Antitrust & Competition Policy

A welcome restructuring at the FCC

by on January 9, 2018 · 0 comments

The FCC released a proposed Order today that would create an Office of Economics and Analytics. Last April, Chairman Pai proposed this data-centric office. There are about a dozen bureaus and offices within the FCC and this proposed change in the FCC’s organizational structure would consolidate a few offices and many FCC economists and experts into a single office.

This is welcome news. Several years ago when I was in law school, I was a legal clerk for the FCC Wireless Bureau and for the FCC Office of General Counsel. During that ten-month stint, I was surprised at the number of economists, who were all excellent, at the FCC. I assisted several of them closely (and helped organize what one FCC official dubbed, unofficially, “The Economists’ Cage Match” for outside experts sparring over the competitive effects of the proposed AT&T-T-Mobile merger). However, my impression even during my limited time at the FCC was well-stated by Chairman Pai in April:

[E]conomists are not systematically incorporated into policy work at the FCC. Instead, their expertise is typically applied in an ad hoc fashion, often late in the process. There is no consistent approach to their use.

And since the economists are sprinkled about the agency, their work is often “siloed” within their respective bureau. Economics as an afterthought in telecom is not good for the development of US tech industries, nor for consumers.

As Geoffrey Manne and Allen Gibby said recently, “the future of telecom regulation is antitrust,” and the creation of the OEA is a good step in line with global trends. Many nations–like the Netherlands, Denmark, Spain, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand–are restructuring legacy telecom regulators. The days of public and private telecom monopolies and discrete, separate communications, computer, and media industries (thus bureaus) is past. Convergence, driven by IP networks and deregulation, has created these trends and resulted in sometimes dramatic restructuring of agencies.

In Denmark, for instance, as Roslyn Layton and Joe Kane have written, national parties and regulators took inspiration from the deregulatory plans of the Clinton FCC. The Social Democrats, the Radical Left, the Left, the Conservative People’s Party, the Socialist People’s Party, and the Center Democrats agreed in 1999:

The 1990s were focused on breaking down old monopoly; now it is important to make the frameworks for telecom, IT, radio, TV meld together—convergence. We believe that new technologies will create competition.

It is important to ensure that regulation does not create a barrier for the possibility of new converged products; for example, telecom operators should be able to offer content if they so choose. It is also important to ensure digital signature capability, digital payment, consumer protection, and digital rights. Regulation must be technologically neutral, and technology choices are to be handled by the market. The goal is to move away from sector-specific regulation toward competition-oriented regulation. We would prefer to handle telecom with competition laws, but some special regulation may be needed in certain cases—for example, regulation for access to copper and universal service.

This agreement was followed up by the quiet shuttering of NITA, the Danish telecom agency, in 2011.

Bringing economic rigor to the FCC’s notoriously vague “public interest” standard seemed to be occurring (slowly) during the Clinton and Bush administrations. However, during the Obama years, this progress was de-railed, largely by the net neutrality silliness, which not only distracted US regulators from actual problems like rural broadband expansion but also reinvigorated the media-access movement, whose followers believe the FCC should have a major role in shaping US culture, media, and technologies.

Fortunately, those days are in the rearview mirror. The proposed creation of the OEA represents another pivot toward the likely future of US telecom regulation: a focus on consumer welfare, competition, and data-driven policy.

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Who needs a telecom regulator? Denmark doesn’t.

by on March 27, 2017 · 0 comments

US telecommunications laws are in need of updates. US law states that “the Internet and other interactive computer services” should be “unfettered by Federal or State regulation,” but regulators are increasingly imposing old laws and regulations onto new media and Internet services. Further, Federal Communications Commission actions often duplicate or displace general competition laws. Absent congressional action, old telecom laws will continue to delay and obstruct new services. A new Mercatus paper by Roslyn Layton and Joe Kane shows how governments can modernize telecom agencies and laws.

Legacy Laws

US telecom laws are codified in Title 47 of the US Code and enforced mostly by the FCC. That the first eight sections of US telecommunications law are devoted to the telegraph, the killer app of 1850, illustrates congressional inaction towards obsolete regulations.

