Op-ed by EU Commission president reflects floating border between censorship and competition issues surrounding digital platforms

Policy makers and opinion leaders increasingly distinguish between the desirability (or at least understandability) of major digital platforms blocking Donald Trump's accounts and the broader implications of private-sector regulators having such enormous power. It already came a bit of a surprise that German chancellor Angela Merkel, never one to like Trump's political positions and style, raised concerns over Twitter's decision to ban The Donald (for my position on impeachment, see this recent post). Last week, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said in a German-language op-ed that it might have been "tempting" for Twitter to block Trump's account, but such a far-reaching restriction of the right to free speech shouldn't be decided by companies: the framework must be set by lawmakers.

President von der Leyen's op-ed (which is a reply to an open letter by Axel Springer CEO Matthias Doepfner). Without making a clear distinction between censorship and competition, she acknowledges Mr. Doepfner's concern over Big Tech's unfettered power, and touts the Commission's proposals for a Digital Markets Act and a Digital Services Act.

On the subject of the Digital Markets Act I strongly recommend this panel discussion hosted by the UK-based Centre for Competition Policy. One of the panelists, Professor Damien Geradin of Brussels-based Geradin Partners, regularly writes about these policy topics on his Platform Law Blog, which I strongly recommend (just like I've repeatedly recommended Professor Thomas Cotter's Comparative Patent Remedies blog on patent remedies and, particularly, FRAND licensing issues.

President von der Leyen's op-ed shows an interesting parallel between the platform regulation and competition discussions in the United States and in Europe: free speech issues get conflated with antitrust enforcement and antitrust-like regulatory interventions such as those envisioned by the DMA--and while it's a rule of thumb in politics that the broader your range of issues is, the smaller your coalition will be, this context is a rare exception: here, the combination of those issues actually helps build a consensus. An oversimplified way to put it is that Twitter's Trump ban increases the regulatory risk for online platforms like Facebook, but also the likelihood of competition enforcement against other tech companies and business models:

• In the U.S., there's an ideological divide: Democrats are concerned about antitrust underenforcement (I very much agree with what Senator Klobuchar said about that in Justice Barrett's confirmation hearing) while Republicans fear that competition enforcement often amounts to governmental overreach and runs counter to Ronald Reagan's "Get government out of the way" approach. But more and more Republican politicians are uncomfortable with the notion of mostly left-leaning Silicon Valley companies (ab)using their Section 230 freedoms in order to suppress free speech by conservatives. Theoretically, those are separate topics, but practically, they're part of a wider #techlash agenda. That agenda has better chances of being implemented without a Republican knee-jerk reaction to competition enforcement.

• In the EU there's a divide between its member states. In France and other Mediterranean countries, the idea of government running or at least directing everything is more popular than in Germany, the Netherlands, and the Nordic countries. With the UK, the most clearly pro-free-market country in Europe has left the EU. And in Germany, the political spectrum as a whole has shifted very much to the left. Seriously, the actual policy differences between President Biden and his predecessor are even smaller than between Biden and Merkel (who is actually a center-left politician, though nominally center-right). The political climate in Europe is definitely amenable to initiatives such as the DMA and DSA (which I, by the way, welcome in principle, though the devil is in the details). But to the extent any politicians might have reservations, concerns over Big Tech undermining democracy and free speech are sure to bring everyone together.

I won't go into detail on particular political initiatives for now. The purpose of this post is just to highlight a certain parallel between developments in the U.S. and in the EU.

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Conservative politicians shouldn't join Greens and communists in calls for compulsory licensing of COVID/mRNA vaccine patents

This post is a departure from my blog's industry focus that I wouldn't have contemplated if not for the highly unusual circumstances we're facing in the COVID-19 pandemic. The scientific aspects of pharmaceutical patents are above my head, but that also applies to the heads of those politicians proposing compulsory licensing of such patents in the current situation.

I just became aware of a disconcerting statement by the chairman of the center-right European People's Party (EPP) group in the European Parliament, Manfred Weber MEP (Christian Social Union, CSU), quoted in a German newspaper article (my translation):

"If need be, admitted vaccines must also be made by others on the basis of compulsory licensing."

This is the same Manfred Weber who lent unconditional support to the EPP's Axel Voss MEP with respect to upload filters (EU Copyright Reform). In other words, he wants IP overenforcement against kids who upload videos from a private party to YouTube, with some commercial music playing in the background, but he wants to deprive the companies who made a miracle happen--the availability of multiple COVID-19 vaccines after such a short time--of their rights.

His party, the CSU, is the regional sister party (comparable to the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party vs. the Democratic Party) of Chancellor Angela Merkel and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen's party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). It's unlikely that he would toss out such an idea if it hadn't at least been floating around in those circles.

The EU is obviously in deep-shit trouble. In yesterday's New York Times there was an article entitled Slow Pace of Vaccinations Pushes Europe Toward Second Economic Slump. The numbers speak a clear language: as of the start of February, Israel had administered at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine to almost 60% of its population, the United Arab Emirates to approximately 35%, the UK to approximately 15%, the U.S. to approximately 10%, and the EU only to about 2%-3%. As I explained early last month, the EU's purchasing decisions were wrong at any given point in time just based on then-available information (New York Times Coronavirus Vaccine Tracker)--and liability issues do not serve as an excuse, as it's simply a reality in a seller's market that not only prices but also other terms are impacted by the demand-supply discrepancy. And money could have solved the problem at the right time by enabling certain companies to invest in European manufacturing capacities early on--just what ex-president Trump achieved with his Operation Warp Speed program.

