As the frontline against illegal monopolies and deceptive corporate behavior, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has a critical role to play in building an economy that works for consumers and small businesses. Since becoming FTC Chair, Lina Khan’s efforts to rein in anti-competitive behavior and protect consumers has been met with fierce resistance from powerful special interests and hostile editorials in the The Wall Street Journal.
Unfortunately, given the FTC’s role in combating unfair corporate behavior, this pushback is to be expected. I should know: I had the privilege of being an FTC commissioner, serving in both the Clinton and Bush administrations. I’ve seen fair, and unfair, criticism targeted at Republican and Democratic FTC chairs alike.
As a commissioner, I served under Chair Tim Muris, who was appointed by George W. Bush and whose aggressive stewardship of the agency resembled in many ways the current leadership of Chair Lina Khan. While at the helm of the FTC, Chair Muris pursued one of the most aggressive regulatory agendas of any Bush-appointed agency heads. His agenda was assisted by his chief of staff, Christine S. Wilson, who went on to be appointed to the FTC by Donald Trump.
Despite this history, Wilson made big news when, as part of her resignation announcement, she attacked Chair Khan’s “honesty and integrity” and accused her of “abuses of government power” and “lawlessness.” This turned many heads in Washington, particularly mine because of how detached this viewpoint was from my prior experience of serving at the FTC under Wilson’s own stewardship of the agency.
In his 2021 Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy, President Biden acknowledged that “a fair, open, and competitive marketplace has long been a cornerstone of the American economy.” Unfortunately, corporate concentration has grown under both parties for many years, especially in the technology industry. It is fortunate, and past time, to see the White House, the FTC, Department of Justice, and other agencies working to swing back the pendulum and reinvigorate competition in the American economy.
Despite the ongoing crisis of corporate concentration, Ms. Wilson took objection to an antitrust policy statement the FTC adopted in November and to Chair Khan’s statements in favor of strong enforcement. I found this odd having seen up close Ms. Wilson zealously advance Chair Muris’s enforcement agenda. In office, Muris “challenged mergers in markets from ‘ice cream to pickles,’” as the Wall Street Journal once noted, including in the technology industry, where Lina Khan has devoted significant attention.
During his tenure, Muris used the power available to him as Chair on behalf of consumers and for the good of the economy. He evolved the theory behind FTC regulatory authority so he could take new action to protect consumers—like creating the DO NOT CALL registry—over frivolous legal objections by the telecommunications industry. Like Khan, he coordinated with the DOJ to ensure that they were addressing anticompetitive behavior.
Ms. Wilson claims that Chair Khan should have recused herself from a Facebook acquisition case because of opinions she had expressed as a Congressional staffer. But both a federal judge and the full Commission found no basis to these claims of impropriety, and it is clear that Chair Khan had no legal or ethical obligation to recuse in this case. FTC Commissioners including Khan, like judges, are required to set their personal opinions aside and evaluate cases on the merits, and they do. The FTC Ethics Guidelines tells commissioners to ”not work on FTC matters that affect your interests: financial, relational, or organizational.” When it comes to ethics guidelines, it doesn’t get any plainer than that, and Chair Khan’s participation in the case clearly does not violate these guidelines.
In a hyper-partisan environment, Ms. Wilson’s attacks on the FTC’s credibility appear to me as an attempt to slow antitrust enforcement and ultimately obfuscate Chair Khan’s pro-consumer agenda.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which lobbies against pro-consumer regulations, sent an open letter to Senate oversight committees demanding an investigation of “mismanagement” at the FTC, including congressional hearings. No wonder the Chamber is upset. The Biden Administration is taking the crisis of corporate concentration seriously and is taking steps to bolster antitrust and consumer protection enforcement. That’s a development American consumers should cheer, because when corporate consolidation rises, competition is inevitably diminished, leading to higher prices and fewer choices for consumers.
Fortunately, Chair Khan is building on the legacy of strong leaders like Muris to build an economy that works for consumers, not harmful monopolies. Ultimately, she will be remembered for that and not cynical, distracting attacks on her.
Sheila Foster Anthony, a FTC commissioner from 1997-2003, previously served as Assistant Attorney General for Legislation at the U.S.Department of Justice. Prior to her government service, she practiced intellectual property law in a D.C. firm.
Over the last 40 years, antitrust cases have been increasingly onerous and costly to litigate, yet if plaintiffs can prevail on one single issue, they dramatically enhance their chances of obtaining a favorable judgment. That issue is market definition.
Market definition is straightforward to explain because it’s just what it sounds like. Litigants and judges must be able to delineate the market in question in order to determine how much control a corporation exercises over it. Defining a relevant market essentially answers, depending on the conduct courts are analyzing, whether computers that run Apple’s MacOS operating system or Microsoft Windows are in the same market or, similarly, if Coca-Cola competes with Pepsi.
A corporation’s degree of control over any particular market is then typically measured by how much market share it has. In antitrust litigation, calculating a firm’s market share is the simplest and most common way to determine a firm’s ability to adversely affect market competition, including its influence over output, prices, or the entry of new firms. While the issue may seem mundane and even somewhat technocratic, defining a relevant market is the single most important determination in antitrust litigation. Indeed, many antitrust violations turn on whether a defendant has a high market share in the relevant market.
Market definition is a throughline in antitrust litigation. All violations that require a rule of reason analysis under Section 1 of the Sherman Act, such as resale price maintenance and vertical territorial restraints, require a market to be defined. All claims under Section 2 of the Sherman Act require a relevant market. And all claims under Sections 3 and 7 of the Clayton Act require a relevant market to be defined.
Defining relevant markets stems from the language of the antitrust laws. Section 2 of the Sherman Act states that monopolization tactics are illegal in “any part of the trade or commerce[.]” Sections 3 and Section 7 prohibit exclusive deals and tyings involving commodities and mergers, respectively in “any line of commerce or…in any section of the country[.]” “[A]ny” “part” or “line of commerce” inherently requires some description of a market that is at issue.
As I more thoroughly described in a newly released working paper, the process of defining relevant markets has a long and winding history stemming from the inception of the Sherman Act in 1890. Between 1890 and 1944, the Supreme Court took a highly generalized approach, requiring as it stated in 1895, only a description of “some considerable portion, of a particular kind of merchandise or commodity[.]” In subsequent cases during this initial era, the Supreme Court provided little additional guidance, maintaining that litigants merely needed to provide a generalized description of “any one of the classes of things forming a part of interstate or foreign commerce.”
In 1945, after Circuit Court Judge Learned Hand found the Aluminum Company of America (commonly known as ALCOA) liable for monopolization in a landmark case, the market definition process started to become more refined, primarily focusing on how products were similar and interchangeable such that they performed comparable functions. At the same time market definition took on more complexity, antitrust enforcement exploded and courts became flooded with antitrust litigation. Given the circumstances, the Supreme Court felt that it needed to provide litigants with more structure to the antitrust laws, not only to effectuate Congress’s intent of protecting freedom of economic opportunity and preventing dominant corporations from using unfair business practices to succeed, but also to assist judges in determining whether a violation occurred. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the Supreme Court repeatedly expressed its frustration that there was no formal process for litigants to help the courts define markets.