In the last decade, therefore, several media, Internet, and telecom companies inadvertently stumbled into Communications Act quagmires. An Internet streaming company, for instance, was bankrupted for upending the TV status quo established by the FCC in the 1960s; FCC precedents mean broadcasters can be credibly threatened with license revocation for airing a documentary critical of a presidential candidate; and the thousands of Internet service providers across the US are subjected to laws designed to constrain the 1930s AT&T long-distance phone monopoly.

US telecom and tech laws, in other words, are a shining example of American “kludgeocracy”–a regime of prescriptive and dated laws whose complexity benefits special interests and harms innovators. These anti-consumer results led progressive Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig to conclude in 2008 that “it’s time to demolish the FCC.” While Lessig’s proposal goes too far, Congress should listen to the voices on the right and left urging them to sweep away the regulations of the past and rationalize telecom law for the 21st century.

Modern Telecom Policy in Denmark

An interesting new Mercatus working paper explains how Denmark took up that challenge. The paper, “Alternative Approaches to Broadband Policy: Lessons on Deregulation from Denmark,” is by Denmark-based scholar Roslyn Layton, who served on President Trump’s transition team for telecom policy, and Joe Kane, a masters student in the GMU econ department. 

The “Nordic model” is often caricatured by American conservatives (and progressives like Bernie Sanders) as socialist control of industry. But as AEI’s James Pethokoukis and others point out, it’s time both sides updated their 1970s talking points. “[W]hen it comes to regulatory efficiency and business freedom,” Tyler Cowen recently noted, “Denmark has a considerably higher [Heritage Foundation] score than does the U.S.”

Layton and Kane explore Denmark’s relatively free-market telecom policies. They explain how Denmark modernized its telecom laws over time as technology and competition evolved. Critically, the center-left government eliminated Denmark’s telecom regulator in 2011 in light of the “convergence” of services to the Internet. Scholars noted,

Nobody seemed to care much—except for the staff who needed to move to other authorities and a few people especially interested in IT and telecom regulation.

Even-handed, light telecom regulation performs pretty well. Denmark, along with South Korea, leads the world in terms of broadband access. The country also has a modest universal service program that depends primarily on the market. Further, similar to other Nordic countries, Denmark permitted a voluntary forum, including consumer groups, ISPs, and Google, to determine best practices and resolve “net neutrality” controversies.

Contrast Denmark’s tech-neutral, consumer-focused approach with recent proceedings in the United States. One of the Obama FCC’s major projects was attempting to regulate how TV streaming apps functioned–despite the fact that TV has never been more abundant and competitive. Countless hours of staff time and industry time were wasted (Trump’s election killed the effort) because advocates saw the opportunity to regulate the streaming market with a law intended to help Circuit City (RIP) sell a few more devices in 1996. The biggest waste of government resources has been the “net neutrality” fight, which stems from prior FCC attempts to apply 1930s telecom laws to 1960s computer systems. Old rules haphazardly imposed on new technologies creates a compliance mindset in our tech and telecom industries. Worse, these unwinnable fights over legal minutiae prevent FCC staff from working on issues where they can help consumers. 

Americans deserve better telecom laws but the inscrutability of FCC actions means consumers don’t know what to ask for. Layton and Kane illuminate that alternative frameworks are available. They highlight Denmark’s political and cultural differences from the US. Nevertheless, Denmark’s telecom reforms and pro-consumer policies deserve study and emulation. The Danes have shown how tech-neutral, consumer-focused policies not only can expand broadband access, they reduce government duplication and overreach.

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No, the Telecom Act didn’t destroy phone and TV competition

by on August 16, 2016 · 2 comments

I came across an article last week in the AV Club that caught my eye. The title is: “The Telecommunications Act of 1996 gave us shitty cell service, expensive cable.” The Telecom Act is the largest update to the regulatory framework set up in the 1934 Communications Act. The basic thrust of the Act was to update the telephone laws because the AT&T long-distance monopoly had been broken up for a decade. The AV Club is not a policy publication but it does feature serious reporting on media. This analysis of the Telecom Act and its effects, however, omits or obfuscates important information about dynamics in media since the 1990s.

