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Regulatory Comments I. Introduction Writing on behalf of the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE), we thank the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC” or “the Commission”) for . . .
Writing on behalf of the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE), we thank the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC” or “the Commission”) for the opportunity to respond to this notice of proposed rulemaking (“NPRM”) as the Commission seeks, yet again, to reclassify broadband internet-access services under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934.
The new NPRM emphasizes the principles of an “open internet,” but falls short of providing a concrete operational definition of what this entails.[1] The Commission’s vague and open-ended description of a “open internet” introduces enormous ambiguities that could grant the FCC unwarranted and expanded scope of discretion. In suggesting that openness equates to basic consumer access, without clear limitations or exceptions, the order leaves room for interpretation of what constitutes “open” access. This not only hampers stakeholders from understanding the boundaries of compliance, but also gives the FCC an opaque veil of authority that could be applied both expansively and inconsistently.
Some critics see the FCC’s pursuit of common-carrier regulation of broadband internet as an attempt to “control” an industry with vast economic and political significance.[2] That may be true. As we discuss in Section II, a more charitable criticism is that the Commission mistakenly believes that the provision of broadband internet is a natural monopoly that is best served by utility-style regulation. Alternatively, it could be argued that the FCC mistakenly believes that a dynamic and competitive industry marked by rapid innovation, improving quality, and falling prices can be effectively regulated as if it were a public utility. Under any of these rationales, Title II regulation is mistaken at best, and nefarious at worst.
Although much has changed since the 2015 Order,[3] nothing has happened that newly justifies the Commission reimposing Title II on broadband service. Perhaps recognizing the difficulty this poses, the Commission offers several new justifications for Title II regulation. In particular, “national security” is offered as a primary justification. In the 2015 Order, “net neutrality” was mentioned nearly 70 times. In contrast, the recent NPRM uses the term only a handful of times: once in the text and the others in only two footnotes. The 2015 Order mentioned “national security” only three times, while the NPRM uses the term more than five dozen times.
In addition, the FCC’s NPRM provides several other new justifications for sweeping regulation of broadband-internet access:
We caution the Commission to take care when relying on these justifications, for several reasons. First, the COVID-19 justification is at odds with the way history unfolded. U.S. broadband providers’ responses to the steep increase in demand during the pandemic was a demonstrable success of broadband competition (especially compared to how networks abroad fared).[7]
The Commission’s reliance on the passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) is also a problematic justification for Title II regulation. The legislative process would have been a perfect time for Congress to legislate net neutrality or Title II regulation as it was debating the investment of tens of billions of dollars to encourage broadband buildout for the next decade or so. But no such provisions were included in the spending bills. If anything, this should indicate that the Commission should refrain from such an excessive regulatory intervention.
Even the Commission’s newly enacted digital-discrimination rules undermine the case for Title II regulation. Congress included a very terse statement that the Commission should look into impermissible discrimination in broadband deployment, but gave zero indication that it wanted Title II reclassification to serve as a remedy, even if such discrimination was found.[8] In short, if Congress intended to regulate broadband internet under Title II, it had numerous opportunities to do so in the recent past, but chose otherwise.
When it comes to national security, Congress has created a number of entities that have oversight powers.[9] But despite recent legislative investment in broadband deployment, Congress gave no indication that it wished the FCC to become a body driven by a national-security mission. Thus, the Commission’s attempt to step into this arena appears both redundant and outside its core competencies. This further suggests that imposing net neutrality under the guise of such justifications might be unfounded, rather than grounded in a changed internet landscape or emergent security threats.
Aside from these overarching concerns advising against Title II regulation, the following comments seek to evaluate the FCC’s numerous beliefs and conclusions, as well as answer questions posed by the NPRM.
In Section II, we report that, by most measures, U.S. broadband competition is vibrant and has improved dramatically since the COVID-19 pandemic. We show that, since 2021, more households are connected to the internet, broadband speeds have increased while prices have declined, more households are served by more than a single provider, and new technologies—such as satellite and 5G—have increased internet access and intermodal competition among providers.
In that section, we also conclude that a mere “incentive and ability” of providers to engage in practices that pose a threat to “internet openness” (however defined) is insufficient justification to impose outright bans on certain practices that have been demonstrated to enhance internet performance, foster investment, and improve consumer and edge provider well-being. Moreover, robust and increasing broadband competition would place a substantial check on the “incentive and ability” for provider attempts to engage in anticompetitive or harmful conduct.
Rather than promoting “openness,” Title II may serve to suppress it, as it would ban or regulate both existing practices or future innovative practices that simultaneously boost provider returns and improve internet users’ experience. As such, Section II argues that the heavy-handed regulation proposed by the NPRM is likely to both reduce investment returns and increase the uncertainty of those returns. This would thereby stifle future broadband investment, especially among small and rural providers.
As discussed in Section II.C.2, paid prioritization has been demonstrated to benefit consumers and edge providers and, in some, cases may be necessary to deliver some high-demand internet services. We also present evidence that throttling of application-service providers is virtually nonexistent and that consumers are largely indifferent to throttling policies as currently practiced. While the NPRM does not anticipate regulating data caps or usage-based pricing, we argue that there is a significant likelihood these practices could be scrutinized under the proposed “internet conduct” rules. Both practices have been shown to be especially beneficial to low-income or low-usage internet subscribers.
Section III describes how already-existing laws and agencies are well-equipped to deal with competition, consumer protection, and national-security issues. Many of the issues the FCC uses to justify extending its purview do not require Title II reclassification, or even action from the FCC itself.
Lastly, in Section IV, we demonstrate that the FCC’s proposed rules will certainly invite challenge under the “major questions doctrine,” which requires a clear grant of authority from Congress when an agency action exercises powers of vast economic and political significance. Moreover, based on recent Supreme Court precedent, there is a significant likelihood that the Commission’s proposed Title II regulation will be struck down by the courts. Reclassification of broadband as a Title II telecommunications service would clearly be an exercise of powers of “vast economic and political significance.” Broadband providers have invested billions of dollars per year into building out reliable high-speed networks throughout the country, serving hundreds of millions of consumers.[10] Nearly every U.S. resident, business, public agency, and other organization uses broadband internet over large portions of the day. Both federal and state governments have supported this continued buildout through subsidies to providers and consumers. As then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh put it when considering the 2015 Order, the “FCC’s net neutrality rule is a major rule for the purposes of The Supreme Court’s major rules doctrine. Indeed, I believe that proposition is indisputable.”[11] It is also clear the classification of broadband under the Communications Act is ambiguous, as every court to review the question has found it to be so.[12]
The Commission’s NPRM proposes regulating broadband as a Title II telecommunications service. But such regulations are unnecessary to protect the public and will harm investment, competition, and innovation. Part II.A details the absence of evidence that would justify reclassifying broadband as a common carrier under Title II. Part II.B shows how the current “light-touch” regulatory approach under Title I promotes innovation and competition. Part II.C presents evidence that Title II reclassification will reduce investment, and Part II.D explains how the NPRM’s proposed rules will reduce innovation by broadband providers.
The NPRM argues that the Commission must restore Title II authority to “safeguard the open Internet” by “clear rules to prevent Internet service providers from engaging in practices harmful to consumers, competition, and public safety….”[13] But the NPRM’s arguments to support this assertion are weak, and the evidence is sparse.
Part II.A.1 argues that the alleged harms to openness are based on poor economic logic and lack any evidence demonstrating that broadband providers have reduced “openness” in the absence of Title II regulation. Part II.A.2 examines the logic of regulating broadband as a monopoly utility, and finds it wanting in light of competitive conditions in the market. Part II.A.3 furthers that argument by detailing the level of competition in the market for high-speed internet, noting the growth in the number of providers, the falling prices and increasing speeds made available, and the increased level of intermodal competition since repeal of the 2015 Order.
In the NPRM, the Commission notes that:
We believe that the rules we propose today will establish a baseline that the Commission can use to prevent and address conduct that harms consumers and competition when it occurs. Above, we express our belief that consumers perceive and use BIAS as an essential service, critical to accessing healthcare, education, work, commerce, and civic engagement. Because of its importance, we further believe it is paramount that consumers be able to use their BIAS connections without degradation due to blocking, throttling, paid prioritization, or other harmful conduct.[14]
Relatedly, the Commission roots its proposed rules in the so-called “incentive and ability [of ISPs] to engage in practices that pose a threat to Internet openness.”[15]
But the NPRM’s proposed rules, rooted in the presumption of ISPs’ “incentive and ability” to engage in practices that threaten internet openness, rest on a speculative foundation, rather than any substantive record of violations. Given the voluminous scale of internet traffic, the evidence of actual infractions is remarkably scant. This paucity of evidence undermines the rationale for preemptive, industrywide prohibitions, which would be based on hypothetical future harms. The mere possibility of ISPs engaging in deleterious conduct does not, in itself, warrant imposing onerous rules that could impede investment in innovative business models.
The assertion that ISPs have the incentive and ability to harm open internet access lacks convincing substantiation of demonstrable harmful conduct.[16] Speculative harm cannot justify regulations that could dissuade ISPs from exploring novel and potentially pro-consumer arrangements. Where there is evidence of consumer ignorance of the tradeoffs inherent in various product offerings, the solution may lie in enhanced disclosure—providing notice and choice to consumers—not in the imposition of broad restrictions.
Furthermore, the Commission fails to distinguish between instances where so-called “paid prioritization” has pro-consumer benefits and where it may constitute an anticompetitive harm. Many business relationships that might be labeled as paid prioritization—such as Netflix’s collocation of data centers within different networks to expedite service and reduce overall network load—are unequivocally pro-consumer. Such arrangements are better understood as sensible network optimization, rather than as anticompetitive behavior.
This narrow focus on ISPs as a potential vector of consumer harm also overlooks the broader ecosystem in which content aggregators like Netflix or Google exert significant influence over access to content. These platforms can, and often do, have a more immediate effect on consumer access than do ISPs. While edge providers sometimes come under fire themselves (wrongly, in our view), it is relevant to assessing the desirability of these proposed rules whether edge providers are made more or less powerful if ISPs are constrained, and what effect that would have on consumer welfare. Relatedly, many of the concerns over blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization are, in essence, expressing a concern that these edge providers will be unable to successfully bargain with ISPs. This, however, is a strange basis for such rules, as many of these firms are as large as or larger than any particular ISP. Moreover, the power these large firms exert in business relationships with ISPs establishes conditions that have downstream benefits for all edge providers.
Thus, the NPRM’s concern over the need for “neutral” connection lanes fails to recognize that neutrality may not be the sole (or even the best) path to fostering innovation. Startups could benefit from making agreements with ISPs to ensure optimized data transmission, which could be more achievable and less costly than the NPRM suggests. Moreover, the emergence of distributed cloud computing blurs the lines between established firms and newcomers, as they often share the same infrastructure and delivery networks, muting the Commission’s concerns.
Before moving forward, the Commission should diligently investigate the likelihood of future harms absent regulation, considering that no concrete evidence has surfaced since the last two rounds of rules on this matter—or even prior—of ISPs using their alleged incentive and ability to affect consumers and edge providers detrimentally. The FCC should substantiate actual harm rather than legislate against conjectural threats. Moreover, the FCC might find that transparency rules alone, or even the mere risk of public disclosure without formal regulation, could sufficiently deter quality degradation without the need for more intrusive regulations.
The Commission concludes that broadband internet access services are “[n]ot unlike other essential utilities, such as electricity and water” and that high-speed internet “was essential or important to 90 percent of U.S. adults during the COVID-19 pandemic.”[17] The Commission appears to argue that broadband internet is therefore an essential public utility and should be regulated as such.
But many essentials to human survival—shelter, food, clothing—are thus not subject to common-carrier regulations, because they are provided by multiple suppliers in competitive markets. Utilities are considered distinct because they tend to have such significant economies of scale that (1) a single monopoly provider can provide the goods or services at a lower cost than multiple competing firms and/or (2) market demand is insufficient to support more than a single supplier.[18] Water, sewer, electricity, and natural gas are typically considered “natural” monopolies under this definition.[19] In many cases, not only are these industries treated as monopolies, but their monopoly status is codified by laws forbidding competition. At one time, local and long-distance telephone services were considered—and treated as—natural monopolies, as was cable television.[20]
Over time, innovations have eroded the “natural” monopolies in telephone and cable.[21] In 2000, 94% of U.S. households had a landline telephone, and only 42% had a mobile phone.[22] By 2018, those numbers flipped.[23] In 2015, 73% of households subscribed to cable or satellite-television service.[24] Today, fewer than half of U.S. households subscribe.[25] Much of that transition is due to the enormous improvements in broadband speed, reliability, and affordability discussed in Part II.A.3.a. Similarly, entry and intermodal competition from 5G, fixed wireless, and satellite—as discussed in Part II.A.3.c—has meant that more than 94% of the country can now access high-speed broadband from three or more providers, thereby eroding the already tenuous claims that broadband-internet service is akin to a utility.
Regulating a competitive industry as a monopoly utility is what former Justice Stephen Breyer identified as a regulatory “mismatch,” which he defined as:
[A]n area where the rationale for regulation, judged by empirical fact, is not compelling, or where there are apparently less restrictive or more incentive-based forms of governmental intervention that can obtain regulation’s purported objective. [26]
As we note throughout these comments, the federal government already has in place many laws, rules, and policies that could satisfy many of the objectives the FCC seeks with Title II reclassification. In nearly every case, existing regulations are less-restrictive, more incentive-based, or less-capricious than common-carrier regulation under Title II.
The FCC seeks comment on the state of competition in broadband internet-access services.[27] The NPRM claims that more than one-third of households lack competitive choice for fixed broadband at speeds of 100/20 Mbps, and that 70% of rural households lack such choice.[28] Despite the fact that nearly one-in-eight households with at-home internet are mobile-only, the Commission concludes that fixed and mobile internet are not substitutable.[29] Against this backdrop, the FCC seeks comment regarding whether services with substantially different technologies can substitute for each other competitively, and whether consumers nationwide have an adequate choice of providers.[30]
By most measures, U.S. broadband competition is vibrant and has increased dramatically since the COVID-19 pandemic. Since 2021, more households are connected to the internet, broadband speeds have increased while prices have declined, more households are served by more than a single provider, and new technologies—such as satellite and 5G—have expanded internet access and intermodal competition among providers.
Criticisms of the current state of broadband deployment tend to presume it results from widespread market failure. Specifically, the critics believe that too few Americans have affordable access to adequate broadband speed and capacity and that this, in turn, is the result of insufficient competition among broadband providers.[31] For example, in her speech announcing the FCC’s latest proposal to regulate internet services under Title II, Chair Jessica Rosenworcel claimed that 80% of the country faces a monopoly or duopoly for 100 Mbps or higher download speeds.[32] But, in fact, nearly all of the country has access to at-home internet, a vast majority has access to high-speed internet, and much of the country has access to these speeds from three or more providers.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) defines high-speed broadband as Internet service that offers speeds of at least 25/3 Mbps.[33] The IIJA defines a location as “unserved” if it has no internet connection available or only has a connection offering speeds of less than 25/3 Mbps.[34] A location is considered “underserved” if the only options available offer speeds of less than 100/20 Mbps.[35] The third iteration of the National Broadband Map, released in November 2023, indicates:[36]
The most recent FCC data on U.S. broadband deployment finds that 90% of the population in 2021 was served by one or more providers offering 250/25 Mbps or higher speeds (Table 1).[37] That is more than double the share of the population five years earlier, when only 44% of Americans had access to such speeds.[38] In 2019, the FCC did not report the share of population with access to 1,000/100 Mbps speeds or higher. In 2021, 28% of the population had access to these gigabit download speeds.
Table 1 shows that, in 2021, more than 85% of the population was covered by two or more fixed broadband providers offering 25/3 Mbps or higher speeds and more than 60% of the country was covered by three or more providers providing such speeds. If satellite and 5G providers are included, then close to 100% of the country is served by two or more high-speed providers.
Moreover, the evidence indicates that broadband competition has increased over time, as measured by the number of competing high-speed providers (Figure 1).[39]
Since the 2018 Order[40] that reclassified broadband under Title I, broadband competition has increased. The share of households with high-speed fixed broadband connections offered by three or more providers has increased. Over the same period, entry and intermodal competition from 5G, fixed wireless, and satellite, as discussed in more depth below, has meant that more than 94% of the country can now access high-speed broadband from three or more providers. The growing consumer adoption of technologies that differ substantially from fixed broadband demonstrate that consumers view these technologies as competitive substitutes for each other.
Critics of the current state of U.S. broadband competition claim that U.S. prices are among the highest in the developed world because the U.S. market is not as competitive as other jurisdictions. For example, the Community Tech Network asks rhetorically, “So why does the internet cost so much more in the U.S. than in other countries? One possible answer is the lack of competition.”[41] Their article includes a graphic in which U.S. internet is described as “expensive and slow” while Australia is categorized as “fast and cheap.”
None of these claims appear to hold up under scrutiny. Instead, adjusting for consumption and download speeds, U.S. fixed-broadband pricing is among the lowest in the developed world. On a cost-per-megabit basis, the United States is among the least costly (Figure 2).[42] In addition, Speedtest’s Global Index of median speeds reports the United States as having the second-fastest median speed among OECD countries (Figure 3).[43]
Cross-country comparisons of broadband pricing are especially fraught, due to country-by-country variations in factors that drive the costs of delivering broadband and the prices paid by consumers. Deployment costs are driven largely by population density and terrain, as well as each country’s unique regulatory and tax policies.[44] Consumer choices often drive the prices paid by subscribers. These include choices regarding the mix of fixed broadband and mobile, speed preferences, and data consumption.[45]
A broadband-pricing index published annually by USTelecom reports that inflation-adjusted broadband prices for the most popular speed tiers among consumers have decreased by 54.7% from 2015 to 2023, or 5.6% a year.[46] Prices for the highest-speed tiers have decreased by 55.8% over the same period. The Producer Price Index for residential internet-access services decreased by 11.2% from 2015 through July 2023.[47] The median fixed-broadband connection in the United States delivers more than 207 Mbps download service, an 80% increase over the pre-pandemic median speed (Figure 4).[48]
An industry experiencing increasing quality along with decreasing prices is consistent with an industry that faces robust, if not increasing, competition. By these measures, the U.S. broadband industry, under Title I regulation, is both competitive and dynamic. To date, proponents of Title II regulation have not demonstrated that net neutrality or other common-carrier obligations have or will improve internet speeds or pricing for consumers.
Nearly one-in-eight households with at-home internet are mobile-only.[49] According to Pew Research, 19% of adults who do not have at-home broadband report that their smartphone does everything they need to do online.[50] Even so, the Commission concludes that fixed and mobile internet are not substitutable,[51] and seeks comments regarding its conclusion that, “fixed broadband and mobile wireless broadband are not substitutes in all cases,” as well as its finding that broadband service and mobile-wireless service “enable[] different situational uses.”[52]
“All cases” is an unreasonably high threshold that fails to recognize the central question of competition—namely, how do or would consumers respond to a significant change in prices, quality, or terms and conditions? It’s been long-established that goods and services need not be perfect—or even close—substitutes to exert competitive pressure.[53] Indeed, as we discuss in this section, consumer adoption of 5G and satellite broadband indicate that many consumers view fixed, mobile, and satellite broadband as competitive substitutes. Thus, any FCC evaluation of broadband competition must account for competitive threats and pressures associated with intermodal competition.
One of the most important changes to occur since the last two net-neutrality rounds is the intensification of intermodal competition, primarily due to the introduction and expansion of satellite and fixed-wireless options, alongside the rapid growth of high-speed 5G technology. These developments have not only diversified the array of available services, but also enhanced their quality and accessibility. Moreover, the advent of widely available satellite and fixed-wireless technologies offers viable alternatives to traditional broadband, breaking down previous geographical and infrastructural barriers. Satellite-broadband services, 5G wireless, and fixed wireless now offer robust competition in areas previously served by, at most, one or two fixed-broadband providers. When considering the state of competition in broadband access, acknowledging this growing intermodal competition is crucial.
The advent of low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband has dramatically expanded the geographic reach of high-speed internet access. Starlink satellite service has been made available to all locations in the United States.[54] Starlink’s reported speeds are between 25/5 Mbps and 220/25 Mbps.[55] Project Kuiper has successfully launched its first test satellites,[56] with commercial service expected to begin in the second half of 2024.[57] Starlink and Project Kuiper provide new broadband options, especially for rural and remote households previously limited to slow DSL services. S&P Global Market Intelligence reports:
Satellite broadband subs … have lingered in the 1 million to 2 million subscriber range since 2008 but finally broke above 2 million last year due largely to growth at Low Earth Orbit new entrant Starlink.” [58]
Research published in 2017—two years before the first launch of Starlink satellites—found that households in manufactured or modular homes are more likely to adopt satellite internet instead of wired, cable connections.[59] One explanation is that many manufactured homes are not cable-ready and lack the wiring for cable-internet connections. Thus, despite the higher monthly costs, the “all-in” cost of satellite connections is relatively lower. These consumers clearly considered cable and satellite to be competitors. In research published last month, Gregory Rosston and Scott Wallsten highlighted the importance of satellite broadband for competition in rural areas:
Starlink (and its likely future LEO competitors) are creating real, facilities-based broadband competition in areas that are currently not served by low-latency service or are served only by companies that rely on heavy subsidies. The opportunities, therefore are broadband competition in rural areas and large reductions in taxpayer spending on broadband availability.[60]
Citing estimates from research firm Omdia, the Wall Street Journal reports that about 43% of U.S. consumers had 5G mobile subscriptions as of June 2023.[61] The increasing deployment of 5G wireless technology has led to faster speeds, lower latency, and greater reliability, leading to 5G becoming increasingly competitive with fixed broadband.
As the 5G rollout continues and more spectrum is deployed, wireless speeds will continue to increase.[67] And enhancements like 5G fixed-wireless access (FWA) enable carriers to compete directly with wired services. For example, one study concludes:
We find that at current prices, full FWA entry to a cable-only market, which constitutes approximately 30 percent of all cable modem subscribers in the United States, would convert 18 percent of cable-only households to FWA …. In cable/fiber markets, we find that full FWA entry would convert 2 percent of households from cable modem to FWA ….[68]
The NPRM assumes that net-neutrality rules assuring an “open Internet” are necessary to promote “edge innovation,” which creates consumer demand for high-speed internet and therefore “expanded investments in broadband infrastructure.”[69] But the NPRM essentially ignores the dynamic competition in broadband markets that leads to significant investment and innovation by broadband providers, as the market since the repeal 2015 Order shows. Part II.B.1 describes this dynamic competition in broadband markets. Part II.B.2 makes the case that Title I classification is what has allowed continued experimentation and innovation by broadband providers.
Potential competition plays a pivotal role in dynamic technology markets. The threat that new technologies like LEO satellite and 5G fixed wireless could disrupt incumbents’ market share stimulates continued infrastructure investment and innovation. Even where substitution currently is incomplete, the looming threat of competitive disruption disciplines behavior.
To this point, as we have previously noted,[70] broadband-market competition should be understood as dynamic, not static. Related to the question of intermodal competition (which can often present imperfect substitutes) are market dynamics driven by potential competition:
In dynamic contexts, potential competitors can have much greater importance. What today appears merely to be a potential competitor can obliterate incumbents tomorrow in acts of Schumpeterian creative destruction. To exclude such a competitor from the boundaries of the market would clearly be a mistake.[71]
Where traditional competition analysis tends to gauge competitiveness using narrow, static indicia such as price levels and market share, a focus on “dynamic competition” may be more appropriate in technology-driven markets like broadband service. Dynamic markets are not typically composed of many competitors making marginal price adjustments to capture small slices of market share. Instead, such markets often experience sequential competition: firms vie to capture the entire market (or most of it), with would-be competitors and new entrants attempting to disrupt incumbents by introducing innovative new products or business models to supplant previous technologies.
An assumption that more concentration must mean less competition stems from a blackboard model of “perfect competition,” where innovation is merely a competitive dimension that emerges from a healthy market structure, rather than innovation driving the evolution of market structures. Rivalry is, of course, important, but no one seriously believes we live in a world of perfect competition characterized by atomistic firms competing to produce commodity goods and services. Yet this simplistic structuralist view of markets is frequently advanced in policy discussions.[72]
As Harold Demsetz famously observed, “the asserted relationship between market concentration and competition cannot be derived from existing theoretical considerations and that it is based largely on an incorrect understanding of the concept of competition or rivalry.”[73] In the case of natural monopolies, scale economies may make it more efficient for one firm to produce a good or service in a given market than it would be for two or more firms. Scale economies arise when high fixed costs are spread over a larger number of goods, allowing larger firms to enjoy lower per-unit costs of production. Due to economies of scale, markets like broadband, with high fixed costs, will tend to have fewer firms than markets with lower fixed costs. But Demsetz demonstrated that, even then, competition for the market itself can lead to an efficient result that prevents the typical welfare harms attributed to monopolies.[74]
The oft-neglected literature on dynamic capabilities and organizational strategy, by contrast, supports the supposition that innovation drives market structure.[75] For the last several decades, this literature has demonstrated that static price-effect-focused analysis is insufficient to understand dynamic markets. For dynamic markets, instead, it is performance that matters, with price as a secondary consideration and innovation as an important component of performance.[76] So long as a market remains contestable, even if it’s highly concentrated, firms’ performance will determine the likelihood of new entrants. It is pressure from those potential new entrants that continues to drive market competitiveness.[77]
Indeed, in highly dynamic economies, particularly those characterized by scale economies, there can be just as much reason to be concerned about too many competitors as by too few. Further, these dynamic markets tend to see a continual rebalancing between equilibrium and disruption:
With dynamic competition, new entrants and incumbents alike engage in new product and process development and other adjustments to change. Frequent new product introductions followed by rapid price declines are commonplace. Innovations stem from investment in R&D or from the improvement and combination of older technologies. Firms continuously introduce product innovations, and from time to time, dominant designs emerge. With innovation, the number of new entrants explodes, but once dominant designs emerge, implosions are likely, and markets become more concentrated. With dynamic competition, innovation and competition are tightly linked.[78]
Thus, in any given market at a given time, there is likely some optimal number of firms that maximizes social welfare.[79] That optimal number—which is sometimes just one and is never the maximum possible—is subject to change, as technological shocks affect the dominant paradigms controlling the market.[80] The optimal number of firms also varies with the strength of scale economies, such that consumers may benefit from an increase in concentration if economies of scale are strong enough.[81] Therefore, in dynamic markets characterized by high fixed costs and strong economies of scale, like broadband markets, the optimal number of firms is reached much more quickly than in, for instance, relatively more commodity-like markets.
Broadband has many of the attributes of a dynamic market, which tends to make static analyses of broadband competition fail to accurately appreciate competitive realities.[82] Broadband markets are driven by technological trends and can be disrupted by rapid modal shifts (e.g., from DSL to cable, or, looking forward, from cable to 5G wireless, satellite, and fixed wireless). Moreover, the infrastructure necessary to deliver broadband requires both long-term planning, as well as substantial sustained investment. Firms in broadband markets are driven not merely by potential entrants today, but by the necessity of intense and expensive planning for future shifts in technology and consumption preferences. Thus, firms operate with an eye toward future competitive pressures, not merely in response to winning market share in the present.
