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A Reflection on Commissioner Pai, Chairman Pai, and Public Service
Josh Wright — 21 January 2021 — Leave a comment
[TOTM: The following is part of a digital symposium by TOTM guests and authors on the legal and regulatory issues that arose during Ajit Pai's tenure as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. The entire series of posts is available here.
Joshua D. Wright is university professor and executive director of the Global Antitrust Institute at George Mason University's Scalia Law School. He served as a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission from 2013 through 2015.]
Much of this symposium celebrates Ajit's contributions as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and his accomplishments and leadership in that role. And rightly so. But Commissioner Pai, not just Chairman Pai, should also be recognized.
I first met Ajit when we were both minority commissioners at our respective agencies: the FCC and Federal Trade Commission. Ajit had started several months before I was confirmed. I watched his performance in the minority with great admiration. He reached new heights when he shifted from minority commissioner to chairman, and the accolades he will receive for that work are quite appropriate. But I want to touch on his time as a minority commissioner at the FCC and how that should inform the retrospective of his tenure.
Let me not bury the lead: Ajit Pai has been, in my view, the most successful, impactful minority commissioner in the history of the modern regulatory state. And it is that success that has led him to become the most successful and impactful chairman, too.
I must admit all of this success makes me insanely jealous. My tenure as a minority commissioner ran in parallel with Ajit. We joked together about our fierce duel to be the reigning king of regulatory dissents. We worked together fighting against net neutrality. We compared notes on dissenting statements and opinions. I tried to win our friendly competition. I tried pretty hard. And I lost; worse than I care to admit. But we had fun. And I very much admired the combination of analytical rigor, clarity of exposition, and intellectual honesty in his work. Anyway, the jealousy would be all too much if he weren't also a remarkable person and friend.
The life of a minority commissioner can be a frustrating one. Like Sisyphus, the minority commissioner often wakes up each day to roll the regulatory (well, in this case, deregulatory) boulder up the hill, only to watch it roll down. And then do it again. And again. At times, it is an exhausting series of jousting matches with the windmills of Washington bureaucracy. It is not often that a minority commissioner has as much success as Commissioner Pai did: dissenting opinions ultimately vindicated by judicial review; substantive victories on critical policy issues; paving the way for institutional and procedural reforms.
It is one thing to write a raging dissent about how the majority has lost all principles. Fire and brimstone come cheap when there aren't too many consequences to what you have to say. Measure a man after he has been granted power and a chance to use it, and only then will you have a true test of character. Ajit passes that test like few in government ever have.
This is part of what makes Ajit Pai so impressive. I have seen his work firsthand. The multitude of successes Ajit achieved as Chairman Pai were predictable, precisely because Commissioner Pai told the world exactly where he stood on important telecommunications policy issues, the reasons why he stood there, and then, well, he did what he said he would. The Pai regime was much more like a Le'Veon Bell run, between the tackles, than a no-look pass from Patrick Mahomes to Tyreek Hill. Commissioner Pai shared his playbook with the world; he told us exactly where he was going to run the ball. And then Chairman Pai did exactly that. And neither bureaucratic red tape nor political pressure—or even physical threat—could stop him.
Here is a small sampling of his contributions, many of them building on groundwork he laid in the minority:
Focus on Economic Analysis
One of Chairman Pai's most important contributions to the FCC is his work to systematically incorporate economic analysis into FCC decision-making. The triumph of this effort was establishing the Office of Economic Analysis (OEA) in 2018. The OEA focus on conducting economic analyses of the costs, benefits, and economic impacts of the commission's proposed rules will be a critical part of agency decision-making from here on out. This act alone would form a legacy any agency head could easily rest their laurels on. The OEA's work will shape the agency for decades and ensure that agency decisions are made with the oversight economics provides.
This is a hard thing to do; just hiring economists is not enough. Structure matters. How economists get information to decision-makers determines if it will be taken seriously. To this end, Ajit has taken all the lessons from what has made the economists at the FTC so successful—and the lessons from the structural failures at other agencies—and applied them at the FCC.
Structural independence looks like "involving economists on cross-functional teams at the outset and allowing the economics division to make its own, independent recommendations to decision-makers."[1] And it is necessary for economics to be taken seriously within an agency structure. Ajit has assured that FCC decision-making will benefit from economic analysis for years to come.
Narrowing the Digital Divide
Chairman Pai made helping the disadvantaged get connected to the internet and narrowing the digital divide the top priorities during his tenure. And Commissioner Pai was fighting for this long before the pandemic started.
As businesses, schools, work, and even health care have moved online, the need to get Americans connected with high-speed broadband has never been greater. Under Pai's leadership, the FCC has removed bureaucratic barriers[2] and provided billions in funding[3] to facilitate rural broadband buildout. We are talking about connections to some 700,000 rural homes and businesses in 45 states, many of whom are gaining access to high-speed internet for the first time.
Ajit has also made sure to keep an eye out for the little guy, and communities that have been historically left behind. Tribal communities,[4] particularly in the rural West, have been a keen focus of his, as he knows all-too-well the difficulties and increased costs associated with servicing those lands. He established programs to rebuild and expand networks in the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico[5] in an effort to bring the islands to parity with citizens living on the mainland.
You need not take my word for it; he really does talk about this all the time. As he said in a speech at the National Tribal Broadband Summit: "Since my first day in this job, I've said that closing the digital divide was my top priority. And as this audience knows all too well, nowhere is that divide more pronounced than on Tribal lands." That work is not done; it is beyond any one person. But Ajit should be recognized for his work bridging the divide and laying the foundation for future gains.
And again, this work started as minority commissioner. Before he was chairman, Pai proposed projects for rural broadband development; he frequently toured underserved states and communities; and he proposed legislation to offer the 21st century promise to economically depressed areas of the country. Looking at Chairman Pai is only half the picture.
Keeping Americans Connected
One would not think that the head of the Federal Communications Commission would be a leader on important health-care issues, but Ajit has made a real difference here too. One of his major initiatives has been the development of telemedicine solutions to expand access to care in critical communities.
Beyond encouraging buildout of networks in less-connected areas, Pai's FCC has also worked to allocate funding for health-care providers and educational institutions who were navigating the transition to remote services. He ensured that health-care providers' telecommunications and information services were funded. He worked with the U.S. Department of Education to direct funds for education stabilization and allowed schools to purchase additional bandwidth. And he granted temporary additional spectrum usage to broadband providers to meet the increased demand upon our nation's networks. Oh, and his Keep Americans Connected Pledge gathered commitment from more than 800 companies to ensure that Americans would not lose their connectivity due to pandemic-related circumstances. As if the list were not long enough, Congress' January coronavirus relief package will ensure that these and other programs, like Rip and Replace, will remain funded for the foreseeable future.
I might sound like I am beating a dead horse here, but the seeds of this, too, were laid in his work in the minority. Here he is describing his work in a 2015 interview, as a minority commissioner:
My own father is a physician in rural Kansas, and I remember him heading out in his car to visit the small towns that lay 40 miles or more from home. When he was there, he could provide care for people who would otherwise never see a specialist at all. I sometimes wonder, back in the 1970s and 1980s, how much easier it would have been on patients, and him, if broadband had been available so he could provide healthcare online.
Agency Transparency and Democratization
Many minority commissioners like to harp on agency transparency. Some take a different view when they are in charge. But Ajit made good on his complaints about agency transparency when he became Chairman Pai. He did this through circulating draft items well in advance of monthly open meetings, giving people the opportunity to know what the agency was voting on.
You used to need a direct connection with the FCC to even be aware of what orders were being discussed—the worst of the D.C. swamp—but now anyone can read about the working items, in clear language.
These moves toward a more transparent, accessible FCC dispel the impression that the agency is run by Washington insiders who are disconnected from the average person. The meetings may well be dry and technical—they really are—but Chairman Pai's statements are not only good-natured and humorous, but informative and substantive. The public has been well-served by his efforts here.
Incentivizing Innovation and Next-Generation Technologies
Chairman Pai will be remembered for his encouragement of innovation. Under his chairmanship, the FCC discontinued rules that unnecessarily required carriers to maintain costly older, lower-speed networks and legacy voice services. It streamlined the discontinuance process for lower-speed services if the carrier is already providing higher-speed service or if no customers are using the service. It also okayed streamlined notice following force majeure events like hurricanes to encourage investment and deployment of newer, faster infrastructure and services following destruction of networks. The FCC also approved requests by companies to provide high-speed broadband through non-geostationary orbit satellite constellations and created a streamlined licensing process for small satellites to encourage faster deployment.
This is what happens when you get a tech nerd at the head of an agency he loves and cares for. A serious commitment to good policy with an eye toward the future.
Restoring Internet Freedom
This is a pretty sensitive one for me. You hear less about it now, other than some murmurs from the Biden administration about changing it, but the debate over net neutrality got nasty and apocalyptic.
It was everywhere; people saying Chairman Pai would end the internet as we know it. The whole web blacked out for a day in protest. People mocked up memes showing a 25 cent-per-Google-search charge. And as a result of this over-the-top rhetoric, my friend, and his family, received death threats.
That is truly beyond the pale. One could not blame anyone for leaving public service in such an environment. I cannot begin to imagine what I would have done in Ajit's place. But Ajit took the threats on his life with grace and dignity, never lost his sense of humor, and continued to serve the public dutifully with remarkable courage. I think that says a lot about him. And the American public is lucky to have benefited from his leadership.
