Participant Presentations and Session Transcript for March 28

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1	FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION
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4	SECTION 2 HEARINGS
5	UNDERSTANDING SINGLE-FIRM BEHAVIOR:
6	REMEDIES
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10	MARCH 28, 2007
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1	P R O C E E D I N G S
2	- - - - -
3	MS. KURSH: Good morning, everyone. Thank you
4	for joining us.
5	I'm Gail Kursh. I'm with the Legal Policy
6	Section of the Antitrust Division, and I would like to
7	welcome everyone this morning to the first of three
8	panels on remedies in Section 2 cases.
9	These panels are part of an ongoing series of
10	public hearings on single-firm conduct.
11	My co-moderator today is Dan Ducore, the
12	assistant director of the Compliance Division in the
13	FTC's Bureau of Competition.
14	The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade
15	Commission are jointly sponsoring these hearings to help
16	advance development of the law concerning Section 2 of
17	the Sherman Act.
18	We began these hearings last June and have
19	covered a wide range of single-firm conduct that may
20	raise antitrust issues, including predatory pricing and
21	predatory bidding, tying, refusals to deal, exclusive
22	dealing, bundled rebates and misleading and deceptive
23	practices, among other topics.
24	It seems fitting to us as we get toward the end
25	of these hearings that we now address remedies.

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1	However, it would have been just as fitting for
2	us to have addressed remedies at the very outset of
3	these hearings.
4	While I expect our panelists today may disagree
5	on the effectiveness of past Section 2 remedies and
6	perhaps even have differing views on the appropriate
7	goals of Section 2 remedies, I hope that we can all
8	agree today that crafting appropriate remedies in
9	Section 2 cases is critically important and that
10	consideration of remedies should begin very early in an
11	investigation or litigation.
12	So on behalf of the division, I want to thank
13	our panelists for participating today and agreeing to
14	share their insights with us.
15	I will introduce each panelist in more detail
16	before he speaks. But in brief, our speakers in order
17	are Dave Heiner, vice president and deputy general
18	counsel for Microsoft; Robert Crandall, a senior fellow
19	at the Brookings Institute; Per Hellstrom, chief of Unit
20	C-3 of the Directorate General for Competition, the
21	European Commission; and Tad Lipsky, a partner at Latham
22	& Watkins and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General
23	for the Antitrust Division.
24	I also want to thank my colleagues at the FTC
25	and at the division for organizing these hearings. And

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1	our panel this morning will go as follows. We will ask
2	each of the four panelists to speak for approximately 15
3	minutes. We will then take a short break.
4	The panelists will each be given a couple
5	minutes to respond to each other and then we will have a
6	moderated discussion that Dan and I will lead.
7	We will not be taking any questions from the
8	floor, and we intend to end today at 12 noon, take a
9	lunch break and begin the afternoon session at around
10	1:30.
11	Before introducing our first speaker, I will
12	turn things over to Dan and let him make an
13	introduction.
14	MR. DUCORE: Thanks, Gail. On behalf of the
15	Federal Trade Commission, I also want to thank our
16	panelists for agreeing to share their time and
17	especially their views with us this morning.
18	Briefly, the remedies issue is obviously from
19	the agency's point of view about more than simply money
20	damages. That is somebody else's issue.
21	But certainly more so than in an area like
22	merger enforcement, Sherman 2 cases present much more of
23	a one of a kind kind of concern when you are trying to
24	develop the remedy in the sense that you have to be very
25	careful that the particular remedy matches the

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1	particular facts and the particular theory of harm in
2	your case.
3	I expect today we will hear a lot about the
4	critical thinking that must go into fashioning effective
5	remedies for particular problems. And Gail is certainly
6	correct -- and I have seen this in my own experience --
7	that you have to be thinking about remedies at the
8	earliest stages of your case and, for an enforcement
9	agency, at the earliest stages of your investigation.
10	As someone who thinks about remedies pretty much
11	full-time, I'm going to be particularly interested in
12	hearing about both the broad approaches but also about
13	some of the smaller issues, including things such as
14	let's say administrability and the pitfalls and dangers
15	that can face an agency as it maybe starts to go off the
16	cliff and become an industry regulator.
17	With those introductions, let me get started,
18	with the exception I have to make a couple of logistical
19	announcements.
20	First, if there is an alarm, please go down the
21	stairway and get out of the building and follow the
22	instructions of people. You will be actually going
23	across the street. Second, the closest restrooms, men's
24	out the door and to the left, women out the door and
25	past the elevators to the left.

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1	And finally, especially for the panelists,
2	please turn off cell phones, electronic devices,
3	especially things like Blackberries. They can create
4	static on the microphones.
5	With that more mundane information, let me turn
6	it back to Gail to introduce the first speaker.
7	MS. KURSH: Thanks, Dan. David Heiner is vice
8	president and deputy general counsel at Microsoft
9	Corporation, where he heads up the legal department's
10	antitrust group.
11	Since joining Microsoft in 1994, Dave has played
12	a leading role in Microsoft's response to government
13	antitrust proceedings in the United States, Europe and
14	Asia.
15	He is the author of "Assessing Tying Claims in
16	the Context of Software Integration: A Suggested
17	Framework for Applying the Rule of Reason Analysis."
18	Dave.
19	MR. HEINER: Thank you, Gail and Dan, for the
20	invitation to speak here today, which I very much
21	appreciate.
22	This is a subject upon which I think it is fair
23	to say Microsoft has quite a bit of experience, working
24	largely with many people I see in the room.
25	At the outset, I thought it might be useful to

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1	briefly recap the remedies to which Microsoft has been
2	subject over the past decade or so.
3	In 1994, a consent decree was put in place and a
4	nearly identical European Union undertaking were put in
5	place. These were mostly contractual in nature.
6	In 2002, a consent decree and associated
7	litigated final judgment were entered in the Section 2
8	case against Microsoft.
9	The Section 2 case was followed by a number of
10	competitor lawsuits. Hundreds of consumer class actions
11	were filed. Nearly all of these private cases have been
12	settled with payments and some conduct relief as well.
13	In March 2004, the European Commission issued
14	its decision against Microsoft. The Commission took a
15	different approach to the issues than did the U.S.
16	court.
17	In February 2006, the Korean Fair Trade
18	Commission issued its decision against Microsoft. The
19	KFTC took yet a third approach. The EC and KFTC
20	decisions are on appeal now.
21	As you might imagine, all of this generates
22	quite a bit of work within Microsoft and its law
23	department.
24	When I joined the company in 1994, I was the
25	first antitrust lawyer at the company. Today I lead a

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1	group of about 30 professionals dedicated full-time to
2	antitrust counseling and compliance.
3	This group includes software developers and
4	business personnel as well as lawyers and paralegals.
5	All told, a few hundred people at Microsoft are
6	engaged in compliance work over the past few years.
7	I would like to begin with a suggestion on the
8	overall approach to fashioning relief.
9	I would suggest that it's probably better to
10	focus on creating or preserving opportunities for
11	competitors rather than limiting the defendant's ability
12	to deliver consumer value. This is the approach very
13	much taken by the U.S. consent decree.
14	The Court of Appeals had reversed and remanded
15	the Section 1 tying claim against Microsoft but affirmed
16	Section 2 liability relating to the manner in which
17	Internet Explorer had been integrated into Windows 98.
18	The decree that resulted did not require that
19	any functionality be removed from Windows. Rather,
20	every provision of the decree is directed at creating or
21	preserving opportunities for competitors, both as a
22	matter of product design and contractually.
23	The focus is upon ensuring that distribution
24	channels remain open. This is an approach that was
25	strongly approved by the Court of Appeals in 2004.

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1	Today, new Windows PCs come loaded up with
2	software from Microsoft's competitors, such as Google,
3	Yahoo, AOL, Semantec, McAfee and many others.
4	Under this approach, consumers benefit from the
5	ability to choose either integrated solutions or
6	separate stand-alone software or, as is so often the
7	case, to use both.
8	The European Commission has taken a different
9	approach. The Commission ordered Microsoft to create
10	new versions of Windows from which media playback
11	functionality had been removed. These are called
12	Windows XPN and Windows Vista N.
13	They were built following extensive compliance
14	discussions with the European Commission staff. They
15	are available in every European language.
16	However, not a single PC manufacturer has chosen
17	to license these operating systems. These operating
18	systems sit on the shelf. Costs have been imposed, but
19	there is little apparent benefit for anyone.
20	I will return to another aspect of this in a
21	moment. For now, I would note only that the U.S.
22	approach seems far more effective at advancing antitrust
23	values.
24	This focus on creating opportunity tells us
25	something about the proper objectives of antitrust

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1	remedies.
2	I would suggest that remedies should be put in
3	place in order to safeguard competitive opportunities
4	but not necessarily to engineer any particular market
5	outcome, such as a reduction in market share. This is
6	for the market to determine once any competitive
7	restraints have been removed.
8	Indeed, even if engineering market outcomes were
9	thought to be desirable theory, it is hard to see how
10	this could be accomplished in practice in most cases.
11	By its nature, a remedy will only govern the
12	conduct of the defendant, not other market participants.
13	Everyone else, competitors, developers of
14	complementary products and, most notably, consumers will
15	act according to their self interest.
16	This is particularly noteworthy in high-tech
17	industries where products often interconnect with each
18	other in different ways.
19	For example, both the U.S. and EU remedies
20	require Microsoft to make available certain technology
21	called communication protocols to its competitors for
22	use in their products.
23	About 30 firms have taken licenses to this
24	technology under the U.S. program and one firm to date
25	under the similar European program.

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1	But whether firms choose to take a license and
2	what kinds of products they build with those licenses
3	is, of course, entirely up to them and outside the
4	control of either Microsoft or any antitrust agency.
5	This general point is relevant outside the
6	context of access remedies as well.
7	Internet Explorer continues to have very high
8	share, although declining. Should this be seen as a
9	shortcoming of the U.S. consent decree?
10	Well, the open source Firefox Web browser now
11	has about 14 percent share, up from zero just a few
12	years ago.
13	Given the safeguards set up by the consent
14	decree which apply on a worldwide basis, there is no
15	reason why Firefox couldn't have a much higher share if
16	that reflected consumer preferences.
17	In fact, Firefox's share is about 33 percent in
18	some major European countries, up from 20 percent just a
19	year ago.
20	This focus on competitive opportunity rather
21	than outcome of market shares is especially important, I
22	think, in government actions.
23	As the Court of Appeals explained in the
24	Microsoft case, liability can be established with little
25	or no proof of actual market impact from the conduct at

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1	issue.
2	This is what the court termed in the Microsoft
3	case a rather endogenous test for causation.
4	In fact, the District Court found that there was
5	no proof that the success of Internet Explorer had been
6	due to unlawful conduct.
7	Where there is no proof of market impact in the
8	first place, it would seem especially inappropriate to
9	expect a remedy to bring about a particular market
10	outcome.
11	This brings me to my third observation.
12	Whatever the proper role of antitrust remedies may be in
13	the abstract, I think, as Gail and Dan said at the
14	outset, it is really quite important that they be fully
15	thought through before liability proceedings are
16	commenced.
17	This is true for at least two reasons.
18	First and most importantly, if it is hard to
19	devise an appropriate remedy, that may suggest that
20	there is no liability in the first place. At the very
21	least, it may suggest that the liability rules were not
22	sufficiently clear to provide any real guidance or
23	notice to the defendant of what would be termed unlawful
24	later.
25	Second, absent a clear view on the question of

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1	remedy, it may be difficult or impossible to obtain
2	rapid relief through settlement.
3	These points are well illustrated I think by
4	Microsoft's experience in dealing with the Windows tying
5	issues through the years.
6	The addition of new functionality to Windows can
7	present competitive challenges for firms that wish to
8	offer comparable functionality separately.
9	Antitrust agencies around the world have focused
10	on that over the past 10 years.
11	At the same time and as the Court of Appeals
12	noted in the Microsoft case, such integration can lead
13	to important benefits for software developers, PC
14	manufacturers, in fact, to the entire PC ecosystem.
15	That's why functionality has been integrated
16	into new operating system products steadily over the
17	past 20 years or so and why in fact we see integration
18	of functions as quite a common function across many
19	product categories.
20	So one has the question how should these
21	competing considerations be addressed in a remedy?
22	In the U.S., the consent decree approach I
23	outlined earlier is now in place. But there were quite
24	a few bumps along the road to getting there, including
25	three rounds of failed settlement talks, one before

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1	Judge Posner in Chicago.
2	I think it is fair to say at least part of the
3	reason why those settlement talks failed is that there
4	was disagreement among the DOJ and the various states as
5	to what would be a suitable form of relief.
6	Absent a clear view on this, no agreement could
7	be reached, and the eventual remedy was delayed.
8	The history in Brussels is instructive as well.
9	In early 2004, Microsoft proposed a variety of remedies
10	to address the Commission's concerns regarding the
11	inclusion of media functionality in Windows.
12	The Commission case team devoted a great deal of
13	effort to defining and exploring those proposals, and
14	Microsoft is grateful for that.
15	Ultimately, however, the Commission determined
16	that a general remedy should be devised that would
17	address all future tying cases.
18	Given the range of possible fact patterns and
19	the benefits of integration, however, neither the
20	Commission nor Microsoft was able to articulate any such
21	rule that would govern future product design decisions
22	despite prodigious efforts by both sides.
23	As a result, settlement talks failed. The
24	Commission proceeded to impose the logical remedy for a
25	tying case, which was an order to untie. As a result,

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1	PC manufacturers and consumers can now choose to get
2	Windows without media functionality.
3	As I have said, they have chosen the
4	full-feature version of Windows, as one might expect.
5	So the question becomes should it be unlawful
6	for a firm to fail to create a product for which there
7	is no appreciable consumer demand? Here consideration
8	of remedy may suggest that there was no unlawful tie in
9	the first place.
10	The same might be said about the package
11	discounting that was at issue in Lepages or the
12	selective discounting and output increases that were at
13	issue in the American Airlines case.
14	I would like to conclude with two final
15	observations of a practical nature.
16	First, in Microsoft's experience, it would seem
17	that the legal process is generally best suited to
18	contractual remedies.
19	Particular cases may call for other forms of
20	relief. But we should recognize that these come with
21	significant challenges for all concerned.
22	Contracts are good because they are within the
23	purview of lawyers. We understand contracts. We know
24	how to read them.
25	They are relatively easy to monitor, both for

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1	the defendant and for the enforcement agency, and I
2	would note that essentially no issue of significance has
3	arisen through the years in Microsoft's compliance with
4	the contractual provisions of the U.S. consent decree.
5	Product design remedies are more difficult.
6	Here considerable technical expertise may be required in
7	order to devise and monitor a remedy.
8	Ultimately lawyers will remain responsible for
9	making compliance judgments regarding highly technical
10	matters, and this may be hard, even with expert
11	technical help.
12	In addition, agency lawyers will inevitably find
13	themselves drawn into the details of product design and
14	even the details of making engineering trade-offs which
15	are essential to the product design process.
16	To deal with these kinds of complexities, the
17	technical committee set up under the U.S. consent decree
18	now has more than 40 full-time employees.
19	Remedies that require sharing of complex
20	technical information are also quite challenging.
21	Technological complexity can quickly lead, I think it is
22	safe to say, to enforcement complexity.
23	Protocol licensing, for example, is just one of
24	eight major provisions of the U.S. consent decree, but
25	it takes up the lion's share of the compliance work,

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1	both for Microsoft and for the agencies.
2	The EU protocol remedy introduces still greater
3	complexity. That is because it seeks to enable
4	fundamentally different computer operating systems with
5	different computer architectures to work together as if
6	they were one.
7	This is a computer science project, and even the
8	Commission itself has recently said that making this
9	work would require a massive development effort by third
10	parties, and that hasn't happened yet.
11	The result has been considerable frustration for
12	the Commission and for Microsoft.
13	This past summer, the Commission imposed fines
14	upon Microsoft of 280 million Euro for failing to
15	complete this project to the satisfaction of the
16	technical advisors set up under that decision.
17	Pricing is another challenge and likely will be
18	for any access case that involves information goods,
19	such as software.
20	The protocol technology that Microsoft has
21	developed was developed over the course of about 10
22	years. It is covered by 35 patents, and many more are
23	pending. It is covered by copyright and trade secret
24	law.
25	How is this to be valued? The answer is not

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1	entirely obvious given the many ways that software is
2	monetized today and the varying business models that
3	people have.
4	Microsoft has suggested pricing that is
5	comparable to that which is in place under the U.S.
6	program where many firms have taken licenses. That
7	pricing is backed up by more than a thousand pages of
8	analysis and justification that the Commission
9	requested.
10	The Commission has taken issue with this
11	pricing, however, and is threatening to impose new fines
12	that could run to additional hundreds of millions of
13	Euros.
14	My final observation relates to globalization.
15	From Microsoft's perspective and I think it is
16	fair to say from that of other high-tech companies, it
17	is increasingly important that antitrust agencies
18	cooperate closely on remedies and show due respect for
19	principles of international comity.
20	For sound economic reasons, the Windows
21	operating system is essentially identical all over the
22	world. That uniformity is critical to the role that
23	Windows provides in enabling compatibility between
24	literally thousands of complementary software products
25	and hardware products.

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1	And that is threatened today by the varying
2	approaches taken to the Windows tying issues in the
3	United States, in Europe and Korea, which I haven't had
4	time to go through this morning.
5	In the compulsory licensing area, I think it is
6	safe to say that the U.S. and foreign countries are
7	taking a different approach to compulsory licensing.
8	In the age of the Internet, once trade secrets
9	are revealed, they can never be recovered. Absent
10	greater deference to comity principles, we may well find
11	that the legal regime that imposes the most onerous
12	legal requirements de facto prevails on a worldwide
13	basis.
14	Again, thanks very much, Gail and Dan. I
15	appreciate the opportunity to speak here today.
16	(Applause.)
17	MS. KURSH: Thanks, Dave. Robert Crandall will
18	be next.
19	Robert is a senior fellow in economic studies at
20	the Brookings Institution. He has previously served as
21	acting deputy and assistant director at the Council on
22	Wage and Price Stability.
23	He has written extensively on antitrust policy,
24	with a particular emphasis on the telecommunications
25	sector and emerging issues in wireless and broadband

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1	competition.
2	Among the antitrust topics on which he has
3	written is the effectiveness or lack thereof, I guess,
4	of relief in government Section 2 cases.
5	Bob.
6	MR. CRANDALL: Thank you, Gail. It is a
7	pleasure to be here.
8	I haven't written that extensively in antitrust.
9	In fact, I spent most of my career looking at regulatory
10	activities that range as far as environmental policy and
11	fuel economy standards and more recently
12	telecommunications regulation, which, of course, is
13	related to competition policy.
14	I have not spent as much time as my colleagues
15	on this panel have, I'm sure, on the details of
16	antitrust, nor the details of Section 2 remedies.
17	My purpose today is to provoke, frankly, and for
18	that reason I'm somewhat disappointed we will not have
19	questions in the audience, though I'm not sure how many
20	economists are in the audience anyway.
21	You see the title of my presentation. I will
22	focus on the AT&T divestiture, not simply because that's
23	the one I know a little bit about, but because some work
24	which I have done and which Clifford Winston and I have
25	done and Ken Elzinga and I have done on Section 2 relief

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1	using a case-by-case approach to this, which I think is
2	the only way to go about it.
3	Each one of these cases is sui generis. It is
4	hard to do a more general study. It suggests very
5	little effect it creates on the market, on competition
6	in the market, on output, on prices.
7	In fact, not because of shameless
8	self-promotion, but because I would like to provoke
9	people to read the articles and maybe prove me wrong, I
10	have listed the articles in this first slide.
11	But the one case that everybody comes to as the
12	example of success in Section 2 structural relief cases
13	particularly is the AT&T divestiture, which, of course,
14	was negotiated someplace on a ski slope in Utah in 1982
15	and was executed effective January 1, 1984 after about
16	10 years of litigation.
17	Indeed, at first I would have been a supporter
18	of that and perhaps anyone that was wishing to get into
19	a debate with me on this would find things I have said
20	in the past, 20 years ago, that I might have approved.
21	Maybe I was overly seduced by Bill Baxter, who was a
22	very persuasive guy and a very good fellow to boot.
23	But over time I have come to question whether in
24	fact even the AT&T case can be considered a success in
25	terms of relief from a Section 2 prosecution.

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1	Now, most people in the room would know about
2	this case. We don't have to spend much time on it.
3	The principal outcome was a divestiture of the
4	Bell operating companies from the rest of AT&T, AT&T
5	keeping the manufacturing and long distance arms and a
6	large share of the research operations.
7	The near-term result -- and I will show in a
8	second -- is long distance service increased. Long
9	distance service output increased and U.S. long distance
10	rates fell.
11	I do these slides myself. That's why they look
12	so bad.
13	But was the increased long distance competition
14	due to vertical divestiture? This is a very different
15	world in 1982.
16	AT&T accounted for 80, 85 percent of the access
17	lines and almost the same percentage of total telephone
18	subscribers, including wireless.
19	AT&T's wireless service was not launched until
20	1983 in Chicago, its cellular service. They had a more
21	mundane wireless service prior to that.
22	This is the period in which I think it was
23	McKinsey was predicting there would be a demand for no
24	more than one million cell phones in the United States.
25	At this time, though, we had so-called universal

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1	service pricing, which is really inverse Ramsey pricing,
2	for you economists in the room. I suppose antitrust
3	lawyers may understand the jargon.
4	This, in fact, invited entry into long distance
5	service. It invited the likes of Bill McGowan of
6	Microwave Communications Incorporated -- he said he
7	changed the name to MCI because he didn't want people to
8	think he was going to fry them -- to enter the long
9	distance service to figure a way to get access to AT&T's
10	service, particularly with very low prices.
11	Indeed, they battled that out for many years,
12	culminating in a private antitrust action and convincing
13	the Justice Department in '74 to file the Section 2
14	case.
15	Once again, the question was was the vertical
16	divestiture which resulted in this case necessary to
17	promote long distance competition? What are the
18	numbers?
19	Here are the numbers on real interstate long
20	distance rates and AT&T's average share of revenues
21	using the same access on the left-hand side.
22	And you see that starting in 1984, after the
23	divestiture, AT&T steadily lost market share and long
24	distance rates came down steadily.
25	This is taken to reflect success of the decree.

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1	Of course, we don't know what the but for would look
2	like. And it may well be that without some action that
3	we wouldn't have had this result.
4	In fact, most other countries had to take action
5	themselves, and they took action only along one
6	dimension of the decree. No other country that I'm
7	aware of has actually required a divestiture of their
8	operating companies from manufacturing or long distance
9	service companies in their country.
10	Virtually all of them, however, at some time
11	after 1984, as late as 1998 in the EU, required access,
12	equal access to the incumbent local exchange company
13	switches for terminating or originating calls.
14	This obviously is regulated access, and in any
15	regulated access there is going to be an argument about
16	the price. But nobody engaged in vertical divestiture.
17	One could argue that what Offcom is doing in the
18	U.K. today is a very mild version of structural
19	separation with British Telecom. We will see how that
20	works out.
21	But no other country actually engaged in
22	vertical divestiture.
23	Now, if you look at what happened to the price
24	of long distance services, comparing the U.S. interstate
25	rate -- the intrastate rates didn't go down as fast

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1	because the states controlled and used their regulatory
2	controls to keep those prices relatively high, the
3	inverse Ramsey pricing continues to stay low.
4	If you look at the U.S. interstate prices
5	against the average for Canada and wouldn't make much
6	difference which one you use for the EU. I use the
7	three-minute price here, and I think they also publish
8	10-minute prices in the annual monitoring reports that
9	the EU does on monitoring effects of their regulatory
10	program.
11	What you see here is prices came down even more
12	rapidly in Canada and the EU, much more quickly
13	subsequent to their liberalization than it did in the
14	United States subsequent to ours.
15	In fact, equal access to the switches was all
16	that was required. And the FCC in the United States had
17	not done this of its own volition prior to the bringing
18	of the AT&T case in 1974 or prior to the negotiation of
19	the consent decree, the divestiture with the equal
20	access provisions in it in 1982.
21	Now, in no small part long distance rates in the
22	United States fell because of declining access charges.
23	One of the things -- and you could take this as
24	a measure of the success of the decree. One of the
25	things that the decree did was to expose exactly how

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1	much if you want to call it broadly subsidy was going on
2	between long distance service and other service, local
3	access to the telephone network in the regulatory
4	process at the Federal Communications Commission.
5	With very high access charges now having to be
6	levied to keep the rates at about the same level, the
7	FCC started the process of rebalancing rates, lowering
8	access charges and putting all those complicated charges
9	that you and I don't understand on the back of our
10	telephone bills, which are in fact designed to try to
11	shield from the public information about what's really
12	going on here.
13	But it made good policy sense to put these
14	nontraffic-sensitive charges as a fixed charge on your
15	telephone bill and to lower the traffic-sensitive
16	charges of long distance by doing so.
17	In fact, a great deal, as you can see, of the
18	decline in long distance rates occurred because of the
19	decline in access charges.
20	My friends who worked on the AT&T case at DOJ
21	and others who have been involved in this process over
22	the years who don't like my presentation will argue with
23	me that this could not have happened but for the case.
24	In fact, that is one of the benefits of the
25	case, I suppose. We could not have persuaded the FCC to

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1	undertake both equal access and to rebalance rates but
2	for the divestiture.
3	I suppose that is a benefit. But again, the
4	problem here was not AT&T's monopolization activities,
5	unless you consider their lobbying activities of the FCC
6	as part of it, but, rather, the FCC's seeming
7	incompetence or reluctance to do the right thing to
8	maximize economic welfare for people using the telephone
9	network.
10	As a mea culpa, I was actually at the FCC
11	advising part-time one of the commissioners, Glen
12	Robinson, who is now professor of administrative law at
13	University of Virginia. So I guess I'm tied up in the
14	complicity in all that.
15	This is simply saying much the same thing, that
16	in fact what happened was as a result of the
17	divestiture, there was an exposure of the folly of the
18	universal service pricing policy, something which the
19	FCC addressed with great opposition from so-called
20	consumer groups, who claimed that millions of low-income
21	people would fall off the telephone network.
22	Of course, we know better than that because we
23	know the price elasticity in the demand for access to
24	telephone service is very, very low.
25	What about the costs of the decree? My own

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1	estimation -- and I haven't seen anyone else attempt to
2	address this -- was that we lost about $5 billion of
3	output just in the transition from the old AT&T to the
4	new AT&T over 1984-85, in that period.
5	There are some estimates -- now, these were
6	funded by the Bell companies as attempting to get out of
7	the decree. There is an estimate by Paul Ruben, a
8	colleague at Emory, that the process of administering
9	the line of business restrictions in the decree totaled
10	about $1.4 billion over time.
11	Though what happened -- and this goes to Dave's
12	presentation on trying to provide technological
13	prescriptions and deal with changes in technology in an
14	antitrust decree. What happened was that the market
15	changed rather dramatically.
16	Something called the Internet came up and the
17	separation of interstate from local and intrastate
18	services in the decree became extremely problematic.
19	Not only that, but the information restriction which
20	eventually was abolished by the Court of Appeals also
21	was a problem at a time when obviously information and
22	transmission switching of signals were melding together.
23	Now, here is one of the more interesting -- I
24	mentioned earlier that the estimates, at least one
25	commercial estimate of what cellular technology was

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1	going to do back in the 1980s was seriously wrong.
2	At the very time that the AT&T case was brought,
3	the FCC was deciding what to do about the so-called
4	cellular spectrum.
5	It took about another nine years for them
6	finally to have one of these licenses begin to --
7	through one of these licenses for service to become
8	available. There was a lengthy hassle over how not only
9	to allocate the spectrum but how to assign it and divvy
10	it up among players.
11	We know what they did. They decided to have
12	only two licenses -- why is not at all clear -- and to
13	give one of them to the incumbent wireline carrier on
14	the grounds that I suppose that wireless was
15	complementary and not likely to be competitive with
16	wireline service.
17	Obviously one's perspective on that would change
18	over time.
19	So it wasn't until 1983 that wireless service
20	began. This is the time when the consent decree was
21	just going into effect, after it had been negotiated.
22	And in the negotiation of the consent decree, the Bell
23	companies were allowed to keep one of the wireless
24	licenses.
25	In retrospect, wireless became the most serious

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1	competitor for a long period of time. Cable and VOiP
2	may now take its place in the future.
3	And it was certainly a mistake to do that. But
4	the bigger mistake was only to assign two bands to
5	cellular service.
6	It wasn't until we ran a huge federal budget
7	deficit and the Congress decided we needed to raise
8	money through spectrum auctions that we began to get
9	more spectrum allocated to, more and more licenses
10	awarded for cellular service.
11	And, of course, starting about 1995, 1996, the
12	new PCS cellular licenses were bid on and began to
13	operate, and we went from two carriers to six national
14	carriers over a period of time through a contorted
15	process I won't bore you with right now, because the
16	stuff was licensed on a local market by local market
17	basis rather than national basis.
18	But the important message here is what drove
19	competition starting in the late '90s was wireless, and
20	particularly long distance competition in the '90s, and
21	now I would even argue competition for the local access.
22	What I show you here is a chart in which the top
23	red line shows what we would have expected interstate
24	terminating switched access minutes to look like given
25	what was happening to prices and GDP, and the dotted

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1	line below, what actually happened to wireline
2	terminating and interstate access.
3	The gap that opens up there is primarily due to
4	wireless. That is, wireless began to take a very, very
5	large share.
6	Interestingly enough, this whole thing developed
7	because of the development of these national plans which
8	most of us have called from anywhere to anywhere. They
9	were introduced first by AT&T, still the largest long
10	distance player.
11	They cannibalized their own business with this,
12	because then ever other cellular company had to follow
13	in the next year. And today, of course, we have not
14	only a proliferation of these plans, but the plans also
15	allow zero per minute calling in nighttime and on
16	weekends.
17	This number, which goes through 2004, is
18	woefully out of date. I haven't tried to update it.
19	I would think that a very, very large share,
20	overwhelming majority of all interstate long distance
21	minutes now go over wireless. As I said, this may
22	change with VOiP.
23	The price of the decree -- and this is one of
24	the problems of any of these decrees -- is it is
25	difficult to get rid of it.

