Category: Antitrust

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Antitrust Monopolization Regulation

It’s about Price, not Competition

One thing we are going to encounter a lot as the anti-big-tech crusade gets under way is the confusion of pricing problems with competition problems. Consider the attack on Apple’s promotion of its own apps on its App Store. This looks like a competition problem: Apple is using its proprietary App Store infrastructure unfairly to promote its own products over those of rivals. Get a court applying the antitrust laws to order Apple to stop doing that, and, it appears, the problem is solved.

Only it’s not solved, because the heart of the problem is not Apple’s creation of an unlevel playing field in app competition. The heart of the problem is that Apple owns the App Store itself.

And for that problem, there is no competitive solution. As Chicago School scholars pointed out long ago, if a company has a monopoly on upstream infrastructure, the company can use that monopoly to extract all of the profits from downstream businesses that rely on the infrastructure, by charging high fees for access.

So long as Apple retains the power to set the fees that it charges software developers for selling apps through the app store, Apple will be able to suck all the value out of those downstream businesses. Forcing Apple to let those businesses compete with Apple’s own apps on a level playing field will not solve the problem because app developers will still need to pay Apple a fee for access that Apple has discretion to set.

Indeed, it is a mistake to think that Apple’s promotion of its own apps on the app store reflects anticompetitive intent. Because Apple could extract all of the profits from competing developers through fees, even without selling any apps of its own, Apple’s reasons for selling its own apps in the App store, and indeed for promoting them over rival apps, can only have other purposes. Most likely, for a firm that has repeatedly demonstrated the desirability to consumers of tight integration of product components, Apple sells its own apps, and promotes them preferentially, because Apple believes that its own apps are actually better, and that when consumers search for new apps, consumers want to know if Apple has a relevant offering. (I know I do.)

What should trouble us about the App Store is not that Apple manages competition on that platform–the company has every reason to do that with a view to making consumers happy–but rather that Apple’s control of the platform allows the company to extract all of the gains created by the platform for itself through fees, leaving relatively little for other app developers, or for consumers themselves.

The only way to solve that problem using competition would be to lessen Apple’s control over the App Store itself. But doing that would destroy the closed app ecosystem that has differentiated the iPhone positively in the minds of consumers from the mayhem and unreliability of Android phones. Letting iPhone owners install apps from anywhere is a recipe for trouble.

In the App Store, as in most tech platforms, we have an efficient market structure. But a monopolistic one. That means that complaints about fairness ultimately must amount to complaints about price, not competition. The solution can therefore only be price regulation, not antitrust.

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Antitrust

Antitrust Blowback

The New York Times spent the spring and summer brazenly promoting antitrust enforcement against its own enemies, Google, Facebook, and Amazon, even though those companies are hardly in the first rank of firms in need of the antitrust hammer. (Telecoms, anyone?) All three are implicated in a decline in writer earnings, thanks to the competition the three have brought to the newspaper and publishing industries, and the Times seemed to want to put a stop to that.

But now the Times is shocked to find that the Trump Administration is engaging in a “cruel parody of antitrust enforcement” in its investigation into the car companies that have worked with California to improve emissions standards. The Administration’s apparent view that the car companies are guilty of collusion is, according to the Times, “[a] nakedly political abuse of authority.” That’s rich given the Times’s own apparent efforts to exploit the antitrust laws for private gain.

Where, incidentally, was the Times’s charge of foul motives when the Trump Administration opened antitrust investigations into Google, Facebook, and Amazon this summer? Absent, of course. The Times celebrated the opening of those investigations knowing full well that President Trump harbors animus toward each of those three liberal corporate bastions, and indeed knowing that the only antitrust case in which the Trump Administration had shown any interest so far was the politically-motivated attack on a merger involving Trump enemy CNN.