Now, for the policy stuff. Though it should go without saying, the light-touch framework Chairman Pai returned us to—as opposed to the public utility one—will ensure that the United States maintains its leading position on technological innovation in 5G networks and services. The fact that we have endured COVID—and the massive strain on the internet it has caused—with little to no noticeable impact on internet services is all the evidence you need he made the right choice. Ajit has rightfully earned the title of the "5G Chairman."
I cannot give Ajit all the praise he truly deserves without sounding sycophantic, or bribed. There are any number of windows into his character, but one rises above the rest for me. And I wanted to take the extra time to thank Ajit for it.
Every year, without question, no matter what was going on—even as chairman—Ajit would come to my classes and talk to my students. At length. In detail. And about any subject they wished. He stayed until he answered all of their questions. If I didn't politely shove him out of the class to let him go do his real job, I'm sure he would have stayed until the last student left. And if you know anything about how to judge a person's character, that will tell you all you need to know.
Congratulations, Chairman Pai.
[1] Jerry Ellig & Catherine Konieczny, The Organization of Economists in Regulatory Agencies: Does Structure Matter?
[2] Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, Fed. Commc'ns Comm'n, https://www.fcc.gov/auction/904.
[3] Press Release, Connect America Fund Auction to Expand Broadband to Over 700,000 Rural Homes and Businesses: Auction Allocates $1.488 Billion to Close the Digital Divide, Fed. Commc'ns Comm'n, https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-353840A1.pdf.
[4] Press Release, FCC Provides Relief for Carriers Serving Tribal Lands, Fed. Commc'ns Comm'n, https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-provides-relief-carriers-serving-tribal-lands.
[5] Press Release, FCC Approves $950 Million to Harden, Improve, and Expand Broadband Networks in Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands, Fed. Commc'ns Comm'n, https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-359891A1.pdf.
In administrative law, Ajit Pai symposium, cost-benefit analysis, economics, federal communications commission, federal trade commission, health care, internet, net neutrality, regulation, regulatory reform, technology, telecommunications, truth on the market, wireless	ajit pai, Broadband, broadband Internet service, coronavirus, digital divide, economic analysis, economics, economists, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, health care, net neutrality, public utilities, Restoring Internet Freedom, rural deployment, satellite, spectrum, technology
Sam Bowman — 12 October 2020
[TOTM: The following is part of a symposium by TOTM guests and authors marking the release of Nicolas Petit's "Big Tech and the Digital Economy: The Moligopoly Scenario." The entire series of posts is available here.]
To mark the release of Nicolas Petit's "Big Tech and the Digital Economy: The Moligopoly Scenario", Truth on the Market and International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) are hosting some of the world's leading scholars and practitioners of competition law and economics to discuss some of the book's themes.
In his book, Petit offers a "moligopoly" framework for understanding competition between large tech companies that may have significant market shares in their 'home' markets but nevertheless compete intensely in adjacent ones. Petit argues that tech giants coexist as both monopolies and oligopolies in markets defined by uncertainty and dynamism, and offers policy tools for dealing with the concerns people have about these markets that avoid crude "big is bad" assumptions and do not try to solve non-economic harms with the tools of antitrust.
This symposium asks contributors to give their thoughts either on the book as a whole or on a selected chapter that relates to their own work. In it we hope to explore some of Petit's arguments with different perspectives from our contributors.
Confirmed Participants
As in the past (see examples of previous TOTM blog symposia here), we've lined up an outstanding and diverse group of scholars to discuss these issues, including:
Kelly Fayne, Antitrust Associate, Latham & Watkins
Shane Greenstein, Professor of Business Administration; Co-chair of the HBS Digital Initiative, Harvard Business School
Peter Klein, Professor of Entrepreneurship and Chair, Department of Entrepreneurship and Corporate Innovation, Baylor University
William Kovacic, Global Competition Professor of Law and Policy; Director, Competition Law Center, George Washington University Law
Kai-Uwe Kuhn, Academic Advisor, University of East Anglia
Richard Langlois, Professor of Economics, University of Connecticut
Doug Melamed, Professor of the Practice of Law, Stanford law School
David Teece, Professor in Global Business, University of California's Haas School of Business (Berkeley); Director, Center for Global Strategy; Governance and Faculty Director, Institute for Business Innovation
Thank you again to all of the excellent authors for agreeing to participate in this interesting and timely symposium.
Look for the first posts starting later today, October 12, 2020.
In antitrust, international competition, petit-moligopoly-symposium, truth on the market	antitrust, big tech, moligopoly, petit-moligopoly-symposium, platform, technology
The Earn IT Act and the Institutional Limits of Congress
Kristian Stout — 14 May 2020
As the initial shock of the COVID quarantine wanes, the Techlash waxes again bringing with it a raft of renewed legislative proposals to take on Big Tech. Prominent among these is the EARN IT Act (the Act), a bipartisan proposal to create a new national commission responsible for proposing best practices designed to mitigate the proliferation of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online. The Act's proposal is seemingly simple, but its fallout would be anything but.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act currently provides online services like Facebook and Google with a robust protection from liability that could arise as a result of the behavior of their users. Under the Act, this liability immunity would be conditioned on compliance with "best practices" that are produced by the new commission and adopted by Congress.
Supporters of the Act believe that the best practices are necessary in order to ensure that platform companies effectively police CSAM. While critics of the Act assert that it is merely a backdoor for law enforcement to achieve its long-sought goal of defeating strong encryption.
The truth of EARN IT—and how best to police CSAM—is more complicated. Ultimately, Congress needs to be very careful not to exceed its institutional capabilities by allowing the new commission to venture into areas beyond its (and Congress's) expertise.
More can be done about illegal conduct online
On its face, conditioning Section 230's liability protections on certain platform conduct is not necessarily objectionable. There is undoubtedly some abuse of services online, and it is also entirely possible that the incentives for finding and policing CSAM are not perfectly aligned with other conflicting incentives private actors face. It is, of course, first the responsibility of the government to prevent crime, but it is also consistent with past practice to expect private actors to assist such policing when feasible.
By the same token, an immunity shield is necessary in some form to facilitate user generated communications and content at scale. Certainly in 1996 (when Section 230 was enacted), firms facing conflicting liability standards required some degree of immunity in order to launch their services. Today, the control of runaway liability remains important as billions of user interactions take place on platforms daily. Related, the liability shield also operates as a way to promote good samaritan self-policing—a measure that surely helps avoid actual censorship by governments, as opposed to the spurious claims made by those like Senator Hawley.
In this context, the Act is ambiguous. It creates a commission composed of a fairly wide cross-section of interested parties—from law enforcement, to victims, to platforms, to legal and technical experts—to recommend best practices. That hardly seems a bad thing, as more minds considering how to design a uniform approach to controlling CSAM would be beneficial—at least theoretically.
In practice, however, there are real pitfalls to imbuing any group of such thinkers—especially ones selected by political actors—with an actual or de facto final say over such practices. Much of this domain will continue to be mercurial, the rules necessary for one type of platform may not translate well into general principles, and it is possible that a public board will make recommendations that quickly tax Congress's institutional limits. To the extent possible, Congress should be looking at ways to encourage private firms to work together to develop best practices in light of their unique knowledge about their products and their businesses.
In fact, Facebook has already begun experimenting with an analogous idea in its recently announced Oversight Board. There, Facebook is developing a governance structure by giving the Oversight Board the ability to review content moderation decisions on the Facebook platform.
So far as the commission created by the Act works to create best practices that align the incentives of firms with the removal of CSAM, it has a lot to offer. Yet, a better solution than the Act would be for Congress to establish policy that works with the private processes already in development.
Short of a more ideal solution, it is critical, however, that the Act establish the boundaries of the commission's remit very clearly and keep it from venturing into technical areas outside of its expertise.
The complicated problem of encryption (and technology)
The Act has a major problem insofar as the commission has a fairly open ended remit to recommend best practices, and this liberality can ultimately result in dangerous unintended consequences.
The Act only calls for two out of nineteen members to have some form of computer science background. A panel of non-technical experts should not design any technology—encryption or otherwise.
To be sure, there are some interesting proposals to facilitate access to encrypted materials (notably, multi-key escrow systems and self-escrow). But such recommendations are beyond the scope of what the commission can responsibly proffer.
If Congress proceeds with the Act, it should put an explicit prohibition in the law preventing the new commission from recommending rules that would interfere with the design of complex technology, such as by recommending that encryption be weakened to provide access to law enforcement, mandating particular network architectures, or modifying the technical details of data storage.
Congress is right to consider if there is better policy to be had for aligning the incentives of the platforms with the deterrence of CSAM—including possible conditional access to Section 230's liability shield.But just because there is a policy balance to be struck between policing CSAM and platform liability protection doesn't mean that the new commission is suited to vetting, adopting and updating technical standards – it clearly isn't. Conversely, to the extent that encryption and similarly complex technologies could be subject to broad policy change it should be through an explicit and considered democratic process, and not as a by-product of the Act.