The AV Club article offers an illustrative collection of left-of-center critiques of the Telecom Act. Similar to Glass-Steagall  repeal or Citizens United, many on the left are apparently citing the Telecom Act as a kind of shorthand for deregulatory ideology run amuck. And like Glass-Steagall repeal and Citizens United, most of the critics fundamentally misstate the effects and purposes of the law. Inexplicably, the AV Club article relies heavily on a Common Cause white paper from 2005. Now, Common Cause typically does careful work but the paper is hopelessly outdated today. Eleven years ago Netflix was a small DVD-by-mail service. There was no 4G LTE (2010). No iPhone or Google Android (2007). And no Pandora, IPTV, and a dozen other technologies and services that have revolutionized communications and media. None of the competitive churn since 2005, outlined below, is even hinted at in the AV Club piece. The actual data undermine the dire diagnoses about the state of communications and media from the various critics cited in the piece.  Continue reading →

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Clinton’s Tech and Telecom Agenda: Good News for Communications Act Reform?

by on June 29, 2016 · 0 comments

Yesterday, Hillary Clinton’s campaign released a tech and innovation agenda. The document covers many tech subjects, including cybersecurity, copyright, and and tech workforce investments, but I’ll narrow my comments to the areas I have the most expertise in: broadband infrastructure and Internet regulation. These roughly match up, respectively, to the second and fourth sections of the five-section document.

On the whole, the broadband infrastructure and Internet regulation sections list good, useful priorities. The biggest exception is Hillary’s strong endorsement of the Title II rules for the Internet, which, as I explained in the National Review last week, is a heavy-handed regulatory regime that is ripe for abuse and will be enforced by a politicized agency.

Her tech agenda doesn’t mention a Communications Act rewrite but I’d argue it’s implied in her proposed reforms. Further, her statements last year at an event suggest she supports significant telecom reforms. In early 2015, Clinton spoke to tech journalist Kara Swisher (HT Doug Brake) and it was pretty clear Clinton viewed Title II as an imperfect and likely temporary effort to enforce neutrality norms. In fact, Clinton said she prefers “a modern, 21st-century telecom technology act” to replace Title II and the rest of the 1934 Communications Act. Continue reading →

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New Article at Harvard JLPP: The FCC’s Transaction Reviews May Violate the First Amendment

by on June 8, 2016 · 0 comments

The FCC’s transaction reviews have received substantial scholarly criticism lately. The FCC has increasingly used its license transaction reviews as an opportunity to engage in ad hoc merger reviews that substitute for formal rulemaking. FCC transaction conditions since 2000 have ranged from requiring AOL-Time Warner to make future instant messaging services interoperable, to price controls for broadband for low-income families, to mandating merging parties to donate $1 million to public safety initiatives.

In the last few months alone,

  • Randy May and Seth Cooper of the Free State Foundation wrote a piece that the transaction reviews contravene rule of law norms.
  • T. Randolph Beard et al. at the Phoenix Center published a research paper about how the FCC’s informal bargaining during mergers has become much more active and politically motivated in recent years.
  • Derek Bambauer, law professor at the University of Arizona, published a law review article that criticized the use of informal agency actions to pressure companies to act in certain ways. These secretive pressures “cloak what is in reality state action in the guise of private choice.”

This week, in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, my colleague Christopher Koopman and I added to this recent scholarship on the FCC’s controversial transaction reviews. Continue reading →

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Apple eBooks Case: Supreme Court Refuses to Defend Permissionless Innovation

by on March 7, 2016 · 0 comments

This article originally appeared at techfreedom.org.