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Antitrust Monopolization World

The Lord Grand Secretary on Regulated Monopoly

The present plan for unifying the salt and iron monopoly is not alone that profit may accrue to the state, but that in the future the fundamental of agriculture may be established and the non-essential repressed, cliques dispersed, extravagance prohibited, and plurality of offices stopped. In ancient times the famous mountains and great marshes were not given as fiefs to be the monopolized profit of inferiors, because the profit of the mountains and the sea and the produce of the broad marshes are the stored up wealth of the Empire and by rights ought to belong to the privy coffers of the Crown; but Your Majesty has unselfishly assigned them to the State Treasurer to assist and succor the people. Ne’er-do-wells and upstarts desiring to appropriate the produce of the mountains and the seas as their own rich inheritance, exploit the common people. Therefore many are those who advise to put a stop to these practices.

Iron implements and soldiers’ weapons are important in the service of the Empire and should not be made the gainful business of everybody. Formerly the great families, aggressive and powerful, obtained control of the profit of the mountains and sea, mined iron at Shih-ku and smelted it, and manufactured salt. One family would collect a host of over a thousand men, mostly exiles who had gone far from their native hamlets, abandoning the tombs of their ancestors. Attaching themselves to a great house and collecting in the midst of mountain fastnesses and barren marshes, they made wickedness and counterfeiting their business, seeking to build up the power of their clique. Their readiness to do evil was also great. Now since the road of recommending capable men has been opened wide, by careful selection of the supervising officers, restoring peace to the people does not wait on the abolition of the salt and iron monopoly.

Esson M. Gale, Discourses on Salt and Iron : A Debate on State Control of Commerce and Industry in Ancient China, Chapters I-XIX: Translated from the Chinese of Huan K’uan with Introduction and Notes 34-35 (1931).
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Antitrust Monopolization

Amazon’s Problem Is Too Much Competition, Not Too Little

Amazon has come under assault in recent weeks for failing to keep “thousands of banned, unsafe, or mislabeled” products sold by third parties off of its site. The New York Times, which has been acting as a mouthpiece for the Authors Guild in its crusade against Amazon, has focused on the sale of knock-off books. But The Wall Street Journal has shown that the problem extends across multiple product categories, and concludes that “Amazon has ceded control of its site.”

The great irony here is that this is proof that Amazon is being too open to competition, not, as Elizabeth Warren, the Open Markets Institute, and the Times have been arguing, too closed to it.

Unlike, say, Apple, which designs virtually every component of its phones, Amazon chose early on to platformize its business. When it created a useful cloud service to support its ecommerce website, Amazon opened the platform, called Amazon Web Services, to the market, turning it into a successful business in its own right. Amazon is doing the same thing with package delivery, allowing anyone with a car and an app to deliver packages for the company. And of course Amazon platformized its own ecommerce website, allowing third party sellers to list and sell products through Amazon.com.

Of course, Amazon could have taken a more traditional route. It could have kept its cloud services to itself. It could have continued to contract out its package delivery business to a single vendor, like UPS. And it could have remained the only retailer on its own ecommerce website. If it had, it is hard to see how Amazon would have come in for criticism from the big tech breakup crowd. Just as nary a peep has been heard about the fact that Apple insists, for example, on designing its own iPhone CPUs.

But Amazon instead did what competition advocates are supposed to want: the company threw open virtually every component of its business to competition. As a result, however, it has been attacked by Elizabeth Warren and others for failing to go even further, and to stop using its own platforms entirely. Under their approach, it is not enough, for example, to allow others to use Amazon Web Services. Amazon must stop using those services itself, otherwise in operating them there is a danger that Amazon will favor its own downstream businesses. Amazon might, for example, tank Walmart’s cloud access in order to get competitive advantage in retail. Similarly, Amazon should stop retailing products for its own account on Amazon.com, argues this group, because Amazon can alter the website to give its own products competitive advantage (by, for example, displaying them more prominently in search results).

So it is bitterly ironic to find Amazon now coming under assault for failing to exercise more control over the third party sellers who use its ecommerce platform.