Contrary to some assumptions, the U.S. broadband market is characterized by a significant amount of entry (and exit). As Connolly & Prieger find:
The striking conclusion is that there is a tremendous amount of dynamic activity in the US broadband market. In the national market, the entry rate averages 14-19% annually, which is greater than the entry rates the economic literature has found for many other industries. The exit rate for broadband is also higher than for other industries, but not as high as the entry rate, so that net entry averages 3.1% annually. With narrower geographic or service type market definitions, the entry rates average from 24% to an astounding 49% per annum.[83]
Thus, broadband providers must balance the need to offer attractive pricing in response to immediate competitive pressures with a simultaneous need to make risky and costly investments in technological upgrades in order to compete with advanced technologies that may not be implemented for a decade or more.
Just as market share is a poor indicator of competition, basic accounting measures of profitability and investment often fail to demonstrate how risk/return expectations are realized in dynamic markets over the entire innovation lifecycle. A very large and very profitable ISP may have experienced prior negative returns on invested capital, a result of the need to assume risk and make enormous investments under conditions of uncertainty. The broadband market is constantly evolving as a result of historical and ongoing infrastructure investment, rapidly changing technology, the evolution of content and content-delivery technology, new regulations, and shifting usage patterns, among other factors. Facilities-based competition (e.g., among fiber, cable, mobile, and satellite) has ebbed and flowed depending on these various characteristics, but it has consistently produced higher-quality connectivity at lower quality-adjusted prices. An accurate assessment of competitiveness in broadband markets must take account of all these characteristics.
Further, it is well-known that process and product innovation does not arise solely from new entry; incumbent firms frequently are important sources of innovation, as well as increased market competitiveness.[84] Dynamic analysis does take entry seriously, but it is much more sensitive to potential entry as a constraint on incumbents than a structuralist view would permit. Thus, for example, an incumbent broadband provider that offers a 250 Mbps tier must consider the potential capabilities of an existing competitor that only offers 100 Mbps service; it must incorporate potential threats from that competitor in its decision matrix when evaluating whether to upgrade its network to 1 Gbps in order to retain its customer base. An incumbent’s dominant position can quickly erode thanks to imperfect in-market substitutes, as well as from out-of-market firms that may decide to enter in the future.[85]
The debate surrounding the optimal regulatory framework for broadband services often hinges on finding a balance that fosters innovation and consumer welfare without stifling competition. The broadband industry has thrived, for decades delivering lower prices and faster speeds under a Title I classification.[86] History has demonstrated that a light-touch regulatory regime under Title I of the Communications Act is the most conducive environment to achieve these objectives.
One of the primary functions of a firm is to discover consumer needs, a process that frequently requires firms to “think outside the box.” To attract and retain customers, firms must experiment with offerings that introduce competition from unexpected quarters and keep competitive pressures in place through technological and business-model innovation.
Light-touch regulatory frameworks are inherently more compatible with this approach than are more onerous regimes, like Title II of the Communications Act. For example, in 2011, MetroPCS attempted to introduce a limited data plan offering subsidized, unlimited access to YouTube and other content providers, targeting price-sensitive consumers.[87] This plan, though unconventional, was poised to help bridge the digital divide by making wireless data more accessible to a segment traditionally underserved by larger carriers. This type of business model is a non-neutral form of paid prioritization, but it would very likely have helped price-conscious consumers access more internet services. MetroPCS ultimately abandoned this plan, and such a plan would almost certainly run afoul of the proposed rules in this NPRM.[88]
Since then, ISPs have experimented with other potentially non-neutral paid-prioritization approaches that nonetheless would yield enormous consumer surplus, such as AT&T’s Sponsored Data program[89] and T-Mobile’s Binge On.[90] Such business models provide more choices, potentially lower prices, and introduce competitive threats to other players in the market. Ex ante rules that presumptively ban this kind of experimentation foreclose the ability to discover if such models actually serve the interests of consumers in practice.
And the harms that flow from reduced innovation affect not just ISPs and their consumers, but all parts of the internet ecosystem. As Sidak and Teece have observed:
The lost benefits [of bans on paid prioritization] would affect both end users and suppliers of content and applications. Optional business-to-business transactions for QoS will enhance the efficiency of traffic flow over broadband networks, reducing congestion. That enhanced efficiency benefits both the end users receiving content or applications and the content providers whose content or applications are demanded. Superior QoS is a form of product differentiation, and it therefore increases welfare by increasing the production choices available to content and applications providers and the consumption choices available to end users. Finally, as in other two-sided platforms, optional business-to-business transactions for QoS will allow broadband network operators to reduce subscription prices for broadband end users, promoting broadband adoption by end users, which will increase the value of the platform for all users.[91]
This follows from the nature of ISPs as platforms sitting at the center of a two-sided market. On one side are end users who pay the ISP for access to the internet; on the other are content providers who want access to the end users. A ban on paid prioritization assures that the ISP can monetize only one side of the market. Aside from putting upward pricing pressure on end consumers, this also has a detrimental effect on the overall value of the platform for users and content providers alike.
Prescriptive ex ante regulations under Title II amount to per se bans on certain conduct, without even inquiring whether such conduct is a net harm. Antitrust law, which is sensitive to exactly the sort of vertical harms that are the subject of concern in this NPRM,[92] has developed rule-of-reason analysis to parse when challenged conduct is harmful to consumer welfare.[93] That is, antitrust law does not assume that vertical restraints always harm consumers, but has learned that, in many cases, vertical restraints are a net benefit. But this analysis always occurs ex post, allowing companies to experiment with innovative business models like the many variations of paid prioritization.
The Commission tentatively deems unsubstantiated the 2018 Order’s conclusions that ISP investment is closely tied to the Title II classification.[94] This is because the Commission now concludes that network-infrastructure owners make long-term, irreversible investments and that the adoption of orders reclassifying broadband internet-access services would be unlikely to change these investment decisions. In addition, because the Commission received conflicting viewpoints on the actual effect of Title II classification on investment, it concludes that no one can “quantify with any reasonable degree of accuracy how either a Title I or a Title II approach may affect future investment.”[95] Instead, the Commission tentatively concludes that changes in ISP investment following adoption of reclassification orders were more likely related to factors such as economic conditions, technology changes, and general business decisions, rather than to Title I or Title II classification.[96] The Commission seeks comments on these findings, beliefs, and conclusions.
Put simply, Title II reclassification will hinder investment. The see-sawing between Title I and Title II regulation over the years has already injected regulatory uncertainty into the broadband market. Reimposing Title II regulations will inject additional uncertainty.[97] This uncertainty is compounded by the FCC’s recent digital-discrimination rules. Title II combined with digital discrimination imposes a double whammy of ex ante regulation of some conduct, combined with ex post monitoring, scrutiny, and enforcement of vast array of other conduct.[98]
Firms’ investment decisions are often likened to a pipeline. But a more appropriate analogy would be an assembly line, where investment opportunities are investigated and evaluated. Opportunities with negative returns on investment are rejected and those with positive returns are further evaluated and ranked. Because firms have limited resources, some of the investments with positive returns are rejected. Once a firm decides to pursue an investment opportunity, the project is further evaluated throughout the deployment timeframe. Just as a product can be pulled from the assembly line for defects, investments can be pulled for economic or technical defects. Generally speaking, the further down the assembly line the project goes, the less likely it is to be pulled. Thus, an interruption at the end of the assembly line is likely to be less disruptive than an interruption at the beginning.
In this sense, the Commission is correct to conclude that Title II classification would have relatively less impact on investments that are near the end of their assembly line. But that observation misses the much bigger picture of investments at the beginning of the assembly line and potential investments that are still in the investigation and evaluation stage. For these projects, Title II classification can turn projects with positive expected returns into projects with negative expected returns. In addition, the regulatory uncertainty that is endemic to Title II regulation reduces firms’ confidence in the reliability of their return-on-investment projections. Because of the well-known and widely accepted risk-return tradeoff, firms facing increased uncertainty in investment returns will demand higher expected returns from the investments they pursue.[99]
Put simply, Title II classification may not have a significant effect on investments near completion, but could have a statistically and economically significant impact on future and early-stage investments. Recently published peer-reviewed research supports this conclusion.
Wolfgang Briglauer and his co-authors examine the impact of net-neutrality regulations on broadband-network investment, specifically fiber-optic networks in OECD countries.[100] Roslyn Layton and Mark Jamison describe Briglauer, et al.’s research as “the only empirical, non-anecdotal analysis of net neutrality and investment to date.”[101] Using panel data from 2000 through 2021, Briglauer and his co-authors find evidence that net-neutrality regulations have a significant negative impact on fiber-optic network investment by internet service providers. They employ several econometric techniques, including fixed effects and instrumental variables models, to establish evidence of a causal relationship between net-neutrality rules and reduced investment. The main finding is that the introduction of net-neutrality regulations leads to an estimated 22-25% decrease in new fiber-optic network investments by ISPs.
Briglauer et al. argue their statistical analysis provides evidence that strict net-neutrality rules tend to slow deployment of new high-speed broadband connections. They find the negative impact manifests with a delay, rather than immediately, likely due to rigidities and lags in broadband-deployment projects, thus pointing to a long-run effect. In addition, their fiber investment variable measures newly installed fiber connections, representing new broadband-infrastructure capacity. This is more indicative of long-run capital investment rather than short-run variations in spending.
Briglauer et al. control for other factors unrelated to net-neutrality regulations by including macroeconomic conditions relevant for investment decisions, such as long-term interest rates and a measure of investment freedom. They also control for deployment costs, measured by population density and wages. In addition, their statistical model includes measures of cable competition, mobile competition, telecommunications services prices, and the number of broadband subscriptions. In many cases, these control variables have a statistically significant relationship with fiber investment. Nevertheless, even controlling for these other factors, the authors found that net-neutrality regulations were associated with decreased fiber-optic network investments by ISPs.
The Commission concludes that “changes in ISP investment following the adoption of each Order were more likely the result of other factors unrelated to the classification of BIAS, such as broader economic conditions.”[102] In this framing, it seems the Commission is arguing that if something contributes “more” (however “more” is measured) to investment than Title II classification, then the Commission should conclude that classification has no effect. But this is the wrong framing. Using statistical analysis, the effect of net-neutrality regulations on investment can be estimated while controlling for these other variables. The fact that other variables also affect investment does not invalidate a finding that net-neutrality regulations have some statistically and economically significant negative relationship with investment.
The Commission proposes to ban paid or affiliated prioritization arrangements, concluding such arrangements harm consumers, competition, and innovation, as well as creating disincentives to promote broadband deployment.”[103] Chair Rosensworcel has characterized paid prioritization as creating “fast lanes that favor those who can pay for access.”[104] This framing invites the question that was raised years ago, “Do fast lanes mean there are, by definition, slow lanes?”[105] The answer is “no,” as explained by Vox:
An ISP’s bandwidth is not fixed at current levels: As MVPDs shift to all-digital infrastructures, they have significant capacity to dedicate a larger portion of their “pipes” to broadband, which can meaningfully increase bandwidth available to consumers from today’s levels. Think of bandwidth as a highway: If an entirely new lane is added at the ISP’s expense, that does not harm anyone riding along on the preexisting highway. We struggle to understand why enabling an “extra” HOV lane is bad policy that requires government regulation. One should not simply assume that the creation of fast lanes of dedicated bandwidth forces everyone else who chooses not to pay ISPs, or cannot pay ISPs, into slow lanes. While those lanes may be slower than the fast lanes, they were slower with or without the fast lanes. And if bandwidth-heavy traffic that would have traveled over the open Internet (adding to congestion) is offloaded onto a separate fast lane that does not impair the preexisting pipe’s bandwidth capabilities, it should actually ease congestion on the existing lanes, rather than create slow lanes.[106]
An ISP’s bandwidth is not fixed at current levels: As MVPDs shift to all-digital infrastructures, they have significant capacity to dedicate a larger portion of their “pipes” to broadband, which can meaningfully increase bandwidth available to consumers from today’s levels.
Think of bandwidth as a highway: If an entirely new lane is added at the ISP’s expense, that does not harm anyone riding along on the preexisting highway. We struggle to understand why enabling an “extra” HOV lane is bad policy that requires government regulation.
One should not simply assume that the creation of fast lanes of dedicated bandwidth forces everyone else who chooses not to pay ISPs, or cannot pay ISPs, into slow lanes. While those lanes may be slower than the fast lanes, they were slower with or without the fast lanes.
And if bandwidth-heavy traffic that would have traveled over the open Internet (adding to congestion) is offloaded onto a separate fast lane that does not impair the preexisting pipe’s bandwidth capabilities, it should actually ease congestion on the existing lanes, rather than create slow lanes.[106]
Prioritization is a longstanding and widespread practice and, as discussed at length in The Verge regarding Netflix’s Open Connect technology, the internet can’t work without some form of it:
When Open Connect originally launched a decade ago, the service started working collaboratively with ISPs on deployment. Netflix provides ISPs with the servers for free, and Netflix has an internal reliability team that works with ISP resources to maintain the servers. The benefit to ISPs, according to both Netflix and Akamai, is fewer costs to ISPs by alleviating the need for them to have to fetch copies of content themselves.[107]
Indeed, the Verge piece makes clear that even paid prioritization can be an essential tool for edge providers. As we’ve previously noted, paid prioritization offers an economically efficient means to distribute the costs of network optimization.[108]
Axel Gautier and Robert Somogyi developed a model that includes both paid prioritization and zero rating and conclude:
Prioritization is the preferred option of both the ISP and consumers under severe congestion and high-value content, because the low price charged by the ISP to consumers is counterbalanced by large payments from the [content providers].[109]
Banning paid prioritization forces all data to be treated equally, even if customers or services would benefit from differentiated offerings. Without flexibility in how services are delivered and priced, companies lose incentives to develop better networks and new innovations for specific use cases like high-bandwidth video streaming or remote medical services.
The Commission proposes to ban throttling lawful content, applications, services, and nonharmful devices.[110] While the Commission notes that throttling is “not outright blocking,” it also concludes such conduct “can have the same effects as outright blocking.”[111] The proposed ban would not ban throttling when it is “based on a choice clearly made by the end user,” such as a consumer’s choice of a plan in which a set amount of data is provided at one speed tier and any remaining data is provided at a lower tier.[112]
Internet bandwidth is a scarce and congestible resource subject to wild swings in consumer use. For example, Taylor Swift’s 2023 U.S. concerts have been associated with record-breaking levels of 5G data use on AT&T’s network.[113] Thus, allowing application-specific throttling gives companies incentives to streamline data demands. For mobile networks, excessive data usage impacts spectrum resources available to other customers. If networks cannot limit bandwidth-hungry apps during busy periods, then smartphone app developers lose incentives to tighten data usage. As internet-video traffic occupies about two-thirds of bandwidth, networks need some ability to manage congestion.[114] Outright throttling bans, rather than specific rules against anticompetitive discrimination, eliminate useful tools.
There is a dearth of empirical research regarding the throttling of application-service providers. In the only known published academic research, Daeho Lee and Junseok Hwang categorize application-service providers into four groups by bandwidth-usage attributes and latency sensitivity.[115] Using data from South Korea, they test the hypothesis that ISPs would be more likely to discriminate against content providers needing more bandwidth and more sensitive to latency. A regression of estimated technology-gap ratios on these variables, however, shows no significance, suggesting that ISPs do not discriminate against content providers based on bandwidth usage or latency. Using crowdsourced measurements across 2,735 ISPs in 183 countries and regions, Li et al. find that U.S. mobile providers seem to throttle content providers, but not to the extent in which consumers would likely notice.[116]
On the consumer side, recent research published in Telecommunications Policy finds no evidence that subscribers change their behavior in the face of throttled data rates.[117] Christoph Bauner and Augusto Espin analyze throughput levels measured for mobile ISPs in the United States with usage data to evaluate how sensitive users are to throttling. Using regression analysis of app usage on various measures of throttling, Bauner & Espin find no significant effect of data throughput on app usage. They argue that users may benefit from a modest degree of throttling when it aids network stability and reliability.[118] Bauner & Espin conclude their finding “seemingly weakens the … argument in favor of net neutrality rules.”[119]
In another consumer study, Hyun Ji Lee and Brian Whitacre found that low-income users were willing to pay for an extra GB of data each month, but were not willing to pay extra for a higher speed.[120] This is likely because, if a subscriber has a higher data limit, then they have a lower chance of being throttled for exceeding the cap. Lee & Whitacre’s results indicate Lifeline consumers are willing to pay for the option to use more unthrottled data, but are not willing to pay for higher speeds at all levels of data usage. This data-speed tradeoff suggests those consumers would benefit from a plan that offered a larger data allowance, but throttled speeds if the allowance is exceeded.
If, in fact, ISPs do not generally engage in throttling application-service providers and, when throttling does happen, consumers do not significantly change their usage in the face of throttling, then a ban on throttling is a solution in search of problem. In fact, it could be a solution that is worse than any perceived problem. A ban on data throttling removes essential network-management tools that could prevent congestion and improve overall customer experience. Moreover, discrimination against specific applications or competing services can already be scrutinized under existing antitrust and consumer-protection laws, as discussed in Part III.
In addition to the Commission’s proposed rules prohibiting throttling, the agency is also investigating data caps and usage-based pricing (UBP).[121] A 2021 survey reports that, during the pandemic, 37% of those surveyed hit their data cap, and 68% of those who exceeded their data-cap limit paid overage fees.[122]
Data caps and UBP are not a new issue. In 2013, an FCC advisory committee issued a report on data caps and UBP.[123] That report identified several ways in which the policies improve network performance, consumer experience, and investment and innovation among ISPs and edge providers:
While the NPRM is silent on data caps and UBP, the 2015 Order noted that data caps “may benefit consumers by offering them more choices over a greater range of service options,” but left open the possibility of future regulation:[125]
The record also reflects differing views over some broadband providers’ practices with respect to usage allowances (also called “data caps”). … Usage allowances may benefit consumers by offering them more choices over a greater range of service options, and, for mobile broadband networks, such plans are the industry norm today, in part reflecting the different capacity issues on mobile networks. Conversely, some commenters have expressed concern that such practices can potentially be used by broadband providers to disadvantage competing over-the-top providers. Given the unresolved debate concerning the benefits and drawbacks of data allowances and usage-based pricing plans, we decline to make blanket findings about these practices and will address concerns under the no-unreasonable interference/disadvantage on a case-by-case basis.[126]
Gus Hurwitz points out that data caps are a way of offering lower-priced services to lower-need users.[127] They are also a way of apportioning the cost of those networks in proportion to the intensity of a given user’s usage. He notes that, if all users faced the same prices regardless of their usage, there would be no marginal cost to incremental usage. Thus, users and content providers would have little incentive to consider their bandwidth usage. Network congestion does not go away by lifting data caps. Instead, it may be worsened, especially if there is no additional cost associated with additional usage.
As we note above, Lee & Whitacre found that low-income consumers were willing to pay for an extra GB of data each month, but were not willing to pay extra for a higher speed.[128] This indicates that even Lifeline subscribers have a positive willingness-to-pay for a greater data allowance.
Regardless of the effects of prohibiting data caps or UBP on consumers and providers, the more pernicious risk is the legal uncertainty of these practices under Title II regulation. Although the NPRM does not identify any specific proposals regarding data caps or UBP, there is a strong likelihood that these practices could be scrutinized or regulated under the overly broad proposed “conduct rules.” For example, Scott Jordan provides a thorough review of possible data-cap practices and which ones might fall afoul of the 2015 Order.[129] He concludes:
Jordan’s comprehensive survey demonstrates that many data-cap practices are in a gray zone of uncertainty regarding whether they would or would not satisfy the FCC’s conduct rules. This uncertainty would, by itself, likely stifle experimentation with innovative business models and practices, thereby hindering investment and diminishing users’ experiences.
The Commission seeks comments on whether consumer-protection and antitrust laws provide sufficient protections against blocking, throttling, paid prioritization, and “other conduct that harms the open Internet.][130] In this section, we note that the United States has a multiplicity of agencies, laws, regulations, and rules that span competition, consumer-protection, and national-security issues. The Commission has provided little to no evidence that the existing regulatory regime has been deficient in enforcing existing policies or that new policies are needed—particularly outside of a congressional mandate.
Fundamental to the Commission’s position in the 2018 Order was the reasonable conclusion that ensuring ISPs do not interfere with consumers’ access to content over the internet would best be effected by adopting a competition and consumer-protection oriented approach. This is consistent with the Commission’s historical, deregulatory approach to information services, including in the 2015 Order. Since 2018, nothing has changed to disturb the soundness of this approach.
Core to the distinction in these approaches is an evaluation of the appropriate way to judge risk. The 2015 Order was premised on the theory that because ISPs have any incentive and ability to engage in problematic conduct, they thus will very likely engage in that conduct.[131] The Commission used this assumption to justify strong ex ante regulation to curtail such expected conduct. In the 2018 Order, rather than simply presuming harm, the Commission undertook an extensive, thorough, and fact-based analysis to first assess the likely risk of harm.[132] Based on this analysis, the Commission concluded that the risk of harmful conduct was 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 Commission reasonably determined that a “light touch” ex post competition-oriented regulatory approach was preferable to the ex ante prescriptive rules adopted in the 2015 Order and under consideration in this NPRM.
We believe that the Commission had the better analysis in 2018 and should continue to support this approach. Indeed, in the long history of the net-neutrality debates, the justifications for imposing Title II obligations on ISPs have been rooted in the precautionary principle, with little or no actual evidence produced demonstrating any intentional violation of “neutrality” principles. And since 2018, no other evidence has been produced.
The ideal regulatory framework for dealing with potential violations of neutrality principles is an ex post regulatory approach that reflects well-established competition law principles and is commensurate with the actual degree of risk and extent of harm associated with ISP misconduct, while also mitigating against the risk that over-regulation that would harm consumers by curtailing pro-competitive ISP activity.
As the Commission observed in the 2018 Order, “[t]he Communications Act includes an antitrust savings clause, so the antitrust laws apply with equal vigor to entities regulated by the Commission.”[133] Thus, the Commission has already 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. As Justice Breyer has observed, “[r]egulation is viewed as a substitute for competition, to be used only as a weapon of last resort—as a heroic cure reserved for a serious disease.”[134]
Of course, the Communications Act does not speak directly to “net neutrality” harms. But to the extent the act permits the Commission to regulate in this area, it does so largely by requiring the agency to choose between Title I and Title II classifications, reserving Title II for circumstances where the Commission determines that the risk of harm from providers is sufficiently great that ex ante, prescriptive regulation is appropriate—“as a heroic cure reserved for a serious disease.”[135]
Moreover, the Commission’s prior efforts to promote net neutrality overlap substantially, if not entirely, with concerns over ISPs engaging in anticompetitive conduct. In the 2018 Order, the Commission specifically noted that this was a necessary logical justification for its previous order, observing that: “The premise of Title II and other public utility regulation is that ISPs can exercise market power sufficient to substantially distort economic efficiency and harm end users.”[136]
In the 2015 Order, the Commission acknowledged that “[c]ommitment to robust competition and open networks defined Commission policy at the outset of the digital revolution,”[137] and that “[t]he principles of open access, competition, and consumer choice embodied in Carterfone and the Computer Inquires have continued to guide Commission policy in the Internet era[.]”[138] Likewise, the Commission explicitly acknowledged in the 2015 Order that its asserted authority under Section 706 was based, at least in part, on a mandate to promote competition.[139] Most tellingly, in a section titled “Competitive Effects,” the Commission noted that:
As the Commission has found previously, broadband providers have incentives to interfere with and disadvantage the operation of third-party Internet-based services that compete with the providers’ own services. Practices that have anti-competitive effects in the market for applications, services, content, or devices would likely unreasonably interfere with or unreasonably disadvantage edge providers’ ability to reach consumers in ways that would have a dampening effect on innovation, interrupting the virtuous cycle. As such, these anticompetitive practices are likely to harm consumers’ and edge providers’ ability to use broadband Internet access service to reach one another . . . .[140]
Thus, as the Commission itself acknowledged in the 2015 Order, competition—and, by implication, anticompetitive behavior of ISPs—is one of the core concerns that drove development of internet policy. Indeed, in the present NPRM, much of the feared harms mentioned are largely derived from vertical foreclosure theory. Namely, they stem from the classic antitrust concern that dominant firms in a vertical supply chain may foreclose competitors from access to consumers, or extract supracompetitive prices from input providers.[141] For example, the NPRM declares that:
[W]e also propose to reinstate rules that prohibit ISPs from blocking or throttling the information transmitted over their networks or engaging in paid or affiliated prioritization arrangements. Additionally, we propose to reinstate a general conduct standard that would prohibit practices that cause unreasonable interference or unreasonable disadvantage to consumers or edge providers.[142]
These instances of potential ISP misconduct raise straightforward antitrust concerns with vertical conduct, squarely within the purview of antitrust law.[143] Importantly, antitrust enforcers and courts—following antitrust economists—assess these vertical restraints under the rule of reason, avoiding their presumptive condemnation because they only rarely result in actual anticompetitive harm.[144]
Under this approach, the effects of potentially harmful conduct are typically evaluated and weighed against the various aims that competition law seeks to promote; only following that review is it determined whether particular conduct is harmful and, if so, whether there are procompetitive benefits that outweigh the harm.
In fact, only a few types of conduct are presumptively condemned, and then only when experience has demonstrated that they are more-often-than-not harmful.[145] Vertical restraints are never evaluated under this per se standard.[146] With such a competition framework for assessing conduct that might threaten “Internet openness,” the Commission would be well-positioned to detect and remedy harmful conduct.
One of the longstanding policies available to protect consumers is the Commission’s transparency rule. The existing transparency rule, as upheld by the D.C. Circuit in Verizon v. FCC, mandates that broadband internet-access service providers disclose network-management practices, performance, and commercial terms.[147] This rule, applicable to both fixed and mobile providers, is integral for enabling consumers and edge providers to make informed choices. This rule has, in one form or another, been operational since 2010, and has served as a valuable consumer-protection measure.
The Commission is, however, considering extending this rule in a number of ways. It’s important to keep in mind that no policy extended indefinitely presents an unalloyed good: even transparency requirements, taken too far, can bring more costs than benefits.[148] For example, the proposed enhancements include more tailored disclosures to various stakeholders—including consumers, edge providers, and the FCC[149]—that, despite best intentions, may impose significant costs in the form of compliance burdens on ISPs, while doing little if anything to inform consumers meaningfully.
Additionally, a rule change that leads to the publication of information like pricing will functionally resemble a de facto tariff system. Tariffing, however, is a core component of common carriage.[150] Thus, if the Commission opts not to reclassify under Title II, imposition of such a de facto tariff could be a violation of Section 706. Moreover, regulatory pressure to report pricing in uniform ways could lead to uniform pricing, which, though benign-sounding, could lead to downstream changes in service level and pricing that do not ultimately increase consumer welfare.
