On balance the Second Circuit was right to apply the antitrust laws to Apple.

Right now the Supreme Court has before it a petition for Certiorari, brought by Apple, Inc., which asks the Court to reverse the decision of the Second Circuit. That decision found per se illegality under the Sherman Act, for Apple’s efforts to promote cooperation among a group of six major publishers, who desperately sought to break Amazon’s dominant position in the ebook market. At that time, Amazon employed a wholesale model for ebooks under which it bought them for a fixed price, but could sell them for whatever price it wanted, including sales at below cost of popular books treated as loss leaders. These sales particularly frustrated publishers because of the extra pressure they placed on the sale of hard cover and paper back books. That problem disappeared under the agency relationship model that Apple pioneered. Now the publishers would set the prices for the sale of their own volumes, and then pay Apple a fixed commission for its services in selling the ebooks.

Read the full piece here.

For a few months I have thought that the Apple eBooks case would find an easy fit within the Supreme Court’s antitrust decisions. The case that seems closest to me is Business Electronics v. Sharp Electronics, an unfortunately under-appreciated piece of antitrust precedent. One sign of its under-appreciation is its absence in some recent editions of antitrust casebooks.

Read the full piece here.

The appellate court’s 2015 decision affirming the district court’s finding of per se liability in United States v. Apple provoked controversy over the legal and economic merits of the case, its significance for antitrust jurisprudence, and its implications for entrepreneurs, startups, and other economic actors throughout the economy. Apple has filed a cert petition with the Supreme Court, which will decide on February 19th whether to hear the case.

Read the full piece here.

I have small children and, like any reasonably competent parent, I take an interest in monitoring their Internet usage. In particular, I am sensitive to what ad content they are being served and which sites they visit that might try to misuse their information. My son even uses Chromebooks at his elementary school, which underscores this concern for me, as I can’t always be present to watch what he does online. However, also like any other reasonably competent parent, I trust his school and his teacher to make good choices about what he is allowed to do online when I am not there to watch him. And so it is that I am both interested in and rather perplexed by what has EFF so worked up in its FTC complaint alleging privacy “violations” in the “Google for Education” program.

Read the full piece here. 

Summary

“The court of appeals’ decision poses a grave risk to the innovation economy. The court condemned as per se violations of the antitrust laws practices that made competition possible in a nascent market through introduction of a new business model. And it did so in the absence of any precedent holding that the novel combination of practices at issue could be deemed per se illegal. The court of appeals’ decision thus sends a chill wind through industry sectors where entrepreneurs are contemplating the launch of innovative business models to fuel the modern economy.

This Court’s precedent on application of the per se rule is clear: “[I]t is only after considerable experience with certain business relationships that courts classify them as per se violations” of the antitrust laws. Broad. Music, Inc. v. Columbia Broad. Sys., Inc., 441 U.S. 1, 9 (1979) (“BMI”). Per se condemnation is appropriate only when a practice lacks any plausible procompetitive rationale. Cal. Dental Ass’n v. FTC, 526 U.S. 756, 771 (1999). If there is no long track record of judicial experience establishing that a practice always or almost always lessens competition, then the practice should be subject to analysis under the rule of reason. BMI, 441 U.S. at 23-24. In that way, a finding that a novel practice (or an old practice in a new context) is anticompetitive may be made only after a rigorous analysis of all the facts and circumstances. Such a rule sensibly avoids unintentional condemnation of economically valuable activity where the full effects of that activity are simply unknown to the courts.

In disregard of these principles, the court of appeals applied the per se rule to a novel combination of competition-enabling practices in an emerging market. The negative consequences of the court’s ruling will be particularly acute for modern high technology sectors of the economy, where entrepreneurs planning to create entirely new markets or inject competition into existing ones through adoption of new business models will now face exactly the sort of artificial deterrents that this Court has strived to prevent. “Mistaken inferences and the resulting false condemnations ‘are especially costly, because they chill the very conduct the antitrust laws are designed to protect…’”

Last week, FCC General Counsel Jonathan Sallet pulled back the curtain on the FCC staff’s analysis behind its decision to block Comcast’s acquisition of Time Warner Cable. As the FCC staff sets out on its reported Rainbow Tour to reassure regulated companies that it’s not “hostile to the industries it regulates,” Sallet’s remarks suggest it will have an uphill climb. Unfortunately, the staff’s analysis appears to have been unduly speculative, disconnected from critical market realities, and decidedly biased — not characteristics in a regulator that tend to offer much reassurance.