The lesson here is two-fold. First, competition is no panacea. As policymakers learned in the mid-19th century, when economic liberalism first came on the scene, excessive competition means fakery, fraud, low quality, and boom and bust cycles that sow economic instability.

Second, antitrust and competition policy are not progressive projects. Progressives seek regulated environments. The big firm dictating standards and stamping out the chaos that is competition across all levels of its supply chain is itself a regulated environment. If a firm does not regulate the way progressives want, the solution for progressives is not to rip the firm apart as a petulant child would rip apart a disappointing toy, but to change the way that the firm behaves. Calling upon Amazon to do more to control what books third party sellers can sell through the company’s sites is a demand for less competition. If that sounds progressive, it is.

One more thing: The Times’s attack on Amazon for selling knock-off books highlights the political opportunism of writers–understood as an interest group–in recent antitrust debates. For at the same time that writers have wrapped themselves in the small-is-beautiful flag, attacking Amazon for destroying main street retail, they have seemed not to think twice about then turning around and attacking Amazon for failing to cast off from its website the small independent publishers of knock-offs that are competing directly, and successfully, with writers. At the end of the day, writers’ fight against Amazon is about protecting writers, not about promoting competition.

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Antitrust

The Fundamental Unit of Competition Is Not the Firm

The fundamental unit of competition is the individual. In American economic lore, the best way to promote innovation is to minimize barriers to entry into markets and increase the rewards to market entry, to ensure that innovators can bring cutting-edge products to market, challenging old and creaky incumbents. In this story, the unit doing the entering is the firm–often visualized as a scrappy startup–and the market consists of one or more incumbent firms serving a particular consumer need with legacy technology.

But why can’t the startup be an individual person–an innovator–and the market be the interior of some great big bureaucratic firm, plus that firm’s own customers? You have an idea for a new product, you take it to your boss, your boss approves it, and the firm starts selling it to customers. There’s competition here, because you compete with other employees of the firm. If your innovation does well, you get promoted.

We all understand that competition of this kind–within-firm competition–works, because we’ve all experienced it, at least to some extent, at that vast bureaucratic organization known as school. You compete against your classmates for grades. And that drives ambitious students to work around the clock to succeed (at least, it was that way at my high school). Why can’t firms produce great innovators internally, in the same way?

One might object that the unit of competition must be the firm because only firms have the resources to implement an individual’s innovative ideas. An individual employee of a great multinational won’t have the resources he needs to develop an idea into a marketable product. By contrast, the argument goes, a startup can assemble the resources it needs to implement its vision simply by tapping funding, labor, and other markets.

But that doesn’t make sense at all. An employee at a big firm can call upon all of the resources of the firm, and the firm itself can seek additional financing, in transforming a bright idea into a marketable product. Indeed, you would expect that a large firm would be able to deploy resources in favor of an employee’s bright idea more efficiently than would a market, because the firm can realize economies of scale in providing resources to support the employee. The startup might need to hire its own accountant, lawyer, and so on, whereas the employee of the big firm could use the firm’s existing accounting and legal staffs for support, potentially filling excess capacity in those departments.

In other words, the big firm is itself a platform upon which competition can thrive, so long as the firm is organized in a way that promotes competition between employees in innovative thinking. While business schools do spend a lot of time studying how to promote innovation within firms, and the tech giants have wrestled with the problem of internal innovation quite a bit, neither antitrust legal scholarship, nor the industrial organization field in economics that serves as antitrust’s social scientific foundation, devotes any time–to my knowledge–to the problem of how to promote competition within firms.

One does find, in Arrow’s famous work on innovation, the following hint of appreciation of the possibilities:

There is really no need for the firm to be the fundamental unit of organization in invention; there is plenty of reason to suppose that individual talents count for a good deal more than the firm as an organization. If provision is made for the rental of necessary equipment, a much wider variety of research contracts with individuals as well as firms and with varying modes of payment, including incentives, could be arranged.