For example, although at times difficult to follow, internet-service pricing that is designed around discounts and incentives could be used to benefit economically vulnerable consumers and attract or retain them through a form of price discrimination. If, however, rates converge on a uniform schedule, it is possible that these forms of discounts and incentives will disappear, and that pricing will reflect a mean that is more difficult for lower-income consumers. This possibility has increased substantially with the FCC’s recently adopted digital-discrimination rules, which explicitly subject pricing, discounts, incentives and other terms and conditions to scrutiny and enforcement under the rules.[151] Thus, even in the absence of Title II regulation, the proposed reporting requirements can work hand-in-hand with the digital-discrimination rules to regulate rates in the direction of uniform pricing across providers, thereby limiting the scope of competition for broadband services.
Further, the utility of certain disclosures, such as those related to network congestion, is also questionable. The Commission opted to forego requiring disclosures related to network performance in the 2015 Order.[152] The Commission should continue in this manner, as such requirements are even less useful today than they were in 2015. With the availability of speed-test applications, consumers already possess tools to assess the performance of their ISP, casting doubt on the additional value of mandatory congestion disclosures.
In the NPRM, the FCC asks whether and how the major questions doctrine (MQD) should inform its conclusions on the text and structure of the Communications Act.[153] With the FCC yet again seeking to reclassify broadband, it is worth noting that, since courts have consistently found the Communications Act is ambiguous as to the proper classification of broadband, there are reasons to doubt whether courts would allow this Title II reclassification as compatible with the MQD.
The MQD, as developed by the Supreme Court, stands for the proposition that agencies will not receive deference while interpreting ambiguous statutory language of “vast economic and political significance.”[154] The MQD requires that Congress give an agency clear congressional authorization to act in such cases. In other words, an ambiguous grant of authority is not enough.
In three recent cases, the Supreme Court has struck down major agency actions due to reliance on ambiguous statutory provisions.
In Ala. Ass’n of Realtors v. Dep’t of Health & Human Servs.,[155] the Court rejected the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) attempt to impose a moratorium upon residential evictions due to COVID-19. The Court emphasized that “[e]ven if the text were ambiguous, the sheer scope of the CDC’s claimed authority… would counsel against the Government’s interpretation.”[156] Instead, the Court required “Congress to speak clearly when authorizing an agency to exercise powers of ‘vast economic and political significance.’”[157] The Court was concerned that the government’s reading of the statute would give them “a breathtaking amount of authority” with virtually “no limit… beyond the requirement that CDC deem a measure ‘necessary.’”[158]
In NFIB v. Dep’t of Labor,[159] the Court found the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) could not pass a vaccine mandate for workplaces. Quoting Realtors, the Court noted that Congress must “speak clearly when authorizing and agency to exercise powers of vast economic and political significance.”[160] Since the vaccine mandate was “a significant encroachment into the lives—and health—of a vast number of employees,” it had vast economic and political significance.[161] Therefore, since the statute did not “plainly authorize[] the Secretary’s mandate,” OSHA’s rule was unlawful.[162] The Court found the MQD was important, because it limited agencies’ ability to “exploit some gap, ambiguity, or doubtful expression in Congress’s statutes to assume responsibilities far beyond its initial assignment.”[163]
In West Virginia v. EPA,[164] the Court considered a rulemaking by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on emission limits for power plants. After reviewing the caselaw back to Brown & Williamson through Gonzalez, UARG, Burwell, Realtors, and NFIB,[165] the Court concluded that there was an “identifiable body of law that has developed over a series of significant cases all addressing a particular and recurring problem: agencies asserting highly consequential power beyond what Congress could reasonably be understood to have granted.”[166] The Court found it was clearly a major question, because the EPA had changed a longstanding practice in how it operated under the statute by expanding its power to “unprecedented” levels through a little-used statutory grant of authority.[167] This is despite the fact the agency had asked Congress for increased authority to do exactly what it decided to do under this provision.[168] Since there was no “clear Congressional authorization” for such a rule, the Court struck it down under the MQD.[169]
In sum, the MQD is now recognized by the Supreme Court as an important limit on agency action. If the statutory authority relied upon by the agency is ambiguous and the agency action is of vast economic and political significance, then courts will find the agency action unlawful on grounds that it exceeds the authority granted by Congress. As the Court put it in NFIB:
Why does the major questions doctrine matter? It ensures that the national government’s power to make the laws that govern us remains where Article I of the Constitution says it belongs—with the people’s elected representatives. If administrative agencies seek to regulate the daily lives and liberties of millions of Americans, the doctrine says, they must at least be able to trace that power to a clear grant of authority from Congress.[170]
Here, reclassification of broadband as a Title II telecommunications service would clearly be an exercise of powers of vast economic and political significance. Broadband providers have invested billions of dollars annually into building out reliable high-speed networks throughout the country, serving hundreds of millions of consumers.[171] On top of that, both federal and state governments have supported this continued buildout through subsidies.[172] The NPRM, which closely mirrors the rules from the 2015 Order, would further affect the expected returns on investment from both broadband providers and policymakers.[173] As then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh put it when considering the 2015 OIO, the “FCC’s net neutrality rule is a major rule for the purposes of The Supreme Court’s major rules doctrine. Indeed, I believe that proposition is indisputable.”[174]
It is worth noting that, much like the agency actions in Realtor and NFIB, the scope of authority claimed by the FCC through reclassification is staggering, allowing the Commission to regulate nearly the entire internet infrastructure through Title II’s expansive regulatory provisions. And as in West Virginia, Congress has considered and rejected net-neutrality legislation that would give the FCC clear authority to impose such rules.
Moreover, the NPRM’s attempt, much like the 2015 Order, to nominally minimize the reach of its claimed authority under Title II through forbearance amounts to rewriting the act to make it more palatable, including by forbearing from rate regulation or network-unbundling requirements. [175] This is very similar to the attempted “tailoring” by the EPA that the Court rejected in Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA.[176] There, the Tailoring Rule was an attempt to make it such that small entities with the potential to emit greenhouse gasses would not be subject to lawsuits that the act would allow.[177] The Court rejected this attempt to rewrite the statute, concluding that an agency “has no power to ‘tailor’ legislation to bureaucratic policy goals by rewriting unambiguous statutory terms.”[178] Much like the EPA in UARG, the FCC’s “need to rewrite clear provisions of the statute should have alerted” them “that it had taken a wrong interpretive turn.”[179]
Moreover, the ability to forbear under Title II also gives the FCC the ability to stop forbearing once Title II reclassification is made. Thus, the decision to reclassify will have huge economic and political implications, as the public and those regulated will have to pay special attention to the forbearance and possible un-forbearance of the FCC’s decisions going forward.
The concurrence from D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judges Sri Srinivasan and David Tatel in US Telecom did not dispute that the rule had vast economic and political significance. The concurrence instead focused on the implications of the Supreme Court’s opinion in National Cable and Telecommn’cs Ass’n v. Brand X Internet Serv., 545 US. 967 (2005).[180] The concurrence concluded essentially that Brand X settled the question by finding the FCC had the authority to make the classification decision.[181]
The problem with this, however, is that the Brand X decision just found that the Communications Act is ambiguous as to whether broadband is a “telecommunications service.”[182] In Brand X, the late Justice Antonin Scalia made the argument in his dissent that the Communications Act defined telecommunications service in a way that unambiguously applied to cable-modem service.[183] If this was the Court’s opinion, then there would be a strong argument that it is settled law that Congress spoke clearly to the issue. But it wasn’t. The majority rejected Justice Scalia’s arguments and found the definition ambiguous. In other words, Brand X did not foreclose a challenge under the MQD.
On the contrary, Brand X, as well as the D.C. Circuit’s decision upholding the 2015 Order[184] and the 2018 Order,[185] all stand for the proposition that the classification of broadband service under the Communications Act is ambiguous. Here, this means that the second part of the MQD, whether Congress clearly spoke to the issue, is a clear no.
To sum up, 1) the MQD is now clearly recognized doctrine by the Supreme Court; 2) the decision to apply Title II to broadband services is a decision of “vast economic and political significance”; and 3) Brand X (and its progeny) stands for the proposition that Congress has not unambiguously spoken to whether broadband service is a telecommunications service under the Communications Act. Therefore, the decision to reclassify broadband service again will likely fail under the MQD.
[1] Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, Safeguarding and Securing the Open Internet, WC Docket No. 23-320 (Sep. 28, 2023) [hereinafter “NPRM”] at ¶ 1.
[2] Brendan Carr, Dissenting Statement of Commissioner Brendan Carr, Safeguarding and Securing the Open Internet, WC Docket No. 23-320, Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (Oct. 19, 2023), available at https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-23-83A3.pdf (“In other words, utility-style regulation of the Internet was never about improving your online experience—that was just the sheep’s clothing. It was always about government control.”).
[3] Report and Order on Remand, Declaratory Ruling, and Order, In the Matter of Protecting and Promoting the Open Internet, GN Docket No. 14-28 (Mar. 15, 2015) [hereinafter “2015 Order”].
[4] Id.
[5] Id.
[6] Id. at ¶ 3.
[7] See, e.g., Anna-Maria Kovacs, U.S. Broadband Networks Rise to the Challenge of Surging Traffic During the Pandemic, Georgetown University (Jun. 2020), https://georgetown.app.box.com/s/8e76udzd1ic0pyg42fqsc96r1yzkz1jf. See also European Commission, Digital Solutions During the Pandemic (Sep. 2023), https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/coronavirus-response/digital-solutions-during-pandemic_en (“To prevent network congestion and to support the enjoyment of digital services, the?European Commission called upon?telecom operators and users to take action and met with the CEOs of the streaming platforms. The streaming platforms were encouraged to offer standard rather than high-definition content, telecom operators were recommended to adopt mitigating measures for continued traffic, and users were advised to apply settings to reduce data consumption, including the use of Wi-Fi.”)
[8] See Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Pub. L. No. 117-58, § 60506 (2021) (Digital Discrimination) [hereinafter “IIJA”].
[9] See Brendan Carr, supra, note 2 (“Congress has already empowered Executive Branch agencies with national security expertise, including the DOJ, DHS, and Treasury, with the lead when it comes to security issues in the communications sector.”)
[10] See, e.g., 2022 Broadband Capex Report, USTelecom (Sep. 8, 2023), https://ustelecom.org/research/2022-broadband-capex (“America’s broadband industry invested a record $102.4 billion in U.S. communications infrastructure in 2022, reflecting broadband providers’ determination to help achieve the national objective of affordable, reliable high-speed connectivity for all. The annual figure represents a 21-year high for investment from the communications sector and a 19% year-over-year increase.”).
[11] US Telecom v. FCC, 855 F.3d 381, 422 (D.C. Cir. 2016) (Kavanaugh, J., dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc).
[12] Cf. National Cable and Telecommn’cs Ass’n v. Brand X Internet Serv., 545 US. 967 (2005); US Telecom v. FCC, 825 F.3d 674 (D.C. Cir. 2016).; Mozilla Corp v. FCC, 940 F.3d 1 (D.C. Cir. 2019).
[13] NPRM at ¶ 3.
[14] Id. at ¶ 116.
[15] Id. at ¶ 122.
[16] See, for example, Bauner & Espin, infra note 116 (regarding throttling, concluding “incentives for such discrimination are not as strong as feared.”)
[17] NPRM at ¶ 17.
[18] See Paul Krugman & Robin Wells, Economics 389 (4th ed. 2015) (“So the natural monopolist has increasing returns to scale over the entire range of output for which any firm would want to remain in the industry—the range of output at which the firm would at least break even in the long run. The source of this condition is large fixed costs: when large fixed costs are required to operate, a given quantity of output is produced at lower average total cost by one large firm than by two or more smaller firms.”)
[19] Id. (“The most visible natural monopolies in the modern economy are local utilities—water, gas, and sometimes electricity. As we’ll see, natural monopolies pose a special challenge to public policy.”)
[20] See Richard H. K. Vietor, Contrived Competition 167 (1994) (“[I]n the early part of the twentieth century, American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) set itself the goal of providing universal telephone services through an end-to-end national monopoly. … By [the 1960s], however, the distortions of regulatory cross-subsidy had diverged too far from the economics of technological change.”); see also Thomas W. Hazlett, Cable TV Franchises as Barriers to Video Competition, 2 Va. J.L. & Tech. 1, 1 (2007) (“Traditionally, municipal cable TV franchises were advanced as consumer protection to counter “natural monopoly” video providers. … Now, marketplace changes render even this weak traditional case moot. … [V]ideo rivalry has proven viable, with inter-modal competition from satellite TV and local exchange carriers (LECs) offering “triple play” services.”)
[21] See id. at 59-73.
[22] Share of United States Households Using Specific Technologies, Our World in Data (n.d.), https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/technology-adoption-by-households-in-the-united-states.
[23] Id. (showing household usage of landlines and mobile phones in 2018 at 42.7% and 95%, respectively).
[24] Edward Carlson, Cutting the Cord: NTIA Data Show Shift to Streaming Video as Consumers Drop Pay-TV, NTIA (2019), https://www.ntia.gov/blog/2019/cutting-cord-ntia-data-show-shift-streaming-video-consumers-drop-pay-tv.
[25] Karl Bode, A New Low: Just 46% Of U.S. Households Subscribe to Traditional Cable TV, TechDirt (Sep. 18, 2023), https://www.techdirt.com/2023/09/18/a-new-low-just-46-of-u-s-households-subscribe-to-traditional-cable-tv. See also Shira Ovide, Cable TV Is the New Landline, N.Y. Times (Jan. 6, 2022), https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/06/technology/cable-tv.html.
[26] See Stephen Breyer, Regulation and Its Reform 195 (1982).
[27] NPRM at ¶ 127.
[28] Id.
[29] Id.
[30] Id.
[31] See, e.g., Karl Bode, Colorado Eyes Killing State Law Prohibiting Community Broadband Networks, TechDirt (Mar. 30, 2023), https://www.techdirt.com/2023/03/30/colorado-eyes-killing-state-law-prohibiting-community-broadband-networks (Local broadband monopolies are a “widespread market failure that’s left Americans paying an arm and a leg for what’s often spotty, substandard broadband access.”).
[32] FCC Chair Rosenworcel on Reinstating Net Neutrality Rules, C-Span (Sep. 25, 2023), https://www.c-span.org/video/?530731-1/fcc-chair-rosenworcel-reinstating-net-neutrality-rules (“Only one-fifth of the country has more than two choices at [100 Mbps download] speed. So, if your broadband provider mucks up your traffic, messes around with your ability to go where you want and do what you want online, you can’t just pick up and take your business to another provider. That provider may be the only game in town.”).
[33] See FCC, 2015 Broadband Progress Report (2015), https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/broadband-progressreports/2015-broadband-progress-report (Upgrading the standard speed from 4/1 Mbps to 25/3 Mbps). In November 2023, FCC Chair Rosenworcel announced a notice of inquiry seeking input on a proposal to raise the minimum connection-speed benchmark to 100/20 Mbps, with a goal of having a benchmark of 1000/500 Mbps by the year 2030; See also, Eric Fruits, Gotta Go Fast: Sonic the Hedgehog Meets the FCC, Truth on the Market (Nov. 3, 2023), https://truthonthemarket.com/2023/11/03/gotta-go-fast-sonic-the-hedgehog-meets-the-fcc.
[34] See IIJA at § 60102 (a)(1)(A). See also Jake Varn, What Makes a Community “Unserved” or “Underserved” by Broadband?, Pew Charitable Trusts (May 3, 2023), available at https://www.pewtrusts.org/-/media/assets/2023/06/un–and-underserved-definitions-ta-memo-pdf.pdf.
[35] See IIJA at § 60102(a)(1)(C)(II)(i).
[36] Mike Conlow, New FCC Broadband Map, Version 3, Mike’s Newsletter (Nov. 20, 2023), https://mikeconlow.substack.com/p/new-fcc-broadband-map-version-3.
[37] FCC, Fixed Broadband Deployment (Jun. 2021), https://broadband477map.fcc.gov/#/area-summary?version=jun2021&type=nation&geoid=0&tech=acfw&speed=25_3&vlat=27.480205324799257&vlon=-41.52925368904516&vzoom=5.127403622197149.
[38] FCC, 2019 Broadband Deployment Report, GN Docket No. 18-238, FCC 19-44 (May 29, 2019), at Fig, 4, available at https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-19-44A1.pdf.
[39] FCC, 2022 Communications Marketplace Report, GN Docket No. 22-203 (Dec. 30, 2022), at Fig. II.A.28, https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-22-103A1.pdf.
[40] Report and Order on Remand, Declaratory Ruling, and Order, In the Matter of Restoring Internet Freedom WC Docket No. 17-108 (Jan. 4, 2018) [hereinafter “2018 Order”]
[41] Why Is the Internet More Expensive in the USA Than in Other Countries?, Community Tech Network (Feb. 2, 2023), https://communitytechnetwork.org/blog/why-is-the-internet-more-expensive-in-the-usa-than-in-other-countries.
[42] This is qualitatively consistent with the FCC’s finding that United States has the seventh-lowest prices per-gigabit of data consumption. FCC, 2022 Communications Marketplace Report (Appendix G), GN Docket No. 22-103 (Dec. 30, 2022), at 69 (Fig. 41 Fixed Broadband Price Indexes), available at https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-22-103A5.pdf.
[43] Speedtest, Median Country Speeds Oct. 2023, Speedtest Global Index (last accessed Dec. 11, 2023), https://www.speedtest.net/global-index.
[44] See Eric Fruits & Kristian Stout, The Income Conundrum: Intent and Effects Analysis of Digital Discrimination, Int’l Ctr. for L. & Econ. (Nov. 14, 2022), available at https://laweconcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/The-Income-Conundrum-Intent-and-Effects-Analysis-of-Digital-Discrimination.pdf; see also Giuseppe Colangelo, Regulatory Myopia and the Fair Share of Network Costs: Learning from Net Neutrality’s Mistakes, Int’l Ctr. for L. & Econ. (May 18, 2023), https://laweconcenter.org/resources/regulatory-myopia-and-the-fair-share-of-network-costs-learning-from-net-neutralitys-mistakes.
[45] Id.
[46] Arthur Menko, 2023 Broadband Pricing Index, Business Planning Inc., (Oct. 2023), available at https://ustelecom.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/USTelecom-2023-BPI-Report-final.pdf.
[47] U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Producer Price Index by Commodity: Telecommunication, Cable, and Internet User Services: Residential Internet Access Services [WPU374102], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (Aug. 29, 2023), https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WPU374102.
[48] Speedtest, United States Median Country Speeds July 2023, Speedtest Global Index (2023), https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states. Prior years retrieved from Internet Archive. See also Camryn Smith, The Average Internet Speed in the U.S. Has Increased by Over 100 Mbps since 2017, AllConnect (Aug. 4, 2023), https://www.allconnect.com/blog/internet-speeds-over-time (average download speed in the United States was 30.7 Mbps in 2017 and 138.9 Mbps in the first half of 2023).
[49] U.S. Census Bureau, 2021 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates, Table Id. S2801 (2021); U.S. Census Bureau, ACS 1-Year Estimates Public Use Microdata Sample 2021, Access to the Internet (ACCESSINET) (2021).
[50] Andrew Perrin, Mobile Technology and Home Broadband 2021, Pew Research Center (Jun. 3, 2021), https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/06/03/mobile-technology-and-home-broadband-2021.
[51] Id. U.S. Census Bureau, 2021 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates, Table Id. S2801 (2021); U.S. Census Bureau, ACS 1-Year Estimates Public Use Microdata Sample 2021, Access to the Internet (ACCESSINET) (2021).
[52] NPRM at ¶123 (emphasis added).
[53] See Edward Chamberlin, The Theory of Monopolistic Competition (1933) (arguing that even if a competitor’s service is not a perfect substitute, it can still exert competitive pressure by appealing to different segments of the market with different preferences.). See also William J. Baumol, Contestable Markets: An Uprising in the Theory of Industry Structure, 72 Am. Econ. Rev. (1982) (arguing that even if a new entrant’s product is not a perfect substitute for the incumbent’s product, it can still exert competitive pressure by threatening to enter the market and erode the incumbent’s market share.)
[54] See Dan Heming, Starlink No Longer Has a Waitlist for Standard Service, and 10 MPH Speed Enforcement Update, Mobile Internet Resource Center (Oct. 3, 3023), https://www.rvmobileinternet.com/starlink-no-longer-has-a-waitlist-for-standard-service-and-10-mph-speed-enforcement-update.
[55] See Starlink Specifications, Starlink (last accessed Dec. 12, 2023), https://www.starlink.com/legal/documents/DOC-1400-28829-70.
[56] See Amazon Staff, Amazon Shares an Update on How Project Kuiper’s Test Satellites are Performing, Amazon (Oct. 16, 2023), https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/innovation-at-amazon/amazon-project-kuiper-test-satellites-space-launch-october-2023-update.
[57] See Kuiper Service to Start by End of 2024: Amazon, Communications Daily (Oct. 12, 2023), https://communicationsdaily.com/news/2023/10/12/Kuiper-Service-to-Start-by-End-of-2024-Amazon-2310110007.
[58] John Fletcher, The History of US Broadband, S&P Global Market Intelligence (May 23,2023), https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/research/the-history-of-us-broadband. The report also notes, “While fixed wireless similarly had trouble breaking above 2 million subscribers for years, its recent surge, driven by T-Mobile US Inc. and Verizon, helped it surpass 6 million last year.” Id.
[59] See Andre Boik, The Economics of Universal Service: An Analysis of Entry Subsidies for High Speed Broadband, 40 Info. Econ. & Pol’y 13 (2017).
[60] Gregory Rosston & Scott Wallsten, Should Satellite Broadband Be Included in Universal Service Subsidy Programs?, 6 J. L. & Innovation 135 (2023).
[61] See Drew FitzGerald, After More Than Four Years, Has 5G Lived Up to Expectations?, Wall St. J. (Oct. 14, 2023), https://www.wsj.com/business/telecom/how-5g-changed-world-752b13ee.
[62] See Robert Wyrzykowski, 5G Experience Report, OpenSignal (Jul. 2023), https://www.opensignal.com/reports/2023/07/usa/mobile-network-experience-5g; Petroc Taylor, Average 5G and Overall Download Speed by Provider in the United States in 2023 (in Mbps), Statista (Jul. 11, 2023), https://www.statista.com/statistics/818204/4g-3g-and-overall-download-speed-in-the-united-states-by-provider.
[63] See Robin Layton, Everything You Need to Know About Internet Speeds, AllConnect (Aug. 9, 2023), https://www.allconnect.com/blog/consumers-guide-to-internet-speed.
[64] See FCC, 2015 Broadband Progress Report (2015), https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/broadband-progressreports/2015-broadband-progress-report (upgrading the standard speed from 4/1 Mbps to 25/3 Mbps). In November 2023, FCC Chair Rosenworcel week announced a notice of inquiry seeking input on a proposal to raise the minimum connection-speed benchmark to 100/20 Mbps, with a goal of having a benchmark of 1000/500 Mbps by the year 2030; See Eric Fruits, Gotta Go Fast: Sonic the Hedgehog Meets the FCC, Truth on the Market (Nov. 3, 2023), https://truthonthemarket.com/2023/11/03/gotta-go-fast-sonic-the-hedgehog-meets-the-fcc.
[65] Reiner Ludwig, Who Cares About Latency in 5G?, Ericsson Blog (Aug. 16, 2022), https://www.ericsson.com/en/blog/2022/8/who-cares-about-latency-in-5g.
[66] FCC, Measuring Fixed Broadband—Eleventh Report (Dec. 31, 2021), https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/measuring-broadband-america/measuring-fixed-broadband-eleventh-report.
[67] See, Eli Blumenthal, Verizon’s 5G Speeds Are About to Get Faster, Ahead of Schedule, CNET (Aug. 14, 2023), https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/verizons-5g-speeds-are-about-to-get-faster-ahead-of-schedule.
[68] Hal Singer & Augustus Urschel, Competitive Effects of Fixed Wireless Access on Wireline Broadband Technologies, Econ One (Jun. 2023), available at https://api.ctia.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Competitive-Effects-of-Fixed-Wireless-Access-on-Wireline-Broadband-Technologies-FINAL.pdf.
[69] NPRM at ¶129.
[70] This section is adapted from Geoffrey A. Manne, Kristian Stout & Ben Sperry, A Dynamic Analysis of Broadband Competition: What Concentration Numbers Fail to Capture, at 26-30, Int. Ctr. for L. & Econ. (Jun. 3, 2021), available at https://laweconcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/A-Dynamic-Analysis-of-Broadband-Competition.pdf.
[71] See J. Gregory Sidak & David J. Teece, Dynamic Competition in Antitrust Law, 5 J. Competition L. & Econ. 581, 614 (2009).
[72] C.f. id. at 585 (“Indeed, it is common to find a debate about innovation policy among economists collapsing into a rather narrow discussion of the relative virtues of competition and monopoly, as if they were the main determinants of innovation. Clearly, much more is at work.”).
[73] Harold Demsetz, Why Regulate Utilities?, 11 J. L. & Econ. 55, 55 (1968).
[74] See id.
[75] See Sidak & Teece, Dynamic Competition, supra note 71.
[76] See, e.g., Thomas M. Jorde & David J. Teece, Competing Through Innovation: Implications for Market Definition, 64 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 741, 742 (1988) (“Moreover, in markets characterized by rapid technological progress, competition often takes place on the basis of performance features and not price.”); David S. Evans & Richard Schmalensee, Some Economic Aspects of Antitrust Analysis in Dynamically Competitive Industries, in 2 Innovation Policy and The Economy 1, 3 (Adam B. Jaffe, et al., eds. 2002) (“The defining feature of new-economy industries is a competitive process dominated by efforts to create intellectual property through R&D, which often results in rapid and disruptive technological change.”).
[77] See generally William J. Baumol, John C. Panzar & Robert D. Willig, Contestable Markets and the Theory of Industry Structure (1982).
[78] Sidak & Teece, Dynamic Competition, supra note 71, at 585, 604.
[79] For a discussion of this principle and how it applies to broadband markets, see T. Randolph Beard, George S. Ford, Lawrence J. Spiwak, & Michael Stern, The Law and Economics of Municipal Broadband, 73 Fed. Comm’cns L.J. 1 (2020) [hereinafter, “Beard, Ford, Spiwak & Stern”].
[80] See Rabah Amir, Market Structure, Scale Economies and Industry Performance, CORE Discussion Paper No. 2003/65 (Sep. 1, 2003), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=995721.
[81] See Demsetz, Why Regulate Utilities?, supra note 73; see also Sharat Ganapati, Growing Oligopolies, Prices, Output, and Productivity, Census Working Paper CES-WP-18-48 (Jan. 20, 2020), available at https://www.sganapati.com/files/Ganapati_2019_OligopoliesPricesQuantities_AEJmicro.pdf (noting that increased concentration results from a beneficial growth in firm size in productive industries that “expand real output and hold down prices, raising consumer welfare, while maintaining or reducing their workforces, lowering labor’s share of output.”)