It took until 1962 for the Supreme Court to comprehensively determine how markets should be defined and bring some much-needed structure to antitrust enforcement. The process, known as the Brown Shoe methodology after the 1962 case, requires litigants to present information to a reviewing court that describes the “nature of the commercial entities involved and by the nature of the competition [firms] face…[based on] trade realit[ies].” With this information, judges are required to engage in a heavy review of the information they are presented with and make a reasonable decision that accurately reflects the actual market competition between the products and services at issue in the litigation.
Constructing a relevant market for the purposes of antitrust litigation using the Brown Shoe methodology can be made using a variety of commonly understood and accessible information sources. For example, previous markets in antitrust litigation have been constructed from reviewing consumer preferences, consumer surveys, comparing the functional capabilities of products, the uniqueness of the buyers or production facilities, or trade association data. In a series of cases between 1962 to the present, the Supreme Court has rigorously refined its Brown Shoe process to ensure both litigants and judges had sufficient guidance to define markets. Critically, in no way did the Supreme Court intend for its Brown Shoe methodology to restrict or hinder the enforcement of the antitrust laws, and the fact that the process relies on readily accessible and commonly understood information is indicative of that goal.
But 1982 was a watershed year. Enforcement officials in the Reagan administration tossed aside more than a decade of carefully crafted jurisprudence from the Supreme Court in favor of complex, unnecessary, and arbitrary tests to define a relevant market. The new test, known as the hypothetical monopolist test (HMT), which is often informed by econometric models, asks whether a hypothetical monopolist of the products under consideration could profitably raise prices over competitive levels. It is tantamount to asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. They primarily accomplished this economics-laden burden through the implementation of a new set of guidelines that detailed how the Department of Justice would analyze mergers, determine whether to bring an enforcement action, and how the agency would conduct certain parts of antitrust litigation, one of those aspects being the market definition process.
From the 1982 implementation of new merger guidelines to the present, judges and litigants, predominantly federal enforcers, have ignored the Brown Shoe methodology and instead have embraced the HMT and its navel-gazing estimation of angels. As a result, courts now entertain battles of econometric experts, over what should amount to a straightforward inquiry.
As scholar Louis Schwartz aptly described, the relegation of the Brown Shoe methodology and its brazen replacement with econometrics under the 1982 guidelines represented a “legal smuggling” of byzantine economic criteria into antitrust litigation.
Besides facilitating the de-economization of antitrust enforcement, abandoning the econometric process would have other notable benefits. First, relying entirely on the Brown Shoe methodology would restrict the power of judges, lawyers, and economists by making the law more comprehensible to litigants. Giving power back to litigants would contribute to making antitrust law less technocratic and abstruse and more democratically accountable. For example, in some cases, economists have great difficulty explaining their findings to judges in intelligible terms. In extreme cases, judges are required to hire their own economic experts just to decipher the material presented by the litigants. Simply stated, the law is not just for economists, judges, or lawyers; it is also for ordinary people. Discarding the econometric tests for market definition facilitates not only the understanding of antitrust law, but also how to stay within its boundaries.
Second, reverting to the Brown Shoe methodology would make antitrust law fairer and promote its enforcement. The only parties that stand to gain from employing econometric tests are the economists conducting the analysis, the lawyers defending large corporations, and corporations who wish to be shielded from the antitrust laws. Frequently charging more than a $1,000 dollars an hour, economists are also extraordinarily expensive for litigants to employ, creating an exceptionally high barrier to otherwise meritorious legal claims.
Since 1982, market definition in antitrust litigation has lingered in a highly nebulous environment, where both the econometric tests informing the HMT and the Brown Shoe methodology co-exist but with only the Brown Shoe methodology having explicit approval by the Supreme Court. Even in its highly contentious and confusing 2018 ruling in Ohio v. American Express, the Supreme Court did not mention or cite the econometric processes currently employed by courts and detailed in the merger guidelines to define relevant markets. In fact, in a brief statement, the Court reaffirmed the controlling process it developed in Brown Shoe, yet lower courts continue to cite the failure of plaintiffs to meet the requirements of the econometric market definition process as one of the primary reasons to dismiss antitrust cases. Putting it aptly, Professor Jonathan Baker has stated that the “outcome of more [antitrust] cases has surely turned on market definition than on any other substantive issue.”
While the econometric process is not the exclusive process enforcers use to define markets in antitrust litigation and is often used in conjunction with the Brown Shoe methodology, completely abandoning it is critical to de-economizing antitrust law more generally. Since the late 1970s, primarily due to the work published by Robert Bork and other Chicago School adherents, economics and economic thinking more generally have become deeply entrenched in antitrust litigation. Chicago School thought has essentially made antitrust enforcement of nearly all vertical restraints like territorial limitations per se legal, and since the 1970s, the Supreme Court has overturned many of its per se rules. Contravening controlling case law on vertical mergers, Chicago School thinking has resulted in judges viewing them as almost always benign or even beneficial and failing to condemn them by applying the antitrust laws. Dubious economic assumptions have significantly restricted antitrust liability for predatory pricing, a practice described by the Supreme Court in 1986 as “rarely tried, and even more rarely successful.” As a result, economic thinking and econometric methodologies, though running contrary to Congress’s intent, have served to undermine the enforcement of the antitrust laws. This is not to say there is no role for economists. Economists can engage in essential fact gathering activities or provide scholarly perspective on empirical data that shows how specific business conduct can adversely affect prices, output, consumer choice, or innovation. For example, economic research has found that mergers and acquisitions habitually lead to higher prices and increased corporate profit margins – repudiating the idea that mergers are beneficial for consumers. But economists have little value to add when it comes to market definition.
Reinstituting many of the overturned per se antitrust rules all but require a change of precedent from the Supreme Court, which appears highly unlikely given the ideology of most of the current justices. However, modifying the process that enforcers use to determine relevant markets does not require overcoming such a seemingly insurmountable hurdle. Ridding antitrust litigation of the econometric process would simply require enforcers, particularly those at the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice, to completely abandon the process altogether in their enforcement efforts (particularly in the merger guidelines) and instead exclusively rely on the Brown Shoe methodology. Neither the law nor the jurisprudence would need to be modified to effectuate this change—although it might be helpful, before unilaterally disarming, to first explain the new policy in the agencies’ forthcoming revision to the merger guidelines.
While some judges currently ignore or dismiss the Brown Shoe methodology, were enforcers to completely abandon the econometric process for defining markets, courts effectively would have no choice but to rely on the controlling Brown Shoe process. Unlike other aspects of antitrust law, enforcement officials can and should fully embrace the controlling law, in this case Brown Shoe, and use it readily, leaving private litigants to employ the econometric process if they so chose. Nevertheless, history indicates that courts are highly deferential to the methods used by federal enforcers—especially when explicated in the merger guidelines—and private litigants would likely follow the lead of federal enforcers in deciding which method to use to define relevant markets.