Today, the Supreme Court declined to review a Second Circuit decision that held Apple violated the antitrust laws by fixing ebook prices when, in preparing to launch its own iBookstore, it negotiated a deal with publishers that would allow them to set prices above Amazon’s one-size-fits-all $9.99 price. The appeals court reached its decision by applying the strict per se rule, which ignores any procompetitive justifications of a challenged business practice. The dissent had argued that Apple “was unwilling to [enter the ebook market] on terms that would incur a loss on e-book sales (as would happen if it met Amazon’s below-cost price),” and thus that Apple’s agreement with major publishers actually benefitted consumers by facilitating competition in the ebooks market, even if it meant higher prices for some ebooks.

The Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the case means the 2013 verdict against Apple, resulting in a $450 million dollar class-action settlement, will stand. The case began in 2010 when Apple negotiated with five major publishers, adopting an agency pricing model in which the publishers set a book’s price and gave a sales commission to Apple. This pricing model is distinct from Amazon’s previously dominant model, where t was allowed to unilaterally set e-book prices — often for below cost as a loss leader strategy to encourage sales of its own Kindle reader and promote the overall Amazon platform. The Justice Department claimed that Apple’s agency model amounted to antitrust conspiracy — and the Second Circuit agreed. Meanwhile, Apple’s entry reduced Amazon’s share of the ebooks market from 90% to 60%.

“The question here wasn’t actually whether Apple should win, but whether Apple should even be allowed to argue that its arrangement could benefit consumers,” said TechFreedom President Berin Szoka. “Apple made a strong case that its deal with publishers was critical to allowing it compete with Amazon. The Supreme Court might or might not have found those arguments convincing, but it should have at least weighed them under antitrust’s flexible rule of reason. By letting the rigid per se deal stand as the controlling legal standard, the Court has ensured that antitrust law in general will put obsolete legal precedents from the pre-digital era above consumer welfare.”

“Business model innovation is no less essential for progress than technological innovation,” concluded Szoka. “Indeed, the two usually go hand in hand. And new business models are usually essential to unseating the first mover in new markets like ebook publishing, especially when the first mover sets artificially low prices. Categorically banning deals that attempt to rebalance pricing power between distributors and publishers in multi-sided markets likely means strangling competition in its crib. Unfortunately, the real costs of today’s decision will go unseen: without an opportunity to defend new business models, innovative companies like Apple will be less likely to attempt to disrupt the dominance of entrenched incumbents. Consumers will simply never know how much today’s decision cost them.”

Read more about the argument for reversing the Second Circuit and applying a rule of reason to novel business arrangements in the amicus brief filed by the International Center for Law & Economics and eleven leading antitrust scholars. Truth on the Market, a blog dedicated to law and economics, held ablog symposium on the case last month.

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UK Competition & Markets Authority on Online Platform Regulation

by on October 30, 2015 · 0 comments

I wanted to draw your attention to this important address on online platform regulation by Alex Chisholm, the head of UK’s Competition and Markets Authority. That’s the non-ministerial department in the UK responsible for competition policy issues. Chisholm delivered the address on October 27th at the Bundesnetzagentur conference in Bonn. It’s a terrific speech that other policymakers would be wise to read and mimic to ensure that antitrust and competition policy decisions don’t derail the many benefits of the Information Revolution.

“Today, as regulators, we have the responsibility but also the great historical privilege of playing an influential role in the deployment throughout the economy of the latest of these defining technological eras,” Chisholm began. “As regulators, we must try to minimise the inevitable mismatch between how we’ve done things before and the opportunities and risks of the new,” he argued.

He continued on to specify three recommendations for those crafting policy on this front: Continue reading →

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Deregulation of Television Finally Bearing Fruit for Consumers

by on October 14, 2015 · 2 comments

Last Friday I attended a fascinating conference hosted by the Duke Law School’s Center for Innovation Policy about television regulation and competition. It’s remarkable how quickly television competition has changed and how online video providers are putting pressure on old business models.

I’ve been working on a project about competition in technology, communications, and media and one chart that stands out is one that shows increasing competition in pay television, below. Namely, that cable providers have lost nearly 15 million subscribers since 2002. Cable was essentially the only game in town in 1990 for pay television (about 100% market share). Yet today, cable’s market share approaches 50%. This competitive pressure accounts for some cable companies trying to merge in recent years.