In google, internet, regulation, technology, truth on the market	Earn It Act, encryption, Immunity, intermediary liability, law enforcement, section 230, technology
There Aren't Luddites in a Quarantine
William Eric Rinehart — 28 April 2020
This post is authored by Will Rinehart, (Senior Research Fellow, Center for Growth and Opportunity).]
Nellie Bowles, a longtime critic of tech, recently had a change of heart about tech, which she relayed in the New York Times:
Before the coronavirus, there was something I used to worry about. It was called screen time. Perhaps you remember it.
I thought about it. I wrote about it. A lot. I would try different digital detoxes as if they were fad diets, each working for a week or two before I'd be back on that smooth glowing glass.
Now I have thrown off the shackles of screen-time guilt. My television is on. My computer is open. My phone is unlocked, glittering. I want to be covered in screens. If I had a virtual reality headset nearby, I would strap it on.
Bowles isn't alone. The Washington Post recently documented how social distancing has caused people to "rethink of one of the great villains of modern technology: screens." Matthew Yglesias of Vox has been critical of tech in the past as well, but recently admitted that these tools are "making our lives much better." Cal Newport might have called for Twitter to be shut down, but now thinks the service can be useful. These anecdotes speak to a larger trend. According to one national poll, some 88 percent of Americans now have a better appreciation for technology since this pandemic has forced them to rely upon it.
Before COVID-19, catchy headlines like "Heavy Social Media Use Linked With Mental Health Issues In Teens" and "Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?" were met with nods and approvals. These concerns found backing in legislation like Senator Josh Hawley's "Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology Act" or SMART Act. The opening lines of the SMART Act make it clear the legislation would "prohibit social media companies from using practices that exploit human psychology or brain physiology to substantially impede freedom of choice, [and] to require social media companies to take measures to mitigate the risks of internet addiction and psychological exploitation."
Most psychologists steer clear of using the term addiction because it means a person engages in hazardous use, shows tolerance, and neglects social roles. Because social media, gaming, and cell phone use don't meet this threshold, the profession tends to describe those who experience negative impacts as engaging in problematic use of the tech, which is only applied to a small minority. According to one estimate, for example, only half of a percent of gamers have patterns of problematic use.
Even though tech use doesn't meet the criteria for addiction, the term addiction finds purchase in policy discussions and media outlets because it suggests a healthier norm. Computer games have prosocial benefits, yet it is common to hear that the activity is no match for going outside to play. The same kind of argument exists with social media and phone use; face-to-face communication is preferred to tech-enabled communication.
But the coronavirus has inverted the normal conditions. Social distancing doesn't allow us to connect in person or play outside with friends. Faced with no other alternative, technology has been embraced. Videoconferencing is up, as is social media use. This new norm has brought with it a needed rethink of critiques of tech. Even before this moment, however, the research on tech effects has had its problems.
To begin, even though it has been researched extensively, screen time and social media use aren't shown to clearly cause harm. Earlier this year, psychologists Candice Odgers and Michaeline Jensen conducted a massive literature review and summarized the research as "a mix of often conflicting small positive, negative and null associations." The researchers also point out that studies finding a negative relationship between well-being and tech use tend to be correlational, not causational, and thus are "unlikely to be of clinical or practical significance" to parents or therapists.
Through no fault of their own, researchers tend to focus a limited number of relationships when it comes to tech use. But professors Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski were able to sidestep these problems by getting computers to test every theoretically defensible hypothesis. In a writeup appropriately titled "Beyond Cherry-Picking," the duo explained why this method is important to policy makers:
Although statistical significance is often used as an indicator that findings are practically significant, the paper moves beyond this surrogate to put its findings in a real-world context. In one dataset, for example, the negative effect of wearing glasses on adolescent well-being is significantly higher than that of social media use. Yet policymakers are currently not contemplating pumping billions into interventions that aim to decrease the use of glasses.
Their academic paper throws cold water on the screen time and tech use debate. Since social media explains only 0.4% of the variation in well-being, much greater welfare gains can be made by concentrating on other policy issues. For example, regularly eating breakfast, getting enough sleep, and avoiding marijuana use play much larger roles in the well-being of adolescents. Social media is only a tiny portion of what determines well-being as the chart below helps to illustrate.
Second, most social media research relies on self-reporting methods, which are systematically biased and often unreliable. Communication professor Michael Scharkow, for example, compared self-reports of Internet use with the computer log files, which show everything that a computer has done and when, and found that "survey data are only moderately correlated with log file data." A quartet of psychology professors in the UK discovered that self-reported smartphone use and social media addiction scales face similar problems in that they don't correctly capture reality. Patrick Markey, Professor and Director of the IR Laboratory at Villanova University, summarized the work, "the fear of smartphones and social media was built on a castle made of sand."
Expert bodies have also been changing their tune as well. The American Academy of Pediatrics took a hardline stance for years, preaching digital abstinence. But the organization has since backpedaled and now says that screens are fine in moderation. The organization now suggests that parents and children should work together to create boundaries.
Once this pandemic is behind us, policymakers and experts should reconsider the screen time debate. We need to move from loaded terms like addiction and embrace a more realistic model of the world. The truth is that everyone's relationship with technology is complicated. Instead of paternalistic legislation, leaders should place the onus on parents and individuals to figure out what is right for them.
In COVID-19-Response-Series, technology, truth on the market	coronavirus, COVID, covid-19, screentime, technology
A New Office of Technology Assessment: The Wrong Answer to the Wrong Question at the Wrong Time
Kristian Stout — 13 December 2019
Congress needs help understanding the fast moving world of technology. That help is not going to arise by reviving the Office of Technology Assessment ("OTA"), however. The OTA is an idea for another age, while the tweaks necessary to shore up the existing technology resources available to Congress are relatively modest.
Although a new OTA is unlikely to be harmful, it would entail the expenditure of additional resources, including the political capital necessary to create a new federal agency, along with all the revolving-door implications that entails.
The real problem with revising the OTA is that it distracts Congress from considering that it needs to be more than merely well-informed. What we need is both smarter regulation as well as regulation better tailored to 21st century technology and the economy. A new OTA might help with the former problem, but may in fact only exacerbate the latter problem.
The OTA is a poor fit for the modern world
The OTA began existence in 1972, with a mission to provide science and technology advice to Congress. It was closed in 1995, following budget cuts. Lately, some well meaning folks — including even some presidential hopefuls — have sought to revive the OTA.
To the extent that something like the OTA would be salutary today, it would be as a check on incorrect technologically and scientifically based assumptions contained in proposed legislation. For example, in the 90s the OTA provided useful technical information to Congress about how encryption technologies worked as it was considering legislation such as CALEA.
Yet there is good reason to believe that a new legislative-branch agency would not outperform the alternatives to these functions available today. A recent study from the National Academy of Public Administration ("NAPA"), undertaken at the request of Congress and the Congressional Research Service, summarized the OTA's poor fit for today's legislative process.
A new OTA "would have similar vulnerabilities that led to the dis-establishment of the [original] OTA." While a new OTA could provide some information and services to Congress, "such services are not essential for legislators to actually craft legislation, because Congress has multiple sources for [Science and Technology] information/analysis already and can move legislation forward without a new agency." Moreover, according to interviewed legislative branch personnel, the original OTA's reports "were not critical parts of the legislative deliberation and decision-making processes during its existence."
The upshot?
A new [OTA] conducting helpful but not essential work would struggle to integrate into the day-to-day legislative activities of Congress, and thus could result in questions of relevancy and leave it potentially vulnerable to political challenges
The NAPA report found that the Congressional Research Service ("CRS") and the Government Accountability Office ("GAO") already contained most of the resources that Congress needed. The report recommended enhancing those existing resources, and the creation of a science and technology coordinator position in Congress in order to facilitate the hiring of appropriate personnel for committees, among other duties.
The one gap identified by the NAPA report is that Congress currently has no "horizon scanning" capability to look at emerging trends in the long term. This was an original function of OTA.
According to Peter D. Blair, in his book Congress's Own Think Tank – Learning from the Legacy of the Office of Technology Assessment, an original intention of the OTA was to "provide an 'early warning' on the potential impacts of new technology." (p. 43). But over time, the agency, facing the bureaucratic incentive to avoid political controversy, altered its behavior and became carefully "responsive[] to congressional needs" (p. 51) — which is a polite way of saying that the OTA's staff came to see their purpose as providing justification for Congress to enact desired legislation and to avoid raising concerns that could be an impediment to that legislation. The bureaucratic pressures facing the agency forced a mission drift that would be highly likely to recur in a new OTA.
The NAPA report, however, has its own recommendation that does not involve the OTA: allow the newly created science and technology coordinator to create annual horizon-scanning reports.
A new OTA unnecessarily increases the surface area for regulatory capture
Apart from the likelihood that the OTA will be a mere redundancy, the OTA presents yet another vector for regulatory capture (or at least endless accusations of regulatory capture used to undermine its work). Andrew Yang inadvertently points to this fact on his campaign page that calls for a revival of the OTA:
This vital institution needs to be revived, with a budget large enough and rules flexible enough to draw top talent away from the very lucrative private sector.
Yang's wishcasting aside, there is just no way that you are going to create an institution with a "budget large enough and rules flexible enough" to permanently siphon off top-tier talent from multi-multi-billion dollar firms working on creating cutting edge technologies. What you will do is create an interesting, temporary post-graduate school or mid-career stop-over point where top-tier talent can cycle in and out of those top firms. These are highly intelligent, very motivated individuals who want to spend their careers making stuff, not writing research reports for congress.