Currently, the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission are redoing and updating their merger guidelines. To continue facilitating the progressive antitrust policy that began with President Biden’s administration and to start broadly de-economizing antitrust litigation, both agencies should seize the opportunity to jettison the econometric-heavy market definition tests and enshrine this change within the updated merger guidelines. Enforcers should instead exclusively rely on the sensible, practical, and fair approach the Supreme Court developed in Brown Shoe.
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Daniel A. Hanley is a Senior Legal Analyst at the Open Markets Institute. You can follow him on Mastodon @danielhanley@mastodon.social or on Twitter @danielahanley.
From its unquestioned bailout of the venture capitalists that ultimately crashed Silicon Valley Bank, to the funneling of public dollars to corporations that shamelessly bribe public officials, the Biden Administration is developing a track record of empathizing with monopolists to whom empathy is utterly unwarranted. It’s not too late to change course.
In January, Congressional Democrats urged Biden’s Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, to bar JBS, a food processing company, from U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) contracts following revelations that JBS’s parent company pleaded guilty to charges of bribing Brazilian officials. For its crimes, JBS was made to pay the U.S. federal government a $256 million fine for its parent’s illicit bribery scheme. But Congressional Democrats understand that this supposed justice is undercut by the millions of dollars that JBS makes off the federal government every year in contracts. Since fiscal year 2019 alone, for example, more than $283 million in American public dollars has been ushered into JBS’s coffers. That amounts to nearly $30 million more than JBS’s fine. Democratic lawmakers, understandably, found this disparity to be reprehensible, prompting their outreach to Vilsack.
JBS has for years received millions of taxpayer dollars in bailout funds and contract awards. Those funds, from our tax dollars, have helped JBS become the largest meat producer in the world and the second largest global food company.
These huge public payouts have then been wielded by JBS (and other contractors like it) to monopolize USDA’s contracting system, creating a toxic cycle of dependency that cements contractors’ dominance in their given market. It is this dependency that led Vilsack, in a letter to Congress published by Politico, to declare that barring JBS “could hurt taxpayers because the company has so few competitors,” and that as a result USDA would continue to accept JBS bids in its contracting services.
Per The American Prospect, Vilsack himself is also unlikely to implement strict contractor ethic standards, given that he’s a “henchman of the very biggest agribusiness giants,” whose chief of staff went on to become a lobbyist at the very corporation in question. The impetus, therefore, must come from elsewhere.
There are many basic ethics reforms that could address these issues, like closing the revolving door between contractors and government agencies, preventing government awards from being used for stock buybacks and union busting, and enforcing strict standards of corporate eligibility for participation in contracting bids when other parts of the government sue for violations of federal law.
Such shifts in federal contracting rules would not only protect the public from corporate abuses, but would also advance the federal government’s financial interest.
Monopolists Dominate The Contracting Market
Alas, the government’s kids-glove treatment of JBS is far from novel. Across the federal landscape, agencies continue to contract with corporations found guilty of wrongdoing simply because those same companies have monopoly power in their given fields.
According to our research, in fiscal year 2022, the federal government gave over $48 billion in public funds to contractors that faced antitrust actions from the Department of Justice (DOJ) in 2021 or 2022. Federal agencies forked over an additional $48.6 billion of taxpayer money in fiscal year 2022 via contracts to firms that faced similar action or inquiry from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over monopoly behavior during that same period. All told, that’s just shy of $100 billion dollars that federal agencies have rewarded to corporations that were actively facing—or recently subject to—enforcement activity from other parts of the government for harmful (or illegal) monopoly conduct during 2022 alone.
To look at just the Pentagon, for example, one-third of Pentagon contracts since 2001 have been awarded to five hyper-consolidated companies: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. This lack of competition has “driv[en] up costs for the American taxpayer, degrad[ed federal] accountability infrastructures, and otherwise creat[ed] ‘Walmarts of War’” that hold hostage actual national security in favor of privatized profits. As the Revolving Door Project has explained, “the current [monopolistic] system also promotes the iniquitous pursuit of massive gains through ‘questionable or corrupt business practices that amount to waste, fraud, abuse, price-gouging [and] profiteering.’”
Monopolies and their prone-to-labor-abuse corporate models also hurt workers in the short term, hurt the taxpayer in the long-term, and have been found to deliver lower quality services in fulfillment of contracted work.
Last year, corporate profit margins in the United States reached their peak since 1950, as corporations padded their profits by raising prices under the pretext of rising costs, while actually fueling inflation. Meanwhile, American families suffered from runaway (and cruelly unnecessary) cost-of-living increases that have left more and more folks facing crises like homelessness and food insecurity.
While the corporate conniving fueling crippling inflation is occurring across economic sectors, it tends to be even more pronounced in highly concentrated industries with monopoly pricing power over crucial goods and services.
Monopolies are manifestly bad for consumers and they’re also bad for workers. Market consolidation leads to depressed household income and wage decreases; indeed, monopolies cost workers approximately 15-25 percent of their wages while charging the public more for less.
The Federal Government Should Be a Champion of Its Own Laws
Despite the selling power of contractors, the federal government wields significant buying power over contracted firms, as the government is the single biggest purchaser of goods and services in the world. The federal government oversees and distributes hundreds of billions of dollars to contractors each year, reaching nearly $700 billion in 2020 and $637 billion in 2021.
The sheer purchasing power of the federal government is unparalleled, leaving it with significant authority to implement and to enforce strict ethics standards for contractors. Despite this power, the government continues to casually fund JBS and other such companies’ grossly inflated profits (that hurt American consumers and families) and turned a blind eye to unlawful abuses of child labor and other workers, systemic underpayments of family farmers and ranchers, egregious food safety violations, and environmental crimes galore. Public money should not fuel the historic profit margins of corporations while those corporations hurt the public.
USDA and other large contracting agencies should be champions of the public good. They should reward contractors who do good work, and they should hold contractors accountable—and indeed stop fueling their government-sponsored bottom lines—when contractors violate federal law.
Instituting basic ethics in contracting is well within the executive branch authority and requires no action from Congress. From reevaluating what requires contractors in the first place to refusing to fund union-busting activities to refusing to promote monopolists, the contracting apparatus is fully within the purview of President Biden and his officers.
To address this crisis of competition and consolidation in contracting, this administration should bolster its existing executive order on competition by requiring executive agencies to provide a public report on the degree of competition (or lack thereof) that exists within their contracting apparatus. Biden could expand the purview of existing “advocates for competition,” to include identifying problems in federal procurement due to concentrated markets and charge. These officials could then be directed to collaborate proactively with the FTC and DOJ to actually and actively protect competition for their agency—a truly whole of government approach to competition.
Through instituting basic ethics and eligibility standards, federal agencies could foster actual competition in government contracting markets. Diversifying the deliverers of goods and services would yield greater accountability and good stewardship of public monies.
Toni Aguilar Rosenthal is a Researcher with the Revolving Door Project.
I love eggs. I really do. There was a year in law school where I religiously made and ate an egg sandwich for breakfast every day. To this day, I believe an egg fried in olive oil until the yolks are jammy and the edges are crispy is a perfect food.