Kenneth Arrow, Economic Welfare and the Allocation of Resources for Invention, in The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity: Economic and Social Factors 609, 624 (R. Nelson ed., 1962).

The failure to consider competition within firms reflects, in my view, a cultural blindspot borne of our American aversion to bureaucratic solutions, regardless whether they work. It is reasonable to suppose that sometimes, the best way to promote competition, and reap its benefits in terms of greater innovation, will come not by making it easier for startups to enter a market, but by insisting that the large firms that dominate the market organize themselves internally in ways that promote innovation. In such cases, rather than impose remedies aimed at promoting external competition, antitrust enforcers should impose remedies that promote internal competition.

One hint that failure to consider internal competition is essentially cultural comes in a study cited in F.M. Scherer’s great, dated, industrial organization textbook. The study shows that in the middle of the 20th century, innovation rates were comparable across countries that pursued different approaches to industrial organization. In British markets that were dominated by large bureaucratic firms, innovation tended to happen internally, within those large firms, whereas in less concentrated American markets, innovation tended to come from startups. Our preconceptions regarding where innovation is possible may be all that limits where our innovation actually comes from.

I’ve been perplexed by our arbitrary insistence that the firm is the basic unit of innovative competition for a long time. What got me thinking about this today is the story of the Australian rocket scientist who invented the black box used on airplanes. While working for a government aeronautical research laboratory, he was able to convince his boss to let him work on the project, albeit in secret because it did not directly contribute to the lab’s mission.

The story of the black box is not directly on point–it involves a government agency and an innovation that was not the product of competition between individuals within the agency–but it does show how an enterprising innovator can marshal resources within a bureaucracy to achieve the kind of from-scratch innovation that we typically associate with startups.

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Antitrust Monopolization

When Writers are a Special Interest: The Press and the Movement to Break Up Big Tech

When Uber and Lyft brought competition to the Seattle taxi market, drivers fought back, asking the city to let them form a cartel to demand higher wages from rideshare companies. If that sounds anticompetitive, it is. But petitioning the government for protection from competition is also completely legal, because the courts expect that informed voters will make the right call about whether the petitioners need a bailout.

That system works well enough for cabbies, but not for another group that has been seeking government protection from competition of late: writers. In their role as journalists, writers give voters the information they need to make the right call about bailouts, but writers cannot be expected to do that dispassionately when they are the ones seeking government protection.

Over the past fifteen years, writers’ earnings have nose-dived thanks to competition from Google, Facebook, and Amazon directed at two of the main industries that employ writers: newspapers, which have lost advertising revenue to Google and Facebook, and publishers, which have lost the ability to dictate book prices as Amazon’s bookselling business has grown.

As a result, writers have quite understandably come to view these companies as a threat to their livelihood. Through the Authors Guild and the News Media Alliance, writers are calling for government protection from competition in the form of antitrust enforcement against Google, Facebook, and Amazon, and an antitrust exemption for newspaper cartels.

But writers’ views on big tech have also carried over into their reporting, making it hard for the public to judge whether government aid is warranted. I will focus on reporting by The New York Times that appears to me—as an antitrust scholar—to be colored by writers’ sense of professional vulnerability to the tech giants. But examples can be found in many other sources.

A Bully Pulpit

One expression of the strength of anti-tech feeling at the Times is the sheer volume of Times reportage suggesting that Google, Facebook and Amazon should be broken up or otherwise prosecuted under the antitrust laws.

In the first seven months of 2019, the Times published more than 300 articles mentioning Google, Facebook, or Amazon and antitrust, including an Op-Ed by a Facebook founder calling for breakup, an article discussing legal changes required to “take down big tech,” and another musing on what Amazon will do once its “domination is complete.”