The same experts who are sufficiently high-level enough to work at the OTA will be similarly employable by large technology and scientific firms. The revolving door is all but inevitable.
The real problem to solve is a lack of modern governance
Lack of adequate information per se is not the real problem facing members of Congress today. The real problem is that, for the most part, legislators neither understand nor seem to care about how best to govern and establish regulatory frameworks for new technology. As a result, Congress passes laws that threaten to slow down the progress of technological development, thus harming consumers while protecting incumbents.
Assuming for the moment that there is some kind of horizon-scanning capability that a new OTA could provide, it necessarily fails, even on these terms. By the time Congress is sufficiently alarmed by a new or latent "problem" (or at least a politically relevant feature) of technology, the industry or product under examination has most likely already progressed far enough in its development that it's far too late for Congress to do anything useful. Even though the NAPA report's authors seem to believe that a "horizon scanning" capability will help, in a dynamic economy, truly predicting the technology that will impact society seems a bit like trying to predict the weather on a particular day a year hence.
Further, the limits of human cognition restrict the utility of "more information" to the legislative process. Will Rinehart discussed this quite ably, pointing to the psychological literature that indicates that, in many cases involving technical subjects, more information given to legislators only makes them overconfident. That is to say, they can cite more facts, but put less of them to good use when writing laws.
The truth is, no degree of expertise will ever again provide an adequate basis for producing prescriptive legislation meant to guide an industry or segment. The world is simply moving too fast.
It would be far more useful for Congress to explore legislation that encourages the firms involved in highly dynamic industries to develop and enforce voluntary standards that emerge as a community standards. See, for example, the observation offered by Jane K. Winn in her paper on information governance and privacy law that
[i]n an era where the ability to compete effectively in global markets increasingly depends on the advantages of extracting actionable insights from petabytes of unstructured data, the bureaucratic individual control right model puts a straightjacket on product innovation and erects barriers to fostering a culture of compliance.
Winn is thinking about what a "governance" response to privacy and crises like the Cambridge Analytica scandal should be, and posits those possibilities against the top-down response of the EU with its General Data Protection Directive ("GDPR"). She notes that preliminary research on GDPR suggests that framing privacy legislation as bureaucratic control over firms using consumer data can have the effect of removing all of the risk-management features that the private sector is good at developing.
Instead of pursuing legislative agendas that imagine the state as the all-seeing eye at the top of the of a command-and-control legislative pyramid, lawmakers should seek to enable those with relevant functional knowledge to employ that knowledge for good governance, broadly understood:
Reframing the information privacy law reform debate as the process of constructing new information governance institutions builds on decades of American experience with sector-specific, risk based information privacy laws and more than a century of American experience with voluntary, consensus standard-setting processes organized by the private sector. The turn to a broader notion of information governance reflects a shift away from command-and-control strategies and toward strategies for public-private collaboration working to protect individual, institutional and social interests in the creation and use of information.
The implications for a new OTA are clear. The model of "gather all relevant information on a technical subject to help construct a governing code" was, if ever, best applied to a world that moved at an industrial era pace. Today, governance structures need to be much more flexible, and the work of an OTA — even if Congress didn't already have most of its advisory bases covered — has little relevance.
The engineers working at firms developing next generation technologies are the individuals with the most relevant, timely knowledge. A forward looking view of regulation would try to develop a means for the information these engineers have to surface and become an ongoing part of the governing standards.
*note – This post originally said that OTA began "operating" in 1972. I meant to say it began "existence" in 1972. I have corrected the error.
In technology, truth on the market	Congress, GAO, legislation, Office of Technology Assessment, OTA, technology
The Snobbery of Bashing Big Tech
Corbin K. Barthold — 23 October 2019
This guest post is by Corbin K. Barthold, Senior Litigation Counsel at Washington Legal Foundation.
In the spring of 1669 a "flying coach" transported six passengers from Oxford to London in a single day. Within a few years similar carriage services connected many major towns to the capital.
"As usual," Lord Macaulay wrote in his history of England, "many persons" were "disposed to clamour against the innovation, simply because it was an innovation." They objected that the express rides would corrupt traditional horsemanship, throw saddlers and boatmen out of work, bankrupt the roadside taverns, and force travelers to sit with children and the disabled. "It was gravely recommended," reported Macaulay, by various towns and companies, that "no public coach should be permitted to have more than four horses, to start oftener that once a week, or to go more than thirty miles a day."
Macaulay used the episode to offer his contemporaries a warning. Although "we smile at these things," he said, "our descendants, when they read the history of the opposition offered by cupidity and prejudice to the improvements of the nineteenth century, may smile in their turn." Macaulay wanted the smart set to take a wider view of history.
They rarely do. It is not in their nature. As Schumpeter understood, the "intellectual group" cannot help attacking "the foundations of capitalist society." "It lives on criticism and its whole position depends on criticism that stings."
An aspiring intellectual would do well to avoid restraint or good cheer. Better to build on a foundation of panic and indignation. Want to sell books and appear on television? Announce the "death" of this or a "crisis" over that. Want to seem fashionable among other writers, artists, and academics? Denounce greed and rail against "the system."
New technology is always a good target. When a lantern inventor obtained a patent to light London, observed Macaulay, "the cause of darkness was not left undefended." The learned technophobes have been especially vexed lately. The largest tech companies, they protest, are manipulating us.
Facebook, The New Republic declares, "remade the internet in its hideous image." The New Yorker wonders whether the platform is going to "break democracy."
Apple is no better. "Have smartphones destroyed a generation?" asks The Atlantic in a cover-story headline. The article's author, Jean Twenge, says smartphones have made the young less independent, more reclusive, and more depressed. She claims that today's teens are "on the brink of the worst mental-health"—wait for it—"crisis in decades." "Much of this deterioration," she contends, "can be traced to their phones."
And then there's Amazon. It's too efficient. Alex Salkever worries in Fortune that "too many clicks, too much time spent, and too much money spent on Amazon" is "bad for our collective financial, psychological, and physical health."
Here's a rule of thumb for the refined cultural critic to ponder. When the talking points you use to convey your depth and perspicacity match those of a sermonizing Republican senator, start worrying that your pseudo-profound TED-Talk-y concerns for social justice are actually just fusty get-off-my-lawn fears of novelty and change.
Enter Josh Hawley, freshman GOP senator from Missouri. Hawley claims that Facebook is a "digital drug" that "dulls" attention spans and "frays" relationships. He speculates about whether social media is causing teenage girls to attempt suicide. "What passes for innovation by Big Tech today," he insists, is "ever more sophisticated exploitation of people." He scolds the tech companies for failing to produce products that—in his judgment—"enrich lives" and "strengthen society."
As for the stuff the industry does make, Hawley wants it changed. He has introduced a bill to ban infinite scrolling, music and video autoplay, and the use of "badges and other awards" (gamification) on social media. The bill also requires defaults that limit a user's time on a platform to 30 minutes a day. A user could opt out of this restriction, but only for a month at a stretch.
The available evidence does not bear out the notion that highbrow magazines, let alone Josh Hawley, should redesign tech products and police how people use their time. You'd probably have to pay someone around $500 to stay off Facebook for a year. Getting her to forego using Amazon would cost even more. And Google is worth more still—perhaps thousands of dollars per user per year. These figures are of course quite rough, but that just proves the point: the consumer surplus created by the internet is inestimable.
Is technology making teenagers sad? Probably not. A recent study tracked the social-media use, along with the wellbeing, of around ten-thousand British children for almost a decade. "In more than half of the thousands of statistical models we tested," the study's authors write, "we found nothing more than random statistical noise." Although there were some small links between teenage girls' mood and their social-media use, the connections were "miniscule" and too "trivial" to "inform personal parenting decisions." "It's probably best," the researchers conclude, "to retire the idea that the amount of time teens spend on social media is a meaningful metric influencing their wellbeing."
One could head the other way, in fact, and argue that technology is making children smarter. Surfing the web and playing video games might broaden their attention spans and improve their abstract thinking.
Is Facebook a threat to democracy? Not yet. The memes that Russian trolls distributed during the 2016 election were clumsy, garish, illiterate piffle. Most of it was the kind of thing that only an Alex Jones fan or a QAnon conspiracist would take seriously. And sure enough, one study finds that only a tiny fraction of voters, most of them older conservatives, read and spread the material. It appears, in other words, that the Russian fake news and propaganda just bounced around among a few wingnuts whose support for Donald Trump was never in doubt.
Over time, it is fair to say, the known costs and benefits of the latest technological innovations could change. New data and further study might reveal that the handwringers are on to something. But there's good news: if you have fears, doubts, or objections, nothing stops you from acting on them. If you believe that Facebook's behavior is intolerable, or that its impact on society is malign, stop using it. If you think Amazon is undermining small businesses, shop more at local stores. If you fret about your kid's screen time, don't give her a smartphone. Indeed, if you suspect that everything has gone pear-shaped since the Industrial Revolution started, throw out your refrigerator and stop going to the dentist.
