Patrolling a fine line

There is a growing disquiet - particularly in the US, but also elsewhere - that competition policy has got too soft on mergers, and has been permitting anti-competitive increases in market concentration. By coincidence the latest in ComCom's excellent series of telco market monitoring reports included some data on the international costs of mobile plans and broadband. It showed just how acute the problem has become in the US, which is well entrenched on the expensive right hand side of both graphs.

As Thomas Philippon said (pp5-6) in his recent book The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets, "In most advanced economies, consumers pay around [US]$35 for broadband internet connections. In the US, they pay almost double. How on earth did that happen? How did the US, where the internet was "invented" and where access was cheap in the 1990s, become such a laggard, overcharging households for a rather basic service?"

His answer, which feels right, is that incumbents' market power to charge more and/or give less has increased as some markets have become overconcentrated. "First, the entry rate of new businesses has declined. Businesses are now older and face fewer new competitors reach year. This has led to concentration from the bottom up", and he says that "lobbying and [new-entrant-unfriendly] regulations explain much of the decline in entry rates". "Second, agencies and judges have allowed more frequent mergers among large businesses. This has led to concentration from the top down. Together, they account for the rise in concentration that we have observed" (all from p96).

However true that may be, there is a risk that the backlash goes too far the other way and puts in jeopardy mergers that would make pro-competitive sense, despite the first-blush look of yet another increasingly concentrated market. While the latest big mergers won't make any of the "you've gone soft" critics happy, they look to have been the right call.

In the US, the example is the merger of the number three and number four mobile telcos, T-Mobile and Sprint. You might think, looking at the left hand panel in the graph above, that allowing further concentration in the already expensive US mobile market would be a difficult proposition to justify. And yet: the argument for it is that a bulked up three-plus-four will be a more effective competitor to the two big incumbents (AT&T and Verizon) than three and four separately would have been. There's a logic to that: it was raised, for example, in one of the first merger clearances I was involved in (Telstra/Clear in 2001) though in the end the merger was cleared along traditional ongoing competitive constraint from incumbents/new entrants lines. In the US, both the Federal Communication Commission and the Department of Justice were prepared to go along. Individual states weren't best pleased, but the last of the them standing, California, has also folded its hand after negotiating some state-specific goodies.

In Australia, it's similar. The ACCC had opposed the TPG-Vodafone merger: the ACCC reckoned that left to its own devices, TPG would have rolled out a fourth mobile network to compete with the big three (Telstra, Optus and Vodafone itself). The case in the end turned out to be less a contest of economic merger perspectives and more one of disputed facts. The court disagreed with the ACCC's view of the world: at [34] the judge said that "The Court has been left in no relevant uncertainty, after reviewing the evidence, as to the future of the retail mobile market which will not involve Mr Teoh [TPG's executive chairman and CEO] or TPG entering the Australian retail mobile market in the next five years" (full judgement here). Earlier this month the ACCC flagged away appealing.

Incidentally, as any of us who have to try and guess where competition litigation will go will agree, you have to tip your hat to Tony Boyd, the Chanticleer columnist at the Australian Financial Review, who in a (possibly paywalled) piece 'ACCC misreads mobile market' back in May 2019 absolutely nailed it: "ACCC chairman Rod Sims is headed for what is almost certainly an embarrassing defeat in court ... Rod Sims is kidding himself if he thinks the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission can win". He got it bang on: Justice Middleton could have saved himself most of his 899-paragraph judgement if he'd just copied and pasted Boyd's conclusion that "The problem with the assumption that TPG’s executive chairman David Teoh will spend billions of dollars building a new network is that it is completely without foundation".

So even against an appropriately heightened sense of scepticism about the merits of even further mergers, ones will still pop up there may be no loss of competition compared with the no-merger counterfactual (as in TPG-Vodafone) or there is the procompetitive emergence of a more effective post-merger competitor (T-Mobile-Sprint). Whether any of these arguments apply to the other behemoth out there - if it's survived the recent market havoc, the proposed merger of  the global number two and number three insurance brokers, Aon and Willis Towers Watson, to create a new number one - will remain to be seen. There look to be a good deal of potential back-office efficiencies, but whether they, and the claimed capability synergies, make up for the potential reduction in competition is debatable.

Finally, the latest ComCom telco report got me digging in the archive. Here are a couple of graphs from the very first telco monitoring report, published back in 2008.

Nor pretty at all back then, was it? The improvement since then, especially on the mobile side, has been enormous. And a lot of it goes to prove Philippon's points: for a good competitive outcome you can't beat new entry (particularly 2degrees) and entry-facilitating regulation (a whole swathe of things, from early 'ladder of investment' ideas like wholesale access through to mobile termination regulation and local loop unbundling).