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Presentations & Interviews ICLE Affiliate Thibault Schrepel joins host Brian L. Frye to discuss his article “Antitrust Without Romance.” Schrepel begins by explaining the concept of “public choice . . .
ICLE Affiliate Thibault Schrepel joins host Brian L. Frye to discuss his article “Antitrust Without Romance.” Schrepel begins by explaining the concept of “public choice theory” and how it can help us understand the incentives of antitrust regulators. He describes the data he collected on how the public statements of regulators illuminates how they may be responding to those incentives. And he explains how the purpose of antitrust policy is in tension with many recent developments in antitrust advocacy. He argues that we should make antitrust policy in light of protecting competition, not morality. The full episode is embedded below.
Presentations & Interviews ICLE Director of Law & Economics Programs Gus Hurwitz participated on the Consumer Protection Remedies: Economic & Legal Considerations panel at the 14th session of . . .
ICLE Director of Law & Economics Programs Gus Hurwitz participated on the Consumer Protection Remedies: Economic & Legal Considerations panel at the 14th session of the FTC’s Hearings Initiative with Creighton University School of Law in Omaha, Nebraska on June 12, 2019. This concluded the FTC’s Hearings on Competition and Consumer Protection in the 21st Century. Video of the event is embedded below.
Presentations & Interviews Gus Hurwitz joins Cyberlaw Podcast host Stewart Baker as they discuss topics ranging from the pending “techocalypse” to the FTC v. Qualcomm decision. Gus reads . . .
Gus Hurwitz joins Cyberlaw Podcast host Stewart Baker as they discuss topics ranging from the pending “techocalypse” to the FTC v. Qualcomm decision. Gus reads the runes to see whether a 50-year Chicago winter for antitrust plaintiffs is finally thawing in Silicon Valley. Gus thinks the predictions of global antitrust warming are overhyped. But he recognizes we’re seeing an awful lot of robins on the lawn: The rise of Margrethe Vestager in the EU, the enthusiasm of state AGs for suing Big Tech, and the piling on of Dem presidential candidates and the House of Representatives. Judge Koh’s Qualcomm decision is another straw in the wind, triggering criticism from Gus (“an undue extension of Aspen Skiing”) and me (“the FTC needs a national security minder in privacy and competition law”). The full episode is embedded below.
Written Testimonies & Filings FTC Hearings on Competition & Consumer Protection in the 21st Century. Comments of the International Center for Law & Economics: Toward a Proper Understanding of Consumer Privacy and Its Regulation: Market Realities and the Consumer Welfare Costs of Abandoning Regulatory Restraint. Hearing #12 (Apr. 9-10). Submitted May 31, 2019.
Digital privacy and data security are important ongoing concerns for lawmakers, particularly in light of recent, high-profile data breaches and allegations of data misuse. Understandably, in the wake of such incidents advocates regularly call for tighter restrictions on data collection and use. But, as we detail below, privacy is a highly complex topic comprising a wide variety of differing, and often conflicting, consumer preferences. While undoubtedly in need of ongoing assessment in the face of new challenges, the US federal government’s sectoral, tailored model of privacy regulation remains the soundest method of regulating privacy.
Although the US does not have a single, omnibus, privacy regulation, this does not mean that the US does not have “privacy law.” In the US, there already exist generally applicable laws at both the federal and state level that provide a wide scope of protection for individuals, including consumer protection laws that apply to companies’ data use and security practices, as well as those that have been developed in common law (property, contract, and tort) and criminal codes. In addition, there are specific regulations pertaining to certain kinds of information, such as medical records, personal information collected online from children, credit reporting, as well as the use of data in a manner that might lead to certain kinds of illegal discrimination.
Before engaging in a deeply interventionist regulatory experiment—such as intervening in the design of algorithms or imposing strict privacy regulations in contravention to revealed consumer preferences—there should be empirically justifiable reasons for doing so; in the language of economics, there should be demonstrable market failures in the provision of “privacy” (however we define that term), before centralized regulation co-opts the voluntary choices of consumers and firms in the economy.
It surely might be the case that some consumers, abstractly speaking, would prefer one-hundred percent perfect privacy and security. It is also a certainty that, faced with tradeoffs—including the price of services, the number of features, the pace of innovation, ease of use and convenience—consumers are willing to settle for some lesser degree of privacy and security.
Click here to read full comments.
Written Testimonies & Filings FTC Hearings on Competition & Consumer Protection in the 21st Century. Comments of the International Center for Law & Economics: Properly Balancing Consumer Protection and Innovation in Broadband Markets: The Competition Law and Economics of Vertical Restraints in Broadband. Hearing #10 (Mar. 20, 2019). Submitted May 31, 2019.
The necessity of the FTC’s involvement in regulating broadband competition arises most recently from the Federal Communication Commission’s (“FCC”) 2018 Restoring Internet Freedom Order (“2018 RIFO”). In the 2018 RIFO, the FCC adopted a competition-oriented approach to preventing what are otherwise violations of so-called “net neutrality” principles. This approach, consistent with the FCC’s historical deregulatory approach to information services, directly implicates the FTC as an important part of preventing competitive injuries that harm downstream consumers.
