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Amicus Brief In this brief for the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, ICLE and 26 distinguished scholars of law & economics argue that the district court in a suit brought by Epic Games rightly found that Apple’s procompetitive justifications outweigh any purported anticompetitive effects in the market for mobile-gaming transactions.
The International Center for Law & Economics (“ICLE”) is a nonprofit, non- partisan global research and policy center aimed at building the intellectual foundations for sensible, economically grounded policy. ICLE promotes the use of law & economics methodologies to inform public policy debates and has longstanding expertise in the evaluation of antitrust law and policy.
Amici also include 26 scholars of antitrust, law, and economics at leading universities and research institutions around the world. Their names, titles, and academic affiliations are listed in Addendum A. All have longstanding expertise in, and copious research on, antitrust law and economics.
Amici have an interest in ensuring that antitrust promotes the public interest by remaining grounded in sensible legal rules informed by sound economic analysis. Amici believe that Epic’s arguments deviate from that standard and promote the private interests of slighted competitors at the expense of the public welfare.
Epic challenges Apple’s prohibition of third-party app stores and in-app payments (“IAP”) systems from operating on its proprietary, iOS platform as a violation of the antitrust laws. But, as the district court concluded, Epic’s real concern is its own business interests in the face of Apple’s business model—in particular, the commission charged for the use of Apple’s IAP system. See Order at 1-ER22, Epic Games, Inc. v. Apple Inc., No. 4:20-CV-05640 (N.D. Cal. Sept. 10, 2021), ECF No. 812 (1-ER3–183). In essence, Epic is trying to recast its objection to Apple’s 30% commission for use of Apple’s optional IAP system as a harm to consumers and competition more broadly.
Epic takes issue with the district court’s proper consideration of Apple’s procompetitive justifications and its finding that those justifications outweigh any anticompetitive effects of Apple’s business model. But Epic’s case fails at step one of the rule of reason analysis. Indeed, Epic did not demonstrate that Apple’s app distribution and IAP practices caused the significant market-wide effects that the Supreme Court in Ohio v. Am. Express Co. (“Amex”) deemed necessary to show anticompetitive harm in cases involving two-sided transaction markets. 138 S. Ct. 2274, 2285–86 (2018). While the district court found that Epic demonstrated some anticompetitive effects, Epic’s arguments below focused only on the effects that Apple’s conduct had on certain app developers and failed to appropriately examine whether consumers were harmed overall. This is fatal. Without further evidence of the effect of Apple’s app distribution and IAP practices on consumers, no conclusions can be reached about the competitive effects of Apple’s conduct.
Nor can an appropriate examination of anticompetitive effects ignore output. It is critical to consider whether the challenged app distribution and IAP practices reduce output of market-wide app transactions. Yet Epic did not seriously challenge that output increased by every measure, and Epic’s Amici ignore output altogether.
Moreover, the district court examined the one-sided anticompetitive harms presented by Epic, but rightly found that Apple’s procompetitive justifications outweigh any purported anticompetitive effects in the market for mobile gaming transactions. The court recognized that the development and maintenance of a closed iOS system and Apple’s control over IAP confers enormous benefits on users and app developers.
Finally, Epic’s reliance on the theoretical existence of less restrictive alternatives (“LRA”) to Apple’s business model is misplaced. Forcing Apple to adopt the “open” platform that Epic champions would reduce interbrand competition, and improperly permit antitrust plaintiffs to commandeer the judiciary to modify routine business conduct any time a plaintiff’s attorney or district court can imagine a less restrictive version of a challenged practice, irrespective of whether the practice promotes consumer welfare. See NCAA v. Alston, 141 S. Ct. 2141, 2161 (2021) (“[C]ourts should not second-guess ‘degrees of reasonable necessity’ so that ‘the lawfulness of conduct turn[s] upon judgments of degrees of e?ciency.’”). Particularly in the context of two-sided platform businesses, such an approach would sacrifice interbrand, systems-level competition for the sake of a superficial increase in competition among a small subset of platform users.