Merger analysis is inherently speculative, but, as courts have repeatedly had occasion to find, the FCC has a penchant for stretching speculation beyond the breaking point, adopting theories of harm that are vaguely possible, even if unlikely and inconsistent with past practice, and poorly supported by empirical evidence. The FCC’s approach here seems to fit this description.

The FCC’s fundamental theory of anticompetitive harm

To begin with, as he must, Sallet acknowledged that there was no direct competitive overlap in the areas served by Comcast and Time Warner Cable, and no consumer would have seen the number of providers available to her changed by the deal.

But the FCC staff viewed this critical fact as “not outcome determinative.” Instead, Sallet explained that the staff’s opposition was based primarily on a concern that the deal might enable Comcast to harm “nascent” OVD competitors in order to protect its video (MVPD) business:

Simply put, the core concern came down to whether the merged firm would have an increased incentive and ability to safeguard its integrated Pay TV business model and video revenues by limiting the ability of OVDs to compete effectively, especially through the use of new business models.

The justification for the concern boiled down to an assumption that the addition of TWC’s subscriber base would be sufficient to render an otherwise too-costly anticompetitive campaign against OVDs worthwhile:

Without the merger, a company taking action against OVDs for the benefit of the Pay TV system as a whole would incur costs but gain additional sales – or protect existing sales — only within its footprint. But the combined entity, having a larger footprint, would internalize more of the external “benefits” provided to other industry members.

The FCC theorized that, by acquiring a larger footprint, Comcast would gain enough bargaining power and leverage, as well as the means to profit from an exclusionary strategy, leading it to employ a range of harmful tactics — such as impairing the quality/speed of OVD streams, imposing data caps, limiting OVD access to TV-connected devices, imposing higher interconnection fees, and saddling OVDs with higher programming costs. It’s difficult to see how such conduct would be permitted under the FCC’s Open Internet Order/Title II regime, but, nevertheless, the staff apparently believed that Comcast would possess a powerful “toolkit” with which to harm OVDs post-transaction.

Comcast’s share of the MVPD market wouldn’t have changed enough to justify the FCC’s purported fears

First, the analysis turned on what Comcast could and would do if it were larger. But Comcast was already the largest ISP and MVPD (now second largest MVPD, post AT&T/DIRECTV) in the nation, and presumably it has approximately the same incentives and ability to disadvantage OVDs today.

In fact, there’s no reason to believe that the growth of Comcast’s MVPD business would cause any material change in its incentives with respect to OVDs. Whatever nefarious incentives the merger allegedly would have created by increasing Comcast’s share of the MVPD market (which is where the purported benefits in the FCC staff’s anticompetitive story would be realized), those incentives would be proportional to the size of increase in Comcast’s national MVPD market share — which, here, would be about eight percentage points: from 22% to under 30% of the national market.

It’s difficult to believe that Comcast would gain the wherewithal to engage in this costly strategy by adding such a relatively small fraction of the MVPD market (which would still leave other MVPDs serving fully 70% of the market to reap the purported benefits instead of Comcast), but wouldn’t have it at its current size – and there’s no evidence that it has ever employed such strategies with its current market share.

It bears highlighting that the D.C. Circuit has already twice rejected FCC efforts to impose a 30% market cap on MVPDs, based on the Commission’s inability to demonstrate that a greater-than-30% share would create competitive problems, especially given the highly dynamic nature of the MVPD market. In vacating the FCC’s most recent effort to do so in 2009, the D.C. Circuit was resolute in its condemnation of the agency, noting:

In sum, the Commission has failed to demonstrate that allowing a cable operator to serve more than 30% of all [MVPD] subscribers would threaten to reduce either competition or diversity in programming.

The extent of competition and the amount of available programming (including original programming distributed by OVDs themselves) has increased substantially since 2009; this makes the FCC’s competitive claims even less sustainable today.