[82] See generally J. Gregory Sidak & David J. Teece, Innovation Spillovers and The “Dirt Road” Fallacy: The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Banning Optional Transactions for Enhanced Delivery Over the Internet, 6 J. Comp. L. Econ. 521, 540 (2010) (Discussing the broad array of factors that must be taken into account in a dynamic analysis of the Internet and broadband service).
[83] Michelle Connolly & James E. Prieger, A Basic Analysis of Entry and Exit in the US Broadband Market, 2005-2008, Pepperdine University School of Public Policy Working Paper No. 42 (2013) at 4, https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/sppworkingpapers/42 (published as Michelle Connolly & James E. Prieger, A Basic Analysis of Entry and Exit in the US Broadband Market, 2005-2008, 12 Rev. Network Econ. 229 (2013)).
[84] See generally Nicolai J. Foss & Peter G. Klein, Organizing Entrepreneurial Judgment (2012).
[85] See, e.g., Sidak & Teece, Dynamic Competition, supra note 71, at 615.
[86] Menko, supra note 46.
[87] See Daniel A. Lyons, Innovations in Mobile Broadband Pricing 3-4, Mercatus Center Working Paper No. 14-08 (Mar. 2014), available at https://www.mercatus.org/research/working-papers/innovations-mobile-broadband-pricing.
[88] Id.
[89] AT&T, Sponsored Data from AT&T (last accessed Dec. 12, 2023), https://www.att.com/att/sponsoreddata/en.
[90] T-Mobile, Unlimited Video Streaming with Binge On (last accessed Dec. 12, 2023), https://www.t-mobile.com/tv-streaming/binge-on.
[91] J. Gregory Sidak & David J. Teece, supra, note 82, at 532-33.
[92] See infra Section III.A.
[93] See, e.g., Herbert Hovenkamp, The Rule of Reason, 70 Fla. L. R. 81 (2018) (“Vertical restraints should be found unlawful only when they facilitate an output reduction that serves to increase prices in relation to costs. To that extent, every anticompetitive vertical restrain must contain at least an implicit horizontal element, whether it be collusion or exclusion. The vast majority of purely vertical agreements pose no such threat. These conclusions are largely borne out by the case law. Once the rule of reason is applied to a vertical practice, few instances of it are condemned.”)
[94] NPRM at ¶ 56.
[95] Id.
[96] Id.
[97] ICLE, Comments on Refreshing the Record in Restoring Internet Freedom and Lifeline Proceedings in Light of the D.C. Circuit’s Mozilla Decision, WC Docket Nos. 17-108, 17-287, 11-42 (Apr. 20, 2020), at 9, available at https://laweconcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/icle_rifo_record_refresh_comments_final-20200420.pdf (“But the widely different regulatory philosophies underlying the Orders—that of the RIFO’s light-touch regulation under Title I compared to the OIO’s more interventionist regulation based on the uncertain whims of a changing political environment under Title II—strongly suggests different levels of regulatory certainty. And it is virtually inevitable that the greater regime uncertainty under Title II would contribute to a reduction in investment and/or its less efficient and effectively deployment. Such an effect is likely more attenuated than the acute, immediate response many seem to be looking for. But it may be no less real and no less important.”)
[98] Brendan Carr, Dissenting Statement of Commissioner Brendan Carr, Implementing the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act: Prevention and Elimination of Digital Discrimination, GN Docket No. 22-69, Report and Order and Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (Nov. 15, 2023), https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-23-100A3.pdf (Regarding digital discrimination rules, “The FCC reserves the right under this plan to regulate both ‘actions and omissions, whether recurring or a single instance.’ In other words, if you take any action, you may be liable, and if you do nothing, you may be liable. There is no path to complying with this standardless regime.”)
[99] See Edwin J. Elton & Martin J. Gruber, Modern Portfolio Theory and Investment Analysis (4th ed, 1991).
[100] Wolfgang Briglauer, Carlo Cambini, Klaus Gugler, & Volker Stocker, Net Neutrality and High-Speed Broadband Networks: Evidence from OECD Countries, 55 Eur. J. Law Econ. 533–571 (2023).
[101] Roslyn Layton & Mark Jamison, Net Neutrality in the USA During COVID-19, in Beyond the Pandemic? Exploring the Impact of COVID-19 on Telecommunications and the Internet, (Jason Whalley, Volker Stocker & William Lehr eds., 2023).
[102] NPRM at ¶ 56.
[103] NPRM at ¶ 157.
[104] FCC, Fact Sheet: FCC Chairwoman Rosenworcel Proposes to Restore Net Neutrality Rules (Sep. 26, 2023), available at https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-397235A1.pdf.
[105] Rich Greenfield, Adding “Fast Lanes” Does Not Require Harming the Internet, Vox (May 14, 2014), https://www.vox.com/2014/5/14/11626812/adding-fast-lanes-does-not-require-harming-the-internet.
[106] Id.
[107] Catie Keck, A Look Under the Hood of the Most Successful Streaming Service on the Planet, The Verge (Nov. 17, 2021), https://www.theverge.com/22787426/netflix-cdn-open-connect.
[108] ICLE Comments., supra note 97 at 3-8. See also J. Gregory Sidak & David J. Teece, supra, note 82 at 533 (“Superior [quality of service] is a form of product differentiation, and it therefore increases welfare by increasing the production choices available to content and applications providers and the consumption choices available to end users. Finally, as in other two-sided platforms, optional business-to-business transactions for [quality of service] will allow broadband network operators to reduce subscription prices for broadband end users, promoting broadband adoption by end users, which will increase the value of the platform for all users.”).
[109] Axel Gautier & Robert Somogyi, Prioritization vs Zero-Rating: Discrimination on the Internet, 73 Int’l. J Ind. Org. 102662 (Dec. 2020).
[110] NPRM at ¶ 153.
[111] Id.
[112] Id. at ¶ 155.
[113] See Nilay Patel, Taylor Swift Fans Used Record Amounts of Data during the Eras Tour in North America, The Verge (Nov. 16, 2023), https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/16/23949041/taylor-swift-eras-tour-mobile-data-usage-att.
[114] Sandvine, Sandvine’s 2023 Global Internet Phenomena Report Shows 24% Jump in Video Traffic, with Netflix Volume Overtaking YouTube (Jan. 17, 2023), https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sandvines-2023-global-internet-phenomena-report-shows-24-jump-in-video-traffic-with-netflix-volume-overtaking-youtube-301723445.html.
[115] Daeho Lee & Junseok Hwang, Network Neutrality and Difference in Efficiency Among Internet Application Service Providers: A Meta-Frontier Analysis, 35 Telecomm. Pol’y 764 (2011).
[116] Fangfan Li, Arian Akhavan Niaki, David Choffnes, Phillipa Gill, & Alan Mislove. A Large-Scale Analysis of Deployed Traffic Differentiation Practices, Association for Computing Machinery, Proceedings of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication, SIGCOMM ’19 (2019), https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3341302.3342092.
[117] Christoph Bauner & Augusto Espin, Do Subscribers of Mobile Networks Care About Data Throttling?, 47 Telecom. Pol’y 102665 (Nov. 2023).
[118] Id. (“[U]sers may actually benefit from a modest degree of throttling as this preserves bandwidth and thus aides network stability and reliability. In other words, even if users get harmed by the direct effect of throttling (slower data transmission), the positive indirect effect (more reliable network) may outweigh this issue, so that users may prefer the throttled network. If this is the case, it would pose an additional argument against net neutrality regulation.”)
[119] Id.
[120] Hyun Ji Lee & Brian Whitacre, Estimating Willingness-to-Pay for Broadband Attributes Among Low-Income Consumers: Results From Two FCC Lifeline Pilot Projects, 41 Telecomm. Pol’y. 769 (Oct. 2017).
[121] Johnny Kampis, Johnny Kampis: FCC Push To Eliminate Data Caps Could Increase Broadband Rates For Many Users, Broadband Breakfast (Sep. 28, 2023), https://broadbandbreakfast.com/2023/09/johnny-kampis-fcc-push-to-eliminate-data-caps-could-increase-broadband-rates-for-many-users.
[122] Peter Christiansen, Survey Finds Nearly Half of America Unaware of Internet Data Cap Limits, HighSpeedInternet.com (Feb. 25, 2021), https://www.highspeedinternet.com/resources/data-caps-survey.
[123] See Working Group on Economic Impacts of Open Internet Frameworks, Policy Issues in Data Caps and Usage-Based Pricing, Open Internet Advisory Committee (Jul. 9, 2013), available at https://transition.fcc.gov/cgb/oiac/Economic-Impacts.pdf.
[124] See id. at 14-16.
[125] 2015 Order at ¶¶ 151-153.
[126] Id.
[127] Guz Hurwitz, The Not Neutrality of Tech Reporting: Discussing the Economics of Lifting Data Caps During a Stay-at-Home Crisis, Truth on the Market (Mar. 20, 2020), https://truthonthemarket.com/2020/03/20/the-not-neutrality-of-tech-reporting-discussing-the-economics-of-lifting-data-caps-during-a-stay-at-home-crisis.
[128] Hyun Ji Lee & Brian Whitacre, Estimating Willingness-to-Pay for Broadband Attributes among Low-Income Consumers: Results from Two FCC Lifeline Pilot Projects, 41 Telecomm. Pol’y. 769 (2017).
[129] See Scott Jordan, A Critical Survey of the Literature on Broadband Data Caps, 41 Telecomm. Pol’y 813 (2017).
[130] NPRM at ¶ 137.
[131] 2015 Order at ¶¶ 78-101; see also In the Matter of Protecting & Promoting the Open Internet, Dissenting Statement of Commissioner Michael O’Rielly, 30 F.C.C. Rcd. 5601, 5987 (2015) (“Even after enduring three weeks of spin, it is hard for me to believe that the Commission is establishing an entire Title II/net neutrality regime to protect against hypothetical harms. There is not a shred of evidence that any aspect of this structure is necessary. The D.C. Circuit called the prior, scaled-down version a “prophylactic” approach. I call it guilt by imagination.”).
[132] 2018 Order at ¶¶ 109-139.
[133] 2018 Order at ¶ 143.
[134] Stephen G. Breyer, Antitrust, Deregulation, and the Newly Liberated Marketplace, 75 Cal. L. Rev. 1005, 1007 (1987).
[135] Id.
[136] 2018 Order at ¶ 123. See also Joshua D. Wright & Thomas W. Hazlett, The Effect of Regulation on Broadband Markets: Evaluating the Empirical Evidence in the FCC’s 2015 “Open Internet” Order, 50 Rev. Indus. Org. 487, 489 (2017) (Network neutrality rules address conduct that “[i]f undertaken for anti-competitive purpose and achieving anti-competitive effect, [] would be deemed vertical foreclosure in economics (or under antitrust law).”). See also 2015 Order at ¶ 79 & note 123 (discussing past instances of alleged ISP misconduct that amounted to “limit[ations on] openness,” all of which were cognizable under the antitrust laws).
[137] 2015 Order at ¶ 63.
[138] Id. at ¶ 64.
[139] Id. at ¶ 275.
[140] Id. at ¶ 140.
[141] See Patrick Rey & Jean Tirole, A Primer on Foreclosure, in III Handbook of Indus. Org. 2145 (Mark Armstrong & Rob Porter eds., 2007).
[142] NPRM at ¶ 23.
[143] See Rey & Tirole, A Primer on Foreclosure, supra note 140.
[144] See Francine Lafontaine & Margaret Slade, Vertical Integration and Firm Boundaries: The Evidence, 45 J. Econ. Lit. 629 (2007) (documenting the economic evidence showing that such vertical relationships are more likely to be competitively beneficial or benign than to raise serious threats of foreclosure).
[145] See Leegin Creative Leather Prods., Inc. v. PSKS, Inc., 551 U.S. 877, 886-87 (2007) (holding that the per se rule should be applied “only after courts have had considerable experience with the type of restraint at issue” and “only if courts can predict with confidence that [the restraint] would be invalidated in all or almost all instances under the rule of reason” because it “‘lack[s] . . . any redeeming virtue.’” (citation omitted)).
[146] See D. Daniel Sokol, The Transformation of Vertical Restraints: Per Se Illegality, the Rule of Reason, and Per Se Legality, 79 Antitrust L.J. 1003, 1004 (2014) (“[T]he shift in the antitrust rules applied to [vertical restraints] has not been from per se illegality to the rule of reason, but has been a more dramatic shift from per se illegality to presumptive legality under the rule of reason”).
[147] NPRM at ¶ 136 (“The Commission’s transparency rule requires ISPs to publicly disclose the network practices, performance characteristics, and commercial terms of the BIAS they offer, including disclosure of any blocking, throttling, and affiliated or paid prioritization practices.”).
[148] See, e.g. Geoffrey A. Manne, The Hydraulic Theory of Disclosure Regulation and Other Costs of Disclosure, 58 Ala. L. Rev. 473 (2007).
[149] NPRM at ¶¶ 172-175.
[150] 47 U.S.C. § 201(b).
[151] Eric Fruits, Everyone Discriminates Under the FCC’s Proposed New Rules, Truth on the Market (Oct. 30, 2023), https://truthonthemarket.com/2023/10/30/everyone-discriminates-under-the-fccs-proposed-new-rules.
[152] NPRM at ¶ 175.
[153] See NPRM at ¶¶ 80-83.
[154] King v. Burwell, 576 U.S. 473, 486 (2015) (quoting Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA, 573 U.S. 302, 324 (2014)).
[155] 141 S. Ct. 2485 (2021).
[156] Id. at 2489.
[157] Id.
[158] Id.
[159] 142 S. Ct. 661 (2022).
[160] Id. at 665.
[161] Id.
[162] Id.
[163] Id. at 669.
[164] 142 S. Ct. 2587 (2022).
[165] See id. at 2607-09.
[166] Id. at 2609.
[167] See id. at 2612.
[168] See id. at 2614.
[169] See id. at 2615-17.
[170] NFIB, 142 S. Ct. at 668.
[171] See, e.g., 2022 Broadband Capex Report, USTelecom (Sep. 8, 2023), https://ustelecom.org/research/2022-broadband-capex (“America’s broadband industry invested a record $102.4 billion in U.S. communications infrastructure in 2022, reflecting broadband providers’ determination to help achieve the national objective of affordable, reliable high-speed connectivity for all. The annual figure represents a 21-year high for investment from the communications sector and a 19% year-over-year increase.”).
[172] See NPRM at ¶ 1 (“Congress responded by investing tens of billions of dollars into building out broadband Internet networks and making access more affordable and equitable, culminating in the generational investment of $65 billion in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.”); 47 U.S.C. § 1701(1) (“[A]ccess to affordable, reliable, high-speed broadband is essential to full participation in modern life in the United States.”). See also 47 U.S.C. §§ 1722(1)(A)-(B) (“[A] broadband connection and digital literacy are increasingly critical to how individuals (A) participate in society, economy and civic institutions of the United States;” and “(B) access health care and essential services, obtain education, and build careers.”)
[173] See supra Part II.C.
[174] US Telecom v. FCC, 855 F.3d 381, 422 (D.C. Cir. 2016) (Kavanaugh, J., dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc).
[175] See NPRM at ¶¶ 103-113. See also FCC Fact Sheet, Safeguarding and Securing the Open Internet (Sept. 28, 2023) (“Propose to forbear from 26 Title II provisions, and clarify that the Commission will not regulate rates or require network unbundling.”).
[176] 573 US. 302, 328 (2014) (“We reaffirm the core administrative-law principle that an agency may not rewrite clear statutory terms to suit its own sense of how the statute should operate.”).
[177] See id. at 326 (“The Tailoring Rule is not just an announcement of EPA’s refusal to enforce the statutory permitting requirements; it purports to alter those requirements and to establish with the force of law that otherwise-prohibited conduct will not violate the Act. This alteration of the statutory requirements was crucial to EPA’s “tailoring” efforts. Without it, small entities with the potential to emit greenhouse gases in amounts exceeding the statutory thresholds would have remained subject to citizen suits—authorized by the Act.”).
[178] Id. at 325.
[179] Id. at 328.
[180] See US Telecom, 855 F.3d at 383-85 (Srinivasan, J. & Tatel, J., concurring in denial from rehearing en banc).
[181] See id. at 385 (“In Brand X, the Supreme Court definitively — and authoritatively, for our purposes as an inferior court — answered that question yes.”).
[182] See Brand X, 545 U.S. at 989 (“[T]he statute fails unambiguously to classify the telecommunications component of cable modem service as a distinct offering.”).
[183] See id. at 1005-14 (Scalia, J., dissenting).
[184] See US Telecom v. FCC, 825 F.3d 674 (D.C. Cir. 2016).
[185] See Mozilla Corp v. FCC, 940 F.3d 1 (D.C. Cir. 2019).
Amicus Brief Interest of Amicus[1] The International Center for Law & Economics (“ICLE”) is a nonprofit, non-partisan global research and policy center that builds intellectual foundations for . . .
The International Center for Law & Economics (“ICLE”) is a nonprofit, non-partisan global research and policy center that builds intellectual foundations for sensible, economically grounded policy. ICLE promotes the use of law and economics methodologies and economic learning to inform policy debates and has longstanding expertise evaluating law and policy.
ICLE has an interest in ensuring that First Amendment law promotes the public interest by remaining grounded in sensible rules informed by sound economic analysis. ICLE scholars have written extensively on issues related to social media regulation and free speech. See, e.g., Geoffrey A. Manne, Ben Sperry, & Kristian Stout, Who Moderates the Moderators?: A Law & Economics Approach to Holding Online Platforms Accountable Without Destroying the Internet, 49 Rutgers Computer & Tech. L. J. 26 (2022); Ben Sperry, Knowledge and Decisions in the Information Age: The Law & Economics of Regulating Misinformation on Social-Media Platforms, 59 Gonzaga L. Rev., forthcoming (2023); Br. of Internet Law Scholars, Gonzalez v. Google; Jamie Whyte, Polluting Words: Is There a Coasean Case to Regulate Offensive Speech?, ICLE White Paper (Sep. 2021); Ben Sperry, An L&E Defense of the First Amendment’s Protection of Private Ordering, Truth on the Market (Apr. 23, 2021); Liability for User-Generated Content Online: Principles for Lawmakers (Jul. 11, 2019).
The pair of NetChoice cases before the Court presents the opportunity to bolster the Court’s longstanding jurisprudence on state action and editorial discretion by affirming that the First Amendment applies to Internet speech without disfavor. See Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844, 870 (1997) (finding “no basis for qualifying the level of First Amendment scrutiny that should be applied” to the Internet).
The First Amendment protects social media companies’ rights to exercise their own content moderation policies free from government interference. Social media companies are private actors with the same right to editorial discretion over disseminating third-party speech as offline equivalents like newspapers and cable operators. See Manhattan Cmty. Access Corp. v. Halleck, 139 S. Ct. 1921, 1926 (2019); Mia. Herald Publ’g Co. v. Tornillo, 418 U.S. 241 (1974); Turner Broad. Sys. v. FCC, 512 U.S. 622 (1994).
Consistent with that jurisprudence, the Court should conclude that social media companies are private actors fully capable of taking part in the marketplace of ideas through their exercise of editorial discretion, free from government interference.
“The most basic of all decisions is who shall decide.” Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions 40 (2d ed. 1996). Under the First Amendment, the general rule is that private actors get to decide what speech is acceptable. It is not the government’s place to censor speech or to require private actors to open their property to unwanted speech. The market process determines speech rules on social media platforms[2] just as it does in the offline world.
The animating principle of the First Amendment is to protect this “marketplace of ideas.” “The theory of our Constitution is ‘that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.’” United States v. Alvarez, 567 U.S. 709, 728 (2012) (quoting Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616, 630 (1919) (Holmes, J., dissenting)). To facilitate that competition, the Constitution staunchly protects the liberty of private actors to determine what speech is acceptable, largely free from government regulation of this marketplace. See Halleck, 139 S. Ct. at 1926 (“The Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment constrains governmental actors and protects private actors….”).
Importantly, one way private actors participate in the marketplace of ideas is through private ordering—by setting speech policies for their own private property, enforceable by common law remedies under contract and property law. See id. at 1930 (a “private entity may thus exercise editorial discretion over the speech and speakers in the forum”).
Protecting private ordering is particularly important with social media. While the challenged laws concern producers of social media content, producers are only a sliver of social media users. The vast majority of social media users are content consumers, and it is for their benefit that social media companies moderate content. Speech, even when lawful and otherwise protected by the First Amendment, can still be harmful, at least from the point of view of listeners. Social media companies must balance users’ demand for speech with the fact that not everyone wants to consume every possible type of speech.
The issue is how best to optimize the benefits of speech while minimizing negative speech externalities. Speech produced on social media platforms causes negative externalities when some consumers are exposed to speech they find offensive, disconcerting, or otherwise harmful. Those consumers may stop using the platform as a result. On the other hand, if limits on speech production are too extreme, speech producers and consumers may seek other speech platforms.
To optimize the value of their platforms, social media companies must consider how best to keep users—both producers and consumers of speech—engaged. Major social media platforms mainly generate revenue through advertisements. This means a loss in user engagement could reduce the value to advertisers, and thus result in less advertising revenue. In particular, a loss in engagement by high-value users could result in less advertising, and that in turn, diminishes incentives to invest in the platform. Optimizing a platform requires satisfying users who are valuable to advertisers.
Major social media platforms have developed moderation policies in response to market demand to protect their users from speech those users consider harmful. This editorial control is protected First Amendment activity.
On the other hand, the common carriage justifications Texas and Florida offer for their restrictions on social media platforms’ control over their own property do not save the States’ impermissible intervention into the marketplace of ideas. Two of the most prominent legal justifications for common carriage regulation—holding one’s property open to all-comers and market power—do not apply to social media companies. Major social media companies require all users to accept terms of service, which limit what speech is allowed. And assuming market power can justify common carriage, neither Florida nor Texas even attempted to make such a finding, making at best mere assertions.
The States’ intervention is more like treating social media platforms as company towns—an outdated approach that this Court should reject as inconsistent with First Amendment doctrine and utterly unsuitable to the Internet Age.
The First Amendment promotes a marketplace of ideas. To have a marketplace of any kind, there must be strong private property rights and enforceable contracts that enable entrepreneurs to discover the best ways to serve consumers. See generally Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital (2000). As full participants in the marketplace of ideas, social media platforms must be free to exercise their own editorial policies and have choice over which ideas they allow on their platforms. Otherwise, there is no marketplace of ideas at all, but either a government-mandated free-for-all where voices struggle to be heard or an overly restricted forum where the government censors disfavored ideas.
The marketplace analogy is apt when considering First Amendment principles because, like virtually any other human activity, speech has both benefits and costs. Like other profit-driven market endeavors, it is ultimately the subjective, individual preferences of consumers that determine how to manage those tradeoffs. The nature of what is deemed offensive is obviously context- and listener-dependent, but the parties best suited to set and enforce appropriate speech rules are the property owners subject to the constraints of the marketplace.
When it comes to speech, an individual’s desire for an audience must be balanced with a prospective audience’s willingness to listen. Formal economic institutions acting in the marketplace must strike the proper balance between these desires and have an incentive to get it right or they could lose consumers. Asking government to make categorical decisions for all of society is substituting centralized evaluation of the costs and benefits of access to communications for the individual decisions of many actors, including property owners who open their property to third party speech. As the economist Thomas Sowell put it, “that different costs and benefits must be balanced does not in itself imply who must balance them?or even that there must be a single balance for all, or a unitary viewpoint (one ‘we’) from which the issue is categorically resolved.” Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions 240 (2d ed. 1996).
Rather than incremental decisions on how and under what terms individuals may relate to one another on a particular platform—which can evolve over time in response to changes in what individuals find acceptable—governments can only hand down categorical guidelines through precedential decisions: “you must allow a, b, and c speech” or “you must not allow x, y, and z speech.”
This freedom to experiment and evolve is vital in the social-media sphere, where norms about speech are in constant flux. Social media users often impose negative externalities on other users through their speech. Thus, social media companies must resolve social-cost problems among their users by balancing their speech interests.
In his famous work “The Problem of Social Cost,” the economist Ronald Coase argued that the traditional approach to regulating externalities was misguided because it overlooked the reciprocal nature of harms. Ronald H. Coase, The Problem of Social Cost, 3 J. L. & Econ. 1, 2 (1960). For example, the noise from a factory is a potential cost to the doctor next door who consequently cannot use his office to conduct certain testing, and simultaneously the doctor moving his office next door is a potential cost to the factory’s ability to use its equipment. In a world of well-defined property rights and low transaction costs, the initial allocation of a right would not matter, because the parties could bargain to overcome the harm in a beneficial manner—i.e., the factory could pay the doctor for lost income or to set up sound-proof walls, or the doctor could pay the factory to reduce the sound of its machines. But in the real world, where there are often significant transaction costs, who has the initial right matters because it is unlikely that the right will get to the highest valued use.
Similarly, on social media, speech that some users find offensive or false may be inoffensive or even patently true to other users. Protecting one group from offensive speech necessarily imposes costs on the group that favors the same speech. There is a reciprocal nature to the harms of speech, much as with other forms of nuisance. Due to transaction costs, it is unlikely that users will be able to effectively bargain to a solution on speech harms. There is a significant difference, though. Unlike the situation of the factory owner and the doctor, social media users are all using the property of social media companies. And those companies are best positioned to—and must be allowed to—balance these varied interests in real-time to optimize their platform’s value in response to consumer demand.
Social media companies are what economists call “multi-sided” platforms. See generally David S. Evans & Richard Shmalensee, Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms (2016). They are for-profit businesses, and the way they generate profits is by acting as intermediaries between users and advertisers. If they fail to serve their users well, those users will abandon the platform. Without users, advertisers would have no interest in buying ads. And without advertisers, there is no profit to be made.
As in any other community, “[i]nteractions on multi-sided platforms can involve behavior that some users find offensive.” David S. Evans, Governing Bad Behavior by Users of Multi-Sided Platforms, 27 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 1201, 1215 (2012). As a result, “[p]eople may incur costs [from] unwanted exposure to hate speech, pornography, violent images, and other offensive content.” Id. And “[e]ven if they are not exposed to this content, they may dislike being part of a community in which such behavior takes place.” Id.
These cases challenge laws that cater to one set of social media users—producers of speech on social media platforms. But social media platforms must be at least as sensitive to their speech consumers. Indeed, the one-percent rule—“a vast majority of user-generated content in any specific community comes from the top 1% of active users”[3]—teaches that speech-consuming users may be even more important because they far outnumber producers. In turn, less intense users are usually the first to leave a platform, and their exit may cascade into total platform collapse. See, e.g., János Török & János Kertész, Cascading Collapse of Online Social Networks, 7 Sci. Rep., art. 16743 (2017).