Read the full brief here.
Amicus Brief In this amicus brief for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, ICLE and a dozen scholars of law & economics address the broad consensus disfavoring how New York and other states seek to apply the “unilateral refusal to deal” doctrine in an antitrust case against Facebook.
Amici are leading scholars of economics, telecommunications, and/or antitrust. Their scholarship reflects years of experience and publications in these fields.
Amici’s expertise and academic perspectives will aid the Court in deciding whether to affirm in three respects. First, amici provide an explanation of key economic concepts underpinning how economists understand the welfare effects of a monopolist’s refusal to deal voluntarily with a competitor and why that supports affirmance here. Second, amici offer their perspective on the limited circumstances that might justify penalizing a monopolist’s unilateral refusal to deal—and why this case is not one of them. Third, amici explain why the District Court’s legal framework was correct and why a clear standard is necessary when analyzing alleged refusals to deal.
This brief addresses the broad consensus in the academic literature disfavoring a theory underlying plaintiff’s case—“unilateral refusal to deal” doctrine. The States allege that Facebook restricted access to an input (Facebook’s Platform) in order to prevent third parties from using that access to export Facebook data to competitors or compete directly with Facebook. But a unilateral refusal to deal involves more than an allegation that a monopolist refuses to enter into a business relationship with a rival.
Mainstream economists and competition law scholars are skeptical of imposing liability, even on a monopolist, based solely on its choice of business partners. The freedom of firms to choose their business partners is a fundamental tenet of the free market economy, and the mechanism by which markets produce the greatest welfare gains. Thus, cases compelling business dealings should be confined to particularly delineated circumstances.
In Part I below, amici describe why it is generally inefficient for courts to compel economic actors to deal with one another. Such “solutions” are generally unsound in theory and unworkable in practice, in that they ask judges to operate as regulators over the defendant’s business.
In Part II, amici explain why Aspen Skiing—the Supreme Court’s most prominent precedent permitting liability for a monopolist’s unilateral refusal to deal—went too far and should not be expanded as the States’ and some of their amici propose.
In Part III, amici explain that the District Court correctly held that the conduct at issue here does not constitute a refusal to deal under Aspen Skiing. A unilateral refusal to deal should trigger antitrust liability only where a monopolist turns down more profitable dealings with a competitor in an effort to drive that competitor’s exit or to disable its ability to compete, thereby allowing the monopolist to recoup its losses by increasing prices in the future. But the States’ allegations do not describe that scenario.
In Part IV, amici address that the District Court properly considered and dismissed the States’ “conditional dealing” argument. The States’ allegations are correctly addressed under the rubric of a refusal to deal—not exclusive dealing or otherwise. The States’ desire to mold their allegations into different legal theories highlights why courts should use a strict, clear standard to analyze refusals to deal.
TOTM For decades, consumer-welfare enhancement appeared to be a key enforcement goal of competition policy (antitrust, in the U.S. usage) in most jurisdictions… Read the full . . .
For decades, consumer-welfare enhancement appeared to be a key enforcement goal of competition policy (antitrust, in the U.S. usage) in most jurisdictions…
Read the full piece here.
ICLE White Paper The European Union's Digital Markets Act will intersect with EU and national-level competition law in ways that subject tech platforms to the risk of double jeopardy and conflicting decisions for the same activity.
In contrast to its stated aims to promote a Digital Single Market across the European Union, the proposed Digital Markets Act (DMA) could serve to fragment Europe’s legal framework even further, largely due to overlaps with competition law. This paper provides an analytical overview of areas where conflicts would inevitably arise from dual application of the DMA and European and national-level antitrust rules. It counsels full centralization of the DMA’s enforcement at the EU level to avoid further fragmentation, as well as constraining the law’s scope by limiting its application to a few large platform ecosystems.