Since last year, however, my egg-loving style has been cramped. As everyone knows, the price of eggs at the grocery store more than doubled in 2022, increasing from $1.78 a dozen in December 2021 to over $4.25 in December 2022. This 138-percent increase in egg prices far outstripped the 12-percent increase Americans saw in grocery prices generally over the same period. And some Americans have had it much worse, as average egg prices reached well over $6 a dozen in states ranging from Alabama to California and Florida to Nevada.
What’s behind the skyrocketing retail price of the incredible edible egg? Well, for one thing, the skyrocketing wholesale price of that egg. Between January 2022 and December 2022, wholesale egg prices went from 144 cents for a dozen Grade-A large eggs to 503 cents a dozen. This was the highest price ever recorded for wholesale eggs. Over the entire year, wholesale egg prices averaged 282.4 cents per dozen in 2022. When we consider that average retail egg prices for the same year were only about 3 cents higher at 285.7 cents per dozen, it becomes clear that the primary contributor to rising egg prices at the grocery store has been the dramatic increase in the wholesale prices charged by egg producers.
If this gives you hope that relief might be around the corner because you’ve heard something about a recent “collapse” in wholesale egg prices, sadly your hope would be misplaced. Despite this much-ballyhooed collapse, the average wholesale egg price has simply gone from 4-to-5 times what it was in January of last year to 2-to-3 times that number. If that weren’t enough, prices are expected to spike again when egg demand picks up in the run-up to Easter. Ultimately, the USDA is projecting that the average wholesale egg price in 2023 will be 207 cents a dozen—or only about 25% lower than the average price for 2022. So much for a collapse.
Are you wondering who sets these wholesale prices? Why, an oligopoly, of course. The production of eggs in America is dominated by a handful of companies led by Cal-Maine Foods. With nearly 47 million egg-laying hens, Cal-Maine controls approximately 20% of the national egg supply and dwarfs its nearest competitor. The leading firms in the industry have a history of engaging in “cartelistic conspiracies” to limit production, split markets, and increase prices for consumers. In fact, a jury found such a conspiracy existed as recently as 2018, and a wide-ranging lawsuit was brought just a couple of years ago accusing several of the largest egg producers (including Cal-Maine) of colluding to increase prices during the COVID-19 pandemic.
When asked about the multiplying price of their product, these dominant egg producers and their industry association, the American Egg Board, have insisted it’s entirely outside their control; an avian flu outbreak and the rising cost of things like feed and fuel, they say, caused egg prices to rise all on their own in 2022. And, sure enough, those were real headaches for the egg industry last year—about 43 million egg-laying hens were lost due to bird flu through December 2022, and input costs for producers certainly increased over 2021 levels. As my organization, Farm Action, detailed in letters to federal antitrust enforcers last month, however, the math behind those explanations for the steep increase in wholesale egg prices just doesn’t add up.
The reality, we argued, is that wholesale egg prices didn’t triple in 2022, and aren’t projected to stay elevated through 2023, because of “supply chain, ‘act of God’ type stuff,” as one industry executive has tried to spin it. Rather, the true driver of record egg prices has been simple profiteering, and more fundamentally, the anti-competitive market structures that enable the largest egg producers in the country to engage in such profiteering with impunity.
Is it really just profiteering? Yes, it’s really just profiteering.
According to the industry’s leading firms, rising egg prices should be blamed on two things: avian flu and input costs. We can stipulate for the sake of argument that, if a massive amount of egg production and, hence, potential revenue were lost due to avian flu, the largest producers would be justified in trying to recoup some of that lost revenue by raising prices on their remaining sales. Likewise, if there were a sharp rise in egg production costs, we can stipulate that producers would be justified in trying to pass them on to wholesale customers. But was there a nosedive in egg production? Did the cost of egg inputs multiply dramatically? Short answer: No, and No.
The bottom line on the avian flu outbreak is that it simply did not have a substantial effect on egg production. Although about 43 million egg-laying hens were lost due to avian flu in 2022, they weren’t all lost at once, and there were always over 300 million other hens alive and kicking to lay eggs for America. The monthly size of the nation’s flock of egg-laying hens in 2022 was, on average, only 4.8 percent smaller on a year-over-year basis. If that isn’t enough, the effect of losing those hens on production was itself blunted by “record high” lay rates throughout the year, which were, on average, 1.7 percent higher than the lay rate observed between 2017 and 2021. With substantially the same number of hens laying eggs faster than ever, the industry’s total egg production in 2022 was—wait for it—only 2.98 percent lower than it was in 2021.
Turning to input costs, it’s true they were higher in 2022 than in 2021, but they weren’t that much higher. Farm production costs at Cal-Maine Foods—the only egg producer that publishes financial data as a publicly traded company—increased by approximately 20 percent between 2021 and 2022. Their total cost of sales went up by a little over 40 percent. At the same time, Cal-Maine produced roughly the same number of eggs in 2022 as it did in 2021. If we take Cal-Maine Foods as the “bellwether” for the industry’s largest firms, we can be pretty sure that the dominant egg producers didn’t experience anywhere near enough inflation in egg production costs to account for the three-fold increase in wholesale egg prices.
Against the backdrop of these facts, the industry’s narrative simply crumbles. It’s clear that neither rising input costs nor a drop in production due to avian flu has been the primary contributor to skyrocketing egg prices. What has been the primary contributor, you ask? Profits. Lots and lots of profits.
Gross profits at Cal-Maine Foods, for example, increased in lockstep with rising egg prices through every quarter of the last year. They went from nearly $92 million in the quarter ending on February 26, 2022, to approximately $195 million in the quarter ending on May 28, 2022, to more than $217 million in the quarter ending on August 27, 2022, to just under $318 million in the quarter ending on November 26, 2022. The company’s gross margins likewise increased steadily, from a little over 19 percent in the first quarter of 2022 (a 45 percent year-over-year increase) to nearly 40 percent in the last quarter of 2022 (a 345 percent year-over-year increase).
The most telling data point, however, is this: For the 26-week period ending on November 26, 2022—in other words, for the six months following the height of the avian flu outbreak in March and April—Cal-Maine reported a five-fold increase in its gross margin and a ten-fold increase in its gross profits compared to the same period in 2021. Considering the number of eggs Cal-Maine sold during this period was roughly the same in 2022 as it was in 2021, it follows that essentially all of this profit expansion came from—you guessed it—higher prices.
But is this an antitrust problem? Yes, it’s an antitrust problem.
On their own, these numbers plainly show that dominant egg producers have been gouging Americans, using the cover of inflation and avian flu to extract profit margins as high as 40 percent on a dozen loose eggs.
Some agriculture economists and market analysts, however, have questioned whether this price gouging should raise antitrust concerns. The dramatic escalation in egg prices over the past year, they’ve argued, has just been “normal economics” at work. Per Angel Rubio, a senior analyst at the industry’s go-to market research firm, Urner Barry, the runaway increase in wholesale egg prices was simply a function of the “compounding effect” of “avian flu outbreaks month after month after month.” These outbreaks repeatedly disrupted egg deliveries, he presumes, driving customers to assent to spiraling price demands from alternative suppliers. In a blog post on Urner Barry’s website, Mr. Rubio further hypothesized that jittery customers may have “increased their ‘normal’ purchase levels to secure more supply,” goosing up prices even higher.
