Spotlight

The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission’s proposed revisions to the merger guidelines represent the Biden administration’s latest effort to bypass Congress and the courts to rewrite a major area of law. These changes would increase the cost and uncertainty that businesses face when considering mergers—and damage the agencies’ reputations.

Executive Summary

In October 2022, the Kroger Co. and Albertsons Cos. Inc. announced their intent to merge in a deal valued at $24.6 billion.[1] Given the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) increasingly aggressive enforcement stance against mergers and acquisitions, as well as Chair Lina Khan’s previous writings on food retail specifically,[2] some commentators have expressed skepticism that the agency would allow the transaction to proceed—even with divestitures.[3] The FTC and U.S. Justice Department’s (DOJ) recently unveiled draft revisions to the agencies’ merger guidelines further suggest that the agencies plan to challenge more mergers—and to do so more aggressively than under past administrations.[4]

But attempting to block this transaction would go against the analytical framework the FTC has historically used to evaluate similar transactions, as well as the agency’s historical precedent of accepting divestures as a remedy to address localized problems where they arise. Such breaks with the past sometimes happen; our understanding of the law and economics evolves. Unfortunately, these likely breaks from tradition would reflect a failure to consider relevant and significant changes in how consumers shop for food and groceries in today’s world.

The FTC has a long history of assessing retail mergers in a manner significantly at odds with the aggressive approach it is currently signaling. Only one supermarket merger has been challenged in court since American Store’s acquisition of Lucky Stores in 1988: the Whole Foods/Wild Oats merger in 2007.[5] Over the last 35 years, the FTC has allowed every other supermarket merger and most retail-store transactions to proceed with divestitures. Within the last two years alone, these have included Tractor Supply/Orschlein and 7-Eleven/Speedway.[6] The FTC’s historic approach recognizes the reality that competitive concerns regarding supermarket mergers can be readily and adequately remedied by divestitures in geographic markets of concern; indeed, even Whole Foods/Wild Oats was ultimately resolved with a divestiture agreement following a fractured circuit court decision.[7]

The retail food and grocery landscape has changed dramatically since American/Lucky and Whole Foods/Wild Oats. With the growth of wholesale clubs, delivery services, e-commerce, and other retail formats, the industry is no longer dominated by traditional supermarkets. In addition, these changing dynamics have made geographic distance, traffic patterns, and population density decreasingly relevant in a consumer’s choice of where they purchase food and groceries. Today, Kroger is only the fourth-largest food and grocery retailer in the United States, behind Walmart, Amazon, and Costco. If the merger goes through, the combined firm will move into third place in market share, but would still account for just 9% of nationwide sales.[8]

The upshot is that the food and grocery industry is arguably as competitive as it has ever been. Unfortunately, recent developments suggest the FTC may well ignore or dismiss the economic realities of this rapid transformation of the food and grocery industry, substituting instead the outdated approach to market definition and industry concentration signaled by the draft guidelines.[9]

Against this backdrop, our brief highlights five important areas where both the commission and commentators’ stances appear to run headlong into legal precedent that mandates an evidence-based approach to merger review, even as the best available evidence points to a dynamic and competitive grocery industry. The correct understanding of the law and the industry appears entirely at odds with a challenge to the proposed merger.

A.      The FTC’s Merger-Enforcement Policy Is on a Collision Course with the Law

The Kroger/Albertsons merger proceeds against a backdrop of tough merger-enforcement rhetoric and actions from the FTC. Recent developments include the publication of aggressive revised merger guidelines, a string of cases brought to block seemingly benign mergers, process revisions burdening even unproblematic mergers, and FTC leadership’s contentious and expansive interpretation of the merger laws. The FTC’s ambition to remake U.S. merger law is likely to falter before the courts, but not before imposing a substantial tax on all corporate transactions—and, ultimately, on consumers.

B.      The Product Market Is Broader Than Supermarkets

Because of recent changes in market dynamics, it no longer makes sense to limit the relevant market to supermarkets alone. Rather, consumer behavior in the face of omnipresent wholesale clubs, e-commerce, and local delivery platforms significantly constrains supermarkets’ pricing decisions.

Recent FTC consent orders involving supermarket mergers have limited the relevant product market to local brick-and-mortar supermarkets and food and grocery sales at nearby hypermarkets (e.g., Walmart supercenters), while excluding wholesale-club stores (e.g., Costco), e-commerce (e.g., Amazon), and further-flung stores accessible through online-delivery platforms (e.g., Instacart). This is based on an assertion that the relevant market includes only those retail formats in which a consumer can purchase nearly all of a household’s weekly food and grocery needs from a single stop, at a single retailer, in the shopper’s neighborhood. This is, however, no longer how most of today’s consumers shop. Instead, shoppers purchase different bundles of groceries from multiple sources, often simultaneously.[10] This pattern has substantial implications for supermarkets’ competitive environment.

C.      Labor Monopsony Concerns Are Unlikely to Hold Up in Court

More than in any previous retail merger, opponents of the Kroger/Albertsons deal have raised the specter of potential monopsony power in labor markets. But these concerns reflect a manifestly unrealistic conception of labor-market competition. Fundamentally, the market for labor in the retail sector is extremely competitive, and workers have a wide range of alternative employment options—both in and out of the retail sector. At the same time, both Kroger and Albertsons are highly unionized, providing a counterbalance to any potential exercise of monopsony power by the merged firm.

D.     The Alleged ‘Waterbed Effect’ Is Not Borne Out by Evidence

Some critics of the merger have speculated that the merged company would be able to exercise monopsony power against its food and grocery suppliers (i.e., wholesalers and small manufacturers), often invoking an economic concept called the “waterbed effect.” The intuition is that the largest buyers may use their monopsony power to negotiate lower input prices from suppliers, leading the suppliers to make up the lost revenue by raising prices for their smaller, weaker buyers.

But these arguments are far from compelling. Much of the discussion of the waterbed effect focuses on harm to competing retailers, rather than consumers. But this is not the harm that U.S. antitrust law seeks to prevent. It is thus not surprising that at least one U.S. court has rejected waterbed-effect claims on grounds that there was no harm to consumers.

E.      Divestitures Historically Have Proven an Appropriate and Adequate Remedy

Historically, the FTC has allowed most grocery-store transactions to proceed with divestitures, such as Ahold/Delhaize (81 stores), Albertsons/Safeway (168 stores), and Price Chopper/Tops (12 stores). The extent of the remedies sought depends on the extent of post-merger competition in the relevant local markets, as well as the likelihood of significant entry by additional competitors into the relevant markets.

Despite a long history of divestitures serving as an appropriate and adequate remedy in supermarket mergers, some point to the Albertsons/Safeway merger divestitures to Haggen as evidence that divestitures are no longer an appropriate remedy. But several factors idiosyncratic to Haggen and its acquisition strategy led to the failure of that divestiture, and it does not properly stand for the claim that all supermarket divestitures are doomed. Any divestures associated with the Kroger-Albertsons merger should learn from the Haggen experience, rather than view it as justification to reject reasonable divestiture options that have worked for other mergers.

I.        The Agencies Are Trying to Rewrite Merger-Review Standards

The recently published FTC-DOJ draft merger guidelines are a particularly notable backdrop for the Kroger/Albertsons merger, leading many commentators to expect the FTC to take a hardline stance on the deal.[11] Merger case law, however, has not changed much in recent years. Given the merging parties’ apparent willingness to litigate the case, if necessary, the likelihood of a protracted legal battle seems high. As we explain below, at least at first sight, any case against the merger would appear to be largely built on sand, and the commission’s chances of succeeding in court appear slim.

The Clayton Act of 1914 grants the U.S. government authority to review and challenge mergers that may substantially lessen competition. The FTC and DOJ are the two antitrust agencies that share responsibility to enforce this law. Traditionally, the FTC investigates retail mergers, while the DOJ oversees other sectors, such as telecommunications, banking, and transportation.

Before the FTC and DOJ officials appointed by the current administration came into office, the settled practice was for the antitrust agencies to follow the 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines, which outline the analytical framework and evidence they use to evaluate mergers. The 2010 guidelines describe four major steps of merger analysis:

1. The first step is to define the relevant product and geographic markets affected by the merger. The goal is to identify the set of products and regions that are close substitutes to the products and regions sold by the merging parties.
2. The second step is to assess the competitive effects of the merger, or how the merger may harm competition in the defined markets.
3. The third step is to examine the role of market entry as a potential counterbalance to the competitive effects of the merger. For entry to be sufficient to deter or undo the anticompetitive effects of a merger, it must be timely, likely, and sufficient in scale and scope.
4. The fourth and final step is to evaluate the efficiencies generated by the merger, or how the merger may benefit consumers by reducing costs and improving quality.

The antitrust agencies weigh all these factors to determine whether a merger is likely to harm competition and consumers. If they find that a merger raises significant competitive concerns, they may seek to block it or require remedies such as divestitures or behavioral commitments from the merging parties.

Several factors, however, suggest that authorities are unlikely to follow this measured approach when reviewing the Kroger/Albertsons merger.

• Primarily, the FTC and DOJ have recently issued draft revised merger guidelines. The 2023 guidelines have not yet been adopted and are currently open for public comment. Compared to the previous iteration, which guided recent consent decrees, the new guidelines contain more stringent structural presumptions—that is, a presumption that a merger that merely increases concentration (as all horizontal mergers do) by a certain amount violates the law, rather than a more nuanced economic analysis connecting specific market attributes to a likelihood of actual consumer harm.[12]
• Although elements of the above framework are present in the new proposed guidelines, they also incorporate new language reflecting a persistent thumb on the scale that systematically undermines merging parties’ ability to justify their merger. For example, while a presumption of harm is triggered at a certain level of concentration (an HHI of 1800), in markets where there has previously been consolidation (over an unspecified timeframe), an impermissible “trend [toward concentration] can be established by… a steadily increasing HHI [that] exceeds 1,000 and rises toward 1,800.”[13] Traditionally, an HHI under 1500 would be considered “unconcentrated” and presumed to raise no competitive concerns.[14] The notion of a “trend” toward concentration raising particular concern hasn’t been reflected in guidelines since 1968,[15] and reached its apotheosis in Von’s Grocery in 1966[16]—one of the most thoroughly reviled merger cases in U.S. history.[17]
• The FTC had already started to tighten its merger-enforcement policy before the draft revised guidelines were published. Among other actions, the agency brought high-profile cases against the Illumina/GRAIL, Meta/Within, and Microsoft/Activision Blizzard[18] So far, all three challenges have resulted in defeat for the FTC in adjudication. Taken together, these cases suggest the agency is willing to push the law beyond its limits in an attempt to limit corporate consolidation, whatever the actual competitive effect.
• Finally, the FTC’s leadership has been particularly bearish about the potential consumer benefits of corporate mergers and acquisitions. This inclination is reflected in Chair Lina Khan’s assertion that the Clayton Act embodies a “broad mandate aimed at prohibiting mergers even when they do not constitute monopolization and even when their tendency to lessen competition is not certain.”[19]

All of these factors—in concert with the merging parties’ claim that they are prepared to go to court if the FTC decides to block the transaction outright—suggest that there is a particularly high likelihood that the Kroger/Albertsons merger will be challenged and litigated, rather than approved or challenged and settled.

For the reasons outlined in the following sections, however, the FTC is unlikely to prevail in court. The market overlaps between the merging parties are few and can be resolved by relatively straightforward divestiture remedies—which, even if disfavored by the agency, are routinely accepted by courts. Likewise, the FTC’s likely market definition and potential theories of harm pertaining to labor monopsony and purchasing power, more generally, appear speculative at best. The upshot is that the FTC’s desire to bring tougher merger enforcement appears to be on a collision course with the law as it is currently enforced by U.S. courts.

II.      The Relevant Market Is Broader Than Supermarkets

The retail food and grocery landscape has changed dramatically since the last litigated supermarket merger. Consumer-shopping behavior has shifted toward more frequent shopping trips across a wide variety of formats, which include warehouse clubs (e.g., Costco), e-commerce (e.g., Amazon), online delivery platforms (e.g., Instacart), limited-assortment stores (e.g., Trader Joe’s and Aldi), natural and organic markets (e.g., Whole Foods), and ethnic-specialty stores (e.g., H Mart), in addition to traditional supermarkets. Because of these enormous changes, the market definition assumed in previous FTC consent orders likely will be—and should be—challenged, given the empirical evidence. This issue brief focuses particularly on the growing importance of warehouse clubs and e-commerce (including online delivery platforms).

A.      Recent Trends in Retailing Have Upended the ‘Traditional’ Grocery Market Definition

The FTC is likely to define the relevant product market as supermarkets, which the agency has previously defined as retail stores that enable consumers to purchase all of their weekly food and grocery requirements during a single shopping visit. This market definition includes supermarkets within hypermarkets, such as Walmart supercenters, but excludes warehouse-club stores, such as Costco.[20] Prior consent orders omit any discussion of whether online retailers or delivery services should be included or excluded from the relevant market. This product-market definition has remained mostly unchanged—and mostly unchallenged—since the Ahold/Giant merger a quarter-century ago.[21]

The consent orders exclude warehouse-club stores—as well as hard discounters, limited-assortment stores, natural and organic markets, and ethnic-specialty stores—because these stores are asserted to “offer a more limited range of products and services than supermarkets and because they appeal to a distinct customer type.”[22] In addition, the orders indicate that “supermarkets do not view them as providing as significant or close competition as traditional supermarkets.”[23] Both claims are wrong.

Figure 1 shows that retail sales by supermarkets, warehouse clubs, supercenters, and other grocery stores have been relatively stable at 5-6% of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP).[24] Figure 2 shows that supermarkets’ share of retail sales dropped sharply from the early 1990s through the mid-2000s, with that share shifting to warehouse clubs and supercenters. These figures are consistent with the conclusion that warehouse clubs and supercenters successfully compete against traditional grocery stores. Indeed, it would be reasonable to conclude that the rise of warehouse clubs and supercenters at the expense of traditional supermarkets is one of the most significant long-run trends in retail.

The retail food and grocery industry has changed dramatically. Below, we note that the average consumer shops for food and groceries more than once a week and shops at more than one retail format in a given week. Since the Ahold/Giant merger in 1998, warehouse clubs and supercenters have doubled their share of retail sales, while supermarkets’ share has dropped by more than 25% (Figure 2). Over the same period, online shopping and home delivery has also greatly changed the market.[25]

Based on these observations, the product-market definition that the FTC has employed in its consent orders over more than two decades is likely to be—and should be—challenged to include warehouse clubs, in addition to accounting for online retail and delivery.

B.      The Once-a-Week Shopper Is No Longer the Norm

In the past, the FTC has specified that, for a firm to be in the relevant market of “supermarkets,” it must be able to “enable[e] consumers to purchase substantially all of their weekly food and grocery shopping requirements in a single shopping visit.”[26] This definition suffers from several deficiencies.

The first deficiency is that this hypothetical consumer behavior is at odds with how many or most consumers behave today.

• Surveys conducted by the Food Marketing Institute and The Hartman Group report the average shopper makes 1.6 weekly trips to buy groceries.[27]
• Surveys conducted by Drive Research show the average household makes an average of 8.1 grocery shopping trips a month, or around two trips a week.[28]

There is no evidence that consumers view retailers who provide one-stop-shopping for an entire week’s food and grocery needs as distinct from other retailers who provide food and groceries. In fact, evidence suggests that many consumers “multi-home” across several different retail categories.

• Survey data published by Drive Research indicate that many households spread their shopping across grocery stores, mass merchants, warehouse clubs, independent grocery stores, natural and specialty grocery stores, dollar stores, and online retailers.[29]
• Acosta, a sales and marketing consulting firm, reports that 76% of consumers shop at more than one retailer a week and about one-third “retail hop” among three or more retailers a week for groceries and staples.[30]
• Research from the University of Florida that found, in 2017, an average consumer visited 3.2 to 4.3 different formats of food outlets a month, depending on income level.[31]

Thus, even if one-stop weekly food and grocery shopping at single retailers was once typical, the evidence indicates such a phenomenon is much less common today.

C.      Supermarkets Compete with Warehouse Clubs

The FTC’s consent orders provide four reasons to exclude warehouse clubs from the relevant market that includes supermarkets:

1. They offer a “more limited range of products and services” than supermarkets;
2. They “appeal to a distinct customer type” from supermarket customers;
3. Shoppers do not view warehouse clubs as “adequate substitutes for supermarkets;” and
4. Supermarkets do not view warehouse clubs as “significant or close competition,” relative to other supermarkets.[32]

In contrast to these conclusions, there is widespread recognition that warehouse clubs impose significant competitive pressure on supermarkets. Indeed, the evidence indicates that supermarkets do consider wholesale clubs to be competitors and vice versa.[33]

• The National Academies of Sciences concludes that, over time, the entry and growth of warehouse clubs, superstores, and online retail has “blurred” the distinctions between retail formats.[34] More importantly for merger-review analysis, the National Academies concludes the retail sector is “highly competitive,” in part because of the entry and growth of warehouse clubs, superstores, and online retail.[35]
• Based on their empirical analysis, Paul Ellickson and co-authors conclude that warehouse clubs are “relevant substitutes” for supermarkets, even when the club stores are outside the geographic area typically used by the FTC in merger reviews.[36]
• Prior to her appointment as FTC chair, Lina Khan and her co-author concluded that competition from warehouse clubs “fueled” grocery mergers in the late 1990s.[37]

The FTC’s consent orders note that warehouse clubs offer a “more limited range of products and services” than supermarkets. The orders identify products sold at supermarket as “including, but not limited to, fresh meat, dairy products, frozen foods, beverages, bakery goods, dry groceries, detergents, and health and beauty products.”[38] The annual reports for Costco, Walmart (Sam’s Club), and BJ’s, however, indicate each company offers the same range of products the FTC consent orders identify as being offered by supermarkets. If warehouse clubs offer similar products, see themselves as competing with supermarkets, and customers view them as substitutes, warehouse clubs must be in the same market.[39]

D.     E-Commerce Has Changed the Food Landscape

Since the Ahold/Giant merger in 1998, online shopping and home delivery have grown from niche services serving only 10,000 households nationwide to a landscape where approximately one-in-eight consumers purchase groceries “exclusively” or “mostly” online.[40] This shift has increased competition and innovation in the supermarket industry, as traditional supermarkets have adapted to changing consumer preferences and behaviors by offering more delivery and pickup options, expanding their online assortments, and enhancing their digital capabilities.[41] Some have invested in their own e-commerce platforms and many have partnered with such third-party providers as Instacart, Shipt, and Peapod.[42]

One might surmise that e-commerce simply replaced in-person shopping, but with the same stores competing. This is not what has happened. E-commerce has also increased competition by bringing in new companies with which traditional stores need to compete (e.g., Amazon) and by increasing the options available to consumers through services like Instacart, which allow for direct price and product comparisons among many stores. Each of these innovations has blurred the lines between brick-and-mortar food and grocery retailers and e-commerce, as well as the lines between supermarkets and other retail formats.