Rather than simply presuming harm, the FCC undertook an extensive, thorough, and fact-based analysis to first assess the likely risk of competitive harms that could arise in the broadband market. Based on this analysis, it concluded that the risk of harmful conduct is low, in terms of both the likelihood that ISPs will engage in such conduct and its potential adverse effects on consumers. Because this risk is low, the FCC determined that a “light-touch,” competition-oriented regulatory approach was appropriate for regulation of broadband.
This conclusion also followed from the FCC’s review of the Communications Act. As the FCC observed, “[t]he Communications Act includes an antitrust savings clause, so the antitrust laws apply with equal vigor to entities regulated by the Commission.” Recognizing this, the Commission carefully structured the 2018 RIFO so that consumers would be protected under existing consumer protection and antitrust laws, while still leaving room for the historically applied light-touch regime for information services under Title I of the Communications Act.
In so doing, the FCC struck the proper balance between indirect antitrust enforcement and direct regulation under the Communications Act, which incorporates competition policy as the generally applicable regulatory “default” in the absence of specific statutory mandates.
Written Testimonies & Filings FTC Hearings on Competition & Consumer Protection in the 21 st Century. Comments of the International Center for Law & Economics: The FTC’s Flawed Data Security Enforcement Program and Suggestions for Reform. Hearing #9 (Dec. 11-12, 2018). Submitted May 31, 2019.
Several pressing issues are raised by the ongoing need for data security as underscored by high profile breaches. One of the core problems in this area, however, is not simply that firms have inadequate data security, but that lawmakers have, to date, broadly failed to offer a viable standard by which firms can guide their conduct in this area.
The flawed strategy which the FTC currently deploys to deal with data security issues is a prime example. In brief, the Commission’s over-reliance on enforcement by consent decrees has created a quasi-regulatory approach to data security, eschewed the fundamentally useful aspects of a true common law approach to developing liability rules, and as a consequence provided little record of what actually amounts to liability for “unreasonable” data security. A true standard would include such components as: the assessment of reasonable care on the part of the tortfeasor, the thorough analysis of causality, an economically grounded computation of harm, and the establishment that harm is likely absent some level of care.
Given these failings, the FTC should consider implementing reforms that might bring its decisional practice closer to the common law tradition. These include giving more weight to economic analysis (notably by allowing the FTC’s Bureau of Economics to play a greater role in data security proceedings), adopting modest measures that would increase the transparency of the FTC’s data security decisions (thereby increasing legal predictability), bringing greater judicial review to data security proceedings, and incentivizing firms to better communicate their data security activities.
TOTM Complexity need not follow size. A star is huge but mostly homogenous. “It’s core is so hot,” explains Martin Rees, “that no chemicals can exist (complex . . .
Complexity need not follow size. A star is huge but mostly homogenous. “It’s core is so hot,” explains Martin Rees, “that no chemicals can exist (complex molecules get torn apart); it is basically an amorphous gas of atomic nuclei and electrons.”
Nor does complexity always arise from remoteness of space or time. Celestial gyrations can be readily grasped. Thales of Miletus probably predicted a solar eclipse. Newton certainly could have done so. And we’re confident that in 4.5 billion years the Andromeda galaxy will collide with our own.
Read the full piece here.
Popular Media In a recent article[1] Joe Kattan and Tim Muris (K&M) criticize our article[2] on the predictive power of bargaining models in antitrust, in which we used two recent applications to explore implications for uses of bargaining models in courts and antitrust agencies moving forward.
In a recent article Joe Kattan and Tim Muris (K&M) criticize our article on the predictive power of bargaining models in antitrust, in which we used two recent applications to explore implications for uses of bargaining models in courts and antitrust agencies moving forward. Like other theoretical models used to predict competitive effects, complex bargaining models require courts and agencies rigorously to test their predictions against data from the real world markets and institutions to which they are being applied. Where the “real-world evidence,” as Judge Leon described such data in AT&T/Time Warner, is inconsistent with the predictions of a complex bargaining model, then the tribunal should reject the model rather than reality.
Popular Media The courtroom trial in the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC’s) antitrust case against Qualcomm ended in January with a promise from the judge in the case, Judge Lucy Koh, to issue a ruling as quickly as possible — caveated by her acknowledgement that the case is complicated and the evidence voluminous.
The courtroom trial in the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC’s) antitrust case against Qualcomm ended in January with a promise from the judge in the case, Judge Lucy Koh, to issue a ruling as quickly as possible — caveated by her acknowledgement that the case is complicated and the evidence voluminous. Well, things have only gotten more complicated since the end of the trial. Not only did Apple and Qualcomm reach a settlement in the antitrust case against Qualcomm that Apple filed just three days after the FTC brought its suit, but the abbreviated trial in that case saw the presentation by Qualcomm of some damning evidence that, if accurate, seriously calls into (further) question the merits of the FTC’s case.