There are several reasons to doubt this theory of the case. To begin with, Mr. Rubio’s analysis presumes that avian flu outbreaks caused significant disruptions in the supply of eggs even though, as discussed above, the aggregate production data suggests that was not the case. But let’s assume that there were supply disruptions, and that these disruptions did lead to a glut of demand for reliable suppliers, giving them pricing power. If that were the case, it would stand to reason that Cal-Maine—which did not report a single case of avian flu at any of its facilities in 2022—had an opportunity to sell a whole lot more eggs in 2022 than in 2021, and to sell them at record-high profit margins. But Cal-Maine didn’t sell a whole lot more eggs. It sold roughly the same number of eggs. If Mr. Rubio’s theory were right, why did Cal-Maine leave money on the table?
Once we start applying this question to the pricing and production behavior of the egg industry’s dominant firms more broadly, a whole variety of competition red flags start cropping up
The red flags—they multiply!
Let’s talk about pricing first. In a truly competitive market, one would have expected rival egg producers to respond to a near-tripling of average market prices with efforts to undercut Cal-Maine’s skyrocketing profit margin and capture market share. Alas, that did not happen. In researching Farm Action’s letter to antitrust enforcers, we found no evidence of aggressive price competition for business among the largest egg producers. Yet everything about the mechanics of egg sales suggests that they should be competitive. Wholesale customers generally buy their eggs directly from producers. Long-term or exclusive contracts for egg supplies are rare. And the price of eggs in each purchase is individually negotiated. In other words, for each delivery of eggs they need, a wholesale customer is in all likelihood free to shop around and give rival suppliers an opportunity to undercut their incumbent supplier. Given this fluid sales environment, how did Cal-Maine manage to raise prices so much that its profit margin quintupled in one year without any other major producer coming to eat its lunch?
Another head-scratcher has been how the industry has managed to throttle production in the face of sustained high egg prices. As early as August of last year, the USDA was observing that favorable conditions existed, both in terms of moderating input costs and record-high egg prices, for producers to invest in expanding their egg-laying flocks. Yet such investment never materialized.
Even as prices reached unprecedented levels between October and December of last year, the number of eggs in incubators and the number of egg-laying chicks hatched by upstream hatcheries both remained flat, and were even below 2021 levels in December. As the year drew to a close, the USDA observed that “producers—despite the record-high wholesale price—are taking a cautious approach to expanding production in the near term.” The following month, it pared down its table-egg production forecast for the entirety of 2023—while raising its forecast of wholesale egg prices for every quarter of the coming year—on account of “the industry’s [persisting] cautious approach to expanding production.”
Because of this “caution” among egg producers, the total number of egg-laying hens in the U.S. has recovered from the losses caused by avian flu outbreak of 2022 at less than one-third of the pace it recovered from the (relatively more severe) avian flu outbreak of 2015, according to data from the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service. At its lowest point in the aftermath of the 2022 avian flu outbreak—in June of last year—the egg-laying flock counted a little under 300.5 million hens, or around 30 million (or 9%) fewer hens than it started the year with (330.8 million). For comparison, at its lowest point following the 2015 outbreak—which was also in June of that year—the egg-laying flock totaled 280.2 million and had nearly 35 million (or 11%) fewer hens than it did at the start of 2015 (315 million).
As you can see from the chart above (Fig. 1), in 2015, it took the industry less than 8 months to rebuild the egg-laying flock from its June low point; by the end of February 2016, producers had added over 30 million hens, bringing the total size of the egg-laying flock back up to 310.2 million. Contrast this pace of flock recovery between 2015 and 2016 with the pace of recovery we’ve seen over the past year. In the 8 months that have passed since June of last year, the industry has added less than 9 million hens—leaving the flock at an anemic 309.4 million at the start of February 2023.
On its own, this comparison shows that large egg producers almost certainly could have rebuilt their hen flocks in the wake of last year’s avian flu outbreaks much faster than they have. When considered alongside the fact that, in 2015, the monthly average wholesale price reached its highest point in August and never exceeded $2.71 per dozen, the sluggishness of the 2022-2023 recovery becomes objectively suspicious. According to Urner Barry, in 2015, wholesale egg prices rose 6-8% for every 1% decrease in the number of egg-laying hens caused by the avian flu; that is barely half the 15% price increase for every 1% decrease in hens observed last year. The monthly price for a dozen wholesale eggs in 2022 cleared the 2015 high of $2.71 per dozen as early as April, and stayed at comparable or higher levels through the rest of the year. And yet, egg producers have been “cautiously” adding hens at a third of pace they did in 2015-2016 since June of last year. What gives?
As Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Katie Porter noted in recent letters to dominant egg producers seeking answers about ballooning prices, producers appear to be “impervious to the basic laws of supply and demand.” This is the case not only in terms of their willingness to invest in new capacity, but also in terms of their willingness to utilize existing capacity. The rate at which hens lay eggs is the basic measure of flock productivity in the industry. Several factors can affect lay rates, including hen genetics and age, but within physical limits, producers can speed or slow egg-laying by their hens through nutrition, lighting, and other flock management choices. Yet, even as millions of hens were being lost to avian flu and eggs were fetching unprecedented prices last year, producers seemed to make choices that depressed, rather than maximized, their remaining hens’ lay rates.
The average table-egg lay rate reached its highest level ever (around 83.5 eggs per 100 hens per day) in the early, most severe, months of the avian flu epidemic—between March and May of last year—but then it nosedived. By June, the national average lay rate had dropped to about 82.5 eggs per 100 hens per day. This was consistent with seasonal trends in years past; it’s typical for lay rates to moderate as Spring turns to Summer. What happened after June, however, was curious. Normally, the average lay rate would start climbing again in July and stay on an upward trend through the end of the year, with the strongest lay rates often reported in the last 2 or 3 months of the year. In 2022, however, the opposite occurred. Lay rates flat-lined from June through the Fall before dipping to their weakest level in the last three months of the year. In other words, during the exact period when egg prices were hitting their stride—the last six months of 2022—the industry somehow managed to orchestrate a wholesale deviation from historical trends in the direction of getting fewer eggs out of the hens they already had.
If it walks like a cartel and swims like a cartel, maybe it’s a cartel?
Together, these dynamics of throttled production and unrestrained pricing are unmistakable red flags that deserve investigation by enforcers. Take Cal-Maine as an example again. They are the leader in a mostly commoditized industry. They presumably have the most efficient operations and the greatest financial power of any firm in the industry—allowing them to stand up hen capacity as fast as anyone and sell at competitive prices to capture unmet or up-charged demand. Instead of doing that, however, it appears they simultaneously abandoned price competition and refrained from expanding production to satisfy demand last year. This begs the question: What made Cal-Maine so confident that other large producers wouldn’t produce more eggs and undercut its prices? More to the point, why didn’t they?
Whatever the answers to these questions might be, this much is clear: Cal-Maine behaved as if its dominant position were entrenched, and its strategy worked. As rival egg producers have gone along instead of competing on price and production, the industry has been able to sustain elevated egg prices from one year to the next without any legitimate justification. Even as egg prices have started ameliorating this year, the USDA is still forecasting an average wholesale price for 2023 that is 70-to-80% higher than the 2021 average, suggesting that whatever “bottom” egg prices might reach this year will, in all likelihood, be at least an order of magnitude higher than 2021 levels.