The Digital Markets Act (DMA) has entered the last and decisive stage of its approval process. With the Council of Europe having reached consensus on its general approach[1] and the European Parliament having adopted amendments,[2] the DMA proposal has moved into the inter-institutional negotiations known as the so-called “trilogue.”
The DMA has spurred a lively debate since it initially was proposed by the European Commission in December 2020.[3] This deliberative process has touched on all the proposal’s features, including its aims and scope, the regulations and rule-based approach it would adopt, and the measure’s institutional design. However, given the positions expressed by the Council and the Parliament, the rationale for DMA intervention and the proposal’s relationship with antitrust law remain relevant topics for exploration.
The DMA is grounded explicitly on the notion that competition law alone is insufficient to effectively address the challenges and systemic problems posed by the digital platform economy. Indeed, the scope of antitrust is limited to certain instances of market power (e.g., dominance on specific markets) and of anti-competitive behavior.[4] Further, its enforcement occurs ex post and requires extensive investigation on a case-by-case basis of what are often very complex sets of facts.[5] Moreover, it may not effectively address the challenges to well-functioning markets posed by the conduct of gatekeepers, who are not necessarily dominant in competition-law terms.[6] As a result, proposals such as the DMA invoke regulatory intervention to complement traditional antitrust rules by introducing a set of ex ante obligations for online platforms designated as gatekeepers. This also allows enforcers to dispense with the laborious process of defining relevant markets, proving dominance, and measuring market effects.
The DMA’s framers declare that the law aims to protect different legal interests than antitrust rules do. That is, rather than seeking to protect undistorted competition on any given market, the DMA look to ensure that markets where gatekeepers are present remain contestable and fair, independent from the actual, likely, or presumed effects of the conduct of a given gatekeeper.[7] Accordingly, the relevant legal basis for the DMA is found not in Article 103 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), which is intended to implement antitrust rules pursuant to Articles 101 and 102 TFEU, but rather in Article 114 TFEU, covering “Common Rules on Competition, Taxation and Approximation of Laws.” Further, from an institutional-design perspective, the DMA opts for centralized implementation and enforcement at the EU level, rather than the traditional decentralized or parallel antitrust enforcement at the national level.
Because the intent of the DMA is to serve as a complementary regulatory scheme, traditional antitrust rules will remain applicable. However, those rules would not alleviate the obligations imposed on gatekeepers under the forthcoming DMA regulations and, particularly, efforts to make the DMA’s application uniform and effective.[8]
Despite claims that the DMA is not an instrument of competition law[9] and thus would not affect how antitrust rules apply in digital markets, the forthcoming regime appears to blur the line between regulation and antitrust by mixing their respective features and goals. Indeed, the DMA shares the same aims and protects the same legal interests as competition law.[10] Further, its list of prohibitions is effectively a synopsis of past and ongoing antitrust cases.[11] Therefore, the proposal can be described as a sector-specific competition law,[12] or a shift toward a more regulatory approach to competition law—one that is designed to allow assessments to be made more quickly and through a more simplified process.[13]
Acknowledging the continuum between competition law and the DMA, the European Competition Network (ECN) and some EU member states (self-anointed “friends of an effective DMA”) have proposed empowering national competition authorities (NCAs) to enforce DMA obligations.[14] Under this approach, while the European Commission would remain primarily responsible for enforcing the DMA and would have sole jurisdiction for designating gatekeepers or granting exemptions, NCAs would be permitted to enforce the DMA’s obligations and to use investigative and monitoring powers at their own initiative. According to supporters of this approach, the concurrent competence of the Commission and NCAs is needed to avoid the risks of conflicting decisions or remedies that would undermine the effectiveness and coherence of both the DMA and antitrust law (and, ultimately, the integrity of the internal market.)[15]
These risks have been heightened by the fact that Germany (one of the “friends of an effective DMA”) subsequently empowered its NCA, the Bundeskartellamt, to intervene at an early stage in cases where it finds that competition is threatened by large digital companies—in essence, granting the agency a regulatory tool that is functionally equivalent to the DMA.[16] Further, several member states are preparing to apply national rules on relative market power and economic dependence to large digital platforms, with the goal of correcting perceived imbalances of bargaining power between online platforms and business users.[17] As a result of these intersections among the DMA, national and European antitrust rules, and national laws on superior bargaining power, a digital platform may be subject to cumulative proceedings for the very same conduct, facing risks of double (or even triple and quadruple) jeopardy.[18]
The aim of this paper is to guide the reader through the jungle of potentially overlapping rules that will affect European digital markets in the post-DMA world. It attempts to demonstrate that, despite significant concerns about both the DMA’s content and its rationale, full centralization of its enforcement at EU level will likely be needed to reduce fragmentation and ensure harmonized implementation of the rules. Frictions with competition law would be further confined by narrowing the DMA’s scope to ecosystem-related issues, thereby limiting its application to the few large platforms that are able to orchestrate an ecosystem.