We now hit the crux of the intellectuals' (and Josh Hawley's) complaint. It's not a gripe about Big Tech so much as a gripe about you. You, the average person, are too dim, weak, and base. You lack the wits to use an iPhone on your own terms. You lack the self-control to post, "like", and share in moderation (or the discipline to make your children follow suit). You lack the virtue to abstain from the pleasures of Prime-membership consumerism.
One AI researcher digs to the root. "It is only the hyper-privileged who are now saying, 'I'm not going to give my kids this,' or 'I'm not on social media,'" she tells Vox. No one wields the "privilege" epithet quite like the modern privileged do. It is one of the remarkable features of our time. Pundits and professors use the word to announce, albeit unintentionally, that only they and their peers have any agency. Those other people, meanwhile, need protection from too much information, too much choice, too much freedom.
There's nothing crazy about wanting the new aristocrats of the mind to shepherd everyone else. Noblesse oblige is a venerable concept. The lords care for the peasants, the king cares for the lords, God cares for the king. But that is not our arrangement. Our forebears embraced the Enlightenment. They began with the assumption that citizens are autonomous. They got suspicious whenever the holders of political power started trying to tell those citizens what they can and cannot do.
Algorithms might one day expose, and play on, our innate lack of free will so much that serious legal and societal adjustments are needed. That, however, is a remote and hypothetical issue, one likely to fall on a generation, yet unborn, who will smile in their turn at our qualms. (Before you place much weight on more dramatic predictions, consider that the great Herbert Simon asserted, in 1965, that we'd have general AI by 1985.)
The question today is more mundane: do voters crave moral direction from their betters? Are they clamoring to be viewed as lowly creatures who can hardly be relied on to tie their shoes? If so, they're perfectly capable of debasing themselves accordingly through their choice of political representatives. Judging from Congress's flat response to Hawley's bill, the electorate is not quite there yet.
In the meantime, the great and the good might reevaluate their campaign to infantilize their less fortunate brothers and sisters. Lecturing people about how helpless they are is not deep. It's not cool. It's condescending and demeaning. It's a form of trolling. Above all, it's old-fashioned and priggish.
In 1816 The Times of London warned "every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion" as . . . the waltz. "The novelty is one deserving of severe reprobation," Britain's paper of record intoned, "and we trust it will never again be tolerated in any moral English society."
There was a time, Lord Macaulay felt sure, when some brahmin or other looked down his nose at the plough and the alphabet.
In internet, politics, regulation, technology, truth on the market	regulatory humility, regulatory overreach, technology
UK COURT OF APPEAL UPHOLDS FRAND INJUNCTION
Natasha Nayak — 30 October 2018
Last week, the UK Court of Appeal upheld the findings of the High Court in an important case regarding standard essential patents (SEPs). Of particular significance, the Court of Appeal upheld the finding that the defendant, an implementer of SEPs, could have the sale of its products enjoined in the UK unless it enters into a global licensing deal on terms deemed by the court to be fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND). The case is noteworthy not least because the threat of an injunction of this sort has become increasingly rare in other jurisdictions, arguably resulting in an imbalance in bargaining power between patent holders and implementers.
The case concerned patents held by Unwired Planet (most of which had been purchased from Ericsson) that it had declared to be essential to the operation of various telecommunications standards. Chinese telecom giant Huawei had incorporated these patented technologies in its products but disputed the legitimacy of Unwired Planet's (UP) patents and refused to license them on the terms that were offered.
By way of a background to the case, in March 2014, UP resorted to suing Huawei, Samsung and Google and claiming an injunction when it found it hard to secure licenses. After the commencement of proceedings, UP made licence offers to the defendants. It made offers in April and July 2014 respectively and during the proceedings, including a worldwide SEP portfolio licence, a UK SEP portfolio licence and per-patent licences for any of the SEPs in suit. The defendants argued that the offers were not FRAND. Huawei and Samsung also contended that the offers were in breach of European competition law. UP settled with Google. Three technical trials of the patents began and UP was able to show that at least two of the patents sued upon were valid and essential and had been infringed. Subsequently, Samsung secured a settlement (at a rate below the market rate) and the FRAND trial went ahead with just Huawei.
Judge Birss delivered the High Court order on April 5, 2017. He held that UP's patents were valid and infringed and it did not abuse its dominant position by requesting an injunction. He ordered a FRAND injunction that was stayed pending appeal against the two patents that had been infringed. The injunction was subject to a number of conditions which are applied because the case was dealing with patents subject to a FRAND undertaking. It will cease to have effect if Huawei enters into the FRAND license determined by the Court. He also observed that the parties can return for further determination when such license expires. Furthermore, it was held that there was one set of FRAND terms and that the scope of this FRAND was world wide.
The UK Court of Appeal (the bench consisting of Lord Justice Kitchin, Lord Justice Floyd, Lady Justice Asplin) in handing down a 291 paragraph, 66 page judgment dealing with Huawei's appeal, upheld Birss' findings. The centrality of Huawei's appeal focused on the global nature of the FRAND license and the non-discrimination undertaking of UP's FRAND commitments. Some significant findings of the Court of Appeal are briefly provided below.
The Court of Appeal in upholding Birss' decision noted that it was unfair to say that UP is using the threat of an injunction to leverage Huawei into taking a global license, and that Huawei had the option to take the global license or submit to an injunction in the UK. Drawing attention to the potential complexities in a FRAND negotiation, the Court observed:
..The owner of a SEP may still use the threat of an injunction to try to secure the payment of excessive licence fees and so engage in hold-up activities. Conversely, the infringer may refuse to engage constructively or behave unreasonably in the negotiation process and so avoid paying the licence fees to which the SEP owner is properly entitled, a process known as "hold-out".
Furthermore, Huawei argues that imposition of a global license on terms set by a national court based on a national finding of infringement is wrong in principle. It also states that there is currently an ongoing patent litigation in both Germany and China and that there are some countries where UP holds "no relevant" patents at all.
In response to these contentions, the Court of Appeal has held that it may be highly impractical for a SEP owner to seek to negotiate a license of its patent rights in each country and rejected the submission made by Huawei that the approach adopted by Birss in these proceedings is out of line with the territorial nature of patent litigations. It clarified that Birss did not adjudicate on issues of infringement or validity concerning foreign SEPs and did not usurp the rights of foreign courts. It further observed that such an approach of Birss is consistent with the Council and the European Economic and Social Committee dated 29 November 2017 (COM (2017) 712 final) ("the November 2017 EU Communication") which notes in section 2.4:
For products with a global circulation, SEP licences granted on a worldwide basis may contribute to a more efficient approach and therefore can be compatible with FRAND.
The Court of Appeal however disagreed with Birss on the issue that there was only one set of FRAND terms. This view of the bench certainly comes as a relief since it seems to appropriately reflect the practical realities of a FRAND negotiation. The Court held:
Patent licences are complex and, having regard to the commercial priorities of the participating undertakings and the experience and preferences of the individuals involved, may be structured in different ways in terms of, for example, the particular contracting parties, the rights to be included in the licence, the geographical scope of the licence, the products to be licensed, royalty rates and how they are to be assessed, and payment terms. Further, concepts such as fairness and reasonableness do not sit easily with such a rigid approach.
Similarly, on the non- discrimination prong of FRAND, the Court of Appeal agreed with Birss that it was not "hard-edged" and the test is whether such difference in rates distorts competition between the licensees. It also noted that the "hard-edged" interpretation would be "akin to the re-insertion of a "most favoured licensee" clause in the FRAND undertaking" which does not seem to be what the standards body, European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) had in mind when it formulated its policies. The Court also held :
We consider that a non-discrimination rule has the potential to harm the technological development of standards if it has the effect of compelling the SEP owner to accept a level of compensation for the use of its invention which does not reflect the value of the licensed technology.
Finally, the Court of Appeal held that UP did not abuse its dominant position just because it failed to strictly comply with the safe harbor framework laid down by Court of Justice of the European Union in Huawei v. ZTE. The only requirement that must be satisfied before proceedings are commenced by the SEP holder is that the SEP holder give sufficient notice to or consult with the implementer.
The Court of Appeal's decision offers some significant guidance to the emerging policy debate on FRAND. As mentioned at the beginning of this post, the decision is significant particularly for the reason that UP is one of a total of two cases in the last two years, where an injunctive relief has been granted in instances involving standard essential patents. Such reliefs have been rarely granted in years in the first place. The second such instance of a grant of injunction pertains to Huawei v. Samsung where the Shenzhen Court in China held earlier this year that Huawei met the FRAND obligation while Samsung did not (negotiations were dragged on for 6 years). An injunction was granted against Samsung for infringing two of Huawei's Chinese patents which are counterparts of two U.S. asserted patents (however Judge Orrick of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California enjoined Huawei from enforcing the injunction).
Current jurisprudence on injunctive relief with respect to FRAND encumbered SEPs is that there is no per se ban on these reliefs. However, courts have been very reluctant to actually grant them. While injunctions are statutory remedies, and granted automatically in most cases when a patent is found to be infringed, administrative agencies and courts have held a position that shows that FRAND commitments certainly limit this premise.