In addition, the rapid growth of e-commerce and delivery services make distance, traffic patterns, and population density decreasingly relevant in a consumer’s choice of where they purchase food and groceries. Dimitropoulos and co-authors note (1) the presence of warehouse clubs expands the relevant geographic market, (2) online delivery options expand the geographic market “far away,” and (3) online food and grocery purchases can be delivered from fulfilment centers, as well as from traditional stores.[43]

Because of these observations, the product market-definition that has been employed in the FTC’s consent orders over more than two decades is likely to be—and should be—challenged to include warehouse clubs and to account for online retail and delivery.

III.    The Merger Is Unlikely to Increase Labor Monopsony Power

In recent years, there has been more and more emphasis in antitrust discussions placed on labor markets and possible harms to workers. The recent draft merger guidelines added an explicit section on mergers that “May Substantially Lessen Competition for Workers or Other Sellers.”[44] Before the guidelines even, some writers predicted the FTC will push a case on labor competition.[45] While, in theory, antitrust harms can occur in labor markets, just as in product markets, proving that harm is more difficult.

An important fact about this merger is that both companies have many unionized workers. Around two-thirds of Kroger employees[46] and a majority of Albertsons employees[47] are part of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), a union representing 1.3 million members. Even if the merger would increase labor monopsony power in the absence of unions, the FTC will have to acknowledge the reality of the unions’ own bargaining power.

Delegates of the UFCW unanimously voted to oppose the merger. [48] Rather than monopsony power or lower wages, however, the union’s stated reason for their opposition was lack of transparency.[49] While lack of transparency may be problematic for the UFCW members, it does not constitute an antitrust harm. Kroger, on the other hand, has contended that the merger will benefit employees, citing a commitment to invest an additional $1 billion toward increased wages and expanded benefits, starting from the day the deal closes.[50] As with most announced goals, however, there is no enforcement mechanism for this commitment at present, although one could be litigated.

Rather than relying on proclamations from any of the parties, we need economic analysis of the relevant labor markets, asking the types of questions raised above surrounding the output markets. A policy report from Economic Policy Institute estimates that “workers stand to lose over $300 million annually” from the merger.[51] But the report uses an estimate of the correlation between concentration (HHI) in labor markets and wages to arrive at that estimate. While academic research may benefit from such an estimate, it is unhelpful in merger analysis. As a long list of prominent antitrust economists recently wrote, “regressions of price on HHI should not be used in merger review… [A] regression of price on the HHI does not recover a causal effect that could inform the likely competitive effects of a merger.”[52]

Any labor case would require showing the merger would harm workers by reducing their bargaining power. For most workers involved, there are still many potential employers competing. While the exact job-to-job switches are unknown, press releases during the pandemic highlighted how Kroger was hiring workers from a wide variety of companies and industries—from hospitality (Marriott International) to restaurants (Waffle House) to food distribution (Sysco).[53] While there are no publicly available data on worker flows between different companies, economist Kevin Murphy explained that if you ask “where do people go when they leave, often you’ll find no more than 5 percent of them go to any one firm, that they go all over the place. And some go in the same industry. Some go in other industries.”[54]

If, as is likely, an overwhelming majority of Kroger’s workers’ next best option (what they would do if a store closed) was not an Albertsons store but something completely outside of food and grocery stores, the merger would not take away those workers’ next best option. If true, the merger cannot be said to increase labor monopsony power to the extent necessary to justify blocking a merger.

IV.    ‘Waterbed Effects’ Are Highly Speculative

One antitrust harm that has been discussed frequently in recent years is the so-called “waterbed effect,” in which “price reductions are negotiated with suppliers by larger buyers and result in higher prices being charged by suppliers to smaller buyers.”[55] The waterbed effect is not unique to mergers but can apply any time there is differential buyer-market power. The firm with more market power gets a good deal and its competitors are harmed. Long before the proposed merger, but still in the context of retail, people were writing about the waterbed effect of Walmart.[56]

In the context of the Kroger/Albertsons merger, critics have again raised the possibility of a waterbed effect. Michael Needler Jr.—the president and chief executive of Fresh Encounter, a chain of 98 grocery stores based in Findlay, Ohio—raised the possibility in a U.S. Senate hearing on the merger.[57] He was also quoted by The New York Times, saying:

When the large power buyers demand full orders, on time and at the lowest cost, it effectively causes the water-bed effect. They push down, and the consumer packaged goods companies have no option but to supply them at their demands, leaving rural stores with higher costs and less availability to products.[58]

In a letter to the FTC, the American Antitrust Institute raised several concerns about the merger and argued that:

The waterbed effect is likely to worsen with Kroger-Albertsons enhanced buyer power post-merger, with adverse effects on the ability of independent grocers to compete in a tighter oligopoly of large grocery chains.[59]

If there is a waterbed effect, some firms will have lower wholesale prices, and some will have higher prices. Both will be partially passed on to consumers. While no doubt frustrating for small retailers, it is unclear whether competing for lower prices and more attention is a normal part of the competitive process, or whether it is anticompetitive, and policy could be used stop it. For example, if one firm is easier to deal with—either because they are more efficient or just more pleasant to interact with—sellers will switch to that firm and correspondingly demand higher returns from the other buyers. Moreover, even if we identify differential prices because of a waterbed effect, it would not imply that there has been any harm to consumers.[60]

While the waterbed theory has attracted the interest of some academics and policymakers, its relevance for antitrust is a different matter. There is a reason that courts have been skeptical. In particular, the court noted that the harms associated with the waterbed theory are borne by competing firms, rather than consumers or competition writ large.[61] Moreover, the court observed that actions taken by firms to avoid any possible harms from a hypothesized waterbed effect (e.g., by purchasing inputs from alternative suppliers) demonstrates a lack of—rather than presence of—monopsony power. The United Kingdom competition authority has evaluated “waterbed effect” allegations in at least two supermarket mergers and found no evidence indicating any anticipated effects of the mergers on input prices that would harm consumers.[62]

V.      Remedies Can Solve Any Remaining Competitive Concerns

While the above sections argue that the FTC will have a hard time making a case that the merger is anticompetitive overall, there may be some specific geographic markets where concerns remain. In the face of such concerns, the FTC historically has allowed most supermarket transactions to proceed with divestitures, such as Ahold/Delhaize (81 stores), Albertsons/Safeway (168 stores), and Price Chopper/Tops (12 stores).[63] The extent of the remedies sought depends on the extent of post-merger competition in the relevant markets, as well as the likelihood of entry by additional competitors.[64] Dimitropoulos and coauthors noted that most divestitures required by recent consent orders in recent supermarket mergers have occurred in geographic markets with fewer than five remaining competitors.[65]

In recent merger consent orders, divested stores have been acquired by both retail supermarkets and wholesalers with retail outlets, including Publix, Supervalu, Big Y, Weis, Associated Wholesale Grocers, Associated Food Stores, and C&S Wholesale Grocers.[66] Several of these companies have been expanding—in some cases outside of their “home” territories. For example, Publix is a Florida-based chain that operates nearly 1,350 stores in seven southeastern states.[67] Publix expanded to North Carolina in 2014, Virginia in 2017, and has announced plans to expand into Kentucky this year.[68] Weis Markets is a Pennsylvania-based chain that operates more than 200 stores in seven northeastern states.[69] Last year, the company announced plans to spend more than $150 million on projects, including new retail locations and upgrades to existing facilities.[70] There are also many smaller stores that have proven successful and possible candidates for a few stores. For example, Rochester, New York-based Wegmans has entered Washington, D.C., Delaware, and Virginia over recent years.[71]

A.      The Haggen Divestiture Can Be Avoided

Despite a long history of divestitures serving as an appropriate and adequate remedy in supermarket mergers, some point to the Albertsons/Safeway merger divestitures to Haggen as evidence that divestitures are no longer an appropriate remedy.[72] But several factors idiosyncratic to Haggen and its acquisition strategy led to failure, rather than the divestiture itself.

In 2014, the parent company of Albertsons announced plans to purchase rival food and grocery chain Safeway for $9.4 billion. During its merger review, the FTC identified 130 local markets in western and mid-western states where it alleged the merger would be anticompetitive.[73] In response, Albertsons and Safeway agreed to divest 168 supermarkets in those geographic markets.[74] Haggen Holdings LLC was the largest buyer of the divested stores, acquiring 146 Albertsons and Safeway stores in Arizona, California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington.

Following its acquisition of the divested stores, Haggen almost immediately encountered numerous problems at the converted stores. Consumers complained of high prices, and sales plummeted at some stores. The company struggled and began selling some of its stores. Less than a year after the FTC announced the divestiture agreement, Haggen filed for bankruptcy. Following the bankruptcy, Albertsons bought back 33 of the stores it had divested in its merger with Safeway.

Unique factors indicate Haggen may not have been an appropriate buyer for the divested stores. Before acquiring the divested stores, Haggen was a small regional chain with only 18 stores, mostly in Washington State. The acquisition represented a ten-fold increase in the number of stores the company would operate. While Haggen was once an independent family-owned firm, when it acquired the divested stores, the company was owned by a private investment firm that used a sale-leaseback scheme to finance the purchase. Christopher Wetzel notes that Haggen failed to invest sufficiently in the marketing necessary to create brand awareness in regions where Haggen had not previously operated.[75] Such issues would need to be avoided in any future divestitures; experience shows they can be.

The problems with the Haggen divestiture need not be repeated. As explained above, there are many companies of various sizes that have the capabilities and desire to expand. While the relevant product and geographic markets for supermarket mergers has shifted enormously over the past few decades, divestitures remain an appropriate and adequate remedy for any competitive concerns. The FTC has knowledge and experience with divestiture remedies and should have a good understanding of what works. In particular, firms acquiring divested assets should have an adequate cushion of capital, experience with the market conditions in which the stores are located, and the operational and marketing expertise to transition customers through the change.

[1] Press Release, Kroger and Albertsons Companies Announce Definitive Merger Agreement, Kroger (Oct. 14, 2022), https://ir.kroger.com/CorporateProfile/press-releases/press-release/2022/Kroger-and-Albertsons-Companies-Announce-Definitive-Merger-Agreement/default.aspx.

[2] In an article written with Sandeep Vaheesan before she became chair of the FTC, Lina Khan expressed disdain for grocery-industry consolidation and deep skepticism of even the best divestiture packages. See Lina Khan & Sandeep Vaheesan, Market Power and Inequality: The Antitrust Counterrevolution and Its Discontents, 11 Harv. L. & Pol’y Rev. 235, 254 (2017) (“Retail consolidation has enabled firms to squeeze their suppliers… and led to worse outcomes for consumers.”) & 289 (“Even if divestitures could be perfectly tailored and if they preserved competition in narrow markets in every instance, they would fail to advance the citizen interest standard.”).

[3] See, e.g., David Dayen, Proposed Kroger-Albertsons Merger Would Create a Grocery Giant, The American Prospect (Oct. 17, 2022), https://prospect.org/power/proposed-kroger-albertsons-merger-would-create-grocery-giant; Richard Smoley, Kroger, Albertsons, and Lina Khan, Blue Book Services (May 2, 2023), https://www.producebluebook.com/2023/05/02/kroger-albertsons-and-lina-khan.

[4] U.S. Dep’t of Justice & Fed. Trade Comm’n, Draft Merger Guidelines (Jul. 19, 2023), available at https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-07/2023-draft-merger-guidelines_0.pdf. See also Gus Hurwitz & Geoffrey Manne, Antitrust Regulation by Intimidation, Wall St. J. (Jul. 24, 2023), https://www.wsj.com/articles/antitrust-regulation-by-intimidation-khan-kanter-case-law-courts-merger-27f610d9.

[5] Prior to Whole Foods/Wild Oats, the last litigated supermarket merger was the State of California’s 1988 challenge to American Store’s acquisition of Lucky Stores. Several retail mergers have been challenged in court, however, such as Staples/Office Depot in 2015. See Press Release, FTC Challenges Proposed Merger of Staples, Inc. and Office Depot, Inc., Federal Trade Commission (Dec. 7, 2015), https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2015/12/ftc-challenges-proposed-merger-staples-inc-office-depot-inc.

[6] This includes approving Albertsons/Safeway (2015), Ahold/Delhaize (2016), and Price Chopper/Tops (2022). See Analysis of Agreement Containing Consent Order to Aid Public Comment, In the Matter of Cerberus Institutional Partners V, L.P., AB Acquisition, LLC, and Safeway Inc. (File No. 141 0108) (Jan. 27, 2015) available at https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/150127cereberusfrn.pdf; Analysis of Agreement Containing Consent Order to Aid Public Comment, In the Matter of Koninklijke Ahold N.V. and Delhaize Group NV/SA (File No. 151-0175) (Jul. 22, 2016), available at https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/160722koninklijkeanalysis.pdf;  Analysis of Agreement Containing Consent Order to Aid Public Comment, In the Matter of The Golub Corporation and Tops Markets Corporation (File No. 211-0002, Docket No. C-4753) (Nov. 8, 2021), available at https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/2110002pricechoppertopsaapc.pdf.

[7] Decision and Order, In the Matter of Whole Foods Market, Inc., (Docket No. 9324) (May 28, 2009), available at https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cases/2009/05/090529wfdo.pdf; FTC v. Whole Foods Market, 548 F.3d 1028 (D.C. Cir. 2008).

[8] Number based on authors’ calculations, using data from Progressive Grocer Staff, 90^th Annual Report, Progressive Grocer (May 2023), https://progressivegrocer.com/crossroads-progressive-grocers-90th-annual-report.

[9] U.S. Dep’t of Justice & Fed. Trade Comm’n, supra note 44.

[10] See, e.g., George Kuhn, Grocery Shopping Consumer Segmentation, Drive Research (2002), available at https://www.driveresearch.com/media/4725/final-2022-grocery-segmentation-report.pdf.

[11] Supra note 3.

[12] For instance, the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI) at which mergers are deemed problematic has been lowered from 2500 (and a post-merger increase of 200) to 1800 (and a post-merger increase of 100). Likewise, combined market shares of more than 30% are generally deemed problematic under the new guidelines (if a merger also increase the market’s HHI by 100 or more). The revised guidelines also focus more heavily on monopsony and labor-market issues. See U.S. Dep’t of Justice & Fed. Trade Comm’n, supra note 4, at 6-7.

[13] Id. at 21.

[14] See U.S. Dep’t of Justice & Fed. Trade Comm’n, 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines (Aug. 19, 2010) at §5.3 , available at https://www.justice.gov/atr/horizontal-merger-guidelines-08192010#5c.

[15] See U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Merger Guidelines (1968) at 6-7, available at https://www.justice.gov/archives/atr/1968-merger-guidelines.

[16] United States v. Von’s Grocery Co., 384 U.S. 270 (1966).

[17] See, e.g., Robert H. Bork, The Goals of Antitrust Policy, 57 Am. Econ. Rev. Papers & Proceedings 242 (1967) (“In the Von’s Grocery case a majority of the Supreme Court was willing to outlaw a merger which did not conceivably threaten consumers in order to help preserve small groceries in the Los Angeles area against the superior efficiency of the chains.”)

[18] FTC v. Illumina, Inc., U.S. Dist. LEXIS 75172 (2021); FTC v. Meta Platforms Inc., U.S. Dist. LEXIS 29832 (2023); FTC v. Microsoft Corporation et al., No. 23-cv-02880-JSC (N.D. Cal. Jul. 10, 2023), available at https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23870711/ftc-v-microsoft-preliminary-injunction-opinion.pdf.

[19] Lina M. Khan, Rohit Chopra, & Kelly Slaughter, Comm’rs, Fed. Trade Comm’n, Statement on the Withdrawal of the Vertical Merger Guidelines (Sep. 15, 2021) at 3, available at https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_statements/1596396/statement_of_chair_lina_m_khan_commissioner_rohit_chopra_and_commissioner_rebecca_kelly_slaughter_on.pdf.

[20] In this paper, the terms “hypermarket” and “supercenter” are used synonymously. See Richard Volpe, Annemarie Kuhns, & Ted Jaenicke, Store Formats and Patterns in Household Grocery Purchases, Economic Research Service, Economic Information Bulletin No. 167 (Mar. 2017), https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/82929/eib-167.pdf?v=0 (supercenters are also known as hypermarkets or superstores).

[21] Fed. Trade Comm’n, supra note 6.

[22] Id.

[23] Id.

[24] Data obtained from: U.S. Census Bureau, Report on Retail Sales and Trends: Annual Retail Trade Survey: 2021, https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2021/econ/arts/annual-report.html.

[25] Id.

[26] FTC, supra note 6.

[27] Food Marketing Institute & The Hartman Group, Consumers’ Weekly Grocery Shopping Trips in the United States from 2006 to 2022 (Average Weekly Trips per Household), Statista (May 2022), available at https://www.statista.com/statistics/251728/weekly-number-of-us-grocery-shopping-trips-per-household.

[28] Kuhn, supra note 10.

[29] Id.

[30] Trip Drivers: Top Influencers Driving Shopper Traffic, Acosta (2017), available at https://acostastorage.blob.core.windows.net/uploads/prod/newsroom/publication_phetw_0rzq.pdf.

[31] Lijun Angelia Chen & Lisa House, US Food Shopper Trends in 2017, Univ. of Fla, IFAS Extension Pub. No. FE1126 (Dec. 7, 2022), https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/FE1126.

[32] FTC, supra note 6.

[33] See Paul B. Ellickson, Paul L.E. Grieco, & Oleksii Khvastunov, Measuring Competition in Spatial Retail, 51 RAND J. Econ. 189 (2020) (“[C]lub stores are able to draw revenue from a significantly larger geographic area than traditional grocers. Hence, club stores are relevant substitutes for grocery stores, even if they are located even several miles away, a fact that could easily be overlooked in an analysis in which stores are simply clustered by geographic market.”).

[34] National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, A Satellite Account to Measure the Retail Transformation: Organizational, Conceptual, and Data Foundations (2021), available at https://www.bls.gov/evaluation/a-satellite-account-to-measure-the-retail-transformation.pdf (“[T]he restructuring that started first with the warehouse clubs and superstores and then moved on to e-commerce has begun to blur the lines between the retail industry and several other sectors …”).

[35] Id. at 25 (“[C]hanges experienced by retail over the past few decades suggest that the sector is highly competitive and is undergoing substantial change and reorganization. As discussed earlier, the changes described involve warehouse clubs and superstores … e-commerce … digital goods, imports, and large firms …”).

[36] Paul B. Ellickson, Paul L.E. Grieco, & Oleksii Khvastunov, Measuring Competition in Spatial Retail, 51 RAND J. Econ. 189 (2020) (“Due to their size and attractiveness for larger purchases, club stores represent strong competitors to grocery stores even, when they are a significant distance away.”).

[37] Khan & Vaheesan, supra note 2, at 255 (“Grocers sought to bulk up in order to compete with the scale of warehouse clubs and large discount stores, fueling further mergers and leading many local grocers to close …”).

[38] FTC, supra note 6.

[39] Costco Wholesale Corporation, Annual Report (Form 10-K) (Aug. 28, 2022), https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0000909832/000090983222000021/cost-20220828.htm; BJ’s Wholesale Club Holdings, Inc., Annual Report (Form 10-K) (Mar. 16, 2023), https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1531152/000153115223000026/bj-20230128.htm; Walmart Inc., Annual Report (Form 10-K) (Mar. 27, 2023), https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/104169/000010416923000020/wmt-20230131.htm.