This pattern of behavior by dominant egg producers over the past year is consistent with longstanding research beginning in the 1970s—from Blair (1972) to Sherman (1977) to Kelton (1980)—on how leading firms in consolidated industries “administer prices” to achieve higher-margin “focal points” during economic shocks and periods of high inflation. And, make no mistake, the egg industry is consolidated. While the top 10 egg producers control 53%—and Cal-Maine alone controls 20%—of all egg-laying hens in the U.S., these numbers understate concentration in actual egg markets. Smaller egg operations (the ones that control the other 47% of America’s hens) tend to produce specialty, not conventional, eggs for sale at premium price points; as such, they typically have neither the scale nor the capacity to supply national grocery chains with the conventional eggs bought by most consumers. Only the largest egg producers can fill this need—a fact that likely makes the submarket for conventional eggs sold to national customers substantially more concentrated than the total egg supply. Was it pure coincidence that prices barely climbed In the fragmented specialty-egg segment but skyrocketed in the consolidated conventional-egg segment?
The honest answer is that I don’t know. In the end, I’m just a country lawyer with a laptop and a love for fried eggs. But smart people at the Boston Fed, the University of Utah, and a few other places have recently shown—empirically, I’m told—that it’s easier for competitors to coordinate for higher profits during a crisis when their industry is concentrated. Maybe that’s what happened here. Maybe it’s not. The only people who can find out for sure—and get the American people some restitution if it is what happened—are the fine public servants at the Federal Trade Commission, the Justice Department Antitrust Division, and state Attorneys General offices across the country. They should do nothing less.
Conclusion
For nearly 12 months now, dominant egg producers have demonstrated their ability to charge exorbitant prices for a staple we all need for no reason beyond having the power to do it. The “philosophy” of our antitrust laws, as Justice Douglas once reminded his colleagues on the Supreme Court, is that such power “should not exist.” With hundreds of millions of dollars missing from Americans’ pockets to enrich the profits of a handful of robber barons in the egg industry, antitrust enforcers owe the public a duty to investigate, and to see to it that the nation’s laws are enforced—even against entrenched giants.
Basel Musharbash is Legal Counsel at Farm Action, a farmer-led advocacy organization dedicated to building a food and agriculture system that works for everyone rather than a handful of powerful corporations. Basel is also the Managing Attorney of Basel PLLC, a mission-driven law firm in Paris, Texas, focused on the intersection of community development and antitrust law.
On Wednesday, the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) provisionally concluded that Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision could result in higher prices, fewer choices, or less innovation for UK gamers. It also released a set of proposed remedies to address the likely anticompetitive harms, including a mandatory divestiture of (1) Activision’s business associated with its popular Call of Duty franchise; (2) the entirety of the Activision segment; or (3) the entirety of both the Activision segment and the Blizzard segment, which would also cover the World of Warcraft franchise.
Assuming Microsoft won’t go for any structural remedy, the deal is likely on ice, and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) would not have to bring any enforcement action against Microsoft. Although this is likely the right outcome from a competition perspective, the antitrust geeks (myself included) will suffer dearly from not getting to observe the theatrics around a hearing and the associated written decisions.
Setting aside Microsoft’s significant holdings in gaming studios, Microsoft’s attempted purchase of Activision can be understood as a vertical merger, in the sense that Microsoft sells its Xbox gaming platform (the downstream division) to consumers, in competition against Sony’s PlayStation and Nintendo’s Switch—and Activision supplies compelling games (the upstream division) for the various gaming platforms. The Xbox platform can be understood either as Microsoft’s traditional gaming console or as its nascent cloud-based Xbox Game Pass platform.
Challenges of vertical mergers have not been successful of late, prompting many scholars to call for new vertical merger guidelines. Among the suggested remedies would be a “dominant platform presumption,” advocated by antitrust law professor Steve Salop, which would shift the burden of proof to the acquiring firm whenever it was deemed a dominant platform.
It’s All About the Departure Rate
Input foreclosure is the term used by economists to describe how a vertically integrated firm—think post-merger Microsoft—might withhold a key input from distribution rivals, thereby impairing the rivals’ ability to compete for customers. When the theory of harm is input foreclosure, proof of anticompetitive effects largely turns on how special or “must-have” the potentially withheld input is for downstream rivals. Economists define the “departure rate” as the share of the rival’s customers who would defect if they could not access the withheld input. Under these models, anticompetitive effects also require that the downstream firm possess a significant market share.
In the Justice Department’s attempt to block AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner in 2018, the agency’s economic expert leaned on an estimated departure rate generated by a third-party consultant. That third-party consultant originally produced results consistent with a low departure rate, suggesting that losing CNN would not cause too much customer defection, only to be changed to a high departure rate before being handed to the economic expert for incorporation into his work. Regardless of how the work was performed, it strained credulity that CNN was considered a must-have input by cable distribution rivals and their customers. Moreover, AT&T’s (local) share of the distribution market, even in its limited footprint, was not substantial.
In contrast, Microsoft wields a commanding share of gaming platforms, by some estimates as high as 60 to 70 percent of global cloud gaming, but only 25 percent of gaming consoles per Ampere Analytics. Call of Duty is considered a must-have input among gaming platforms, based in part on CMA’s analysis of internal “data on how Microsoft measures the value of customers in the ordinary course of business.” For modeling purposes, it still would be incumbent on the agency’s economist to measure the departure rate, and here it might be difficult to find a natural experiment—for example, where a platform temporarily lost access to Call of Duty—to exploit. As part of its investigation, CMA “commission[ed] an independent survey of UK gamers,” which could have been used to asked Call of Duty users whether they might leave a platform if they couldn’t access their favorite game. CMA noted that Microsoft has already employed a strategy “of buying gaming studios and making their content exclusive to Microsoft’s platforms … following several previous acquisitions of games studios.”
Microsoft has made commitments to Sony and Nintendo to continue releasing its new Call of Duty games for ten years. Yet such commitments are hard to enforce, and could be undermined through trickery. For example, Microsoft could offer access only at some unreasonable price, or only under unreasonable conditions in which (say) the rival platform also agreed to purchase a set of boring games, alongside Call of Duty, at a supracompetitive price. Without a regulator to oversee access, the commitment could be ephemeral, much like T-Mobile’s access commitment to Dish, to remedy T-Mobile’s acquisition of Sprint, which is widely recognized as a farce. Despite its disfavor of behavioral remedies, CMA noted in its notice of possible remedies that it would nevertheless “consider a behavioural access remedy as a possible remedy,” yet concludes that the agency is “of the initial view that any behavioural remedy in this case is likely to present material effectiveness risks.”
Microsoft reportedly entered into a neutrality agreement with organized labor, under which Microsoft would not impair progress towards unionization of Activision employees. Whatever benefits such an agreement might generate for workers, those benefits could not be used to offset the harms suffered by consumers in the product markets under Philadelphia National Bank. Unfortunately, the treatment of offsets is not as clear under monopolization law.