It’s damning enough to the FCC’s case that there is no marketplace evidence of such conduct or its anticompetitive effects in today’s market. But it’s truly impossible to square the FCC’s assertions about Comcast’s anticompetitive incentives with the fact that, over the past decade, Comcast has made massive investments in broadband, steadily increased broadband speeds, and freely licensed its programming, among other things that have served to enhance OVDs’ long-term viability and growth. Chalk it up to the threat of regulatory intervention or corporate incompetence if you can’t believe that competition alone could be responsible for this largesse, but, whatever the reason, the FCC staff’s fears appear completely unfounded in a marketplace not significantly different than the landscape that would have existed post-merger.

OVDs aren’t vulnerable, and don’t need the FCC’s “help”

After describing the “new entrants” in the market — such unfamiliar and powerless players as Dish, Sony, HBO, and CBS — Sallet claimed that the staff was principally animated by the understanding that

Entrants are particularly vulnerable when competition is nascent. Thus, staff was particularly concerned that this transaction could damage competition in the video distribution industry.

Sallet’s description of OVDs makes them sound like struggling entrepreneurs working in garages. But, in fact, OVDs have radically reshaped the media business and wield enormous clout in the marketplace.

Netflix, for example, describes itself as “the world’s leading Internet television network with over 65 million members in over 50 countries.” New services like Sony Vue and Sling TV are affiliated with giant, well-established media conglomerates. And whatever new offerings emerge from the FCC-approved AT&T/DIRECTV merger will be as well-positioned as any in the market.

In fact, we already know that the concerns of the FCC are off-base because they are of a piece with the misguided assumptions that underlie the Chairman’s recent NPRM to rewrite the MVPD rules to “protect” just these sorts of companies. But the OVDs themselves — the ones with real money and their competitive futures on the line — don’t see the world the way the FCC does, and they’ve resolutely rejected the Chairman’s proposal. Notably, the proposed rules would “protect” these services from exactly the sort of conduct that Sallet claims would have been a consequence of the Comcast-TWC merger.

If they don’t want or need broad protection from such “harms” in the form of revised industry-wide rules, there is surely no justification for the FCC to throttle a merger based on speculation that the same conduct could conceivably arise in the future.

The realities of the broadband market post-merger wouldn’t have supported the FCC’s argument, either

While a larger Comcast might be in a position to realize more of the benefits from the exclusionary strategy Sallet described, it would also incur more of the costs — likely in direct proportion to the increased size of its subscriber base.

Think of it this way: To the extent that an MVPD can possibly constrain an OVD’s scope of distribution for programming, doing so also necessarily makes the MVPD’s own broadband offering less attractive, forcing it to incur a cost that would increase in proportion to the size of the distributor’s broadband market. In this case, as noted, Comcast would have gained MVPD subscribers — but it would have also gained broadband subscribers. In a world where cable is consistently losing video subscribers (as Sallet acknowledged), and where broadband offers higher margins and faster growth, it makes no economic sense that Comcast would have valued the trade-off the way the FCC claims it would have.

Moreover, in light of the existing conditions imposed on Comcast under the Comcast/NBCU merger order from 2011 (which last for a few more years) and the restrictions adopted in the Open Internet Order, Comcast’s ability to engage in the sort of exclusionary conduct described by Sallet would be severely limited, if not non-existent. Nor, of course, is there any guarantee that former or would-be OVD subscribers would choose to subscribe to, or pay more for, any MVPD in lieu of OVDs. Meanwhile, many of the relevant substitutes in the MVPD market (like AT&T and Verizon FiOS) also offer broadband services – thereby increasing the costs that would be incurred in the broadband market even more, as many subscribers would shift not only their MVPD, but also their broadband service, in response to Comcast degrading OVDs.

And speaking of the Open Internet Order — wasn’t that supposed to prevent ISPs like Comcast from acting on their alleged incentives to impede the quality of, or access to, edge providers like OVDs? Why is merger enforcement necessary to accomplish the same thing once Title II and the rest of the Open Internet Order are in place? And if the argument is that the Open Internet Order might be defeated, aside from the completely speculative nature of such a claim, why wouldn’t a merger condition that imposed the same constraints on Comcast – as was done in the Comcast/NBCU merger order by imposing the former net neutrality rules on Comcast – be perfectly sufficient?