That’s a lot of ink to spill on an issue that lacks either public or scholarly support. Polls show that the public has little interest in breaking up companies that either employ them, or sell them products at low or zero prices. And although I have decried Facebook’s treatment of app developers, to my knowledge no antitrust specialist has argued for the breakup of Google, Facebook, or Amazon. To the contrary, probably the two most prominent scholars in the field, Herbert Hovenkamp and Carl Shapiro, have urged caution. (Tim Wu, who has written on antitrust, but has much broader interests, has made the limited suggestion that Facebook should unwind its acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram.)

Grasping for Scholarly Support

The absence of scholarly support for antitrust action was highlighted by the oddest episode to date in the Times’ reporting on the tech giants. In 2017, the paper reported extensively on academic work by a law student that sought to make a legal case for antitrust action against Amazon. What surprised antitrust scholars about the publicity wasn’t just that the Times had bypassed experts in the field in favor of promoting student work, but that the work itself broke no new ground.

Firms violate the antitrust laws by taking steps to disadvantage rivals. But the student, Lina Khan, offered no evidence of such conduct. Her closest attempt—the argument that Amazon had run diapers.com out of business by charging very low diaper prices—fell flat because charging low prices is anticompetitive only if the prices charged are below cost. Otherwise, low prices are a sign of healthy competition. Khan offered no evidence of below-cost pricing.

By reporting this work, however, the paper created the impression that there is an antitrust case to be made against Amazon, one that the paper reinforced by publishing two Op-Eds by Khan and then a profile by David Streitfeld that went so far as to call her a “legal prodigy.”

Khan’s association with Barry Lynn, a journalist and head of the pro-breakup Open Markets Institute, for which Khan worked both before and after law school, highlights the close relationship between the Times’s reporting and writers’ grievances against the tech giants. Lynn has written to the Justice Department on behalf of organized writers calling for antitrust action against Amazon.

Creating the Impression of Crisis

Equally troubling is the paper’s reporting on the ongoing House investigation into big tech. The Times ran a front page story on the investigation under the headline “Antitrust Troubles Snowball for Tech Giants,” suggesting a groundswell of interest in antitrust action.

What the story did not disclose is that the Congressman leading the investigation, David Cicilline—whom the Times quoted extensively in that article—is a sponsor of legislation pushed by the News Media Alliance that would allow newspapers to cartelize for purposes of fighting Google and Facebook. Cicilline has, incidentally, hired Khan to help with the investigation.

Similarly, the Times recently gave front page coverage to a preliminary step by antitrust enforcers to consider an investigation into big tech, and suggested that a case would have merit. But the paper did not mention that the only major antitrust action brought by the Trump Administration to date was the politically-motivated, and failed, attempt to block AT&T’s acquisition of TimeWarner, owner of Trump rival CNN. Given the President’s animus toward Google, Facebook, and Amazon, the opening of an investigation tells little about whether a case would have merit.

The Giant that Didn’t Bark

Further suggestion that writers’ professional concerns are coloring their coverage of the tech giants comes from the conspicuous absence of Apple from the paper’s crosshairs. Under the standard measure of monopoly power, the ability profitably to raise price, Apple has far more power than Google, Facebook, or Amazon, earning twice what runner-up Google earned last year.

But it has been hard to find a critical word about Apple in the Times’s pages.

That may be because Apple has played the role of hero to a beleaguered trade. In 2009, as the Kindle was sowing panic among publishing executives, Steve Jobs entered into a cartel agreement with the major publishers to sell ebooks via iTunes at fixed prices several dollars above the prices Amazon insisted upon for the Kindle. The Justice Department frustrated these plans, however, suing to break up the cartel, and winning at trial against Apple.

Against this backdrop, other connections between the Times and advocates of breakup appear in a new light. Times writers have repeatedly appeared to cast Elizabeth Warren, who has called for breakup, as the Democratic frontrunner, even as she has lagged in the polls. And the Times endorsed Zephyr Teachout in her failed 2018 bid for New York Attorney General. Teachout, who made her name as a scholar of corruption, rather than antitrust, is, to my knowledge, the only current law scholar publicly to call for breakup of Google and Facebook.