What Goes Around Comes Around
If CMA’s actions ultimately stop the Microsoft-Activision merger, the relatively weaker merger enforcement in the United States would get a pass. U.S. antitrust agencies are readying a revised and more stringent set of merger guidelines, which would bring U.S. standards in line with European authorities. In the meantime, the global reach of the dominant tech platforms—and thus exposure to foreign antitrust regimes—might ironically protect U.S. consumers from the platforms’ most audacious lockups.
Congressional Democrats managed to pass a few crucial measures during December’s lame duck session. One tiny fraction of the omnibus bill to fund the government was the Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act, a measure for which anti-monopoly advocates have long been pushing.
The Act reforms the Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) filing fee structure, the program through which the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice (DOJ) collect fees from corporations seeking to merge and gain federal approval. The HSR program takes significant resources to administer, and the number of companies seeking to merge has increased in recent years — between 2020 and 2021, filing more than doubled from 1,637 to 3,644, but the fee system had not been updated to account for increased burden upon the antitrust enforcers. Due to the Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act increasing the cap on fees, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the new fees will result in $325 million in each of the first five years, with the two antitrust agencies splitting the fees and receiving $162.5 million each per year.
Congress appropriated $430 million for the FTC and $225 million for the DOJ Antitrust Division for FY2023. These budgets represent only a 22.5% and 11.9% increase from FY2022, respectively, and fall well short of the agencies’ respective requests of $490 million and $273 million. Since 2010, when adjusted for inflation, the FTC has received only a $40 million increase and the Antitrust Division a measly $7 million extra, despite processing more than double the number of HSR transactions in 2022 that they did in 2010. The agencies didn’t request more funding because they’re greedy; they need more funding to carry out their enormous missions, and Congress should support the missions.
The Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act, while an important reform, only increases what share of the FTC and DOJ Antitrust budget comes from HSR fees, and does not increase the overall budget independent of congressional funding. The recent flood of mergers (and higher valuations of those mergers) necessitates additional staff and resources at the agencies to properly review each transaction. Without more investment by Congress, the FTC and DOJ will remain pitifully short-staffed and under-resourced relative to the thousands of mergers and acquisitions that take place each year.
The perpetual underfunding of antitrust regulation has been known for years. As anti-monopoly researcher Matt Stoller pointed out, “spending on antitrust today is about a third what it was throughout most of the 20th century, and with a much bigger economy today. To get back to the level of antitrust enforcement we had in 1941 would require increasing the budgets of the agencies by ten times.”
And beyond the DOJ Antitrust and FTC’s edict to enforce competition, the FTC has another underfunded but crucial mission: consumer protection.
The FTC’s Mission To Protect Consumers Is Just As Important As Protecting Competition
In 2022, the headlines were filled with stories of corporate misdeeds, oftentimes involving deceit of customers. The FTC has a legal mandate and enforcement power to crack down on many such businesses. Through Section 5 of the FTC Act, the FTC can take legal action against companies that engage in “unfair or deceptive acts.”
The FTC has two options for enforcement under Section 5 — administrative and judicial. Administrative enforcement happens after a problem has already arisen. It involves a proceeding in front of an administrative law judge, who issues a cease and desist order if they find a given practice illegal under Section 5. It is then up to the FTC to determine whether the illegal practices warrant additional penalties, mainly through consumer redress or civil fines. Judicial enforcement, on the other hand, is a preventive measure used by the FTC while the administrative process is still underway. For example, the FTC can use judicial enforcement to enjoin a merger that will hurt consumers while the administrative judge is still determining its legality.
One of the FTC’s “top priorities” is to protect older consumers. A 2022 FTC report found that older Americans were more likely to be victims of scams and lost more money when being scammed. The best-known of these are telemarketing scams in which fraudsters convince people to transfer money by impersonating a friend or government agent, or convincing them they’d won a prize or lottery. The fraudsters can’t carry out these schemes alone — and the FTC is cracking down.
FTC Chair Lina Khan has made good on the promise to prioritize cases that harm elderly Americans. In June 2022, the FTC filed a lawsuit against Walmart for its part in facilitating fraudulent transactions that targeted the elderly. The lawsuit alleges that Walmart’s money-transfer service routinely turned a blind eye to fraudulent transactions by not training their employees or warning consumers, thus allowing the scammers to collect the ill-gotten money. Over a five-year period, over 200,000 fraud-induced money transfers were sent to or from Walmart stores, costing consumers nearly $200 million. If the FTC is successful, Walmart will have to compensate consumers for the lost money, pay civil penalties, and be subject to a permanent injunction that forces them to end money-transfering practices that result in fraud.
While older consumers are more likely to fall victim to telemarketing scams, children are unknowingly being tricked by corporations to increase their profits. Epic Games, the video game company that owns Fortnite, was fined $520 million for numerous privacy violations and “deceptive interfaces” that resulted in users, many of whom were children, making unintended purchases.
The FTC also cracked down on so-called “dark patterns” — underhanded tactics that companies use to squeeze more money from consumers including junk fees, misleading advertising, data sharing, and making it difficult to cancel subscriptions. The agency has prosecuted LendingClub, ABCmouse, and Vizio for these dark patterns, and returned millions of dollars to consumers. The public benefits greatly from this work, both by cracking down on shady schemes and putting money back in the victim’s pockets.
Although it carries out work that clearly benefits everyday Americans, the consumer protection side of the FTC often gets less press than high-profile mergers and acquisitions. But Americans are weary of corporations deceiving them to make more money off their private information. According to a 2019 study by Pew Research, 79% of Americans are very or somewhat concerned about how companies are using their personal data. Enforcing laws we already have in place shows people how the Biden Administration can help them by reining in corporate misbehavior and putting money back in their pockets.
In FY 2022, the FTC returned a total of $459.6 million to 2.3 million consumers who lost money to illegal business practices. These are material results demonstrating to people that the government can protect them from corporate shenanigans. And yet, the budget for FY 2023 underfunded the FTC by $60 million. The FTC’s budget request included funds for an additional 148 full-time staff members specifically dedicated to consumer protection, a worthy investment for addressing more of these complaints. Without the full amount of requested funds, it’s unclear how many staffers the FTC will be able to hire, but it certainly will not be enough.
The FTC should make bold requests for adequate staffing, and the Biden Administration should be willing to elevate any resistance from Congress. And don’t just take our word on why such a fight would be good politics – Biden’s prioritizing consumer protection in his State of the Union address demonstrates that he and his team see consumer protection as a political winner.
Going After Dominant Firms Is Not Enough To Protect Consumers
As with antitrust enforcement, the FTC looks to “maximize impact” of its limited resources for enforcing data privacy by going after “dominant” and “intermediary” companies. While this makes the best of the situation, this approach means plenty of abuses are falling through the cracks formed by inadequate funding for enforcement. Compare this to how the Securities and Exchange Commission often targets well-known celebrities when they engage in petty financial fraud — these cases are relatively easy to prosecute and generate headlines that hopefully give the impression of a tough agency on the beat, but these are all ultimately efforts to make do with far too little.