The paper is structured as follows. Section II analyzes the intersection between the DMA and competition law. Section III examines the DMA’s enforcement structure and the solutions advanced to safeguard cooperation and coordination with member states. Section IV illustrates the arguments supporting full centralization of DMA enforcement and the need to narrow its scope. Section V concludes.
Read the full white paper here.
[1] Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on Contestable and Fair Markets on the Digital Sector (Digital Markets Act) – General Approach, Council of the European Union (Nov. 16, 2021), available at https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-13801-2021-INIT/en/pdf.
[2] Amendments Adopted on the Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on Contestable and Fair Markets in the Digital Sector (Digital Markets Act), European Parliament (Dec. 15, 2021), https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-9-2021-12-15_EN.html.
[3] Proposal for a Regulation on Contestable and Fair Markets in the Digital Sector (Digital Markets Act), European Commission (Dec. 15, 2020), available at https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:52020PC0842&from=en.
[4] Ibid., Recital 5.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid., Recital 10.
[8] Ibid., Recital 9 and Article 1(5).
[9] Margrethe Vestager, Competition in a Digital Age, speech to the European Internet Forum (Mar. 17, 2021), https://ec.europa.eu/commission/commissioners/2019-2024/vestager/announcements/competition-digital-age_en.
[10] Heike Schweitzer, The Art to Make Gatekeeper Positions Contestable and the Challenge to Know What Is Fair: A Discussion of the Digital Markets Act Proposal, 3 ZEuP 503 (Jun. 11, 2021).
[11] Cristina Caffarra and Fiona Scott Morton, The European Commission Digital Markets Act: A Translation, Vox EU (Jan. 5, 2021), https://voxeu.org/article/european-commission-digital-markets-act-translation.
[12] Nicolas Petit, The Proposed Digital Markets Act (DMA): A Legal and Policy Review, 12 J. Eur. Compet. Law Pract 529 (May 11, 2021).
[13] Marco Cappai and Giuseppe Colangelo, Taming Digital Gatekeepers: The More Regulatory Approach to Antitrust Law, 41 Comput. Law Secur. Rev. 1 (Apr. 9, 2021).
[14] How National Competition Agencies Can Strengthen the DMA, European Competition Network (Jun. 22, 2021), available at https://ec.europa.eu/competition/ecn/DMA_joint_EU_NCAs_paper_21.06.2021.pdf; Strengthening the Digital Markets Act and Its Enforcement, German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, French Ministére de l’Économie, les Finance et de la Relance, Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy, (May 27, 2021), available at https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/DE/Downloads/XYZ/zweites-gemeinsames-positionspapier-der-friends-of-an-effective-digital-markets-act.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=4.
[15] European Competition Network, supra note 14, 6-7.
[16] See Section 19a of the GWB Digitalization Act (Jan. 18, 2021), https://www.bundesrat.de/SharedDocs/beratungsvorgaenge/2021/0001-0100/0038-21.html.