[40] Hean Tat Keh & Elain Shieh, Online Grocery Retailing: Success Factors and Potential Pitfalls, 44 Bus. Horizons 73 (Jul.-Aug., 2001); Appinio & Spryker, Share of Consumers Purchasing Groceries Online in the United States in 2022, by Channel, Statista (Sep. 2002).

[41] Navigating the Market Headwinds: The State of Grocery Retail 2022, McKinsey & Co. (May 2022), available at https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/retail/how%20we%20help%20clients/the%20state%20of%20grocery%20retail%202022%20north%20america/mck_state%20of%20grocery%20na_fullreport_v9.pdf.

[42] Id.; Dimitri Dimitropoulos, Renée M. Duplantis, & Loren K. Smith, Trends in Consumer Shopping Behavior and Their Implications for Retail Grocery Merger Reviews, CPI Antitrust Chron. (Dec. 2021), available at https://www.brattle.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Trends-in-Consumer-Shopping-Behavior-and-their-Implications-for-Retail-Grocery-Merger-Review.pdf.

[43] Dimitropoulos, et al., supra note  (“Of course, adjustments to geographic market definition likely would need to be factored into the analysis, as club stores tend to have larger catchment areas than traditional grocery stores, and online delivery can reach as far away as can be travelled by truck from a central fulfilment center.”)

[44] U.S. Dep’t of Justice & Fed. Trade Comm’n, supra note 4 at 25-7.

[45] Maeve Sheehey & Dan Papscun, Kroger-Albertsons Merger Tests FTC’s Focus on Labor Competition, Bloomberg Law (Dec. 2, 2022) https://news.bloomberglaw.com/antitrust/kroger-albertsons-merger-tests-ftcs-focus-on-labor-competition.

[46] Kroger Union, UFCW, https://www.ufcw.org/actions/campaign/kroger-union (last accessed Jul. 26, 2023).

[47] Albertsons and Safeway Union, UFCW, https://www.ufcw.org/actions/campaign/albertsons-and-safeway-union (last accessed Jul. 26, 2023).

[48] Press Release, America’s Largest Union of Essential Grocery Workers Announces Opposition to Kroger and Albertsons Merger, UFCW (May 5, 2023), https://www.ufcw.org/press-releases/americas-largest-union-of-essential-grocery-workers-announces-opposition-to-kroger-and-albertsons-merger.

[49] Id. (“Given the lack of transparency and the impact a merger between two of the largest supermarket companies could have on essential workers – and the communities and customers they serve – the UFCW stands united in its opposition to the proposed Kroger and Albertsons merger”).

[50] Press Release, Kroger and Albertsons Companies Announce Definitive Merger Agreement, Kroger (Oct. 14, 2022), https://ir.kroger.com/CorporateProfile/press-releases/press-release/2022/Kroger-and-Albertsons-Companies-Announce-Definitive-Merger-Agreement/default.aspx.

[51] Ben Zipperer, Kroger-Albertsons Merger Will Harm Grocery Store Worker Wages, Economic Policy Institute (May 1, 2023), https://www.epi.org/publication/kroger-albertsons-merger.

[52] Nathan Miller et al., On the Misuse of Regressions of Price on the HHI in Merger Review, 10 J. Antitrust Enforcement 248 (2022), available at http://www.nathanhmiller.org/hhiregs.pdf.

[53] Press Release, The Kroger Family of Companies Provides New Career Opportunities to 100,000 Workers, Kroger (May 14, 2020), https://ir.kroger.com/CorporateProfile/press-releases/press-release/2020/The-Kroger-Family-of-Companies-Provides-New-Career-Opportunities-to-100000-Workers/default.aspx.

[54] Kevin Murphy, Transcript of Proceedings at the Public Workshop Held by the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice (Sep. 23, 2019), at 19, available at https://www.justice.gov/atr/page/file/1209071/download.

[55] Roman Inderst & Tommaso M. Valletti, Buyer Power and the ‘Waterbed Effect’, CEIS Research Paper 107 (Feb. 21, 2014), at 2, https://ssrn.com/abstract=1113318.

[56] Albert Foer, Mr. Magoo Visits Wal-Mart: Finding the Right Lens for Antitrust, American Antitrust Institute Working Paper No. 06-07, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1103609.

[57] Michael Needler Jr., Senate Hearing on Kroger and Albertsons Grocery Store Chains, at 1:43:00, available at https://www.c-span.org/video/?524439-1/senate-hearing-kroger-albertsons-grocery-store-chains.

[58] Julie Creswell, Kroger-Albertsons Merger Faces Long Road Before Approval, New York Times (Jan. 23, 2023), https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/23/business/kroger-albertsons-merger.html.

[59] Diana Moss, The American Antitrust Institute to the Honorable Lina M. Khan, American Antitrust Institute (Feb. 7, 2023), available at https://www.antitrustinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Kroger-Albertsons_Ltr-to-FTC_2.7.23.pdf.

[60] For an explicit economic model of the waterbed effect, see Roman Inderst & Tommaso M. Valletti, Buyer Power and the ‘Waterbed Effect’ 59  J. Ind. Econ. 1 (2011).

[61] DeHoog v. Anheuser-Busch InBev, SA/NV, No. 1:15-CV-02250-CL, 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 137759, at *13-16 (D. Or. July 22, 2016).

[62] Safeway Merger Report, UK Competition Commission (2003), available at https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20120119163858/http:/www.competition-commission.org.uk/inquiries/completed/2003/safeway/index.htm (“Overall, therefore, there is little evidence of an immediate or short-term ‘waterbed’ effect. … [O]ur surveys produced insufficient evidence on this point for us to conclude that any waterbed effect would be exacerbated by any of the mergers.”); Anticipated Merger between J Sainsbury PLC and ASDA Group Ltd: Summary of Final Report, UK Competition & Markets Authority (Apr. 25, 2019), available at https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5cc1434ee5274a467a8dd482/Executive_summary.pdf  (“Overall, it seems unlikely that many retailers will raise their prices in response to the Merger; and even if some individual retailers do, the overall effect on UK households is unlikely to be negative. On that basis, our finding is that the Merger is unlikely to lead to customer harm through a waterbed effect.”).

[63] Supra note 6.

[64] See Dimitropoulos, et al., supra note 42.

[65] Id.

[66] Supra note 6.

[67] Publix, Facts and Figures (2023), https://corporate.publix.com/about-publix/company-overview/facts-figures.

[68] Caroline A., The History of Publix: Entering New States, The Publix Checkout (Jan. 4, 2018), https://blog.publix.com/publix/the-history-of-publix-entering-new-states; Press Release, Publix Breaks Ground on First Kentucky Store and Announces Third Location, Publix (Jun. 23, 2022), https://corporate.publix.com/newsroom/news-stories/publix-breaks-ground-on-first-kentucky-store-and-announces-third-location.

[69] Weis Markets, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/weis-markets/about, (last accessed Jul. 26, 2023).

[70] Sam Silverstein, Weis Markets Unveils $150M Expansion and Upgrade Plan, Grocery Dive (May 2, 2022), https://www.grocerydive.com/news/weis-markets-unveils-150m-expansion-and-upgrade-plan/623015.

[71] Russell Redman, Wegmans lines up its next new store locations, Winsight Grocery Business (Dec. 1, 2022) https://www.winsightgrocerybusiness.com/retailers/wegmans-lines-its-next-new-store-locations.

[72] Dayen, supra note 3. (“As the Haggen affair makes clear, the whole idea of using conditions to allow high-level mergers and competition simultaneously has been a failure.”)

[73] Supra note 7.

[74] Id.

[75] Christopher A. Wetzel, Strict(er) Scrutiny: The Impact of Failed Divestitures on U.S. Merger Remedies, 64 Antitrust Bull. 341 (2019).

 

Despite organizing many hearings around antitrust issues, U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar has been unable to convince her colleagues in the Senate to overhaul U.S. antitrust law. With no movement from Congress, the Minnesota Democrat’s fellow progressive trust busters at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice (DOJ) are pushing for change from within the executive branch.

Read the full piece here.

Axios – ICLE Chief Economist Brian Albrecht was quoted by Axios in a story about reportedly pending antitrust litigation against Amazon. You can read full piece here.

Ultimately, it’s up to the courts whether they will accept the guideline changes and it will be a point of debate, says Brian Albrecht, chief economist at the International Center for Law & Economics.

 

Winsight Grocery Business – ICLE President Geoffrey Manne, Chief Economist Brian Albrecht, Director of Competition Policy Dirk Auer, and Senior Scholar Eric Fruits were cited extensively by Winsight Grocery Business in a story about an ICLE issue brief on issues with a potential Federal Trade Commission challenge to the merger of Kroger and Albertsons. You can read full piece here.

Accurately defining today’s grocery retail marketplace stands as one of five hurdles for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to surmount if it attempts to block the $24.6 billion deal, according to the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE), a nonprofit, nonpartisan research group.

In a brief released Thursday, titled “Five Problems with a Potential FTC Challenge to the Kroger-Albertsons Merger,” Portland, Oregon-based ICLE said an FTC effort to halt the transaction would collide with the law “as it is currently enforced by U.S. courts.” Such a move would be unlikely to prevail in court because of failure to account for “dramatic changes in the retail food and grocery landscape,” the viability of store divestitures as an antitrust remedy “routinely accepted by courts,” and “speculative” claims about harm to the labor market and purchasing power, the group explained.

What’s more, the 19-page brief said the Kroger-Albertsons merger likely will be challenged, citing an “increasingly aggressive enforcement stance” against mergers and acquisitions by the FTC, including new merger guidelines proposed last week.

ICLE also points to the merging parties’ “apparent willingness to litigate the case,” which it said “makes the likelihood of a protracted legal battle high.” Indeed, back in May, The Kroger Co. Chairman and CEO Rodney McMullen said in a Bloomberg interview that his company—slated to acquire Albertsons Cos. under the mega-merger—was willing to pursue litigation if the deal is nixed by regulators.

Law.com – ICLE Director of Innovation Policy Kristian Stout was quoted by Law.com in a story about the Biden administration’s approach to regulating artificial intelligence. You can read full piece here.

Kristian Stout, director of innovation policy at the nonprofit International Center for Law & Economics, agreed.

“AI intersects with a lot of different regulatory and policy agendas, and it also intersects with a lot of different points of anxiety in the general public that have been percolating over the last 10 or 15 years as tech companies have become more prominent in society,” Stout said.

Stout said that it appears to him that the Biden administration is trying to “gently coerce” Big Tech companies to commit that they will ensure AI products are safe before introducing them to the public, and that they will build systems that put security first and secure the public’s trust.

… While AI already plays a behind-the-scenes role for many Americans through smart devices such as Siri and Alexa or through predicative-text completion on emails, the conversation around AI really seemed to take off with the recent launch of ChatGPT, Stout said.

…“There are things we need to be concerned with. First off, we need to get away from the ‘It’s about to end the world.’ That is totally not a useful thing to think about,” Stout said.

“But we do want to think about ‘Could [ChatGPT] be used to promote more fraud, accelerate spam calls or accelerate fraud on consumers. There’s that potential there. At the same time, you want to start thinking about how can police departments start using facial recognition and advanced analytics to target people that we don’t want them targeting? That’s a valid concern,” Stout said.

Marginal Revolution – ICLE President Geoffrey Manne and Director of Law & Economics Programs Gus Hurwitz were cited in a post at Marginal Revolution about their recent Wall Street Journal op-ed about the Federal Trade Commission and U.S. Justice Department’s recently unveiled draft merger guidelines. You can read full piece here.

Gus Hurwitz (a former student) and Geoffrey Manne have an excellent piece in the WSJ discussing the FTCs new merger guidelines. First, what are these guidelines?

…The new guidelines, however, are very different as they attempt not to summarize the law but to create new policy in the absence of legislation from Congress or rulings by the courts, in other words to subvert the rule of law.

 

Townhall – ICLE research on payments markets was cited by columnist Julio Rivera in an op-ed for Townhall about efforts to attach Sen. Richard Durbin’s (D-Ill.) Credit Card Competition Act to the National Defense Authorization Act. You can read full piece here.

Research from the International Center for Law & Economics and George Mason University School of Law also found that the promised savings to consumers never materialized and that large retailers simply pocketed the money.

Cato@Liberty – ICLE Chief Economist Brian Albrecht and Director of Law & Economics Programs Gus Hurwitz were cited in a post at the Cato@Liberty blog about the proposed merger guidelines. You can read full piece here.

As Brian Albrecht points out, economics questions the idea that concentration correlates to an anti??competitive effect. Similarly, others have discussed how increased concentration does not mean higher prices for consumers. In fact, it would punish firms from improving efficiency in ways that lead to lower prices as such actions can lead to increased concentration due to consumer response to lower prices.

…As Gus Hurwitz tweets, while many of these cases are technically “good law”, this is largely due to the fact that previous guidelines for agency enforcement have led to more informal behavioral changes and settlements that meant courts have not had the opportunity to formally repudiate them in the past. The selective nature of the new guidelines is likely to meet skepticism from courts more familiar with the entire body of law and could, in fact, result in more formal repudiation of the cases on which the guidelines are based. Agency officials seeking to enforce under the new guidelines could find themselves worse off than they are now by providing courts a more formal opportunity to overturn these outdated precedents and diminish the courts’ view of the soundness of the agency’s guidelines.

Yahoo Finance – ICLE was cited in a press release about the amicus brief it filed jointly with the New Civil Liberties Alliance at the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in the In Re Bystolic antitrust litigation. You can read full piece here.

In a major March victory, Judge Lewis J. Liman of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed the In re Bystolic antitrust lawsuit, citing a powerful argument in NCLA’s district court amicus curiae brief joined by the International Center for Law and Economics (ICLE). NCLA argued that an antitrust plaintiff seeking to prove that a patent owner has made a prohibited “large” payment to potential competitors must show it was a large net payment (the cash paid minus the value of services provided), not merely a large gross payment. Judge Liman cited the NCLA/ICLE amicus brief in his opinion.

Now, NCLA and ICLE have partnered again in the case to file an amicus curiae brief at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Congress has long mandated that courts should strive to maintain a balance between the sometimes-competing claims of patent law and antitrust law, which should not be used to shortchange the rights of patent holders. So, before Plaintiffs’ lawyers are permitted to get into court to challenge the legality of a patent-litigation settlement, the NCLA/ICLE brief argues that, at a minimum, they ought to bear the burden of demonstrating a “large” and “unjustified” net payment made for the purpose of restraining trade.

Reason – ICLE President Geoffrey Manne, Chief Economist Brian Albrecht, and Senior Scholar Lazar Radic were quoted by Reason in a story about new merger guidelines promulgated jointly by the U.S. Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission. You can read full piece here.

“The overbroad guidelines are clearly designed to deter merger activity as a whole, regardless of the risk posed to competition,” said Geoffrey Manne, president of the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE).

…”While there is a lot to digest in the 51 page document with over 100 (largely stale) footnotes, the broad picture is clear: the goal of this document is to stop more mergers. Period,” writes Brian Albrecht, ICLE chief economist, at the Truth on the Market blog. “To achieve that end, the guidelines have jettisoned the insights from economics that antitrust has learned over the past 60 years and moved back to a world where virtually all conduct is presumed to be anticompetitive.”

…Lazar Radic, an adjunct law professor at IE Law School, notes that the draft guidelines also set up a world in which no platform operator “can simultaneously operate and participate on a platform.” (I.e., Amazon selling its own Amazon-brand products on the Amazon platform.)

“This de-facto prohibits vertical integration in platforms of a certain size, destroying the incentive to build & develop those platforms, and forfeiting the massive consumer benefits that accrue from vertical integration,” he points out. “The combined effect of the new merger guidelines, the FTC’s crusade against ‘self-preferencing,’ and bills like [the American Innovation and Choice Online Act], would be no Amazon Basics, no FBA (and probably no Prime)—heck, probably no Marketplace bc Amazon might just decide to kick all third party sellers out. Why would the FTC, an agency tasked with protecting consumers and competition, want to do this? Bc under its neo-brandeisian leadership, the FTC has reframed that mission with the goal of undermining ‘bigness’- consequences and statutes be damned.”

The Dispatch – ICLE Chief Economist Brian Albrecht was quoted by The Morning Dispatch in an item about the Federal Trade Commission’s string of failed merger challenges. You can read full piece here.

On a per year basis, the FTC has seen more abandonments to challenged deals under the Biden administration than the Trump administration. “It’s fair to say there’s been a chilling effect,” Brian Albrecht, chief economist at the International Center for Law and Economics, tells TMD.

Barron’s – ICLE Academic Affiliates John Lopatka and Keith Hylton were quoted by Barron’s in a story about the string of recent losses suffered by Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan in enforcement cases. You can read full piece here.

“They are out on the frontier of antitrust,” said John Lopatka, from Penn State’s School of Law on Khan’s fresh approach to enforcing competition policy.

“It’s just that the courts are not that receptive,” he added.

…”Courts are naturally conservative institutions, they don’t change overnight,” said Keith Hylton, professor of law at Boston University.

Heatmap – ICLE Editor-in-Chief R.J. Lehmann was quoted by Heatmap in a story about ongoing dislocations in the Florida property insurance market. You can read full piece here.

Farmers “looked at their book and determined they needed to reduce their catastrophe exposure. Most national carriers made that decision a long time ago,” RJ Lehmann, editor-in-chief and senior fellow at the International Center for Law and Economics, told me.

…“We’re getting to a place where the availability problem will get better,” Lehmann said. “The affordability problem? We live on a low-lying peninsula with some of the most hurricane prone waters in the world.”

Corporate Counsel – ICLE Academic Affiliate John Lopatka was quoted by Corporate Counsel in a story about Amazon hiring former Federal Trade Commission staff to assist in ongoing litigation with the agency. You can read full piece here.

By hiring FTC staffers, Amazon “will get useful information about processes and personalities at the FTC,” said John Lopatka, a Penn State law professor. “It’s not crossing any ethical boundary to say, ‘This case is spearheaded by Jane Doe,’ for example, ‘and I think she would listen to these kinds of arguments.’”

…For Amazon, zeroing in on FTC talent makes sense, said Lopatka, the Penn State professor.

“If you’re getting sued, [and] if you’re Amazon, you’ll want every advantage you can get,” Lopatka said. “If it helps even a little bit, it’s worth it.”

Lopatka, who was a consultant for the FTC’s Office of General Counsel 2001 to 2004, said some of the FTC departures stem from displeasure with Khan’s leadership.

SiliconValley.com – ICLE Director of Innovation Policy Kristian Stout was quoted by SiliconValley.com in a story about the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act. You can read full piece here.

Kristian Stout, director of innovation policy at the International Center for Law and Economics, a nonprofit policy think tank, points to two key concerns. The anti-retaliation provision would likely face free-speech court challenges from platforms arguing they can’t be forced to publish material they object to. There also are fair-use doctrines that protect creative content but allow sharing of information.

“These bills run right up against the First Amendment,” Stout said. “I don’t see how they survive in court.”

Forbes – ICLE Academic Affiliate Todd Zywicki was cited by Forbes in a story about the Credit Card Competition Act of 2023. You can read full piece here.