Social media companies thus need to optimize the value of their platform by setting rules that keep users—mostly speech consumers—sufficiently engaged that there are advertisers who will pay to reach them. Even more, social media platforms must encourage engagement by the right users. To attract advertisers, platforms must ensure individuals likely to engage with advertisements remain active on the platform.[4] Platforms ensure this optimization by setting and enforcing community rules.
In addition, like users, advertisers themselves have preferences social media platforms must take into account. Advertisers may threaten to pull ads if they do not like the platform’s speech-governance decisions. For instance, after Elon Musk restored the accounts of Twitter users who had been banned by the company’s prior leadership, major advertisers left the platform. See Kate Conger, Tiffany Hsu, & Ryan Mac, Elon Musk’s Twitter Faces Exodus of Advertisers and Executives, N.Y. Times (Nov. 1, 2022); Ryan Mac & Tiffany Hsu, Twitter’s US Ad Sales Plunge 59% as Woes Continue, N.Y. Times (Jun. 5, 2013).
Thus, it is no surprise that in the cases of major social media companies, the platforms have set content-moderation standards that restrict many kinds of speech. See generally Kate Klonick, The New Governors: The People, Rules, and Processes Governing Online Speech, 131 Harv. L. Rev. 1598 (2018).
The bottom line is that the market process leaves the platforms themselves best positioned to make these incremental editorial decisions about their users’ preferences on speech, in response to the feedback loop between consumer, producer, and advertiser demand. It should go without saying that social media users do not necessarily want more opportunities to say and hear certain speech. Forcing social media companies to favor one set of users—a fraction of speech producers—by forbidding “viewpoint discrimination” favored by other users is unwarranted and unlawful interference in those companies’ editorial discretion. That interference threatens rather than promotes the marketplace of ideas.
The First Amendment protects the right of social media platforms to serve the speech preferences of their users through their moderation policies.
The “text and original meaning [of the First and Fourteenth Amendments], as well as this Court’s longstanding precedents, establish that the Free Speech Clause prohibits only governmental abridgment of speech. The Free Speech Clause does not prohibit private abridgment of speech.” Halleck, 139 S. Ct. at 1928. The First Amendment’s reach does not grow when private property owners open their property for speech. If such property owners were “subject to First Amendment constraints” and thus “lose the ability to exercise what they deem to be appropriate editorial discretion within that open forum” they would “face the unappetizing choice of allowing all comers or closing the platform altogether.” Id. at 1930. That is, the First Amendment respects—indeed protects—private ordering.
So, while the First Amendment protects the right of individuals to speak (and receive speech) without fear of legal repercussions in most instances, it does not make speech consequence-free, nor does it mandate the carrying of all speech in private spaces.
“Bad” speech has, in fact, long been kept in check via informal means, or what one might call “private ordering.” In this sense, property rights and contract law have long played a crucial role in determining the speech rules of any given space.
For instance, a man would be well within his legal rights to eject a guest from his home for using racial epithets. As a property owner, he would not only have the right to ask that person to leave but could exercise his right to eject that person as a trespasser—if necessary, calling the police to assist him. Similarly, one could not expect to go to a restaurant and yell at the top of her lungs about political issues and expect the venue to abide. A bar hosting an “open mic night” and thus opening itself up to speech is still within its rights to end a performance so offensive it could lead to a loss of patrons. Subject to narrow exceptions, property owners determine acceptable speech on their property and may enforce those rules by excluding those who refuse to comply.
One exception to this strong distinction between state and private action is when a “private entity performs a traditional, exclusive public function.” See Halleck, 139 S. Ct. at 1928. In those cases, there may be a right to free speech that operates against a private actor. See Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501 (1946).
Proceeding from Marsh, many litigants seize upon this Court’s recent analogizing social media to the “modern public square.” Packingham v. N. Carolina, 137 S. Ct. 1730, 1737 (2017). They argue social media companies are like a company town or town square and so lack the discretion to restrict speech protected by the First Amendment. But cases since Marsh make clear that the state-actor exception is exceptionally narrow.
In Marsh, this Court found that a company town, while private, was a state actor for purposes of the First Amendment. At issue was whether the company town could prevent a Jehovah’s Witness from passing out literature on the town’s sidewalks. The Court noted that “[o]wnership does not always mean absolute dominion. The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it.” Marsh, 326 U.S. at 506. The Court proceeded to balance private property rights with First Amendment rights, determining that, in company towns, the First Amendment’s protections should be in the “preferred position.” See id. at 509.
The Court later extended this finding to shopping centers, finding they were the “functional equivalent” to the business district in Marsh, and thus finding that a shopping center could not restrict peaceful picketing of a grocery story by a local food-workers union. Food Employees v. Logan Valley Plaza, 391 U.S. 308, 318, 325 (1968).
But the Court began retreating from both Logan Valley and Marsh just a few years later in Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner, 407 U.S. 551 (1972), which concerned hand-billing in a shopping mall. Noting the “economic anomaly” that was company towns, the Court said Marsh “simply held that where private interests were substituting for and performing the customary functions of government, First Amendment freedoms could not be denied where exercised in the customary manner on the town’s sidewalks and streets.” Id. at 562 (emphasis added).
Building on Tanner, the Court went a step further in Hudgens v. NLRB, 424 U.S. 507 (1976), reversing Logan Valley and more severely cabining Marsh. Hudgens involved picketing on private property, and the Court concluded bluntly that, “under the present state of the law the constitutional guarantee of free expression has no part to play in a case such as this[.]” Id. at 521. Marsh is now a narrow exception, the Court explained, limited to situations where private property has taken on all attributes of a town. See id. at 516. And following Hudgens, the Court further limited the public-function test to “the exercise by a private entity of powers traditionally exclusively reserved to the State.” See Jackson v. Metropolitan Edison Co., 419 U.S. 345, 352 (1974).
Today it is well-established that “the constitutional guarantee of free speech is a guarantee only against abridgment by government, federal or state.” Hudgens, 424 U.S. at 513. Purely private actors—even those who open their property to the public—are not subject to First-Amendment limits on how they use their property.
The Court reaffirmed that rule recently in Halleck, which considered whether a public-access channel operated by a cable provider was a state actor. Summarizing the case law, the Court said the test required more than just a finding that the government at some point exercised the same function or that the function serves the public good. Instead, the government must have “traditionally and exclusively performed the function.” Halleck, 139 S. Ct. at 1929 (emphasis in original).
The Court then found that merely operating as a public forum for speech is not a function traditionally and exclusively performed by the government. And because “[it] is not an activity that only governmental entities have traditionally performed,” a private actor providing a forum for speech retains “editorial discretion over the speech and speakers in the forum.” Id. at 1930.
Following this Court’s state-actor jurisprudence, federal courts have consistently found social media companies are not equivalent to company towns and thus not subject to First Amendment constraints. Unlike the company town, where those within their geographical confines have little choice but to deal with them as if they are the government themselves, social media users can simply use alternative means to convey speech or receive it. The Ninth Circuit, for instance, squarely rejected the argument that social media companies fulfill a traditional, public function. See Prager Univ. v. Google, LLC, 951 F.3d 991, 996-99 (9th Cir. 2020). Every federal court to consider whether social media companies are state actors under this theory has found the same. See, e.g., Freedom Watch, Inc. v. Google Inc., 816 F. App’x 497, 499 (D.C. Cir. 2020); Brock v. Zuckerberg, 2021 WL 2650070, at *3 (S.D.N.Y. Jun. 25, 2021); Zimmerman v. Facebook, Inc., 2020 WL 5877863 at *2 (N.D. Cal. Oct. 2, 2020); Ebeid v. Facebook, Inc., 2019 WL 2059662 at *6 (N.D. Cal. May 9, 2019); Green v. YouTube, LLC, 2019 WL 1428890, at *4 (D.N.H. Mar. 13, 2019); Nyabwa v. Facebook, 2018 WL 585467, at *1 (S.D. Tex. Jan. 26, 2018); Shulman v. Facebook.com, 2017 WL 5129885, at *4 (D.N.J. Nov. 6, 2017).
Private actors have the right to editorial discretion that cannot generally be overcome by state action compelling the dissemination of speech. See Mia. Herald Publ’g Co. v. Tornillo, 418 U.S. 241 (1974); Turner Broad. Sys. v. FCC, 512 U.S. 622 (1994). This is particularly important for private actors whose business is disseminating speech, like newspapers, cable operators, and social media companies.
In Tornillo, the Court struck a right-to-reply statute for political candidates because it “compel[s] editors or publishers to publish that which ‘reason tells them should not be published.’” 418 U.S. at 256. The Court established a general rule that the limits on media companies’ editorial discretion were not defined by government edict but by “the acceptance of a sufficient number of readers—and hence advertisers —to assure financial success; and, second, the journalistic integrity of its editors and publishers.” Id. at 255 (citing Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc. v. Democratic Nat’l Comm., 412 U. S. 94, 117 (1973)). In other words, the limits on how private entities exercise their editorial discretion comes from the marketplace of ideas itself—the preferences of speech consumers, advertisers, and the property owners—not the government.
The size and influence of social media companies does not shrink Tornillo’s effect. No matter how large the editor or the forum, the government still may not coerce private entities to disseminate speech. See id. at 254 (“However much validity may be found in these arguments [about monopoly power], at each point the implementation of a remedy such as an enforceable right of access necessarily calls for some mechanism .?.?.?If it is governmental coercion, this at once brings about a confrontation with the express provisions of the First Amendment.”). Alleged market power is insufficient to justify compelling the dissemination of speech by social media companies.
Turner confirms that market power is irrelevant. There the Court began with “an initial premise: Cable programmers and cable operators engage in and transmit speech, and they are entitled to the protection of the speech and press provisions of the First Amendment.” 512 U.S. at 636. While the Court nonetheless applied intermediate scrutiny, it did so based on technological differences in transmission by newspapers and cable television, and the fact that the law was content-neutral. The level of scrutiny thus turns on “the special characteristics” of transmission, not “the economic characteristics” of the market. Id. at 640.
Returning to Tornillo, the Court reasoned that the law violated the First Amendment by intruding upon the company’s editorial discretion. See 418 U.S. at 258. Like newspapers, social media platforms are “more than a passive receptable for news, comment, and advertising,” as their “choice of material,” their “decisions made as to the limitations on the size and content of the paper” and their “treatment of public issues and public officials—whether fair or unfair—constitute the exercise of editorial control and judgment.” Id. Indeed, that exercise of editorial control and judgment is central to a platform’s retention of speech consumers and attraction of advertisers targeting those users, and thus the platform’s continued survival. See supra, pp. ___.
Accordingly, federal courts rightly have called government actions into question when they violate the right of social media platforms to exercise editorial discretion. See NetChoice, LLC v. Bonta, 2023 WL 6135551, at *15 (N.D. Cal. Sept. 18, 2023); O’Handley v. Padilla, 579 F. Supp. 3d 1163, 1186-88 (N.D. Cal. Jan. 10, 2022); see also Murthy v. Missouri, No. 23-411, 2023 WL 6935337, at *2 (U.S. Oct. 20, 2023) (Alito, J., dissenting) (“The injunction applies only when the Government crosses the line and begins to coerce or control others’ [i.e. the social media companies’] exercise of their free-speech [i.e. editorial discretion] rights.”).
Thus, the Fifth Circuit’s claim in Paxton that “the Supreme Court’s cases do not carve out ‘editorial discretion’ as a special category of First-Amendment-protected expression,” 49 F.4th at 463, is demonstrably wrong. The Court has established that private actors have a right to exercise editorial discretion concerning speech on their property. See Halleck (using the phrase “editorial discretion” 11 times). Social media platforms have the same right.
As social media companies have a right to editorial discretion, the next question is the level of scrutiny the challenged statutes must satisfy. Strict scrutiny is proper, because social media platforms are much more like the newspapers in Tornillo than the cable companies in Turner.
In Turner, the Court found:
[The] physical connection between the television set and the cable network gives the cable operator bottleneck, or gatekeeper, control over most (if not all) of the television programming that is channeled into the subscriber’s home .?.?.?. [U]nlike speaker in other media, [cable operators] can thus silence the voice of competing speakers with a mere flick of the switch.
512 U.S. at 656. Social media platforms have no physical control of the connection to the home, and thus no practical ability to exclude competing voices or platforms. The internet architecture simply does not allow them to stop users from using other sites to find speech or speak. Strict scrutiny should apply to SB 7072 and HB 20.
Likewise, compelling social media companies to allow speech contrary to their terms of service is fundamentally different than mandating access for military recruiters in law schools or requiring shopping malls to allow the peaceful exercise of speech in areas held open to the public. Contra Paxton, 49 F.4th at 462-63. In those instances, there was no identification of the venue with the message. See Rumsfeld v. Forum for Acad. & Inst. Rights, Inc., 547 U.S. 47, 65 (2006); PruneYard Shopping Ctr. v. Robins, 447 U.S. 74, 86-88 (1980).
Here, the moderation decisions of social media companies do have implications for advertisers who do not want their brand associated with certain content. See Jonathan Vanian, Apple, Disney, other media companies pause advertising on X after Elon Musk boosted antisemitic tweet, CNBC (Nov. 17, 2023);[5] Caleb Ecarma, Twitter Can’t Seem to Buck Its Advertisers-Don’t-Want-to-Be-Seen-Next-to-Nazis Problem, Vanity Fair (Aug. 17, 2023);[6] Ryan Mac & Tiffany Hsu, Twitter’s US Ad Sales Plunge 59% as Woes Continue, N.Y. Times (Jun. 5, 2023).[7] Similarly, users will exit if they don’t enjoy the experience of the platform. See Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Twitter seeing ‘record user engagement’? The data tells a different story, ZDNet (Jun. 30, 2023).[8] Speech by social media companies disavowing what is said by some users of their platforms does not prevent advertisers and much of the public from identifying user speech with the platform.
Moreover, both the Florida and Texas laws are discriminate based upon content, as a reviewing court would have to consider what speech is at issue to determine whether a social media company can moderate it. This makes the laws different than those at issue in Turner, and offer an alternative reason they should be subject to strict scrutiny.
Section 230 of the Communications Act does not change this analysis. Contra Paxton, 49 F.4th at 465-66. Section 230 supplements the First Amendment’s protection of editorial discretion by granting “providers and users of an interactive computer service” immunity from (most) lawsuits for speech generated by other “information content providers” on their platforms. See 47 U.S.C. §230(c). The animating reason for Section 230 was to provide “protection for private blocking and screening” by preventing lawsuits over third party content that was left up, see Section 230(c)(1), or over third-party content that was taken down, see Section 230(c)(2). See also Geoffrey A. Manne, Ben Sperry, & Kristian Stout, Who Moderates the Moderators?: A Law & Economics Approach to Holding Online Platforms Accountable Without Destroying the Internet, 49 Rutgers Computer & Tech. L. J. 26, 39-41 (2022). Section 230 encourages social media companies to use their underlying First Amendment rights to editorial discretion. There is no basis for citing it as a basis for restricting such rights.
* * *
The challenged Florida and Texas laws treat social media platforms essentially as company towns. But social media platforms simply do not demonstrate the requisite characteristics sufficient to treat them as company towns whose moderation decisions are subject to court review for viewpoint discrimination. Instead, consistent with their economic function, they are private actors with their own rights to editorial discretion protected from government interference.
The law and economics principles described above establish a general rule of the First Amendment that private property owners like social media companies have the right, responsibility, and need in the marketplace to moderate speech on their platforms. It makes no more sense to apply common carriage regulation to social media platforms than it does to treat them as company towns subject to the First Amendment.
Both Florida’s SB 7072 and Texas’s HB 20 are designed to restrict the ability of social media companies to exercise editorial discretion on their platforms. Each State justified its law by comparing social media companies to common carriers. Florida’s legislative findings included the statement that social media platforms should be “treated similarly to common carriers.” Act of May 24, 2021, ch. 2021-32, § 1(6), 2021 Fla. Laws 503, 505. Texas’ legislature found that “social media platforms function as common carriers” and “social media platforms with the largest number of users are common carriers by virtue of their market dominance.” Act of Sept. 9, 2021, ch. 3, § (3)–(4), 2021 Tex. Gen. Laws 3904, 3904.
But simply “[l]abeling” a social media platform “a common carrier .?.?.?has no real First Amendment consequences.” Denver Area Educ. Telecomm. Consortium, Inc. v. FCC, 518 U.S. 727, 825 (1996) (Thomas, J., concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part). And nothing about social media platforms justifies the label in any event: Social media platforms do not hold themselves out to the public as common carriers, and social media platforms lack monopoly power.
Both the Eleventh Circuit in Moody and the Fifth Circuit in Paxton recognized that one characteristic common carriers share is that they hold themselves out as serving all members of the public without individualized bargaining. See Moody, 34 F.4th 1196, 1220 (11th Cir. 2022); Paxton, 49 F.4th at 469.
Major social media companies, however, do not hold themselves out to the public indiscriminately either for users or the type of speech allowed. Unlike a telephone company or the postal service, both of which carry all private communications regardless of the underlying message, social media companies require all users to accept terms of service dealing specifically with speech in order to use the platform. They also maintain the discretion to enforce their rules as they see fit, both curating and editing speech before presenting it to the world.. As the Eleventh Circuit put it in Moody, social media users “are not freely able to transmit messages ‘of their own design and choosing’ because platforms make—and have always made—‘individualized’ content- and viewpoint-based decisions about whether to publish particular messages or users.” Moody, 34 F.4th at 1220 (quoting FCC v. Midwest Video Corp., 440 U.S. 689, 701 (1979)).
Moreover, the very service that online platforms offer to users, and that users accept, is the moderation of speech in one form or another. Instagram allows users to curate feeds of specialized images, and Twitter does the same for specialized microblogs. Without this core moderation service, the services would be essentially useless to users. By contrast, common carriers do not have as a core part of their service the moderation of speech: any moderation of speech is incidental to operation of the service (e.g. removing unruly passengers).
Judge Srinivasan’s concurring opinion in United States Telecom Association v. FCC, 855 F.3d 381 (D.C. Cir. 2017) (denying rehearing en banc), is instructive on this point. The panel there had denied a petition for review of the FCC’s net neutrality order, which applied common carriage regulation to internet service providers. At the rehearing stage, then-Judge Kavanaugh feared the panel’s opinion would allow the government to “impose forced-carriage or equal-access obligations on YouTube and Twitter.” Id. at 433 (Kavanaugh, J., dissenting). Judge Srinivasan sought to allay that fear by explaining: Social media platforms “are not considered common carriers that hold themselves out as affording neutral, indiscriminate access to their platform without any editorial filtering[.]”. Id. at 392 (Srinivasan, J., concurring) (emphasis added). Indeed, even the Internet service providers deemed common carriers there could escape such designation if they acted like social media platforms and exercised editorial discretion and advertised themselves as doing so. See id. at 389-90 (Srinivasan, J., concurring).
Unlike the telegraph, telephone, the postal service, or even email, major social media companies do not hold themselves out to the public as open to all legal speech—they expressly retain their editorial discretion. They have publicly available terms of service that users must agree to before creating profiles that detail what is and is not allowed on their platforms. While common carriers like airlines may be able to eject passengers based upon conduct even where there is a speech element, social media companies retain the right to restrict pure expression that is inconsistent with their community standards. These rules include limitations on otherwise legal speech and disclose that violators may be restricted from use, including expulsion. Br. for Pet’rs, https://netchoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/No.-22-555_NetChoice-and-CCIAs-Brief-Paxton.pdf, at 4-7.
The Fifth Circuit was wrong to minimize social media platforms’ editorial discretion by comparing their efforts to newspapers curating articles and columns. See Paxton, 49 F.4th at 459-60, 492 (noting that more than 99% of content is not reviewed by a human). Miami Herald did not establish a floor on how much a private actor must exercise editorial discretion in order to be protected by the First Amendment. Nor did it specify that a human must review content rather than a company investing in algorithms to help them moderate content. The Fifth Circuit’s reasoning is essentially a “use it or lose it” theory of the First Amendment, which says if social media companies do not aggressively use their editorial discretion rights, then they can lose them. “That is not how constitutional rights work,” however; the “‘use it or lose it’ theory is wholly foreign to the First Amendment.” U.S. Telecom, 855 F.3d at 429 (Kavanaugh, J., dissenting).
Since social media companies do not hold themselves out to the public as open to all speech, they are not common carriers that can somehow be required to carry third party speech contrary to their terms of service.
Another reason offered for treating social media platforms like common carriers is that some social media companies are alleged to have “dominant market share,” see Biden v. Knight, 141 S. Ct. 1220, 1224 (2021) (Thomas, J., concurring), or in the words of Turner, “gatekeeper” or “bottleneck” market power. See Turner, 512 U.S. at 656.
As shown above, however, Turner is not really about market power but about the unique physical connection that gave cable providers the power to restrict access to content by the flick of a switch. In any case, there is no basis for concluding that social media companies are all monopolists.
A number of major social media companies covered by the Florida and Texas laws are not in any sense holders of substantial market power as measured by share of visits.[9] Neither are companies like reddit, LinkedIn, Tumblr, or Pinterest, who all have even fewer visits. Nonetheless, the challenged laws would apply to such entities based on monthly users at the national level or gross revenue. See Fla. Stat. §501.2041(1)(g)(4) (covered providers must have at least 100 million monthly users or $100 million in gross annual revenue); Tex. Bus. & Com. Code §§ 120.001(1), .002(b) (covered social media platforms have 50 million monthly active users). But raw revenue or user numbers do not show market power. It is, at the very least, market share (i.e., concentration) that could plausibly be instructive—and even then, market power entails a much more complex determination. See, e.g., Brian Albrecht, Competition Increases Concentration, Truth on the Market (Aug. 16, 2023), https://truthonthemarket.com/2023/08/16/competition-increases-concentration/. As economist Chad Syverson puts it, “concentration is worse than just a noisy barometer of market power. Instead, we cannot even generally know which way the barometer is oriented.” Chad Syverson, Macroeconomics and Market Power: Context, Implications, and Open Questions, 33 J. Econ. Persp. 23, 26 (2019).
Second, there is no legislative finding of market power that would justify either law: just a bare assertion by the Texas legislature that “social media platforms with the largest number of users are common carriers by virtue of their market dominance.” HB 20 § 1(4). That “finding” by the Texas legislature fails to even define a relevant market, let alone establish market shares, or identify any indicia of market power of any players in that market. In then-Judge Kavanaugh’s words, both Florida and Texas failed to “even tr[y] to make a market power showing.” U.S. Telecom, 855 F.3d at 418 (Kavanaugh, J., dissenting); see also FTC v. Facebook, 560 F. Supp. 3d 1, 18 (D.D.C. Jun. 28, 2021) (“[T]he FTC’s bare assertions would be too conclusory to plausibly establish market power”).
The Texas legislature’s bare assertion is considerably weaker than the “unusually detailed statutory findings” the Court relied on in Turner, 512 U.S. at 646,[10] and is woefully insufficient to permit reliance on this justification for common-carrier-like treatment under the First Amendment.
The First Amendment protects the marketplace of ideas by protecting private ordering of speech rules. For the foregoing reasons, the Court should reverse the decision of the Fifth Circuit in Paxton and affirm the decision of the Eleventh Circuit in Moody.
[1] Amicus curiae affirms that no counsel for any party authored this brief in whole or in part, and that no entity or person other than amici and their counsel made any monetary contribution toward the preparation and submission of this brief.
[2] Throughout this brief, the term “platform” as applied to the property of social media companies is used in the economic sense, as these companies are all what economists call multisided platforms. See David S. Evans, Multisided Platforms, Dynamic Competition, and the Assessment of Market Power for Internet-Based Firms, at 6 (Coase-Sandor Inst. for L. & Econ. Working Paper No. 753, Mar. 2016).
[3] Valtteri Vuorio & Zachary Horne, A Lurking Bias: Representativeness of Users Across Social Media and Its Implications for Sampling Bias In Cognitive Science, PsyArXiv Preprint at 1 (Feb. 2, 2023); see also, e.g., Alessia Antelmi, et al., Characterizing the Behavioral Evolution of Twitter Users and The Truth Behind the 90-9-1 Rule, in WWW ’19: Companion Proceedings of The 2019 World Wide Web Conference 1035 (May 2019).
[4] “For decades, the 18-to-34 age group has been considered especially valuable to advertisers. It’s the biggest cohort, overtaking the baby boomers in 2015, and 18 to 34s are thought to have money to burn on toys and clothes and products, rather than the more staid investments of middle age.” Ryan Kailath, Is 18 to 34 still the most coveted demographic?, Marketplace.com Dec. 8, 2017), https://www.marketplace.org/2017/12/08/coveted-18-34-year-old-demographic.
[5] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/17/apple-has-paused-advertising-on-x-after-musk-promoted-antisemitic-tweet.html.
[6] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/08/twitter-advertisers-dont-want-nazi-problem.
[7] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/technology/twitter-ad-sales-musk.html.
[8] https://www.zdnet.com/article/twitter-seeing-record-user-engagement-the-data-tells-a-different-story.
[9] See https://www.statista.com/statistics/265773/market-share-of-the-most-popular-social-media-websites-in-the-us (Facebook at 49.9%, Instagram at 15.85%, X/Twitter at 14.69%, YouTube at 2.29%); https://gs.statcounter.com/social-media-stats/all/united-states-of-america (similar numbers).
[10] See also Pub. L. 102-385 § 2(a)(1) (detailing price increases of cable television since rate deregulation, which is inferential evidence of market power); id. § 2(a)(2) (explaining that local franchising regulations and the cost of building out cable networks leave most consumers with only one available option).
TOTM Betteridge’s Law of Headlines states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” But, apparently, folks in the nation’s capital . . .
Betteridge’s Law of Headlines states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” But, apparently, folks in the nation’s capital found a way around Betteridge’s Law.
This week, a U.S. House subcommittee hearing featured testimony from all five members of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The majority on the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology did away with the question mark, titling the hearing “Oversight of President Biden’s Broadband Takeover.”
While it might be a stretch to call the administration’s broadband-policy agenda a “takeover,” one can be forgiven for concluding that the FCC is moving forward with so many massive and comprehensive interventions in nearly every aspect of the broadband market that it looks a lot like a takeover.
Read the full piece here.
TOTM It happens at just about every hootenanny. There’s always at least one song that clears the dance floor. Some tunes, people just won’t dance to. . . .
It happens at just about every hootenanny. There’s always at least one song that clears the dance floor. Some tunes, people just won’t dance to. But with a little remixing and a better tempo, even a dirge can be danceable.
For years, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has refused to dance to the tune of research that suggests Title II regulation depresses broadband investment. But a recently published paper changes the tune so much that the FCC can’t—or at least shouldn’t—ignore the vibe.
ICLE Issue Brief I. Introduction Proposals to protect children and teens online are among the few issues in recent years to receive at least rhetorical bipartisan support at . . .