I don’t think there is a writers’ conspiracy here. But just as you won’t hear a good word from a cabbie about Uber or Lyft—even if these companies have made life for the rest of us much easier—you won’t hear a good word from a writer about Google, Facebook, or Amazon. The difference is that when writers complain, America is forced to listen.

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Annals of American Decline Antitrust Despair Regulation World

Why Progressives Once Fought Tariffs as They Fought Monopolies

The Nineteenth Century understood very well that tariffs have the same effect on consumers as do monopolies. Tariffs prevent foreign competitors from undercutting the prices of domestic companies, because the foreign competitors must now pay the tariffs, and that in turn allows domestic companies to raise prices. It is for this reason that in the Nineteenth Century the same Progressive movement that sought to prevent monopoly pricing, either through antitrust or rate regulation, also sought to replace tariffs with income taxation as the source for government revenue. And succeeded.

But what millions of Americans understood in the late Nineteenth Century is greeted as a bizarre and surprising result today.

Compare:

President Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on imported washing machines has had an odd effect . . . . It is hardly surprising that the tariffs drove up the price of foreign washers. Perhaps more unexpectedly, they also prompted American manufacturers to raise their prices.
Companies that largely sell imported washers, like Samsung and LG, raised prices to compensate for the tariff costs they had to pay. But domestic manufacturers, like Whirlpool, increased prices, too, largely because they could. There aren’t a lot of upstart domestic producers of laundry equipment that could undercut Whirlpool on price if the company decided to capture more profits by raising prices at the same time its competitors were forced to do so.

Jim Tankersley, Trump’s Washing Machine Tariffs Stung Consumers While Lifting Corporate Profits, N.Y. Times, April 21, 2019.

With:

Beginning as early as the 1860s, the Democratic Party challenged Republican power with a biting critique of the central element of the consumption-tax system — the tariff. . . . The Democratic Party developed a general attack on special privilege, monopoly power, and public corruption — one that harkened back to the ideals of the American Revolution and the early republic. Most important, the Democrats described the tariff as the primary engine of a Republican program of subsidizing giant corporations. In 1882, in his first public political statement, the young Woodrow Wilson declared that the tariffs had “Monopoly for a father.” . . . . In the face of these problems, millions of Americans . . . regarded the progressive income tax at the federal level as the next-best alternative . . . .

W. Elliot Brownlee, Federal Taxation in America: A History 77, 79 (3d ed. 2016).
To battles won that were then fought anew,
  Our bodies hastened while our minds withdrew.
Categories
Antitrust Monopolization Regulation

The Big and the Bad

That firm size tells us little about propensity to innovate is nicely illustrated by contrasting AT&T and Verizon with Amazon. AT&T and Verizon have rightly been criticized for what looks like intentional underinvestment in broadband, made possible by their oligopoly power. Comes now Amazon, planning to invest billions to provide global broadband access via satellite, and Google, investing billions to build new undersea internet cables.

The big can do wrong, but they can also do right.

There is a Schumpeterian lesson here too. Schumpeter argued that market power is always in jeopardy from outside the market, and that is in evidence here. Who would have thought a few years ago that an online retailer would one day plan to use the profits generated from dominance in its own market to challenge the vicious telecom oligopoly?

It should also be clear that a broken up Amazon or Google, an Amazon or Google confined to one business, one market, and one level of the supply chain, would have neither the capital, nor the ambition, nor the legal right to attack the telecoms.

It is not size that is a problem, but the misuse of size, and the remedy for misuse is to encourage the good uses and suppress the bad. Which is to say: not to break up, but to regulate.

Categories
Antitrust Meta Monopolization Regulation

Chicxulubian Antitrust

There is a lot for industrial policy, including antitrust, to gain from reflecting upon evolution. Consider, for example, the theory that the demise of the dinosaurs in a catastrophic meteor impact at Chicxulub cleared the way for mammals to become the world’s dominant megafauna.