The actions the FTC does take against privacy-violating corporations are isolated and have limited power to deter future misconduct. For example, in 2019, the FTC fined Facebook $5 billion for misleading users by sharing personal information to third parties without their knowledge. While the fine was the largest ever levied by the agency, Facebook was using this misleading tactic for seven years in violation of a 2012 FTC order following previous allegations of even more brazenly deceptive practices.
And it is far from clear if the Trump-era FTC would have taken enforcement action but for the horrendous press Facebook generated for their relationship with Cambridge Analytica. Reliance on high stakes and high stress journalism is not a dependable basis of law enforcement – especially as journalism declines as an industry (ironically, in large part due to abuses by social media platforms). The fact that Facebook, one of the largest companies in the world, got away with deceptive data sharing for seven years also indicates that the FTC needs more resources to go after the dominant firms in addition to ensuring that smaller companies are not engaging in similar tactics. And the $5 billion fine, while historic, was a drop in the bucket for a company that hit a $1 trillion market cap not long after.
The limited financial impact of historic fines would be true for other large corporations profiting off their customer’s information as well. As Marta Tellada of Consumer Reports pointed out, “fines alone will not reform [the] market,” and the tech giants view fines “as a cost of doing business.”
And it’s not just Facebook which collects personal information on its users — today, 73% of companies in the United States do so, from small businesses to monopolies, with many opportunities for corporate malfeasance. When a potentially unfair or deceptive business practice becomes endemic across the economy, regulators cannot meaningfully “set examples” and hope the rest of the market complies. Yes, the FTC needs new rulemaking as well as congressionally-mandated tools for protecting consumers, but ramping up capacity in the meanwhile can tangibly benefit millions of Americans. The FTC needs the resources to properly enforce the laws it is already charged with carrying out.
Andrea Beaty is Research Director at the Revolving Door Project, focusing on anti-monopoly, executive branch ethics and housing policy. KJ Boyle is a research intern with the Revolving Door Project. The Revolving Door Project scrutinizes executive branch appointees to ensure they use their office to serve the broad public interest, rather than to entrench corporate power or seek personal advancement.
An analysis of public comments submitted to the FTC
In conjunction with its proposed ban on noncompete agreements, the FTC solicited comments on from any interested parties. Submission began on January 10 and, as of Friday, January 27, 2022, approximately 5,200 comments had been submitted. Fortunately, under the eRulemaking Initiative, the US Government has broadened public access to documents, permitting bulk download of comments pertaining to regulatory materials, including the FTC proposed ban on noncompete agreements.
Bulk download permits the output of all comments to a delimited text file, allowing the various fields including dates, individual and/or corporate entity submitting the comment (where available), state (again, where available) to be analyzed. Further, the comments field, which includes submissions up to 5,000 characters in length, permits text parsing for keywords such as type of employment, hourly wages, and other phrases of interest. Most importantly, the comments field reveals the submitting entity’s stance toward the proposed rulemaking.
This article describes my ongoing analysis of these data through January 27. Updated results will be uploaded periodically through the March 20, 2023 deadline for comment submissions.
As of January 27, the results:
- demonstrate overwhelming public support for the ban on non-compete agreements. Such support is consistent across individual states, underscoring bipartisan agreement on prohibiting such restraints of trade.
- highlight the ubiquity of such agreements and their ability to constrain both lower wage and higher wage labor
- reveal that medical professionals, including physicians, represent the single most vocal group supporting the FTC’s proposed rule and advocating for a complete ban on non-compete agreements. This result exposes the flaw in attempting to cabin the scope of the rulemaking to lower-wage workers. While arguments supporting non-compete clauses may appear least defensible when encumbering lower-wage workers, the comments indicate that the negative effects are no less pronounced on those earning higher wages, such as doctors and others in the healthcare field. Further, as myriad comments observe, such constraints can have negative spillover effects, such as entrenching monopsony power, raising healthcare costs, and lowering the quality of care.
- expose the incongruity of economic theory proffered by some in defense of non-compete agreements when juxtaposed against the real-world experiences of workers who labor under such restrictions.
The overall results including comments submitted through January 27, 2023 appear in Table 1 below. Overall, approximately 93% of comments reflect support for the FTC’s proposed ban. Determination of whether the respondent supported or opposed the FTC rulemaking proceeded as follows. Of the approximately 5,200 comments received as of January 27, I reviewed approximately 3,626 by reading or skimming each comment individually. The reminder were classified as 1) supporting the ban if they contained keywords such as “depress”, “oppress”, “trap”, “archaic”, “in favor”, “eliminate”, “monopoly” or 2) opposing the ban if they contain key phrases such as “to the state”, “overreach”, “object”, “oppose”, “protect small”, “damage small”, “hurt small”, “harm small”. The latter comments were interpreted to mean that the FTC’s rulemaking would hurt small businesses or infringe upon states’ rights. Individual review of the 3600+ comments informed the determination of the keywords and phrases used.
Table 1. Results
The overwhelming support for the FTC’s rulemaking banning non-compete agreements shown in Table 1 extends nationwide, with every state except Hawaii (n=2) indicating that the majority of commenters favor of the FTC’s proposed ban. Among states with at least 10 respondents, the lowest rates of approval were 78.9%, 80% and 81.8% for New Mexico, Utah, and South Carolina, respectively.
The figure below provides a daily breakdown of the percentage of comments submitted that supported the proposed ban on non-compete agreements. The results provide some evidence of coordination of responses in opposition to the FTC’s position. A substantially higher proportion of comments opposing the proposed rulemaking occurred during the 3-day period of January 20, 23 and 24 (the 21st and 22nd were weekend days so the data did not include comments on those dates), reaching a zenith on January 23.
I also analyzed the extent of support for the ban on non-competes by occupation, as reflected in the comments. By far the most common occupation listed referenced work as either a “physician”, a specialty therein (e.g., cardiologist, radiologist, etc.) or a generic description of the medical field. Other noted occupations included accounting (e.g., CPA), dentist, veterinarian, engineering, spa/salon, insurance, or restaurant-related work.
The support among physicians for the ban on non-competes was nearly unanimous. Approximately 98% decried the use of non-competes, citing their harm to physician careers, their families, as well as the negative impact non-competes have on quality of care.
Support for non-competes largely originates from owners of individual practices who expressed concern that their employees may leave and “open up shop across the street” and compete with them. However, even business owners overwhelmingly support the FTC’s proposed rule. Among comments that included terms such as “small business” or “small company(ies)” approximately 68.9% of comments favored the FTC ban, a nearly identical result when evaluating comments indicating ownership of a company (69.3% in favor of the FTC ban).
Many supporters of the FTC’s planned rulemaking vehemently rejected the restraints imposed by non-compete agreements, likening them to indentured servitude, slavery, and using evocative terms such as “toxic”, “chains”, “prison”, “trap”, “bully” and “exploit”. Of the 4653 respondents who supported the FTC’s ban (93.2% of total), approximately 730 (15.7%) used at least one of these terms in their comments.
Note: Ted Tatos is an adjunct professor of economics at the University of Utah and a testifying expert with EconONE Research. This analysis of responses to FTC comments will be updated periodically until the March 20 deadline.