The government is creating a game of whack-a-mole: Increased competition in one sector will lead to diminished competition in another. As Todd Zywicki, professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, recently wrote:

“By artificially pushing down interchange fees on credit cards, the bill would curb an important revenue stream for banks. Larger banks, which have gotten even bigger since Dodd-Frank was enacted, could offset such losses by selling investment advice, mortgages and other products—or by imposing new fees as they did in response to the original Durbin amendment. Small banks lack these revenue streams and would have to raise fees, curtail services or merge, fueling industry consolidation.”

CNN – ICLE President Geoffrey A. Manne was quoted by CNN in a story about the launch of the Instagram spinoff Threads. You can read full piece here.

If Threads puts pressure on Twitter to improve its service, that is a form of competition between apps, said Geoffrey Manne, founder of the Portland, Oregon-based International Center for Law and Economics.

But, he added, if it leads to a concentration of power in the social media industry more broadly, it could mean a reduction in competition overall. It all depends on how you define the market.

“I’m inclined to say it does both simultaneously, and the ultimate consequences aren’t so clear,” Manne said.

Rather than viewing it through the lens of a social media market, one helpful way to look at the issue is from the perspective of the advertising market, he said. It’s possible that once Threads introduces advertising — which Zuckerberg has said won’t happen until the app has increased to significant scale — Threads simply reinforces Meta’s advertising market power, Manne said. That could lead to further antitrust scrutiny for Meta even if the question about competition in social media is ambiguous.

Jeff Blattner, a former DOJ antitrust official, said it can only benefit consumers to have Threads as a rival to Twitter.

“Two platforms run by maniac billionaires are better than one,” he wrote on Threads — though if Threads is so successful as to effectively knock out Twitter altogether, then in some ways the original question about Meta’s dominance will still stand.

Cowboy State Daily – ICLE Academic Affiliate George Mocsary was quoted by Cowboy State Daily in a story about a federal court decision in the case Missouri v Biden. You can read full piece here.

George Mocsary, a First Amendment expert and University of Wyoming law professor, said he had no idea why Wyoming wasn’t invited into the lawsuit.

Wyoming’s exclusion probably had nothing to do with forum shopping, Mocsary added, noting that even if Wyoming had joined the case, the plaintiffs still could have chosen to file it in the U.S. District Court of Western Louisiana, as they did.

Doughty is a Trump-appointed judge who struck down vaccine mandates for federally employed preschool workers and a federal masking mandate for the preschoolers in November 2022. He called the administrative mandates “tyranny” at the time.

Sweeping Injunction 

But Mocsary noted the breadth of Doughty’s order, saying it sends a clear message.

“By issuing such a broad order, the court is effectively saying that the executive branch can’t be trusted, based on its past actions, to make any ‘suggestions’ to social media platforms,” said Mocsary. “It’s shown that it can’t be trusted not to cross the line into improper coercion.”

ICLE Director of Law & Economics Programs Gus Hurwitz was a guest on The Cyberlaw Podcast to discuss commitments made last week by leaders of the artificial-intelligence (AI) industry to political leaders in Washington, as well the European Commission’s struggles to get other jurisdictions to adopt the EU’s regulatory framework for AI.

Other topics included the Federal Communication Commission’s new cybersecurity label for IoT devices, the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulations for water-system cybersecurity, and the latest U.S. Justice Department/Federal Trade Commission draft merger-review guidelines.

The full episode is embedded below.

The phrase “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” is used to signify that we shouldn’t accidentally throw out good things in our efforts to get rid of the bad. As the U.S. Senate again gears up to consider multiple bills intended to protect teens online, they must be aware that substantially increasing the costs of creating teen-friendly platforms could lead online platforms to gate access to their platforms in ways that would exclude teens altogether.

Read the full piece here.

Despite organizing many hearings around antitrust issues, U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar has been unable to convince her colleagues in the Senate to overhaul U.S. antitrust law. With no movement from Congress, the Minnesota Democrat’s fellow progressive trust busters at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice (DOJ) are pushing for change from within the executive branch.

Read the full piece here.

Freedom of enterprise is considered a second-class freedom in Spain, rather than a fundamental right. It is clear that this has been the view not only of successive Spanish governments since the current Constitution was promulgated in 1978, but also of the judges of the Supreme Court of Spain (Tribunal Supremo) and the Constitutional Court of Spain (Tribunal Constitucional). Spanish regulation of unscheduled urban transport services provided by private-hire passenger vehicles (PHVs) perfectly illustrates the former’s interventionist impulses (as part of the close and pernicious relationship between politics and business, in which economic freedoms are used as a bargaining chip) as well as the deference to power shown by the latter.

Read the full piece here.

The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission’s proposed revisions to the merger guidelines represent the Biden administration’s latest effort to bypass Congress and the courts to rewrite a major area of law. These changes would increase the cost and uncertainty that businesses face when considering mergers—and damage the agencies’ reputations.

The FTC and DOJ have done it: on July 19 they released the long awaited (or dreaded) draft merger guidelines, which . . . well, could have been worse, given current agency leadership, but could have been better (as demonstrated by the certainly imperfect, but still better, 2010 guidelines they replaced). Jumping on the agencies’ myopia bandwagon, I protest: it’s late July and I’m on vacation, damnit! Having been deep in the central American jungle, I’m late to this party, even as the party I’d long planned has been interrupted.

Read the full piece here.

 

The Norwegian Data Protection Authority (DPA) on July 14 imposed a temporary three-month ban on “behavioural advertising” on Facebook and Instagram to users based in Norway. The decision relied on the “urgency procedure” under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which exceptionally allows direct regulatory interventions by other national authorities than the authority of the country where the business is registered (here: Ireland).

My initial view of the decision is that it is both a misuse of the urgency procedure and mischaracterizes the leading judgment from the EU Court of Justice (CJEU) on which it purports to rely (see my analysis of that judgment: part 1 and part 2). The decision misses the critical legal issue that it’s unclear to what extent the CJEU’s analysis applies to first-party personal data (collected by Facebook and Instagram) as the Court’s judgment expressly covered third-party data (collected “off-platform”).

Read the full piece here.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) is either woefully economically ignorant or intent on misleading world governments with respect to the so-called net zero energy transition. This much is clear to me, as an economist, after reading the recent report from the RealClearFoundation and the Energy Policy Research Foundation (EPRF) on the IEA’s net zero scenario.

Read the full piece here.

On July 19, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) (the agencies) finally issued new draft Merger Guidelines (DMG), open to public comments for two months. The DMG embody a set of thirteen individual Guidelines, which “are not exhaustive of the ways that a merger may substantially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly” (Guideline 13). Coincidentally or not, the decision to promulgate thirteen Guidelines is a bad omen – the DMG are fatally flawed from start to finish.

Read the full piece here.

Yesterday, Lina Khan’s FTC released their long-awaited draft merger guidelines for public comment. Regrettably yet unsurprisingly, the new guidelines are a radical departure from established case law and antitrust thinking. They’re marked by a failure to account for the role of efficiencies in the competitive process, and a failure to distinguish between the implications of generally pro-competitive vertical mergers and horizontal mergers. If the FTC’s 0-4 losing track record in merger litigation so far is any indication, then they’re likely to be struck down by courts nationwide.

Read the full piece here.

Fifteen months after the close of the comment period, we finally have the release of the draft merger guidelines by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ).

While there is a lot to digest in the 51 page document with over 100 (largely stale) footnotes, the broad picture is clear: the goal of this document is to stop more mergers. Period.

Read the full piece here.

In baseball, it’s three strikes and you’re out. By that standard, antitrust enforcers at the Federal Trade Commission should have stepped off the playing field a while ago.

In tallying up the losses, it’s hard to know where to start. The regulatory parade of follies includes the agency’s debatable effort to block Altria’s minority equity investment in Juul, a struggling e-cigarette maker; its puzzling suit to block Facebook’s acquisition of Within, a metaverse fitness app; and now a federal court’s rejection of its challenge to Microsoft’s acquisition of the video-game publisher Activision (which the FTC immediately appealed).

Read the full piece here.

Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) recently introduced legislation to regulate how credit-card transactions are routed that, if passed, would hinder competition between credit-card issuers, reduce benefits for consumers, and impede fraud detection and prevention.

Read the full piece here.

A longstanding principle of common law in both the United States and the United Kingdom recognizes the value of establishing “common carriers”— that is, entities that transport goods, people or services for the benefit of the general public with an obligation not to discriminate among them. Unlike private or “contract” carriers, a common carrier operates under a license provided by a regulator, who retains authority to interpret the carrier’s obligations to the public.

Read the full piece here.

Why do monopolies exist? Many textbooks point to barriers to entry as a cause of monopolies.

Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok’s textbook says: “In addition to patents, government regulation and economies of scale, monopolies may be created whenever there is a significant barrier to entry, something that raises the cost to new firms of entering the industry.” Greg Mankiw’s textbook goes as far as to say: “The fundamental cause of monopoly is barriers to entry.”

Read the full piece here.

Among the regulatory tools created by the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA)—landmark competition legislation that took effect across the EU last November—is a mandate that the largest digital-messaging services must be made interoperable. In the name of promoting fairness in digital markets, these gatekeeper services are asked to allow external services to connect with them, enabling new and smaller players to compete.

Read the full piece here.

We learned this week that July 4’s average global temperature of 62.92 degrees Fahrenheit was the world’s hottest day since at least 1979, when the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction began keeping records, and potentially the hottest in about 125,000 years.

And yet, in a world in which even ExxonMobil concedes the reality of climate change and touts that it is “playing a leading role in the transition to a lower-emission future,” it appears that insurance “consumer advocates” constitute the group most steadfast in their refusal to come to grips with what adapting to a warmer planet inevitably entails.

Read the full piece here.

Democratic lawmakers like Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin and the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division want to impose new rules for credit-card transactions that would reduce competition, harm consumers and crush small banks.

Yesterday, I delved into the recent judgment in the Meta case (Case C-252/21) from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). I gave a preliminary analysis of the court’s view on some of the complexities surrounding the processing of personal data for personalized advertising under the GDPR, focusing on three lawful bases for data processing: contractual necessity, legitimate interests, and consent. I emphasized the importance of a nuanced understanding of the CJEU decision and pointed out that the decision does not determine definitively whether Meta can rely on legitimate interests or fall back on user consent for personalized advertising.

Read the full piece here.

The European Commission early last month published its draft template for DMA-compliance reports. This is the document that gatekeepers will periodically need to fill out, and which subsequently will be used to determine whether they comply with the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA).

Read the full piece here.

Today’s judgment from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Meta’s case (Case C-252/21) offers new insights into the complexities surrounding personalized advertising under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In the decision, in which the CJEU gave the green light to an attempt by the German competition authority (FCO) to rely on the GDPR, the court also explored the lawful bases for data processing under the GDPR, notably for personalized advertising.

Read the full piece here.

Executive Summary

In October 2022, the Kroger Co. and Albertsons Cos. Inc. announced their intent to merge in a deal valued at $24.6 billion.[1] Given the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) increasingly aggressive enforcement stance against mergers and acquisitions, as well as Chair Lina Khan’s previous writings on food retail specifically,[2] some commentators have expressed skepticism that the agency would allow the transaction to proceed—even with divestitures.[3] The FTC and U.S. Justice Department’s (DOJ) recently unveiled draft revisions to the agencies’ merger guidelines further suggest that the agencies plan to challenge more mergers—and to do so more aggressively than under past administrations.[4]

But attempting to block this transaction would go against the analytical framework the FTC has historically used to evaluate similar transactions, as well as the agency’s historical precedent of accepting divestures as a remedy to address localized problems where they arise. Such breaks with the past sometimes happen; our understanding of the law and economics evolves. Unfortunately, these likely breaks from tradition would reflect a failure to consider relevant and significant changes in how consumers shop for food and groceries in today’s world.

The FTC has a long history of assessing retail mergers in a manner significantly at odds with the aggressive approach it is currently signaling. Only one supermarket merger has been challenged in court since American Store’s acquisition of Lucky Stores in 1988: the Whole Foods/Wild Oats merger in 2007.[5] Over the last 35 years, the FTC has allowed…

I.        Introduction

In the ever-evolving landscape of digital entertainment, European consumers enjoy a broad variety of viewing options, including substantial availability of non-European content offered by large international streaming services. This availability has raised red flags for some EU policymakers, however, who are concerned that the supply of and demand for domestic cultural products might suffer. Prompted by these concerns, the European Union has opened the door for national policymakers to expand preexisting policies to support or favor domestic content by placing new obligations on foreign streaming providers to invest in EU member states’ domestic markets. The risk, however, is that member states have such broad latitude in implementing these provisions that they stoke inflationary pressures that distort local content markets.

Amended in 2018, the EU Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD)^[1] has two relevant provisions: 1. Article 13(1) sets a requirement that 30% of the works that on-demand audiovisual media service (“VOD”) providers carry be European in origin, and that these works be given those works prominent placement; and 2. Article 13(2) provides that member states may impose additional financial obligations on VOD providers and broadcasters (“media service providers”) based on the revenues these services generate in, or that are targeted toward, the member state’s territory, with the proceeds used to support the production of European works.

The second set of obligations, which depend on a member state enacting enabling legislation, can be pursued either through direct investment in the production of European works (sometimes with very prescriptive local language…

Interests of Amici Curiae and Introduction

The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit civil rights organization devoted to defending constitutional freedoms from violations by the administrative state.[1] The “civil liberties” of the organization’s name include rights at least as old as the U.S. Constitution itself, such as jury trial, due process of law, the right to be tried in front of an impartial and independent judge, and protection against government taking of private property without just compensation. Yet these self-same rights are also very contemporary—and in dire need of renewed vindication—precisely because Congress, administrative agencies, and even sometimes the courts have neglected them for so long. NCLA aims to defend civil liberties—primarily by asserting constitutional constraints on the administrative state.

The International Center for Law & Economics (“ICLE”) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan global research and policy center aimed at building the intellectual foundations for sensible, economically grounded policy. ICLE promotes the use of law & economics methodologies to inform public policy debates and has longstanding expertise in the evaluation of antitrust law and policy. ICLE has an interest in ensuring that antitrust promotes the public interest by remaining grounded in sensible legal rules informed by sound economic analysis.

In establishing a patent system, Congress sought to spur invention of new and useful products by conferring property rights on those who, through investment of substantial time and resources, successfully develop such products. As evidenced by its amicus curiae filing in this case, the Federal Trade Commission has sought for decades to weaken the patent laws by invoking antitrust law to pare back the scope of the property rights conferred by Congress on pharmaceutical patent owners. The Supreme Court’s decision in FTC v. Actavis, 570 U.S. 136 (2013), rebuffed those efforts to a significant degree. Appellants—the Direct-Purchaser Plaintiffs, the Retailer Plaintiffs, and the End-Payor Plaintiffs—largely parrot the FTC’s misinterpretation of patent and antitrust law.

NCLA and ICLE have no connection, financial or otherwise, with any of the parties before the Court. They are filing this brief for the sole purpose of providing the Court with their economically informed assessment of relevant statutory principles. In particular, NCLA and ICLE agree with the district court’s holding that, in determining whether a patentee’s payment to an alleged infringer qualifies under the Actavis standard as ” large,” the proper focus is on the “net” payment to the alleged infringer (that is, the amount by which the payment exceeds the value of what the patentee receives in return), not the “gross” payment. See D. Ct. ECF 438 (Second Op.) at 15 n.9.

Based on NCLA’s and ICLE’s reading of the district court’s opinions and the parties’ briefs, amici agree with Appellees that the complaints fail to state claims upon which relief can be granted. However, because amici have not closely studied the patent-litigation settlement documents, they do not have a well-informed view on whether Appellants have met the antitrust pleadings standards established by Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 530 U.S. 544, 556-59 (2007), and do not address that issue in this brief.

Statement of the Case

Bystolic is a prescription drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of high blood pressure. Forest[2] obtained two patents covering Bystolic: the ‘”040 Patent” (which issued in 2003 and expired in 2021) and the ‘”580 Patent” (which issued in 1998 and expired in 2015). In 2011, seven generic-drug manufacturers (the “Generic Manufacturers”) filed Abbreviated New Drug Applications (ANDAs) with FDA, seeking authority to market generic forms of Bystolic. All seven ANDAs claimed that the ‘040 Patent and the ‘580 Patent were invalid and that their generic formulations would not infringe the patents. Those claims essentially forced Forest to file patent infringement suits against the seven Generic Manufacturers (which it did in March 2012); otherwise, FDA could have immediately approved the ANDAs.

Over the course of the next 20 months, Forest entered into separate settlement agreements with each of the Generic Manufacturers. The litigation-settlement agreements were all lengthy and included a variety of side deals. Appellants allege that each included the following two terms: (1) Forest licensed each of the seven Generic Manufacturers to sell generic Bystolic beginning September 17, 2021 (three months earlier than sales would have begun had they awaited expiration of the ‘040 Patent); and (2) all seven agreed to drop their invalidity/noninfringement counterclaims and not to begin marketing until September 17, 2021—unless another one of the Generic Manufacturers entered the market earlier.

Appellants allege that Forest and the Generic Manufacturers violated federal and state antitrust laws by conspiring to restrain trade. They allege that the Generic Manufacturers agreed to delay their entry into the Bystolic market in return for large payments from Forest. In January 2022, the district court dismissed their complaints for failure to state a claim, with leave to file amended complaints. D. Ct. ECF 354 (First Op.).

Appellants filed amended complaints in February 2022, and Forest and the Generic Manufacturers again moved to dismiss the complaints. On February 21, 2023, the district court granted the motions and dismissed the complaints with prejudice. Second Op. at 3.

The court recognized that Forest, in connection with the patent-litigation settlements, entered into side deals that entailed payments to each of the Generic Manufacturers. It concluded, however, that Appellants’ factual allegations failed to show that any of the side-deal payments were “large and unjustified,” as those terms are defined in Actavis. Id. at 19. The Court explained that whether a payment is “large” within the meaning of Actavis should be determined based on the patentee’s “net” payment (i.e., the gross payment minus the value received in return). Id. at 15 n.9.[3] After carefully examining Appellants’ factual allegations regarding the settlement agreements, the court concluded the allegations “d[id] not suffice to state a claim” because Appellants had “not asserted facts as to any of the factors that would suggest conduct inconsistent with a pro-competitive justification.” Id. at 20.

Summary of Argument

Congress has long mandated that courts should strive to maintain a balance between the sometimes-competing claims of the patent law and antitrust law, and that antitrust law should not be used to shortchange the rights of patent holders. Simpson v. Union Oil Co., 377 U.S. 13, 14 (1964). In its Actavis decision, the Supreme Court sought to maintain that balance in the context of drug-patent litigation settlements between brand-name and generic drug companies. It sought to steer a middle ground between the “presumption of unreasonable restraint” approach espoused by FTC and adopted by the Third Circuit,[4] and the “scope of the patent” test adopted by other federal appeals courts,[5] under which such “reverse payment” settlements were not subject to antitrust scrutiny so long as their anticompetitive effects did not extend beyond the exclusionary potential of the underlying patents. Actavis, 570 U.S. at 158-160.