Following the eBay decision in the U.S., defendants in infringement claims involving SEPs have argued that permanent injunctions should not be available for FRAND-encumbered SEPs and were upheld in cases such as Apple v. Motorola in 2014 (where Judge Randall Radar also makes a sound case for evidence of a hold out by Apple in his dissenting order). However, in an institutional bargaining framework of FRAND, which is based on a mutuality of considerations, such a recourse is misplaced and likely to inevitably disturb this balance. The current narrative on FRAND that dominates policymaking and jurisprudence is incomplete in its unilateral focus of avoiding the possible problem of a patent hold up in the absence of concrete evidence indicating its probability. In Ericsson v D-Links Judge Davis of the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit underscored this point when he observed that "if an accused infringer wants an instruction on patent hold-up and royalty stacking [to be given to the jury], it must provide evidence on the record of patent hold-up and royalty stacking."
Remedies emanating from a one sided perspective tilt the bargaining dynamic in favour of implementers and if the worst penalty a SEP infringer has to pay is the FRAND royalty it would have otherwise paid beforehand, then a hold out or a reverse hold up by implementers becomes a very profitable strategy. Remedies for patent infringement cannot be ignored because they are also core to the framework for licensing negotiations and ensuring compliance by licensees. A disproportionate reliance on liability rules over property rights is likely to exacerbate the countervailing problem of hold out and detrimentally impact incentives to innovate, ultimately undermining the welfare goals that such enforcement seeks to achieve.
The Court of Appeal has therefore given valuable guidance in its decision when it noted:
Just as implementers need protection, so too do the SEP owners. They are entitled to an appropriate reward for carrying out their research and development activities and for engaging with the standardization process, and they must be able to prevent technology users from free-riding on their innovations. It is therefore important that implementers engage constructively in any FRAND negotiation and, where necessary, agree to submit to the outcome of an appropriate FRAND determination.
Hopefully this order brings with it some balance in FRAND negotiations as well as a shift in the perspective of courts in how they adjudicate on these litigations. It underscores an oft forgotten principle that is core to the FRAND framework- that FRAND is a two-way street, as was observed in the celebrated case of Huawei v. ZTE in 2015.
In patent, Patents, standard setting, truth on the market	patent holdout, patent holdup, Patents, SEP, standard-essential patent, technology
AOL/Time Warner merger conditions are a template for disastrous tech policy
Kristian Stout — 30 July 2018
Senator Mark Warner has proposed 20 policy prescriptions for bringing "big tech" to heel. The proposals — which run the gamut from policing foreign advertising on social networks to regulating feared competitive harms — provide much interesting material for Congress to consider.
On the positive side, Senator Warner introduces the idea that online platforms may be able to function as least-cost avoiders with respect to certain tortious behavior of their users. He advocates for platforms to implement technology that would help control the spread of content that courts have found violated certain rights of third-parties.
Yet, on other accounts — specifically the imposition of an "interoperability" mandate on platforms — his proposals risk doing more harm than good.
The interoperability mandate was included by Senator Warner in order to "blunt [tech platforms'] ability to leverage their dominance over one market or feature into complementary or adjacent markets or products." According to Senator Warner, such a measure would enable startups to offset the advantages that arise from network effects on large tech platforms by building their services more easily on the backs of successful incumbents.
Whatever you think of the moats created by network effects, the example of "successful" previous regulation on this issue that Senator Warner relies upon is perplexing:
A prominent template for [imposing interoperability requirements] was in the AOL/Time Warner merger, where the FCC identified instant messaging as the 'killer app' – the app so popular and dominant that it would drive consumers to continue to pay for AOL service despite the existence of more innovative and efficient email and internet connectivity services. To address this, the FCC required AOL to make its instant messaging service (AIM, which also included a social graph) interoperable with at least one rival immediately and with two other rivals within 6 months.
But the AOL/Time Warner merger and the FCC's conditions provide an example that demonstrates the exact opposite of what Senator Warner suggests. The much-feared 2001 megamerger prompted, as the Senator notes, fears that the new company would be able to leverage its dominance in the nascent instant messaging market to extend its influence into adjacent product markets.
Except, by 2003, despite it being unclear that AOL had developed interoperable systems, two large competitors had arisen that did not run interoperable IM networks (Yahoo! and Microsoft). In that same period, AOL's previously 100% IM market share had declined by about half. By 2009, after eight years of heavy losses, Time Warner shed AOL, and by last year AIM was completely dead.
Not only was it not clear that AOL was able to make AIM interoperable, AIM was never able to catch up once better, rival services launched. What the conditions did do, however, was prevent AOL from launching competitive video chat services as it flailed about in the wake of the deal, thus forcing it to miss out on a market opportunity available to unencumbered competitors like Microsoft and Yahoo!
And all of this of course ignores the practical impossibility entailed in interfering in highly integrated technology platforms.
The AOL/Time Warner merger conditions are no template for successful tech regulation. Congress would be ill-advised to rely upon such templates for crafting policy around tech and innovation.
In technology, truth on the market	innovation, internet, platforms, tech companies, technology
FCC-FTC Plans for Welfare-Enhancing Cooperation on Online Consumer Protection
Alden Abbott — 12 December 2017
As the Federal Communications (FCC) prepares to revoke its economically harmful "net neutrality" order and replace it with a free market-oriented "Restoring Internet Freedom Order," the FCC and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) commendably have announced a joint policy for cooperation on online consumer protection. According to a December 11 FTC press release:
The Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced their intent to enter into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) under which the two agencies would coordinate online consumer protection efforts following the adoption of the Restoring Internet Freedom Order.
"The Memorandum of Understanding will be a critical benefit for online consumers because it outlines the robust process by which the FCC and FTC will safeguard the public interest," said FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. "Instead of saddling the Internet with heavy-handed regulations, we will work together to take targeted action against bad actors. This approach protected a free and open Internet for many years prior to the FCC's 2015 Title II Order and it will once again following the adoption of the Restoring Internet Freedom Order."
"The FTC is committed to ensuring that Internet service providers live up to the promises they make to consumers," said Acting FTC Chairman Maureen K. Ohlhausen. "The MOU we are developing with the FCC, in addition to the decades of FTC law enforcement experience in this area, will help us carry out this important work."
The draft MOU, which is being released today, outlines a number of ways in which the FCC and FTC will work together to protect consumers, including:
The FCC will review informal complaints concerning the compliance of Internet service providers (ISPs) with the disclosure obligations set forth in the new transparency rule. Those obligations include publicly providing information concerning an ISP's practices with respect to blocking, throttling, paid prioritization, and congestion management. Should an ISP fail to make the required disclosures—either in whole or in part—the FCC will take enforcement action.
The FTC will investigate and take enforcement action as appropriate against ISPs concerning the accuracy of those disclosures, as well as other deceptive or unfair acts or practices involving their broadband services.
The FCC and the FTC will broadly share legal and technical expertise, including the secure sharing of informal complaints regarding the subject matter of the Restoring Internet Freedom Order. The two agencies also will collaborate on consumer and industry outreach and education.
The FCC's proposed Restoring Internet Freedom Order, which the agency is expected to vote on at its December 14 meeting, would reverse a 2015 agency decision to reclassify broadband Internet access service as a Title II common carrier service. This previous decision stripped the FTC of its authority to protect consumers and promote competition with respect to Internet service providers because the FTC does not have jurisdiction over common carrier activities.
The FCC's Restoring Internet Freedom Order would return jurisdiction to the FTC to police the conduct of ISPs, including with respect to their privacy practices. Once adopted, the order will also require broadband Internet access service providers to disclose their network management practices, performance, and commercial terms of service. As the nation's top consumer protection agency, the FTC will be responsible for holding these providers to the promises they make to consumers.
Particularly noteworthy is the suggestion that the FCC and FTC will work to curb regulatory duplication and competitive empire building – a boon to Internet-related businesses that would be harmed by regulatory excess and uncertainty. Stay tuned for future developments.
In advertising, consumer protection, data security, federal communications commission, federal trade commission, privacy, truth on the market	consumer protection, FCC, ftc, net neutrality, technology
Supreme Court Turns Again to Patent Cases, Against the Backdrop of a Decline in American Patent Protection that Threatens Future U.S. Innovation and International Competitiveness
Alden Abbott — 22 November 2017
On November 27, the U.S. Supreme Court will turn once again to patent law, hearing cases addressing the constitutionality of Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) "inter partes" review (Oil States Energy v. Greene), and whether PTAB must issue a final written decision as to every claim challenged by the petitioner in an inter partes review (SAS Institute v. Matal).
As the Justices peruse the bench memos and amicus curiae briefs concerning these cases, their minds will, of course, be focused on legal questions of statutory and constitutional interpretation. Lurking in the background of these and other patent cases, however, is an overarching economic policy issue – have recent statutory changes and case law interpretations weakened U.S. patent protection in a manner that seriously threatens future American economic growth and innovation? In a recent Heritage Foundation Legal Memorandum, I responded in the affirmative to this question, and argued that significant statutory reforms are needed to restore the American patent system to a position of global leadership that is key to U.S. economic prosperity. (Among other things, I noted severe constitutional problems raised by PTAB's actions, and urged that Congress consider passing legislation to reform PTAB, if the Supreme Court upholds the constitutionality of inter partes review.)