Proposals to protect children and teens online are among the few issues in recent years to receive at least rhetorical bipartisan support at both the national and state level. Citing findings of alleged psychological harm to teen users,[1] legislators from around the country have moved to pass bills that would require age verification and verifiable parental consent for teens to use social-media platforms.[2] But the primary question these proposals raise is whether such laws will lead to greater parental supervision and protection for teen users, or whether they will backfire and lead teens to become less likely to use the covered platforms altogether.
The answer, this issue brief proposes, is to focus on transaction costs.[3] Or more precisely, the answer can be found by examining how transaction costs operate under the Coase theorem.
The major U.S. Supreme Court cases that have considered laws to protect children by way of parental consent and age verification all cast significant doubt on the constitutionality of such regimes under the First Amendment. The reasoning such cases have employed appears to apply a Coasean transaction-cost/least-cost-avoider analysis, especially with respect to strict scrutiny’s least-restrictive-means test.
This has important implications for recent attempts to protect teens online by way of an imposed duty of care, mandatory age verification, and/or verifiable parental consent. First, because it means these solutions are likely unconstitutional. Second, because a least-cost-avoider analysis suggests that parents are in best positioned to help teens assess the marginal costs and benefits of social media, by way of the power of the purse and through available technological means. Placing the full burden of externalities on social-media companies would reduce the options available to parents and teens, who could be excluded altogether if transaction costs are sufficiently large as to foreclose negotiation among the parties. This would mean denying teens the overwhelming benefits of social-media usage.
Part II of this brief will define transaction costs and summarize the Coase theorem, with an eye toward how these concepts can help to clarify potential spillover harms and benefits arising from teens’ social-media usage. Part III will examine three major Supreme Court cases that considered earlier parental-consent and age-verification regimes enacted to restrict minors’ access to allegedly harmful content, while arguing that one throughline in the jurisprudence has been the implicit application of least-cost-avoider analysis. Part IV will argue that, even in light of how the internet ecosystem has developed, the Coase theorem’s underlying logic continues to suggest that parents and teens working together are the least-cost avoiders of harmful internet content.
Part V will analyze proposed legislation and recently enacted bills, some of which already face challenges in the federal courts, and argue that the least-cost-avoider analysis embedded in Supreme Court precedent should continue to foreclose age-verification and parental-consent laws. Part VI concludes.
The Coase theorem has been described as “the bedrock principle of modern law and economics,”[4] and the essay that initially proposed it may be the most-cited law-review article ever published.[5] Drawn from Ronald Coase’s seminal work “The Problem of Social Cost”[6] and subsequent elaborations in the literature,[7] the theorem suggests that:
A few definitions are in order. An externality is a side effect of an activity that is not reflected in the cost of that activity—basically, what occurs when we do something whose consequences affect other people. A negative externality occurs when a third party does not like the effects of an action. When we say that such an externality is bilateral, it is to say that it takes two to tango: only when there is a conflict in the use or enjoyment of property is there an externality problem.
Transaction costs are the additional costs borne in the process of buying or selling, separate and apart from the price of the good or service itself—i.e., the costs of all actions involved in an economic transaction. Where transaction costs are present and sufficiently large, they may prevent otherwise beneficial agreements from being concluded. Institutional frameworks determine the rules of the game, including who should bear transaction costs. In order to maximize efficiency, the Coase theorem holds that the burden of avoiding negative externalities should be placed on the party or parties that can avoid them at the lowest cost.
A related and interesting literature focuses on whether the common law is efficient, and the mechanisms by which that may come to be the case.[8] Todd J. Zywicki and Edward P. Stringham argue—contra the arguments of Judge Richard Posner—that the common law’s relative efficiency is a function of the legal process itself, rather than whether judges implicitly or explicitly adopt efficiency or wealth maximization as goals.[9] Zywicki & Stringham find both demand-side and supply-side factors that tend to promote efficiency in the common law, but note that the supply-side factors (e.g., competitive courts for litigants) have changed over time in ways that may result in diminished incentives for efficiency.[10] Their central argument is that the re-litigation of inefficient rules eventually leads to the adoption of more efficient ones.[11] Efficiency itself, they argue, is also best understood as the ability to coordinate plans, rather than as wealth maximization.[12]
In contrast to common law, there is a relative paucity of literature on whether constitutional law follows a pattern of efficiency. For example, one scholar notes that citations to Coase’s work in the corpus of constitutional-law scholarship are actually exceedingly rare.[13] This brief seeks to contribute to the law & economics literature by examining how the Supreme Court appears implicitly to have adopted one version of efficiency—the least-cost-avoider principle—in its First Amendment reviews of parental-consent and age-verification laws under the compelling-government-interest and least-restrictive-means tests.
The Coase theorem’s basic insights are useful in evaluating not only legal decisions, but also legislation. Here, this means considering issues related to children and teenagers’ online social-media usage. Social-media platforms, teenage users, and their parents are the parties at-issue in this example. While social-media platforms create incredible value for their users,[14] they also arguably impose negative externalities on both teens and their parents.[15] The question here, as it was for Coase, is how to deal with those externalities.
The common-law framework of rights in this scenario is to allow minors to enter into enforceable agreements, except where they are void for public-policy reasons. As Adam Candeub points out:
Contract law is a creature of state law, and states require parental consent for minors entering all sorts of contracts for services or receiving privileges, including getting a tattoo, obtaining a driver’s license, using a tanning facility, purchasing insurance, and signing liability waivers. As a general rule, all contracts with minors are valid, but with certain exceptions they are voidable. And even though a minor can void most contracts he enters into, most jurisdictions have laws that hold a minor accountable for the benefits he received under the contract. Because children can make enforceable contracts for which parents could end up bearing responsibility, it is a reasonable regulation to require parental consent for such contracts. The few courts that have addressed the question of the enforceability of online contracts with minors have held the contracts enforceable on the receipt of the mildest benefit.[16]
Of course, many jurisdictions have passed laws requiring age-verification for various transactions prohibited to minors, such as laws for buying alcohol or tobacco,[17] obtaining driver’s licenses,[18] and buying lottery tickets or pornography.[19] Through the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and its regulations, the federal government also requires that online platforms obtain verifiable parental consent before they are permitted to collect certain personal information regarding children under age 13.[20]
The First Amendment, however, has been found to protect minors’ ability to receive speech, including through commercial transactions.[21] The question therefore arises: how should the law regard minors’ ability to access information on social-media platforms? In recent years, multiple jurisdictions have responded to this question by proposing or passing age-verification and parental-consent laws for teens’ social-media usage.[22]
As will be detailed below,[23] while the internet has contributed to significant reductions in transaction costs, they are still present. Thus, in order to maximize social-media platforms’ benefits while minimizing the negative externalities they impose, policymakers should endeavor to place the burden of avoiding the harms associated with teen use on the least-cost avoider. I argue that the least-cost avoider is parents and teens working together to make marginal decisions about social-media use, including by exploiting relatively low-cost practical and technological tools to avoid harmful content. The thesis of this issue brief is that this finding is consistent with the implicit Coasean reasoning in the Supreme Court’s major First Amendment cases on parental consent and age verification.
Parental-consent and age-verification laws that seek to protect minors from harmful content are not new. The Supreme Court has had occasion to review several of them, while applying First Amendment scrutiny. An interesting aspect of this line of cases is that the Court appears implicitly to have used Coasean analysis in understanding who should bear the burden of avoiding harms associated with speech platforms.
Specifically, in each case, after an initial finding that the restrictions were content-based, the Court applied strict scrutiny. Thus, the burden was placed on the government to prove the relevant laws were narrowly tailored to a compelling government interest using the least-restrictive means. The Court’s transaction-cost analysis is implicit throughout the descriptions of the problem in each case. But the main area of analysis below will be from each case’s least-restrictive-means test section, with a focus on the compelling-state-interest test in Part III.C. Parts III.A, III.B, and III.C will deal with each of these cases in turn.
In United States v. Playboy Entertainment Group,[24] the Supreme Court reviewed § 505 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which required “cable television operators who provide channels ‘primarily dedicated to sexually-oriented programming’ either to ‘fully scramble or otherwise fully block’ those channels or to limit their transmission to hours when children are unlikely to be viewing, set by administrative regulation as the time between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.”[25] Even prior to the regulations promulgated pursuant to the law, cable operators used technological means called “scrambling” to blur sexually explicit content for those viewers who didn’t explicitly subscribe to such content, but there were reported problems with “signal bleed” that allowed some audio and visual content to be obtained by nonsubscribers.[26] Following the regulation, cable operators responded by shifting the hours when such content would be aired—i.e., by making it unavailable for 16 hours a day. This prevented cable subscribers from viewing purchased content of their choosing at times they would prefer.[27]
The basic Coasean framework is present right from the description of the problems that the statute and regulations were trying to solve. As the Court put it:
Two essential points should be understood concerning the speech at issue here. First, we shall assume that many adults themselves would find the material highly offensive; and when we consider the further circumstance that the material comes unwanted into homes where children might see or hear it against parental wishes or consent, there are legitimate reasons for regulating it. Second, all parties bring the case to us on the premise that Playboy’s programming has First Amendment protection. As this case has been litigated, it is not alleged to be obscene; adults have a constitutional right to view it; the Government disclaims any interest in preventing children from seeing or hearing it with the consent of their parents; and Playboy has concomitant rights under the First Amendment to transmit it. These points are undisputed.[28]
In Coasean language, the parties at-issue were the cable operators, content-providers of sexually explicit programming, adult cable subscribers, and their children. Cable television provides tremendous value to its customers, including sexually explicit subscription content that is valued by those subscribers. There is, however, a negative externality to the extent that such programming may become available to children whose parents find it inappropriate. The Court noted that some parents may allow their children to receive such content, and the government disclaimed an interest in preventing such reception with parental consent. Given imperfect scrambling technology, this possible negative externality was clearly present. The question that arose was whether the transaction costs imposed by time-shifting requirements in Section 505 have the effect of restricting adults’ ability to make such viewing decisions for themselves and on behalf of their children.
After concluding that Section 505 was a content-based restriction, due to the targeting of specific adult content and specific programmers, the Court stated that when a content-based restriction is designed “to shield the sensibilities of listeners, the general rule is that the right of expression prevails, even where no less restrictive alternative exists. We are expected to protect our own sensibilities ‘simply by averting [our] eyes.’” [29]
This application of strict scrutiny does not change, the court noted, because we are dealing in this instance with children or the issue of parental consent:
No one suggests the Government must be indifferent to unwanted, indecent speech that comes into the home without parental consent. The speech here, all agree, is protected speech; and the question is what standard the Government must meet in order to restrict it. As we consider a content-based regulation, the answer should be clear: The standard is strict scrutiny. This case involves speech alone; and even where speech is indecent and enters the home, the objective of shielding children does not suffice to support a blanket ban if the protection can be accomplished by a less restrictive alternative.[30]
Again, using our Coasean translator, we can read the opinion as saying the least-cost way to avoid the negative externality of unwanted adult content is by just not looking at it, or for parents to use the means available to them to prevent their children from viewing it.
In fact, that is exactly where the Court goes, by comparing, under the least-restrictive-means test, the targeted blocking mechanism made available in Section 504 of the statute to the requirements imposed by Section 505:
[T]argeted blocking enables the Government to support parental authority without affecting the First Amendment interests of speakers and willing listeners—listeners for whom, if the speech is unpopular or indecent, the privacy of their own homes may be the optimal place of receipt. Simply put, targeted blocking is less restrictive than banning, and the Government cannot ban speech if targeted blocking is a feasible and effective means of furthering its compelling interests. This is not to say that the absence of an effective blocking mechanism will in all cases suffice to support a law restricting the speech in question; but if a less restrictive means is available for the Government to achieve its goals, the Government must use it.[31]
Moreover, the Court found that the fact that parents largely eschewed the available low-cost means to avoid the harm was not necessarily sufficient for the government to prove that it is the least-restrictive alternative:
When a plausible, less restrictive alternative is offered to a content-based speech restriction, it is the Government’s obligation to prove that the alternative will be ineffective to achieve its goals. The Government has not met that burden here. In support of its position, the Government cites empirical evidence showing that § 504, as promulgated and implemented before trial, generated few requests for household-by-household blocking. Between March 1996 and May 1997, while the Government was enjoined from enforcing § 505, § 504 remained in operation. A survey of cable operators determined that fewer than 0.5% of cable subscribers requested full blocking during that time. Id., at 712. The uncomfortable fact is that § 504 was the sole blocking regulation in effect for over a year; and the public greeted it with a collective yawn.[32]
This is because there were, in fact, other market-based means available for parents to use to avoid the harm of unwanted adult programming,[33] and the government had not proved that Section 504 could be effective with more adequate notice.[34] The Court concluded its least-restrictive means analysis by saying:
Even upon the assumption that the Government has an interest in substituting itself for informed and empowered parents, its interest is not sufficiently compelling to justify this widespread restriction on speech. The Government’s argument stems from the idea that parents do not know their children are viewing the material on a scale or frequency to cause concern, or if so, that parents do not want to take affirmative steps to block it and their decisions are to be superseded. The assumptions have not been established; and in any event the assumptions apply only in a regime where the option of blocking has not been explained. The whole point of a publicized § 504 would be to advise parents that indecent material may be shown and to afford them an opportunity to block it at all times, even when they are not at home and even after 10 p.m. Time channeling does not offer this assistance. The regulatory alternative of a publicized § 504, which has the real possibility of promoting more open disclosure and the choice of an effective blocking system, would provide parents the information needed to engage in active supervision. The Government has not shown that this alternative, a regime of added communication and support, would be insufficient to secure its objective, or that any overriding harm justifies its intervention.[35]
In Coasean language, the government’s imposition of transaction costs through time-shifting channels is not the least-cost way to avoid the harm. By publicizing the blocking mechanism of Section 504, as well as promoting market-based alternatives like VCRs to record programming for playback later or blue-screen technology that blocks scrambled video, adults would be able to effectively act as least-cost avoiders of harmful content, including on behalf of their children.
In Ashcroft v. ACLU,[36] the Supreme Court reviewed a U.S. District Court’s preliminary injunction of the age-verification requirements imposed by the Children Online Protection Act (COPA), which was designed to “protect minors from exposure to sexually explicit materials on the Internet.”[37] The law created criminal penalties “of a $50,000 fine and six months in prison for the knowing posting” for ‘commercial purposes’ of World Wide Web content that is ‘harmful to minors.’”[38] The law did, however, provide an escape hatch, through:
…an affirmative defense to those who employ specified means to prevent minors from gaining access to the prohibited materials on their Web site. A person may escape conviction under the statute by demonstrating that he “has restricted access by minors to material that is harmful to minors— “(A) by requiring use of a credit card, debit account, adult access code, or adult personal identification number; “(B) by accepting a digital certificate that verifies age; or “(C) by any other reasonable measures that are feasible under available technology.” § 231(c)(1).[39]
…an affirmative defense to those who employ specified means to prevent minors from gaining access to the prohibited materials on their Web site. A person may escape conviction under the statute by demonstrating that he
“has restricted access by minors to material that is harmful to minors—
“(A) by requiring use of a credit card, debit account, adult access code, or adult personal identification number;
“(B) by accepting a digital certificate that verifies age; or
“(C) by any other reasonable measures that are feasible under available technology.” § 231(c)(1).[39]
Here, the Coasean analysis of the problem is not stated as explicitly as in Playboy, but it is still apparent. The internet clearly provides substantial value to users, including those who want to view pornography. But there is a negative externality in internet pornography’s broad availability to minors for whom it would be inappropriate. Thus, to prevent these harms, COPA established a criminal regulatory scheme with an age-verification defense. The threat of criminal penalties, combined with the age-verification regime, imposed high transaction costs on online publishers who post content defined as harmful to minors. This leaves adults (including parents of children) and children themselves as the other relevant parties. Again, the question is: who is the least-cost avoider of the possible negative externality of minor access to pornography? The adult-content publisher or the parents, using technological and practical means?
The Court immediately went to an analysis of the least-restrictive-means test, defining the inquiry as follows:
In considering this question, a court assumes that certain protected speech may be regulated, and then asks what is the least restrictive alternative that can be used to achieve that goal. The purpose of the test is not to consider whether the challenged restriction has some effect in achieving Congress’ goal, regardless of the restriction it imposes. The purpose of the test is to ensure that speech is restricted no further than necessary to achieve the goal, for it is important to ensure that legitimate speech is not chilled or punished. For that reason, the test does not begin with the status quo of existing regulations, then ask whether the challenged restriction has some additional ability to achieve Congress’ legitimate interest. Any restriction on speech could be justified under that analysis. Instead, the court should ask whether the challenged regulation is the least restrictive means among available, effective alternatives.[40]
The Court then considered the available alternative to COPA’s age-verification regime: blocking and filtering software. They found that such tools are clearly less-restrictive means, focusing not only on the software’s granting parents the ability to prevent their children from accessing inappropriate material, but also that adults would retain access to any content blocked by the filter by simply turning it off.[41] In fact, the Court noted that the evidence presented to the District Court suggested that filters, while imperfect, were probably even more effective than the age-verification regime.[42] Finally, the Court noted that, even if Congress couldn’t require filtering software, it could encourage it through parental education, by providing incentives to libraries and schools to use it, and by subsidizing development of the industry itself. Each of these, the Court argued, would be clearly less-restrictive means of promoting COPA’s goals.[43]
In Coasean language, the Court found that parents using technological and practical means are the least-cost avoider of the harm of exposing children to unwanted adult content. Government promotion and support of those means were held up as clearly less-restrictive alternatives than imposing transaction costs on publishers of adult content.
In Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association,[44] the Court considered California Assembly Bill 1179, which prohibited the sale or rental of “violent video games” to minors.[45] The Court first disposed of the argument that the government could create a new category of speech that it considered unprotected, just because it is directed at children, stating:
The California Act is something else entirely. It does not adjust the boundaries of an existing category of unprotected speech to ensure that a definition designed for adults is not uncritically applied to children. California does not argue that it is empowered to prohibit selling offensively violent works to adults—and it is wise not to, since that is but a hair’s breadth from the argument rejected in Stevens. Instead, it wishes to create a wholly new category of content-based regulation that is permissible only for speech directed at children. That is unprecedented and mistaken. “[M]inors are entitled to a significant measure of First Amendment protection, and only in relatively narrow and well-defined circumstances may government bar public dissemination of protected materials to them.” Erznoznik v. Jacksonville, 422 U.S. 205, 212-213, 95 S.Ct. 2736*2736 2268, 45 L.Ed.2d 125 (1975) (citation omitted). No doubt a State possesses legitimate power to protect children from harm, Ginsberg, supra, at 640-641, 88 S.Ct. 1274; Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U.S. 158, 165, 64 S.Ct. 438, 88 L.Ed. 645 (1944), but that does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed. “Speech that is neither obscene as to youths nor subject to some other legitimate proscription cannot be suppressed solely to protect the young from ideas or images that a legislative body thinks unsuitable for them.” Erznoznik, supra, at 213-214, 95 S.Ct. 2268.[46]
The California Act is something else entirely. It does not adjust the boundaries of an existing category of unprotected speech to ensure that a definition designed for adults is not uncritically applied to children. California does not argue that it is empowered to prohibit selling offensively violent works to adults—and it is wise not to, since that is but a hair’s breadth from the argument rejected in Stevens. Instead, it wishes to create a wholly new category of content-based regulation that is permissible only for speech directed at children.
That is unprecedented and mistaken. “[M]inors are entitled to a significant measure of First Amendment protection, and only in relatively narrow and well-defined circumstances may government bar public dissemination of protected materials to them.” Erznoznik v. Jacksonville, 422 U.S. 205, 212-213, 95 S.Ct. 2736*2736 2268, 45 L.Ed.2d 125 (1975) (citation omitted). No doubt a State possesses legitimate power to protect children from harm, Ginsberg, supra, at 640-641, 88 S.Ct. 1274; Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U.S. 158, 165, 64 S.Ct. 438, 88 L.Ed. 645 (1944), but that does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed. “Speech that is neither obscene as to youths nor subject to some other legitimate proscription cannot be suppressed solely to protect the young from ideas or images that a legislative body thinks unsuitable for them.” Erznoznik, supra, at 213-214, 95 S.Ct. 2268.[46]
The Court rejected that there was any “longstanding tradition” of restricting children’s access to depictions of violence, as demonstrated by copious examples of violent content in children’s books, high-school reading lists, motion pictures, radio dramas, comic books, television, music lyrics, etc. Moreover, to the extent there was a time when government enforced such regulations, the courts have eventually overturned them.[47] The fact that video games were interactive did not matter either, the Court found, as all literature is potentially interactive, especially genres like choose-your-own-adventure stories.[48]
Thus, because the law was clearly content-based, the Court applied strict scrutiny. The Court was skeptical even of whether the government had a compelling state interest, finding the law to be both seriously over- and under-inclusive. The same effects of exposure to violent content, the Court noted, could be found from covered video games and cartoons not subject to the law’s provisions. Moreover, the law allowed a parent or guardian (or any adult) to buy violent video games for their children.[49]
The Court then gets to the law’s real justification, which it summarily rejected as inconsistent with the First Amendment:
California claims that the Act is justified in aid of parental authority: By requiring that the purchase of violent video games can be made only by adults, the Act ensures that parents can decide what games are appropriate. At the outset, we note our doubts that punishing third parties for conveying protected speech to children just in case their parents disapprove of that speech is a proper governmental means of aiding parental authority.[50]
In Coasean language, the Court is saying that video games—even violent ones—are subjectively valued by those who play them, including minors. There may be negative externalities from playing such games, in that exposure to violence could be linked to psychological harm, and that they are interactive, but these content and design features are still protected speech. Placing the transaction costs on parents/adults to buy such games on behalf of minors, just in case some parents disapprove of their children playing them, is not a compelling state interest.
While the Court is only truly focused on whether there is a compelling state interest in California’s statutory scheme regulating violent video games, some of the language would equally apply to a least-restrictive means analysis:
But leaving that aside, California cannot show that the Act’s restrictions meet a substantial need of parents who wish to restrict their children’s access to violent video games but cannot do so. The video-game industry has in place a voluntary rating system designed to inform consumers about the content of games. The system, implemented by the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), assigns age-specific ratings to each video game submitted: EC (Early Childhood); E (Everyone); E10 + (Everyone 10 and older); T (Teens); M (17 and older); and AO (Adults Only—18 and older). App. 86. The Video Software Dealers Association encourages retailers to prominently display information about the ESRB system in their stores; to refrain from renting or selling adults-only games to minors; and to rent or sell “M” rated games to minors only with parental consent. Id., at 47. In 2009, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) found that, as a result of this system, “the video game industry outpaces the movie and music industries” in “(1) restricting target-marketing of mature-rated products to children; (2) clearly and prominently disclosing rating information; and (3) restricting children’s access to mature-rated products at retail.” FTC, Report to Congress, Marketing Violent Entertainment to Children 30 (Dec.2009), online at http://www. ftc.gov/os/2009/12/P994511violent entertainment.pdf (as visited June 24, 2011, and available in Clerk of Court’s case file) (FTC Report). This system does much to ensure that minors cannot purchase seriously violent games on their own, and that parents who care about the matter can readily evaluate the games their children bring home. Filling the remaining modest gap in concerned parents’ control can hardly be a compelling state interest. And finally, the Act’s purported aid to parental authority is vastly overinclusive. Not all of the children who are forbidden to purchase violent video games on their own have parents who care whether they purchase violent video games. While some of the legislation’s effect may indeed be in support of what some parents of the restricted children actually want, its entire effect is only in support of what the State thinks parents ought to want. This is not the narrow tailoring to “assisting parents” that restriction of First Amendment rights requires.[51]
But leaving that aside, California cannot show that the Act’s restrictions meet a substantial need of parents who wish to restrict their children’s access to violent video games but cannot do so. The video-game industry has in place a voluntary rating system designed to inform consumers about the content of games. The system, implemented by the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), assigns age-specific ratings to each video game submitted: EC (Early Childhood); E (Everyone); E10 + (Everyone 10 and older); T (Teens); M (17 and older); and AO (Adults Only—18 and older). App. 86. The Video Software Dealers Association encourages retailers to prominently display information about the ESRB system in their stores; to refrain from renting or selling adults-only games to minors; and to rent or sell “M” rated games to minors only with parental consent. Id., at 47. In 2009, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) found that, as a result of this system, “the video game industry outpaces the movie and music industries” in “(1) restricting target-marketing of mature-rated products to children; (2) clearly and prominently disclosing rating information; and (3) restricting children’s access to mature-rated products at retail.” FTC, Report to Congress, Marketing Violent Entertainment to Children 30 (Dec.2009), online at http://www. ftc.gov/os/2009/12/P994511violent entertainment.pdf (as visited June 24, 2011, and available in Clerk of Court’s case file) (FTC Report). This system does much to ensure that minors cannot purchase seriously violent games on their own, and that parents who care about the matter can readily evaluate the games their children bring home. Filling the remaining modest gap in concerned parents’ control can hardly be a compelling state interest.
And finally, the Act’s purported aid to parental authority is vastly overinclusive. Not all of the children who are forbidden to purchase violent video games on their own have parents who care whether they purchase violent video games. While some of the legislation’s effect may indeed be in support of what some parents of the restricted children actually want, its entire effect is only in support of what the State thinks parents ought to want. This is not the narrow tailoring to “assisting parents” that restriction of First Amendment rights requires.[51]
In sum, the Court suggests that the law would not be narrowly tailored, because there are already market-based systems in place to help parents and minors make informed decisions about which video games to buy—most importantly from the rating system that judges appropriateness by age and offers warnings about violence. Government paternalism is simply insufficient to justify imposing new transaction costs on parents and minors who wish to buy even violent video games.
Interestingly, the concurrence of Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, also contains some language that could be interpreted through a Coasean lens. The concurrence allows, in particular, the possibility that harms from interactive violent video games may differ from other depictions of violence that society has allowed children to view, although it concludes that reasonable minds may differ.[52] In other words, the concurrence basically notes that the negative externalities may be greater than the majority opinion would allow, but nonetheless, that Justices Alito and Roberts agreed the law was not drafted in a constitutional manner that comports with the obscenity exception to the First Amendment.
Nonetheless, it appears the Court applies an implicit Coasean framework when it rejects the imposition of transaction costs on parents and minors to gain access to protected speech—in this case, violent video games. Parents and minors remain the least-cost avoiders of the potential harms of violent video games.
As outlined above, the issue is whether social media needs age-verification and parental-consent laws in order to address negative externalities to minor users. This section will analyze this question under the Coasean framework introduced in Part II.
The basic argument proceeds as follows:
Part IV.A will detail the substantial transaction costs associated with obtaining age verification and verifiable parental consent. Part IV.B argues that parents and teens working together using practical and technological means are the lowest-cost avoiders of the harms of social-media use. Part IV.C will consider the counterfactual scenario of placing the transaction costs on social-media companies and argue that the result would be teens’ exclusion from social media, to their detriment, as well as the detriment of parents who would have made different choices.