While the FCC staff analysis accepted as true (again, contrary to current marketplace evidence) that a bigger Comcast would have more incentive to harm OVDs post-merger, it rejected arguments that there could be countervailing benefits to OVDs and others from this same increase in scale. Thus, things like incremental broadband investments and speed increases, a larger Wi-Fi network, and greater business services market competition – things that Comcast is already doing and would have done on a greater and more-accelerated scale in the acquired territories post-transaction – were deemed insufficient to outweigh the expected costs of the staff’s entirely speculative anticompetitive theory.

In reality, however, not only OVDs, but consumers – and especially TWC subscribers – would have benefitted from the merger by access to Comcast’s faster broadband speeds, its new investments, and its superior video offerings on the X1 platform, among other things. Many low-income families would have benefitted from expansion of Comcast’s Internet Essentials program, and many businesses would have benefited from the addition of a more effective competitor to the incumbent providers that currently dominate the business services market. Yet these and other verifiable benefits were given short shrift in the agency’s analysis because they “were viewed by staff as incapable of outweighing the potential harms.”

The assumptions underlying the FCC staff’s analysis of the broadband market are arbitrary and unsupportable

Sallet’s claim that the combined firm would have 60% of all high-speed broadband subscribers in the U.S. necessarily assumes a national broadband market measured at 25 Mbps or higher, which is a red herring.

The FCC has not explained why 25 Mbps is a meaningful benchmark for antitrust analysis. The FCC itself endorsed a 10 Mbps baseline for its Connect America fund last December, noting that over 70% of current broadband users subscribe to speeds less than 25 Mbps, even in areas where faster speeds are available. And streaming online video, the most oft-cited reason for needing high bandwidth, doesn’t require 25 Mbps: Netflix says that 5 Mbps is the most that’s required for an HD stream, and the same goes for Amazon (3.5 Mbps) and Hulu (1.5 Mbps).

What’s more, by choosing an arbitrary, faster speed to define the scope of the broadband market (in an effort to assert the non-competitiveness of the market, and thereby justify its broadband regulations), the agency has – without proper analysis or grounding, in my view – unjustifiably shrunk the size of the relevant market. But, as it happens, doing so also shrinks the size of the increase in “national market share” that the merger would have brought about.

Recall that the staff’s theory was premised on the idea that the merger would give Comcast control over enough of the broadband market that it could unilaterally impose costs on OVDs sufficient to impair their ability to reach or sustain minimum viable scale. But Comcast would have added only one percent of this invented “market” as a result of the merger. It strains credulity to assert that there could be any transaction-specific harm from an increase in market share equivalent to a rounding error.

In any case, basing its rejection of the merger on a manufactured 25 Mbps relevant market creates perverse incentives and will likely do far more to harm OVDs than realization of even the staff’s worst fears about the merger ever could have.

The FCC says it wants higher speeds, and it wants firms to invest in faster broadband. But here Comcast did just that, and then was punished for it. Rather than acknowledging Comcast’s ongoing broadband investments as strong indication that the FCC staff’s analysis might be on the wrong track, the FCC leadership simply sidestepped that inconvenient truth by redefining the market.

The lesson is that if you make your product too good, you’ll end up with an impermissibly high share of the market you create and be punished for it. This can’t possibly promote the public interest.

Furthermore, the staff’s analysis of competitive effects even in this ersatz market aren’t likely supportable. As noted, most subscribers access OVDs on connections that deliver content at speeds well below the invented 25 Mbps benchmark, and they pay the same prices for OVD subscriptions as subscribers who receive their content at 25 Mbps. Confronted with the choice to consume content at 25 Mbps or 10 Mbps (or less), the majority of consumers voluntarily opt for slower speeds — and they purchase service from Netflix and other OVDs in droves, nonetheless.

The upshot? Contrary to the implications on which the staff’s analysis rests, if Comcast were to somehow “degrade” OVD content on the 25 Mbps networks so that it was delivered with characteristics of video content delivered over a 10-Mbps network, real-world, observed consumer preferences suggest it wouldn’t harm OVDs’ access to consumers at all. This is especially true given that OVDs often have a global focus and reach (again, Netflix has 65 million subscribers in over 50 countries), making any claims that Comcast could successfully foreclose them from the relevant market even more suspect.