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1	The price for getting rid of it after 10 or 12
2	years was the 1996 Telecommunications Act which -- and I
3	won't go into in great detail; we don't have time -- is
4	subject to its own folly and led to enormous battles
5	between entrants and particularly MCI and AT&T and the
6	regional Bell companies, led to an unbundling regime
7	which got more and more liberal as more and more of the
8	new entrants failed and ended up with a thing called a
9	uni-platform which means the entrant could use all of
10	the facilities of the Bell companies at discounted
11	rates, 50 to 60 percent off retail, through the
12	so-called unbundling process, a provision which was
13	eventually overturned by the Court of Appeals which said
14	it went too far.
15	Also, there was a line-sharing provision which
16	is still in existence throughout Europe and most other
17	countries of the world, Japan, Australia, but which also
18	was ruled as an unjustified extension of the unbundling
19	regime by the D.C. Circuit.
20	In fact, the great savior of folly in U.S.
21	telecommunications was Steven Williams of the U.S. Court
22	of Appeals, now retired or senior status.
23	What happened in the '96 act, we wasted at least
24	$50 billion of investment. Where the stuff went nobody
25	knows. I can't find it on eBay today.

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1	MCI and AT&T were forced to enter the arms of
2	Verizon and SBC respectively, not because of the ending,
3	the D.C. Circuit opinions. They would have been forced
4	into it anyway because wireless was eating their lunch
5	so rapidly that their revenues were declining by 10 to
6	15 percent per year.
7	So, after 12 years of the AT&T decree and nine
8	years after the 1996 act, we reverted back to a
9	vertically integrated telecom sector.
10	It was not antitrust, although you could argue
11	that antitrust, certainly the equal access provision did
12	generate the nascent competition early on in long
13	distance services.
14	But we could have gotten there without antitrust
15	had the FCC been on the job or had they realized the
16	benefits of doing this. We led the way with the AT&T
17	decree, and then the rest of the world could follow with
18	their equal access provisions.
19	Today, the local bottleneck is largely
20	irrelevant. And, in fact, despite the rhetoric
21	surrounding it, the local telephone companies are in
22	deep trouble because they do not have a network which is
23	easily capable of delivering high-speed video on demand
24	and are, therefore, having to spend enormous amounts of
25	money to upgrade their networks to catch the cable

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1	companies who very easily can offer voice
2	telecommunications services.
3	As a result, what has happened is with the
4	change in the regulatory regime, the incumbent local
5	carriers are now investing enormous sums in their
6	networks, far more, by the way, than the more regulated
7	EU carriers are investing in Europe or, for that matter,
8	more regulated carriers in Australia. Japan still is
9	investing a lot despite a heavily regulated system.
10	I don't know that I can give you general lessons
11	from all this. I think this is sui generis.
12	The AT&T decree may have worked in a narrow
13	sense in that it did introduce equal access into long
14	distance.
15	The cost of the vertical divestiture was
16	extremely high. Was it necessary? I think in
17	retrospect I can say probably not.
18	But I didn't have the foresight at the time to
19	say that. And it is easy enough to go back and be a
20	Monday morning quarterback.
21	But I think it is at least too facile to say
22	this is a decree that clearly was a success and one
23	which we ought to follow in other cases, although one
24	wonders what other industry would offer the same
25	opportunities for this type of vertical divestiture and

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1	access.
2	But perhaps Dave has some ideas on that.
3	With that, let me just stop and say one of the
4	things that Cliff Winston and I really wanted to provoke
5	is economists looking at the impacts of antitrust
6	decrees, antitrust policy in general, more empirical
7	work.
8	Our conclusion in our paper wasn't that
9	antitrust is a failure. It was that we have no
10	empirical evidence that it is a success. And that is a
11	serious problem for a policy that's only been in place
12	for 117 years.
13	So we hope to provoke people into doing research
14	and either proving what we have done so far right or
15	wrong, as the case may be.
16	I thank you for your attention.
17	(Applause.)
18	MS. KURSH: Thank you, Bob.
19	I would like to now ask Per Hellstrom to come
20	up. Per is chief of the Unit C-3 at the Directorate
21	General for Competition, European Commission.
22	He is actively involved in the European
23	Commission's case against Microsoft, and we are very
24	grateful to him for traveling across the Atlantic to
25	share his perspectives based on his experiences with

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1	Article 82.
2	MR. HELLSTROM: I would like to provide a
3	European perspective to this issue of remedies.
4	I don't really intend to go into detail in any
5	particular case. I certainly don't want this to turn
6	into another hearing on the Microsoft case.
7	I already defended that case once before the
8	court, and we are still awaiting the judgment in that
9	case.
10	But I could mention that as some of you may be
11	aware, the Commission is currently undertaking a review
12	of its policy under Article 82, which is our provision
13	for single-firm behavior.
14	And in addition to that, we are also reviewing
15	our policy as regards remedies, both under Article 81,
16	cartels, et cetera, and Article 82. And we are
17	preparing some internal guidance in this regard.
18	Just a brief overview of the legal framework in
19	Europe, which may be different than the U.S. framework.
20	We have Article 82 of the treaty, which states
21	that abuse of a dominant position shall be prohibited.
22	Now, this provision has direct effect and it can
23	be relied upon by private parties before national
24	courts, and it is the implementing regulation,
25	Regulation 1/2003, which provides the enforcement powers

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1	to the European Commission to enforce Article 82 and
2	impose remedies.
3	Remedies are not mentioned in Article 82 itself.
4	In addition to that, we have the case law of the
5	Community Courts which, of course, has dealt with the
6	issue of remedies in some cases, and there is certain
7	decisional practice of the European Commission, the
8	Microsoft decision being one of those.
9	I believe, therefore, that one must separate the
10	issues of the finding of an abuse and the imposition of
11	a remedy, at least in our legal system.
12	Having said that, from the point of view of an
13	enforcement authority, I do share the view that it is
14	important to think about remedies early on in an
15	investigation.
16	But for the purposes of the discussion on
17	remedies, I think also we must assume that we have
18	already a valid finding of an abuse, for example, a
19	refusal to deal, tying, excessive pricing. And certain
20	aspects that could in theory be relevant for the
21	imposition of a remedy, such as the specific character
22	of the market, efficiencies, incentives to innovate,
23	et cetera, may in fact already have been taken into
24	account in the finding of the abuse.
25	Now, regulation 1/2003, that is the implementing

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1	regulation that gives powers to the Commission.
2	The context with regard to remedies are Article
3	7, which gives the power for us to take prohibition
4	decisions and impose mandatory remedies; Article 9,
5	which provides for commitment decisions. That is
6	voluntary remedies where it is up to the parties to
7	propose adequate remedies. There is no finding of an
8	abuse.
9	And these decisions are only possible where the
10	Commission does not intend to impose a fine.
11	And then there is also provision for interim
12	measures in cases of urgency in Article 8.
13	I will focus today only on the first one,
14	Article 7, prohibition decisions, whereby the Commission
15	is entitled, where it finds an infringement of either
16	Article 81 or 82, to require the undertaking concerned
17	to bring such an infringement to end. For this purpose,
18	it may impose on them any behavioral or structural
19	remedies which are proportionate to the infringement
20	committed and necessary to bring the infringement
21	effectively to an end.
22	Structural remedies can only be imposed either
23	where there is no equally effective behavioral remedy or
24	where any equally effective behavioral remedy would be
25	more burdensome for the undertaking concerned than the

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1	structural remedy.
2	In other words, two types of remedies are
3	possible, behavioral, structural.
4	As the wording indicates, the principles of
5	necessity and proportionality applies. And the aim, as
6	stated, is to bring the infringement effectively to an
7	end.
8	In other words, the Commission has the power to
9	require a company to restore the market conditions
10	absent the infringement and to impose remedies that are
11	necessary to that effect.
12	But, of course, details of any such measures can
13	only be decided on a case-by-case basis.
14	In addition to this, Recital 12 of the
15	regulation provides that with regard to structural
16	remedies, "changes in the structure of an undertaking as
17	it existed before the infringement was committed would
18	only be proportionate where there is a substantial risk
19	of a lasting or repeated infringement that derives from
20	the very structure of the undertaking."
21	Now, if we look at how this framework is applied
22	in practice, I believe that the standard scenario is to
23	have a cease and desist order plus fines.
24	In our terminology, fines are not really
25	remedies, but cease and desist orders are.

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1	And by cease and desist orders, I mean an order
2	for the company to bring the abusive behavior to an end
3	and refrain from repeating such act and conduct as well
4	as any act or conduct having the same or equivalent
5	object or effect.
6	This is usually the standard phrase in an
7	Article 82 decision.
8	But a remedy, as we speak about it here today,
9	is an elaboration, then, sometimes an expansion of a
10	cease and desist order, either prescribing a certain
11	action or prohibiting a certain action, leaving the firm
12	discretion on what precisely to implement.
13	Now, how to design a remedy. In theory,
14	remedies or commitments should be effective,
15	proportionate/necessary, clear and precise, cost
16	efficient, transparent and consistent.
17	Of course, in practice, this is quite a
18	challenge.
19	And as mentioned, evidently there is an inherent
20	link between the nature of the infringement and the
21	remedies available to the Commission, and any assessment
22	of the effectiveness and necessity of the remedy must be
23	based on the facts and circumstances of each individual
24	case.
25	But here are some possible criterias, a

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1	nonexhaustive list on how to assess the effectiveness of
2	a remedy, questions such as does the remedy lower
3	barriers to entry, is it likely to increase consumer
4	welfare, can it be practically implemented, monitored
5	and enforced and how quickly can the remedy restore
6	competition.
7	One question that has been raised is whether one
8	could foresee a two-step approach with regard to
9	remedies. That is, if the initial remedies imposed are
10	ineffective for one reason or another, could stricter
11	remedies be imposed.
12	Here there may be a difference in our respective
13	legal frameworks. In Europe, in order for us to impose
14	a new remedy if the initial remedy does not work, we
15	would have to respect the procedural rights of the
16	parties, and we would normally have to issue a so-called
17	statement of objections outlining the reasons why a new
18	remedy is required. And that, of course, is a procedure
19	that we know takes time.
20	Of course, this is true for the initial remedy.
21	We must provide sufficient notice in a statement of
22	objection of the remedies foreseen. It would be
23	possible to have some options, some alternatives and
24	allow the company concerned to comment on these.
25	With regard to behavioral remedies, a possible

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1	definition of behavioral remedy, "a behavioral remedy is
2	a measure that obliges the concerned undertaking to act
3	in a certain way or to omit certain anticompetitive
4	conduct."
5	Compliance with behavioral remedies usually has
6	to be monitored and enforced. One can classify these
7	types of remedies according to the type of infringement,
8	antiforeclosure remedies, anticollusion remedies or
9	antiexploitation remedies.
10	I will not go into further detail on these now.
11	Common to most behavioral remedies is that they
12	do not change the incentive of the firms to engage in
13	anticompetitive behavior. As a consequence, compliance
14	has to be monitored to avoid circumvention.
15	Monitoring raises various questions as to who
16	should monitor and how. Should it be the European
17	Commission, some sector-specific regulator, competitors,
18	customers, trustees, national courts, or could one
19	resort to some arbitration mechanism, and how should all
20	this be organized.
21	I believe as regards monitoring, the U.S. is
22	probably more advanced in this regard than we are in
23	Europe. And we are currently looking into ways to
24	improve our effectiveness in this regard.
25	A structural remedy is a measure that

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1	effectively changes the structure of the market by a
2	transfer of property rights regarding tangible or
3	intangible assets, including the transfer of an entire
4	business unit that does not lead to any ongoing
5	relationships between the former and future owner.
6	After its completion, "a structural remedy
7	should not require any further monitoring."
8	So structural remedies would normally involve
9	the transfer of property rights, some form of
10	divestiture. There should not be any ongoing links.
11	There should be a one-off measure, a clean
12	break, and this remedy should remove incentives and/or
13	the means of a firm to infringe competition law.
14	It may be necessary to have some sort of
15	behavioral flanking measures. Monitoring and
16	enforcement should only be necessary until divestiture
17	is completed.
18	That would be an advantage compared to
19	behavioral remedies. However, structural remedies have
20	rarely been used in Europe under Article 82.
21	However, for the future, the Commission would
22	not hesitate to impose structural remedies when
23	necessary and appropriate. In fact, we could even be
24	obliged to do so, although, of course, again it would
25	depend on the circumstances of each case.

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1	I would just like to conclude with a quote from
2	Mr. Charles A. James, the former Assistant Attorney
3	General at DOJ.
4	He has stated in an article that "an antitrust
5	remedy must stop the offending conduct, prevent its
6	recurrence and restore competition. Preventing
7	recurrence must involve proactive steps to address
8	conduct of similar nature. Restoration requires
9	prospective relief to create lost competition and may
10	involve actions to disadvantage the antitrust offender
11	and/or favor its rivals."
12	I believe the Commission would fully subscribe
13	to this statement, although I should add that the
14	Assistant Attorney General also emphasized that the
15	relief, however, must have its foundation in the
16	offending conduct.
17	So in the end, it all comes back to the inherent
18	link between the remedy and the infringement identified.
19	Thank you for your attention.
20	(Applause.)
21	MS. KURSH: Thank you, Per.
22	Tad Lipsky is a partner at Latham & Watkins and
23	a former Deputy Assistant Attorney General at the
24	Antitrust Division.
25	While at the division, he organized and

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1	supervised preparation of the merger guidelines and the
2	Antitrust Division's view of the United States versus
3	IBM, among many important antitrust cases.
4	His career has spanned virtually every facet of
5	antitrust law, and he has served in both public and
6	private practice, both here and abroad.
7	Welcome, Tad.
8	MR. LIPSKY: Thanks, Gail and Dan. Your careers
9	have spanned almost every aspect of antitrust law too.
10	I must say you have the organization of these
11	hearings down to an art and science.
12	It is really a great pleasure to be able to
13	focus just on the substance and you are taking care of
14	all the rest.
15	So congratulations. This has been a fascinating
16	set of presentations this morning, and, indeed, the
17	whole record of the hearings has been very interesting.
18	I enjoyed it very much. I am sure it will end
19	up being a very signal contribution to a lot of
20	subjects.
21	The remedies in some respects is really the
22	whole debate.
23	Ultimately every antitrust case comes down to
24	what is the problem and what do you want to do about it.
25	If you don't have the answer to the remedy, you really

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1	aren't out of the starting gate.
2	It is interesting when Bill Baxter came to
3	Washington, he had a specific plan for some things he
4	wanted to address. Actually, the AT&T case was not high
5	on his list.
6	His list was to begin an amicus program to
7	articulate to the courts in antitrust cases some
8	economic errors and omissions that he thought were
9	endemic in the precedent.
10	It is interesting we are seeing sort of the
11	final element of that play out just this week with the
12	Legion case.
13	Just about every landmark of judicial ignorance
14	that Bill had identified has now fallen, when you look
15	at the Monsanto and Associated General Contractors and
16	NCAA versus Board of Regents and Copperweld.
17	This is really getting down to the last part of
18	that program.
19	And then he wanted to rewrite what were then the
20	effective merger guidelines, the 1968 sort of Warren
21	court, Lyndon B. Johnson version of merger guidelines.
22	Finally, the third element on his list was what
23	he had seen -- he wanted to do something about judgments
24	and decrees and the way relief was handled in the
25	division, and that meant not only cleaning out a lot of

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1	old decrees but, believe it or not, when Baxter came to
2	town in 1981, it was not yet the consistent practice,
3	although it was beginning to be more consistent to have
4	sunset provisions in judgment decrees and in consent
5	decrees entered by the Antitrust Division.
6	I think both at the Commission and the division
7	that is now pretty much uniformly the practice.
8	He abolished the judgment enforcement section
9	because he thought it was very pernicious to have a
10	separate judgment enforcement section which discouraged
11	connecting the theory of remedy to the theory of relief
12	sought in a case.
13	Bill had many memorable phrases, but his way of
14	summing up this problem was to say of the division
15	litigators, he said "Everybody likes to catch them, but
16	nobody wants to clean them," by which he meant if you
17	weren't willing to clean the fish, then you probably
18	shouldn't be fishing to catch it either.
19	My presentation is really in two parts. One is
20	talking about essential facilities and mandatory access,
21	because that is such a hot part of the remedies debate
22	in the context certainly of Section 2 cases,
23	monopolization cases.
24	But it is really the way of illustrating what I
25	think is a fundamental point that is sometimes lost in

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1	debating the specifics of particular cases and I think
2	needs to be emphasized.
3	Perhaps not a Baxterian phrase, but my phrase to
4	capture the issue is no sense pretending.
5	If your image of the way an industry should work
6	in a modern capitalist competitive economy is that there
7	should be a number of competitors vying for advantage to
8	supply products and services that meet demand, there are
9	some industries where you are not going to have
10	multiple -- by virtue of the cost structure or some
11	other almost element of the technology or the market,
12	you are not going to have multiple competitors.
13	This is where the essential facility doctrine
14	really starts, from an implicit recognition that if you
15	have something that meets the essential facility
16	definition and it also is something that other
17	competitors cannot practically duplicate -- is I think
18	the phrase from the seminar cases -- what you have is a
19	classic declining cost industry where you simply are not
20	going to be able to structure it and expect optimal
21	results on a competitive basis.
22	You will have to consider the viability of
23	regulatory alternatives, price limits in the framework
24	of utility regulation or some other kind of public
25	intervention, and that puts you kind of in the space

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1	where you have essentially got a fundamental departure I
2	think from the antitrust vision of the way an industry
3	is supposed to operate and you need to consider whether
4	you can even attack the problem with an antitrust-like
5	remedy, be it vertical divestiture or whatever, or
6	whether you need a regulatory scheme.
7	And it also means that the costs and benefits of
8	these ways of addressing this problem need to be
9	confronted in an intellectually honest way and that you
10	might conclude that the best thing to do is to do
11	nothing because there are some problems whose remedies
12	are more costly than just suffering the problem.
13	I also wanted to point out, as long as we are on
14	the subject, there is a flaw in the essential facilities
15	doctrine, and that is that there is an element that says
16	you are not required to provide access if you don't have
17	room in your facility to provide the access.
18	That is just inconsistent with the fundamental
19	premise of an essential facility. If you are a
20	monopolist, you obviously have the incentive to
21	undersize and not build enough capacity.
22	So the fact you are actually operating at
23	capacity and don't have room to fit in access by anybody
24	else may actually be a signal that you are engaged in
25	exploiting your monopoly position.

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1	So it shouldn't be a reason -- you can say the
2	essential facilities doctrine is silly because all it
3	does is identify circumstances where you have to replace
4	antitrust with regulation.
5	But at least if that's your theory, you don't
6	want to say that you are going to ignore the problem if
7	it turns out that the monopolist is in fact a monopolist
8	and doing what he is not supposed to do.
9	Finally, a point that has been touched on
10	before, the idea of intellectual property and mandatory
11	licensing of intellectual property as a remedy.
12	If your inability to duplicate is because of a
13	law that says that nobody else has the legal right to
14	make, use or sell some product or do something else,
15	then you have an inherent tension between the reward
16	structure set up by the intellectual property law and
17	the idea of antitrust intervention.
18	That is another real complicated problem. So if
19	you want to try and access remedy, here are some of the
20	costs and complications.
21	First of all, we already heard how complicated
22	it is to engage in access pricing. These are all the
23	familiar problems of traditional public utility-style
24	regulation, local distribution monopolies, gas,
25	electricity, what have you.

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1	Another issue that I think tends to be ignored
2	is evasion possibilities. It is very easy to discuss
3	monopoly pricing in your premise for intervention and to
4	slip into an assumption that if you can do something
5	about monopoly pricing, that will enhance the
6	performance of the essential facility that you have.
7	But, in fact, anybody who has dealt with an
8	insurance company or bought a car or actually bought
9	anything more complicated than a toothpick realizes that
10	there are zillions of dimensions to any commercial
11	transaction. There is credit terms, there is delivery,
12	there is service, repair, do you get a case with that
13	instrument.
14	If you have monopoly problem, you have to have
15	some way of forcing, compelling the monopolist to go out
16	beyond the area of profit maximization in every
17	dimension, not just price and output but quality and
18	service and innovation and all that other stuff.
19	So these regulatory problems tend to be severely
20	underestimated.
21	I have listed some other disadvantages here of
22	access remedies. You sacrifice economies of
23	integration, as is made obvious by some of our decrees
24	over the years, the Paramount decree separating
25	exhibition from production of motion pictures.

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1	You had it in the AT&T case. It comes up from
2	time to time. The institutional problems of enforcement
3	through the consent decree process I think are fairly
4	well recognized.
5	The Paramount decree, as a matter of fact, being
6	perhaps a good example, because after a course of
7	enforcement over many years, you had a situation where
8	ultimately the Assistant Attorney General had to walk
9	away from a remedy that had been adopted by the decree
10	enforcement staff, which looked to the new folks like
11	authorizing the so-called splits, the exhibition side,
12	buyers cartel.
13	So arguably you had a decree enforcement staff
14	being co-opted by the industry that they were regulating
15	and coming up with a solution that was seriously
16	anticompetitive.
17	Finally, here is a huge problem that is very
18	difficult to get a grip on but nevertheless we are
19	confident that it exists, that if you encourage
20	disadvantaged firms, usually a disadvantaged competitor,
21	to believe there is an antitrust remedy in an essential
22	facility-type context, you are encouraging them to come
23	to the agency, to invest their resources in legal
24	maneuvering rather than investing those resources in
25	innovation that would destroy the monopoly. And that's

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1	a bad thing.
2	Nevertheless, as this slide is headed, once you
3	are in this space where you can't assume that there is a
4	competitive structure that will automatically achieve
5	optimal performance, you have to assess the possibility
6	that some kind of intervention and some kind of access
7	remedy, despite all the costs and burdens that I just
8	enumerated, might actually be better than doing nothing
9	or might be better than applying some other regulatory
10	remedy.
11	And some of the items that are sometimes
12	relevant to deciding whether you want to dive off that
13	cliff or not, if you are going to establish conditions,
14	prices and conditions of access, is there a regulatory
15	mechanism that is already extant that could take care of
16	that issue.
17	What most people regard as the seminal essential
18	facilities case -- it is arguable, but let's accept that
19	for right now -- U.S. versus Terminal Railroad, that's
20	where the J. Gould Railroads owned all the bridges and
21	terminals in St. Louis, and they wouldn't let the
22	western railroads use those facilities on equivalent
23	terms.
24	When the Supreme Court basically found liability
25	or instructed the lower court to find liability for the

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1	Gould coalition's behavior, they sent the matter back to
2	the District Court and said fashion a decree that lets
3	the western railroads use these facilities more or less
4	on the same terms and conditions as the railroads that
5	are part of the Gould group, "but, by the way, don't
6	mess around with the ICC's ratemaking authority, you
7	can't make rates."
8	So they had the ICC there they thought they
9	could rely on to solve any specific ratemaking issues.
10	We have already heard reference to the FCC's
11	ability to adjust the access charges and in effect work
12	in cooperation with the federal District Court in the
13	Bell system decree.
14	Then you have this fascinating case of Otter
15	Tail Power, where the Supreme Court in a 4-3 decision,
16	where the dissent was actually right, but nevertheless,
17	it was a 4-3 decision where the Supreme Court
18	essentially said that on remand, the parties would have
19	to work out an access arrangement.
20	And in this particular instance, the Federal
21	Power Commission would have been the logical regulator.
22	But at that time it did not have the power to regulate
23	the access terms and conditions that the Supreme Court
24	was looking to have enforced.
25	I don't know where that left people practically.