The Court held that when a generic drug company agrees, in connection with a patent-litigation settlement, to drop its challenge to patent validity, the agreement is subject to antitrust scrutiny under a rule-of-reason analysis if, but only if, the settlement also includes an “unusual,” “large,” and “unjustified” “payment” from the brand-name drug company to the generic company. Id. at 147, 158. The Court explicitly rejected FTC’s argument that “reverse payment settlement agreements are presumptively unlawful” and that such agreements should be examined under a “quick look” approach rather than applying “a rule of reason.” Id. at 158-59.

Although the Court did not define with specificity when a settlement-agreement payment should be deemed “unusual,” “large,” and “unjustified” (and thus subject to antitrust scrutiny), it provided several guideposts to assist lower courts in making that determination. First, a payment is not “unjustified” if it consists of granting a license to market the patented product in advance of the patent expiration date. Id. at 158. Second, the Court held that a payment is not “large” (and thus not actionable under antitrust law) if it is less than the litigation expenses the brand-name company could be expected to incur if it did not settle. Id. at 159. Third, the magnitude of any payment from the brand-name company (whether provided in cash or in the form of a non-cash benefit) is to be measured by the “net” benefit (i.e., the gross value of the benefit minus any goods or services the generic company is required to supply in return), not the gross value. Id. at 156. Determining whether a payment is “large” based solely on the amount of cash transferred to the generic company makes little sense, because that rule would not account for the many types of non-cash benefits that can flow between the parties. Fourth, a payment is not “unusual” or “unjustified” if it is one “supported by traditional settlement considerations.” Id. at 154.

The guideposts cited above are highly relevant to the district court’s decision that the complaints fail to state a cause of action. To survive the motion to dismiss, Appellants were required to allege facts sufficient to render plausible their claims that the payments from Forest were “large”; and for purposes of determining whether a payment is “large,” that figure is computed by subtracting, from the amount of cash paid by Forest, the value of goods and services Forest contracted to receive in return.  Moreover, simply alleging facts showing that the cash paid exceeds the value of goods and services received in return does not suffice to demonstrate the requisite “large” payment; the payment is not “large” unless it exceeds the expected litigation costs saved by settling the lawsuit. Finally, entering into “side deals” in conjunction with a litigation settlement (deals that by definition entail benefits flowing from both settling parties) is a “traditional settlement consideration” and does not by itself provide cause to subject the settlement to antitrust scrutiny.

[1] No counsel for a party authored this brief in whole or in part, nor has any person or entity, other than amici curiae and their counsel, made a monetary contribution intended to fund the preparation and submission of the brief. All parties consented to the filing of the brief.

[2] The developers and marketers of Bystolic are collectively referred to herein as “Forest.”

[3] As the district court explained, “If the payment reflects fair value for goods or services, it would say nothing about the patentee’s belief in the validity of the patent.” Ibid.

[4] In re K-Dur Antitrust Litig., 686 F .3d 2012 (3d Cir. 2012), vacated, 570 U.S. 913 (2013).

[5] See, e.g., In re Tamoxifen Citrate Antitrust Litig., 466 F.3d 187 (2d Cir. 2006).

QUESTION PRESENTED

Whether the court should overrule Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, or at least clarify that statutory silence concerning controversial powers expressly but narrowly granted elsewhere in the statute does not constitute an ambiguity requiring deference to the agency.

INTEREST OF AMICI CURIAE

The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (“MI”) is a nonpartisan public policy research foundation whose mission is to develop and disseminate new ideas that foster greater economic choice and individual responsibility. To that end, MI has historically worked sponsored scholarship and filed briefs supporting economic freedom against government overreach.

Richard Epstein is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at New York University. He also serves as the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law emeritus and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

Todd Zywicki is George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law at George Mason University Antonin Scalia School of Law and a research fellow of the GMU Law and Economics Center.

Justin “Gus” Hurwitz is a senior fellow and academic director of the Center for Technology, Innovation, and Competition at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.

Geoffrey Manne is the president and founder of the International Center for Law and Economics and a distinguished fellow at Northwestern University’s Center on Law, Business, and Economics.

This case interests amici because it involves an agency regulation that was not explicitly authorized by statute. Indeed, it gives the Court a chance to revisit Chevron—either overruling it or clarifying that statutory silence does not require judicial deference.

SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT

Family-run fishing businesses face a fraught and competitive environment even before the intrusion of burdensome regulations. Here, the National Marine Fisheries Service (“NMFS”) promulgated a rule for certain classes of herring boats that sweeps in most such businesses, as portrayed in the Oscar-winning movie CODA. If a vessel needs a monitor and has not already been assigned one under a federally funded program, it must pay for one itself. The cost for most herring boats exceeds $710 per sea day.

Petitioners, four family-owned and -operated fishing companies, contend that the industry-funding requirement which is not explicitly authorized by statute—will have a devastating economic impact on the herring fleet and will disproportionately impact small businesses, destroying historic communities.

The district court ruled for the government, finding that various provisions of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (“MSA”) together conferred broad authority on the NMFS to implement regulations to carry out fishery management plan’s measures. Without any analysis, the court also found that, even if the statute were ambiguous, the government’s reading would be reasonable under Chevron Step Two and thus worthy of judicial deference. A divided panel of the D.C. Circuit affirmed, reasoning that the MSA’s authorization for the placement of monitors, through silence on funding, left room for agency discretion. This Court granted certiorari to determine whether the Court should overrule Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. NRDC, 467 U.S. 837 (1984), or at least clarify that statutory silence concerning controversial powers expressly but narrowly granted elsewhere in the statute does not constitute an ambiguity requiring deference to the agency.

The Court should now take this opportunity to overhaul the Chevron-deference regime, because this experiment in rebalancing the relationship between administration and judicial review has failed. It has led to agency overreach, haphazard practical results, and the diminution of Congress. Although intended to empower Congress by limiting the role of courts, Chevron has instead empowered agencies to aggrandize their own powers to the greatest extent plausible under their operative statutes, and often beyond. Congress has proved unequal to the task of responding to this pervasive agency overreach and now has less of a role in policymaking than in the pre-Chevron era. Courts, in turn, have become sloppy and lazy in interpreting statutes. It’s a vicious cycle of legislative buckpassing and judicial deference to executive overreach.

Chevron deference rests on the presumption that Congress won’t over-delegate and that agencies will be loyal agents. But the past 40 years have shown that Congress loves passing the buck and agencies are actually principals who pursue their own interests. The time has more than come for the Court to revisit Chevron, whether it chooses to overrule it explicitly or keep it nominally under a newly restricted standard. Cf. Kisor v. Wilkie, 139 S. Ct. 2400 (2019) (preserving Auer deference but reworking it so completely that both Chief Justice Roberts, who joined Justice Kagan’s majority opinion, and Justice Kavanaugh, who joined Justice Gorsuch’s effective dissent, noted that there wasn’t much difference between the two).

 

I. Introduction

On 27 April 2023, the European Commission published its Proposal for a Regulation on Standard Essential Patents (“SEP Regulation”). The proclaimed aims of the SEP Regulation are to: 1. ensure that end users, including small businesses and EU consumers, benefit from products based on the latest standardised technologies; 2. make the EU attractive for standards innovation; and 3. encourage both SEP holders and implementers to innovate in the EU, make and sell products in the EU, and be competitive in non-EU markets.[1]

We are grateful for the opportunity to provide comments on the proposed SEP Regulation in the context of public feedback. The following is a summary of our observations:

1. The available evidence does not demonstrate the existence of a market failure in SEP-licensing markets that would justify regulatory oversight. Instead, the Commission’s own evidence points to the low incidence of SEP litigation and no systemic negative effects on SEP owners and implementers. The mobile-telecommunication market—which is claimed to have the most SEP litigation and licensing inefficiencies—has over the years seen rapid growth, expansion, declining consumer prices, and new market entry.
2. Some market imperfections are necessary-but-not-sufficient conditions for regulatory intervention. Regulation might not be necessary or proportionate if its aims could be achieved with less costly instruments.
3. The proposed SEP Regulation appears to pursue the value-redistributive function of imposing costs on only one group (SEP owners), while accruing all benefits to non-EU-based standard implementers. It is difficult to find justification for such value redistribution from the evidence presented on the functioning of SEP licensing markets.
4. The proposed SEP Regulation applies to all standards licensed on FRAND terms. It is unclear how many standards will be caught and why all standards licensed on FRAND terms are presumed to be inefficient, requiring regulatory intervention. One early study identified 148 standards licensed on FRAND terms in a 2010 laptop. No evidence was presented that licensing inefficiencies of these standards caused harms in laptop markets.
5. Evaluators and conciliators need to be qualified and experienced experts in relevant fields. There are unlikely to be enough evaluators to conduct essentiality checks reliably on such a massive scale.
6. The proposed SEP Regulation raises competition concerns, as it may allow implementers to exchange sensitive commercial information that could lead to a buyers cartel.
7. Aggregate royalty-rate notifications and nonbinding expert opinions on global aggregate royalty rates may not produce meaningful inputs and may lead to even more confusion for implementers.
8. The proposed SEP Regulation has extraterritorial effects. While the SEP Register and essentiality checks apply only for patents in force in EU Member States, a nonbinding opinion on aggregate royalties and FRAND determination will be worldwide, covering portfolios in other countries.
9. Other countries may follow and introduce their own regulations on SEPs. Such regulations may be used as a strategic and protectionist tool to devaluate the royalties of innovative European SEP owners. The proliferation of regulatory regimes would make SEP licensing even more costly, with unknown effects on the viability of the current system of collaborative and open standardisation.

Considering the above, it is our view is that the proposed SEP Regulation, in its current form, is unnecessary, disproportionate, and likely to harm both European innovators and Europe’s technology leadership on a global stage.

Nevertheless, this is not to say that the SEP licensing framework cannot be further refined and simplified. It may be possible to find solutions that might improve the existing system in a cost-effective, balanced, and efficient way. We propose some private ordering instruments as an alternative to regulation, which could be used to make licensing in the Internet of Things (“IoT”) more efficient and transparent.

II. No Evidence of a Market Failure Justifying Regulatory Intervention

The current system of SEP licensing consists of bilateral negotiations and collective licensing via patent pools. The overwhelming majority of licensing agreements are concluded amicably,[2] but in cases where parties cannot agree, litigation may become necessary.[3] This is, of course, a feature of commercial disputes of all kinds.[4] Over the years, courts have proven more than capable of resolving various contentious questions about SEPs. For instance, they gave promulgated guidance regarding if and under what conditions the SEP owner can request and obtain an injunction for infringement of an SEP;[5] what the FRAND rate between the parties ought to be;[6] the scope of a FRAND license, whether global or national;[7] the meaning of a FRAND commitment’s non-discrimination requirements;[8] whether FRAND commitments require SEP owners to offer licenses at different levels of the production chain;[9] and how to adjudicate allegations of patent holdup (supposedly opportunistic behaviour of SEP owners attempting to charge more than FRAND terms) and holdout (implementers intentionally delaying or avoiding the conclusion of a licensing agreement).[10] The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) provided a framework in Huawei v ZTE for good-faith license negotiation. Courts of the EU Member States have subsequently become accustomed to evaluating the conduct of both parties and have produced substantial case law and guidance on the contents of good-faith licensing negotiations.[11]

Despite successful interventions by the courts, the Commission is concerned that the current SEP licensing and litigation system is fraught with problems and inefficiencies. Three alleged major problems have been suggested as justifying regulatory intervention.

First are high transaction costs and licensing uncertainties. According to the Commission, the average per-licence bilateral negotiation costs for the SEP holder and implementer are estimated to be between €2 million and €11 million.[12] The Commissions asserts that licensing uncertainties follow from insufficient transparency of SEP ownership and essentiality, lack of information about FRAND royalties, and a dispute system not adapted for FRAND determination.[13] That system is said to be dissatisfactory for both parties.

The Commission maintains that SEP owners face long negotiations and high costs of licensing.[14] To better assess the value that the technology brings to standard implementations, an SEP owner would have to wait several years (on average, between two and four) until the standard is implemented in the market and then approach companies with an offer to license.[15] Negotiations would then ensue, taking about three years. If no agreement is reached, litigation would add another one to two and a half years.[16] During all this time, the SEP owner would not receive any royalties for use of its technology. According to the Commission, this may explain why major SEP owners usually have licenses with only 100-200 implementers with sufficiently high volumes and/or sales value that would allow for the absorption of these costs.[17] Thus, SEP owners are unable to license the whole market. High licensing and negotiation costs may reduce their income base and incentive for participation in developing new standards.[18]

On the other hand, the Commission says that implementers face uncertainty about the costs of using standards, potentially discouraging them from implementing new technologies.[19] Implementers who take a licence are also worried about being disadvantaged against their unlicensed foreign competitors.[20] Of course, licensees are worried about competitors who do not take licences—it makes no difference whether they are foreign or home-grown. But the Commission seems to have not taken into account that this holdout is not only real, but is the most egregious example of anticompetitive behaviour.

The second supposed problem is the growing IoT market that increasingly uses technological standards from the information and communications technology (“ICT”) industry.[21] IoT markets are fragmented; volumes for certain applications may be small and profit margins tight. These industries are also not familiar with SEPs. The combination of these factors is said to make SEP licensing more difficult and expensive.

The third major concern is the protection of small and midsize enterprises (“SMEs”). According to the Commission, SMEs lack the resources to negotiate with SEP owners on an equal footing or to engage in court proceedings.[22] They also do not have sufficient licensing expertise. 84% of EU-based standard implementers are SMEs, totalling about 3,192 companies.[23]

The publicly available evidence relayed by the Commission, however, does not justify any significant concern with the current SEP-licensing system, much less a concern of such magnitude to justify extensive regulatory intervention. In fact, the Commission’s study found that high transaction costs and licensing uncertainties have not led to increased litigation or systemic negative effects.[24]

First, the Commission found that the volume of SEP-litigation cases has been relatively stable in Europe, while falling in the United States but increasing in China.[25] In recent years, the share of declared SEPs subject to litigation has declined.[26] They further showed that the prevalence of SEP litigation is low and has not increased over time. According to the study, there are fewer than 0.05 lawsuits per-license involving major SEP licensors and patent pools.[27] Regarding the effects of the current SEP-licensing system on the incentives of SEP owners and implementers, the study found no evidence that SEP owners contribute less to standards development.[28] The econometric evidence suggests that a significant share of contributions to standards development relies on patent-related incentives, indicating the importance of preserving innovation incentives for the success of the standards-development process. On the implementation side, the study found no evidence that SEP-licensing frictions lead implementers to switch to alternative (royalty-free) standards or to have systematically depressed or delayed standards implementation.[29]

The evidence from the mobile-telecommunications market, which some believe is hindered by SEP-licensing inefficiencies, demonstrates that it is functioning particularly well, with year-to-year increased output, lower prices, increased market entry, and billions of euros of investment in research and development (R&D) for connectivity standards and the rollout of new network infrastructure.^[30] For example, the latest estimate for the mobile economy in 2022 was 8.4 billion SIM connections and 4.4 billion mobile-internet subscribers, contributing $5.2 trillion or 5% of global gross domestic product, and directly and indirectly supporting 28 million jobs.^[31] In Europe, subscriber penetration was 90%, and smartphone adoption was 81%.^[32] By 2035, the impact of 5G is projected to grow to $13.2 trillion in global economic output, and the global 5G value chain will generate $3.6 trillion in economic output.^[33] Moreover, 5G is expected to add up to €1 trillion to European GDP by 2025.[34] In comparison, the total estimated revenue from cellular SEP licensing was estimated to be less than 0.5% of the mobile economy.^[35] Other studies found that the cumulative royalty yield of 2G, 3G, and 4G SEPs was only 3.4% of the smartphone’s average selling price, or just $9.60.^[36]

As to potential licensing problems in the IoT, we have yet to see the full implementation of ICT standards and corresponding SEP licensing. As such, it is too early to conclude with a sufficient degree of certainty whether there will be a systemic problem with IoT licensing. The Commission’s Impact Assessment did not provide information on the current SEP-licensing revenues obtained from various IoT sectors.[37] Thus, we do not know the current magnitude of SEP licensing in the IoT. What is certain is that IoT devices will grow in the future. According to the CRA study, cellular IoT devices represented only 20% of mobile phones in 2022, which is expected to grow to 60% by 2030.[38] As such, while licensing in the IoT may generate significant revenues, we do not at the moment have sufficient information on how many IoT devices are currently licensed.

We may observe, however, that market actors are adapting to the challenges posed by IoT. Avanci is a platform for licensing 3G, 4G, and soon 5G in the IoT.[39] It has a licensing programme for car manufacturers and has more than 120 million licensed connected vehicles.[40] Avanci includes 56 licensors and has brought together the largest SEP owners, such as Samsung, Qualcomm, Nokia, and Ericsson. It offers a one-stop solution for vehicle manufacturers with a single per unit-license of $20 per vehicle—less than a parking ticket. According to some estimates, Avanci successfully covers more than 80% of the market.[41] It may be said that SEP licensing in the automotive sector has been successfully concluded, despite the initial reluctance of car manufacturers and disputes about the appropriate level of licensing.[42]

In another example, Sisvel, a patent-pool administrator, experimented with a novel payment mechanism to address concerns that companies that take a license are disadvantaged against their unlicensed competitors. For its Wi-Fi 6 pool, it provided a licensing programme that adjusts royalty payments based on the percentage of the licensed market.[43] In other words, most royalty payments will be deferred, unless and until other competitors also pay. Such a mechanism protects licensees from patent-infringement liability, while paying only a fraction of the due royalties until the whole market takes a licence. The experience of the Avanci and Sisvel pools demonstrates that SEP owners are adjusting to the changed market realities and looking for ways to simplify licensing, with innovative structures to address the need for certainty and transparency in the IoT.

As to the supposed harmful impact of the current system of SEP licensing on SMEs, it is difficult to draw such a conclusion from the available evidence. The Commission noted that most SMEs are de facto unlicensed because licensing costs outweigh potential licensing revenues.[44] To better understand the views of SMEs, the Commission carried out two surveys—a general one in which all stakeholders could participate and a targeted one only for SMEs. The Commission received responses from nine SMEs in the general survey, while 37 SMEs participated in the targeted survey.[45] That represents a sample of only 1.15% of the 3,192 SMEs that are reported to implement standards, making it impossible to draw general conclusions from such a limited sample. The question may be asked: if SMEs face licensing problems, why have they not expressed more interest in surveys? The only answer one can reasonably draw is that there is no problem. The SME survey shows some licensing; seven out of 37 SMEs had a license.[46] It would be interesting to know, however, which SEP owners approached and licensed SMEs, as well as the licensing policies of major SEP owners toward SMEs. We do not currently possess such information.

While there is no evidence that the current SEP licensing framework has produced systematic negative effects, this is not to say that the system could not be improved. Evidence still shows that licensing costs are not insignificant and that it takes years to conclude licensing agreements. Moreover, it is unlikely that every SEP owner could reach every implementer in the IoT, thus creating an uneven playing field between licensed and unlicensed implementers.

