AT&T/Time Warner: Rube Goldberg Machines, Bob Dylan Quotes and a Shifting View of Video Programming Competition

My partners Mark Palchick and Marty Stern have written a good article on the District of Columbia's recent antitrust ruling rejecting the U.S. Justice Department's efforts to block AT&T's acquisition of Time Warner.

AT&T/Time Warner DOJ Smack Down: You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Is Blowing.

Interesting stats from their article:

• The District Court's opinion is 172 pages long.
• There are over 20 exclamation points!
• References to Rube Goldberg machines.
• And at least one quote from Bob Dylan.

Here is the takeaway from their article:

The evidence adduced at trial also seemed to contradict a central concern of the Open Internet rules -- that broadband distributors will block access to rival video sources. The court found that distributors have a strong incentive to maximize distribution of video programming on their networks, not curtail it.

If you read nothing else in the opinion, and want a plain English description and a clear distillation of the current state of the programming supply and distribution markets, and the cut-throat, highly competitive, knock-down, drag-out negotiations between programmers and distributors, complexity, warts and all, peruse pages one through forty of the opinion.  It is a wonderful distillation of how the sausage is made.  While there are many, one key take-away from that discussion is that there is no more “must have” national programming, which is now a mere marketing term, and the absence of particular channels on an MVPD platform does not preclude the ability of MVPDs to compete in the marketplace.

 Clearly, according to the judge, the market is shifting away from MVPD competition and the traditional cable and broadcast advertising markets based on linear, live programming and gross eyeballs to a market focused on data-driven targeted advertising, driving data usage through subscriber video consumption, and on the competition between wireline and wireless providers to be the broadband delivery method of choice.  “[A]s Nobel laureate Bob Dylan correctly observed,” noted the court, “‘You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.’”

Mark Palchick and Marty Stern are partners in the Communications, Technology & Media practice of law firm Womble Bond Dickinson in Washington, D.C. They are co-authors of the firm’s Communications, Tech & Media Review blog.

Will Kavanaugh's "Modern Approach" Change The Trajectory of Supreme Court Antitrust Jurisprudence?

Justice Kennedy swearing in Brett Kavanaugh to D.C. Circuit

In my last post, I discussed one of Judge Kavanaugh's antitrust opinions, in which he argued for a "modern approach" to antitrust law.  Others have similarly commented on Kavanaugh's willingness to modernize antitrust law by discarding outdated precedent and creating clear guidelines.  Professor Stephen Calkins notes that "modern" appears six times in Kavanaugh's dissent in Anthem and four times in Whole Foods.  In the latter case, Kavanaugh critiques older antitrust cases as "relics" with "loose" or "free-wheeling" analysis.  According to Kavanaugh modern approach, antitrust cases that have not "stood the test of time," should be pushed "to the jurisprudence sidelines."

Would this "modern approach" to antitrust law change the direction of the Supreme Court's jurisprudence?  It is hard to say.  After all, Justice Kennedy, whom Kavanaugh is nominated to replace, was himself a modernizer of antitrust law.  

Justice Kennedy authored the majority opinion in Brooke Group v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco, which heightened the standards for predatory pricing.  Kennedy held that a plaintiff must show that a defendant's price was below cost and that the defendant would be able to raise prices and "recoup" those loses after competitors left the market.  This modern standard is so hard to meet, that there have been virtually no successful predatory price cases after Kennedy's 1993 decision.

In Leegin Creative Leather Products v. PSKS, Justice Kennedy reversed 100-years of antitrust precedent in holding that resale price maintenance would no longer be considered per se illegal.  In so ruling, Justice Kennedy looked to modern "economic analysis," which showed that vertical retail price restraints could be procompetitive.  Rather than continuing to follow outdated precedent, Kennedy explained that the Sherman Act should be treated as a "common-law statute" which can "evolve[] to meet the dynamics of present economic conditions."  Kennedy was willing to overrule established precedent because "subsequent cases [and modern economic analysis] have undermined their doctrinal underpinnings."

Similarly, Kennedy joined the majority in Twombly in changing the pleading standards for antitrust cases.  That decision was based, in part, on the "costs of modern federal antitrust litigation and the increasing caseload of the federal courts."  Two years later, Kennedy himself was the author of the majority opinion in Iqbal which confirmed that Twombly's heightened pleading standards apply to all cases.   Together, Twombly and Iqbal represent the most significant change, or modernization, of civil procedure in decades.

Given Justice Kennedy's willingness to discard outdated precedent and modernize antitrust law based on our current understanding of economic principles, Judge Kavanaugh's "modern" approach to antitrust law will likely simply be an extension of Justice Kennedy's jurisprudence, rather than a new approach.  This is not altogether surprising considering that Judge Kavanaugh was a clerk for Justice Kennedy on the Supreme Court in 1993--the same year that Justice Kennedy created the modern standards for predatory pricing in Brooke Group.