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1	I doubt that that decree did much good. But in any
2	event, since we have gone from the Federal Power
3	Commission to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission,
4	they do now have the power to order and regulate access.
5	But, of course, things have been scrambled in
6	that industry by some fairly aggressive deregulation.
7	There are some cases which are decided more on
8	Section 1 grounds, Gamco and the Associated Press case.
9	I will not spend any time on them. Basically,
10	it is an organization where they are granting access to
11	a bunch of different competitors.
12	So if one of them is wrongfully excluded, you
13	can just order access on the same terms and conditions
14	that are available to everybody else. That makes your
15	information and regulation costs a lot lower.
16	And, finally, the question of dynamic
17	efficiencies, I think that Bob has really touched on
18	this very profound question about whether the AT&T
19	decree really has anything to do with the fact that long
20	distance rates have come down and now we have all of
21	these different forms of communication.
22	I think it is arguable -- I don't have the time
23	or energy to argue it right now. But I think it is
24	arguable that a lot of these innovations might not ever
25	have occurred without the divestiture decree.

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1	AT&T had essentially invented mobile telephony
2	or at least developed it to the point where the FCC was
3	beginning to grant licenses.
4	A tremendous fraction of the immense
5	communications and data processing research in the
6	United States took place in an AT&T subsidiary known as
7	Bell Labs.
8	That was brought to an end by the decree.
9	Really I think it may turn out that the strongest case
10	for connecting the AT&T decree to the subsequent
11	explosion in competition in the communication sector is
12	more an institutional question of unbinding parts of the
13	system that were capable of innovating, although I'm not
14	sure even Bill Baxter would have identified that as a
15	specific objective of his.
16	It is difficult to draw general conclusions from
17	this history of Section 2 remedies, but let me try a
18	few.
19	The need for speed. It is often remarked how
20	long structural cases take and how the industry and the
21	technology tend to change in a manner that by the time
22	you are done, everything you thought when you started
23	the case is irrelevant.
24	Well, Exhibit A in that would be United States
25	versus IBM, where it started as a relatively restricted

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1	predatory pricing case, actually, but it soon expanded.
2	It absorbed all these issues about foreign peripherals
3	being attached to the IBM system.
4	The theory shifted. And, of course, if you look
5	at the specific procedural approach that was taken in
6	the Federal District Court up in New York, where the
7	case was pending, sort of put like an eight- to 10-year
8	bump in the schedule for the trial, more or less
9	guaranteed disaster.
10	If you want to have some fun, go back and look
11	at the original 1969 IBM complaint. It sounds so
12	antique.
13	In an effort to make IBM sound like this
14	thundering, huge, unstoppable behemoth, it says its
15	revenues for general purpose computer systems went from
16	600 million to $3 billion, as if that was something that
17	would scare us. But nowadays, $3 billion would probably
18	not be a 1 percent market share in that particular
19	industry.
20	U.S. v. Microsoft, I am the mid-Atlantic
21	distributor of Ann Bingaman's success sheet. I really
22	love what she did in the processor license case.
23	She took it -- I think from the day that the
24	division actually opened the investigation to the day
25	that decree was entered was just about exactly one year.

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1	If you can pick a targeted practice and remedy
2	it on that time schedule, it almost doesn't matter
3	whether it was good or bad, because you look at it on a
4	time schedule where things haven't changed that much and
5	you can actually make a judgment about what you are
6	doing, whether you are doing something that is helpful
7	or the opposite.
8	If it had taken 13 years, it would have been
9	ridiculous. But this is an approach that provided a lot
10	of flexibility and tended to minimize error costs.
11	The broader phase of Microsoft that we have
12	heard spoken about mostly this morning it seems to me
13	extended over a much longer time period.
14	There are a lot of shifts in remedies. You had
15	a change in administration, where certainly the emphasis
16	shifted, and that sort of fits back into the old IBM
17	pattern that you can't -- I believe I heard it said at
18	one point that we were going to go into the liability
19	determination and that phase of Microsoft without any
20	clear idea of what the remedy was going to be.
21	Of course, there were some fairly notorious
22	developments on that subject, both in the District Court
23	and in the Court of Appeals, the bit about, well, we won
24	World War II, so we get to determine how the Japanese
25	have to behave.

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1	And then U.S. versus Western Electric, which was
2	sort of the middle and the end phase of the AT&T
3	litigation. Back in the 1910s, it was thought that AT&T
4	had a monopoly of long distance which it was using to
5	snuff out competition of local telecommunications.
6	In the 1950s incarnation of U.S. versus Western
7	Electric, the theory was that AT&T had a monopoly of
8	telecommunications equipment that was being used to
9	monopolize long lines and local.
10	And then finally in the 1974, the final phase of
11	the case, the theory was that it was the local
12	monopolies that were used to monopolize the other part.
13	So this is a little bit gratuitous. It is
14	perfectly possible that over that horrendous stretch of
15	time, all three theories might have been true when they
16	were asserted. Yet, I think it is only in the final
17	phase that you have a good match between the theory of
18	liability and the remedy that was proposed.
19	I think that's what made -- to the extent it
20	worked, I think that's what made the U.S. versus AT&T
21	decree work.
22	Institutional suitability of different elements
23	of our society, of our political and legal system to
24	manage relief in these large cases, we all know that the
25	legislature can only intervene selectively and to set

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1	broad principles.
2	It is very difficult when you do that to try to
3	achieve any kind of economic policy coherence. It only
4	happens rarely, for example, in the Airline Deregulation
5	Act, when essentially Congress said forget economic
6	regulation, we are going back to antitrust.
7	We have sort of the opposite in communications
8	regulation, all kinds of interventions for all kinds of
9	conflicting and indistinct policy purposes.
10	Administrative regulation itself tends to
11	reflect that policy and coherence that often
12	characterize legislation.
13	The executive is a little bit more coherent. At
14	least you have the President theoretically in charge of
15	what the Assistant Attorney General does, and the
16	Assistant Attorney General at least in theory is in
17	charge of what the trial staff does.
18	It tends to be better directed and more
19	coherent, but it is not immune from distractions and
20	from other agendas, as I think is perhaps illustrated by
21	some of the side-winding that has occurred in almost
22	every major Section 2 structural case since World War
23	II.
24	Finally, the judicial role. Of course, the
25	Federal District Court is very much in command of what

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1	happens in its own courtroom.
2	Griffin Bell loves to tell the story he was
3	appointed directly to the Fifth Circuit Court of
4	Appeals, and at his investiture the chief judge said
5	"well, Griffin, you made a hell of a mistake, you know
6	up on this court you have to get at least one other guy
7	to agree with you before you can do anything, but in
8	Federal District Court, you are pretty much in command
9	of the courtroom."
10	I think Judge Green's phase of United States
11	versus AT&T illustrates certainly the best of what can
12	happen when he gets ahold of a good structural Section 2
13	case, and maybe in the later phases he might also have
14	illustrated perhaps not the worst of what can happen but
15	some of the disadvantages, that even judges are not
16	immune from the kind of bunker mentality that sets in
17	after you have witnessed these two litigants going back
18	and forth and perhaps have some views of your own, based
19	on the evidence, of course, but nevertheless we do have
20	examples.
21	Judge Wiezanski in United Shoe Machinery
22	Corporation or -- I have forgot the name of the judge in
23	the Paramount decree, and there is also some evidence of
24	that from the New Jersey court, where the same judge had
25	responsibility for administering United States versus

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1	Western Electric for '56 to '82 -- anyway, 26 years.
2	You can do the subtraction.
3	In conclusion, if I had to derive a number of
4	crisp, identifiable principles from our hundred-plus
5	years of experience in these kinds of cases, to have a
6	good one, you have to have a legally sound theory for
7	attacking a monopoly and you have to have a good
8	economic analysis that convinces you that the legal
9	theory deserves to be applied.
10	And for our purposes here today, most
11	importantly, you have to be able to identify an
12	effective remedy that can actually be carried out
13	without imposing so many costs on various parts of the
14	system that it is not worth the trip.
15	And if you wanted to identify a good candidate
16	for a structural case, I think given all of these
17	difficulties, you need, number one -- this is something
18	that is only useful for important problems.
19	The administrative costs and complexities, the
20	type of focus, long-term focus on these kinds of issues
21	that is necessary to bring them to successful conclusion
22	means that you don't mess around with lemon carts even
23	if they are monopolies.
24	You are looking for very long-term performance
25	issues and very big and important industries.

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1	Finally, to return to the point I was trying to
2	make with the initial presentation about access remedies
3	and essential facilities, you have to be intellectually
4	honest about what you are balancing.
5	You can try some limited remedies. You can look
6	at the possibility of access remedies and more
7	regulatory approaches, either under the rubric of an
8	antitrust case or perhaps you ought to be lobbying a
9	federal agency or a state agency, for that matter, to
10	impose the regulatory alternative, and you also need to
11	ask yourself the question whether given the costs and
12	benefits of all the alternatives, maybe the best thing
13	to do is nothing.
14	So thank you.
15	(Applause.)
16	MS. KURSH: We will take a 10-minute break and
17	then start off with the questions. Thank you.
18	(Recess.)
19	MS. KURSH: Back on the record. Thank you
20	everyone.
21	The way we are going to proceed for the
22	remainder of our time this morning is I will ask each of
23	our panelists in order, starting with Dave, to take just
24	a few minutes to respond to anything they heard from
25	anyone else.

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1	For example, Dave, if you want to respond to Per
2	or anyone else on the panel, you should feel free.
3	And then we will proceed with our moderated
4	question session.
5	The way we have done this in the past, for those
6	of you who haven't been here before, is the agency will
7	be putting up on the slide some propositions. These are
8	not necessarily propositions that the agencies are
9	endorsing, but they are just a way for us to begin the
10	questioning as sort of a springboard for the discussion.
11	So, Dave, why don't we start with you.
12	MR. HEINER: I hate to disappoint, Gail. But I
13	don't think I have any comments to add to what the
14	others said.
15	MS. KURSH: All right, fine. Then we will -- go
16	ahead, Bob.
17	MR. CRANDALL: I'm more loquacious than Dave.
18	A couple things. First, we mentioned this in a
19	conference call. Tad raises the essential facilities
20	doctrine.
21	The problem with the essential facilities is
22	someone has to set the price. I can't imagine in the
23	modern world anything, other than maybe water utilities
24	or gas utilities, in which it would be a very easy task
25	to set the prices efficiently for access to a network

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1	industry.
2	The difficulty in figuring out costs, whether
3	they are forward looking or backward looking costs, of
4	dealing with the problem of the real options for not
5	investing when technology is changing, the stranded cost
6	problem, essentially, are just enormous, not to mention
7	the fact that once you begin to have a regulated
8	approach to essential facilities, you then create
9	enormous tensions in modernizing those essential
10	facilities.
11	Once you have a set of clients using the network
12	of the local telephone companies in the United States or
13	in Europe, then any attempt by the telephone company to
14	change its network technology is going to be opposed by
15	some of those people who are using the current
16	technology.
17	So you create enormous disincentives, both from
18	the pricing and because of the argument over technology
19	for deploying new technologies.
20	So it strikes me that there is a very strong
21	presumption against the essential facilities doctrine in
22	technologically progressive industries.
23	Finally, Tad mentions the fact that there was
24	probably some benefit to breaking up AT&T because they
25	tended to control the technologies through Bell Labs and

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1	everything.
2	There is something to that. Interestingly
3	enough, a lot of the students of telecom think one of
4	the great tragedies of breaking up AT&T was the
5	destroying of Bell Laboratories.
6	But at the bottom, this was a regulatory
7	problem. Had the FCC not engaged in activities to
8	foreclose entry, through the licensing spectrum or
9	through its long distance policy, remember the FCC
10	actually fought in court to try to prevent MCI from
11	offering switched long distance service.
12	The only reason they allowed MCI and the others
13	and in the so-called special access carriers was to get
14	information on what the costs are from another source so
15	they could regulate AT&T a little more efficiently.
16	So the problem at the bottom was the fact of a
17	regulatory regime which was interested in the long run
18	perpetuation of itself. That's a problem which also
19	could exist as we heard in terms of continuing to
20	supervise decrees and why sunset is a good item on
21	decrees.
22	MS. KURSH: Thank you.
23	Per.
24	MR. HELLSTROM: Perhaps a brief comment to
25	something that Dave said.

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1	He said that the aim for competition authority
2	should be to create competitive opportunities rather
3	than engineer a particular market outcome.
4	I just would like to say that I think we fully
5	support that. I think the European Commission does not
6	aim to engineer market outcomes. But, of course, we may
7	disagree on what it actually means to have real
8	competitive opportunities, and there may be some
9	divergence.
10	MS. KURSH: Actually, if I could follow-up on
11	that a little bit.
12	Dave, one of the questions I had for you on that
13	point that you made, would you say that's also true in a
14	case where the theory of liability was based on the
15	monopoly resulting from the exclusionary conduct?
16	MR. HEINER: Well, I think I was mainly focused
17	on the experience Microsoft has had to date, which was a
18	case where there was not an acquisition of monopoly
19	cases.
20	Is that what your question is going to?
21	MS. KURSH: Yes.
22	MR. HEINER: My comment was focused on the
23	monopoly maintenance situation. In that case, it seems
24	appropriate to try to create opportunities but not
25	necessarily go so far as to try to have a particular

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1	market outcome in terms of share.
2	MS. KURSH: Thank you.
3	Tad?
4	MR. LIPSKY: Just maybe to respond briefly to
5	Bob's remark.
6	There is no question that the occasions for
7	invocation of the essential facility doctrine are
8	becoming more rare because of a lot of industries like
9	electric power.
10	As I suggested, the public policy focus has been
11	more on maximizing the areas of the industry that can be
12	deregulated or where market-based solutions can be
13	implemented.
14	So we no longer have a regulated utility kind of
15	as our mental model for the way that that industry
16	works. But it shouldn't be excluded that there are
17	areas that would be candidates for the application of
18	that doctrine.
19	Again, I don't argue with the fact that the
20	costs and complexities of administering an access
21	pricing program can be just enormous. That could be a
22	very good reason for just saying "tough, here is an
23	essential facility."
24	And if Congress isn't willing to adopt a
25	tailored regulatory regime to address it, probably we

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1	are going to do more harm than good by attacking it with
2	antitrust remedies.
3	I think you will actually find at least more
4	than a hint of that style of reasoning in this new line
5	I guess what I would call soft immunity cases in which I
6	would put both Town of Concord versus Boston Edison and
7	also arguably the Trinko case, where you have an
8	antitrust remedy that is sought to be overlaid on a
9	regulatory background and where the court says the
10	standard for immunity for federal antitrust is a very
11	high one.
12	It is the plain repugnancy standard, which was a
13	term first used in Terminal Railroad, that we are not
14	going to rule, we are going to reject the argument for
15	immunity, but nevertheless, we refuse to recognize the
16	validity of the claim.
17	That's why I call it kind of soft immunity. It
18	is a legal ruling that the claim will not go forward.
19	But it is not under the traditional rubric of either
20	express or implied immunity from antitrust prosecution.
21	MS. KURSH: Thanks.
22	Tad, let me follow up a little bit on that. You
23	had said -- and I think that's what you were addressing
24	right now -- that there may be times when the best thing
25	is to do nothing.

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1	Can you set out what are the guideposts for
2	those situations? What are you looking for? When do
3	you make that determination that the best thing is to do
4	nothing?
5	MR. LIPSKY: It is very hard to define in the
6	abstract other than to say you have to look at all the
7	costs and benefits in the particular industry.
8	It is not something that lends itself really to
9	an ideological type of approach.
10	For example, there was a phase of the AT&T case
11	when, and this was the rationale that the entry of the
12	decree was based on and much of the dialogue or debate
13	in the early implementation of the decree, including
14	decisions made on applications for waiver of the line of
15	business restrictions and so forth.
16	You used to constantly hear the phrase that the
17	RBOCs had the incentive and ability to fill in the
18	blank, but basically to goldplate, to enter at less than
19	remunerative prices, to do all kinds of things to
20	exclude competitors and so on and so forth and,
21	therefore, these incentives and the ability to restrict
22	competition in the market they proposed to enter either
23	that they be kept out or that it be conditioned.
24	I think that argument is logically sound. But
25	if all you can say for the arguments is that it is

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1	logically sound, it seems to me you have only taken like
2	the first step, because you had to worry about things
3	like if we exclude the RBOCs, what is going to happen to
4	innovation, what is going to happen to competition in
5	this line of business, who is going to administer the
6	restriction, who is going to decide whether a Humvee is
7	a car if they are applying to enter the car market and
8	they produce a Humvee.
9	All those hideous administrative chores are
10	costly. They encourage strategic behavior. They have
11	all the costs and also some of the benefits that I have
12	identified.
13	It is really the weighing of the costs and
14	benefits which is the critical step. It is not simply
15	having a logical argument as to why a remedy of a
16	certain type ought to address a certain type of
17	anticompetitive behavior. It is very extremely fact
18	specific.
19	MS. KURSH: With that, let's start with our
20	first proposition, slide number 2. I will read it for
21	the record.
22	"Relief should 'terminate the illegal monopoly,
23	deny to the defendant the fruits of its statutory
24	violation, and ensure that there remain no practices
25	likely to result in monopolization in the future.'"

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1	It is a quote from United Shoe Machinery.
2	First, I will start with the basic question whether
3	everyone on the panel agrees that these are appropriate
4	remedial goals in a Section 2 case.
5	MR. HEINER: I will comment briefly.
6	We had occasion to look at this in connection
7	with the Section 2 case against Microsoft, where this
8	particular quote which was brought out.
9	Our understanding of its meaning was that the
10	"terminate the illegal monopoly" part of that would
11	apply in a monopoly acquisition case as opposed to a
12	monopoly maintenance case.
13	Understood that way, it seems to make sense.
14	The next clause, "deny to the defendant the
15	fruits of its statutory violation," I think one has to
16	then look at the causation issue, what were the fruits
17	of the violation.
18	And if as I was saying during my 15 minutes, if
19	the causation is relatively weak, there may be lesser
20	occasion to try to effect change.
21	And the last clause seems to be relatively
22	noncontroversial, I would think.
23	MS. KURSH: Does anyone have a different view or
24	is there a general agreement?
25	MR. CRANDALL: I think it is incredibly

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1	optimistic that the last clause could be achieved by any
2	decree, particularly given the difficulty of even
3	understanding what caused the monopoly to start with.
4	But in high-tech industries, given the rapid
5	rate of change, imagine I guess -- we haven't raised --
6	have you raised MediaPlayer yet?
7	MR. HEINER: I briefly referenced it.
8	MR. CRANDALL: The idea that somehow breaking
9	off MediaPlayer -- that's right, you talked about
10	selling the one without Realplayer.
11	The idea that that somehow was necessary to
12	prevent Steve Jobs from getting into the business of
13	distributing music seems rather naive now in retrospect.
14	I think things change so rapidly you can't
15	possibly satisfy that last clause in a lot of industry.
16	MS. KURSH: But is it an appropriate goal to be
17	reaching for that?
18	MR. CRANDALL: To dream the impossible dream? I
19	suppose.
20	MS. KURSH: I will take that.
21	MR. HEINER: Let me offer two qualifications.
22	The word "ensure" is obviously a very strong word.
23	Whether you could really ensure anything in this area is
24	kind of a question mark, I think.
25	And as I read the quote -- and it may or may not

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1	be what the court had intended -- but I would read it as
2	ensure that there remain no practices likely to result
3	in unlawful monopolization.
4	There may be natural economic forces and there
5	may be someone built a better mousetrap leading to a
6	very high market share. That is something I think we
7	don't try to remedy through antitrust.
8	MS. KURSH: If you were to tweak the quote
9	somewhat, in a monopoly maintenance case would you agree
10	that determining the unlawful exclusionary conduct would
11	also be an appropriate goal?
12	MR. HEINER: I would think so.
13	MS. KURSH: Let me throw out some other
14	possibilities as goals and see what people think about
15	them.
16	Do we get agreement that punishment is not an
17	appropriate equitable goal for the enforcement agencies
18	in the United States anyway?
19	MR. HEINER: You will get agreement from Me.
20	MR. CRANDALL: You mean in a civil sense or a
21	criminal sense?
22	MS. KURSH: Either one.
23	MR. CRANDALL: To the extent you invoke as one
24	of the goals of deterrence, I suppose you can justify
25	doing that.

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1	I can't imagine you could do it for Section 2.
2	That is one of the arguments for criminal penalties or
3	treble damages in section 1. Of course, we have no
4	studies that show whether it works, it deters collusion
5	or not.
6	MS. KURSH: Let me follow up on that for a
7	moment.
8	You used the word deterrents. Do you think it
9	is an appropriate goal of a Section 2 remedy to try to
10	deter others from engaging in Section 2 violations?
11	MR. CRANDALL: Once again, I think it is
12	impossible to imagine that it would work. I can't
13	imagine that somebody engaged in some new industry where
14	he gains 80, 90 percent market share is going to be
15	deterred unless there are criminal penalties associated
16	or very large financial penalties associated with a
17	certain market share, which I would hope would never
18	take place.
19	I can't imagine this is sufficiently certain
20	that it could work as a deterrent in a Section 2 case.
21	MS. KURSH: Tad, do you have any views on
22	whether punishment or deterrence of others are
23	appropriate goals?
24	MR. LIPSKY: I don't think punishment is
25	something that comes in to most questions of

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1	monopolizing conduct.
2	You can imagine episodes that might occur within
3	the context of a Section 2 litigation where other
4	statutes are brought to bear that do properly have
5	punishment and deterrence elements, thinking of things
6	like destruction of evidence or intimidation of
7	witnesses or crimes collateral to any judicial
8	proceeding or government prosecution.
9	But I think there was a case called Empire Gas
10	which was brought as a criminal Section 2 case where it
11	was probably the only Section 2 claim that also included
12	a federal firearms count.
13	I wish I could remember the specific
14	circumstances. Probably somebody riding around the
15	Midwest countryside using a 30 ought 6 to shoot at his
16	competitors' propane tanks or something.
17	AUDIENCE MEMBER: Dynamite.
18	MR. LIPSKY: Dynamite, thank you. It is so
19	helpful to have Greg here in the audience. He really
20	knows his firearms.
21	MS. KURSH: I think I heard at least two
22	panelists, maybe more, maybe Dave and Per mention about
23	helping disadvantaged rivals.
24	What are the views of the panelists on whether
25	that is an appropriate Section 2 remedy, remedial goal?

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1	MR. HELLSTROM: I think I may have mentioned in
2	that I quoted something stated by Mr. Charles A. James.
3	MS. KURSH: What is your view on it, Per? Do
4	you think that in the EU helping disadvantaged rivals is
5	an appropriate goal in a Section 2 case -- not Section
6	2.
7	MR. HELLSTROM: I think if you have a
8	foreclosure abuse that forecloses competition, and that
9	is presumably also some competitors, indeed, a remedy
10	would probably favor some of the rivals in that it would
11	allow if they had been unlawfully foreclosed, allow them
12	to enter or stay in the market, yes. That would be
13	favorable to them.
14	MR. CRANDALL: To the economist, it sounds a
15	little bit like the infant industries argument. And
16	politically it strikes me as a bad general idea because
17	it risks creating a set of clients from whom you can't
18	disengage because they require the favorable environment
19	in order to survive.
20	MS. KURSH: Dave, do you see a distinction
21	between opening up the opportunities for rivals and
22	helping disadvantaged rivals?
23	MR. HEINER: The phrase "helping disadvantaged
24	rivals" could be subject to a range of interpretations,
25	I suppose.

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1	If it means creating opportunities, I think
2	that's exactly what we need to do.
3	One could imagine a fuller interpretation of
4	that phrase that could mean take the assets of the
5	defendant and transfer them to the disadvantaged rival.
6	That would seem to go too far.
7	I think that phrase which Mr. James used
8	possibly could be subject to being misread.
9	MS. KURSH: And, Per, if I could ask you to just
10	comment. Do you see the remedial goals different under
11	European law than in the United States in this area?
12	MR. HELLSTROM: I'm not too familiar with
13	remedial goals in the United States. It is hard for me
14	to comment.
15	MS. KURSH: Do you see them as different than
16	the ones in this proposition?
17	MR. HELLSTROM: Clearly, I would agree with Dave
18	that it is not really the purpose to terminate the
19	illegal monopoly insofar as our Article 82 relates to
20	abusive behaviors.
21	It is more about terminating the abusive
22	behavior and not the dominant position as such.
23	So I would agree with that statement.
24	MS. KURSH: If we can go to slide number 3 for a
25	moment.

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1	I will read this quickly. I think someone
2	already commented on it.
3	"The fruits of a violation must be identified
4	before they may be denied."
5	Of course, that is from Microsoft.
6	In essence, that's saying that one -- we talked
7	about earlier one goal is to deny the fruits of a
8	violation to the defendant.
9	How do you determine what the fruits of a
10	violation are? Does anyone have some thoughts on how
11	you should go about making that determination?
12	MR. HEINER: That is something that is supposed
13	to come out during liability phase, I would think.
14	The next sentence from this decision goes on to
15	say what the fruits were in the Microsoft case. And
16	what they said was that Microsoft had inhibited nascent
17	competitive threats.
18	So the logical remedy the court explained was to
19	remove those inhibitions on a going forward basis, and
20	that's what was done in the consent decree.
21	MS. KURSH: Tad or Bob, do either one of you
22	have some thoughts about general principles that should
23	be applied when deciding what fruits flow from a
24	particular violation or is it just a very fact-specific
25	determination?

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1	MR. CRANDALL: I don't like the term "fruits."
2	It strikes me that this suggests that the real issue
3	here is the monopoly profits of the defendant.
4	I can imagine a situation in which Microsoft had
5	reaped even greater returns from its operating system
6	position, monopoly, and being a perfectly discriminating
7	monopolist, which an economist might say there is no
8	grounds for intervention here because the output is at
9	an optimal level.
10	This is a battle that has gone on for years. It
11	is not so much that the greedy monopolist earned
12	monopoly profits but rather that profits and outputs are
13	distorted.
14	I would prefer it to say the effects of a
15	violation must be identified, the effects on prices and
16	output, rather than fruits.
17	MS. KURSH: Tad?
18	MR. LIPSKY: We have this system in the United
19	States where you have the government which never seeks
20	damages or relief that will redown to the government's
21	benefit as a purchaser.
22	So they don't care about fruits in general,
23	except in the most kind of Elysian and abstract sense
24	that any remedial system like antitrust is supposed to
25	work, you did something wrong, you have to pay back.

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1	Then, of course, we have the fantastic system
2	with these wonderful talk about fruits, subsidies to
3	private action. You have mandatory treble damages and
4	payment of attorney fees and notice pleading and
5	discovery and joint and several liability.
6	It just goes on and on and on so that you have
7	this entire population which stretches 12 stories high
8	from here all the way up to Connecticut Avenue of people
9	working to either get or defend people from having to
10	pay these spectacular sums which are surely in excess of
11	anything that could reasonably be described as fruits of
12	the violation.
13	It is almost like the system is designed so that
14	we will never seek an intelligent answer to that
15	question.
16	It does have a meaning in the sense that it was
17	referred to in the first part of the previous quote,
18	which is if you have a case where you think the monopoly
19	is attributable to a certain type of behavior, then you
20	have a real problem. Then you have to decide whether to
21	actually have a structural remedy where you break
22	something up.
23	Beyond that meaning of fruits, I think we have a
24	problem implementing that in our system.
25	MS. KURSH: All right. Can we turn to slide 5.