At the same time, while the staff apparently viewed the broadband alternatives as “limited,” the reality is that Comcast, as well as other broadband providers, are surrounded by capable competitors, including, among others, AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, Google Fiber, many advanced VDSL and fiber-based Internet service providers, and high-speed mobile wireless providers. The FCC understated the complex impact of this robust, dynamic, and ever-increasing competition, and its analysis entirely ignored rapidly growing mobile wireless broadband competition.

Finally, as noted, Sallet claimed that the staff determined that merger conditions would be insufficient to remedy its concerns, without any further explanation. Yet the Commission identified similar concerns about OVDs in both the Comcast/NBCUniversal and AT&T/DIRECTV transactions, and adopted remedies to address those concerns. We know the agency is capable of drafting behavioral conditions, and we know they have teeth, as demonstrated by prior FCC enforcement actions. It’s hard to understand why similar, adequate conditions could not have been fashioned for this transaction.

In the end, while I appreciate Sallet’s attempt to explain the FCC’s decision to reject the Comcast/TWC merger, based on the foregoing I’m not sure that Comcast could have made any argument or showing that would have dissuaded the FCC from challenging the merger. Comcast presented a strong economic analysis answering the staff’s concerns discussed above, all to no avail. It’s difficult to escape the conclusion that this was a politically-driven result, and not one rigorously based on the facts or marketplace reality.

Filed under: antitrust, Efficiencies, exclusionary conduct, federal communications commission, internet, law and economics, market definition, merger guidelines, mergers & acquisitions, net neutrality, regulation, technology, telecommunications, television Tagged: antitrust, Broadband, Comcast, FCC, Jonathan Sallet, merger, merger review, MVPD, Netflix, OVD, Time Warner Cable, TWC

Excerpt

Futurists say that the total sum of human knowledge doubles every year or two—and that the rate is increasing. “There were five exabytes of information created by the entire world between the dawn of civilization and 2003,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said at a conference in 2010. “Now that same amount is created every two days.”

That’s part of the reason why “general search”—searching of all of the world’s accessible information and delivering results without differentiation—is fast becoming hopelessly outdated. In an era of exploding data, it is more efficient and more effective to presort information into categories. So it is hardly surprising that Google searches have evolved to emphasize specialized results better targeted to users’ queries.

Yet regulators seem perplexed. Consider what European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager said recently about the EU’s formal complaint against Google: “We find the conduct in one area where it has a very dominant position in one market, which is general search, has led to favorable treatment not based on the merits in another related market.”

This reflects a deep misunderstanding. It’s a mistake to consider “general search” and “comparison shopping” or “product search” to be distinct markets.

Continue reading on WSJ.com

As the organizer of this retrospective on Josh Wright’s tenure as FTC Commissioner, I have the (self-conferred) honor of closing out the symposium.

When Josh was confirmed I wrote that:

The FTC will benefit enormously from Josh’s expertise and his error cost approach to antitrust and consumer protection law will be a tremendous asset to the Commission — particularly as it delves further into the regulation of data and privacy. His work is rigorous, empirically grounded, and ever-mindful of the complexities of both business and regulation…. The Commissioners and staff at the FTC will surely… profit from his time there.

Whether others at the Commission have really learned from Josh is an open question, but there’s no doubt that Josh offered an enormous amount from which they could learn. As Tim Muris said, Josh “did not disappoint, having one of the most important and memorable tenures of any non-Chair” at the agency.

Within a month of his arrival at the Commission, in fact, Josh “laid down the cost-benefit-analysis gauntlet” in a little-noticed concurring statement regarding a proposed amendment to the Hart-Scott-Rodino Rules. The technical details of the proposed rule don’t matter for these purposes, but, as Josh noted in his statement, the situation intended to be avoided by the rule had never arisen:

The proposed rulemaking appears to be a solution in search of a problem. The Federal Register notice states that the proposed rules are necessary to prevent the FTC and DOJ from “expend[ing] scarce resources on hypothetical transactions.” Yet, I have not to date been presented with evidence that any of the over 68,000 transactions notified under the HSR rules have required Commission resources to be allocated to a truly hypothetical transaction.

What Josh asked for in his statement was not that the rule be scrapped, but simply that, before adopting the rule, the FTC weigh its costs and benefits.