As Coase taught, in a world without transaction costs (or where such costs are sufficiently low), age-verification laws or mandates to obtain verifiable parental consent would not matter, because the parties would bargain to arrive at an efficient solution. Because there are high transaction costs that prevent such bargains from being easily struck, making the default that teens cannot join social media without verifiable parental consent could have the effect of excluding them from the great benefits of social media usage altogether.[54]
There is considerable evidence that, even despite the internet and digital technology serving to reduce transaction costs considerably across a wide range of fronts,[55] transaction costs remain high when it comes to age verification and verifiable parental consent. A data point that supports this conclusion is the experience of social-media platforms under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).[56] In their working paper “COPPAcalypse? The YouTube Settlement’s Impact on Kids Content,”[57] Garrett Johnson, Tesary Lin, James C. Cooper, & Liang Zhong summarized the issue as follows:
The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), and its implementing regulations, broadly prohibit operators of online services directed at children under 13 from collecting personal information without providing notice of its data collection and use practices and obtaining verifiable parental consent. Because obtaining verifiable parental consent for free online services is difficult and rarely cost justified, COPPA essentially acts as a de facto ban on the collection of personal information by providers of free child-directed content. In 2013, the FTC amended the COPPA rules to include in the definition of personal information “persistent identifier that can be used to recognize a user over time and across different Web sites or online services,” such as a “customer number held in a cookie . . . or unique device identifier.” This regulatory change meant that, as a practical matter, online operators who provide child-directed content could no longer engage in personalized advertising. On September 4, 2019, the FTC entered into a consent agreement with YouTube to settle charges that it had violated COPPA. The FTC’s allegations focused on YouTube’s practice of serving personalized advertising on child-directed content at children without obtaining verifiable parental consent. Although YouTube maintains it is a general audience website and users must be at least 13 years old to obtain a Google ID (which makes personalized advertising possible), the FTC complaint alleges that YouTube knew that many of its channels were popular with children under 13, citing YouTube’s own claims to advertisers. The settlement required YouTube to identify child-directed channels and videos and to stop collecting personal information from visitors to these channels. In response, YouTube required channel owners producing [“made-for-kids”] MFK content to designate either their entire channels or specific videos as MFK, beginning on January 1, 2020. YouTube supplemented these self-designations with an automated classifier designed to identify content that was likely directed at children younger than 13.9 In so doing, YouTube effectively shifted liability under COPPA to the channel owners, who could face up to $42,530 in fines per video if they fail to self-designate and are not detected by YouTube’s classifier.[58]
The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), and its implementing regulations, broadly prohibit operators of online services directed at children under 13 from collecting personal information without providing notice of its data collection and use practices and obtaining verifiable parental consent. Because obtaining verifiable parental consent for free online services is difficult and rarely cost justified, COPPA essentially acts as a de facto ban on the collection of personal information by providers of free child-directed content. In 2013, the FTC amended the COPPA rules to include in the definition of personal information “persistent identifier that can be used to recognize a user over time and across different Web sites or online services,” such as a “customer number held in a cookie . . . or unique device identifier.” This regulatory change meant that, as a practical matter, online operators who provide child-directed content could no longer engage in personalized advertising.
On September 4, 2019, the FTC entered into a consent agreement with YouTube to settle charges that it had violated COPPA. The FTC’s allegations focused on YouTube’s practice of serving personalized advertising on child-directed content at children without obtaining verifiable parental consent. Although YouTube maintains it is a general audience website and users must be at least 13 years old to obtain a Google ID (which makes personalized advertising possible), the FTC complaint alleges that YouTube knew that many of its channels were popular with children under 13, citing YouTube’s own claims to advertisers. The settlement required YouTube to identify child-directed channels and videos and to stop collecting personal information from visitors to these channels. In response, YouTube required channel owners producing [“made-for-kids”] MFK content to designate either their entire channels or specific videos as MFK, beginning on January 1, 2020. YouTube supplemented these self-designations with an automated classifier designed to identify content that was likely directed at children younger than 13.9 In so doing, YouTube effectively shifted liability under COPPA to the channel owners, who could face up to $42,530 in fines per video if they fail to self-designate and are not detected by YouTube’s classifier.[58]
The rule change and settlement increased the transaction costs imposed on social-media platforms by requiring verifiable parental consent. YouTube’s economically rational response was to restrict the content creators’ ability to benefit from (considerably more lucrative) personalized advertising. The end result was less content created for children, with competitive effects to boot:
Consistent with a loss in personalized ad revenue, we find that child-directed content creators produce 13% less content and pivot towards producing non-child-directed content. On the demand side, views of child-directed channels fall by 22%. Consistent with the platform’s degraded capacity to match viewers to content, we find that content creation and content views become more concentrated among top child-directed YouTube channels.[59]
This is not the only finding regarding COPPA’s role in reducing the production of content for children. The president of the App Association, a global trade association for small and medium-sized technology companies, presented extensively at the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) 2019 COPPA Workshop.[60] The testimony from App Association President Morgan Reed detailed that the transaction costs associated with obtaining verifiable parental consent did little to enhance parental control, but much to reduce the quality and quantity of content directed to children. But it is worth highlighting Reed’s constant use of the words “friction,” “restriction,” and “cost” to describe how the institutional environment of COPPA affects the behavior of the social media platforms, parents, and children. While noting that general audience content is “unfettered, meaning that you don’t feel restricted by what you can get to, how you do it. It’s easy, it’s low friction. Widely available. I can get it on any platform, in any case, in any context and I can get to it rapidly,” COPPA-regulated apps and content are, Reed said, all about:
Friction, restriction, and cost. Every layer of friction you add alters parent behavior significantly. We jokingly refer to it as the over the shoulder factor. If a parent wants access to something and they have to pass it from the back seat to the front seat of the car more than one time, the parent moves on to the next thing. So the more friction you add to an application directed at children the less likely it is that the parent is going to take the steps necessary to get through it because the competition, of course, is as I said, free, unfettered, widely available. Restriction. Kids balk against some of the restrictions. I can’t get to this, I can’t do that. And they say that to the parent. And from the parent’s perspective, fine, I’ll just put in a different age date. They’re participating, they’re parenting but they’re not using the regulatory construction that we all understand. … The COPPA side, expensive, onerous or friction full. We have to find some way around that. Restrictive, fewer features, fewer capabilities, less known or available, and it’s entertaining-ish. … Is COPPA the barrier? I thought this quote really summed it up. “Seamlessness is expected. But with COPPA, seamlessness is impossible.” And that has been one of the single largest areas of concern. Our folks are looking to provide a COPPA compliant environment. And they’re finding doing VPC is really hard. We want to make it this way, we just walked away. And why do they want to do it? We wanted to create a hub for kids to promote creativity. So these are not folks who are looking to take data and provide interest based advertising. They’re trying to figure out how to do it so they can build an engaging product. Parental consent makes the whole process very complicated. And this is the depressing part. … We say that VPC is intentional friction. It’s clear from everything we’ve heard in the last two panels that the authors of COPPA, we don’t really want information collected on kids. So friction is intentional. And this is leading to the destruction of general audience applications basically wiping out COPPA apps off the face of the map.[61]
Friction, restriction, and cost. Every layer of friction you add alters parent behavior significantly. We jokingly refer to it as the over the shoulder factor. If a parent wants access to something and they have to pass it from the back seat to the front seat of the car more than one time, the parent moves on to the next thing. So the more friction you add to an application directed at children the less likely it is that the parent is going to take the steps necessary to get through it because the competition, of course, is as I said, free, unfettered, widely available. Restriction. Kids balk against some of the restrictions. I can’t get to this, I can’t do that. And they say that to the parent. And from the parent’s perspective, fine, I’ll just put in a different age date. They’re participating, they’re parenting but they’re not using the regulatory construction that we all understand. …
The COPPA side, expensive, onerous or friction full. We have to find some way around that. Restrictive, fewer features, fewer capabilities, less known or available, and it’s entertaining-ish. …
Is COPPA the barrier? I thought this quote really summed it up. “Seamlessness is expected. But with COPPA, seamlessness is impossible.” And that has been one of the single largest areas of concern. Our folks are looking to provide a COPPA compliant environment. And they’re finding doing VPC is really hard. We want to make it this way, we just walked away. And why do they want to do it? We wanted to create a hub for kids to promote creativity. So these are not folks who are looking to take data and provide interest based advertising. They’re trying to figure out how to do it so they can build an engaging product. Parental consent makes the whole process very complicated. And this is the depressing part. …
We say that VPC is intentional friction. It’s clear from everything we’ve heard in the last two panels that the authors of COPPA, we don’t really want information collected on kids. So friction is intentional. And this is leading to the destruction of general audience applications basically wiping out COPPA apps off the face of the map.[61]
Reed’s use of the word “friction” is particularly enlightening. Mike Munger has often described transaction costs as frictions, explaining that, to consumers, all costs are transaction costs.[62] When higher transaction costs are imposed on social-media platforms, end users feel the impact. In this case, the result is that children and parents receive less quality children’s apps and content.
A similar example can be seen in the various battles between traditional media and social-media companies in Australia, Canada, and the EU, where laws have been passed that would require platforms to pay for linking to certain news content.[63] Because these laws raise transaction costs, social-media platforms have responded by restricting access to news links,[64] to the detriment of users and the news-media organizations themselves. In other words, much like with verifiable parental consent, the intent of these laws is thwarted by the underlying economics.
More evidence that imposing transaction costs on social-media companies can have the effect of diminishing the user experience can be found in the preliminary injunction issued by the U.S. District Court in Austin, Texas in Free Speech Coalition Inc. v. Colmenero.[65] The court cited evidence from the plaintiff’s complaint that included bills for “several commercial verification services, showing that they cost, at minimum, $40,000.00 per 100,000 verifications.”[66] The court also noted that “[Texas law] H.B. 1181 imposes substantial liability for violations, including $10,000.00 per day for each violation, and up to $250,000.00 if a minor is shown to have viewed the adult content.”[67]
Moreover, the transaction costs in this example also include the subjective costs borne by those who actually go through with verifying their age to access pornography. As the court noted “the law interferes with the Adult Video Companies’ ability to conduct business, and risks deterring adults from visiting the websites.”[68] The court issued a preliminary injunction against the law’s age-verification provision, finding that other means—such as content-filtering software—are clearly more effective than age verification to protect children from unwanted content.[69]
In sum, transaction costs for age verification and verifiable parental consent are sufficiently high as to prevent an easy bargain from being struck. Thus, which party bears the burden of those costs will determine the outcome. The lessons from COPPA, news-media laws, and online-pornography age-verification laws are clear: if the transaction costs are imposed on the online platforms and apps, it will lead to access restrictions on the speech those platforms provide, almost all of which is protected speech. This is the type of collateral censorship that the First Amendment is designed to avoid.[70]
If transaction costs due to online age-verification and verifiable-parent-consent laws are substantial, the question becomes which party or parties should be subject to the burden of avoiding the harms arising from social-media usage.
It is possible, in theory, that social-media platforms are the best-positioned to monitor and control content posted to their platforms—for instance, when it comes to harms associated with anonymous or pseudonymous accounts imposing social costs on society.[71] In such cases, a duty of care that would allow for intermediary liability against social-media companies may make sense.[72]
On the other hand, when it comes to online age-verification and parental-consent laws, widely available practical and technological means appear to be lowest-cost way to avoid the negative externalities associated with social-media usage. As NetChoice put it in their complaint against Arkansas’ social-media age-verification law, “[p]arents have myriad ways to restrict their children’s access to online services and to keep their children safe on such services.”[73]
In their complaint, NetChoice recognizes the subjective nature of negative externalities, stating:
Just as people inevitably have different opinions about what books, television shows, and video games are appropriate for minors, people inevitably have different views about whether and to what degree online services are appropriate for minors. While many minors use online services in wholesome and productive ways, online services, like many other technologies, can be abused in ways that may harm minors.[74]
They then expertly list all the ways that parents can take control and help their children avoid online harms, including with respect to the decisions to buy devices for their children and to set terms for how and when they are permitted to use them.[75] Parents can also choose to use tools from cell-phone carriers and broadband providers to block certain apps and sites from their children’s devices, or to control with whom their children can communicate and for how long they can use the devices.[76] They also point to wireless routers that allow for parents to filter and monitor online content;[77] parental controls at the device level;[78] third-party filtering applications;[79] and numerous tools offered by NetChoice members that all allow for relatively low-cost monitoring and control by parents and even teen users acting on their own behalf.[80] Finally, they note that NetChoice members, in response to market demand,[81]expend significant resources curating content to make sure it’s appropriate.[82]
The recent response from the Australian government to the proposed “Roadmap for Age Verification”[83] buttresses this analysis. The government pulled back from plans to “force adult websites to bring in age verification following concerns about privacy and the lack of maturity of the technology.”[84] In particular, the government noted that:
It is clear from the Roadmap that at present, each type of age verification or age assurance technology comes with its own privacy, security, effectiveness and implementation issues. For age assurance to be effective, it must: work reliably without circumvention; be comprehensively implemented, including where pornography is hosted outside of Australia’s jurisdiction; and balance privacy and security, without introducing risks to the personal information of adults who choose to access legal pornography. Age assurance technologies cannot yet meet all these requirements. While industry is taking steps to further develop these technologies, the Roadmap finds that the age assurance market is, at this time, immature. The Roadmap makes clear that a decision to mandate age assurance is not ready to be taken.[85]
It is clear from the Roadmap that at present, each type of age verification or age assurance technology comes with its own privacy, security, effectiveness and implementation issues. For age assurance to be effective, it must:
Age assurance technologies cannot yet meet all these requirements. While industry is taking steps to further develop these technologies, the Roadmap finds that the age assurance market is, at this time, immature.
The Roadmap makes clear that a decision to mandate age assurance is not ready to be taken.[85]
As a better solution, the government offered “[m]ore support and resources for families,”[86] including promoting tools already available in the marketplace to help prevent children from accessing inappropriate content like pornography,[87] and promoting education for both parents and children on how to avoid online harms.[88]
In sum, this is all about transaction costs. The least-cost avoider from negative externalities imposed by social-media usage are the parents and teens themselves, working together to make marginal decisions about how to use these platforms through the use of widely available practical and technological means.
If the burden of avoiding negative externalities is placed on social-media platforms, the result could be considerable collateral censorship of protected speech. This is because of transaction costs, as explained above in Part IV.A. Thus, while one could argue that the externalities imposed by social-media platforms on teen users and their parents represent a market failure, this is not the end of the analysis. Transaction costs help to explain that the institutional environment we create fosters the rules of the game that platforms, parents, and teens follow. If transaction costs are too high and placed incorrectly on social-media platforms, parents and teens’ ability to control how they use social media will actually suffer.
As can be seen most prominently in the COPPA examples discussed above,[89] the burden of obtaining verifiable parental consent leads to platforms reallocating investments into the exclusion of the protected class—in that case, children under age 13—that could otherwise go toward creating a safe and vibrant community from which children could benefit. Thus, proposals like COPPA 2.0,[90] which would extend the need for verifiable consent to teens, could yield an equivalent result of greater exclusion of teens. State laws that would require age verification and verifiable parental consent for teens are likely to produce the same result, as well. The irony, of course, is that parental consent laws would actually reduce the available choices for those parents who see the use value for their teenagers.
In sum, the economics of transaction costs explains why age-verification and verifiable-parental-consent laws will not satisfy their proponents’ stated objectives. As with minimum-wage laws[91] and rent control,[92] economics helps to explain the counterintuitive finding that well-intentioned laws can actually produce the exact opposite end result. Here, that means age-verification and verifiable-parental-consent laws lead to parents and teens being less able to make meaningful and marginal decisions about the costs and benefits of their own social-media usage.
Bringing this all together, Part V will consider the constitutionality of the enacted and proposed laws on age verification and verifiable parental consent under the First Amendment. As several courts have already suggested, these laws will not survive First Amendment scrutiny.
The first question is whether these laws will be subject to strict scrutiny (because they are content-based) or instead to intermediate scrutiny as content-neutral regulations. There is a possibility that it will not matter, because a court could find—as one already has—that such laws burden more speech than necessary anyway. Part V.A will take up these questions.
The second set of questions is whether, assuming strict scrutiny applies, these enacted and proposed laws could survive the least-restrictive-means test. Part V.B will consider this set of questions and argue that, as the lowest-cost avoiders, parents and teens working together using widely available practical and technological means to avoid negative externalities also represents the least-restrictive means to promote the government’s interest in protecting minors from the harms of social media.
The first important question is whether laws that attempt to protect minors from externalities associated with social-media usage are content-neutral. One argument that has been forwarded is that they are simply content-neutral contract laws that shift the consent default to parents before teens can establish an ongoing contractual relationship with a social-media company by creating a profile.[93]
Before delving into whether that argument could work, it is worth considering laws that are clearly content-based to help tell the difference. For instance, the Texas law challenged in Free Speech Coalition v. Colmenero is clearly content-based, because “the regulation is based on whether content contains sexual material.”[94]
Similarly, laws like the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA)[95] are content-based, in that they require covered platforms to take:
reasonable measures in its design or operation of products and services to prevent or mitigate the following:
Consistent with evidence-informed medical information, the following mental health disorders: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance use disorders, and suicidal behaviors.
Patterns of use that indicate or encourage addiction-like behaviors.
Physical violence, online bullying, and harassment of the minor.
Sexual exploitation and abuse.
Promotion and marketing of narcotic drugs (as defined in section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act (21 U.S.C. 802)), tobacco products, gambling, or alcohol.
Predatory, unfair, or deceptive marketing practices, or other financial harms.[96]
While parts 4-6 and actual physical violence all constitute either unprotected speech or conduct, decisions about how to present information from part 2 is arguably protected speech.[97] Even true threats like online bullying and harassment are speech subject to at least some First Amendment scrutiny, in that they would require some type of mens rea to be constitutional.[98] Part 1 may be unconstitutionally vague as written.[99] Moreover, 1-3 are clearly content-based, in that it is necessary to consider the content presented, which will include at least some protected speech. This equally applies to the California Age Appropriate Design Code,[100] which places an obligation on covered companies to identify and mitigate speech that is harmful or potentially harmful to users under 18 years old, and to prioritize speech that promotes such users’ well-being and best interests.[101]
In each of these cases, it would be difficult to argue that strict scrutiny ought not apply. On the other hand, some have argued that the Utah and Arkansas laws requiring age verification and verifiable parental consent are simply content-neutral regulations of contract formation, which can be considered independently of speech.[102] Arkansas has argued that Act 689’s age-verification requirements are “merely a content-neutral regulation on access to speech at particular ‘locations,’ so intermediate scrutiny should apply.”[103]
But even in NetChoice v. Griffin,[104] the U.S. District Court in Arkansas, while skeptical that the law was content-neutral,[105] proceeded as if it was and still found, in granting a preliminary injunction, that the age-verification law “is likely to unduly burden adult and minor access to constitutionally protected speech.”[106] Similarly, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California found that all major provisions of California’s AADC were likely unconstitutional under a lax commercial-speech standard.[107]
Nonetheless, there are strong arguments that these laws are content-based. As the court in Griffin put it:
Deciding whether Act 689 is content-based or content-neutral turns on the reasons the State gives for adopting the Act. First, the State argues that the more time a minor spends on social media, the more likely it is that the minor will suffer negative mental health outcomes, including depression and anxiety. Second, the State points out that adult sexual predators on social media seek out minors and victimize them in various ways. Therefore, to the State, a law limiting access to social media platforms based on the user’s age would be content-neutral and require only intermediate scrutiny. On the other hand, the State points to certain speech-related content on social media that it maintains is harmful for children to view. Some of this content is not constitutionally protected speech, while other content, though potentially damaging or distressing, especially to younger minors, is likely protected nonetheless. Examples of this type of speech include depictions and discussions of violence or self-harming, information about dieting, so-called “bullying” speech, or speech targeting a speaker’s physical appearance, race or ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender. If the State’s purpose is to restrict access to constitutionally protected speech based on the State’s belief that such speech is harmful to minors, then arguably Act 689 would be subject to strict scrutiny. During the hearing, the State advocated for intermediate scrutiny and framed Act 689 as “a restriction on where minors can be,” emphasizing it was “not a speech restriction” but “a location restriction.” The State’s briefing analogized Act 689 to a restriction on minors entering a bar or a casino. But this analogy is weak. After all, minors have no constitutional right to consume alcohol, and the primary purpose of a bar is to serve alcohol. By contrast, the primary purpose of a social media platform is to engage in speech, and the State stipulated that social media platforms contain vast amounts of constitutionally protected speech for both adults and minors. Furthermore, Act 689 imposes much broader “location restrictions” than a bar does. The Court inquired of the State why minors should be barred from accessing entire social media platforms, even though only some of the content was potentially harmful to them, and the following colloquy ensued: THE COURT: Well, to pick up on Mr. Allen’s analogy of the mall, I haven’t been to the Northwest Arkansas mall in a while, but it used to be that there was a restaurant inside the mall that had a bar. And so certainly minors could not go sit at the bar and order up a drink, but they could go to the Barnes & Noble bookstore or the clothing store or the athletic store. Again, borrowing Mr. Allen’s analogy, the gatekeeping that Act 689 imposes is at the front door of the mall, not the bar inside the mall; yes? THE STATE: The state’s position is that the whole mall is a bar, if you want to continue to use the analogy. THE COURT: The whole mall is a bar? THE STATE: Correct. Clearly, the state’s analogy is not persuasive. NetChoice argues that Act 689 is not a content-neutral restriction on minors’ ability to access particular spaces online, and the fact that there are so many exemptions to the definitions of “social media company” and “social media platform” proves that the State is targeting certain companies based either on a platform’s content or its viewpoint. Indeed, Act 689’s definitions and exemptions do seem to indicate that the State has selected a few platforms for regulation while ignoring all the rest. The fact that the State fails to acknowledge this causes the Court to suspect that the regulation may not be content neutral. “If there is evidence that an impermissible purpose or justification underpins a facially content-neutral restriction, for instance, that restriction may be content-based.” City of Austin v. Reagan Nat’l Advertising of Austin, LLC, 142 S. Ct. 1464, 1475 (2022).[108]
Deciding whether Act 689 is content-based or content-neutral turns on the reasons the State gives for adopting the Act. First, the State argues that the more time a minor spends on social media, the more likely it is that the minor will suffer negative mental health outcomes, including depression and anxiety. Second, the State points out that adult sexual predators on social media seek out minors and victimize them in various ways. Therefore, to the State, a law limiting access to social media platforms based on the user’s age would be content-neutral and require only intermediate scrutiny.
On the other hand, the State points to certain speech-related content on social media that it maintains is harmful for children to view. Some of this content is not constitutionally protected speech, while other content, though potentially damaging or distressing, especially to younger minors, is likely protected nonetheless. Examples of this type of speech include depictions and discussions of violence or self-harming, information about dieting, so-called “bullying” speech, or speech targeting a speaker’s physical appearance, race or ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender. If the State’s purpose is to restrict access to constitutionally protected speech based on the State’s belief that such speech is harmful to minors, then arguably Act 689 would be subject to strict scrutiny.
During the hearing, the State advocated for intermediate scrutiny and framed Act 689 as “a restriction on where minors can be,” emphasizing it was “not a speech restriction” but “a location restriction.” The State’s briefing analogized Act 689 to a restriction on minors entering a bar or a casino. But this analogy is weak. After all, minors have no constitutional right to consume alcohol, and the primary purpose of a bar is to serve alcohol. By contrast, the primary purpose of a social media platform is to engage in speech, and the State stipulated that social media platforms contain vast amounts of constitutionally protected speech for both adults and minors. Furthermore, Act 689 imposes much broader “location restrictions” than a bar does. The Court inquired of the State why minors should be barred from accessing entire social media platforms, even though only some of the content was potentially harmful to them, and the following colloquy ensued:
THE COURT: Well, to pick up on Mr. Allen’s analogy of the mall, I haven’t been to the Northwest Arkansas mall in a while, but it used to be that there was a restaurant inside the mall that had a bar. And so certainly minors could not go sit at the bar and order up a drink, but they could go to the Barnes & Noble bookstore or the clothing store or the athletic store. Again, borrowing Mr. Allen’s analogy, the gatekeeping that Act 689 imposes is at the front door of the mall, not the bar inside the mall; yes?
THE STATE: The state’s position is that the whole mall is a bar, if you want to continue to use the analogy.
THE COURT: The whole mall is a bar?
THE STATE: Correct.
Clearly, the state’s analogy is not persuasive.
NetChoice argues that Act 689 is not a content-neutral restriction on minors’ ability to access particular spaces online, and the fact that there are so many exemptions to the definitions of “social media company” and “social media platform” proves that the State is targeting certain companies based either on a platform’s content or its viewpoint. Indeed, Act 689’s definitions and exemptions do seem to indicate that the State has selected a few platforms for regulation while ignoring all the rest. The fact that the State fails to acknowledge this causes the Court to suspect that the regulation may not be content neutral. “If there is evidence that an impermissible purpose or justification underpins a facially content-neutral restriction, for instance, that restriction may be content-based.” City of Austin v. Reagan Nat’l Advertising of Austin, LLC, 142 S. Ct. 1464, 1475 (2022).[108]
Utah’s laws HB 311 and 152 would also seem to suffer from a similar defect as KOSA and AADC,[109] though they have not yet been litigated.
Assuming that courts do, in fact, find that these laws are content-based, strict scrutiny would apply, including the least-restrictive-means test.[110] In that case, the caselaw is clear: the least-restrictive means to achieve the government’s interest of protecting minors from social media’s speech and design problems is to promote low-cost monitoring and filtering.
First, however, it is also worth inquiring whether the government would be able to establish a compelling state interest, as the Court discussed in Brown. The Court’s strong skepticism of government paternalism[111] applies equally to the verifiable-parental-consent laws enacted in Arkansas and Utah, as well as COPPA 2.0. Aiding parental consent likely fails to “meet a substantial need of parents who wish to restrict their children’s access”[112] to social media, but can’t do so, to use the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s language. Moreover, the “purported aid to parental authority” is likely to be found to be “vastly overinclusive” because “[n]ot all of the children who are forbidden” to join social media on “their own have parents who care whether” they do so.[113] While such laws “may indeed be in support of what some parents of the restricted children actually want, its entire effect is only in support of what the State thinks parents ought to want. This is not the narrow tailoring to ‘assisting parents’ that restriction of First Amendment rights requires.”[114]
As argued clearly above, Ashcroft is strong precedent that promoting the practical and technological means available in the marketplace, outlined by NetChoice in its brief in Griffin, is less restrictive than age-verification laws to protect minors from harms associated with social-media usage.[115] In fact, there is a strong argument that the market has subsequently produced more and more effective tools than were available even then. This makes it exceedingly unlikely that the Supreme Court will change its mind.