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1	Jumping ahead a little bit to keep things
2	moving. We have talked about this a little. Let's get
3	into it in more detail.
4	A famous quote from Trinko, "No court should
5	impose a duty to deal that it cannot explain or
6	adequately and reasonably supervise. The problem should
7	be deemed irremediable by antitrust law when compulsory
8	access requires the court to assume the day-to-day
9	controls characteristic of a regulatory agency."
10	We have had some discussion about this already,
11	but I think it is worth a little more.
12	In Trinko, the Court specifically was addressing
13	refusals to deal.
14	Tad, I would start with you. What if any
15	refusals to deal do you believe are irremediable?
16	MR. LIPSKY: Well, I don't think any refusal to
17	deal is irremediable.
18	The question is whether it is irremediable at a
19	tolerable cost. I think that's what I was trying to
20	suggest.
21	If Judge Green had not had the FCC to fall back
22	on for the implementation of the access charge element
23	of the MFJ remedy, I think he might well have concluded
24	that it was an impossible task, that as meritorious as
25	the division's case was, it was simply not an acceptable

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1	judicial function for him to be involved in.
2	I wonder if he could have just said in the
3	Tunney Act proceeding this is a violation of Article 3,
4	courts don't do this.
5	It is almost what is suggested in this quotation
6	from Trinko, and I suppose that in the right case, he
7	probably would have been upheld in that.
8	MS. KURSH: Are there other types of cases,
9	let's say predatory pricing or other types of refusal to
10	deal cases where you think the cost of a remedy are
11	going to be so high or so difficult to effectively
12	monitor and enforce that the agency should not be
13	bringing the cases?
14	Anyone want to comment on that?
15	MR. CRANDALL: The Robinson-Patman Act. Any
16	reduction in price is unlawful.
17	MS. KURSH: Do you think that even if the cost
18	of a conduct decree is very high that there is value in
19	bringing the case with a simple "sin no more" kind of
20	judgment, the violation is enjoined?
21	MR. LIPSKY: If there ever is a good predatory
22	pricing case brought, I think that would be a good
23	example.
24	The IBM case started that way. It started
25	essentially as a predatory pricing case involving a

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1	Model 90 and very advanced for them, very advanced
2	computers that control data -- they were beating IBM to
3	the prestige customers like the MIT Labs and Lawrence
4	Berkeley and so forth.
5	So there was a valid predatory pricing claim
6	that could have been discussed back in 1969.
7	Unfortunately, things worked out so that that
8	aspect of the case was obscure.
9	But there would be an occasion to say all right,
10	let's have a big fine, let's have a big kind of remedial
11	punishment for engaging in blatant predatory pricing
12	behavior.
13	MS. KURSH: But for -- I'm sorry. Let me just
14	follow up on that.
15	In a government case, what do you see as the
16	appropriate relief in a predatory pricing case that you
17	believe should be brought?
18	MR. LIPSKY: I think arguably you could just
19	have some kind of fine or penalty. I'm not suggesting
20	that the remedy in a predatory pricing case would be
21	price regulation.
22	I think especially in a market like that, which
23	was extraordinarily dynamic and remains dynamic, I
24	wouldn't attempt to impose any kind of forward-looking
25	remedy.

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1	MS. KURSH: Dave?
2	MR. HEINER: I would just say generally I think
3	that a sin no more remedy, once the sin is identified,
4	will likely be more efficacious and easier to administer
5	than remedies in the form of thou shall do something.
6	Whenever you have a defendant creating something
7	new or doing something they haven't done before, I think
8	we are getting into more challenging areas and certainly
9	have seen that in various Microsoft remedies, I think.
10	MS. KURSH: If oversight, control, regulation is
11	unworkable or extremely costly, should that be a basis
12	for a structural remedy? Anyone? Any takers?
13	MR. CRANDALL: Not necessarily. It may well be
14	that -- as an economist, when I talk about cost, I'm
15	talking about the effect on output, not just the
16	administrative cost of carrying out the decree.
17	It may well be that the structural remedy
18	creates more economic cost than doing nothing.
19	So ruling out a behavioral decree and then
20	looking at a structural decree is okay, but that doesn't
21	mean to say necessarily you go with a structural decree.
22	MR. HEINER: It may well be also, I think, as I
23	was suggesting earlier, if it is so costly to administer
24	an access remedy, that may reflect in part the fact that
25	perhaps the underlying objective is too ambitious or

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1	there shouldn't really be liability in the first place.
2	MS. KURSH: I wanted to follow-up. Do people
3	agree with that, if there does not seem to be an
4	appropriate effective remedy, that suggests that maybe
5	there was not underlying liability to begin with?
6	Per, do you have a view on that?
7	MR. HELLSTROM: I have my doubts on that
8	approach. I think that puts the cart before the horse
9	in a sense.
10	I think one should carefully analyze the
11	behavior and try to establish whether there is an abuse.
12	As we said, there are various alternative
13	remedies. A simple cease and desist order could be an
14	appropriate remedy, together with a fine.
15	So I'm not sure if indeed there are such
16	situations.
17	MR. LIPSKY: I hesitate to make any absolute
18	statement about that. The theory is the theory and the
19	remedy is the remedy. You can imagine good theories and
20	bad remedies and vice versa.
21	MR. HEINER: My statement was not absolute
22	either. It was a maybe kind of statement.
23	Just to elaborate on it a little, the central
24	antitrust issue involving Microsoft over the past 10
25	years or so has been this question of building features

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1	into Windows and this second question involving
2	interoperability that has become quite prominent
3	recently.
4	I have really been struck by this tying issue,
5	as we have gone around the world literally talking to
6	enforcement agencies about it, that the agencies may
7	have a clear view on liability, but we don't seem to get
8	to a remedy that will be deemed satisfactory.
9	Again, this is why we really couldn't settle the
10	European Union case. The Commission had taken the view,
11	not unreasonably, that a settlement really ought to
12	address the issue on a going-forward basis for years to
13	come. It should not just address MediaPlayer
14	functionality.
15	So Commissioner Monti was looking for something
16	that we could really generalize. And, frankly, there
17	was nothing we could come up with.
18	It seems to me that the reason for that was that
19	anything you would propose, the remedy was worse than
20	the perceived harm. You would lose the benefits of
21	integration over time.
22	It is those benefits that also lead us back to
23	thinking, gee, should there be liability in the first
24	place.
25	And then we have the remedy which didn't come

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1	out of the settlement but was imposed and further drives
2	on the point that there shouldn't be any liability. We
3	will hear from the European court on that and see how it
4	comes out.
5	MS. KURSH: Do any of the panelists have a view
6	on what is appropriate equitable relief in a product
7	design case?
8	Are there limitations? Is there a template that
9	we should be following? No? Okay.
10	MR. CRANDALL: I don't know how you can
11	generalize that.
12	MR. DUCORE: I would like to follow up a little
13	on this point about irremediability, if there is such a
14	word.
15	And maybe I will be provocative here. Maybe I
16	should give the disclaimer that I should have given
17	before, that whatever I say are my own views and not the
18	views of the Commission or commissioner.
19	But from the perspective of an enforcement
20	agency, does anybody on the panel think, especially in
21	the context of the U.S. system, where you can have
22	follow-on private litigation -- that's all about money
23	generally.
24	Is there a value in an agency, enforcement
25	agency taking on perhaps a difficult, complex situation

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1	and establishing the point that what took place was a
2	Sherman 2 violation or a Section 5 violation and even if
3	it is not able to fashion a specific, effective going
4	forward conduct remedy, set the stage for the victims of
5	that conduct then coming forward with follow-on
6	litigation to get the damages that, after all, the
7	agency generally doesn't seek on its own?
8	MR. CRANDALL: I will offer a view on that.
9	I don't see the antitrust laws as being designed
10	to redistribute income.
11	The way you put it, you avoided one large class
12	of people, namely, the trial attorneys who are going to
13	benefit from that.
14	I don't see that there is an overwhelming social
15	benefit from doing that, and there have to be better
16	ways to redistribute income than doing it that way.
17	MR. LIPSKY: Given all of the incentives for
18	private litigation that exist under the U.S. system, I
19	would say that what you are proposing is kind of
20	dangerous, because it used to be that you have a
21	criminal case and there would or wouldn't be a trial and
22	there would be a plea, and sort of word would get out,
23	and at some point the private litigation, the class
24	actions would follow.
25	Nowadays, all you need is a press release saying

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1	that some agency somewhere in the world is investigating
2	some industry, and, kaboom, you have an MDL, even where
3	the press release says it is the European Commission
4	investigating, not even the United States that is
5	investigating.
6	Given this -- it just happens -- there used to
7	be just the criminal cases and then it went to all the
8	horizontal cases. Now it is even vertical cases, like
9	Dentsply.
10	You immediately get follow-on class actions the
11	minute something comes to light. The same with U.S.
12	Tobacco.
13	The whole litigation bar is sitting out there
14	like the Strategic Air Command on hairtrigger alert.
15	I think the necessity for the agencies to go
16	forward and establish liability, as you have described,
17	I think that's in many ways a dangerous approach.
18	Now, it is another thing to say should the
19	agencies be articulating and focusing on competition
20	problems. Absolutely. Usually, at least for the major
21	Section 2 cases, all of these cases arise in kind of a
22	broader policy context.
23	The AT&T case are years of debate about what to
24	do about this or that part of telecom, and there is a
25	White House Office of Telecommunications policy that was

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1	involved and the FCC was involved.
2	And the Division and the Commission should be
3	vigorously involved in those kinds of debates. And they
4	have investigative tools that are appropriate for
5	situations like that.
6	But on the narrow proposition if there is no
7	hope of an efficacious remedy should the agencies
8	nevertheless go forward and prosecute just to get the
9	determination on the record that this was bad, somehow
10	that rubs me very much the wrong way.
11	MR. DUCORE: What about to establish the points
12	of that so it might be easier to challenge the next
13	conduct that's similar earlier in the process, maybe at
14	a point where you could more easily follow up on an
15	efficacious remedy?
16	MR. CRANDALL: If? I don't understand.
17	MR. DUCORE: In other words, take on a hard
18	case, hoping to be able to design a good remedy but not
19	steering away from the case I will say simply because
20	you are not sure you can develop the remedy but
21	nevertheless if you establish liability, then setting
22	the stage so that if the next industry comes along and
23	does the same thing, you are better positioned perhaps
24	to challenge it more quickly and stop it before it
25	reaches a point where it is irremediable.

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1	MR. LIPSKY: I guess you could defend the United
2	States versus Robert Crandall on that case. But it is
3	not the same Bob Crandall. It is the former chairman of
4	American Airlines.
5	I think it is a good point in the context of
6	legal theory. U.S. versus Crandall is sort of the
7	perfect illustration of something that was conduct that
8	was debatably within the attempt defense. I think it
9	was brought as a civil case primarily for that reason.
10	It did have the result that the agency wanted,
11	which was to establish that this kind of inchoate offer
12	to collude would work as an attempt case where the
13	parties could collectively exercise monopoly power.
14	Of course, inchoate collusion, invitations to
15	collude has since become kind of an active prong of
16	antitrust under other statutes as well. I think it
17	served the intended purpose.
18	I think well-advised business people are told
19	that inchoate forms of collusion, offers to collude,
20	even though they may not meet the standards of Section 1
21	of the Sherman Act, are nevertheless very bad ideas.
22	In the Section 2 area, in the monopolization
23	conduct area, though, I wonder if there isn't enough
24	difference industry to industry and form of conduct to
25	form of conduct.

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1	It might be a relatively rare case where you
2	actually want to accomplish or where there is any
3	objective in trying to accomplish the plausibility.
4	Offering natural gas and gas water heaters as a
5	bundle might be more or less desirable in ways that
6	offering a computer operating system and a
7	Windows-compatible Internet browser are not. It could
8	go either way.
9	So I think you query what you really accomplish
10	in trying to establish a standard, given that a lot of
11	these cases occur in very dynamic industries.
12	MS. KURSH: Tad, on a somewhat different point,
13	I have a question for you.
14	In Aspen Skiing, the District Court had ordered
15	the parties to offer jointly a four-area coupon book, as
16	you might recall, similar to the one that Ski Co was
17	offering at another resort.
18	Do you have any view on whether this aspect of
19	the remedy in Aspen Skiing helped or hurt consumers and
20	when if ever forceing the only two competitors in a
21	market to collaborate is good for consumer welfare?
22	MR. LIPSKY: Well, Aspen is a funny little case,
23	because the market power issue was stipulated the wrong
24	way.
25	But if you can force yourself to imagine that

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1	the four ski slopes in Aspen, Colorado had a monopoly
2	anything, maybe you can picture a world in which all the
3	ski slopes in North America are owned by two companies,
4	and one owns 75 percent of them and the other owns 25
5	percent of them. So in the average ski resort, you
6	would have a situation like Aspen.
7	You could respectively argue that this is more
8	like the U.S. versus Associated Press or Gamco Warehouse
9	kind of situation.
10	Here is an efficient arrangement. The terms and
11	conditions have been set historically by the parties for
12	ordinary profit-maximizing reasons. And you could order
13	them to collaborate if you thought that the conduct
14	was -- that the larger competitor's conduct in cutting
15	off cooperation with the smaller competitor was an
16	attempt to maintain this monopoly.
17	There is a leak in that theory, though, and that
18	is in order to get its refusal to cooperate with I
19	forget which ski company was the evil monopolist and
20	which one was the gallant David challenging Goliath.
21	But the problem was the David ski company said
22	we will give you a voucher, we will give our customers a
23	voucher redeemable at the local bank in cash.
24	It was actually more remunerative for the
25	monopolist to accept that voucher than to allow people

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1	to use their credit cards, because they didn't even have
2	to pay the merchant fee, the clearance fee associated
3	with use of the credit card.
4	To me, as I say, if you can force yourself to
5	believe that it was a monopoly case, I think the whole
6	case could have been solved simply by enjoining that
7	act, that the defendant should have been required when a
8	customer of the other ski company came up and said
9	"here, I will give you this cash, this face value cash
10	cost-free voucher for your tickets," the defendant could
11	have been required to accept that and that would have
12	solved the whole problem.
13	Now, I think maybe the issue you were trying to
14	get at is the one lurking below the surface of
15	cooperation between competitors.
16	Of course, that is a huge problem and it is
17	alluded to in Trinko, of course. But Aspen Skiing
18	actually is a little bit different because of the
19	externality, the joint product of allowing customers to
20	use all the competitors.
21	That is actually a product that had independent
22	utility to customers in Aspen Skiing, which would not be
23	true.
24	You wouldn't buy a form of long distance service
25	just because it allowed you to make a call on MCI and on

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1	AT&T. That would make no sense.
2	It is in the AT&T-type situation, where there is
3	no utility in the use of multiple competitors, that you
4	have the much greater danger and no apparent benefit of
5	the forced collaboration.
6	MS. KURSH: In a refusal to deal with a rival
7	situation, how does the court, the agency establish the
8	terms in which the rivals have to deal?
9	MR. LIPSKY: That's, of course, what most of my
10	remarks were devoted to, what a terrible dilemma that
11	is.
12	The presence of a regulatory agency helps, query
13	whether a court can ever do it absent the Associated
14	Press/Gamco Warehouse kind of situation.
15	MR. CRANDALL: I would demur on that.
16	My discussion of this with the regulatory agency
17	in many cases can't come close to getting it right. The
18	fact they have more resources to throw at it doesn't
19	suggest they will get the prices right.
20	It may be something for courts to avoid. It
21	doesn't suggest a regulatory solution necessarily.
22	MR. LIPSKY: Bob, do you allow the intellectual
23	possibility that there could be a case where as
24	imperfect as the regulatory solution might be, with all
25	the costs and benefits considered, it might be better to

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1	regulate rather than if your alternative is to do
2	nothing?
3	MR. CRANDALL: I suggest something like water
4	distribution or gas distribution, something where the
5	technology is extremely simple and not changing very
6	much. That's a possibility.
7	Once you get beyond that, I think it is
8	problematic.
9	MS. KURSH: Thank you very much.
10	Dan, do you have something?
11	MR. DUCORE: One question to try to wrap that
12	up.
13	The FTC and DOJ have slightly different
14	functions. We are not always in front of a judge.
15	I guess the question for a panel is whether they
16	see a value in whether you call it an investigation or
17	administrative litigation that leads to some report that
18	identifies the issue and sort of tees it up that a
19	court-type remedy doesn't seem workable here, Congress
20	should step in and deal with it in some way?
21	MR. CRANDALL: You are suggesting just an
22	investigation, an inquiry, but not necessarily
23	litigation?
24	MR. DUCORE: If the concern is that we are not
25	equipped to write a decree or order, that it goes

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1	forward and specifically modulates conduct and there
2	isn't an existing regulatory agency that we think would
3	be well equipped but at least flag it for consideration.
4	MR. CRANDALL: I think it is perfectly
5	appropriate for the FTC or the DOJ to be doing analyses
6	of these things.
7	The question is do they bring cases. Earlier
8	you were suggesting you might bring a case even though
9	you don't have an appropriate remedy and it's just a
10	learning experience so that you are better prepared next
11	time.
12	I think Dave might be concerned that you spent
13	10 years on Microsoft trying to learn how to do it
14	better the next time.
15	MR. DUCORE: What I was getting at is if all you
16	can get -- my earlier point I don't think I made it as
17	clear.
18	If you could only have what is called a
19	sin-no-more remedy, you did this, this was unlawful,
20	don't do that again, that obviously may set up private
21	actions, but it also sets the precedent so we have told
22	you not to do this again, if the next guy comes along
23	and maybe he is doing it, maybe we could get a judge to
24	tell him stop earlier in the process.
25	It is not that you couldn't have a remedy. It

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1	is that the remedy would simply be you shouldn't do that
2	anymore.
3	MS. KURSH: All right. On that note, I would
4	ask everyone to join me in thanking our panelists for
5	their insight.
6	We will see everyone this afternoon at 1:30. We
7	pick up on remedies and some other interesting topics to
8	get into.
9	Thank you. 12:00 p.m.
10	(Whereupon, at 12:00 p.m., the hearing was
11	recessed, to be reconvened at 1:30 p.m. this same day.)
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25

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1	AFTERNOON SESSION (1:30 p.m.)
2	MR. ELIASBERG: Welcome to the second remedies
3	panel, part of the ongoing series of hearings on
4	single-firm conduct.
5	I'm Ed Eliasberg. I'm a lawyer with the legal
6	policy section of the Antitrust Division. My
7	co-moderator today is Dan Ducore, the assistant director
8	of the compliance division in the FTC's Bureau of
9	Competition.
10	The Department of Justice and Antitrust Division
11	and Federal Trade Commission are jointly sponsoring
12	these hearings to help advance the development of the
13	law concerning Section 2 of the Sherman Act.
14	Transcripts and other materials from the prior
15	sessions are available on the DOJ and FTC Websites.
16	These are the next to last set of hearings. We
17	will be holding a wrap-up in the coming months and ask
18	that you check the Division's and FTC Website pages for
19	more information about it.
20	Today's session concerns remedies in actions
21	brought under Section 2.
22	Accepted wisdom seems to be that effectively
23	remedying violations of Section 2 can be a challenge.
24	Our panelists may have differing views on how well
25	remedies in past Section 2 matters have furthered the

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1	purposes of the antitrust laws.
2	The discussion session in this panel will have
3	particular emphasis on structural and conduct remedies
4	in Section 2 matters.
5	Also on our panel is a representative from the
6	European Commission to share his perspectives based on
7	emerging remedies under European law.
8	On behalf of the Division, I thank our panelists
9	for participating today and sharing their views with us.
10	I will introduce each in more detail before he
11	speaks. But in brief, our speakers in the amended order
12	of appearance are the following.
13	Andy Joskow is a senior vice president and
14	director of NERA Economic Consulting.
15	Dietrich Kleemann is head of the task force on
16	ex post assessment of merger decisions, Directorate
17	General for Competition, European Commission.
18	We are scheduled to have also Franklin Fisher,
19	who is the Jane Berkowitz Carlton and Dennis William
20	Carlton professor of microeconomics at the Massachusetts
21	Institute of Technology, and hopefully he will be able
22	to join us in a few minutes.
23	Then John Thorne, who is senior vice president
24	and deputy general counsel at Verizon Communications.
25	And Richard Epstein, the James Parker Hall

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1	distinguished service professor of law at the University
2	of Chicago Law School.
3	Thanks to my colleagues at the FTC and the
4	division for organizing this hearing.
5	The organization of the panel is as follows. We
6	will have three panelists speak for approximately 15
7	minutes each. Then we will take a short break. The
8	final two panelists will speak.
9	Each panelist will have a couple minutes to
10	respond to the other presentations, and then there will
11	be a moderated discussion led by Dan and me.
12	In that time period also, David Heiner, who was
13	on the panel this morning who is, I believe, deputy
14	general counsel of Microsoft, has graciously agreed to
15	join us and maybe will also be participating, if he
16	likes, in the moderated discussion.
17	We will not be taking any questions from the
18	floor, and we plan to end at 4:30.
19	Before introducing our first speaker, I would
20	like to turn things over to my co-moderator, Dan Ducore.
21	MR. DUCORE: On behalf of the Federal Trade
22	Commission, I want to thank our panelists for graciously
23	volunteering their time and their views today to help
24	assess remedies for single-firm antitrust violation
25	cases. I was going to say Sherman 2, but we do it under

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1	Section 5 of the FTC Act.
2	As I think it became pretty clear in this
3	morning's session, I will say Sherman 2 violations are
4	sometimes hardest to make out.
5	I think it is probably equally true that once
6	you have made them out, figuring out the best way to
7	remedy those problems is at least equally hard.
8	And unlike some other areas in merger
9	enforcement and certainly horizontal agreements
10	enforcement, Sherman 2 single-firm conduct violations
11	are of necessity, particularly fact intensive when it
12	comes to designing remedies, both in terms of what the
13	theory of the harm is and how the industry operates.
14	As someone whose office has to deal with
15	remedies for all kinds of antitrust cases every day, I'm
16	going to be particularly interested in hearing about
17	broad approaches as well as some of the more detailed
18	issues having to do with administrability and, as part
19	of that, what do you do if it is not clear that a
20	remedy, a workable remedy doesn't do more harm than
21	good.
22	We talked a little bit about that this morning.
23	This afternoon we are going to focus a little more on
24	the difference between the conduct remedy approach and
25	the structural approach.

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1	So with that, we are about to start, except I
2	have to make a couple of logistical announcements.
3	One is in case of an emergency and if an alarm
4	goes off, walk, do not run, to the exit and do not take
5	the elevator but take the stairs down stairs and walk
6	across the street, and there will be obviously people
7	directing you to where to go. I suspect that won't be
8	an event this afternoon.
9	Also, the restrooms, if anybody in the audience
10	needs them, are out the hall to the left, the men's room
11	to the immediate left, the women's room past the
12	elevators to the left.
13	Finally, please turn off all electronic devices,
14	especially cell phones, Blackberries and other hand-held
15	devices which in particular can create static if they
16	are operating near the microphones.
17	So without any further ado, and I don't know if
18	you are going to restructure the order again.
19	MR. ELIASBERG: We have the good fortune that
20	Dr. Franklin Fisher has been able to join us now.
21	Welcome, Frank.
22	Frank, I will sort of leave it to you. If you
23	need a moment to catch your breath, we can have Andy go
24	first.
25	DR. FISHER: I can go first.

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1	MR. ELIASBERG: I appreciate you going back to
2	the bullpen, Andy.
3	DR. FISHER: Of course, you understand that I am
4	tempted to talk about the effects of deregulation on the
5	behavior of airlines. Perhaps not.
6	MR. ELIASBERG: Franklin Fisher is the Jane
7	Berkowitz Carlton and Dennis William Carlton professor
8	of microeconomics at the Massachusetts Institute of
9	Technology, Emeritus, where he has taught for 44 years.
10	He has served as director of CRA International
11	since 1967 and is a director of the National Bureau of
12	Economic Research.
13	His book, "Industrial Organization, Economics
14	and the Law," is widely read by lawyers and economists
15	alike.
16	Frank, let me assure you we are delighted to
17	have you here today.
18	DR. FISHER: Thank you. I am delighted to be
19	here, although somewhat more stressed than I thought I
20	was going to be.
21	All right. Well, the question of how to design
22	remedies in Section 2 cases isn't easy.
23	Unlike prospective mergers which can be blocked
24	or price fixing cases or collusion cases where actions
25	can be enjoined, single-firm monopoly cases even when

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1	won tend to founder on remedy issues.
2	Structural relief can be and often is seen as
3	too drastic, and injunctive relief can simply turn into
4	an effort to prohibit actions already in the past and
5	already obsolete or can require continuing and perhaps
6	continual judicial supervision.
7	Too often in the past antitrust authorities have
8	failed adequately to consider the problem of remedies.
9	And I'm delighted to see an actual hearing is taking
10	place on this subject.
11	With those encouraging remarks, I have two parts
12	to this talk.
13	I want first to discuss what I think the
14	desirable objectives are that a Section 2 remedy or
15	maybe any remedy should be, and then I want to exemplify
16	some of this by talking about the Microsoft case and
17	suggested remedies in it.
18	I was the principal economic witness for the
19	Division in that case. And I'm going to talk about
20	these two things.
21	Here are the five things that I think one ought
22	to try to achieve, and it will turn out that some of
23	them are impossible to achieve and you can't achieve
24	some of them without making some of the others
25	difficult.