If we suppose that mammals are better creatures than dinosaurs — more advanced, more sophisticated, somehow — then the theory suggests that until the meteor impact the dinosaurs had short-circuited competition from mammals, preventing them from leveraging their superiority to overpower the dinosaurs.

Perhaps the short circuit was the mere fact of dinosaurs’ incumbency. Mammals couldn’t reach livestock size, for example, and compete with larger dinosaurs, simply because dinosaurs already occupied that niche, denying mammals the resources they would need to evolve into it. Similarly, antitrust and innovation economics have long recognized that there are first-mover advantages that can block competition. Indeed, the argument current today that Google and Facebook use their size to acquire startups before they can grow into serious competitors resembles the role dinosaurs’ incumbency may have played in obstructing the development of mammals.

But perhaps instead of confirming our fears about the anticompetitive character of incumbency, the story of dinosaurs and mammals undermines it. For there is no reason to assume that mammals really are the better — more advanced, more sophisticated, somehow — of the two groups. Perhaps if the advantages of incumbency could be eliminated, and dinosaurs and mammals, in fully-developed form, could be set against each other, dinosaurs would emerge victorious.

In that case the meteor impact did not operate the way some believe that using the antitrust laws to break up Big Tech would operate today. The cataclysm did not free up space for more innovative upstarts to develop and occupy the ecosystem, but rather wiped out a more advanced form, allowing less-developed upstarts to thrive, and then to turn around and use the advantages of incumbency to prevent the more advanced form from returning to its original position of dominance. The meteor laid low the dinosauric epitome of life, and mammals leapt into the space and prevented dinosaurs from coming back. It is hard, when looking at the dinosaurs’ descendants, the birds, with their obsession with beauty, long-term amorous relationships, and increasingly-well-documented intelligence, not to wonder what might have been.

In other words, there is no reason for industrial policymakers to suppose that periodically shaking up the business world using the industrial cataclysm of the deconcentration order must necessarily, through competition, lead to better firms. Some value judgment must be made by policymakers regarding whether what will come next promises to be better than what we have now. Competition is path dependent, a kind of roll of the dice, and there is no guarantee that a new roll will produce better forms than the last. The evolution of the mammals into man — an unmitigated disaster for the global ecosystem — stands as Exhibit One to that sorry fact.

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Antitrust Monopolization Regulation

Boeing Shows Us Why Prices Are Too Important for Private Enterprise to Decide Alone

The sad tale of Boeing’s pricing of essential safety features for the 737 MAX 8 as product options is an object lesson in why pricing should always be a public-private project.

Many firms engage in price discrimination: charging different prices for the same product. The ideal way to do that is to generate reliable information on the willingness of each customer to pay, and then to charge higher prices to those willing to pay more and lower prices to those willing to pay less. But often firms can’t just discriminate in prices directly, either because discriminatory pricing would be politically sensitive, or because firms just don’t know how much buyers are willing to pay. So firms discriminate indirectly, by splitting the product into a base model and then selling optional additions.

By pricing the additions far above the actual incremental cost of adding the addition onto the product, the firm can seduce buyers into bringing price discrimination upon themselves. The buyer who is relatively price insensitive — and therefore has a high willingness to pay — will load up on options, and end up paying a far higher total price for the product than will the price-sensitive buyers, who will go with the base model. If this sounds like the business model of the car industry, that’s because car makers — particularly GM — pioneered this form of covert price discrimination in the mid-20th century.

Is covert price discrimination of this kind good for the economy? If a firm’s overhead is so high that the firm would not be able to cover costs, including overhead costs, at a competitive uniform price, then the answer may be yes. But if not, then price discrimination represents a pure redistribution of wealth from consumers to firms, by allowing firms to raise prices higher than necessary, to those consumers who happen to be willing to pay more.