As I noted at the time:

[I]t is the Commission’s responsibility to ensure that the rules it enacts will actually be beneficial (it is a consumer protection agency, after all). The staff, presumably, did a perfectly fine job writing the rule they were asked to write. Josh’s point is simply that it isn’t clear the rule should be adopted because it isn’t clear that the benefits of doing so would outweigh the costs.

As essentially everyone who has contributed to this symposium has noted, Josh was singularly focused on the rigorous application of the deceptively simple concept that the FTC should ensure that the benefits of any rule or enforcement action it adopts outweigh the costs. The rest, as they say, is commentary.

For Josh, this basic principle should permeate every aspect of the agency, and permeate the way it thinks about everything it does. Only an entirely new mindset can ensure that outcomes, from the most significant enforcement actions to the most trivial rule amendments, actually serve consumers.

While the FTC has a strong tradition of incorporating economic analysis in its antitrust decision-making, its record in using economics in other areas is decidedly mixed, as Berin points out. But even in competition policy, the Commission frequently uses economics — but it’s not clear it entirely understands economics. The approach that others have lauded Josh for is powerful, but it’s also subtle.

Inherent limitations on anyone’s knowledge about the future of technology, business and social norms caution skepticism, as regulators attempt to predict whether any given business conduct will, on net, improve or harm consumer welfare. In fact, a host of factors suggests that even the best-intentioned regulators tend toward overconfidence and the erroneous condemnation of novel conduct that benefits consumers in ways that are difficult for regulators to understand. Coase’s famous admonition in a 1972 paper has been quoted here before (frequently), but bears quoting again:

If an economist finds something – a business practice of one sort or another – that he does not understand, he looks for a monopoly explanation. And as in this field we are very ignorant, the number of ununderstandable practices tends to be very large, and the reliance on a monopoly explanation, frequent.

Simply “knowing” economics, and knowing that it is important to antitrust enforcement, aren’t enough. Reliance on economic formulae and theoretical models alone — to say nothing of “evidence-based” analysis that doesn’t or can’t differentiate between probative and prejudicial facts — doesn’t resolve the key limitations on regulatory decisionmaking that threaten consumer welfare, particularly when it comes to the modern, innovative economy.

As Josh and I have written:

[O]ur theoretical knowledge cannot yet confidently predict the direction of the impact of additional product market competition on innovation, much less the magnitude. Additionally, the multi-dimensional nature of competition implies that the magnitude of these impacts will be important as innovation and other forms of competition will frequently be inversely correlated as they relate to consumer welfare. Thus, weighing the magnitudes of opposing effects will be essential to most policy decisions relating to innovation. Again, at this stage, economic theory does not provide a reliable basis for predicting the conditions under which welfare gains associated with greater product market competition resulting from some regulatory intervention will outweigh losses associated with reduced innovation.

* * *

In sum, the theoretical and empirical literature reveals an undeniably complex interaction between product market competition, patent rules, innovation, and consumer welfare. While these complexities are well understood, in our view, their implications for the debate about the appropriate scale and form of regulation of innovation are not.

Along the most important dimensions, while our knowledge has expanded since 1972, the problem has not disappeared — and it may only have magnified. As Tim Muris noted in 2005,

[A] visitor from Mars who reads only the mathematical IO literature could mistakenly conclude that the U.S. economy is rife with monopoly power…. [Meanwhile, Section 2’s] history has mostly been one of mistaken enforcement.

It may not sound like much, but what is needed, what Josh brought to the agency, and what turns out to be absolutely essential to getting it right, is unflagging awareness of and attention to the institutional, political and microeconomic relationships that shape regulatory institutions and regulatory outcomes.

Regulators must do their best to constantly grapple with uncertainty, problems of operationalizing useful theory, and, perhaps most important, the social losses associated with error costs. It is not (just) technicians that the FTC needs; it’s regulators imbued with the “Economic Way of Thinking.” In short, what is needed, and what Josh brought to the Commission, is humility — the belief that, as Coase also wrote, sometimes the best answer is to “do nothing at all.”

The technocratic model of regulation is inconsistent with the regulatory humility required in the face of fast-changing, unexpected — and immeasurably valuable — technological advance. As Virginia Postrel warns in The Future and Its Enemies:

Technocrats are “for the future,” but only if someone is in charge of making it turn out according to plan. They greet every new idea with a “yes, but,” followed by legislation, regulation, and litigation…. By design, technocrats pick winners, establish standards, and impose a single set of values on the future.