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1	And while I don't think it is a whole mess, I do
2	think it is a very complicated issue.
3	The first one is one ought to want to restore
4	competition. That ought to be a primary objective. One
5	ought to want to undo the anticompetitive effects of the
6	violation.
7	That may not be possible. Indeed, it may not be
8	clear what would have happened in the absence of the
9	violation. That's particularly true in innovative
10	industries.
11	Second, the punishment as it were ought to fit
12	the crime. I realize these are civil cases, but you
13	know what I mean. One wants to fit the remedy to the
14	violation.
15	It is natural to require that the remedy be
16	reasonably consonant with the liability findings. In
17	particular, it is natural to require that the remedy be
18	such that had it been in place at the time, the
19	violations would not have occurred.
20	But while that requirement is as the law is
21	developed as I understand it, that requirement may
22	satisfy the standard for consent decree hearings under
23	the Tunney Act, it is not guaranteed to satisfy the
24	important objective of restoring competition.
25	I will exemplify that when we talk about the

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1	Microsoft case.
2	A broader remedy that prohibits violations, not
3	merely those found liable but similar to those to be
4	liable, may still not work.
5	This is likely to happen if the defendant used
6	the anticompetitive actions to ward off a threat to its
7	monopoly power at a crucial moment, with similar threats
8	unlikely to arise again or perhaps ever.
9	Next one would like to disgorge monopoly
10	profits. The violator shouldn't be permitted to profit
11	from the violation. Otherwise, there won't be any
12	disincentives for it or others to repeat such
13	violations.
14	But, of course, fines are unusual in Section 2
15	cases. On the other hand, fines may not be necessary.
16	The treble damage provision of the Clayton Act
17	certainly encourages private suits, and the loss of such
18	a suit can result in considerably more than the
19	disgorgement of monopoly profits.
20	I really don't like that answer. I can't tell
21	from your faces whether you like it or not, but I don't.
22	Treble damages also encourage -- here, by the
23	way -- I don't know if you have been given my text. If
24	you have, in the text there is a really Freudian error.
25	The text I recently discovered says "treble damages also

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1	encourage reasonably basic private suits" --the word
2	"basic" should be "baseless" -- "sometimes suits that
3	follow a federal investigation, even though that
4	investigation doesn't result in an actual case and
5	finding of liability."
6	Particularly in large class action suits, this
7	results in a kind of legalized privacy, with the mere
8	certification of a class enough to produce settlement by
9	defendants greatly at risk.
10	That's mainly a problem I think for Section 1
11	cases. But the whole issue of treble damages is too
12	complex to simply assume that they should continue and
13	will result efficiently in the disgorgement of monopoly
14	profits.
15	One possible answer would be to require the
16	defendants to compensate those that were injured (back
17	to the federal case) as well as paying something above
18	that, since otherwise they or others may be tempted to
19	take advantage of these situations, and in return the
20	compensated victims should give up their rights to sue
21	for treble damages.
22	D, I'm quite fond of this one, but it is
23	difficult. Make the remedy self-enforcing. If
24	possible, one wants the remedy to serve for itself.
25	You want a situation to be created in which

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1	market forces prevent the recurrence of the same or
2	similar violations, as opposed to injunctive relief.
3	That kind of remedy ideally doesn't require
4	continued and long judicial supervision and continued
5	wrangling and litigation that can go with that.
6	Ordinarily, of course, this is going to require
7	some sort of structural remedy. That isn't easy to do.
8	In the first place, courts are traditionally
9	reluctant to grant structural relief, which usually
10	means divestment or breakup. In the second place,
11	crafting one is not easy and may sometimes be
12	impossible.
13	Too often in the past the antitrust
14	authorities -- let me say for the moment I will talk
15	about something in the quite distant past. You don't
16	have to worry, guys. You weren't around. I was.
17	The antitrust authority has simply assumed that
18	a somewhat arbitrary divestment is what is called for.
19	That may have gone hand in hand with the naive belief
20	that monopoly power equals large market share, so that
21	simply breaking up the defendant would be sufficient
22	without the relationship of the breakup to the
23	violation.
24	That was certainly true of the great fiasco of
25	the IBM case. I, by the way, was the principal witness

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1	for IBM in the IBM case.
2	The government's remedy proposal never reached
3	the court but was discussed at deposition by an
4	economist whom I will courteously not name.
5	He proposed breaking up IBM into four successor
6	companies, each of which would have one and only one
7	tape plant or disk plant. No consideration was given to
8	whether computer companies with only one such plant were
9	likely to be viable.
10	The focus was exclusively on reducing IBM's
11	supposedly very large market share, which was measured
12	by the government in truly peculiar ways, having nothing
13	to do with market power.
14	Structural remedies need to be better thought
15	through than that.
16	I'm sorry. I can't stop myself from telling the
17	following story:
18	That witness never testified at trial. It came
19	out at his deposition.
20	And there was a truly peculiar set of things in
21	the deposition, which began with the witness being
22	instructed not to answer the questions of how many
23	successor companies he proposed to have. And the
24	grounds for that -- first, I quote the lawyer in
25	question -- "I won't tell you."

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1	Upon being told that that was not cognizable
2	under the Federal Rules, he offered to tell if the room
3	would be cleared of people not connected with the case.
4	IBM's lawyer said "I don't see anybody in the
5	room not connected with the case." And the lawyer for
6	the Justice Department observed that my son and the son
7	of the late John McGowan, who both of us were working on
8	the case, were present he said "the boys."
9	So they sent the boys out of the room. And now
10	the lawyer was willing to give the grounds.
11	He said "I'm not going to let him tell because
12	it might upset the stock market."
13	Well, there was some discussion as to whether
14	that came under the Federal Rules, and decided to let
15	the answer go on, provided the room was still further
16	cleared of everybody not totally essential.
17	Nicholas Katzenbach, then general counsel for
18	IBM, asked if it was okay if he stayed. The lawyer said
19	yes, but I couldn't.
20	I said I was going to go out and join my
21	12-year-old son, who was no doubt calling his broker at
22	that very moment.
23	The witness then testified about the tape plants
24	and the disk plants. But the number was sealed and
25	referred to as X in the transcript.

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1	The motion to unseal, like many things in the
2	IBM case, remained undecided. That was in 1974. The
3	case ended in 1982 with that motion still undecided by
4	Judge Edelstein.
5	That number was four to anybody with any sense
6	who can count the number of tape plants and disk plants
7	that IBM had, and it was also four to anybody who was
8	with that same witness at a cocktail party a couple
9	weeks later and heard him say it was four.
10	Believe me, the IBM case was full of things like
11	this, some much worse.
12	Anyway, I could not talk about remedies without
13	getting to that. It lives with me still.
14	The last thing is I think, as I already said,
15	one ought to try to avoid remedies that require
16	prolonged and complicated judicial oversight.
17	That's likely to be true of complicated
18	injunctive relief, and it is particularly burdensome if
19	the injunction is to hold for long periods of time in a
20	changing industry.
21	Now I want to talk about Microsoft.
22	One of the things about Microsoft is almost none
23	of the remedies proposed were without flaws, maybe none
24	of them without.
25	I have to talk first a little bit about the

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1	underlying economics and what is called the
2	"applications barrier to entry", and then I have to talk
3	about the violation.
4	This won't take very long, and then the conduct
5	remedies all the problems and the structural problems,
6	ultimately some problems.
7	Here is the story on the underlying economics.
8	How long have I got? I will speak slower.
9	First place, this is the way things stood in the
10	business in the late 1990s and to some extent still
11	stand, I think.
12	Applications written for one operating system
13	generally don't run on others. It is expensive to port
14	them. You have to start all over to port them to
15	another operating system.
16	Secondly, software application writing has large
17	economies of scale. The costs are all up front, big
18	costs. They are the costs of writing the program,
19	debugging the program, writing the manuals that go with
20	it. Putting out extra copies of the program costs
21	essentially zero.
22	As a result, application writers prefer to write
23	for operating systems which have many users so they can
24	spread the fixed costs over a large number of customers.
25	On the other hand, not surprisingly, computer

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1	users prefer operating systems that have a large number
2	of applications.
3	As a result, an operating system that becomes
4	relatively popular for whatever reason attracts more
5	applications. These attract additional users, which in
6	turn attract even more -- well, this is badly written.
7	It should say which in turn attract even more
8	applications, which in turn attract even more users and
9	so on.
10	Eventually that operating system attains
11	monopoly power as other operating systems find it
12	difficult or expensive to attract application writers.
13	This is the so-called applications barrier to entry.
14	Microsoft was the beneficiary of this, starting
15	at least with Windows 95 and continuing onward. And if
16	Microsoft had simply been content with this relatively
17	natural phenomenon, there would not have been an
18	antitrust case and there certainly wouldn't have been a
19	successful antitrust case.
20	But Microsoft was not content with this. It
21	sought to destroy or contain two innovations, Netscape's
22	browser and Sun Microsystem's Java, that threatened to
23	weaken or remove the applications barrier to entry.
24	I'm not going to discuss exactly how those would
25	have worked, but I will -- that's relatively available

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1	elsewhere.
2	There is -- I can't resist it -- government
3	Exhibit 39. By the way, you mustn't think that I retain
4	in my memory after whatever it is, eight years, what is
5	in every single exhibit in the case. This happens to be
6	my favorite.
7	Government Exhibit 39 is an e-mail that says you
8	should care about the browser even more than does Bill
9	Gates, because if we lose the browser, we lose basically
10	everything, and goes on about the operating systems will
11	turn into a commodity and so on.
12	Microsoft basically was found to have violated
13	the antitrust laws by its actions in those two
14	dimensions.
15	This was a great victory for the government.
16	But the events leading to the remedy, in my opinion,
17	eventually turned that victory into another fiasco.
18	What remedies were suggested and what were the
19	problems with them? Well, with perhaps one exception
20	which wasn't exactly considered seriously by the
21	government, I believe, every suggested remedy had
22	important defects in terms of the objectives that I
23	listed above.
24	I begin with the conduct remedies.
25	There is the one in the ultimate settlement.

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1	This is a remedy -- basically it is a conduct remedy
2	that matched the violation. It did that and might deter
3	similar conduct.
4	It didn't restore competition, and it may have
5	left Microsoft secure in having destroyed two really
6	important threats.
7	Well, there is an issue here. That would
8	satisfy and did satisfy Tunney Act proceeding. But this
9	wasn't an ordinary a Tunney Act proceeding.
10	This wasn't a proceeding before liability. This
11	was a proceeding after liability had been decided,
12	appealed, affirmed, certiorari had been denied, and the
13	case came back again with a remand on remedy.
14	By the way, I didn't have much to do with the
15	remedies which is why I'm criticizing them. I was
16	retained briefly by the Antitrust Division after the
17	remand on remedy, but there was no serious work involved
18	in that.
19	The remedy that eventually emerged might have
20	been appropriate for a pretrial consent decree, but it
21	wasn't appropriate after liability was finally decided.
22	It gave up the fruits of victory.
23	It is entirely possible -- one doesn't know --
24	that if you think about it, Microsoft may have succeeded
25	in destroying the threats to the applications barrier to

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1	entry at the golden moment in which they were there.
2	And trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube
3	afterwards doesn't work.
4	Another remedy that was a conduct remedy
5	suggested was allowing other operating systems to use
6	the application programming interface of Windows; that
7	is, give the other makers of other operating systems
8	enough information so that programs written for Windows
9	would run on their operating system. They could design
10	their operating systems that way.
11	Well, that would certainly have been effective
12	if it had succeeded. It would, however, have
13	required -- it might have gone too far, in fact.
14	It would have required prolonged and complicated
15	judicial oversight. Anybody who has ever been involved
16	in writing a complicated software program -- and believe
17	me, I know at the moment from bitter experience and the
18	programs I'm involved with are nothing like as
19	complicated as operating systems -- knows that even with
20	the best will in the world, if you try to make the
21	program available to other programmers or teach them how
22	to do things with it, it is very hard.
23	And there wouldn't have been the best will in
24	the world, and there would have been for a very long
25	time continued wrangling over whose fault it was that

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1	this wasn't succeeding. And that would have required
2	continued judicial oversight.
3	Now I come to structural remedies. The first is
4	the one one might most naturally think of. It was
5	called the Baby Bills for reasons that should be
6	apparent.
7	It was one in which there would have been three
8	successor companies made out of Microsoft. Each one of
9	them would have had the right to Windows.
10	There were a number of objections to this, some
11	of them valid, some of them not quite so impressive.
12	The first one was; Would successor companies
13	have kept their versions of Windows compatible with the
14	installed base of programs? There was a lot of talk
15	about that.
16	I think the answer was of course they would,
17	because they would have had a big incentive to attract
18	the people with the installed base of program.
19	The second one sounds funny but isn't, the
20	question of who would get Bill Gates, who may not have
21	been an asset in the trial, believe me, but he was
22	certainly an asset to the company and would still be.
23	And you can't divide him up, so to speak.
24	The one that wasn't typically mentioned but I
25	think ought to be bothersome is the following.

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1	Eventually the phenomenon that I talked about in
2	the underlying economics would take over again, and one
3	or the other of these companies would get ahead, the
4	snowball effect would take over, the application remedy
5	would occur and the thing would be restored.
6	Of course, each of these companies would be
7	owned by the original Microsoft shareholders, so that in
8	some sense anyway the monopoly profits it would have
9	earned later would accrue back to the owners of the
10	violator.
11	The remedy proposed by the Antitrust Division
12	was to break up Microsoft into two successor companies,
13	one with the operating systems and the other with the
14	applications, particularly Microsoft Office, in the
15	belief or the hope that the applications company would
16	have a big incentive to encourage competition and
17	operating systems.
18	Maybe that would have worked. It is somewhat
19	roundabout, and it is not obvious that if it worked, it
20	would have been self-enforcing.
21	Not obvious that it would have worked, and I
22	don't find it particularly attractive. It never got, so
23	to speak, much past the starting block.
24	The remedy that I think is attractive, although
25	also has problems, is the one proposed by Herbert

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1	Hovenkamp, but so far as I know, not apparently
2	seriously discussed in the higher reaches of the Justice
3	Department.
4	This was the following. Pick a number, N. You
5	have to study what the number N should be. Then require
6	Microsoft to auction off N licenses to Windows together
7	with the requisite know-how. Do nothing further.
8	This is simple. And it improves competition.
9	No breakup is required. If the ultimate monopoly gains
10	do not necessarily occur, the ultimate gains don't
11	necessarily principally accrue to the original Microsoft
12	shareholders, which is attractive, as opposed to the
13	Baby Bill remedy.
14	This seems to me to be a model of remedy design,
15	despite its possible flaws. And I wish it had been more
16	seriously discussed.
17	But Microsoft, like other cases, is a case in
18	which it was not obvious that there is any really,
19	really good remedy.
20	I happen to hate the one that eventually arose
21	in the settlement, but other people made that.
22	Thank you.
23	(Applause.)
24	MR. ELIASBERG: Thank you, Frank.
25	Dietrich Kleemann is head of the task force on

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1	ex post assessment of merger decisions, Directorate
2	General for Competition, European Commission.
3	Dietrich, welcome.
4	Can we just check with the panelists,
5	double-check to be sure the Blackberries are off. Thank
6	you.
7	MR. KLEEMANN: Frankly spoken, at first I think
8	I'm not the best place to speak to you here today in
9	this hearing because of our more than 16 years since the
10	beginning of your merger work, I was a member of the
11	merger task force and today a proud member and followed
12	the European Commission.
13	However, I think that there are quite
14	significant similarities between remedies under merger
15	regulation and remedies that would be called abuse cases
16	under Article 82 of what you would call attempt to
17	monopolize.
18	But let me just take a short look at our
19	experience in the remedies.
20	Since we started, we have had more than 3000
21	final decisions in European merger control, but out of
22	them, only 19 prohibitions and maybe 28 restores in the
23	second phase.
24	That is what you would call a second request,
25	more or less, which is normally like a prohibition

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1	decision.
2	On the other hand, we had 140 clearance
3	decisions with remedies in the first place and 79
4	decisions with remedies in phase two. And frequently
5	these decisions were not only related to the remedy but
6	to the whole package.
7	So I think one can say that around 8 percent of
8	all our cases we intervened by way of remedies, and the
9	question is now can the antitrust practice use a benefit
10	from this rich experience in merger control.
11	I said there are similarities. However, there
12	are also differences between the remedies in merger
13	control and antitrust.
14	First of all, from a more formal point of view,
15	our remedies are based on commitments proposed by the
16	parties.
17	The remedies in abuse cases are imposed by the
18	authority on the parties. However, I would say this is
19	a more formal difference because of costs.
20	In a merger case the Commission would always
21	negotiate remedies with the merging parties and give
22	guidance and indicate what would be necessary to clear a
23	case at the end for the parties to have any incentive to
24	follow this guidance in order to avoid the prohibition
25	decision.

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1	I think more important is the difference between
2	behavioral and structural remedies.
3	As my colleague, Per Hellstrom, certainly
4	outlined this morning, for cases under violation 1 of
5	2003, behavioral remedies are the rule and structural
6	remedies are only the exception.
7	I think we will come back to this point later in
8	the discussion certainly.
9	By contrast, in merger control, because it deals
10	with structural competition problems, not just behavior
11	of a party, the most adequate remedies are normally
12	structural ones. That meets the classical divestiture.
13	Although I must admit the borderline between
14	structural remedies and behavioral remedies is not
15	always clear. It is only clear if I limit the
16	structural remedy. There are many other instances where
17	you could say it has behavioral elements but also
18	structural elements.
19	However, having said this, in appropriate cases,
20	we accept also typical behavioral remedies. This is the
21	case that divestiture, for instance, is not feasible or
22	would not be meaningful. However, to prohibit blankly
23	the case would not be proportionate.
24	And there we have two groups in particular. To
25	one are those I would call the access remedies. I will

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1	go through this later on. The other group which also
2	plays a significant role are changes to long-term
3	exclusive contracts.
4	However, as I said, we have structural remedies.
5	Here you see an overview from our so-called remedy
6	studies carried out on 96 cases between '96 and 2000.
7	And you see around 60 percent of remedies were
8	divestitures. The others were sometimes cutting links
9	between competitors by exiting a joint venture was even
10	17 percent.
11	Long-term exclusive licenses which are sometimes
12	replacing classical divestitures because they were
13	partially related to what they call -- they have limited
14	competition.
15	You can't divest forever a brand because there
16	would then -- there would be more companies in different
17	countries.
18	So we intend to exercise and that, I must say,
19	wasn't always very successful. Not surprisingly, the
20	most successful remedy was to find in the right place
21	the transfer of a stand-alone business, where you didn't
22	have to make a package, a remedy to cut off all
23	services. It was a clear-cut business which was sold.
24	I emphasize the importance of access remedies in
25	merger.

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1	They are maybe related to the access to
2	infrastructure, for instance, to a network, platforms,
3	the telecommunications sector and so on, to technology,
4	which implies the licensing of intellectual property
5	sometimes and access to what I would call essential
6	inputs.
7	This talks about, for instance, in the media
8	sector, the content, TV content and so on or, for
9	instance, in the electricity sector, we had the case
10	where we organized auctions to open up the market to
11	give excess electricity in a situation where we had a
12	merger structure.
13	The main purpose was always either to avoid
14	foreclosure effect, maybe resulting from vertical links,
15	where we had to get control of our essential upstream
16	facilities, such as a decoder base, for instance, and so
17	on.
18	And the second purpose which went way off with
19	the first one together was to lower barriers to entry so
20	as to outbalance the loss of competition but open up the
21	market to new competitors.
22	A crucial issue, however, with these kind of
23	remedies, much more than was with structural remedies,
24	is the way how you implement it.
25	First of all, sometimes nearly part of the

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1	problem is how to determine from the outset the terms of
2	access, price to be paid, for instance, the general
3	conditions.
4	It has taken one to lead a very strong and
5	mandatory, which is very often not feasible for the
6	Commission itself. You wouldn't set up otherwise a task
7	force for 10 years for an individual case.
8	So we need there to rely on trustees, sometimes
9	in a very official way on regulators, which help us to
10	monitor these remedies.
11	And the last one is the best one, a kind of
12	safeguard by the market when you impose a rapid
13	evaluation procedure, a fast resolution period.
14	And just not to run out of time, I will give you
15	at the end maybe a practical example which was the case,
16	Newscorp Telepiu, a case of pay TV in Italy where one of
17	two TV players controlled by Newscorp acquired Telepiu,
18	the by far leading pay TV player in Italy.
19	The case led virtually to a monopoly. On the
20	other hand, we were confronted with a scenario where
21	although this was not a failing company case, there was
22	quite a high likelihood that the second player would
23	accept the market over time, and that would mean we
24	would have had a monopoly in any event.
25	So on balance, it was better for the consumer

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1	and better for the market to have some kind of a
2	regulator place a number of far reaching commitments
3	which were all designed to facilitate new entry into
4	this pay TV market so to have at least a chance that in
5	the future in the evolving market there won't be this
6	problem.
7	We see typically a set of remedies which are
8	here combined but are used separately. The first was
9	limiting exclusivity for TV rights so to make them
10	available for newcomers.
11	There we had a commitment getting the output
12	rights for early termination for existing, limiting on,
13	the other hand, distribution of future output use or
14	football rights to two, prospectively three years, and
15	limiting the exclusivity to the DTHI, their viewers, so
16	as to enable user companies pay for the other TV spot.
17	It was such as the upcoming ADSL such that the
18	DVD or such as the cable network, which are not very
19	much involved in Italy, get a chance to get premier
20	content on their transmission means.
21	The second one will also enable them further to
22	have immediately the necessary anchor channels you need
23	for a successful pay TV.
24	So Telepiu had to grant access to third parties
25	to its premier content, the premium sport channels and

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1	the premium Hollywood TV channels.
2	Of course, this raised the question how to
3	calculate the price. We did that at a fixed rate and
4	so-called retail market basis.
5	That means looking at the retail price of
6	Telepiu and deducting the costs of that on the basis of
7	a wholesaler. It means the costs added on some other
8	factors like benchmarking were similar to situations in
9	other countries.
10	As a counterpart, they had to grant access to
11	third parties to their technical platform, the
12	condition, the related services, which would enable a
13	new entrant to access the old channels now on DTH,
14	because without access to the similar decoder base of
15	Telepiu, this would not have been possible.
16	There was a classic element that said if you had
17	to divest this DTT business, the two channels, in this
18	evolving market, in particular in Italy, all this was
19	subject to a detailed dispute resolution arrangement,
20	and here in particular the most sensitive parts were
21	taken over by the Italian media and telecom regulator,
22	the so-called Ajicom, which was committed to apply his
23	own word in dispute settlements to this specific case,
24	and in fact did it very successfully.
25	I think two years ago in the decision they

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1	reduced the price for the wholesale offer for premium
2	content by around 40 percent.
3	Having said this, this is a typical example, but
4	also you have a very limited number of cases where you
5	have this complex set of remedies which we thought were
6	the appropriate solution in this specific situation.
7	You may notice that many of the features in this
8	case or general features of merger committees could also
9	play a major role in antitrust abuse cases.
10	But on balance, I would say antitrust can
11	benefit from our experience in merger control, certainly
12	as the implementation is concerned, all the technical
13	stuff with trustees and so on.
14	But I think also in certain instances in terms
15	of the substantive solution.
16	Thanks.
17	(Applause.)
18	MR. ELIASBERG: Thank you, Dietrich.
19	Our last speaker before the break is Andrew
20	Joskow.
21	Andrew is senior vice president and director of
22	NERA's Washington, D.C. office.
23	Dr. Joskow is a former deputy assistant attorney
24	general for economics at the Antitrust Division and also
25	a senior staff economist on the President's Council of

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1	Economic Advisors and a member of the joint FTC/DOJ task
2	force on efficiencies that drafted the efficiency
3	sections of the 1992 horizontal guidelines.
4	Andy, welcome.
5	DR. JOSKOW: Thanks for inviting me.
6	It is very nice to see some old Department of
7	Justice colleagues here. Thanks for coming.
8	When I was listening to Professor Fisher talk
9	about the IBM case, it became clear to me that these
10	cases just infect people's beings over time.
11	The expert that Professor Fisher was talking
12	about was a professor at the school where I went to
13	undergraduate college. And as an alumnus -- I will keep
14	you guessing -- as an alumnus, I met him a number of
15	years later, and it was clear to me that he never
16	recovered.
17	So in that vein, what I want to talk about today
18	is this issue of structure versus conduct.
19	What I want to do is take it from the point of
20	view of merger remedies, which is a somewhat settled
21	area, and try to talk a little bit about the principles
22	that make us say structure, yes in mergers. Behavioral,
23	no. But in Section 2, maybe less yes, structural, maybe
24	more yes, conduct.
25	And as I said, it is quite well developed and

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1	the Antitrust Division has a merger policy guide, and it
2	kind of lays out things quite simply.
3	But when we start talking about Section 2, we
4	just see a whole host of issues where there are lots of
5	possibilities, but each possibility seems to create
6	problems.
7	We talk about divestiture or breakup, all kinds
8	of organizational design problems. If you make a
9	mistake, you can't go back.
10	Exclusive dealing contracts, you can prohibit
11	them, but there are lots of ways or often ways to
12	recreate those contracts in other ways.
13	You can prohibit the tie in a tying case, but
14	you risk the loss of certain integration efficiencies in
15	certain cases.
16	Predatory pricing, I don't know what to do in
17	that case. I will talk about that a little bit later.
18	You have all kinds of various cease and desist
19	orders, some of which could be beneficial, but at the
20	same time you risk them being anticompetitive or outside
21	the violation being discussed.
22	So mergers, there is a single goal. The remedy
23	isn't trying to make competition better than it was
24	before the merger, just trying to restore competition.
25	The structure seems to strongly prefer a way to

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1	do that, a structural remedy, usually through divesting
2	assets or an existing business, and all that with the
3	hope of preserving any efficiencies inherently in the
4	merger.
5	Quoting from the guideline, "restoring
6	competition is the only appropriate goal with respect to
7	crafting a merger."
8	It is interesting that these guidelines are
9	written almost in the negative in the sense they talk
10	about why conduct remedies would be bad, less why
11	structure would be good.
12	Why are conduct remedies bad in a merger case?
13	Well, there is the direct cost of just monitoring a
14	conduct remedy through the life of a consent decree.
15	That should be "cost," not "coast."
16	Indirect costs of evading the spirit of a
17	decree. For example, you could say you have to have a
18	price cap, but there are lots of ways of undermining a
19	particular price cap, and, of course, that doesn't
20	necessarily get to all -- prices don't necessarily get
21	to all the aspects you want to preserve in a competitive
22	market.
23	If you constrain pro-competitive behavior, for
24	example, prohibiting price discrimination could
25	eliminate the possibility for efficient pricing in some

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1	cases and just generally constrain the ability of the
2	merger, of a firm to flex its muscles in the market.
3	It seems clear that structure is the way to go.
4	And mergers are about changing structure, and what you
5	want to get out of competition is lower prices, improved
6	quality, more innovation.
7	And the way to get that is to maintain rivalry
8	within the market, and that means separating assets.
9	If you went the other way, as I said, price
10	protection as an example, that really undermines the
11	multiple -- it doesn't preserve the multiple dimensions
12	of competition that we were talking about.
13	This is the benefit of the Hart-Scott-Rodino
14	Act. It allows assets to be divested before they are
15	scrambled so you don't have to deal with this problem of
16	where do we put Bill Gates and these assets. Everything
17	is already separate.
18	Now, there is a preference in these situations
19	to divest an existing business entity.
20	That is something that Dietrich mentioned in one
21	of his examples. And that begins to get to the issue
22	of, well, what is it we are trying to do, once you have
23	found a violation in a merger, what is the but-for world
24	that you are looking for?
25	Are you trying to get the Herfindahl back to

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1	1800 if you went from 1800 to now? Well, not
2	necessarily because once you get to the remedy phase,
3	you are really looking to make sure you created an
4	entity that will allow competition to be restored.
5	That may mean taking more than just bringing the
6	merger back to 1800. We need to have sufficient assets
7	in order to make sure the firm has the incentive to
8	compete.
9	In a sense, there has been a market test in a
10	merger case because the business is already designed.
11	You have a sense of what assets are necessary in order
12	to compete in the premerger world.
13	Even so, after all that, being kind of the
14	general way to go, the FTC studied these things back in
15	1999, and they found kind of a mixed bag in the success
16	of structural remedy.
17	So even in a merger case, you really need to be
18	careful. One of the things that actually came out of
19	that study was the increased preference for an ongoing
20	business that already existed as a form of public
21	remedy.
22	So what about in the Section 2 case? The
23	conduct arises from the existence of monopoly power. So
24	the thought would be, well, you want to change the
25	firm's structure so that it doesn't have the ability or

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1	incentive to restrain competition in the future.
2	But what does that mean? You want the remedy to
3	be tied to the violation, as Professor Fisher said.
4	But how far do you want to go? This is
5	something maybe we can talk about in discussion.
6	What is the but-for market structure? If
7	Microsoft had an 80 percent market share and whatever it
8	did violating Section 2 brought it to a 90 percent
9	market share, does that mean we just want to bring it
10	back to 80 percent or do we say that's not enough, it
11	will just happen again and you want the Baby Bills?
12	Exactly where do we want to go?
13	I think the difficulty in going very far is
14	because the structural remedy is very difficult because
15	firms just aren't divided up this way.
16	In the case of a horizontal divestiture, it is
17	not necessarily neatly divided in that way.
18	What are the necessary assets, what are the
19	necessary intellectual property, what are the necessary
20	employees to create a going concern and have these
21	separated entities?
22	It seems that the risk of failure in a situation
23	is quite great, that you just don't create the right
24	firm. The market essentially unravels and goes back to
25	the way it was.