It is likely possible to improve the existing system in a cost-effective, balanced, and efficient way, including through private and public ordering instruments.[47] If the aims could be achieved with less costly instruments, extensive regulatory intervention might be neither necessary nor proportionate.[48] In other words, the existence of market imperfections is necessary but not sufficient conditions for regulatory intervention. Regulators should also be mindful not to fall into the “nirvana fallacy”, striving for ideal but unrealistic solutions that produce more costs than other feasible alternatives that may not lead to ideal results.[49]

III. Evaluating the Effects of SEP Regulation on SEP-Licensing Markets

While the Regulation pursues the worthwhile goals of increasing transparency and certainty to parties in SEP licensing, it is improbable that the proposed solutions will achieve those aims. This section raises several issues that should be considered in future policy discussions.

A. The Regulation’s Value-Redistributive Function

The Regulation imposes unbalanced costs and benefits. According to the Impact Assessment, SEP owners will bear all the costs, while implementers will reap all the benefits.[50] The 10-year average approximate annual benefits for SEP implementers are estimated to be €24.4 million, while for SEP owners, the costs are €28.9 million. As such, the Regulation does not attempt to improve conditions for all actors (i.e., pursue Pareto efficiency) but directly seeks to redistribute value from SEP owners to implementers. The Commission notes that a large part of SEP owners’ costs would be due to an expected increase in patent fees, thanks to the anticipated rise in the number of patents.[51] It adds that patent fees would represent revenue to European and national patent offices, making the whole system socially profitable.

The Commission recognised that it is difficult to predict the impact of SEP Regulation on royalty level. The Regulation’s effects may go in two opposing directions: 1. potentially more firms taking a license (increasing implementation costs and income for SEP owners), or 2. potentially lower royalties paid (decreasing implementers’ costs and SEP owners’ income).[52] The latter scenario would place even more costs on SEP owners. If royalty revenues fall and licensing costs of increase, an unintended but obvious consequence could be that SEP owners may no longer find collaborative standardisation attractive and might instead pursue proprietary solutions unencumbered by FRAND commitments. A fragmented global system would surely impede innovation.

The EU-based implementers will not even be among the primary beneficiaries of the Regulation’s value-redistribution.  According to the Commission’s Impact Assessment, just 8% of potential manufacturing firms are in the EU. In other words, 92% of implementers are non-EU companies. The Regulation would effectively subsidise non-EU implementers while, at the same time, harming European technology developers and Europe’s technological leadership.

It is difficult to see justifications for such value redistribution from the evidence presented on the functioning of SEP licensing. In our view, any regulation should attempt to lead to better outcomes than the perceived harms it seeks to address.

B. The Regulation’s Broad Scope

The Regulation has a very broad scope and applies to an unknown number of standards. Once it enters into force, the Regulation would catch all FRAND-committed SEPs.[53] It is not unclear why such broad scope is necessary. Concerns about SEP-licensing problems have focused overwhelmingly on just a few standards, mainly in cellular communication (3G, 4G, 5G) and Wi-Fi. Other standards licensed on FRAND terms have not been mentioned as potentially problematic. Nevertheless, the Regulation will apply to all standards licensed on FRAND terms.

The Commission noted that there were about 75,000 patent families of declared SEPs worldwide in 2021.[54] But we still lack information on how many standard developing organisations (“SDOs”) were analysed, nor the number of standards expected to be caught. An earlier 2010 study identified 251 technical-interoperability standards in a modern laptop, with 148 of those licensed under FRAND terms.[55] It is unclear why these 148 standards should be regulated, nor what market failures have been associated with them. If anything, a better understanding of the SEP-licensing system in the laptop market is required before introducing regulations.

The Regulation offers some exceptions from its full application for a few standards deemed unproblematic. By a special act, the Commission will designate standards and use cases “where there is sufficient evidence that … SEP licensing negotiations on FRAND terms do not give rise to significant difficulties or inefficiencies affecting the functioning of the internal market”.[56] In other words, there is a presumption that all standards with FRAND-licensing conditions are inefficient and affect the internal market’s functioning, with the onus placed on stakeholders to rebut this presumption.

Even for such unproblematic standards, the exceptions are limited; only the provisions on conciliators facilitating the agreement on aggregate royalty rates, the nonbinding expert opinion on global aggregate royalty rates, and the mandatory FRAND determination will not apply.[57] The costliest obligations—i.e., the registration of SEP and annual essentiality checks—will continue to apply even for these standards.

C. The Need for Qualified-Expert Evaluators and Conciliators

The extent of the Regulation’s reliability will depend on having qualified experts to work as evaluators and conciliators. Evaluators will need specialised knowledge of the particular technological area in which they will conduct essentiality checks. The Commission estimates that there are about 1,500 experts (650 patent attorneys and 800 patent examiners) qualified to do essentiality checks in the EU.[58]

The sheer magnitude of the task, however, will require many more evaluators and it is very doubtful that the optimal number of potential qualified experts are even available to join this process. For certain, special arrangements would need to be made with patent offices to grant patent examiners leave to conduct essentiality checks. Each year, evaluators will need to test a random sample of up to 100 SEPs if requested by each SEP owner or an implementer per standard. Thus, the amount of work may exponentially increase depending on how many standards are caught by the Regulation.

If 148 FRAND-licensed standards per laptop are to serve as a rough proxy, then we might expect more than 100-200 standards to be checked for essentiality every year. In addition, if SEP owners and implementers regularly use the possibility of testing up to 100 SEPs per standard and per SEP owner, the sheer magnitude of work may exceed the capacity of patent attorneys. Patent attorneys may find it challenging to regularly engage in such high volumes of essentiality checks while also serving other clients. And why should they do it at all unless the rate of pay is at least what they could earn in a patent law firm? To be blunt, the work would not be as much fun as acting for real clients, so the pay would probably have to be even higher to attract applicants.

Consequently, it is very unlikely that the capability even exists to annually perform a large number of essentiality checks of registered SEPs. If the requirements to become an evaluator were relaxed to address this workload, this would cast doubt on the reliability of the whole system. There is no point in building a battleship unless you are sure you can get a competent crew.

Additionally, the patent attorneys who most apt to be familiar with these technologies may well also find themselves with conflicts of interest. They will probably have worked for some SEP owners or implementers. Elaborate rules to avoid such conflicts would need to be implemented to prevent patent attorneys who were, or still are, engaged with certain clients from becoming evaluators of those clients’ registered SEPs. The conflicts problem would, of course, apply not just to individual attorneys but to their entire firms.

Conciliators would also need to be experts in the field. They might come from the ranks of retired judges, seasoned former company officials, or experienced lawyers. Conflict-of-interest provisions should also ensure their independence and impartiality in mandatory FRAND determinations.  But the job would, again, have to be sufficiently attractive, both in remuneration and in work content and culture. The Commission has made no investigation as to whether a sufficiently large pool of credible individuals could be found to make the system work.

Of course, there are well-established voluntary systems of conciliators and mediators, some of which are used now to help resolve FRAND disputes. But the proposal adds the idea of compulsory mediation or conciliation. There is scant evidence that either system works in other commercial disputes around the world, and it is unclear why it should be assumed to work here.

D. Competitive and Practical Concerns with Aggregate Royalty Rates

The Regulation also raises potential competition concerns. The participation of implementers in the process of providing expert opinion on global aggregate rates could be used as a vehicle for a buyers cartel and could devalue FRAND royalty rates. Namely, it is unclear from the text of the Regulation if implementers will be allowed to coordinate their submissions to conciliators. If this is permitted, implementers could use the process to exchange commercially sensitive information and agree on the maximum global aggregate royalties they would pay. This would be tantamount to a buyers cartel, with price fixing of input costs. Even if such coordination is not allowed, by individually submitting their maximum royalty expectations—which are made with the goal of minimising input costs—implementers might attempt to devalue SEP royalties. Given that there are far more implementers than there are SEP owners, implementers might have an outsized influence on conciliators preparing expert opinions. The Regulation also lacks competition safeguards against the exchange of commercially sensitive information by SEP owners in the process of joint notification of aggregate royalty rates, which establish the value that devices derive from using the standardised technologies in question.

Moreover, from a practical perspective, the provisions’ usefulness is questionable. The Regulation appears to allow multiple groups of SEP owners to jointly notify their views. This may add even more confusion to standard implementers. For example, some SEP owners could announce an aggregate rate of $10 per product, another 5% of the end-product price, while a third group would prefer a lower $1 per-product rate. Moreover, it is unclear what difference the joint aggregate royalty-rate notifications would bring to the existing practice of unilateral announcement of licensing terms. Many SEP owners already publicly announce their royalty programmes in advance, which was recognised by the Commission’s studies.[59] To be on the safe side, SEP owners may simply notify their maximum preference, knowing that negotiations would lead to different prices depending on the unique details of various licensees. As a result, the aggregate royalty rates may not produce meaningful data points.

Nonbinding expert opinions on global aggregate royalty rates could also add to the confusion. Implementers would likely initiate the process, which would then exist in parallel with SEP owners’ joint notifications of aggregate rates. All these different and possibly conflicting estimates might lead to even greater uncertainty. Moreover, if those providing nonbinding opinions are not universally regarded as “experts”, the parties are unlikely to respect such opinions.

Aggregate royalty notifications and nonbinding opinions might be used in the top-down method for FRAND-royalty determinations. A top-down method provides that the SEP owner should receive a proportional share of a standard’s total aggregate royalty. It requires: 1. establishing a cumulative royalty for a standard; and then 2. calculating the share in the total royalty for an individual SEP owner. This may be the reason for having aggregate royalty-rate notifications and opinions. At the same time, essentiality checks are still needed to filter out which patents are truly essential, and to assess each individual SEP owner’s share.

We caution strongly against relying too much on the top-down approach for FRAND-royalty determinations. It is not used in commercial-licensing negotiations, and courts have frequently rejected its application. Industry practice is to use comparable licensing agreements. The top-down approach was applied in Unwired Planet v Huawei only as a cross-check for the rates derived from comparable agreements.[60] TCL v Ericsson relied on this method, but was vacated on appeal.[61] The most recent Interdigital v Lenovo judgment considered and rejected its use, finding “no value in Interdigital’s Top-Down cross-check in any of its guises”.[62] Moreover, the top-down approach, as currently applied, relies only on patent counting. It does not consider that not every patent has the same value, nor that some patents may be invalid or not infringed by a specific device. Crucially, the top-down approach and aggregate royalty notifications/opinions would be related to global FRAND royalties, while the registration of SEPs and corresponding essentiality checks are limited only to EU SEPs. In other words, the SEP Regulation has extraterritorial effects, the consequences of which are discussed below.

E. Circumventing the Regulation by Litigating Outside the EU

As a result of the high costs imposed by the Regulation and the likely delays caused by mediation/conciliation, SEP owners may realistically decide to enforce their patents outside the EU, in such countries as the United Kingdom, the United States, China, and India—all of which have had SEP litigation. This would allow firms to avoid application of the Regulation entirely.[63] Judge Klaus Grabinski, president of the Court of Appeal of the Unified Patent Court, went out of his way to note just that at the Court’s opening ceremony in Luxembourg.[64]  In truth, the Regulation constitutes a statement of lack of faith that the new Court (or, indeed, any court) can do their job.

The evidence already shows that SEP litigation in China is rising, while the United States—historically, a major venue for SEP litigation—may see a renewed increase in cases should Europe become an unattractive option.[65] The UK is also a major forum that has witnessed important cases clarifying many aspects of FRAND licensing.

For its part, Europe has built an impressive case law in implementing the Huawei v ZTE judgment and clarified the steps in good-faith licensing negotiations, but it could be left behind in shaping global SEP-licensing practices if the Regulation serves to shift litigation to other jurisdictions.

F. The Geopolitical Effects

As currently drafted, the SEP Regulation has exterritorial effects, which may lead to unintended consequences. It applies to SEPs in force in one of the EU Member States. Such SEPs should be registered with the SEP Register and will be subject to essentiality checks. This is in accordance with the principle of territoriality.

The Regulation then provides, however, for a nonbinding expert opinion that will relate to a global royalty rate, and that FRAND determination shall concern a global FRAND license (unless otherwise specified by the parties). In other words, while SEP Register and essentiality checks apply only for patents in force in EU Member States, aggregate royalties and FRAND determination will be worldwide, covering portfolios in other countries.

This exterritoriality may lead to three effects. First, if the SEP Register and the result of essentiality checks for EU SEPs are used in global aggregate royalty and FRAND determinations, they will produce inaccurate results. Some patent owners focus on the United States and U.S.-based SDOs and do not patent as much in Europe. There may also be many SEPs in China and other Asian countries that do not have European counterparts.[66] It is a euro-centric view to assume that European SEPs are a sufficient basis to determine global aggregate and FRAND rates. The Commission’s Impact Assessment notes that the EU’s share of SEPs is only 15%, compared to the United States and South Korea’s shares of 19% and China’s 30%.[67]

Second, while it is true that standards are global and commercial practice is to license globally, it is a different matter altogether when legislation requires its institutions to adopt measures with extraterritorial effects. Conciliators determining global aggregate and FRAND rates would indirectly rule on foreign portfolios held by foreign companies. Other countries will not look on this favourably.

The third and principal unintended consequence is that other countries may introduce similar regulations and could easily justify their actions as incorporating a simple “best practice” from Europe. Imagine a situation in which similar regulations are adopted by other countries: requiring notification of national SEPs, conducting local essentiality checks, determining global aggregate royalty rates for a standard, and setting global FRAND-licensing terms. It would effectively transfer SEP disputes from courts into the hands of national regulators.

Moreover, the costs to SEP owners for enforcing SEPs would be compounded, since they would need to notify and pay for essentiality checks in multiple countries. The effects of these increased costs of SEP enforcement and licensing on innovation incentives and participation in collaborative standardisation would need to be assessed. A radically changed and fragmented SEP-licensing environment would also lead to even more uncertainty for both SEP owners and implementers.

An SEP regulation implemented by other countries might easily backfire and could be used as a strategic tool to devalue the royalties of innovative European SEP owners. China might be especially receptive to the idea of regulating SEP licensing. Jonathan Barnett has provided evidence regarding how China has strategically deployed competition and patent law to reduce royalties for SEPs held by foreign companies to the benefit of domestic manufacturers.[68] The EU has also launched a complaint before the World Trade Organization (“WTO”) against China’s practice of issuing broad anti-suit injunctions to prevent the enforcement of SEPs in other jurisdictions.[69] Instead of using competition and patent law, a regulation similar to the one proposed by the European Commission could attain the same industrial policy and protectionist aims.

Taken together, the proposed SEP Regulation makes licensing SEPs more costly, provides solutions that are likely to prove unworkable in practice, and risks countervailing measures by other countries that might be detrimental to European SEP owners and innovation.

IV. Market-Based Alternatives to the Proposed Regulation

Here, we suggest some measures as alternatives to the proposed Regulation. Consistent with the principle that extensive regulatory intervention might not be necessary or proportionate if the aims could be achieved with less-costly instruments, we believe small changes in the institutes of private ordering might improve the existing system in a cost-effective and balanced way. If regulatory action is to be pursued, however, then the application of the Regulation could be limited at first to only a few selected standards and/or use cases to tests its effects.

A. Pledges from SEP Owners Not to Assert SEPs Against SMEs

According to the Commission, most standard implementers are SMEs.[70] They are currently de facto unlicensed since the transaction costs apparently outweigh the expected licensing revenues. They will remain unlicensed until they achieve sufficient market scale for the licensing to become profitable. Nevertheless, there is some evidence that a small number of SMEs have a licence, but we do not have information on how many, or which SEP owners licensed those SMEs.[71]

The situation for SMEs is thus characterised by uncertainty. While most SMEs will not be approached for a license, a small number might still be targeted by some SEP owners. Those SMEs that took a licence would be disadvantaged compared to the unlicensed majority of SMEs. Additionally, SMEs are uncertain at what point they would be considered sufficiently large to trigger the interest of SEP owners.

A private-ordering solution could be for SEP owners to give a binding pledge not to enforce SEPs against SMEs. The Commission might investigate how much support such a measure has with SEP owners. Such a pledge could be given to relevant SDOs and made public. To avoid any doubt, a definition of an SME should also be provided. For example, the Commission considers an entity an SME if it has less than 250 employees and a turnover of no more than €50 million or a balance sheet of no more than €43 million.[72] Other definitions could also be considered. For instance, there may be successful companies in the IoT that employ less staff but generate large turnover and capture a significant share of the relevant market. In any event, a clear threshold should be set so that companies may know in advance at what point they would need to take a license and might expect to be approached by SEP owners.

The downside of binding pledges not to enforce SEPs against SMEs is that SMEs represent an important part of the market. As mentioned, 84% of standard-implementers in the EU are estimated to be SMEs. While it might not be profitable to license them individually, they may generate significant collective royalties. Thus, SEP owners would be renouncing a potentially substantial royalty income. A better option might be to consider ways to simplify and reduce the costs of licensing to SMEs, as discussed in the next proposal.

B. SME License-Purchasing Groups

One way for SMEs to get licensed simply and efficiently would be to form special license-purchasing groups (“LPGs”), as proposed by Ruud Peters et al.[73] LPGs would comprise SMEs with up to 15-20% share of the relevant market, and an LPG administrator experienced in patent licensing would take care of licensing negotiations on behalf of member SMEs. This option would simplify licencing for SMEs and reduce transaction costs for both sides. SEP owners would negotiate with just one entity and, with one license, could cover hundreds or thousands of SMEs that are not profitable to license individually. The benefits to SMEs would be that they could delegate licensing negotiations to experienced professionals and be ensured that they will receive a license on the same terms as other SMEs in the LPG.

It is important to note that this proposal differs from the licensing-negotiations groups (“LNGs”) suggested by the SEP Expert Group, which raise serious competition-law risks and may be considered a façade for buyers’ cartels among implementers.[74] In an LPG, there will be no discussion of product prices, profit margins, market share, the maximum amount of royalty, or licensing level. The tasks of the LPG administrator are only to check if an SME needs a license (i.e., if it produces standard-implementing products) and to negotiate such a license with individual SEP owners and pools based on their licensing programmes. In licensing negotiations, the LPG administrator would ensure that LPG members receive an appropriate volume discount, so that SMEs would not be disadvantaged relative to larger companies with significant volumes; guarantee that members comply with reporting obligations and royalty payments to qualify for a discounted rate for compliance; and attempt to negotiate a discount on past sales. If an SME that is a member of LPG does not accept a license negotiated by the LPG administrator, it would be considered an unwilling licensee, and the SEP owner might be able to sue and obtain an injunction in accordance with Huawei v ZTE.

Therefore, with appropriate competition safeguards and mechanisms against holdout, LPGs might be a vehicle for SMEs to receive a license in an efficient, inexpensive, and secure manner, and for SEP owners to cover the whole market, which is currently untapped because of the unprofitability of bilateral licensing with SMEs.

C. Support the Formation of IoT Patent Pools

Patent pools may be an effective solution for IoT use cases characterised by many implementers and where no-cross licensing is involved. We are already witnessing Avanci and Sisvel preparing and modelling new licensing programmes for different IoT applications. Patent pools would resolve many of the Commission’s concerns about transparency: they provide certainty that truly essential patents are included in a pool, and if many SEP owners accept the pool, it serves as a de facto aggregate royalty rate for a standard.