For Josh, the first JD/Econ PhD appointed to the FTC,

economics provides a framework to organize the way I think about issues beyond analyzing the competitive effects in a particular case, including, for example, rulemaking, the various policy issues facing the Commission, and how I weigh evidence relative to the burdens of proof and production. Almost all the decisions I make as a Commissioner are made through the lens of economics and marginal analysis because that is the way I have been taught to think.

A representative example will serve to illuminate the distinction between merely using economics and evidence and understanding them — and their limitations.

In his Nielson/Arbitron dissent Josh wrote:

The Commission thus challenges the proposed transaction based upon what must be acknowledged as a novel theory—that is, that the merger will substantially lessen competition in a market that does not today exist.

[W]e… do not know how the market will evolve, what other potential competitors might exist, and whether and to what extent these competitors might impose competitive constraints upon the parties.

Josh’s straightforward statement of the basis for restraint stands in marked contrast to the majority’s decision to impose antitrust-based limits on economic activity that hasn’t even yet been contemplated. Such conduct is directly at odds with a sensible, evidence-based approach to enforcement, and the economic problems with it are considerable, as Josh also notes:

[I]t is an exceedingly difficult task to predict the competitive effects of a transaction where there is insufficient evidence to reliably answer the[] basic questions upon which proper merger analysis is based.

When the Commission’s antitrust analysis comes unmoored from such fact-based inquiry, tethered tightly to robust economic theory, there is a more significant risk that non-economic considerations, intuition, and policy preferences influence the outcome of cases.

Compare in this regard Josh’s words about Nielsen with Deborah Feinstein’s defense of the majority from such charges:

The Commission based its decision not on crystal-ball gazing about what might happen, but on evidence from the merging firms about what they were doing and from customers about their expectations of those development plans. From this fact-based analysis, the Commission concluded that each company could be considered a likely future entrant, and that the elimination of the future offering of one would likely result in a lessening of competition.

Instead of requiring rigorous economic analysis of the facts, couched in an acute awareness of our necessary ignorance about the future, for Feinstein the FTC fulfilled its obligation in Nielsen by considering the “facts” alone (not economic evidence, mind you, but customer statements and expressions of intent by the parties) and then, at best, casually applying to them the simplistic, outdated structural presumption – the conclusion that increased concentration would lead inexorably to anticompetitive harm. Her implicit claim is that all the Commission needed to know about the future was what the parties thought about what they were doing and what (hardy disinterested) customers thought they were doing. This shouldn’t be nearly enough.

Worst of all, Nielsen was “decided” with a consent order. As Josh wrote, strongly reflecting the essential awareness of the broader institutional environment that he brought to the Commission:

[w]here the Commission has endorsed by way of consent a willingness to challenge transactions where it might not be able to meet its burden of proving harm to competition, and which therefore at best are competitively innocuous, the Commission’s actions may alter private parties’ behavior in a manner that does not enhance consumer welfare.

Obviously in this regard his successful effort to get the Commission to adopt a UMC enforcement policy statement is a most welcome development.

In short, Josh is to be applauded not because he brought economics to the Commission, but because he brought the economic way of thinking. Such a thing is entirely too rare in the modern administrative state. Josh’s tenure at the FTC was relatively short, but he used every moment of it to assiduously advance his singular, and essential, mission. And, to paraphrase the last line of the movie The Right Stuff (it helps to have the rousing film score playing in the background as you read this): “for a brief moment, [Josh Wright] became the greatest [regulator] anyone had ever seen.”

I would like to extend my thanks to everyone who participated in this symposium. The contributions here will stand as a fitting and lasting tribute to Josh and his legacy at the Commission. And, of course, I’d also like to thank Josh for a tenure at the FTC very much worth honoring.

Filed under: antitrust, consumer protection, cost-benefit analysis, economics, error costs, federal trade commission, ftc, JDW Symposium, law and economics, merger guidelines, political economy, regulation Tagged: cost-benefit analysis, error costs, Federal Trade Commission, ftc, joshua wright, regulatory humility, Symposium