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1	And I think this is why we really don't see this
2	very much, this type of remedy, the horizontal
3	divestiture.
4	We have to go back to 1911 for the Standard Oil
5	case and the American Tobacco case to see that. It was
6	rejected later in the United Shoe case. And I think the
7	horizontal, "let's turn Microsoft into three," was
8	fairly quickly rejected early on.
9	What about vertical divestitures? Does that
10	work?
11	There you would think that the lines within a
12	firm may be clearer. You have the input part of the
13	firm, the output part of the firm. You can see how
14	changing the vertical relationship between two companies
15	might change the incentives for foreclosure.
16	So this is what happened in AT&T. We had a form
17	of a vertical divestiture. But even there, when we had
18	structural relief, we had it seemed like limitless
19	ongoing needs to monitor the lines of business the Bell
20	operating companies were in.
21	There were connecting issues simply because
22	there had to be an ongoing relationship between the two
23	companies, not just two companies, but the long distance
24	companies and the operating companies.
25	In Microsoft, again, maybe it would have been

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1	easier to split along operating system lines and
2	application system lines.
3	But I sort of agree that even if there weren't
4	huge loss of efficiencies, it is not clear to me that
5	this indirect type of divestiture would have led to the
6	ultimate entry of a competing operating system company.
7	It seemed highly theoretical.
8	Again, it could have -- because of the network
9	effects, it could have easily unraveled and gotten the
10	market right back to where it was.
11	There is just no practical experience really in
12	having a world of competing operating systems. It seems
13	like quite a leap to think "well, we can just do it."
14	So in thinking about structure, it seems that in
15	mergers, the benefits are pretty high to having some
16	type of structural or divestiture remedy, whereas, the
17	costs are pretty low. They often can be accomplished
18	without forgoing efficiencies.
19	When you have to forgo a lot of efficiencies,
20	the case for divestiture might be weaker, but in general
21	I think it is pretty strong.
22	In Section 2 cases, on the other hand, it seems
23	like the costs are pretty high. You don't really have
24	much experience in competition in the particular market,
25	and it is not clear that the competitive process would

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1	necessarily be enhanced if the market just reverted back
2	to monopoly.
3	It would be difficult to determine how far to go
4	with structure if your goal is really just to try to
5	apportion how much of the monopoly was gained as a
6	result of the anticompetitive conduct.
7	The efficiency losses could be pretty
8	substantial.
9	Still, most likely you will require ongoing
10	monitoring anyway, particularly in the vertical case and
11	possibly even in the horizontal case.
12	So what about behavioral remedies in Section 2?
13	Well, like any behavioral remedy, there is ongoing
14	monitoring.
15	Evasion clearly can be a problem. But it seems
16	to me that in certain cases, exclusive dealing, tying,
17	bundled discounts, they can be prohibited fairly broadly
18	within consent decrees.
19	And they do get at this issue of, well, what is
20	the incremental effect of the anticompetitive conduct.
21	Because it focuses on the effect on facilitating entry,
22	and even if there is some loss of efficiency to the
23	dominant firm, it seems like that loss in many cases is
24	worthwhile in order to in a sense help rivals and
25	improve and facilitate entry.

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1	Dentsply is a particular example of a pretty
2	simple remedy, not attempting to break up Dentsply.
3	That leaves us with attempted monopolization,
4	which seems to me to fall outside of both of these
5	cases, structural versus conduct.
6	Is there an irremediable violation? That
7	question has been asked. This one has bothered me for a
8	long time.
9	It seems that whenever anyone thinks of
10	prohibiting lower end prices, that seems
11	anticompetitive, expanding output, that seems
12	anticompetitive, limiting the magnitude of price cuts,
13	that seems also anticompetitive.
14	Breaking up the airline doesn't seem to be the
15	way to go if you think about the American Airlines case
16	because there are strong network effects. There aren't
17	many hub airports with two hub carriers.
18	So, again, that seems really not the way to go.
19	Maybe fines are a remedy, although in the American
20	Airlines case, you really didn't have recoupment.
21	I'm not sure if this would be a disgorgement or
22	some kind of fine for deterrence.
23	Is guess that leaves open the question if you
24	don't have a remedy, is there a case.
25	The agencies have the obligation to enforce the

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1	antitrust laws, but they certainly have an interest in
2	deterring what they think to be anticompetitive
3	predatory pricing.
4	But it seems to me that this may be a situation
5	where there is no clear structural or conduct remedy
6	that one could put forward in any kind of very
7	broad-based fix, such as thou shalt not violate Section
8	2, or something like that.
9	It just seems like it doesn't really get at the
10	specific conduct and it is just adding a criminal
11	contempt portion to one's obligations under the Sherman
12	Act.
13	So just in summary, it seems that in mergers,
14	the structural remedies and the basis for those remedies
15	seem pretty clear.
16	In Section 2 cases, I think the case is weaker.
17	That's not to say never, but I think that the historical
18	experience has been limited, which would probably limit
19	one's desire to go in that direction.
20	So I think in the case of Section 2, I think it
21	is more likely desirable to focus on some form of
22	conduct remedy.
23	Thank you.
24	(Applause.)
25	MR. ELIASBERG: Thank you, Andy.

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1	Why don't we take a 10-minute break and come
2	back for the last two speakers.
3	Thank you.
4	(Recess.)
5	MR. ELIASBERG: Welcome back.
6	Our first speaker will be John Thorne, who is
7	senior vice president and deputy general counsel at
8	Verizon, where he works on antitrust trade regulation,
9	merger review and strategic initiatives. He is coauthor
10	of several academic treatises, including "Federal
11	Communication Law and Federal Broadband Law."
12	John, welcome.
13	MR. THORNE: Thank you very much. I don't have
14	any slides. So you can relax your eyes a little bit.
15	The first thing I want to say is I did read in
16	preparation for this session Richard Epstein's new book
17	on consent decrees, and I cannot praise it enough. It
18	is a wonderful concise summary of an awful lot of
19	history, and I found it very useful in preparation here.
20	I recommend it to the Commission. I wanted to
21	offer my own gift to the people studying this topic,
22	partly because this is a book that was written in 1992.
23	It has been revised and it is way out of date. You
24	can't find it anyplace.
25	But it has a full history of the AT&T breakup

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1	decree and prior decrees in a way that you can't find.
2	When we rewrote the treatise, even though this
3	is longer, there is hardly anything in here about Judge
4	Green anymore.
5	Dan, I want to give you those as a present.
6	MR. ELIASBERG: Thank you, John. We greatly
7	appreciate it. But Richard's book was only 144 pages.
8	MR. THORNE: I'm serious. You may actually find
9	those are useful as references. Put it in the library.
10	MR. ELIASBERG: Thank you very much.
11	MR. THORNE: My experience and the reason I'm
12	the token business person on this panel is I worked on
13	the AT&T breakup remedy from 1983 to 1996.
14	I also worked on several antitrust consent
15	decrees along the way, for example, most recently the
16	Verizon-MCI merger decree, which is still pending before
17	Judge Emmett Sullivan in the D.C. Court.
18	I wrote some books about the experience. There
19	is an awful lot to say about the AT&T breakup decree,
20	and I'm attempting to tell you interesting stories about
21	it.
22	The first story I will tell is it was actually
23	the third of three government cases that resulted in
24	consent decrees against the AT&T company.
25	In fact, the second one, the one that resulted

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1	in a consent decree the year I was born, 1956, it is
2	interesting. If we have time, maybe if we have
3	questions, I want to come back to it.
4	I know a current question relating to my friend
5	Qualcom or Microsoft or others is should we take all of
6	their intellectual property and let other people have it
7	at either free or at discounted nondiscriminatory terms.
8	That question was answered and implemented in a
9	consent decree in 1956 against the Bell system.
10	There is some interesting history there. The
11	one decree I was going to focus on for a couple minutes
12	is this 1982 AT&T breakup decree implemented in 1984.
13	It was agreed to by the parties and approved in
14	1982. A lot of litigation preceded that. I could talk
15	about that. I won't.
16	Starting in 1982, that was not -- when you think
17	of settlement, consent decree, that's the end of the
18	case, done. The lawyers go home, the parties now start
19	complying.
20	That was actually the beginning of more
21	litigation than had preceded the decree. There were
22	7,782 briefs filed with Judge Green, plus an additional
23	large number.
24	I didn't actually count them. I can get the
25	numbers if you guys want the number, a large number of

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1	briefs, hundreds if not thousands of briefs filed with
2	the Department of Justice, which had its own shadow
3	docket.
4	In fact, every week, if you went to the DOJ
5	offices, they had an updated table of what was pending
6	at DOJ, the motions docket on the purple table.
7	Judge Green issued countless orders. There was
8	a criminal trial and a conviction of NYNEX for
9	criminally violating the decree's provisions. It was
10	overturned in the D.C. Circuit.
11	Besides that appeal, there were 15 other
12	consolidated groups of appeals in the D.C. Circuit.
13	There were about a half a dozen certiorari issues.
14	The '82 decree itself was summarily affirmed in
15	the Supreme Court, over a dissent by three justices. It
16	was written by then Justice Rehnquist, who wasn't the
17	chief at that point.
18	He was concerned that Judge Green was embarking
19	on a nonjudicial function. He did not want to
20	inadvertently create a judicial branch, the common
21	carrier bureau of the FCC, and he was worried that might
22	ensue. He recognized that was a bad thing.
23	If you go over to the D.C. court's new annex
24	where they built that sort of circular structure right
25	next to the old Barrett Prettyman Courthouse building,

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1	you will see a series of exhibits.
2	I contributed one of the exhibits. It is about
3	Judge Green and the legacy he left, because in fact he
4	did create something like the FCC's common carrier
5	bureau.
6	He and the 1982 decree were put out of business
7	with the 1996 act of Congress called the
8	Telecommunications Act of 1996.
9	Now, there is an interesting debate. I don't --
10	I will just give you my view of it quickly, an
11	interesting debate on whether the AT&T decree did any
12	substantive good at all in terms of competition.
13	People who say it did a lot of good claim that
14	the decree brought down long distance prices by 70
15	percent and gave us colored telephones.
16	Both of those statements are not true. Long
17	distance prices did come down very substantially, but
18	more than 100 percent of the price decrease is
19	attributable to a different phenomenon that was going on
20	over at the FCC, a reduction of access charges. Major
21	costs for long distance prices came down almost as much
22	as the access prices came.
23	The colored telephones, the plethora of new
24	devices, that is something the FCC accomplished before.
25	They came up with a plug and play rule. You have a plug

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1	in the side of your wall, and you start mixing and
2	matching telephones.
3	That was not a benefit of the decree. There was
4	a different effect from the breakup, and that is that
5	the breakup disbursed the power of a single firm.
6	A very powerful single firm was broken up into
7	eight or 10 or 11 entities. It was AT&T, which was the
8	long distance manufacturing arm initially, seven
9	regional local telephone companies.
10	They had a jointly owned separate services
11	company, Bellcorp, and there was Cincinnati Bell and
12	Southern New England Telephone, which had been partially
13	owned by AT&T.
14	The diversity of behaviors of the different
15	firms you would have expected. If you sliced up one
16	thing and sent the pieces off on their own, the
17	diversity was largely stifled by line of business
18	restrictions that attached to seven of the firms.
19	Judge Green had said in approving the decree
20	that we the public would not tolerate a king over the
21	means of our political processes or economic processes,
22	in his view much better to have local warlords.
23	That's what we got. Some of the efficiencies of
24	a larger firm were sacrificed. Many of those
25	efficiencies have been recreated since, reachieved since

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1	the divestiture happened.
2	But the topic here is not what is the applicable
3	structure of telecommunications markets. The question
4	is what did we learn about remedies, both structural and
5	conduct remedies.
6	The AT&T decree involved both kinds of remedies.
7	Both the structural and the conduct aspects of
8	the AT&T decree derived from a belief held by Bill
9	Baxter -- maybe there's some in the room who worked with
10	him -- the belief that vertical integration by a
11	regulated monopoly firm is a bad thing.
12	So the solution was in part structural, take
13	apart the vertically integrated pieces, separate things
14	that are competitive from the regulated monopoly
15	businesses.
16	And there was a regulatory component. Let's
17	forbid the reintegration of the new vertical, things
18	that will sprout, let's quarantine the regulated
19	monopoly.
20	The structural remedy was very painful, it was
21	expensive. It changed an awful lot of things.
22	It made an opportunity for me personally. So
23	Green that he was able to pull it off. He was an expert
25	administrator and he got it done.

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1	The conduct regulation is what created the 8,000
2	briefs filed afterward.
3	The basic idea was almost everything was
4	prohibited and it required Judge Green repeatedly and
5	the Justice Department even more so to keep answering
6	these two kinds of questions, what is allowed, what is
7	okay and, on the other hand, can we have an exception,
8	please.
9	So, for example, I can't do this justice -- the
10	books do it justice -- but March 22, 1985, Judge Green
11	issued this order from his court, "Pacific Bell" -- that
12	was one of the telecoms in California, now it is AT&T --
13	"is permitted to provide telephone service to Mrs. Mary
14	Campbell who lives in the Plymouth exchange in the
15	Stockton, California LATA via the Placerville central
16	office in the Sacramento, California LATA."
17	September 10, 1991, June Green ordered,
18	"Wisconsin Bell may provide interLATA cross-boundary
19	foreign exchange service to Ms. Vicky Mallard and
20	Mr. Ricky Schultz."
21	There is a category of behaviors or services
22	called information services. Green ruled it was okay to
23	provide time and weather announcements as a public
24	service and separately a kind of wireless service that
25	had been prevalent, paging services -- nobody in this

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1	room uses paging services anymore, but people used to
2	carry pagers to be summoned.
3	Green said it was okay for the local telephone
4	companies to provide paging services, provide time,
5	provide paging, but not okay to provide the time over a
6	paging signal to your wristwatch. He ruled that was not
7	okay.
8	The telephone companies were forbidden from
9	manufacturing customer telephone equipment or network
10	telephone equipment.
11	And the question came up what if it breaks, can
12	you fix it, is repair a permitted or prohibited
13	manufacturing function.
14	Judge Green answered the detailed question "what
15	does it mean to manufacture." And Bell Atlantic -- I
16	was there at the time -- filed a brief which we called a
17	certificate of compliance, which was our way of trying
18	to get an answer to a further question.
19	We were going to tell them how we are going to
20	comply with his definition of manufacture. We said we
21	understood we could continue providing advice, not
22	repair, but advice to manufacturers to help fix product
23	defects.
24	Judge Green issued an order saying I refuse, the
25	court refused to clarify the point.

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1	Instead, he declared some of what we were
2	proposing may be forbidden and it would be subject to
3	enforcement proceedings.
4	That's 1988. Judge Green directed us to seek
5	guidance from the Department of Justice. The Justice
6	Department refused to provide guidance because it has
7	neither the obligation nor the resources to do so.
8	But later the Justice Department told a
9	different Bell company it could engage in some repair
10	functions.
11	We took that as a good sign. DOJ asked Judge
12	Green to confirm the DOJ interpretation because, quote,
13	"the decree's manufacturing prohibition is ambiguous
14	with respect to repairs."
15	Judge Green refused to consider the DOJ request.
16	Three years later, it was my son's birthday, I
17	remember this. It was July 10. All of the telephone
18	networks in suburban Maryland and Northern Virginia and
19	Washington, D.C. went out.
20	There was a problem with signaling machinery
21	that was generating a bunch of garbage messages. All
22	the networks went down.
23	Bell Atlantic thought they had people who knew
24	how to fix this. They flew to Texas to Alcatel here are
25	our ideas for how to solve the problem.

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1	I called up whoever was on duty at DOJ that day.
2	I think it was Connie Robinson. She may have been on
3	holiday or something. Don Russell had to take the call.
4	I said, "Don, we want to send people to try to
5	fix the phone." I don't remember if I called or not;
6	the phones weren't working.
7	I got a message through to DOJ, "we will try to
8	help repair this, is that okay with you?" They said
9	"well, we don't know."
10	They had an emergency motion in front of Judge
11	Green, asked can we go help try to fix the telephone
12	networks that had been out for several days.
13	Green agreed and immediately authorized it and
14	wrote "repair and fixing and troubleshooting and so on
15	are things that are normally done, that are
16	appropriately done. I don't think can by any stretch of
17	the imagination can they be regarded as either the
18	manufacture or design of the equipment."
19	Wireless service is now a big business. There
20	are now more wireless phones. Everybody has one, just
21	in case you get summoned for something.
22	1983, that was not the case. 1983 AT&T is in
23	the middle of the divestiture negotiations. We signed
24	the decree in '82 implementing it and drawing these
25	boundaries around what are the permitted calling areas.

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1	They were drawn with respect to the land
2	facilities, the 99.9 percent of what the local Bell
3	companies had.
4	AT&T went to DOJ and said, wait a minute, these
5	wireless phones won't fit neatly in the land boundaries,
6	moving customers don't respect the geography the same
7	way, the networks will have different scales.
8	And DOJ said, wait a minute, of course wireless
9	is confined to the LATA boundaries, just like the land
10	services are.
11	This was probably, in contract terms, a mistake
12	of law, a mistake of fact. There had been no meeting of
13	the minds on how to treat wireless.
14	We went to Judge Green, and Green ruled wireless
15	would be confined. So for 13 years, every time we
16	wanted to expand a wireless service area, we had to go
17	back to Judge Green to get it preapproved.
18	The long distance prohibition, very easy in
19	concept, a difference between local and long distance
20	calls.
21	Left to answer were things like can you switch a
22	long distance call. It is not carrying a long distance
23	call but can the local switches switch a call, can they
24	provide directory assistance or operator service, is it
25	okay to put out a local pay phone that is capable of use

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1	for long distance calls.
2	These were all big issues and briefed
3	extensively.
4	Small number of lessons from this experience.
5	One -- and you will hear this more from Richard, I
6	expect, or certainly read it in his book -- is a lesson
7	that humility is much to be preferred than exuberance,
8	enthusiasm of ambitious remediers.
9	Richard's subtitle, "less is more," that is
10	absolutely right.
11	When markets and technologies are changing,
12	nobody, not even the very good staff of the Justice
13	Department, is accurately able to predict how that will
14	end up.
15	We have examples of what seemed like very
16	reasonable predictions on which much was staked that all
17	came to nothing.
18	I suggest as a very positive concrete idea the
19	Antitrust Division manual on remedies, which goes
20	through lots of boilerplate. It ought to be added
21	something about considering the limits of your knowledge
22	for predicting the future.
23	There is an obvious connection between the
24	quality and the sureness, the certainty of your
25	substance and how good the remedy is going to be.

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1	Section 2 is a harder thing to figure out,
2	whether you actually have a violation. It translates
3	immediately into the difficulty of coming up with a good
4	remedy.
5	Bill Baxter, God bless him, wanted to forbid all
6	vertical integration by a regulated monopoly. It was
7	premised in a kind of regulation that was going out of
8	style then.
9	That remedy ignored the other technologies that
10	were looming, wireless and Internet. It resulted in a
11	freeze of things as they existed in 1982, so simple
12	things like telephone service or complex things like
13	whether there were vertical deficiencies or vertical
14	problems.
15	In one important respect, the Bell decree was
16	very, very bad. Probably the worst thing about it was
17	it reached out and covered markets that had not been the
18	subject of the litigation.
19	There was a category of activities that had been
20	part of a bill in Congress that hadn't passed called
21	information services.
22	The government, thinking it is a competitive
23	business, just like long distance or equipment
24	manufacturing, said let's prohibit any involvement with
25	overly regulated monopolies in information services.

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1	That had effects that ranged from tiny to significant.
2	On the tiny side, useful services like voice
3	mail were delayed by my estimate about four years. It
4	turns out that voice mail, if you don't answer the phone
5	and someone takes a message, that's something a local
6	telephone company can provide for you more efficiently
7	than any external service provider.
8	Four years of delay getting that. More
9	significant effects were wireless business which was not
10	litigated or really meant to be covered by the decree.
11	I think that was crippled compared to Europe.
12	We were delayed compared to Europe in deployment
13	of wireless services as a result of the restrictions on
14	wireless.
15	I personally think, not to go through this in
16	detail, that our development of the Internet was delayed
17	by about a decade by these restrictions.
18	We had the second string building the Internet
19	instead of the people that had more of the core assets
20	needed to do a good job of it.
21	It is important before I sign off here to
22	compliment Judge Green, give him and the staff of DOJ
23	the highest compliments that are possible.
24	Judge Green had -- I have anecdotes about Judge
25	Green being a great administrator before he got the job

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1	and when he got the job.
2	But he could not keep up with the pace of
3	regulation that this decree produced. That means it
4	can't be done by anybody. I have statistics on that.
5	But that's gilding the lily.
6	One last point, then. I think there is a strong
7	connection from the certainty of your substance to how
8	the remedy is going to work.
9	But there is an opposite effect as well. There
10	is sort of a feedback from problems of remedy to
11	substance.
12	You see this reflected in the recent Trinko
13	decision, where Justice Scalia writes, "Effective
14	remediation of violations of regulatory sharing
15	requirements ordinarily require continuing supervision
16	of a highly detailed degree. We think Professor Oleto
17	got it right that no court should impose a duty to deal,
18	a substantive requirement that it can't explain or
19	adequately and reasonably supervise."
20	If a problem is irremediable by antitrust law,
21	we shouldn't have that as a problem, or, in my terms,
22	you shouldn't be setting yourself up to find violations
23	you can't fix. It is better to cut the law off.
24	This comes up probably most vividly in the
25	current debates over whether discounted bundles should

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1	be Section 2 problems. Microsoft offers you a
2	discounted bundle of multiple products, should that be a
3	violation.
4	And if you can't fix that, then the answer
5	probably is it shouldn't be a violation. I will stop
6	there.
7	(Applause.)
8	MR. ELIASBERG: Thank you, John.
9	Richard Epstein is the James Parker Hall
10	distinguished service professor of law, faculty director
11	of curriculum and director, law and economics program,
12	University of Chicago Law School, where he has taught
13	since 1972.
14	He has also been the Peter and Kirstin Senior
15	Fellow at the Hoover Institution since 2000.
16	He served as editor of the Journal of Law and
17	Economics from 1991 to 2000.
18	Richard has written on a wide range of legal and
19	interdisciplinary subjects, including the recent book on
20	antitrust called "Consent Decrees and Practice" that
21	John just mentioned.
22	Richard, welcome.
23	MR. EPSTEIN: Thank you.
24	You see that John and I have very different
25	styles. And in fact, if I had talked to John before I

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1	wrote the stuff on the AT&T decree, it would have been a
2	much longer book because I would have had to go through
3	all of these situations.
4	Let me see if I can talk a little bit about
5	this, and I'm going to I think start with a point that
6	John ended on, which is the relationship between your
7	confidence in the substantive law and your ability to
8	design remedies on the other.
9	Before I actually came back to look at antitrust
10	laws in some detail, I had sort of forgotten there was a
11	Section 2 and always thought the only thing a sensible
12	antitrust law could do was to try to regulate horizontal
13	behavior by controlling such cases as cartels and
14	divisions of markets, and then as the more difficult
15	task to figure out what should happen with respect to
16	mergers.
17	The reason why the first task is relatively easy
18	and the second task is more moderately difficult is in
19	the first case, you are generally but not always
20	confident that the efficiency gains are very small from
21	horizontal collusive arrangements but the restrictive
22	practices are large.
23	Then as you start going over to the merger
24	areas, you are never quite sure what the relative
25	magnitudes are going to be. So you have a lot of

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1	problems to worry about.
2	Now, when you come to Section 2, after I figured
3	out what this was all about, you realize that there the
4	worm may have completely turned and that virtually every
5	practice which is going to be attacked under Section 2
6	will be the kind of practice which will have some
7	substantial efficiency gain.
8	So you will have to go into a question of
9	whether or not its restrictive component is going to be
10	large enough so as to justify losing that particular
11	gain in question.
12	If your basic intuition is that the magnitudes
13	are going to be roughly of equal proportion at best and
14	you know that the administrative solutions are going to
15	be far more difficult than in the other areas, there is
16	a part of me -- it is not the part of me which I
17	actually believe in 100 percent -- which says maybe we
18	should call the whole thing off and the way in which we
19	solve the problem of remedies under Section 2 is to get
20	rid of liability under Section 2 of the Sherman Act so
21	you don't have anything to worry about at all.
22	I have become reluctantly persuaded that there
23	are a number of cases in which the strategies of
24	foreclosure by contract and otherwise may have some
25	modicum of success.