A timely opinion article published yesterday in the Wall Street Journal emphasizes that the decline in American patent protection also has profound negative consequences for American international economic competitiveness. Journalist David Kline, author of the commentary ("Fear American Complacency, Not China"), succinctly contrasts unfortunate U.S. patent policy developments with the recent strengthening of the Chinese patent system (a matter of high priority to the Chinese Government):
China's entrepreneurs have been fueled by reforms in recent years that strengthened intellectual property rights—ironic for a country long accused of stealing trade secrets and ignoring IP protections. Today Chinese companies are filing for more patents than American ones. The patent application and examination process has been streamlined, and China has established specialized intellectual property courts and tribunals to adjudicate lawsuits and issue injunctions against infringers. "IP infringers will pay a heavy price," President Xi Jinping warned this summer. . . .
In the U.S., by contrast, a series of legislative actions and Supreme Court rulings have weakened patent rights, especially for startups. A new way of challenging patents called "inter partes review" results in at least one patent claim being thrown out in roughly 80% of cases, according to an analysis by Adam Mossoff, a law professor at George Mason University. Unsurprisingly, many of these cases were brought by defendants facing patent infringement lawsuits in federal court.
This does not bode well for America's global competitiveness. The U.S. used to rank first among nations in the strength of its intellectual property rights. But the 2017 edition of the Global IP Index places the U.S. 10th—tied with Hungary.
The Supreme Court may not be able to take judicial notice of this policy reality (although strong purely legal arguments would support a holding that PTAB inter partes review is unconstitutional), but Congress certainly can take legislative notice of it. Let us hope that Congress acts decisively to strengthen the American patent system – in the interests of a strong, innovative, and internationally competitive American economy.
In intellectual property, patent, patent reform, Patents, truth on the market	patent reform, technology
A Well-Reasoned Antitrust Division Boost for the Legitimate Exploitation of Patent Rights
On November 10, at the University of Southern California Law School, Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Makan Delrahim delivered an extremely important policy address on the antitrust treatment of standard setting organizations (SSOs). Delrahim's remarks outlined a dramatic shift in the Antitrust Division's approach to controversies concerning the licensing of standard essential patents (SEPs, patents that "read on" SSO technical standards) that are often subject to "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory" (FRAND) licensing obligations imposed by SSOs. In particular, while Delrahim noted the theoretical concerns of possible "holdups" by SEP holders (when SEP holders threaten to delay licensing until their royalty demands are met), he cogently explained why the problem of "holdouts" by implementers of SEP technologies (when implementers threaten to under-invest in the implementation of a standard, or threaten not to take a license at all, until their royalty demands are met) is a far more serious antitrust concern. More generally, Delrahim stressed the centrality of patents as property rights, and the need for enforcers not to interfere with the legitimate unilateral exploitation of those rights (whether through licensing, refusals to license, or the filing of injunctive actions). Underlying Delrahim's commentary is the understanding that innovation is vitally important to the American economy, and the concern that antitrust enforcers' efforts in recent years have threatened to undermine innovation by inappropriately interfering in free market licensing negotiations between patentees and licensees.
Important "takeaways" from Delrahim's speech (with key quotations) are set forth below.
Thumb on the scale in favor of implementers: "In particular, I worry that we as enforcers have strayed too far in the direction of accommodating the concerns of technology implementers who participate in standard setting bodies, and perhaps risk undermining incentives for IP creators, who are entitled to an appropriate reward for developing break-through technologies."
Striking the right balance through market forces (as opposed to government-issued best practices): "The dueling interests of innovators and implementers always are in tension, and the tension is resolved through the free market, typically in the form of freely negotiated licensing agreements for royalties or reciprocal licenses."
Holdup as theoretical concern with no evidence that it's a systemic or widespread problem: He praises Professor Carl Shapiro for his theoretical model of holdup, but stresses that "many of the proposed [antitrust] 'solutions' to the hold-up problem are often anathema to the policies underlying the intellectual property system envisioned by our forefathers."
Rejects prior position that antitrust is only concerned with the patent-holder side of the holdup equation, stating that he's more concerned with holdout given the nature of investments: "Too often lost in the debate over the hold-up problem is recognition of a more serious risk: the hold-out problem. . . . I view the collective hold-out problem as a more serious impediment to innovation. Here is why: most importantly, the hold-up and hold-out problems are not symmetric. What do I mean by that? It is important to recognize that innovators make an investment before they know whether that investment will ever pay off. If the implementers hold out, the innovator has no recourse, even if the innovation is successful. In contrast, the implementer has some buffer against the risk of hold-up because at least some of its investments occur after royalty rates for new technology could have been determined. Because this asymmetry exists, under-investment by the innovator should be of greater concern than under-investment by the implementer."
What's at stake: "Every incremental shift in bargaining leverage toward implementers of new technologies acting in concert can undermine incentives to innovate. I therefore view policy proposals with a one-sided focus on the hold-up issue with great skepticism because they can pose a serious threat to the innovative process."
Breach of FRAND as primarily a contract or fraud, not antitrust issue: "There is a growing trend supporting what I would view as a misuse of antitrust or competition law, purportedly motivated by the fear of so-called patent hold-up, to police private commitments that IP holders make in order to be considered for inclusion in a standard. This trend is troublesome. If a patent holder violates its commitments to an SSO, the first and best line of defense, I submit, is the SSO itself and its participants. . . . If a patent holder is alleged to have violated a commitment to a standard setting organization, that action may have some impact on competition. But, I respectfully submit, that does not mean the heavy hand of antitrust necessarily is the appropriate remedy for the would-be licensee—or the enforcement agency. There are perfectly adequate and more appropriate common law and statutory remedies available to the SSO or its members."
Recommends that unilateral refusals to license should be per se lawful: "The enforcement of valid patent rights should not be a violation of antitrust law. A patent holder cannot violate the antitrust laws by properly exercising the rights patents confer, such as seeking an injunction or refusing to license such a patent. Set aside whether taking these actions might violate the common law. Under the antitrust laws, I humbly submit that a unilateral refusal to license a valid patent should be per se legal. Indeed, just this Monday, Chief Judge Diane Wood, a former Deputy Assistant Attorney General at the Antitrust Division, stated that "[e]ven monopolists are almost never required to assist their competitors."
Intent to investigate buyers' cartel behavior in SSOs: "The prospect of hold-out offers implementers a crucial bargaining chip. Unlike the unilateral hold-up problem, implementers can impose this leverage before they make significant investments in new technology. . . . The Antitrust Division will carefully scrutinize what appears to be cartel-like anticompetitive behavior among SSO participants, either on the innovator or implementer side. The old notion that 'openness' alone is sufficient to guard against cartel-like behavior in SSOs may be outdated, given the evolution of SSOs beyond strictly objective technical endeavors. . . . I likewise urge SSOs to be proactive in evaluating their own rules, both at the inception of the organization, and routinely thereafter. In fact, SSOs would be well advised to implement and maintain internal antitrust compliance programs and regularly assess whether their rules, or the application of those rules, are or may become anticompetitive."
Basing royalties on the "smallest salable component" as a requirement by a concerted agreement of implementers is a possible antitrust violation: "If an SSO pegs its definition of "reasonable" royalties to a single Georgia-Pacific factor that heavily favors either implementers or innovators, then the process that led to such a rule deserves close antitrust scrutiny. While the so-called 'smallest salable component' rule may be a useful tool among many in determining patent infringement damages for multi-component products, its use as a requirement by a concerted agreement of implementers as the exclusive determinant of patent royalties may very well warrant antitrust scrutiny."
Right to Injunctive Relief and holdout incentives: "Patents are a form of property, and the right to exclude is one of the most fundamental bargaining rights a property owner possesses. Rules that deprive a patent holder from exercising this right—whether imposed by an SSO or by a court—undermine the incentive to innovate and worsen the problem of hold-out. After all, without the threat of an injunction, the implementer can proceed to infringe without a license, knowing that it is only on the hook only for reasonable royalties."
Seeking or Enforcing Injunctive Relief Generally a Contract Not Antitrust Issue: "It is just as important to recognize that a violation by a patent holder of an SSO rule that restricts a patent-holder's right to seek injunctive relief should be appropriately the subject of a contract or fraud action, and rarely if ever should be an antitrust violation."
FRAND is Not a Compulsory Licensing Scheme: "We should not transform commitments to license on FRAND terms into a compulsory licensing scheme. Indeed, we have had strong policies against compulsory licensing, which effectively devalues intellectual property rights, including in most of our trade agreements, such as the TRIPS agreement of the WTO. If an SSO requires innovators to submit to such a scheme as a condition for inclusion in a standard, we should view the SSO's rule and the process leading to it with suspicion, and certainly not condemn the use of such injunctive relief as an antitrust violation where a contract remedy is perfectly adequate."
In antitrust, antitrust division, intellectual property, Patents, truth on the market	antitrust, FRAND, IP, SEPs, technology
The Internet Conduct Rule Must Die
Allen Gibby — 18 May 2017
It's fitting that FCC Chairman Ajit Pai recently compared his predecessor's jettisoning of the FCC's light touch framework for Internet access regulation without hard evidence to the Oklahoma City Thunder's James Harden trade. That infamous deal broke up a young nucleus of three of the best players in the NBA in 2012 because keeping all three might someday create salary cap concerns. What few saw coming was a new TV deal in 2015 that sent the salary cap soaring.
If it's hard to predict how the market will evolve in the closed world of professional basketball, predictions about the path of Internet innovation are an order of magnitude harder — especially for those making crucial decisions with a lot of money at stake.
