The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently clarified a long-standing policy specifically defining, for the first time in history, how it is going to judge anti-competitive behavior.

As a little background, the FTC has always been tasked with enforcing the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Clayton Act. But those laws are aimed at stopping anti-competitive behavior at the national level when a company is stifling a whole market. It has been exceedingly hard to apply those laws to a smaller market or to the actions of a large company stifling only a single tiny competitor.

In the telecom industry there are numerous cases where the large cable companies went after a small competitor, but these small companies have never had any legal recourse. I don’t think there are any examples of a small company using the law to stop anti-competitive behavior by the big cable companies. In every case I have ever worked with, the smaller company has gotten legal advice that it’s almost impossible to win an anti-competition claim against a big cable company.

And that has been a shame since there are cases where the behavior of the incumbents has been egregious. I’ve seen large cable companies cut rates significantly in a market to try to harm a new competitor while jacking up the rates in surrounding communities to make up for the losses in the one market. Those are the kinds of things that monopolies aren’t supposed to be able to do, but there has never been a mechanism for stopping this anti-competitive behavior.

I’m not a lawyer and I don’t know if the new FTC language fixes this problem, but my layman’s interpretation is that it offers hope. Here is how the FTC now defines how it will look at anti-competitive behavior:

• The commission will be guided by public policy behind antitrust law, namely, consumer welfare.
• An act or practice challenged by the FTC must cause or be likely to cause harm to competition or the competitive process, while taking into account related efficiencies and business justifications.
• The commission is less likely to challenge acts or practices on the sole basis that they constitute unfair competition if the Sherman or Clayton Acts would be enough to address them.

It’s the second bullet point that I think holds out hope. It’s clear that the actions of large companies can cause harm to competition and the competitive process, and this makes it clear that the FTC feels they have the right to oversee such practices. As that second bullet also notes, sometimes small competitors get crushed inadvertently when a large company implements a nationwide practice for efficiency or business reasons. The FTC is not likely to tackle those cases, but should be open to investigating cases where a large company specifically goes after a small company in one market.

The timing of this is interesting for our industry. For many years the place to take a complaint against a large cable company would have been the FTC since the FCC didn’t regulate the cable companies as carriers. The FCC has regulated cable practices and requirements for being a cable company, but not issues like anti-competitive behavior.

But recently, with the changes coming from the net neutrality rule, the FCC has turned the cable companies into carriers under its jurisdiction. The FCC has always heard complaints from small telephone carriers against the larger telcos, so perhaps now the FCC might also be willing to entertain complaints from small cable providers against the larger cable companies.

It would be ironic that now the FTC is willing to perhaps hear such anti-competition claims that they might no longer hold the jurisdiction over the cable market. Those two agencies are certainly engaged currently in an arm-wrestling match over this issue and it might take a while to figure out which agency would be the one to take an anti-competition claim.