[17] See, e.g., German GWB Digitalization Act, supra note 16; See, also, Belgian Royal Decree of 31 July 2020 Amending Books I and IV of the Code of Economic Law as Concerns the Abuse of Economic Dependence, Belgian Official Gazette (Jul. 19, 2020), http://www.ejustice.just.fgov.be/cgi_loi/change_lg.pl?language=fr&la=F&cn=2019040453&table_name=loi.
[18] Marco Cappai and Giuseppe Colangelo, A Unified Test for the European Ne Bis in Idem Principle: The Case Study of Digital Markets Regulation, SSRN working paper (Oct. 27, 2021), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3951088.
TOTM U.S. antitrust policy seeks to promote vigorous marketplace competition in order to enhance consumer welfare. For more than four decades, mainstream antitrust enforcers have taken . . .
U.S. antitrust policy seeks to promote vigorous marketplace competition in order to enhance consumer welfare. For more than four decades, mainstream antitrust enforcers have taken their cue from the U.S. Supreme Court’s statement in Reiter v. Sonotone (1979) that antitrust is “a consumer welfare prescription.” Recent suggestions (see here and here) by new Biden administration Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) leadership that antitrust should promote goals apart from consumer welfare have yet to be embodied in actual agency actions, and they have not been tested by the courts. (Given Supreme Court case law, judicial abandonment of the consumer welfare standard appears unlikely, unless new legislation that displaces it is enacted.)
Written Testimonies & Filings ICLE President Geoffrey Manne testified to the House Judiciary Committee Antitrust Subcommittee on the role of competition in America's food-supply chain.
There is a wide range of possible explanations for the rise in consumer food prices over the past year: Increased demand driven by fiscal stimulus, disruptions arising from an unprecedented set of simultaneous supply and demand shocks, the incentive effects of government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, and an increase in the money supply, among others. Each of these factors is interrelated, and each has surely contributed in varying degrees to current headline inflation woes.
What is not a plausible explanation is increased concentration and the exercise of market power in the food supply chain.
Between December 2019 and September 2021, the U.S. money supply (driven primarily by the Federal Reserve’s purchases of Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities), grew by approximately $5.5 trillion—a 36% increase. Likewise, the federal government has approved about $4.5 trillion in pandemic relief and stimulus payments since the beginning of COVID-19. The government also injected a huge amount of money into the economy and added about $5 trillion to the federal debt.
Massive debt spending isn’t inherently inflationary as long as people understand that taxes will increase or spending will decrease to “pay off” the debt. But today it seems that people do not have much of an expectation that taxes will meaningfully increase or that spending will meaningfully decrease. Indeed, the discourse around the administration’s “Build Back Better” legislation gives the impression of a virtually endless spending binge with little additional revenues to offset the spending. This feeds inflation expectations, and expectations can be self-fulfilling.
To make matters worse, the pandemic was not a standard demand-driven recession. Pre-COVID, the U.S. economy was more or less roaring. Unemployment was at its lowest rate in 50 years. Labor force participation among the working age populations was back to pre-Great Recession levels. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was at an all-time high. Americans may have needed relief to get through the pandemic, but the economy did not need any stimulus.
We should also be clear that the current 7% headline inflation rate is a measure of past price- level changes between December 2020 and December 2021. It’s not a measure of the rate at which prices are increasing right now, however. And while the 7% number grabbed all the headlines, the CPI rose at a slower rate in December than it did in November, meaning the monthly inflation rate (as well as the implied annualized inflation rate) actually fell in December. The point is that, problematic as they are for actual consumers, current consumer prices and trends do not provide a sound basis for massive, economy-wide government intervention.
It is hardly surprising that shifting consumption patterns and the post-vaccine re-opening of the economy have led to short-term frictions, such as backlogs at ports, a shortage of truckers, and disruption throughout the supply chain, all of which are associated with important relative price movements. But they aren’t “inflation” in the sense that all prices and wages aren’t increasing together. These shocks are most likely transitory, and higher prices will recede as the supply chain returns to normal. That is, as long as sensible economic and fiscal policies predominate. But in the face of the harsh political realities of the current state of affairs, there is no guarantee that reason will prevail.
