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Microsoft comes full circle

I am disappointed but not surprised to see that my former employer filed an official antitrust complaint against Google in the EU.  The blog post by Microsoft’s GC, Brad Smith, summarizing its complaint is here.

Most obviously, there is a tragic irony to the most antitrust-beleaguered company ever filing an antitrust complaint against its successful competitor.  Of course the specifics are not identical, but all of the atmospheric and general points that Microsoft itself made in response to the claims against it are applicable here.  It smacks of competitors competing not in the marketplace but in the regulators’ offices.  It promotes a kind of weird protectionism, directing the EU’s enforcement powers against a successful US company . . . at the behest of another US competitor.  Regulators will always be fighting last year’s battles to the great detriment of the industry.  Competition and potential competition abound, even where it may not be obvious (Linux for Microsoft; Facebook for Google, for example).  Etc.  Microsoft was once the world’s most powerful advocate for more sensible, restrained, error-cost-based competition policy.  That it now finds itself on the opposite side of this debate is unfortunate for all of us.

Brad’s blog post is eloquent (as he always is) and forceful.  And he acknowledges the irony.  And of course he may be right on the facts.  Unfortunately we’ll have to resort to a terribly-costly, irretrievably-flawed and error-prone process to find out–not that the process is likely to result in a very reliable answer anyway.  Where I think he is most off base is where he draws–and asks regulators to draw–conclusions about the competitive effects of the actions he describes.  It is certain that Google has another story and will dispute most or all of the facts.  But even without that information we can dispute the conclusions that Google’s actions, if true, are necessarily anticompetitive.  In fact, as Josh and I have detailed at length here and here, these sorts of actions–necessitated by the realities of complex, innovative and vulnerable markets and in many cases undertaken by the largest and the smallest competitors alike–are more likely pro-competitive.  More important, efforts to ferret out the anti-competitive among them will almost certainly harm welfare rather than help it–particularly when competitors are welcomed in to the regulators’ and politicians’ offices in the process.

As I said, disappointing.  It is not inherently inappropriate for Microsoft to resort to this simply because it has been the victim of such unfortunate “competition” in the past, nor is Microsoft obligated or expected to demonstrate intellectual or any other sort of consistency.  But knowing what it does about the irretrievable defects of the process and the inevitable costliness of its consequences, it is disingenuous or naive (the Nirvana fallacy) for it to claim that it is simply engaging in a reliable effort to smooth over a bumpy competitive landscape.  That may be the ideal of antitrust enforcement, but no one knows as well as Microsoft that the reality is far from that ideal.  To claim implicitly that, in this case, things will be different is, as I said, disingenuous.  And likely really costly in the end for all of us.

Filed under: antitrust, business, exclusionary conduct, law and economics, markets, monopolization, politics, regulation, technology Tagged: Brad Smith, Competition law, European Commission, google, microsoft, politics, regulation

Full post as published by Truth on the Market on March 31, 2011 (boomark / email).