The FCC's answer for what it considered to be the dangerous unpredictability of Internet innovation was to write itself a blank check of authority to regulate ISPs in the 2015 Open Internet Order (OIO), embodied in what is referred to as the "Internet conduct standard." This standard expanded the scope of Internet access regulation well beyond the core principle of preserving openness (i.e., ensuring that any legal content can be accessed by all users) by granting the FCC the unbounded, discretionary authority to define and address "new and novel threats to the Internet."
When asked about what the standard meant (not long after writing it), former Chairman Tom Wheeler replied,
We don't really know. We don't know where things will go next. We have created a playing field where there are known rules, and the FCC will sit there as a referee and will throw the flag.
Somehow, former Chairman Wheeler would have us believe that an amorphous standard that means whatever the agency (or its Enforcement Bureau) says it means created a playing field with "known rules." But claiming such broad authority is hardly the light-touch approach marketed to the public. Instead, this ill-conceived standard allows the FCC to wade as deeply as it chooses into how an ISP organizes its business and how it manages its network traffic.
Such an approach is destined to undermine, rather than further, the objectives of Internet openness, as embodied in Chairman Powell's 2005 Internet Policy Statement:
To foster creation, adoption and use of Internet broadband content, applications, services and attachments, and to ensure consumers benefit from the innovation that comes from competition.
Instead, the Internet conduct standard is emblematic of how an off-the-rails quest to heavily regulate one specific component of the complex Internet ecosystem results in arbitrary regulatory imbalances — e.g., between ISPs and over-the-top (OTT) or edge providers that offer similar services such as video streaming or voice calling.
As Boston College Law Professor, Dan Lyons, puts it:
While many might assume that, in theory, what's good for Netflix is good for consumers, the reality is more complex. To protect innovation at the edge of the Internet ecosystem, the Commission's sweeping rules reduce the opportunity for consumer-friendly innovation elsewhere, namely by facilities-based broadband providers.
This is no recipe for innovation, nor does it coherently distinguish between practices that might impede competition and innovation on the Internet and those that are merely politically disfavored, for any reason or no reason at all.
Free data madness
The Internet conduct standard's unholy combination of unfettered discretion and the impulse to micromanage can (and will) be deployed without credible justification to the detriment of consumers and innovation. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the confusion surrounding the regulation of "free data."
Free data, like T-Mobile's Binge On program, is data consumed by a user that has been subsidized by a mobile operator or a content provider. The vertical arrangements between operators and content providers creating the free data offerings provide many benefits to consumers, including enabling subscribers to consume more data (or, for low-income users, to consume data in the first place), facilitating product differentiation by mobile operators that offer a variety of free data plans (including allowing smaller operators the chance to get a leg up on competitors by assembling a market-share-winning plan), increasing the overall consumption of content, and reducing users' cost of obtaining information. It's also fundamentally about experimentation. As the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) recently explained:
Offering some services at subsidized or zero prices frees up resources (and, where applicable, data under a user's data cap) enabling users to experiment with new, less-familiar alternatives. Where a user might not find it worthwhile to spend his marginal dollar on an unfamiliar or less-preferred service, differentiated pricing loosens the user's budget constraint, and may make him more, not less, likely to use alternative services.
In December 2015 then-Chairman Tom Wheeler used his newfound discretion to launch a 13-month "inquiry" into free data practices before preliminarily finding some to be in violation of the standard. Without identifying any actual harm, Wheeler concluded that free data plans "may raise" economic and public policy issues that "may harm consumers and competition."
After assuming the reins at the FCC, Chairman Pai swiftly put an end to that nonsense, saying that the Commission had better things to do (like removing barriers to broadband deployment) than denying free data plans that expand Internet access and are immensely popular, especially among low-income Americans.
The global morass of free data regulation
But as long as the Internet conduct standard remains on the books, it implicitly grants the US's imprimatur to harmful policies and regulatory capriciousness in other countries that look to the US for persuasive authority. While Chairman Pai's decisive intervention resolved the free data debate in the US (at least for now), other countries are still grappling with whether to prohibit the practice, allow it, or allow it with various restrictions.
In Europe, the 2016 EC guidelines left the decision of whether to allow the practice in the hands of national regulators. Consequently, some regulators — in Hungary, Sweden, and the Netherlands (although there the ban was recently overturned in court) — have banned free data practices while others — in Denmark, Germany, Spain, Poland, the United Kingdom, and Ukraine — have not. And whether or not they allow the practice, regulators (e.g., Norway's Nkom and the UK's Ofcom) have lamented the lack of regulatory certainty surrounding free data programs, a state of affairs that is compounded by a lack of data on the consequences of various approaches to their regulation.
In Canada this year, the CRTC issued a decision adopting restrictive criteria under which to evaluate free data plans. The criteria include assessing the degree to which the treatment of data is agnostic, whether the free data offer is exclusive to certain customers or certain content providers, the impact on Internet openness and innovation, and whether there is financial compensation involved. The standard is open-ended, and free data plans as they are offered in the US would "likely raise concerns."
Other regulators are contributing to the confusion through ambiguously framed rules, such as that of the Chilean regulator, Subtel. In a 2014 decision, it found that a free data offer of specific social network apps was in breach of Chile's Internet rules. In contrast to what is commonly reported, however, Subtel did not ban free data. Instead, it required mobile operators to change how they promote such services, requiring them to state that access to Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp were offered "without discounting the user's balance" instead of "at no cost." It also required them to disclose the amount of time the offer would be available, but imposed no mandatory limit.
In addition to this confusing regulatory make-work governing how operators market free data plans, the Chilean measures also require that mobile operators offer free data to subscribers who pay for a data plan, in order to ensure free data isn't the only option users have to access the Internet.
The result is that in Chile today free data plans are widely offered by Movistar, Claro, and Entel and include access to apps such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram, Pokemon Go, Waze, Snapchat, Apple Music, Spotify, Netflix or YouTube — even though Subtel has nominally declared such plans to be in violation of Chile's net neutrality rules.
Other regulators are searching for palatable alternatives to both flex their regulatory muscle to govern Internet access, while simultaneously making free data work. The Indian regulator, TRAI, famously banned free data in February 2016. But the story doesn't end there. After seeing the potential value of free data in unserved and underserved, low-income areas, TRAI proposed implementing government-sanctioned free data. The proposed scheme would provide rural subscribers with 100 MB of free data per month, funded through the country's universal service fund. To ensure that there would be no vertical agreements between content providers and mobile operators, TRAI recommended introducing third parties, referred to as "aggregators," that would facilitate mobile-operator-agnostic arrangements.
The result is a nonsensical, if vaguely well-intentioned, threading of the needle between the perceived need to (over-)regulate access providers and the determination to expand access. Notwithstanding the Indian government's awareness that free data will help to close the digital divide and enhance Internet access, in other words, it nonetheless banned private markets from employing private capital to achieve that very result, preferring instead non-market processes which are unlikely to be nearly as nimble or as effective — and yet still ultimately offer "non-neutral" options for consumers.
Thinking globally, acting locally (by ditching the Internet conduct standard)
Where it is permitted, free data is undergoing explosive adoption among mobile operators. Currently in the US, for example, all major mobile operators offer some form of free data or unlimited plan to subscribers. And, as a result, free data is proving itself as a business model for users' early stage experimentation and adoption of augmented reality, virtual reality and other cutting-edge technologies that represent the Internet's next wave — but that also use vast amounts of data. Were the US to cut off free data at the legs under the OIO absent hard evidence of harm, it would substantially undermine this innovation.
The application of the nebulous Internet conduct standard to free data is a microcosm of the current incoherence: It is a rule rife with a parade of uncertainties and only theoretical problems, needlessly saddling companies with enforcement risk, all in the name of preserving and promoting innovation and openness. As even some of the staunchest proponents of net neutrality have recognized, only companies that can afford years of litigation can be expected to thrive in such an environment.
In the face of confusion and uncertainty globally, the US is now poised to provide leadership grounded in sound policy that promotes innovation. As ICLE noted last month, Chairman Pai took a crucial step toward re-imposing economic rigor and the rule of law at the FCC by questioning the unprecedented and ill-supported expansion of FCC authority that undergirds the OIO in general and the Internet conduct standard in particular. Today the agency will take the next step by voting on Chairman Pai's proposed rulemaking. Wherever the new proceeding leads, it's a welcome opportunity to analyze the issues with a degree of rigor that has thus far been appallingly absent.
And we should not forget that there's a direct solution to these ambiguities that would avoid the undulations of subsequent FCC policy fights: Congress could (and should) pass legislation implementing a regulatory framework grounded in sound economics and empirical evidence that allows for consumers to benefit from the vast number of procompetitive vertical agreements (such as free data plans), while still facilitating a means for policing conduct that may actually harm consumers.
The Golden State Warriors are the heavy odds-on favorite to win another NBA Championship this summer, led by former OKC player Kevin Durant. And James Harden is a contender for league MVP. We can't always turn back the clock on a terrible decision, hastily made before enough evidence has been gathered, but Chairman Pai's efforts present a rare opportunity to do so.
In administrative law, european commission, federal communications commission, international, international center for law & economics, internet, markets, net neutrality, technology, telecommunications, wireless	internet, net neutrality, Network neutrality, sponsored data, technology, wireless, zero rating

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