Rather than accepting these extremely likely causes of the recent increase in prices, some blame inflation on a widespread pandemic of “greed” and “collusion” by businesses. Wide swaths of American industry have been hit with these allegations, including oil companies, natural gas producers, health care providers, meat packers, and grocery stores.
Critics of American business blame years, if not decades, of so-called “rising concentration.” It’s claimed that the increase in concentration stems from mergers and acquisitions over the years that were blessed by lax antitrust regulators or merely overlooked by overworked agencies. These critics give the impression that in virtually all corners of the American economy lurk sleeper cells of colluding cartels that activated their plans just as the country went into lockdown.
Under this thinking, vigorous antitrust enforcement will punish the colluders and stop the scourge of rising prices. But this thinking is misplaced.
First, antitrust is simply not the proper tool. The purpose of antitrust law in the U.S. is to protect competition, rather than to guarantee low prices in and of themselves. That’s why it is illegal to conspire to raise prices or attempt to monopolize a market. Conversely, this also explains why high or rising prices are not an antitrust violation—because these prices may be the result of the undistorted competition antitrust ultimately protects. Even price gouging during a disaster rarely merits antitrust scrutiny because it’s understood that that is how markets work—especially competitive markets. That is because it is widely understood that the price system is the most effective system for allocating resources, even when the process itself is painful.
Second, and more practically, antitrust enforcement often moves at a glacial pace. Even successful prosecutions of anticompetitive behavior take years to resolve. The DOJ’s investigations of price fixing in the broiler chicken market and the packaged seafood market were announced several years after the alleged collusion began. While the investigations led to guilty pleas and a criminal conviction, they did nothing to reduce prices at the time the conspiracies were active.
All of this is not to say that some producers are not monopolizing a market or conspiring with competitors to raise prices. If they are, there is an important role for an antitrust investigation and enforcement—that is the purpose of our antitrust laws. But even relatively rapid and vigorous antitrust investigations will do little to reduce the prices consumers are paying today, especially if they are the perfectly predictable, if messy, result of market competition in the midst of a global pandemic. As much as some would like antitrust to be the Swiss Army knife of public policy, it is an entirely inappropriate tool to address economy-wide inflation.
At the same time, even within the industries that have seen particularly newsworthy price increases, and which are the subject of today’s hearing, the complex competitive dynamics of those industries offer far more plausible explanations of current prices than do unsubstantiated claims of anticompetitive conduct or collusion. But they don’t offer convenient scapegoats to quell the political consequences of these price increases.
It is difficult not to see the pursuit of a scapegoat in the administration’s focus on concentration and market power as a culprit for today’s higher food prices.
Read the full written testimony here.
TOTM Early last month, the Italian competition authority issued a record 1.128 billion euro fine against Amazon for abuse of dominance under Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning . . .
Early last month, the Italian competition authority issued a record 1.128 billion euro fine against Amazon for abuse of dominance under Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). In its order, the Agenzia Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato (AGCM) essentially argues that Amazon has combined its Amazon.it marketplace and Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) services to exclude logistics rivals such as FedEx, DHL, UPS, and Poste Italiane.
Read the full piece.
TOTM As a new year dawns, the Biden administration remains fixated on illogical, counterproductive “big is bad” nostrums. Noted economist and former Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers . . .
As a new year dawns, the Biden administration remains fixated on illogical, counterproductive “big is bad” nostrums.
Noted economist and former Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers correctly stressed recently that using antitrust to fight inflation represents “science denial,” tweeting that…
TOTM Antitrust policymakers around the world have taken a page out of the Silicon Valley playbook and decided to “move fast and break things.” While the . . .
Antitrust policymakers around the world have taken a page out of the Silicon Valley playbook and decided to “move fast and break things.” While the slogan is certainly catchy, applying it to the policymaking world is unfortunate and, ultimately, threatens to harm consumers.