Boeing’s decision to charge pilots extra to be able to read data from a key sensor used by an anti-stall system in the 737 MAX 8 is a classic example of covert price discrimination. The cost of enabling pilots to read data off the sensor was apprently near zero, but Boeing charged airlines thousands of dollars for that option in order to coax airlines with a higher willingness to pay to pay more for a 737 MAX 8. Predictably, budget airlines, like Lion Air, whose 737 MAX 8 crashed on takeoff, possibly because pilots could not read data off of the sensor, and therefore did not know that the plane’s anti-stall system was malfunctioning, did not choose that option.

If America had a general price regulator — an administrative agency responsible for approving the prices charged by large American businesses, including Boeing — then that regulator would be able to tell us today whether Boeing really needed to price discriminate in order to cover overhead, and therefore whether the high price Boeing charged for that safety option really was justified by its costs. Or whether Boeing’s price discrimination amounted to the charging of above-cost prices — prices that redistribute wealth from consumers to firms, not because the extra wealth is required to make the firm ready, willing, and able to produce, not because the extra wealth is necessary to give investors a reasonable return on their investment, but simply because Boeing, as a member of a two-firm global airplane production duopoly (along with Airbus), had the market power to raise price. And because Boeing thought it had more of a right to airline profits — and ultimately to the hard-earned cash of consumers — than do the airlines that buy planes from Boeing and the consumers that fly on them. If it turns out that the safety option was priced higher to extract monopoly profits from consumers, rather than to cover overhead, then we have in Boeing an example of how market power can inflict not just harm on the pocketbook, but actually take lives.

The existence of a general price regulator would have allowed us to pass judgment on Boeing, because what price regulators do is to extract information from big businesses about their costs, including overhead, and based on that to determine whether these firms need to engage in price discrimination to survive, and if so, how much price discrimination is required to cover costs. Regulators then approve price discrimination — called “demand-based pricing” in regulator-speak — if it is needed to cover costs, and reject it where it amounts to no more than an exercise of monopoly power.

Because we have no price regulation of airline production, we simply have no way of telling for sure what Boeing was doing when it decided to charge more for the safety option.

Indeed, the advantage of having a rate regulatory agency goes deeper than just ensuring that firms deploy price discrimination only when it is absolutely necessary to cover costs. Rate regulators have a long history of using their power to approve prices to insist that firms structure their covert price discrimination in a way that is maximally beneficial to consumers. That includes insisting that when firms break their products into base models and sets of options, they do so with a view to safety. Indeed, one of the great benefits of rate regulation is government say over what constitutes an acceptable product. When the airlines were regulated by the Civil Aeronautics Board, for example, the regulator insisted that the airlines maximize the number of direct flights they offer, with the result that today’s layover hell was largely unknown to mid-century fliers.

Boeing has an incentive to make safety features optional, because high willingness-to-pay airlines are more likely to cough up for safety options. But the extra profits that go to Boeing from being able to price discriminate against wealthy airlines come at the cost of delivery of unsafe planes to budget carriers. A rate regulator might well have insisted that that Boeing’s definition of a base aircraft model include far more safety features than it does today.

Of course, the Federal Aviation Administration, which has authority over flight safety, could have mandated that airlines purchase the optional safety features, but chose not to do so. But a rate regulator would have added an additional regulatory safety net, making it possible to stop dangerous pricing at the source — when the prices are chosen — rather than when airlines make decisions about which options to buy, as the FAA would have done.

Given that aircraft manufacturing prices are not regulated today, is our only option to throw up our hands in despair? No. We can still at least get to the bottom of the question whether Boeing priced that option as an exercise of monopoly power, or out of a need to cover costs, through the unlikely vehicle of the antitrust laws. I have argued that the Sherman Act should be read to provide a right of action to any buyer to sue for a judicial determination whether a firm is charging above-cost, and therefore unnecessarily high, prices.

Now would be the perfect time for the world’s airlines to bring that antitrust case.