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1	I guess I backed off that provision and I now
2	believe an ideal operation of either the FTC or the FCC
3	or the DOJ might be able to bring some positive good to
4	this area, even though I think to some extent it is a
5	long shot.
6	In doing this, I should say that I have worked
7	both with Microsoft, although not on the antitrust case
8	here but on other matters, and certainly I worked with
9	John Thorne with respect to the various things having to
10	do with the implementation of the 1996 Act.
11	And indeed, I think I gave him the single worst
12	advice he ever received in the history of mankind when I
13	told him that the statute was actually drafted, this '96
14	Act, in an intelligent fashion.
15	The lesson I learned from that is it wasn't the
16	statute is so difficult. It is one of the things you
17	worry about is the constant drift between a statute
18	which seems to have a game plan that is moderately
19	coherent and administrative implementation and
20	interpretation of it, which can easily run awry.
21	So the whole question of drift within
22	administrative agencies is to me one of the single
23	biggest problems you have with legislative reform.
24	Where you start off, the various questions, and
25	how it is that you manage to keep the relative balance

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1	on the remedial side direct to the administrative issue
2	to the judicial enforcement is to me a very major
3	problem.
4	In dealing with this, what I did -- and this was
5	an inspired thing that Microsoft asked me to do -- is
6	write a history of some of the consent decrees that
7	actually emerged from the various sorts of litigation
8	under Section 2.
9	The first case was a Section 1 case which I
10	talked about, which had to do with the meatpackers case.
11	Though it was a Section 1 case, all the mistakes
12	came in Section 2 guise. What I mean by that is you had
13	there a situation in which there was evident collusion
14	among the packers with respect to the distribution of
15	their goods, but the remedies decided to impose on each
16	of the companies restrictions on what they could do
17	unilaterally in those markets in which they had no
18	monopoly to begin with.
19	Essentially what happened when the thing was
20	subject to litigation is Justice Cardozo was a good
21	common lawyer and said "you make a bed of nails by
22	contract with the Justice Department, you expect to be
23	stung and burned every time you try to roll over on this
24	bed of nails, and I'm not going to let you out of it."
25	So you have this weird situation where the

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1	government continues, in many cases for 30 or 40 years,
2	to insist upon the enforcement of provisions that are in
3	the contract without making any independent evaluation
4	of why it is that they have the slightest bit of good
5	they can confer on anybody.
6	The first lesson one learns about consent
7	decrees is that shorter is better, 40 years is too long,
8	open-ended is simply inexcusable. Once you get over
9	three or five years out, it is almost sure you are going
10	to be making a mistake.
11	What you want to do is to recognize that
12	Shakespeare was right when he said that brevity is the
13	soul of wit. You don't want these things to run on.
14	The explanation was given the movement of
15	companies and technologies are almost always
16	unanticipated.
17	The packers case and Swift and Company actually
18	had its final litigation in the 1960s and had to do with
19	an acquisition of the Greyhound Bus Company.
20	So you can see that the continuity across these
21	cases was in fact something which simply could not be
22	sustained.
23	As you start to move on -- I will not talk about
24	all the cases. But let me talk about one which I think
25	is perhaps the poster child of inept management with

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1	respect to unilateral practices, although, again, it is
2	not quite a unilateral practice case, and that has to do
3	with the United Shoe Machinery case.
4	This is a transaction which began with the
5	merger of United Shoe in 1899. To the extent it is a
6	merger case, of course it is not a pure unilateral
7	practices case.
8	The logic behind this merger was in fact one of
9	immense economic advantage in that shoe making was an
10	extremely complicated process and that you had separate
11	companies, each of whom owned patents which controlled
12	separate stages in the processes.
13	And if you tried to negotiate piecemeal
14	transactions amongst them, what you did is you ran into
15	a classic version of the double, triple, quadruple
16	marginalization problem.
17	When you all the companies, essentially what you
18	did is you created a patent pool which allowed somebody
19	to smoothly price the entire process from soup to nuts.
20	What was interesting is that the antitrust
21	sophistication circa 1910 was probably greater than the
22	antitrust sophistication circa 1960 on this matter, and
23	the Supreme Court let this thing go, understanding
24	exactly what was happening, even though it would not
25	have used language like "double marginalization" or any

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1	of the terms we use today.
2	What happened is after the merger took place,
3	the government just would not let go. This was part of
4	Woodrow Wilson's exuberant progressivement.
5	What you then do is you try to attack various
6	kinds of contractual restrictions that are imposed upon
7	the various lessees of United Shoe Machinery's
8	equipment, most of which had some degree of exclusivity
9	associated with them.
10	To take a simple kind of provision, if it turns
11	you want to use one of our particular machines, you have
12	to use all of our particular machines, and you have to
13	use them for certain periods of length.
14	All these clauses, at least if you take the view
15	of the modern law, essentially engage in the sin known
16	as foreclosure, which means by virtue of the fact that
17	you now control something at one stage of the market,
18	you will preclude competition from taking place at
19	something either upstream or downstream from the thing
20	that you control.
21	The lesson I think one has to learn from this is
22	extremely important, and it actually carries over I
23	think very well to the Microsoft cases.
24	What happens is the government managed after
25	some great deliberation to win these cases, and all of

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1	these offending clauses in the first round of litigation
2	were removed.
3	So now the question is what's going to happen in
4	the marketplace. And the answer in this particular case
5	was absolutely nothing.
6	It turned out that there may have been a 2
7	percent or a 5 percent difference, but that there were
8	huge efficiency advantages associated with being able to
9	get all of your equipment from a single supplier such
10	that if any part of the stream went down, you would know
11	whom to turn to for repair, and that vertical
12	integration was prized by customers, who did not love
13	the thought of trying to mix and match 27 different
14	pieces from 14 different companies, knowing that the
15	interconnections would never be quite right and having
16	each company say that the other fellow had done it
17	wrong.
18	If it is a 15 percent monopoly premium you are
19	paying for piece of mind, it is money well spent in the
20	eyes of many people.
21	What happens is that the clauses themselves
22	turned out to have very little value with respect to the
23	way in which United Shoe continued to operate its
24	business.
25	There is a very important lesson to be learned

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1	from this, which is if you keep the clauses in place and
2	start to fight over them, all of a sudden somebody will
3	actually believe you know something about the way in
4	which your business runs, and by making such a big deal
5	of it as a defendant, all you do is you create the
6	impression that they have greater causal efficacy than
7	in fact they do in the marketplace.
8	So I have a piece of free advice to all clients
9	of mine or nonclients of mine, which is that any time
10	somebody wants to attack one of your contractual
11	provisions on the grounds that it creates market power,
12	exclusion foreclosure, whatever it is, you just
13	surrender, pull the damn thing out and let business go
14	on exactly the same way as it did before.
15	Here I think I disagree a little bit with Frank
16	Fisher with respect to the question about how potent
17	were the various exclusionary provisions Microsoft that
18	had with respect to the kind of things that go on his
19	desktop and so forth.
20	I thought Microsoft made a horrific set of
21	mistakes in terms of the way in which it handled the
22	early stages of the litigation, by hanging on to these
23	clauses as if everything depended upon them.
24	When in fact once they were removed, it turned
25	out that the modifications that were made with respect

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1	to Microsoft Explorer probably had much more to do with
2	the decline of Netscape than any kind of contractual
3	provisions that you have.
4	So what you say in effect is this. If you keep
5	the contractual injunction in place in these sorts of
6	situations, everybody is now going to impute high
7	restrictive, low efficiency value with respect to the
8	particular practice in question, and you won't have a
9	laboratory experiment which will allow you to sort these
10	things out.
11	If my intuitions about end-to-end services are
12	correct -- and I think those intuitions are right as
13	much in the United Shoe case as they are in the
14	Microsoft case and vice versa -- what you want to do is
15	pull the plug on the restriction and then simply rely on
16	the efficiency with respect to the products that you
17	want.
18	As it turns out, I think in this world, monopoly
19	is not necessarily an ideal situation, but it is
20	certainly one which is not necessarily less preferable
21	than other situations in which you have coordination
22	problems to replace it.
23	To use the very fancy language some people use
24	today, when you start having to put together equipment
25	from multiple players, it is kind of like a self-imposed

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1	anticommons problem. You have this guy here, that guy
2	there, everybody is getting in everybody else's way.
3	And it may well be that empirically the commons
4	problem, taking everything from a single supplier, even
5	if it is able to expand its control by virtue of the
6	network it has, is a better solution for you than
7	anything else.
8	So now, having said all this, how do we start to
9	think about these questions of design?
10	I will not take too much more time because I
11	think the discussion is important. But I want to say a
12	couple things about John Thorne's remarks.
13	It is not that I disagree with him, but
14	strangely enough, I don't think that John actually
15	talked about the single worst features associated with
16	the decree which were the original structural choices
17	that were made with respect to.
18	If you go back, the FCC was not the world's most
19	nimble agency in the '60s and '70. But by the
20	mid-1970s, after the MCI case and so forth, it did begin
21	to tinker with the prospect that the way in which you
22	try to handle the common carrier system as a common
23	carrier issue was to mandate various kinds of
24	interconnections between the central system and anybody
25	else who wanted to get on.

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1	What happened is if you had kind of a trunk
2	line, other people could hook on and start to add their
3	service. And the theory would be that the function of
4	the legal system would be to make sure that any rival
5	competitor could reach any customer on the AT&T system,
6	and if you could start on the AT&T system, you could
7	reach anybody from a rival competitor.
8	Of course, if you had two rival competitors in
9	different places, then you would have to be able to go
10	from rival A through AT&T, if need be, back to rival B.
11	So that what happens is that the way in which
12	you expanded competition under these things is to
13	mandate intersection.
14	The question is how do you do it. If I
15	understand the situation correctly, what you simply do
16	is ensure compatibility, just as you would in the
17	Microsoft case, and you don't worry very much about
18	pricing issues.
19	The brute fact of the matter is early on if you
20	were tiny in the AT&T system as B, you are getting a
21	subsidy by virtue of the interconnection.
22	What is nice about this subsidy is that it
23	shrinks with time, because as you become larger now, it
24	turns out access to your customers by the main carrier
25	is more valuable than it was to begin with, and after a

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1	while you get yourself into a nice equilibrium.
2	In my view, if they had done that first in the
3	1982 decree and if they had basically blown up all of
4	the unbundled network pricing elements associated with
5	the 1996 Act, you would have been able to see a fairly
6	coherent expansion of what has happened.
7	The thing that I wanted to stress about this is
8	when you are talking about these network industries, of
9	which I think both the computing and I think the
10	telecommunications industries qualify -- but United Shoe
11	does not -- what you want to do in effect is to make
12	sure that interconnections can be obtained at the lowest
13	possible cost and to do nothing else thereafter.
14	It is not that you are going to get yourself
15	into a perfect solution.
16	But I think if there is anything that I learned
17	from the AT&T decree is this constant, mindless, numbing
18	rhetoric about how it is when you force people to sell
19	things to other people at prices that administrators
20	will now determine, incorrectly as a matter of force and
21	effect, that we have somehow removed ourselves closer to
22	a competitive system.
23	The truth about the matter is John I think was
24	right when he alluded to the fact that the rate cap
25	system was a pretty sensible way in which to run that

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1	business, because what rate caps essentially did is you
2	didn't try to use cost-plus pricing, but you took into
3	account the fact that generally speaking, there are
4	always going to be greater efficiencies in telecom.
5	So if you just lower in real terms the rates by
6	2 or 3 percent a year and do nothing else, they will get
7	a little monopoly profits, you will get a lot of
8	administrative savings, and there will be a huge amount
9	of administration underneath the kind of caps that take
10	place.
11	So that kind of mix on remedies is I think
12	exactly what you are after.
13	Here is the way in which I start to think about
14	Section 2 in a word, is that I think basically damages
15	are not particularly important one way or another when
16	you are bringing these government suits, which is why
17	they have not been brought.
18	I think the invalidation of certain kinds of
19	contractual provisions is certainly appropriate and
20	relatively easy to implement, and my advice to both
21	firms is that you basically pull them out of the
22	agreement so that you don't have to fight that battle
23	under adverse terms.
24	And most of the structural remedies are a case
25	of too much at too high a cost. And in general, I can

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1	think of no cases that succeeded on this.
2	I would guess that it was in the trillions of
3	dollars over the last 25 years that we could attribute
4	to bad remedial design in telecommunications, a really
5	very big and substantial number.
6	United Shoe was a small little case. But
7	remember, when they finally got frustrated at the
8	inability to make the contractual restrictions change
9	the behaviors in markets, they broke up the firm, and it
10	sort of went belly up.
11	I think one has to remember that. I'm a lawyer.
12	I don't start with existence theorems about how the
13	government can improve things by picking the optimal
14	choice.
15	I'm a guy who believes that you start with a
16	breach and realize it is substantial, and unless you can
17	find a clean kill, the best thing to do is to stay your
18	hand.
19	Thank you.
20	(Applause.)
21	MR. ELIASBERG: Thank you, Richard.
22	Before we get into the moderated discussion, why
23	don't we go down the panel here and see if any of the
24	speakers would like to take a moment or two to comment
25	on what the other speakers have said.

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1	So with the request that it just be a minute or
2	two, Franklin, let me start with you. Any thoughts?
3	DR. FISHER: Yes. I can't resist it.
4	MR. ELIASBERG: Try to speak into the
5	microphone, please, for the court reporter.
6	DR. FISHER: Sure.
7	I can't resist it. I think the dictum that
8	every practice under Section 2 has large efficiency
9	gains is wrong.
10	I think it is correct -- that every practice
11	under Section 2 is likely to be defended as having large
12	efficiency gains is not the same thing.
13	MR. ELIASBERG: Okay.
14	Dietrich, anything?
15	MR. KLEEMANN: Maybe to John's remark about the
16	remedies, actual remedies.
17	I remember you said maybe in a Section 2 cases,
18	behavior, yes. However, it is not too clear.
19	I want to add something which is I would say any
20	intervention of the state in terms of structural
21	remedies is an intervention into the right of property.
22	If you see a merger case, there the parties,
23	they change themselves, the market such so you can say
24	if they do this in an anticompetitive way, it might not
25	so much be covered by their right of property to do

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1	this, and you can't intervene against such operation.
2	By contrast, in that case, nobody changes the
3	market structure in the same sense. Simply they use a
4	given market structure to achieve some anticompetitive
5	goals.
6	And for me, it is not so obvious that you can
7	intervene in such a situation easily into the property
8	rights of a party which is always some kind of action as
9	if you would an expropriation.
10	On the other hand, you can say commercial
11	property is certainly not to be used in an absolutely
12	free way.
13	It is subject to some fundamental applications.
14	And these fundamental applications certainly include the
15	respect of the basic rules for market economy.
16	And if you heard these basic rules in a very
17	clear, blatant way, it might be justified to intervene
18	into the property rights. But I repeat it probably is
19	in legal terms as opposed to merger control a last
20	resort.
21	Therefore, the hurdle is much higher.
22	MR. ELIASBERG: Thank you.
23	Andy, any thoughts?
24	DR. JOSKOW: Just one thing. I think there is
25	some consensus about what we are saying with regard to

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1	structure versus conduct.
2	What I hear what I think is happening is what we
3	are saying about remedies is actually tying it back to
4	what one might say about what is a real good liability
5	case.
6	If we are saying that, well, you can probably
7	make something out of cases where we can limit or remove
8	certain contractual provisions, at least to foreclosure
9	and reductions of competition, in some cases I think we
10	are in the types of legitimate cases we may be talking
11	about.
12	I think that is important too.
13	MR. ELIASBERG: Thank you.
14	John, any thoughts?
15	MR. THORNE: Can I ask a question instead of
16	making a comment?
17	MR. ELIASBERG: Well, you may ask, yes.
18	MR. THORNE: This is a question for Dietrich.
19	In your remarks, you talked about access
20	remedies as being one of the primary ways you resolve
21	mergers.
22	Then the first issue you listed under the topic
23	of access grants is setting the terms for the access
24	grants, price and other terms.
25	I wondered, you have a large body of mergers

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1	where you have insisted on access grants. How do you
2	deal with the effect of that requirement on investment,
3	investment either by the firm where the requirement is
4	placed, which might want to invest less in stuff it has
5	to give away on regulated terms or incentives of the
6	demanders for access who might not build as much of
7	their own stuff if they can borrow it for free from
8	others?
9	MR. KLEEMANN: First of all, I think I have to
10	say access remedies are the most important behavior
11	remedies, certainly not in general the most important,
12	which are still clear-cut remedies such as divestiture.
13	However, there are situations, in particular in
14	industries where you have essential facilities and where
15	there is the high risk of foreclosure combining
16	essential facilities vertically with players where you
17	have to find a way out.
18	It is certainly true an eternal argument of all
19	incumbents in the possession of platforms or networks
20	that if you interfere with their strategies, you stifle
21	any kind of new investment.
22	Take only the current debate in Germany or in
23	Europe about the demands of the German Telecom to get
24	for their super quick DSL network, fiber network, an
25	exception from the generally regulated rule. Otherwise,

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1	as I said, they would not invest.
2	In my view, this can, however, not be an excuse
3	to do something, to simply accept that one guy is going
4	to foreclose a market at the outset with all the severe
5	consequences for the future development.
6	Having said this, if you go to impose such an
7	access remedy, you have, however, to be fair.
8	I just mentioned in my short statement our
9	solution in the Telepiu case, where we started with the
10	certain bases, a price which is feasible, including a
11	certain margin for them and also some benchmarking with
12	other similar situations, other markets.
13	I think this is a realistic approach, and I
14	don't think that Telepiu's investment over the last
15	three or five years has been harmed by this.
16	Having said this, of course you should do all
17	this in a careful way and not going to impose easily
18	without carefully examination of this kind of
19	commitment.
20	But to confuse and generally to renounce this
21	kind of commitment, even in blunt cases of market
22	foreclosure, I would say would be a general kind of
23	resignation in this area.
24	And I saw in some statements if you are caught,
25	if it is communicated as it is, and I found this kind of

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1	resignation, in particular, given the importance of
2	these kind of markets that have these remedies is not
3	acceptable.
4	MR. ELIASBERG: Richard, do you have a comment?
5	MR. EPSTEIN: I have a couple comments.
6	One, I think with respect to the whole problem
7	about Section 2, I think there are some of these
8	practices which are inefficient. I think they have
9	small efficiency gains and small inefficiencies.
10	One of the things that is most striking about
11	many of these contractual restrictions is they did a
12	little foreclosure and they did a little good. And
13	getting rid of the provisions didn't change things very
14	much.
15	One of the things you always worry about when
16	people knock down contractual terms is if you leave
17	freedom of price, so whatever you couldn't get in the
18	contract term you may well get in the price term.
19	So it is not at all clear you made some major
20	sort of social advancement with respect to these things.
21	With respect to what was just said about the
22	European approach on the remedy side, it is probably
23	something more that David can speak to than I.
24	But the striking differences between the EU
25	remedies with respect to the Microsoft and the American

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1	remedies are very dramatic. What happens is there are
2	two dangers here, and I think he has only alluded to
3	one.
4	The first danger is, of course, that monopoly
5	foreclosure will take place.
6	The other danger is while subsidization through
7	expropriation of the transactions, where you no price
8	term associated with them for the divestiture of
9	intellectual property or patents of some kind or another
10	or prices that are well below the cost and, in fact, one
11	of the problems about John's industry which I think
12	shows this is if you go back to the history of telereg
13	pricing, what those guys managed to dream up in the FCC
14	was they gave you a very small rate and said they would
15	be depreciating it on you.
16	Since they gave you a small rate base, they gave
17	you a very low rate of return. The standard history of
18	regulated industries on pricing is if you give people a
19	large rate base, taking very little risk and they get a
20	smaller rate of return, and if give them a higher rate,
21	what they did under telereg was to give them a small
22	base and a low rate, which had really very after adverse
23	consequences.
24	The Supreme Court, they would not attack this as
25	either a statutory construction matter nor in the end as

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1	a takings and regulatory kind of takings issue.
2	MR. ELIASBERG: Thank you, Richard.
3	Why don't we go to the moderated discussion.
4	And with this we will not only have our panelists, but
5	David Heiner has graciously agreed to also participate.
6	Let's take a look first at slide 4.
7	And I will go ahead and just read this into the
8	record.
9	"Finding the right remedy for antitrust
10	violations is never easy, and we have never been
11	particularly good at it."
12	And that comes from Herbert Hovenkamp's "The
13	Antitrust Enterprise."
14	Would I be correct in assuming that there is no
15	disagreement with that among any of the panelists?
16	MR. EPSTEIN: Actually, there is some. One of
17	the reasons why there is some disagreement is I think
18	Herbert got the remedies wrong.
19	He was really very harsh on the Microsoft
20	remedy. I think, for example, he wildly overrated the
21	technical efficiency of the OS 2 system and created the
22	error that I think constantly happens, which is to
23	assume whenever there is a restricted practice which we
24	have now struck down, it was that practice rather than
25	the inherent merits of the product which led to the

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1	loss.
2	I thought of all the Microsoft exhibits I read
3	the one that was really devastating on that point was
4	the one prepared by Kevin Murphy which went through the
5	question of why it was all the other systems had failed,
6	given very powerful and detailed explanations based on
7	structure architecture and design.
8	Yes, I think we aren't particularly good at it.
9	It is not the case that the author of the quote is
10	necessarily immune from the criticism.
11	MR. HEINER: I could pick up on that a little
12	bit and specifically comment on the remedy that
13	Professor Fisher pointed out that Professor Hovenkamp
14	proposed in the Microsoft case.
15	First off, I would agree with the quote and I
16	would agree with the thrust of Professor Fisher's
17	presentation that remedies are certainly hard in Section
18	2 cases.
19	I have personally found that to be the case with
20	respect to the Microsoft issues that I have been dealing
21	with for many years.
22	My sense of the situation is that to some extent
23	it may be that remedies are so hard in Section 2 cases
24	because quite often the underlying structure is in fact
25	efficient and perhaps even the conduct is efficient as

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1	to which there has been liability determined.
2	But when you get to the remedy phase, you maybe
3	begin to have second thoughts about some of that.
4	That is sorted of pointed up by Professor
5	Fisher's application about the applications barrier to
6	entry in the Microsoft case.
7	The applications barrier to entry is a
8	reflection of natural economic forces, as the professor
9	said.
10	It reflects the value of compatibility to
11	consumers. They want to get a PC that is the same as
12	other PCs, it runs the same applications.
13	Many of the remedies that were proposed through
14	the years went to try to attack the applications barrier
15	to entry and thereby break compatibility.
16	People turned away from those remedies quite
17	properly because they didn't want to give up that
18	benefit. I think that was very much the case with the
19	remedy number 5 that we saw from Professor Hovenkamp.
20	The idea there was that Microsoft should be
21	obliged to conduct an auction of the Windows source
22	code, the crown jewels of the company essentially, to
23	end licensees who would then go out and offer Windows in
24	competition with one another.
25	What would have happened in that case is that

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1	the value of Windows and the price would have
2	essentially tended toward zero.
3	Any time you have two or three or more firms
4	with the exact same information good with a zero
5	marginal cost, they will tend to compete the cost down
6	to zero.
7	The effect would have been quite dramatic in
8	terms of taking away the value of what is really one of
9	the most valuable products of all time.
10	The three firms, to try to break out of that,
11	would have sought to differentiate their products.
12	They would have competed with one another to add
13	different features and thereby break compatibility.
14	That would not have been maintained, and customers would
15	have lost the benefit of that.
16	That I think is why the Division did not go down
17	that path. But I do think it illustrates the broader
18	point about many times the remedies may point up that
19	the existing situation is efficient.
20	MR. ELIASBERG: Frank, did you want to make a
21	comment on that?
22	DR. FISHER: Well, I don't agree with that.
23	MR. HEINER: I know.
24	DR. FISHER: I agree that the successor firms
25	under that remedy would try to differentiate themselves

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1	and try to improve their products in various ways.
2	All of them would have a great big incentive of
3	remaining compatible with the existing stock of
4	programs. I think it is unlikely they would try to
5	differentiate themselves in ways that would break
6	compatibility.
7	MR. EPSTEIN: I think the difficulty with that
8	logic is the only way they could avoid breaking down
9	compatibility is to meet with one another.
10	What you would have is a contract combination in
11	restraint of trade. It would have to take place because
12	the gains, as Frank says, from coordination are so
13	great.
14	But it can only take place underneath some sort
15	of government supervision to make sure that while those
16	folks are sitting in the room to figure out compatible
17	features they don't manage to figure themselves out on
18	compatible prices.
19	In addition to that, as everybody is trying to
20	develop products to make sure that they can make the
21	compatibility, everybody has to slow down with respect
22	to what they are doing to make sure the compatibilities
23	will survive.
24	My own view about it is so long as you allow for
25	some degree of competition on top of the operating

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1	system that was designed under the Kollar-Kotelly
2	decree, that's all that you can expect.
3	I will say this, since he was my former student.
4	When Doug Ginsberg actually evaluated this particular
5	portion in the state case which Hovenkamp helped to
6	author, he did not give a Chevron deference kind of
7	answer which said we don't know what is going on there,
8	when are not smart enough to figure all this out, if she
9	thinking it is right, we are just going to let it fly.
10	He said well done. This was in fact very much
11	considered on the part of the Justice Department.
12	Frank's position lost. And frankly, well done.
13	DR. FISHER: Frank doesn't agree with that
14	either.
15	MR. EPSTEIN: I'm stunned to hear.
16	DR. FISHER: The compatibility I was talking
17	about -- we may be using the term a little bit
18	differently -- was remaining compatible so that any
19	program that ran on Windows at the time that this
20	occurred would continue to run on the operating systems
21	as they developed at the other company.
22	I was not referring to a situation in which they
23	had to remain compatible with each other other than
24	that.
25	MR. EPSTEIN: I did misunderstand you.