Much of this churn by subscribers was to satellite providers but it’s the “telephone” companies providing TV that’s really had a competitive impact in recent years. Telcos went from about 0% market share in 2005 to 13% in 2014. This new competition can be tied to Congress finally allowing telephone companies to provide TV in 1996. However, these new services didn’t really get started until a decade ago when 1) digital and IP technology improved, and 2) the FCC made it clear by deregulating DSL ISPs that telephone companies could expect a market return for investing in fiber broadband nationwide.

Pay TV Market Share TLF

UPDATE:

And below is market share data going back ten more years to 1994 using FCC data, which uses a slightly different measurement methodology (hence the kink around 2003-2004). I’ve also omitted market share of Home Satellite Dish (those large dishes you sometimes see in rural areas). Though HSD has negligible market share today, it had a few million subscribers in the mid-1990s. I may add HSD later.

Pay TV Market Share TLF 1994-2014

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What Should the FTC Do about State & Local Barriers to Sharing Economy Innovation?

by on May 12, 2015 · 0 comments

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is taking a more active interest in state and local barriers to entry and innovation that could threaten the continued growth of the digital economy in general and the sharing economy in particular. The agency recently announced it would be hosting a June 9th workshop “to examine competition, consumer protection, and economic issues raised by the proliferation of online and mobile peer-to peer business platforms in certain sectors of the [sharing] economy.” Filings are due to the agency in this matter by May 26th. (Along with my Mercatus Center colleagues, I will be submitting comments and also releasing a big paper on reputational feedback mechanisms that same week. We have already released this paper on the general topic.)

Relatedly, just yesterday, the FTC sent a letter to Michigan policymakers about restricting entry by Tesla and other direct-to-consumer sellers of vehicles. Michigan passed a law in October 2014 prohibiting such direct sales. The FTC’s strongly-worded letter decries the state’s law as “protectionism for independent franchised dealers” noting that “current provisions operate as a special protection for dealers—a protection that is likely harming both competition and consumers.” The agency argues that:

consumers are the ones best situated to choose for themselves both the vehicles they want to buy and how they want to buy them. Automobile manufacturers have an economic incentive to respond to consumer preferences by choosing the most effective distribution method for their vehicle brands. Absent supportable public policy considerations, the law should permit automobile manufacturers to choose their distribution method to be responsive to the desires of motor vehicle buyers.

The agency cites the “well-developed body of research on these issues strongly suggests that government restrictions on distribution are rarely desirable for consumers” and the staff letter continues on to utterly demolish the bogus arguments set forth by defenders of the blatantly self-serving, cronyist law. (For more discussion of just how anti-competitive and anti-consumer these laws are in practice, see this January 2015 Mercatus Center study, “State Franchise Law Carjacks Auto Buyers,” by Jerry Ellig and Jesse Martinez.) Continue reading →

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The Wrong Way to End the Terrestrial Radio Exemption

by on April 19, 2015 · 0 comments

A bill before Congress would for the first time require radio broadcasters to pay royalty fees to recording artists and record labels pursuant to the Copyright Act. The proposed Fair Play Fair Pay Act (H.R. 1733) would “[make] sure that all radio services play by the same rules, and all artists are fairly compensated,” according to Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY).

… AM/FM radio has used whatever music it wants without paying a cent to the musicians, vocalists, and labels that created it. Satellite radio has paid below market royalties for the music it uses …

The bill would still allow for different fees for AM/FM radio, satellite radio and Internet radio, but it would mandate a “minimum fee” for each type of service for the first time.

A February report from the U.S. Copyright Office cites the promotional value of airtime as the longstanding justification for exempting terrestrial radio broadcasters from paying royalties under the Copyright Act.

In the traditional view of the market, broadcasters and labels representing copyright owners enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship whereby terrestrial radio stations exploit sound recordings to attract the listener pools that generate advertising dollars, and, in return, sound recording owners receive exposure that promotes record and other sales.

The Copyright Office now feels there are “significant questions” whether the traditional view remains credible today. But significant questions are not the same thing as clear evidence. Continue reading →

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