While some have argued that Justice Clarence Thomas’ dissent in Brown offers roadmap to reject these precedents,[116] there is little basis for that conclusion. First, Thomas’ dissent in Brown was not joined by any other members of the Supreme Court.[117] Second, Justice Thomas joined the majority in Ashcroft v. ACLU, suggesting he probably still sees age-verification laws as unconstitutional.[118] Even Associate Justice Samuel Alito issued a concurrence to the majority in that case,[119] expressing skepticism of Justice Thomas’ approach.[120] Third, it seems unlikely that the newer conservative justices, whose jurisprudence has been more speech-protective by nature,[121] would join Justice Thomas in his opinion on the right of children to receive speech. And far from being vague on the issue of whether a minor has a right to receive speech, [122] Justice Scalia’s majority opinion clearly stated that:
[M]inors are entitled to a significant measure of First Amendment protection, and only in relatively narrow and well-defined circumstances may government bar public dissemination of protected materials to them… but that does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed.[123]
Precedent is strong against age-verification and parental-consent laws, and there is no reason to think the personnel changes on the Supreme Court would change the analysis.
In sum, straightforward applications of Brown and Ashcroft doom these new social-media laws.
This issue brief has two main conclusions, one of interest to the scholarship of applying law & economics to constitutional law, and the other to the policy and legal questions surrounding social-media age-verification and parental-consent laws:
In conclusion, these online age-verification laws should be rejected. Why? The answer is transaction costs.
[1] See, e.g., Kirsten Weir, Social Media Brings Benefits and Risks to Teens. Here’s How Psychology Can Help Identify a Path Forward, 54 Monitor on Psychology 46 (Sep. 1, 2023), https://www.apa.org/monitor/2023/09/protecting-teens-on-social-media.
[2] See, e.g., Khara Boender, Jordan Rodell, & Alex Spyropoulos, The State of Affairs: What Happened in Tech Policy During 2023 State Legislative Sessions?, Project Disco (Jul. 25, 2023), https://www.project-disco.org/competition/the-state-of-affairs-state-tech-policy-in-2023 (noting laws passed and proposed addressing children’s online safety at the state level, including California’s Age-Appropriate Design Code and age-verification laws in both Arkansas and Utah, all of which will be considered below).
[3] With apologies to Mike Munger for borrowing the title of his excellent podcast, invoked several times in this issue brief; see The Answer Is Transaction Costs, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-answer-is-transaction-costs/id1687215430 (last accessed Sept. 28, 2023).
[4] Steven G. Medema, “Failure to Appear”: The Use of the Coase Theorem in Judicial Opinions, at 4, Dep’t of Econ. Duke Univ., Working Paper No. 2.1 (2019), available at https://hope.econ.duke.edu/sites/hope.econ.duke.edu/files/Medema%20workshop%20paper.pdf.
[5] Fred R. Shapiro & Michelle Pearse, The Most Cited Law Review Articles of All Time, 110 Mich. L. Rev. 1483, 1489 (2012).
[6] R.H. Coase, The Problem of Social Cost, 3 J. L. & Econ. 1 (1960).
[7] See generally Steven G. Medema, The Coase Theorem at Sixty, 58 J. Econ. Lit. 1045 (2020).
[8] Todd J. Zywicki & Edward Peter Stringham, Common Law and Economic Efficiency, Geo. Mason Univ.. L. & Econ. Rsch., Working Paper No. 10-43 (2010), available at https://www.law.gmu.edu/assets/files/publications/working_papers/1043CommonLawandEconomicEfficiency.pdf.
[9] See id. at 4.
[10] See id. at 3.
[11] See id. at 10.
[12] See id. at 34.
[13] Medema, supra note 4, at 39.
[14] See, e.g., Matti Cuorre & Andrew K. Przybylski, Estimating the Association Between Facebook Adoption and Well-Being in 72 Countries, 10 Royal Soc’y Open Sci. 1 (2023), https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/epdf/10.1098/rsos.221451; Sabrina Cipoletta, Clelia Malighetti, Chiara Cenedese, & Andrea Spoto, How Can Adolescents Benefit from the Use of Social Networks? The iGeneration on Instagram, 17 Int. J. Environ. Res. Pub. Health 6952 (2020), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7579040.
[15] See Jean M. Twenge, Thomas E. Joiner, Megan L Rogers, & Gabrielle N. Martin, Increases in Depressive Symptoms, Suicide-Related Outcomes, and Suicide Rates Among U.S. Adolescents After 2010 and Links to Increased New Media Screen Time, 6 Clinical Psych. Sci. 3 (2018), available at https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/cs565/sp2018/Live1_Depression&ScreenTime.pdf.
[16] Adam Candeub, Age Verification for Social Media: A Constitutional and Reasonable Regulation, FedSoc Blog (Aug. 7, 2023), https://fedsoc.org/commentary/fedsoc-blog/age-verification-for-social-media-a-constitutional-and-reasonable-regulation.
[17] See Wikipedia, List of Alcohol Laws of the United States, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alcohol_laws_of_the_United_States (last accessed Sep. 28, 2023); Wikipedia, U.S. History of Tobacco Minimum Purchase Age by State, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._history_of_tobacco_minimum_purchase_age_by_state (last accessed Sep. 28, 2023).
[18] See Wikipedia, Driver’s Licenses in the United States, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver%27s_licenses_in_the_United_States (last accessed Sep. 28, 2023).
[19] See Wikipedia, Gambling Age, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling_age (last accessed Sep. 28, 2023) (table on minimum age for lottery tickets and casinos by state). As far as this author is aware, every state and territory requires identification demonstrating the buyer is at least 18 years old to make a retail purchase of a pornographic magazine or video.
[20] See 15 U.S.C. § 6501, et seq. (2018); 16 CFR Part 312.
[21] See infra Part III. See Brown v. Ent. Merch. Ass’n, 564 U.S. 786, 794 (2011) (“California does not argue that it is empowered to prohibit selling offensively violent works to adults—and it is wise not to, since that is but a hair’s breadth from the argument rejected in Stevens. Instead, it wishes to create a wholly new category of content-based regulation that is permissible only for speech directed at children. That is unprecedented and mistaken. ‘[M]inors are entitled to a significant measure of First Amendment protection, and only in relatively narrow and well-defined circumstances may government bar public dissemination of protected materials to them…’ No doubt a State possesses legitimate power to protect children from harm… but that does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed. ‘Speech that is neither obscene as to youths nor subject to some other legitimate proscription cannot be suppressed solely to protect the young from ideas or images that a legislative body thinks unsuitable for them.’”) (internal citations omitted).
[22] See infra Part V.
[23] See infra Part IV.
[24] 529 U.S. 803 (2000).
[25] Id. at 806.
[26] See id.
[27] See id. at 806-807.
[28] Id. at 811.
[29] Id. at 813 (internal citation omitted).
[30] Id. at 814.
[31] Id. at 815.
[32] Id. at 816.
[33] See id. at 821 (“[M]arket-based solutions such as programmable televisions, VCR’s, and mapping systems []which display a blue screen when tuned to a scrambled signal[] may eliminate signal bleed at the consumer end of the cable.”).
[34] See id. at 823 (“The Government also failed to prove § 504 with adequate notice would be an ineffective alternative to § 505.”).
[35] Id. at 825-826.
[36] 542 U.S. 656 (2004).
[37] Id. at 659.
[38] Id. at 661.
[39] Id. at 662.
[40] Id. at 666.
[41] See id. at 667 (“Filters are less restrictive than COPA. They impose selective restrictions on speech at the receiving end, not universal restrictions at the source. Under a filtering regime, adults without children may gain access to speech they have a right to see without having to identify themselves or provide their credit card information. Even adults with children may obtain access to the same speech on the same terms simply by turning off the filter on their home computers. Above all, promoting the use of filters does not condemn as criminal any category of speech, and so the potential chilling effect is eliminated, or at least much diminished. All of these things are true, moreover, regardless of how broadly or narrowly the definitions in COPA are construed.”).
[42] See id. at 667-669.
[43] See id. at 669-670.
[44] 564 U.S. 786 (2011).
[45] See id. at 787.
[46] Id. at 793-795.
[47] See id. at 794-797.
[48] See id. at 796-799.
[49] See id. at 799-802.
[50] Id. at 801.
[51] Id. at 801-804.
[52] See id. at 812 (J. Alito, concurring):
“There is a critical difference, however, between obscenity laws and laws regulating violence in entertainment. By the time of this Court’s landmark obscenity cases in the 1960’s, obscenity had long been prohibited, See Roth v. U.S., 354 U.S. 476, at 484-485, and this experience had helped to shape certain generally accepted norms concerning expression related to sex.
There is no similar history regarding expression related to violence. As the Court notes, classic literature contains descriptions of great violence, and even children’s stories sometimes depict very violent scenes.
Although our society does not generally regard all depictions of violence as suitable for children or adolescents, the prevalence of violent depictions in children’s literature and entertainment creates numerous opportunities for reasonable people to disagree about which depictions may excite “deviant” or “morbid” impulses. See Edwards & Berman, Regulating Violence on Television, 89 Nw. U.L.Rev. 1487, 1523 (1995) (observing that the Miller test would be difficult to apply to violent expression because “there is nothing even approaching a consensus on low-value violence”).
Finally, the difficulty of ascertaining the community standards incorporated into the California law is compounded by the legislature’s decision to lump all minors together. The California law draws no distinction between young children and adolescents who are nearing the age of majority.”
See also id. at 819 (Alito, J., concurring) (“If the technological characteristics of the sophisticated games that are likely to be available in the near future are combined with the characteristics of the most violent games already marketed, the result will be games that allow troubled teens to experience in an extraordinarily personal and vivid way what it would be like to carry out unspeakable acts of violence.”).
[53] The following sections are adapted from Ben Sperry, Right to Anonymous Speech, Part 3: Anonymous Speech and Age-Verification Laws, Truth on the Market (Sep. 11, 2023), https://truthonthemarket.com/2023/09/11/right-to-anonymous-speech-part-3-anonymous-speech-and-age-verification-laws.
[54] See Ben Sperry, Online Safety Bills Will Mean Kids Are No Longer Seen or Heard Online, The Hill (May 12, 2023), https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/4002535-online-safety-bills-will-mean-kids-are-no-longer-seen-or-heard-online; Ben Sperry, Bills Aimed at ‘Protecting’ Kids Online Throw the Baby out with the Bathwater, The Hill (Jul. 26, 2023), https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/4121324-bills-aimed-at-protecting-kids-online-throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater; Przybylski & Vuorre, supra note 14; Mesfin A. Bekalu, Rachel F. McCloud, & K. Viswanath, Association of Social Media Use With Social Well-Being, Positive Mental Health, and Self-Rated Health: Disentangling Routine Use From Emotional Connection to Use, 42 Sage J. 69S, 69S-80S (2019), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1090198119863768.
[55] See generally Michael Munger, Tomorrow 3.0: Transaction Costs and the Sharing Economy, Cambridge University Press (Mar. 22, 2018).
[56] The Future of the COPPA Rule: An FTC Workshop Part 2, Federal Trade Commission (Oct. 7, 2019), available at https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_events/1535372/transcript_of_coppa_workshop_part_2_1.pdf.
[57] Garrett A. Johnson, Tesary Lin, James C. Cooper, & Liang Zhong, COPPAcalypse? The YouTube Settlement’s Impact on Kids Content, SSRN (Apr. 26, 2023), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4430334.
[58] Id. at 6-7 (emphasis added).
[59] Id. at 1.
[60] FTC, supra note 56.
[61] Id. at 6 (emphasis added).
[62] See Michael Munger, To Consumers, All Costs are Transaction Costs, Am. Inst. Econ. Rsch. (June 13, 2023), https://www.aier.org/article/to-consumers-all-costs-are-transaction-costs.
[63] See Katie Robertson, Meta Begins Blocking News in Canada, N.Y. Times (Aug. 2, 2023), https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/02/business/media/meta-news-in-canada.html; Mark Collom, Australia Made a Deal to Keep News on Facebook. Why Couldn’t Canada?, CBC News (Aug. 3, 2023), https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/meta-australia-google-news-canada-1.6925726.
[64] See id.
[65] Free Speech Coal. Inc. v. Colmenero, No. 1:23-CV-917-DAE, 2023 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 154065 (W.D. Tex. 2023), available at https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txwd.1172751222/gov.uscourts.txwd.1172751222.36.0.pdf.
[66] Id. at 10.
[67] Id.
[68] Id.
[69] Id. at 44.
[70] Geoffrey A. Manne, Ben Sperry, & Kristian Stout, Who Moderates the Moderators?: A Law & Economics Approach to Holding Online Platforms Accountable Without Destroying the Internet, 49 Rutgers Comput. & Tech. L.J. 26 (2022), https://laweconcenter.org/resources/who-moderates-the-moderators-a-law-economics-approach-to-holding-online-platforms-accountable-without-destroying-the-internet; Geoffrey A. Manne, Kristian Stout, & Ben Sperry, Twitter v. Taamneh and the Law & Economics of Intermediary Liability, Truth on the Market (Mar. 8, 2023), https://truthonthemarket.com/2023/03/08/twitter-v-taamneh-and-the-law-economics-of-intermediary-liability; Ben Sperry, The Law & Economics of Children’s Online Safety: The First Amendment and Online Intermediary Liability, Truth on the Market (May 12 2023), https://truthonthemarket.com/2023/05/12/the-law-economics-of-childrens-online-safety-the-first-amendment-and-online-intermediary-liability.
[71] See Manne, Stout, & Sperry, Twitter v. Taamneh and the Law & Economics of Intermediary Liability, supra note 70; Ben Sperry, Right to Anonymous Speech, Part 2: A Law & Economics Approach, Truth on the Market. (Sep. 6, 2023), httsps://truthonthemarket.com/2023/09/06/right-to-anonymous-speech-part-2-a-law-economics-approach; Manne, Sperry, & Stout, Who Moderates the Moderators?: A Law & Economics Approach to Holding Online Platforms Accountable Without Destroying the Internet, supra note 70.
[72] See Manne, Stout, & Sperry, Who Moderates the Moderators?: A Law & Economics Approach to Holding Online Platforms Accountable Without Destroying the Internet, supra note 70, at 28 (“To the extent that the current legal regime permits social harms online that exceed concomitant benefits, it should be reformed to deter those harms, provided it can be done so at sufficiently low cost.”); Sperry, Right to Anonymous Speech, Part 2: A Law & Economics Approach, supra note 71.
[73] See NetChoice Complaint, NetChoice LLC v. Griffin, NO. 5:23-CV-05105, available at 2023 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 154571 (W.D. Ark. 2023), https://netchoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/NetChoice-v-Griffin_-Complaint_2023-06-29.pdf.
[74] Id. at para. 13.
[75] See id. at para. 14
[76] See id.
[77] See id. at para 15.
[78] See id. at para 16.
[79] See id.
[80] See id. at para. 17, 19-21
[81] See Ben Sperry, Congress Should Focus on Protecting Teens from Real Harms, Not Targeted Ads, The Hill (Feb. 12, 2023), https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/3862238-congress-should-focus-on-protecting-teens-from-real-harms-not-targeted-ads.
[82] See NetChoice Complaint, supra note 73 at para. 18.
[83] Government Response to the Roadmap for Age Verification, Australian Gov’t Dep’t of Infrastructure, Transp., Reg’l Dev., Commc’ns and the Arts (Aug. 2023), available at https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/government-response-to-the-roadmap-for-age-verification-august2023.pdf.
[84] See Josh Taylor, Australia Will Not Force Adult Websites to Bring in Age Verification Due To Privacy And Security Concerns, The Guardian (Aug. 30, 2023), https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/aug/31/roadmap-for-age-verification-online-pornographic-material-adult-websites-australia-law.
[85] See NetChoice Complaint, supra note 73 at 2.
[86] Id. at 6.
[87] See id.
[88] See id. at 6-8.
[89] Supra Part IV.A.
[90] See Children and Teen’s Online Privacy Protection Act, S. 1418, 118th Cong. (2023), as amended Jul. 27, 2023, available at https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/1418/text (last accessed Oct. 2, 2023). Other similar bills have been proposed as well. See Protecting Kids on Social Media Act, S. 1291, 118th Cong. (2023); Making Age-Verification Technology Uniform, Robust, and Effective Act, S. 419, 118th Cong. (2023); Social Media Child Protection Act, H.R. 821, 118th Cong. (2023).
[91] See David Neumark & Peter Shirley, Myth or Measurement: What Does the New Minimum Wage Research Say About Minimum Wages and Job Loss in the United States? (Nat’l Bur. Econ. Res. Working Paper 28388, Mar. 2022), available at https://www.nber.org/papers/w28388 (concluding that “(i) there is a clear preponderance of negative estimates in the literature; (ii) this evidence is stronger for teens and young adults as well as the less-educated; (iii) the evidence from studies of directly-affected workers points even more strongly to negative employment effects; and (iv) the evidence from studies of low-wage industries is less one-sided.”).
[92] See Lisa Sturtevant, The Impacts of Rent Control: A Research Review and Synthesis, at 6-7, Nat’l Multifamily Hous. Coun’cl Res. Found. (May 2018), available at https://www.nmhc.org/globalassets/knowledge-library/rent-control-literature-review-final2.pdf (“1. Rent control and rent stabilization policies do a poor job at targeting benefits. While some low-income families do benefit from rent control, so, too, do higher-income households. There are more efficient and effective ways to provide assistance to lower-income individuals and families who have trouble finding housing they can afford. 2. Residents of rent-controlled units move less often than do residents of uncontrolled housing units, which can mean that rent control causes renters to continue to live in units that are too small, too large or not in the right locations to best meet their housing needs. 3. Rent-controlled buildings potentially can suffer from deterioration or lack of investment, but the risk is minimized when there are effective local requirements and/or incentives for building maintenance and improvements. 4. Rent control and rent stabilization laws lead to a reduction in the available supply of rental housing in a community, particularly through the conversion to ownership of controlled buildings. 5. Rent control policies can hold rents of controlled units at lower levels but not under all circumstances. 6. Rent control policies generally lead to higher rents in the uncontrolled market, with rents sometimes substantially higher than would be expected without rent control. 7. There are significant fiscal costs associated with implementing a rent control program.”).
[93] See Candeub, supra note 16.
[94] Colmenero, supra note 65, at 22.
[95] See Kids Online Safety Act, S. 1409, 118th Cong. (2023), as amended and posted by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science , and Transportation on July 27, 2023, available at https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/1409/text#toc-id6fefcf1d-a1ae-4949-a826-23c1e1b1ef26 (last accessed Oct. 2, 2023).
[96] See id. at Section 3.
[97] Cf. Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, 139 S. Ct. 1921, 1930-31 (2019):
[M]erely hosting speech by others is not a traditional, exclusive public function and does not alone transform private entities into state actors subject to First Amendment constraints…
If the rule were otherwise, all private property owners and private lessees who open their property for speech would be subject to First Amendment constraints and would lose the ability to exercise what they deem to be appropriate editorial discretion within that open forum. Private property owners and private lessees would face the unappetizing choice of allowing all comers or closing the platform altogether.
[98] See Counterman v. Colorado, 600 U.S. 66 (2023); Ben Sperry (@RBenSperry), Twitter (June 28, 2023, 4:46 PM), https://twitter.com/RBenSperry/status/1674157227387547648.
[99] Cf. HØEG v. Newsom, 2023 WL 414258 (E.D. Cal. Jan. 25, 2023); Sperry, The Law & Economics of Children’s Online Safety: The First Amendment and Online Intermediary Liability, supra note 70.
[100] California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, AB 2273 (2022), https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220AB2273.
[101] See id. at § 1798.99.32(d)(1), (2), (4).
[102] See Candeub, supra note 16.
[103] NetChoice LLC. v. Griffin, Case No. 5:23-CV-05105 at 25 (Aug. 31, 2023), slip op., available at https://netchoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/GRIFFIN-NETCHOICE-GRANTED.pdf.
[104] Id.
[105] Id. at 38 (“Having considered both sides’ positions on the level of constitutional scrutiny to be applied, the Court tends to agree with NetChoice that the restrictions in Act 689 are subject to strict scrutiny. However, the Court will not reach that conclusion definitively at this early stage in the proceedings and instead will apply intermediate scrutiny, as the State suggests.”).
[106] Id. at 48 (“In sum, NetChoice is likely to succeed on the merits of the First Amendment claim it raises on behalf of Arkansas users of member platforms. The State’s solution to the very real problems associated with minors’ time spent online and access to harmful content on social media is not narrowly tailored. Act 689 is likely to unduly burden adult and minor access to constitutionally protected speech. If the legislature’s goal in passing Act 689 was to protect minors from materials or interactions that could harm them online, there is no compelling evidence that the Act will be effective in achieving those goals.”).
[107] See NetChoice v. Bonta, Case No. 22-cv-08861-BLF (N.D. Cal. Sept. 18, 2023), slip op., available at https://netchoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/NETCHOICE-v-BONTA-PRELIMINARY-INJUNCTION-GRANTED.pdf; Ben Sperry, What Does NetChoice v. Bonta Mean for KOSA and Other Attempts to Protect Children Online?, Truth on the Market (Sep. 29, 2023), https://truthonthemarket.com/2023/09/29/what-does-netchoice-v-bonta-mean-for-kosa-and-other-attempts-to-protect-children-online.
[108] Id. at 36-38.
[109] See Carl Szabo, NetChoice Sends Veto Request to Utah Gov. Spencer Cox on HB 311 and SB 152, NetChoice (Mar. 3, 2023), https://netchoice.org/netchoice-sends-veto-request-to-utah-gov-spencer-cox-on-hb-311-and-sb-153.
[110] See, e.g., Sable Commcn’s v. FCC, 492 U.S. 115, 126 (1989) (“The Government may, however, regulate the content of constitutionally protected speech in order to promote a compelling interest if it chooses the least restrictive means to further the articulated interest.”).
[111] Brown, 564 U.S. at 801 (“California claims that the Act is justified in aid of parental authority: By requiring that the purchase of violent video games can be made only by adults, the Act ensures that parents can decide what games are appropriate. At the outset, we note our doubts that punishing third parties for conveying protected speech to children just in case their parents disapprove of that speech is a proper governmental means of aiding parental authority.”).
[112] Brown, 564 U.S. at 801.
[113] Id. at 803
[114] Id.
[115] See supra IV.B.
[116] See Clare Morrell, Adam Candeub, & Michael Toscano, No, Big Tech Doesn’t Have A Right To Speak To Kids Without Their Parent’s Consent, The Federalist (Sept. 21, 2023), https://thefederalist.com/2023/09/21/no-big-tech-doesnt-have-a-right-to-speak-to-kids-without-their-parents-consent (noting “Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his dissent in the Brown case that “the ‘freedom of speech,’ as originally understood, does not include a right to speak to minors (or a right of minors to access speech) without going through the minors’ parents or guardians.”).
[117] Brown, 564 U.S. at 821.
[118] Id. at 822.
[119] Id. at 805.
[120] Id. at 813.
[121] See, e.g., Ben Sperry, There’s Nothing ‘Conservative’ About Trump’s Views on Free Speech and the Regulation of Social Media, Truth on the Market (Jul. 12, 2019), https://truthonthemarket.com/2019/07/12/theres-nothing-conservative-about-trumps-views-on-free-speech (noting Kavanaugh’s majority opinion in Halleck on compelled speech included all the conservative justices; at the time he and Gorsuch were relatively new Trump appointees); Justice Amy Comey Barrett has also joined the majority opinion in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, 600 U.S. 570 (2023), written by Gorsuch and joined by all the conservatives, which found public-accommodations laws are subject to strict scrutiny if they implicate expressive activity.
[122] Clare Morell (@ClareMorellEPPC), Twitter (Sept. 7, 2023, 8:27 PM), https://twitter.com/ClareMorellEPPC/status/1699942446711357731.
[123] Brown, 564 U.S. at 786.
TOTM Idon’t mean to sound like a broken record, but why is the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) playing a broken record? I’ve been writing a fair . . .
Idon’t mean to sound like a broken record, but why is the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) playing a broken record?
I’ve been writing a fair bit about Federal Trade Commission (FTC) rulemaking initiatives. On the theory that you deserve a nominal break from all of that, this post is mostly about the FCC.
On Sept. 28, the FCC published a “fact sheet” and a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) on “Safeguarding and Securing the Open Internet.” Just shy of a month later, on Oct. 25, the FCC published another “fact sheet” and NPRM—this one, on “Preventing Digital Discrimination.”
My International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) colleague Eric Fruits has written about the proposals here, here, here, here, here, and, with our colleague Ben Sperry, here. ICLE’s Kristian Stout is here. Eric explains how, in relatively straightforward fashion, the anti-discrimination requirements could lead to price regulation, notwithstanding the FCC’s own observation that “there is little to no evidence of intentional digital discrimination of access.”
TOTM At lunch last week, I handed out the first of my new business cards with the title “Director, Hootenanny Division.” My lunchmate looked down and . . .
At lunch last week, I handed out the first of my new business cards with the title “Director, Hootenanny Division.” My lunchmate looked down and said, “Sounds fun, what do you do?”
Then, I had to explain that part of the job involves watching open meetings of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and reporting on what our federal government has in store for us next. It’s a bit like being a passenger on a steam train. No matter how much fuss you make in the coach cars, the engineer can’t hear you, and wouldn’t care if he could. The engineer’s got places to go, and nothing is going hold him back.
That’s like the FCC and its latest efforts to impose Title II regulation on much of the internet—nothing’s going to hold ‘em back.
Communications Daily – ICLE Director of Innovation Policy Kristian Stout was quoted by Communications Daily in a story about the Federal Communications Commission’s vote to reinstate . . .
Communications Daily – ICLE Director of Innovation Policy Kristian Stout was quoted by Communications Daily in a story about the Federal Communications Commission’s vote to reinstate Title II regulations on broadband providers. You can read full piece here.
The reintroduction of Title II regulation “stands on even shakier ground now than it did in 2015,” said Kristian Stout, International Center for Law & Economics director-innovation policy: “The wisdom behind the commission’s 2018 Restoring Internet Freedom Order is more evident with each passing year, as the broadband market continues to demonstrate no need for utility-style regulations.” He said the rulemaking presents a major questions doctrine issue “that will leave the FCC in an uphill battle before the U.S. Supreme Court in the face of inevitable legal challenges.”
Presentations & Interviews ICLE Director of Innovation Policy Kristian Stout appeared as a guest on Minnesota Public Radio’s Marketplace in a segment on the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to . . .
ICLE Director of Innovation Policy Kristian Stout appeared as a guest on Minnesota Public Radio’s Marketplace in a segment on the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to reinstate so-called “net neutrality” for broadband providers.
But Kristian Stout, director of innovation policy at the International Center for Law and Economics, argues that we don’t need net neutrality as much as we once did because most of us are already online now. So how do we ensure access for every last American? “You don’t do that by upending or frustrating the investment incentives that have made this work really well for 90 to 95% of the country. What you do is try to figure out targeted solutions,” Stout said.
But Kristian Stout, director of innovation policy at the International Center for Law and Economics, argues that we don’t need net neutrality as much as we once did because most of us are already online now. So how do we ensure access for every last American?
“You don’t do that by upending or frustrating the investment incentives that have made this work really well for 90 to 95% of the country. What you do is try to figure out targeted solutions,” Stout said.
Audio of the full segment is embedded below.