The Commission might explore ways to assist the creation of pools. The first step may be to initiate a dialogue with patent owners and pool administrators to understand what help they may need in setting new licensing programmes. Concrete measures could then be taken to incentivise and support pool formation. For example, a pool’s implementation costs are often substantial,[75] and the Commission might consider subsidising initial essentiality checks of patents included in a pool, which would be repaid after the pool starts generating licensing revenues.

D. Limit the Scope of the Proposed Regulation

If the Regulation is to be adopted in the present shape, which we think would be a mistake, its scope of application could be limited to only a few selected standards and/or use cases for which the Commission has evidence of licensing inefficiencies, and which would serve as a real-world test of the usefulness of new regulatory measures. In this way, we may observe in real time how regulatory measures would be applied in practice and their effects on SEP-licensing markets. After evaluating their effectiveness, the Regulation might later be expanded to include other standards where licensing inefficiencies have been identified, or it may be changed or completely repealed if the solutions proposed by the Regulation prove to be ineffective, burdensome, and costly, as we and many others predict they would be.

V. Conclusion

We would like to thank the European Commission for the opportunity to comment on the proposed SEP Regulation. We believe that the available evidence used by the Commission in preparation for this Regulation does not show the existence of market failure in SEP-licensing markets that justify  regulatory oversight. Quite the opposite, the mobile-telecommunications sector, which is alleged to be the most problematic, is seeing continuous growth, innovation, and market entry. The incidence of SEP litigation is low and has been declining over the years, with no systemic negative effects on SEP owners and implementers.

In our opinion, the proposed SEP Regulation would complicate SEP licensing even further and may alter incentives to innovate in the open-standardisation environment. It unevenly distributes all the benefits to implementers and costs to SEP owners, raising the costs of licensing even more. Its broad scope will capture all standards licensed on FRAND terms, despite not establishing with a sufficient degree of certainty that all these standards are problematic. The increased costs of enforcing SEPs may shift the litigation away from Europe to other parts of the world: the United States, United Kingdom, China, and India.

European courts have over the years have built impressive case law clarifying the contents of FRAND licenses and good-faith licensing negotiations. It would be a shame to see Europe lose its place in influencing the future SEP-licensing framework. Crucially, other countries may be inspired by the Commission’s SEP Regulation and decide to adopt similar regulatory regimes. Regulations implemented by other countries might easily backfire and be used for protectionist purposes and as a strategic tool to devalue the royalties of innovative European SEP owners. The primary beneficiaries of the Regulation might be non-EU based implementers, to the detriment of European innovators and Europe’s technological leadership.

While we believe the proposed SEP Regulation is unnecessary and disproportionate, this is not to say that the SEP-licensing framework cannot be further refined and simplified. The challenge, however, is to find solutions that improve the existing system in a cost-effective, balanced, and efficient way. We believe market-based mechanisms should be supported and sought over government regulation. It must also be emphasised that there is no one size-fits-all answer. Different solutions may be applied in different markets, and appropriate competition-law safeguards must be put in place to guarantee efficient market outcomes.

[1] European Commission, Explanatory Memorandum for Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on Standard Essential Patents and Amending Regulation (EU) 2017/1001, COM (2023) 232 Final (“Explanatory Memorandum”).

[2] Justus Baron, Pere Argue-Castells, Armandine Leonard, Tim Pohlman, & Eric Sergheraert, Empirical Assessment of Potential Challenges in SEP Licensing, European Commission (2023), p. 112.

[3] See European Commission, Impact Assessment Report Accompanying the Document Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on Standard Essential Patents and Amending Regulation (EU) 2017/1001, SWD(2023) 124 final (“Impact Assessment”) p. 26 (“about 70% of the implementers take a license without litigation according to the results from the public consultation”).

[4] Adapting Carl von Clausewitz’s aphorism: “Litigation is the continuation of negotiation by other means.”

[5] C-170/13 Huawei v ZTE, ECLI:EU:C:2015:477

[6] Unwired Planet v Huawei [2017] EWHC 711 (Pat).

[7] Sisvel v Haier, KZR 36/17 Federal Court of Justice (05 May 2020)

[8] Unwired Planet v Huawei; Huawei and ZTE v Conversant [2020] UKSC 37; Philips v Wiko, 6 U 183/16 Karlsruhe Higher Regional Court (30 October 2019); HEVC (Dolby) v MAS Elektronik, 4c O 44/18 Dusseldorf Regional Court (7 May 2020).

[9] Nokia v Daimler, 2 0 34/19, Mannheim Regional Court (18 August 2020); Sharp v Daimler, 7 O 8818/19 Munich Regional Court (10 September 2020).

[10] See, Sisvel v Haier, KZR 36/17 Federal Court of Justice (05 May 2020), 61 (that implementers should not engage in patent holdout by exploiting the structural disadvantage, which SEP holders face due to the limitation of their rights to assert patents in court); Optis v Apple [2022] EWCA Civ 1411, 115 (“Apple’s behaviour …. Could well be argued to constitute a form of hold out … while Optis’ contention … would open the door to holdout”); Ericsson v D-Link, 773 F.3d 1201, 1234 (Fed Cir 2014) (“The district court need not instruct the jury on hold-up or stacking unless the accused infringer presents actual evidence of hold-up or stacking. Certainly something more than a general argument that these phenomena are possibilities is necessary.”)

[11] An electronic database of court cases implementing Huawei v ZTE is available at: https://caselaw.4ipcouncil.com/guidance-national-courts.

[12] Impact Assessment p. 13.

[13] Id. at 17.

[14] Id. at 14.

[15] Id. at12.

[16] Id. at 12.

[17] Id.

[18] Id. at 16.

[19] Id. at 14.

[20] Id. at 16.

[21] Id. at 23.

[22] Id. at 17.

[23] Id. at 11.

[24] Baron et al., supra note 2.

[25] Id. at 109-110

[26] Id. at110

[27] Id. at 108, 112.

[28] Id. at 164.

[29] Id. at 164.

[30] For some of the voluminous literature, see: Alexander Galetovic, Stephen Haber, & Ross Levine, An Empirical Examination of Patent Holdup, 11(3) Journal of Competition Law & Economics 549 (2015); Keith Mallinson, Don’t Fix What Isn’t Broken: The Extraordinary Record of Innovation and Success in the Cellular Industry Under Existing Licensing Practices, 23 George Mason Law Review 967 (2016); David Teece, The “Tragedy of the Anticommons” Fallacy: A Law and Economics Analysis of Patent Thickets and FRAND Licensing, 32 Berkeley Technology Law Journal 1490 (2017); J. Gregory Sidak, Is Patent Holdup a Hoax, 3 Criterion Journal on Innovation 401 (2018); Alexander Galetovic, Stephen Haber, & Lew Zaretzki, Is There an Anti-Commons Tragedy in the Smartphone Industry, 32 Berkeley Technology Law Journal 1527 (2018); Daniel F. Spulber, Licensing Standard Essential Patents with FRAND Commitments: Preparing for 5G Mobile Telecommunications, 18 Colorado Technology Law Journal 79 (2020); Dirk Auer & Julian Morris, Governing the Patent Commons, 38(2) Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal 291 (2020).

[31] The Mobile Economy, GSMA (2023), available at https://www.gsma.com/mobileeconomy/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/270223-The-Mobile-Economy-2023.pdf.

[32] Ibid.

[33] The 5G Economy: How 5G Will Contribute to the Global Economy?, IHS Market (2019).

[34] The Impact of 5G on the European Economy, Accenture (Feb. 2021).

[35] Bowman Heiden, Jorge Padilla, & Ruud Peters, The Value of Standard Essential Patents and the Level of Licensing, 49(1) AIPLA Quarterly Journal 1, 5-6 (2021).

[36] Alexander Galetovic, Stephen Haber, & Lew Zaretzki, An Estimate of the Average Cumulative Royalty Yield in the World Mobile Phone Industry: Theory, Measurement and Results, 42 Telecommunications Policy 263 (2018); Keith Mallinson, Cumulative Mobile SEP Royalties (19 Aug. 2015); J. Gregory Sidak, What Aggregate Royalty Do Manufacturers of Mobile Phones Pay to License Standard-Essential Patents?, 1 Criterion Journal of Innovation 701 (2016).

[37] The Commission noted that SEP royalty payments in the mobile-telecommunications industry generate between EUR 14–18 billion per year (see Impact Assessment, supra note 3, at 9).

[38] Raphaël De Coninck, Christoph von Muellern, Samuel Zimmermann, & Kilian Müller, SEP Royalties, Investment Incentives and Total Welfare, CRA Study 2022, (2022), at 18-19.

[39] https://www.avanci.com.

[40] Avanci Vehicle 4G, https://www.avanci.com/vehicle/4g.

[41] Victoria Waldersee & Supantha Mukherjee, Automakers Tackle Patent Hurdle in Quest for In-Car Tech, Reuters (21 Sep. 2021), available at: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/automakers-tackle-patent-hurdle-quest-in-car-tech-2022-09-21.

[42] Igor Nikolic, Injunctions Facilitate Patent Licensing Deals: Evidence from the Automotive Sector, CPI Columns Intellectual Property (Jun. 2022).

[43] LIFT: Accelerating Market Penetration and Levelling the Playing Fields, Sisvel (18 Jul. 2022), available at: https://www.sisvel.com/blog/wireless-communications/lift-levelling-the-playing-field-for-early-licensees.

[44] Impact Assessment, supra note 3, at 17.

[45] Id. at 63, 68.

[46] Impact Assessment, supra note 3, at 67; Another study found that only one out of 12 surveyed SMEs had a licence, see Joachim Henkel, Licensing Standard-Essential Patents in the IoT – A Value Chain Perspective on the Markets for Technology, 51 Research Policy 104600 (2022).

[47] Bowman Heiden & Justus Baron, A Policy Governance Framework for SEP Licensing: Assessing Private Versus Public Market Interventions (2021) available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3872493.

[48] Auer & Morris, supra note 30.

[49] Harold Demsetz, Information and Efficiency: Another Viewpoint, 12(1) The Journal of Law and Economics 1 (1969).

[50] Impact Assessment, supra note 3, at 58.

[51] Id.

[52] Id. at 50.

[53] Article 1(2) of the SEP Regulation.

[54] Impact Assessment, supra note 3, at 8.

[55] Brad Biddle, Andrew White, & Sean Woods, How Many Standards in a Laptop? (And Other Empirical Questions) (2013) available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1619440.

[56] Article 1(4) of the SEP Regulation.

[57] Article 1(3) of the SEP Regulation

[58] Impact Assessment, supra note 3, at 101.

[59] Impact Assessment, supra note 3, at 84-85.

[60] Unwired Planet v Huawei [2017] EWHC 711 (Pat).

[61] TCL v Ericsson, Case No. 8:14-cv-003410JVS-DFM (C.D. Cal. 2018); TCL v Ericsson, 943 F.3d 1360 (Fed. Cir. 2019)

[62] Interdigital v Lenovo [2023] EWHC 539 (Pat) 733.

[63] The Regulation requires that patent owners register SEPs if they want to litigate them against infringers in the courts of Member States (Article 20(1)). Patent owners may simply decide to litigate outside the EU. As a result, they do not register SEPs and completely avoid conducting essentiality checks or going into mandatory FRAND determinations.

[64] Rory O’Neil, Breaking: UPC Chief Urges EU to Rethink SEP Plan, ManagingIP (30 May 2023), available at: https://www.managingip.com/article/2bqbfr0uyrki1fniy9ou8/breaking-upc-chief-urges-eu-to-rethink-sep-plan.

[65] Baron et al., supra note 2, at 110.

[66] Florian Mueller, EU-Only SEP Register Can’t Serve as a Basis for Global FRAND Determinations: Proposed EU Regulation on Standard-Essential Patents Suffers from Incongruent Provisions, FossPatents (4 Jun. 2023), available at: http://www.fosspatents.com/2023/06/eu-only-sep-register-cant-serve-as.html.

[67] Impact Assessment, supra note 3, at 8.

[68] Jonathan Barnett, Antitrust Mercantilism: The Strategic Devaluation of Intellectual Property Right in Wireless Markets, Berkeley Journal of Law & Technology (forthcoming); see also Jeanne Suchodolski, Suzanne Harrison, & Bowman Heiden, Innovation Warfare, 22 North Carolina Journal of Law & Technology 175 (2020).

[69] DS611: China-Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights, World Trade Organization (2022), available at: https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/cases_e/ds611_e.htm.

[70] Impact Assessment, supra note 3, at 11 (84% of EU-based standard implementers are SMEs).

[71] Impact Assessment, supra note 3, at 67.

[72] European Commission, Recommendation of 6 May 2003 Concerning the Definition of Micro, Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (2003) C 1422.

[73] Ruud Peters, Igor Nikolic, & Bowman Heiden, Designing SEP Licensing Negotiation Groups to Reduce Patent Holdout in 5G/IoT Markets in Jonathan Barnett & Sean O’Connor (eds), 5G and Beyond: Intellectual Property and Competition Policy in the Internet of Things (Cambridge University Press 2023).

[74] Contribution to the Debate on SEPs, Group of Experts on Licensing and Valuation of Standard Essential Patents (2021), available at: https://ec.europa.eu/docsroom/documents/45217; for commentary, see Nikolic, supra note 59.

[75] Michael Mattioli & Robert P. Merges, Measuring the Costs and Benefits of Patent Pools, 78(2) Ohio State Law Journal 281 (2017).

We thank the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) for this opportunity to provide regulatory commentary on the pivotal subject of artificial-intelligence (AI) regulation. AI technology, already a familiar part of American life, is poised to become among the most consequential technological advancements in the coming years. As the rate of innovation in AI technologies accelerates, there will be greater opportunity for an expanded spectrum of applications that increase social welfare. At the same time, we are cognizant of some potential risks that AI could pose.

The Biden administration has already taken commendable steps toward advancing innovation, safeguarding Americans’ rights and safety, and ensuring that the public can benefit from AI. The updated National AI R&D Strategic Plan,[1] the blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights,[2] and the AI Risk Management Framework,[3] among other initiatives, represent thoughtful efforts to grapple with the legal and social implications of AI technologies.

We firmly believe that the prime concern should be to avoid premature regulatory action. Each technology grouped under the broad umbrella of AI is unique and requires careful consideration and understanding on its own terms. It is crucial to take sufficient time to study these important distinctions and appreciate the specific challenges and opportunities inherent in each. Overarching or rushed regulations could stifle innovation, impede economic growth, and inadvertently undermine efforts to realize AI’s transformative potential.

Furthermore, when contemplating the adoption of a risk-based regulatory framework, we propose that the OSTP steer clear of overreliance on the precautionary principle. While intended to anticipate potential risks, the precautionary principle can over-index in the direction of caution and, due to its inherently conservative nature, serve as a barrier to innovation and progress. Instead, we recommend an approach that grounds any potential regulation in addressing real harms, with particular focus on preventing or minimizing those harms with a significant likelihood of occurring, that are more comprehensively understood, and that are tangible, rather than based on speculative or nebulous risks.

Developing a comprehensive national AI strategy is, indeed, a commendable undertaking and holds the promise that it could align various stakeholders’ interests and offer a holistic approach to address AI’s challenges. It is of paramount importance that this strategy remain responsive to the latest AI advances and global changes, considering the dynamic and evolving nature of AI technology. We are confident that the OSTP and the National AI Initiative Office will thoughtfully integrate the inputs provided through this Request for Information (RFI)[4] to inform the National AI Strategy’s development. We look forward to contributing our perspectives and suggestions to this critical dialogue.

Below we answer select questions in the RFI, we wanted to direct attention to a larger set of comments we submitted last month to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s separate inquiry on this topic.[5] Those comments are attached in full.

Understanding the Components of AI Must Come Before Regulation

1. What specific measures – such as standards, regulations, investments, and improved trust and safety practices – are needed to ensure that AI systems are designed, developed, and deployed in a manner that protects people’s rights and safety? Which specific entities should develop and implement these measures?[6]

Before deciding what standards are necessary to regulate AI, it is necessary to develop some meaningful definition of what “AI” means. The present enthusiasm for AI has led to an oversimplification in the public discourse that can obscure how diverse the underlying technologies and their respective applications actually are. AI, in fact, covers a spectrum of technologies from large language models[7] to recommender systems[8] and beyond. These applications differ significantly from some of the more extravagant conceptions of AI, such as artificial general intelligence (AGI). A failure to distinguish among these technologies and their particular use cases can result in what we refer to as “regulatory overaggregation”—that is, a regulatory generalization that clouds the distinct aspects of each technology and may fail to address actual harms due to an inability to adequately address granular subjects.

The contemporary urge to overgeneralize the regulation of AI has parallels with the domains of “privacy rights” and “privacy regulation,” where sharply divergent potential harms are often conflated under the same broad topic. The concept of privacy often invokes an expectation of seclusion or allowing an individual to control their personal information.[9] This framing, however, is too general and cannot capture all actionable areas of law that implicate privacy, such as “revenge porn” or the unauthorized sale of cellphone location data. Overaggregating these distinct issues under a unified “law of privacy” may lead to regulations that fail to properly address each concern.

On the other hand, the domain of intellectual property (IP) demonstrates a more nuanced approach. Though it covers an array of legal constructs like copyright, patents, and trademarks, each area has specific legislation addressing unique rights, harms, and remedies. This approach fosters legislative richness and avoids the pitfall of overaggregation.

Lessons from both privacy law and intellectual property may be instructive for AI. Overly broad AI regulations risk stifling innovation and technological advancement, while potentially failing to address specific harms. Therefore, rather than a blanket regulatory approach, a detailed understanding of AI’s various subdomains is needed to target identifiable harms. This could be aided by OSTP facilitating the development of a comprehensive catalog of AI technologies and their potential risks, which could serve as a reference for regulators and courts.

Emphasize Harm-Based Approaches to AI Regulation and Require Cost-Benefit Analysis

Drawing upon the challenges associated with regulating emergent technologies such as AI, we could begin to explore this domain by considering an analogy to an older technology: photography. If camera technology were nascent, we might project myriad potential harms. But we can reflect from our position of having nearly two centuries of experience with the technology that a universal regulatory framework to manage all aspects of camera technology would be absurd. Instead, existing general laws more adequately address the specific harms that can be facilitated by camera technology, such as infringements on privacy rights arising from covert filming, use in the furtherance of criminal enterprises, or theft of trade secrets. In these instances, it is not the camera technology itself that forms the subject of legal concern, but the illicit actions carried out through its use.

Further, when assessing potential harms facilitated by new technology, a comprehensive analysis must consider the balance between the likelihood of harmful uses and the prospects of beneficial applications. Copyright law, as exemplified in the landmark Betamax case,[10] provides an insightful precedent. That case illustrated how law could adapt to new technology, in that instance underscoring the need for copyright law to accommodate “substantial noninfringing uses” of new technologies that could reproduce protected material.[11] The decision upheld that, while the technology may facilitate some infringement, it would be inappropriate to apply a broad presumption against its use.[12] Moreover, the case stressed the importance of examining each circumstance on a case-by-case basis.[13]

Regulation and accountability in the realm of AI should echo this approach, emerging organically through bottom-up, case-by-case processes that examine the relevant facts of any given situation and how they alter (or do not alter) our legal system’s baseline assumptions. New legislation, if required, should be incremental, guided by well-defined principles, and focused on identifiable harms, thus allowing law to fit specific circumstances without conflicting with established legal and regulatory principles.