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1	But having that understanding, it seems to me
2	that software designers who were now going to have to be
3	compatible with foreign-compatible systems are going to
4	have incentives that are less than ideal.
5	This is a case in which the monopoly platform
6	has an advantage and it is shown by virtue of the fact
7	that you can design something for a market where you
8	will get 10X as opposed to 2.5.
9	That's why it is that Macintosh, although it is
10	finally moving up there, is always essentially first we
11	do the Microsoft system and two years later you come out
12	with it.
13	What is the difference in the number of programs
14	for one system as opposed to the other?
15	MR. HEINER: It is large.
16	MR. EPSTEIN: 10, six, whatever it is.
17	That's one of the things you start to give up in
18	this game. There are no free lunches here.
19	DR. FISHER: It is true, and I thought I said
20	so, that it is probable that eventually anyway the
21	natural effects will take over and one of these things
22	will become very large again.
23	That's perfectly true. That's a defect. You
24	can't prevent that.
25	MR. EPSTEIN: So the frictions aren't worth

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1	running.
2	MR. HEINER: Let's turn to that different point,
3	which is the natural tendency of the market to move on
4	in high-tech industries.
5	It is kind of interesting to see now in 2007, is
6	there a huge excitement when Microsoft comes out with
7	Windows Vista, the latest version, are people running to
8	get Vista to run Vista applications?
9	And the answer unfortunately for Microsoft seems
10	to be not as much as we might like.
11	Where is the excitement today in terms of
12	applications? It is all Internet-based services. So it
13	is the YouTubes of the world and My Space and Friendster
14	and Flicker and Yahoo and Google and all that. That
15	runs across any browser on any operating system.
16	Here is another case where technology does move
17	on, market forces tend to take care of themselves. I
18	don't know what will come in 2010 and 2012.
19	Microsoft will be offering its own
20	Internet-based services increasingly in the years to
21	come.
22	But it does feel like already the discussion we
23	had in the late '90s is moving on.
24	MR. ELIASBERG: With that in mind, looking back
25	again at the statement by Hovenkamp and putting aside

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1	that people who live in glass houses should not throw
2	stones, Richard's point, I would ask particularly of
3	Frank and Richard, any Section 2 cases come to mind,
4	government Section 2 cases where the remedy was right,
5	where the agency got the remedy right?
6	MR. EPSTEIN: Microsoft.
7	MR. ELIASBERG: Frank?
8	DR. FISHER: None. I'm not suggesting it was an
9	easy task either.
10	MR. ELIASBERG: Not one case?
11	When you said no, you mean no to Microsoft or no
12	case at all?
13	DR. FISHER: I don't agree with it for
14	Microsoft, and I cannot think of any case in which it
15	has been really very well done.
16	That is partly because -- three reasons why.
17	One, I'm probably not familiar as I sit here with all
18	the cases. I think that is probably true.
19	Two, it is a very difficult problem.
20	Three, until fairly recently, my impression is
21	if you go back historically that the record of the
22	amount of thought put into this in Section 2 cases is
23	rather poor.
24	MR. ELIASBERG: Okay.
25	MR. THORNE: Let me amplify the number of

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1	Section 2 cases that might have come out correctly.
2	The Seventh Circuit decision written by Judge
3	Cudahee in MCI versus AT&T drew a distinction.
4	They articulated a broad essential facilities
5	doctrine that probably does not exist in American law.
6	They drew a distinction between kinds of
7	circuits that AT&T was voluntarily selling to others.
8	When MCI came up to the windows and said "can I have
9	some of those too, please," AT&T said "no."
10	That was a violation. So that piece of it was
11	decided by the court as a violation. And the remedy was
12	you must provide to MCI what you voluntarily sell to
13	others on the same terms.
14	There was another piece where MCI came to the
15	window and said I haven't built my long distance lines
16	to San Francisco, will you give me big chunks of your
17	long distance network, and Judge Cudahee said no, we are
18	not going to give that to you. That's an asset. If you
19	want to compete for it, you have to build yourself.
20	His decision and the remedy which is if you are
21	voluntarily offering something, don't discriminate
22	against rivals, that was a pretty simple one and I think
23	correct.
24	MR. EPSTEIN: That fits with my program, which
25	is nondiscrimination is another way of saying

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1	interchange which is something you mandate.
2	It is kind of a common carrier remedy. The
3	reason you do it through the antitrust situation as
4	opposed to the FCC is since they voluntarily priced it
5	so you didn't have to have a ratemaking hearing going on
6	in order to deal with that issue.
7	So that you got the real advantages of
8	essentially both halves.
9	MR. THORNE: If you are worried about investment
10	deterrents, when a firm voluntarily sets the terms, you
11	don't worry about it and you say do for others what you
12	do for others.
13	MR. EPSTEIN: To me that has always been the
14	pattern and the great mistake in the 1996 act which was
15	amplified by the administrative rules was the horrific
16	pricing with respect to the unbundled network elements.
17	That was done through legislation and then
18	through pricing at the administrative level.
19	The basic position I would take and it applies
20	to the Microsoft remedy in Europe is transferring
21	assets, no, facilitating interconnections, yes, where
22	you would like to be.
23	MR. ELIASBERG: Andy?
24	DR. JOSKOW: I'm not sure zero is the right
25	answer on the government's effectiveness.

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1	I don't know effectiveness, but on what were
2	appropriate remedies.
3	I mentioned the Dentsply case which was about
4	false teeth. That was a Section 2 case. It seems to me
5	certainly the exclusive dealing contracts were the place
6	to look in that case because the jury is still out on
7	what happened.
8	Visa and MasterCard, which is really a Section 1
9	case but like a Section 2 case, if there is a finding of
10	liability, the rule about allowing banks to issue cards,
11	presumably American Express cards, seemed to be where to
12	look.
13	You can argue about whether those contracts were
14	efficient, and the argument had been strong they should
15	have won the case. Once there is liability, it seems
16	like those remedies are the place to look.
17	That is consistent with what we have been saying
18	in these kind of very stark contractual cases. If there
19	is anyplace where there was a remedy, it would be in
20	those cases.
21	MR. EPSTEIN: Visa is a client. What can I tell
22	you?
23	I didn't work on this case. The Walmart case
24	which talked about the illegal tie-in between the
25	various debit and credit cards as opposed to the pin

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1	debit, this is another illustration.
2	There is $3 billion paid out. They removed the
3	restrictions, and eight people decided to abandon the
4	thing, or a number like that. You can check with the
5	Visa people.
6	The change in actual on-the-ground behavior by
7	virtue of removal of the tie was nonexistent. Keeping
8	this tie is yet another version of a suicide pact that
9	many large corporations do. They overestimate the value
10	of the restraint to their business.
11	If you are sitting there and you have a bunch of
12	customers, a thousand coming in, even only 5 percent of
13	them use whatever you think to be the elicit tying
14	thing. You don't want to chase away 5 percent of your
15	business.
16	Dennis Carlton gave his most sophisticated
17	testimony and great class action stuff. In the end, it
18	is like as Rick Blaine said, it is not worth a hill of
19	beans in this crazy world.
20	DR. FISHER: Just one thing about that.
21	I am in fact the Jane Berkowitz Carlton and
22	Dennis Carlton --
23	MR. EPSTEIN: Dennis is an old and dear friend.
24	DR. FISHER: He is an old and dear friend of
25	mine too. He may in fact have given a great deal of

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1	fine testimony, but it was only at the class action
2	side.
3	The guy who gave the testimony in the Walmart
4	suit generally was me.
5	MR. EPSTEIN: I stand corrected. I thought you
6	guys did a terrific job of lawyering.
7	It is interesting, this is another point which
8	we didn't talk too much about.
9	Essentially network industries tend to be
10	two-sided industries, and they don't have any unique
11	pricing equilibrium.
12	Trying to drive everybody down to marginal costs
13	gives you all the same problems that you had with the
14	marginal cost controversy and the bridge which Viccerey
15	talked about in the 1940s.
16	These are very hard things to work out. That
17	was just another case in which the tie-in arguments were
18	very eloquent but the actual change occurred after the
19	lawsuit was finished.
20	MR. ELIASBERG: Perhaps hold that thought.
21	Before we go on, did you have any questions,
22	Dan?
23	With that respect, why don't we have slide
24	number 8.
25	The slide reads "Conduct remedies are more

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1	effective than structural remedies in Section 2 cases."
2	Dietrich, I will let you off the hook on this
3	one because we understand from you and Per that indeed
4	under your regulation, 2001 regulation, there is a
5	presumption in favor of civil remedies.
6	So you sort of have it mandated to you. But I
7	would like to start out with getting the reaction of the
8	other panelists.
9	Yes or no, is it more accurate or not that
10	conduct remedies are more effective than structural
11	remedies in Section 2?
12	MR. EPSTEIN: It is an ambiguous question.
13	Certainly they are if effective means does it
14	make as great or a smaller change. It makes a much
15	greater change to use a structural remedy than a conduct
16	remedy.
17	But if effectiveness means do you get more
18	social surplus from the remedy, which is more Draconian,
19	I think, in most cases, the answer is not.
20	So what you want is a remedy which is less
21	intrusive because it does modest harm and almost no bad,
22	as opposed to one which is like to create harm because
23	it is effected with the wrong sign attached to it.
24	MR. ELIASBERG: In your thinking, usually
25	conduct remedies will do less harm?

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1	MR. EPSTEIN: And a little bit of good. My
2	basic schtick on that is usually the underlying business
3	doesn't change that much.
4	That's not an argument for keeping it. In my
5	book, I advocated unilateral surrender, which I said
6	that rather than even get yourself into trouble and
7	having all these learned economists, why would you want
8	to invite trouble from Dennis? What you do is pull the
9	damn thing out, and it turns out you keep 90 percent of
10	your business.
11	MR. ELIASBERG: On that score, Frank, given the
12	chair that you hold and also the positions that I
13	understood you to be making in your presentation, what
14	are your views on this, particularly with respect to
15	what you said about Microsoft?
16	DR. FISHER: I agree with the first half of what
17	Richard said. I'm not sure about the second half.
18	Conduct remedies are easier to get. They are
19	easier -- they are not as likely to do serious harm. I
20	agree with that.
21	They can be awfully difficult to supervise
22	effectively.
23	The part I don't necessarily agree with is they
24	basically have no effect.
25	I think structural -- there are not a whole lot

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1	of cases with really big structural remedies, and I
2	think rightly so.
3	MR. ELIASBERG: Anybody else?
4	MR. KLEEMANN: One problem in this respect.
5	If we are talking about behavioral remedies and
6	structural remedies, it seems that there is a clear
7	distinction between those in practice.
8	There are remedies which are just at the fall
9	line. Just to give you an example, we had the case
10	where we had a monopolist in France for energy who
11	bought up a large German competitor and they would
12	remove a potential competitor.
13	We had to look at the situation. The structural
14	remedies, we cannot force EDF to sell four or five
15	French nuclear power plants. Therefore, we had to see
16	for a different way to open up the French market and to
17	create the market.
18	As a rule of thumb, to have a market, you need
19	an ability of one sort of the nature of customers.
20	And, therefore, we asked EDF to auction on a
21	regular basis 6000 megawatt capacity in so-called
22	virtual power plants.
23	At least for five years it is going on. This
24	facilitated significantly the creation of the market in
25	France in terms of protecting this.

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1	You would see the first sign since we are able
2	because we asked them to behave in a certain way, you
3	would define as access to energy, gasoline comes through
4	too.
5	But we couldn't change the sector of the market
6	completely. I would be cautious to put too much
7	emphasis on difference too.
8	MR. THORNE: I agree with Richard that the
9	question is ambiguous and it depends on what kind of
10	conduct you are prohibiting or requiring.
11	The dimension on which remedies get really bad
12	is the time dimension. It is not like wine that gets
13	better if you save it.
14	Conduct remedies you enforce over long periods
15	of time. Structural remedies, you do them and then the
16	market and the firms, they get on with life.
17	Bad things that are part of a structural remedy
18	get cured in the market adjusting. Conduct remedies can
19	skew things over a long period and have much more
20	harmful effects.
21	MR. ELIASBERG: If you have a structural remedy,
22	you would be saying it is important not to have
23	something where there is a conduct remedy preventable,
24	for example, like a line of business.
25	MR. THORNE: Bill Baxter had a very good idea

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1	when he came to the Antitrust Division. There were all
2	these -- he had a program of let's root them out and
3	vacate them.
4	They way outlived their lifetime. Anything that
5	takes very long to happen is probably a bad idea.
6	DR. JOSKOW: This reads like an empirical
7	question. The problem is under the second clause,
8	structural remedies, we really don't have many examples
9	to look at.
10	I do agree with the instinct that people have
11	with regard to substantial costs and through structural
12	remedies.
13	The conduct remedies, on the other hand, you
14	can't think of conduct remedies that don't require the
15	kind of line of business intervention. You can think of
16	conduct remedies that are structural in the sense that
17	you are in or out.
18	So in that sense, in those cases they could be
19	effective.
20	MR. EPSTEIN: I would draw a distinction on the
21	conduct remedies. I think things like the early decrees
22	from United Shoe. It says these foreclosure clauses
23	will never be used again in a lease, and they lasted for
24	30, 50 years.
25	I think when the conduct remedies start to say

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1	you have to provide a mix of services at certain kinds
2	of prices --
3	MR. THORNE: Let's license all patents at
4	reasonable royalties.
5	MR. EPSTEIN: Which is in many of these decrees,
6	which is a suicide pact.
7	There is a pretty good empirical reason to
8	believe if you take compulsory licenses, ideally if you
9	had to only issue compulsory licenses, you couldn't
10	practice the patent, you would want the income stream to
11	equal exactly on net what you would get if you practiced
12	the patent before, and that would leave you indifferent.
13	The theory would be if the government paid a
14	lump sum, you get the marginal cost at the back end.
15	I'm not aware of any instance associated with
16	any compulsory licensing scheme where that condition has
17	been met. Almost invariably what happens is the
18	licenses come very cheap in many industries or in
19	certain industries like the copyright stuff, the radio
20	cases, things where they have different reasons, many of
21	the licenses, the increases are so high they drive half
22	the stations out of business.
23	This is a situation where in some industries you
24	are systematically low and others you are systematically
25	high. So you don't want to be systematically in that

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1	business.
2	MR. DUCORE: To what extent do people think that
3	the efficacy of a conduct remedy would vary or would
4	depend on the kind of violation, for example, an
5	exclusive dealing violation versus a predation
6	violation?
7	MR. EPSTEIN: In exclusive dealing, you could
8	prohibit the foreclosure clauses. The ASCAP decree, the
9	first time out of the box they said you cannot license
10	one of these things where you have to take it for the
11	whole time of the station as opposed to the amount of
12	time that's being dedicated to music.
13	Over the next 70 years of that decree, nobody
14	ever argued about that provision.
15	I think with the exclusionary, you have some
16	fairly good fixes.
17	But in predation, I wouldn't know what it is.
18	Do not sell it below cost in an industry where cost
19	declines at 22 percent a year this year and 42 percent
20	next year?
21	It is so incoherent to me it seems to me what
22	you have done in the name of a conduct remedy what you
23	have done is you have a ratemaking procedure done
24	through some sort of special master.
25	MR. DUCORE: We have broken up the slide. The

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1	next slide would be structural remedy.
2	I think we can talk about whichever slide is up
3	there. My next question is along the lines of similar
4	to what kind of conduct violation.
5	Does it make a difference in your views, in your
6	thinking about a structural versus a conduct remedy
7	whether the violation itself is a monopoly acquisition
8	violation versus a monopoly maintenance violation?
9	MR. EPSTEIN: By conduct? I know what it means.
10	You are not talking about mergers in the acquisition
11	side?
12	MR. DUCORE: No. But if the conduct led to the
13	monopoly that didn't exist previously, does that make
14	more of a case for a structural remedy?
15	MR. EPSTEIN: I can't think of any reason. Can
16	you? I think most of us -- we are willing to surrender
17	on both cases.
18	DR. JOSKOW: You still have to think about in
19	the business sense what the market would have looked
20	like.
21	I don't think we have any idea. That puts aside
22	the practical issues we discussed with regard to
23	structural remedy.
24	MR. DUCORE: Does it make a difference whether
25	in the trial, assuming there has been a trial, that

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1	there is no evidence -- that the evidence shows that
2	there was no necessarily efficiency basis for the
3	monopoly, the monopoly was caused by the conduct? Does
4	that reduce your concern about fixing a structure?
5	MR. EPSTEIN: I think somebody, Frank or
6	somebody mentioned reversability is an extremely
7	important consideration in these things.
8	In fast-moving technological industries, you
9	can't reverse the 2006 in 2007. Given the pace in which
10	these cases run, you are typically talking years' delay.
11	I think the effort to try and get yourself back
12	to the old situation and sort of engineer forward from
13	that to where you would have been in the absence of is
14	just hopeless.
15	DR. FISHER: I agree with that. I don't want
16	you to think I'm totally negative.
17	MR. EPSTEIN: We agree on 85 percent.
18	DR. FISHER: Yes, but it is not the same 85
19	percent.
20	MR. EPSTEIN: It has to be.
21	DR. JOSKOW: The same 60 percent.
22	DR. FISHER: Anyhow, I agree with all of that.
23	The pure way the question was posed supposes
24	that the monopoly is solely the fruit of conduct that
25	has no efficiency consequences. And presumably you

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1	could take that to mean that if you prohibited the
2	conduct, the monopoly would cease to exist.
3	I think that's very rare. But if that is true,
4	that would be the case with prohibiting conduct.
5	The question I think may presuppose that
6	reversability is possible.
7	MR. ELIASBERG: I want to be sure I understand.
8	For example, in United Shoe, to take a case that
9	is a little more neutral to everyone, the situation may
10	well be that the contracts involved added to monopoly
11	power, added to a larger market share. But absent it,
12	there would still be, if you will, a monopoly.
13	So is everyone saying the same thing, that is to
14	say, that in a situation like that, a structural remedy
15	would be inappropriate?
16	MR. EPSTEIN: It would create the vertical
17	difficulties that the merger managed to overcome.
18	Remember that was a situation where you had guys
19	lining patents up. The last thing you want to do is
20	destroy the efficiencies.
21	So you got rid of the clauses, and it turned out
22	it made relatively little difference. And then the
23	government had another breakup, and that made a lot of
24	difference and didn't help anybody.
25	By that time, foreign competition was real in

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1	the United States. And now the major American
2	competitor is no longer.
3	I have to go in two minutes to catch a plane.
4	Can I make one little kind of observation?
5	On the intellectual property stuff --
6	MR. ELIASBERG: Which was the next slide.
7	MR. EPSTEIN: It is property. There is some
8	Supreme Court or Court of Claims case that somehow the
9	takings clause doesn't protect issued patents out there
10	which I think is most dangerous stuff.
11	The systematic attack on intellectual property
12	is often misguided. If it is not, you reform the
13	intellectual property law, change fair use. The last
14	thing you want to do is either bolster or weaken a
15	patent in the context of an antitrust dispute.
16	That's why I don't like the EU approach with
17	respect to Microsoft. In its original version, it said
18	all trade secrets shall go into the public domain.
19	It is not only in Europe. It is worldwide. The
20	last decree was awfully generous in allowing the
21	competitors to take the stuff from Microsoft and use it
22	to build rival networks.
23	I know you have gone ape over the case. It
24	can't be because you think it is the same as the
25	American decree.

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1	MR. HEINER: I touched on this a little bit this
2	morning before you got here.
3	MR. EPSTEIN: You did go ape.
4	MR. HEINER: The proposition -- I think you
5	might as well put up the next slide on IP. The
6	proposition was --
7	MR. ELIASBERG: Slide 9.
8	MR. HEINER: -- should IP be treated the same as
9	other kinds of property.
10	What we are concerned about now under the
11	European approach is will IP be treated as property at
12	all.
13	That's the fundamental question, because this is
14	a case where we have a few dozen patents at issue and a
15	decision or a statement of objections recently by the
16	Commission that seems to suggest, although it is hard to
17	tell, that maybe those patents aren't worth much at all
18	and that the trade secrets are really not to be valued
19	at all and the same for the copyright, for that matter.
20	So for us, the first line of defense is just
21	should IP be treated as property, period.
22	MR. EPSTEIN: Thank you all. I have to run to
23	catch a plane.
24	MR. ELIASBERG: Let me sort of ask a follow-up
25	question that repeats a bit what David and Richard were

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1	going into.
2	In a Section 2 case, when should compulsory
3	licensing be considered? No takers on this?
4	DR. FISHER: I will give it a try. I'm doing
5	this on my feet. I'm sitting down.
6	One could imagine a case in which a patent has
7	been grossly misused and misused in such a way as to
8	preserve a monopoly.
9	One way to get around that is to say, okay,
10	let's stop the misuse. Another way to get around it is
11	possibly the only way to reverse that might be to have
12	compulsory licensing.
13	That's the best I can do with it. I'm not
14	really certain.
15	MR. ELIASBERG: I am going to put you on the
16	spot, Andy, in your position with NERA.
17	Sometimes you have to quickly make an assessment
18	and a statement. What are your views on that?
19	DR. JOSKOW: I agree with Frank.
20	MR. THORNE: There was an actual experiment run
21	in the 1956 Bell decree which required at that point the
22	premier American research facility, Bell Labs, to
23	license on reasonable terms all its patents and,
24	secondarily, not to practice them itself except to the
25	extent they were used in providing accounting for a

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1	telephone service.
2	So the AT&T company was not allowed to sell
3	computers to people even though they invented them,
4	lasers or transistors or any of the gear they naturally
5	would have done if they used their own patents.
6	They could license them. I don't know if that
7	was good or bad. It was a very large experiment run on
8	a very large generator of IP.
9	MR. ELIASBERG: Let me ask you, John, if you
10	know, in that decree, was the compulsory licensing
11	royalty-free or not?
12	MR. THORNE: To a small number of favored
13	providers, they were royalty free. For most people who
14	would want to use the patents, they were on reasonable
15	terms.
16	I think in the almost 30 years that that decree
17	was in effect, I think there were maybe two disputes
18	brought to a magistrate in the District Court.
19	Otherwise, they appear to have been without dispute and
20	they were cheap and nondiscriminatory.
21	MR. ELIASBERG: Sort of a follow-up question for
22	anybody on the panel. And Dietrich, I'm also looking
23	toward you on this one.
24	When is it appropriate to have a royalty-free
25	license in a Section 2 case? Not just compulsory but

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1	royalty-free.
2	MR. KLEEMANN: If I can take a position, it is
3	with respect to the merger practice. It is not an issue
4	there so much.
5	The issue for us is a merger, for instance,
6	where one company takes over assets to which essential
7	patents relate, and essential patents are those which
8	cannot be circumvented by producing a certain product.
9	That means if a competitor gets these kind of
10	essential patents, there is a high risk that he could
11	exclude all his competitors as a consequence, and there
12	either we would have a case at all and there are cases
13	where we had this danger and the merger was abandoned
14	afterwards. Or we would at least ask in large instances
15	on the fee to spend basis, which is by the way in many
16	industries the standard.
17	In particular, if you have the standard-setting
18	bodies, they are all working on the lease rent terms.
19	That would be the type of case for us.
20	MR. ELIASBERG: It is usually not -- Frank, Andy
21	and John, anyone care to address this?
22	DR. FISHER: The only merit I can see in a
23	royalty-free licensing as opposed to compulsory
24	licensing at reasonable royalties is it prevents
25	argument about what the reasonable royalties are.

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1	Apart from that, it seems to me that there isn't
2	any case for that. That seems to be simply an
3	expropriation of intellectual property.
4	I'm unable to think of a situation in which
5	that's the only way to remedy the problem.
6	MR. ELIASBERG: Okay. Andy or John?
7	DR. JOSKOW: It does seem like one can always
8	think about that in a competitive market, but for the
9	monopoly, there was some competitive prices, competitive
10	royalty that one can imagine is out there so that it is
11	hard to imagine that one would want to therefore impose
12	zero royalties.
13	Even in the merger cases, when there is
14	licensing required, what is required is paid up licenses
15	with no ongoing royalties often. But it has to do with
16	more of the ongoing interaction between the two firms.
17	But even in cases like that, you want some kind
18	of compensation for the product.
19	MR. THORNE: As a believer in the principle that
20	you learn something about whether there is a violation
21	from whether there's a remedy, I can't imagine a
22	violation that requires that as a remedy.
23	MR. DUCORE: Again, a consensus that a zero
24	royalty is never appropriate.
25	MR. THORNE: The consensus is nobody can think

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1	of a violation where that would be the right remedy.
2	MR. DUCORE: Is it sort of a philosophical
3	concern that there must be value to the intellectual
4	property or is it a concern that we haven't come across
5	a fact pattern that demonstrates that but for the
6	illegal conduct, the intellectual property holder would
7	have had nothing of value to hold out to customers?
8	DR. FISHER: Had that been the case, it was
9	pretty farfetched. What is happening is there would
10	have been competing patents.
11	But the defendant has managed somehow to make
12	competing patents unprofitable or to absorb or it bought
13	up all the competing patents as we established the
14	monopoly and, therefore, has been able to charge a high
15	price for the patents.
16	The monopoly offense, the effect is to acquire
17	the patent monopoly.
18	Arguably you could say it would be worth very
19	little if they had done that. I can't think of an
20	actual case.
21	DR. JOSKOW: The patents competed in the market,
22	right?
23	DR. FISHER: They didn't because every time
24	somebody filed for a patent, these guys came along and
25	bought it up.

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1	I don't know of any case like that.
2	MR. DUCORE: What about a situation where,
3	assuming the facts exist to show this, you could show
4	that but for the violation, technology would have gone
5	along in a direction that didn't infringe patents?
6	In other words, you have some kind of failure to
7	disclose and lock in and things of that nature, so that
8	by the time -- it was a fact issue clearly.
9	But the thrust of the violation is that the
10	technology practitioners would not have locked
11	themselves into this technology and then had liability
12	to the patentholders.
13	DR. FISHER: I'm not going to say anymore.
14	DR. JOSKOW: We think we know what case you are
15	talking about.
16	MR. ELIASBERG: There are no comments on that
17	one. Actually, I would -- can we have slide 6, please.
18	This is a quote from Microsoft 3. "Relief
19	should be tailored to fit the wrong creating the
20	occasion for the remedy."
21	I think all of you have talked or made allusions
22	to the different types of, different kinds of Section 2
23	violations.
24	I just wanted to go back to this.
25	Vis-a-vis conduct versus structure, this whole

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1	notion of conduct versus structure, not to repeat what
2	people have said about the virtue of conduct in general
3	or the virtue of structure in general or all that, but
4	thinking of the frequent types or classifications of
5	Section 2 conduct, predatory pricing, predatory business
6	bidding, refusal to deal, bundled discounts, are there
7	any where it seems cry out for a conduct decree or any
8	that seems to on the other hand cry out for an approach
9	where structural relief would be more appropriate?
10	DR. FISHER: Can I comment on the quote?
11	MR. ELIASBERG: Yes.
12	DR. FISHER: That is one of the appropriate
13	objectives of if you want a remedy to satisfy. I would
14	be happier if it had said relief should be tailored to
15	fit the consequences of the wrong creating the occasion
16	for the remedy.
17	I don't think it is enough -- this is putting
18	the genie back in the bottle again. I don't think it is
19	enough to say we are going to tailor something that if
20	1947 ever comes around again, this wouldn't happen.
21	If you could figure it out, what you want to do
22	is restore competition. That doesn't necessarily go
23	with this.
24	MR. ELIASBERG: Anything else?
25	DR. JOSKOW: What is the wrong? Is it the

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1	monopoly or is it the conduct?
2	It seems like it is hard to determine how much
3	of a monopoly is because of the behavior. So it seems
4	that this is really talking about the incremental
5	effects of the behavior. If that's what it is talking
6	about.
7	DR. FISHER: I think it assumes Judge
8	Ginsburg -- I don't think that's what he meant. I agree
9	that's what he ought to have meant.
10	MR. THORNE: One difference you haven't focused
11	on is the difference between relief that is ordered
12	after an adjudication of a violation versus a consent
13	decree, which is a little bit like a plea bargain, where
14	the defendant is facing breaking up into eight or nine
15	or 10 or 12 pieces.
16	Instead, I will accept the other conditions that
17	you want and then the sentence reads as relief should
18	not go beyond addressing the violations that were being
19	proved in the case that got started prior to the
20	settlement as opposed to you have a willing defendant
21	and you have thought of a lot of other good things the
22	defendant could do to improve the markets and you would
23	like to impose a lot of those things too and the
24	defendant seems willing to agree to them.
25	MR. KLEEMANN: Maybe I would subscribe totally

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1	to this merger control. Everything is about to avoid
2	the risk of anticompetitive interpretation and not about
3	the consequence.
4	It is a risk situation. I wonder whether this
5	could be typical in abuse cases where you are not
6	creating the structural change but with a certain
7	behavior which has consequences.
8	MR. ELIASBERG: Well, I think we have run out of
9	time. And I would request that the audience join me in
10	a round of applause thanking our panel.
11	(Applause.)
12	(Whereupon, at 4:30 p.m., the hearing was
13	concluded.)
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1	C E R T I F I C A T I O N O F R E P O R T E R
2
3
4	I HEREBY CERTIFY that the transcript contained
5	herein is a full and accurate transcript of the notes
6	taken by me at the hearing on the above cause before the
7	FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION to the best of my knowledge and
8	belief.
9
10	DATED: APRIL 2, 2007
11
12	__________________________
13	BRENDA SMONSKEY
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