the corner. It is widely reported that ThyssenKrupp is contemplating the sale of its elevator business, with Kone as a potential buyer. This potential deal provides an opportunity to highlight the likely challenges, complexity, and cost that regulatory scrutiny of such mergers actually entails — and it is likely to be a far cry from the lax review and permissive decisionmaking of antitrust critics’ imagining.

In the case of a potential ThyssenKrupp/Kone merger, the combined entity would face lengthy, costly, and duplicative review in multiple jurisdictions, any one of which could effectively block the merger or impose onerous conditions. It would face the automatic assumption of excessive concentration in several of these, including the US, EU, and Canada. In the US, the deal would also face heightened scrutiny based on political considerations, including the perception that the deal would strengthen a foreign firm at the expense of a domestic supplier. It would also face the risk of politicized litigation from state attorneys general, and potentially the threat of extractive litigation by competitors and customers.

Whether the merger would actually entail anticompetitive risk may, unfortunately, be of only secondary importance in determining the likelihood and extent of a merger challenge or the imposition of onerous conditions.

Today, Reuters reports that Germany-based ThyssenKrupp has received bids from three bidding groups for a majority stake in the firm’s elevator business. Finland’s Kone teamed with private equity firm CVC to bid on the company. Private equity firms Blackstone and Carlyle joined with the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board to submit a bid. A third bid came from Advent, Cinven, and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.

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It has become virtual received wisdom that antitrust law has been subdued by economic analysis into a state of chronic underenforcement. Following this line of thinking, many commentators applauded the Antitrust Division’s unsuccessful campaign to oppose the acquisition of Time-Warner by AT&T and some (unsuccessfully) urged the Division to take stronger action against the acquisition of most of Fox by Disney. The arguments in both cases followed a similar “big is bad” logic. Consolidating control of a large portfolio of creative properties (Fox plus Disney) or integrating content production and distribution capacities (Time-Warner plus AT&T) would exacerbate market concentration, leading to reduced competition and some combination of higher prices and reduced product for consumers.

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Abstract

The object of this dissertation is to study the role that innovation occupies – and should occupy – in Antitrust/Competition analysis, and to put forward a coherent framework for the analysis of “innovation defenses” (defined as situations where a restriction of competition is necessary to produce a socially desirable innovation).

The dissertation is separated into two parts.

Part I adopts a positive law and economics approach, and examines how competition law an innovation might overlap. The dissertation separates this issue into three questions: What is innovation; what are the goals of competition laws on both sides of the Atlantic; and where is the enforcement of competition laws most likely to affect innovation? Having answered these questions, the dissertation examines how European Union (“EU”) competition law currently deals with innovation defenses. If this were done in a satisfactory manner, then there would be little need for a revised innovation defense framework. To this end, the dissertation surveys recent European competition cases to determine whether they incorporate economic concepts related to innovation and whether they overtly take defendants’ incentives to innovate into account. The dissertation shows that European competition law currently does not address innovation defenses in a coherent and satisfactory manner.

Part II takes a more normative stance. In order to fill the perceived policy gap, identified in Part I, it puts forward a framework for innovation defenses (“the framework”). The goal of this framework is not so much to be applied directly, but to guide policymakers through the various issues that would arise if they decided to analyze the potential chilling effects that their enforcement activities may exert on innovation.The framework centers on two key questions: is a given innovation desirable from a social welfare standpoint (i.e. do its social benefits outweigh its social costs), and is a restriction of competition necessary in order to achieve the innovation? The framework hinges on the economic concept of appropriability. Key questions include whether firms take the existence of such frameworks into account, even unwittingly, when they make their investment decisions; how the framework should be implemented; and whether it is compatible with the stated goals of competition laws and existing antitrust legislation on both sides of the Atlantic. The dissertation then applies this framework in a number of case studies and discusses its potential implications.