Competition/Antitrust

The Fiber Broadband Association and RVA, LLC released a new report on the rapid growth of the North American fiber broadband industry. Key findings include:

According to the Federal Communications Commission’s last-published report, 24 million Americans lack access to high-speed internet service, with 19 million of them in rural areas. But last week the New York Times offered new numbers and they’re problematic, too. It found that 162 million people across the country do not use internet service at broadband speeds. There’s a big delta between 24 million and 162 million. 

A series of interactive maps to visualize home internet access, covering more than 65,000 occupied Census tracts in the fifty states and the District of Columbia. On the base maps, NDIA calculated and mapped two crucial data points from census data: 1) What percentage of households in each Census tract had no home internet access at all in 2017 — not even mobile internet or dial-up connections?  2) What percentage of households in each Census tract had “Broadband such as cable, fiber optic or DSL” in 2017?

The purposes of antitrust law can be broad; the mechanism of antitrust is legal. This is the core of Brandeis’s approach—to find enforceable legal standards that identify harmful industrial conduct in a manner that vindicates social and democratic values through the careful delineation of institutional roles. That job was made easier because Louis Brandeis subscribed to the view that these social and democratic values were all threatened by monopoly; thus by focusing on the practicalities of competition, antitrust statutes could advance broader societal interests as well.

We have tried to rein in the power of telecommunications, media and cable giants for more than 30 years. In these important industries, strong antitrust has only worked when paired with equally strong pro-competition market-opening regulations. Antitrust alone cannot expand the diversity of media and content ownership that relies upon internet distribution. Antitrust alone cannot protect the integrity of individual speech rights that are essential to democratic discourse. And antitrust alone cannot foster innovation and entrepreneurship.

For Louis Brandeis, antitrust would serve both social and economic goals. He saw complete harmony in critiquing the economic justification for corporate power, on terms familiar to modern antitrust analysis, while pressing the larger case for democracy and industrial liberty. Legislatures can, and should, take an expansive view. As a starting point, Brandeis believed that values other than economics would be served by the protection of competition through antitrust, chief among them the preservation of democracy and individual initiative. This was not a subtle view.

The Federal Trade Commission is tackling a central question of competition: Are the goals of antitrust enforcement in the United States best pursued by applying what’s known as the consumer welfare standard? But what does it mean just to safeguard “consumer” welfare?