AI, like any tool, can be misused, and any such misuse should incur legal consequences. Yet, the legal analysis should focus primarily not on the AI itself, but on the malefactors’ actions and the resulting harms. Attempting to construct a foolproof regulatory framework that precludes the misuse of AI may prove futile and could potentially stifle the development of socially beneficial tools.

Moreover, the fact that AI technology remains largely in the research and development phase complicates regulatory decisions. Proactive regulation based on the precautionary principle might thwart unforeseen benefits that could emerge as these technologies mature and find unique applications.[14] Even in high-risk industries like nuclear power, precautionary regulation often results in net social harms.[15]

When imagining the harms that could occur, it is crucial to distinguish two broad categories of AI-related concerns. First is the largely theoretical fear associated with AGI—the understandable apprehension many feel about inadvertently creating a superintelligence that could potentially extinguish human life.[16] If it is even possible to create AGI, about which there remains significant doubt, it is crucial to emphasize that current AI technologies are far from AGI. AI technologies today are essentially sophisticated prediction engines for dealing with text or pixels.[17] It is highly unlikely that we will accidentally stumble onto AGI by merely chaining thousands of these prediction engines together.

The second, more realistic set of concerns pertain to the misuse of AI technologies to perpetuate illicit activities. Specifically, these very impressive technologies might be misused to further discrimination and crime, or could have such a disruptive impact on areas like employment that they will quickly generate tremendous harms. When contemplating harms that could occur, however, it is also necessary to acknowledge the many significant benefits also could be generated. Moreover, as with earlier technologies, economic disruptions will provide both challenges and opportunities. It is easy to see the immediate effect on the jobs of content writers posed by ChatGPT, for example, but less easy to measure the benefits that would be realized by firms that can deploy this technology to “in-source” tasks.  Thus, static analyses of AI’s substitution power are likely to miss the bigger picture of social welfare that could be realized as organizations improve their efficiency through the adoption of AI tools.

Finally, it is important to remember that dynamic competition—where technology is continually evolving and firms are competing to provide consumers with innovative products and services—drives far more economic growth than static competition. As the economist Joseph Schumpeter noted, competition thrives not merely on price but on the advent of disruptive new commodities, technologies, and supply sources.[18]

Regulation of AI must be seen in the same light. To this end, we advocate a regulatory regime for AI that encourages sector-specific rules to emerge when regulators discover that their existing rules are inadequate for new AI-augmented technologies. This approach should be harm-based, rather than risk-based. In other words, regulations should focus on mitigating the known and likely harms caused by the misuse of AI rather than trying to predict and prevent every possible risk associated with it. A clear-eyed cost-benefit analysis should guide this process.

Rather than preemptively stifling innovation with burdensome regulations based on hypothetical risks, a more nuanced approach would be to respond to actual harms as they arise, carefully weighing the potential harms against the prospective benefits of AI technologies. Such a balanced approach would not only protect society from misuse of AI but would also allow for the continued development and beneficial application of these transformative technologies.

Adopting this approach will require an ongoing dialogue among all stakeholders and an openness to adjust our regulatory frameworks as our understanding of AI and its societal impact deepens. A harm-based, case-by-case approach to AI regulation is consistent with our common-law tradition and promises to be the most effective and flexible approach to guide the development and application of AI technologies.

The Implications of a Centralized Regulator for AI: Risks to Competition and Innovation

1. … Which specific entities should develop and implement these measures?[19]

The prospect of creating a centralized regulator for emergent technologies like AI raises important concerns, particularly those relating to market competition. A central regulator may inadvertently favor established industry players like OpenAI, as new entrants might be hindered by regulations and compliance costs, which incumbents could manipulate to increase rivals’ costs.[20] The strategic promotion of a strong central regulator can thus serve to maintain or increase incumbents’ market dominance.

In recent U.S. Senate hearings, some witnesses and senators proposed a central regulator to create and administer a licensing regime for AI.[21] While licensing might be necessary for certain AI applications, such as military weaponry, it is broadly inadvisable due to the diverse nature of AI technologies. Developers of AI tools face numerous challenges, including assuring data collection and management, anticipating downstream usage of tools, and managing the complex chain of AI-system development and deployment. A centralized AI regulator would struggle to understand the nuances of each distinct industry, leading to ineffective or inappropriate licensing requirements.

Unlike such sectors as railroads and nuclear power, which have dedicated regulators, AI is more akin to a general-purpose tool, like chemicals or combustion engines. Different agencies regulate the use of these tools as appropriate for their context, without a central regulator overseeing every aspect of development and use. A licensing requirement could introduce undesirable delays into the process of commercializing AI technologies, significantly impeding technological progress and innovation, and potentially leaving the United States behind in the global AI race.

A better advisable approach would be to create product-centric and harm-centric frameworks that other sectoral regulators or competition authorities could incorporate into their rules for goods and services. For example, safety standards for medical devices should be maintained, whether or not AI is involved. But a thoughtful framework might raise questions that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) finds are necessary to consider when implementing new regulations. This product-centric regulatory approach would ensure safety, quality, and effectiveness without stifling innovation. With their deep industry knowledge, sectoral regulators are better positioned to address the unique challenges posed by AI technology within their spheres of influence.

By contrast, there is a risk that a centralized regulator, operating with an overaggregated concept of AI, might design rules that slow or prevent AI-infused technologies from coming to market if they cannot navigate the complex tradeoffs among interested parties across all such technologies.[22] This could make society worse off and strengthen the position of global competitors. Therefore, it is crucial to approach the regulation of AI with careful consideration of its impacts on competition and innovation, advocating for a framework that encourages diversity and flexibility.

17. What will the principal benefits of AI be for the people of the United States? How can the United States best capture the benefits of AI across the economy, in domains such as education, health, and transportation? How can AI be harnessed to improve consumer access to and reduce costs associated with products and services? How can AI be used to increase competition and lower barriers to entry across the economy?[23]

The advent of AI promises transformative potential across various domains, heralding numerous benefits for the people of the United States and beyond. Foremost, AI can drastically improve worker efficiency. Advanced AI algorithms could handle repetitive tasks swiftly and accurately, allowing employees to focus on more complex and strategic aspects of their jobs. In sectors ranging from manufacturing to health care to customer service, AI-driven automation can accelerate processes, minimize errors, and enhance productivity, ultimately leading to improved business performance and growth.

For instance, in health care, AI can help practitioners analyze complex medical data rapidly, improving diagnostic accuracy and speed. In manufacturing, AI-powered machines can manage labor-intensive tasks, reducing the possibility of human error and occupational injuries. These efficiencies can reduce costs, with the potential for savings to be passed on to consumers.

Furthermore, AI technology, like many disruptive technologies before it, may be capable not only of augmenting existing workforces but also of fostering new types of industries and opportunities. As AI becomes more sophisticated, we anticipate the emergence of entirely new job categories, similar to how the advent of the internet spurred professions in web design, digital marketing, and e-commerce.

AI can also improve consumer access to, and reduce costs associated with, various products and services. For instance, we have already seen AI-powered recommendation systems personalize the shopping experience, allowing consumers to find relevant products with ease. And in education, we’ve seen AI personalize learning for individual students, tailoring educational content to match each learner’s needs and pace and, in turn, improving educational outcomes and accessibility.

The promise of AI extends to increasing competition and lowering barriers to entry across the economy. By providing businesses with more information and greater efficiency, AI can give rise to more effective business strategies and models. It could level the playing field for small and medium-size enterprises, allowing them to compete with larger corporations by offering cost-effective solutions that previously required significant capital or resources.

19. What specific measures – such as sector-specific policies, standards, and regulations – are needed to promote innovation, economic growth, competition, job creation, and a beneficial integration of advanced AI systems into everyday life for all Americans? Which specific entities should develop and implement these measures?[24]

As noted above, we believe that specific measures to promote innovation and the safety of advanced AI systems are best approached with a sector-specific focus. Due to the diverse nature of AI applications and the varying impacts on diverse industries, sector-specific policies and standards will be more effective and beneficial than broad, sweeping regulations.

For instance, in the health-care sector, safety and privacy standards must be upheld when deploying AI tools for diagnosing diseases or managing patient data. In such cases, regulators like the FDA or the Department of Health and Human Services could leverage their expertise to develop and implement targeted regulations that ensure safety without stifling innovation.

Similarly, in the automotive sector, where AI is used for autonomous vehicles, transportation authorities could create guidelines and standards to ensure road safety, while also promoting innovation. In finance, where AI algorithms are used for trading, credit scoring, and risk management, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and other relevant financial regulators can establish rules to prevent unfair practices and ensure market stability.

Conclusion

We again thank the OSTP for initiating this important and timely inquiry into AI regulation. It is through dialogues like these that we can collectively explore AI’s impacts on society. It is crucial to reiterate that regulation, while necessary, should be formulated with a nuanced understanding of the technology. Being eager to impose regulations prematurely could stifle the very innovation that we seek to cultivate and the potential benefits that we aim to harvest. AI has the potential to be a transformative force for the United States and the world, providing a multitude of benefits, and empowering us with the tools to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. A measured and informed approach to AI regulation would further reinforce our nation’s position as a global leader in technological innovation.

[1] National Artificial Intelligence Research And Development Strategic Plan 2023 Update, Select Committee On Artificial Intelligence Of The National Science And Technology Council (May 2023), available at https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/National-Artificial-Intelligence-Research-and-Development-Strategic-Plan-2023-Update.pdf.

[2] Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (2023), available at https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/ai-bill-of-rights.

[3] Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework (AI RMF 1.0), National Institute of Standards and Technology (Jan. 2023), available at https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ai/NIST.AI.100-1.pdf.

[4] Request for Information National Priorities for Artificial Intelligence, 3270-F1, 88 FR 34194,White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (May 26, 2023) (“RFI”).

[5] Kristian Stout et al., ICLE Response to the AI Accountability Policy Request for Comment, International Center for Law & Economics (Jun. 2023), https://laweconcenter.org/resources/icle-response-to-the-ai-accountability-policy-request-for-comment (“ICLE NTIA Comments”).

[6] RFI at 34195.

[7] LLMs are a type of artificial-intelligence model designed to parse and generate human language at a highly sophisticated level. The deployment of LLMs has driven progress in fields such as conversational AI, automated content creation, and improved language understanding across a multitude of applications, even suggesting that these models might represent an initial step toward the achievement of artificial general intelligence (AGI). See Alejandro Pen?a et al., Leveraging Large Language Models for Topic Classification in the Domain of Public Affairs, arXiv (Jun. 5, 2023), https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.02864v1.

[8] Recommender systems are advanced tools currently used across a wide array of applications, including web services, books, e-learning, tourism, movies, music, e-commerce, news, and television programs, where they provide personalized recommendations to users. Despite recent advancements, there is a pressing need for further improvements and research in order to offer more efficient recommendations that can be applied across a broader range of applications. See Deepjyoti Roy & Mala Dutta, A Systematic Review and Research Perspective on Recommender Systems, 9 J. Big Data 59 (2022), available at https://journalofbigdata.springeropen.com/counter/pdf/10.1186/s40537-022-00592-5.pdf.

[9] The prototypical framing of this view is captured by the seminal work by Samuel D. Warren & Louis D. Brandeis, The Right to Privacy, 4 Harv. L. Rev. 193 (1890).

[10] Sony Corp. of Am. v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417, 439 (1984).

[11] Id. In this case, the Supreme Court imported the doctrine of “substantial noninfringing uses” into copyright law from patent law.

[12] Id.

[13] Id.

[14] See Adam Thierer, Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case For Comprehensive Technological Freedom (2016).

[15] See, e.g., Matthew J. Neidell, Shinsuke Uchida, & Marcella Veronesi, The Unintended Effects from Halting Nuclear Power Production: Evidence from Fukushima Daiichi Accident, NBER Working Paper 26395 (2022), https://www.nber.org/papers/w26395 (Japan abandoning nuclear energy in the wake of the Fukushima disaster led to decreased energy consumption, which in turn led to increased mortality).

[16] See, e.g., Eliezer Yudkowsky, Pausing AI Developments Isn’t Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down, Time (Mar. 29, 2023), https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough.

[17] See, e.g., Will Knight, Some Glimpse AGI in ChatGPT. Others Call It a Mirage, Wired (Apr. 10, 2023), https://www.wired.com/story/chatgpt-agi-intelligence (“GPT-4, like its predecessors, had been fed massive amounts of text and code and trained to use the statistical patterns in that corpus to predict the words that should be generated in reply to a piece of text input.”)

[18] Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism And Democracy 74 (1976).

[19] RFI at 34195.

[20] This competition concern is one that is widely shared across the political spectrum. See, e.g., Cristiano Lima, Biden’s Former Tech Adviser on What Washington Is Missing about AI, The Washington Post (May 30, 2023), https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/05/30/biden-former-tech-adviser-what-washington-is-missing-about-ai (Tim Wu noting that he’s “not in favor of an approach that would create heavy compliance costs for market entry and that would sort of regulate more abstract harms”).

[21] Oversight of A.I.: Rules for Artificial Intelligence: Hearing Before the Subcomm. on Privacy, Technology, and the Law of the S. Comm. on the Judiciary, 118th Cong. (2023) (statement of Sam Altman, at 11), https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/download/2023-05-16-testimony-altman.

[22] This is a well-known problem that occurs in numerous regulatory contexts. See, e.g., Raymond J. March, The FDA and the COVID?19: A Political Economy Perspective, 87(4) S. Econ. J. 1210, 1213-16 (2021), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8012986 (discussing the political economy that drives bureaucratic agencies’ incentives in the context of the FDA’s drug-approval process).

[23] RFI at 34196.

[24] RFI at 34196.

Abstract

This paper presents a theoretical framework for determining the ownership stakes held by financial investors in companies competing in the same product market, or, in other words, the level of common ownership. In our model, the primary motivation for these investors is the anticipation of capital gains resulting from the impact of common ownership on product market competition, which leads to increased profitability for the firms involved. On the other hand, common ownership undermines effective corporate governance by reducing monitoring, increasing extraction of private benefits by the manager, and inhibiting investments that contribute to firm value. These negative effects on corporate governance act as limiting factors, ultimately determining the equilibrium level of common ownership.

Threads from ICLE scholars on trending issues for the month of July 2023.

Last October, Kroger/Albertsons announced their agreement to merge. All signs point that the FTC will challenge it.

Our team at @LawEconCenter has a new policy brief with what you need to know.

We highlight 5 problems we expect with an FTC challenge ? https://t.co/bm48pLKAyt

— Brian Albrecht (@BrianCAlbrecht) July 27, 2023

With the Senate's markup on KOSA and COPPA 2.0 scheduled for tomorrow, it is worth considering the costs of such bills. My newest op-ed @TheHillOpinion argues that these bills will lead to age-gating and exclusion of teens from many online platformshttps://t.co/W9pHJxaGQG

— Ben Sperry (@RBenSperry) July 26, 2023

AI Leaders Bring Washington a Bag of Promises
Episode 469 of the Cyberlaw Podcasthttps://t.co/vi4GV36VMo

— stewartbaker (@stewartbaker) July 25, 2023

Some have suggested that the new US draft merger guidelines ("Guidelines") bring the US closer to the EU's tougher stance on merger control. But, in many ways, the Guidelines herald a world in which merger control is stricter in the US than in the EU. Short ?

— Lazar Radic (@laz_radic) July 24, 2023

This is a really interesting piece of legislation that would be aimed at banning attempts by federal employees and contractors from coercing social media platforms into censorship (a ?) https://t.co/G8htP7iNC1

— Ben Sperry (@RBenSperry) July 20, 2023

My colleagues @LawEconCenter (@geoffmanne, @GusHurwitz, @laz_radic, and @BrianCAlbrecht) have already offered amazing commentary on the FTC/DOJ's proposed changes to the the merger guidelines, as highlighted @reason but I'd like to add my 2 cents (a ?) https://t.co/pro0lPJuVL

— Ben Sperry (@RBenSperry) July 20, 2023

The new merger guidelines are as we expected. That’s not a compliment.

Here are just a few of the problems with these new guidelines ?https://t.co/FyFAMEYbVV

— Brian Albrecht (@BrianCAlbrecht) July 19, 2023

Today's big antitrust news: DOJ/FTC released their much-anticipated proposed revisions to the merger guidelines.

A lot to digest, but some initial thoughts below. Bottom line: if adopted as proposed these changes will do serious reputational damage to the agencies in court. 1/

— Gus Hurwitz (@GusHurwitz) July 19, 2023

We've known @linakhanFTC wanted to rewrite US antitrust since she first took office. (Actually, since she was in law school). So far, she's struck out.

Today's new draft FTC/DOJ guidelines reveal her vision on mergers.

If taken seriously, they will set antitrust back decades ?

— Brian Albrecht (@BrianCAlbrecht) July 19, 2023

Listening to the testimony of Khan, it’s clear to me that she is reproducing -perhaps unknowingly- the narrative that a cabal of evil neoliberals funded by capitalists remade the world in the 1970s to bolster capital and destroy labor. ? https://t.co/lHDz0rRDlB

— Lazar Radic (@laz_radic) July 13, 2023

1/ The EU Commission just decided that the US is “adequate” under the GDPR, giving a convenient and clear legal basis for transfers of personal data to the US. But this will likely be challenged. What will the courts say? Are we going to get “Schrems III”?

— Miko?aj Barczentewicz (@MBarczentewicz) July 10, 2023

In a new @lawfare publication, I suggest that if interoperability can’t be accomplished without reducing security, then the DMA mandate arguably should remain a dead letter until it can.?? https://t.co/LWK3T4Th3D

— Miko?aj Barczentewicz (@MBarczentewicz) July 7, 2023

https://twitter.com/lawfare/status/1677028748518883330?s=20 

Judge Doughty of the federal district for West. Dist. of La. found enough evidence, if the allegations are taken as true, that federal officials have been coercing social media companies into censoring speech in Missouri, et al. v. Biden et al. (a ?): https://t.co/VW4TbllcbR

— Ben Sperry (@RBenSperry) July 6, 2023

I just published an expanded preliminary analysis of the EU Court's new Meta judgment on my website. One additional thing I noticed is that there's an apparent contradiction in the Court's view on "contractual necessity"… https://t.co/oslMIHnxU3 https://t.co/iB58rEAytt

— Miko?aj Barczentewicz (@MBarczentewicz) July 4, 2023

1/ What must you know about today’s potentially momentous decision from the EU’s highest court (CJEU) in Meta’s case? (Case C-252/21)
TLDR: personalized advertising under the GDPR may get even more tricky, but this is not the end.

— Miko?aj Barczentewicz (@MBarczentewicz) July 4, 2023

It's been said that if you want people to pay attention to your company today, you have to genuflect in the direction of AI, whether AI is actually relevant to your company or not. Apparently the same holds for regulatory agencies. 1/5 https://t.co/nXkKT9Av3t

— Geoffrey Manne (@geoffmanne) June 29, 2023