The FTC joined the DOJ brief in American Needle v. National Football League arguing that the Supreme Court should deny certiorari.  The brief characterizes the question presented as…

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But wholesale rejection of the document — the most complete statement to date on the law and economics of Section 2 — because of disagreement with some of its positions is irresponsible and premature. And the rejection of specific conclusions from among the range of possibilities discussed in the report without any discussion of which other policy positions the DOJ would support, and why, severely undermines the intellectual efforts that the DOJ and FTC staffs put into the original report by summarily dismissing them. Instead, Varney asserts that the report “loses sight of an ultimate goal of antitrust laws — the protection of consumer welfare” — but cites no evidence. (And the report, for its part, mentions “consumer welfare” 31 times.) Meanwhile, the mere reference in Varney’s speech to the idea of returning to “tried and true” principles of Section 2 enforcement is meaningless, since no one knows what those are, and the whole point of the report was to define them. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the announcement dismisses the report and its intellectual bases simply because it was inconvenient to the agenda upon which the DOJ’s antitrust division is about to embark.

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The NYT ran an unsigned editorial on “Intel and Competition” that, quite frankly, doesn’t make much sense to us.  It offers two basic arguments: (1) that the Bush administration DOJ is responsible for the state of Section 2 law requirement that plaintiffs demonstrate actual consumer harm, and (2) that foreign antitrust jurisdictions’ pursuit of enforcement actions against Intel’s loyalty rebates suggests that the failure of the Federal Trade Commission to do so is a failure of the Bush administration to enforce the antitrust laws to protect consumers.

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I’ll be testifying tomorrow at the Federal Trade Commission hearings on Resale Price Maintenance.   My panel will focus on rule of reason analysis of RPM Post-Leegin.  There is a bit of awkwardness testifying about different modes of rule of reason analysis with legislation that would restore the Dr. Miles per se rule pending, but it strikes me as a valuable exercise nonetheless.  The early afternoon panel looks very interesting and focuses on the legal and business history of RPM.   I do not have a written statement for my prepared remarks, but you can see my slides here.

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Last week the European Commission slapped Intel Corporation with the largest antitrust fine in the Commission’s history, announcing that the sanctions were necessary to protect consumers from the egregious abuses of a “dominant firm.” What did Intel do to merit this sanction? Whatever its intentions were, its actions leading up to the fine resulted inarguably in lower prices for consumers.

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Reacting to the EU fines imposed on Intel, Geoff raises a nice point about the difficulty of constructing the but-for world in antitrust cases generally, but particularly in cases where prices are falling.   This discussion reminded me of Thom’s excellent post responding to the NYT editorial and an AAI working paper and putting theoretical anticompetitive concerns to an empirical test and discussing evidence of falling prices for both Intel and AMD products and increased operating margins for AMD.  So how are we to sensibly evaluate the EU decision?

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Our own Josh Wright is quoted in the lead article in today’s Wall Street Journal. Josh opines that the European Union’s record $1.45 billion fine against Intel for lowering its prices on granting “exclusionary” rebates on microprocessors means that FTC action against Intel is “much more likely than it was two weeks ago.” And what about our reinvigorated DOJ, Josh? Aren’t they going to want a piece of this action, lest they look like pansies next to those muscular South Koreans, Europeans, and FTC folk?

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I am curious about something.  AMD and Intel have been competing head to head for more than 15 years, at least since AMD released its Intel 386 clone in the early 90s.  In that time, inarguably, microprocessor prices have plumeted and  processing power and other features have increased dramatically (I’m aware that we don’t know what the but-for world would look like, but these effects have been enormous).

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A few quick reactions to the repudiation of the Section 2 Report, and more importantly, what it means for the future of monopolization enforcement…

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