German and other EU politicians shouldn't make themselves ridiculous by sometimes arguing in the same interview that the U.S. can outvaccinate the EU because it's such a large country, and Israel does so because it's a small country. Some politicians sound like those communist leaders did in the late 1980s before the fall of the Iron Curtain.

The problem is not going to get solved anytime soon, though I was surprised by the good news regarding the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, which appears to beat all other adenovirus vector-based COVID vaccines by a wide margin by using a different vector for the second (booster) jab (and both vectors appear to be unharmful human adenovirus strains)--the EU may end up importing that one. Meanwhile, the virus keeps mutating at a pace that makes it hard to follow. Yesterday, for instance, the BBC reported that the UK just found "more coronavirus cases with 'concerning' mutations."

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste. The EU should learn its lesson and reform itself. Brexit has its first success story (outvaccinating the EU by a factor of 5), and the EU will make things only worse if it doesn't think things through. The Daily Mail was never the EU's best friend, but in this article the British newspaper quotes media from all over Europe, including some very EU-friendly ones, who concluded they can't defend the indefensible anymore with respect to the EU's temporary intentions to put border controls in place between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in order to enforce vaccine export restrictions (which are, by the way, the epitome of "vaccine nationalism" as opposed to people being all for a coordinated EU effort, but criticizing what went wrong).

Even to only toss out the idea of compulsory licensing in this particular context is an insanity.

In the tech sector, I'm against injunctive relief except maybe under the most egregious of circumstances. Just yesterday I stressed again that patent remedies must be proportionate. And I'm not ruling out at all that maybe, further down the road, some general mRNA-related patents might prove overbroad--and compulsory licensing might be needed on antitrust grounds, should there be a clear and present danger of only one or two companies ultimately being able to make that new generation of vaccines (and potentially other types of mRNA-based medications).

But in the current situation, there simply isn't an economic case for compulsory licensing of COVID-19 vaccine patents. (To be clear, patent remedies are only available after publication of the related applications, and COVID-19 is too new for anything to have been published yet, but there are some general mRNA-related patents and patent applications that BioNTech might be able to enforce already against anyone plagiarizing their COVID-19 vaccines.)

The cost of lockdowns and similar restrictions is so high that there's enough money to be made not only for the companies that invented the vaccines but also by those who merely manufacture them. The recent deal between Pfizer partner BioNTech and Sanofi (which invested in BioNTech two years ago) shows that solutions can be worked out at the negotiating table. It's not just about immediate revenue opportunities: every contribution to what may help to solve the COVID-19 problem generates political goodwill and nice publicity.

What governments should do is incentivize such partnerships by making offers that enable both the inventor and the manufacturer to be generously rewarded. There's this saying that you sometimes achieve more with a gun and a smile than with a smile alone. In this case, however, the solution is money, not governmental heavyhandedness like in a plan-based Soviet-style economy.

I have to stress again that what I just wrote was only about COVID-19 vaccines. I do very much believe in the compulsory licensing of standard-essential patents (SEPs), as most of my readers know. But there's a difference between a couple or a handful of patents reading on a COVID-19 vaccine, with enormous risks taken, and the hundreds of thousands of patents one could theoretically assert against a smartphone maker or automotive company--and no single one of which patents truly protects a major investment in research and development.

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Nokia's patent assertion tactics conflict with von der Leyen's environmental and Vestager's industrial policy goals

Daimler brought its EU antitrust complaint against Nokia in 2018, and the Euporean Commission is still dragging its feet while another court decision (Nokia v. Daimler, scheduled for May 20) is around the corner. Just for a few seconds, let's imagine an alternative universe in which the target of the complaints would have been a cellular SEP holder like Qualcomm, InterDigital, Huawei, or LG--as opposed to Nokia. Those organizations, especially the American ones, might already have been fined by now, or at a minimum they'd have received a strong Statement of Objections (SO). But Nokia and, by extension, Ericsson benefit from such an obvious and indefensible kind of protectionism that this situation threatens to wreak havoc to the EU Commission's credibility as a competition watchdog on the global stage.

So Daimler's and its suppliers' tough luck here is that shrinking Nordic companies are above EU law in the eyes of some people in Brussels--according to what I've heard from a variety of sources, Nokia can also count on French commissioner Thierry Breton, who has a telecoms background that appears to be infinitely more important to him and his cabinet than the importance of the automotive industry to Europe as a whole and his native France. As an EU commissioner, he's supposed to focus on the European interest, which he is apparently not doing; and as a French appointee, there is a natural expectation in his country that he would keep French industrial interests in mind as opposed to personal preferences or loyalty conflicts.

But instead of regretting Daimler's and its suppliers' (politically, not legally) wrong choice by complaining about Nokia first, the Commission should also look at it from another angle: Nokia self-servingly seeks to leverage its increasingly-devalued patent portfolio without giving a damn about the EU's economic interests and the Commission's overarching policy goals.

1. There's a simple reason for which Nokia decided to sue Daimler prior to any other automaker on this planet and previously bullied Volkswagen and BMW--two rather cowardly organizations--into Avanci license agreements of limited scope. That reason is Germany's unbalanced patent litigation system. While it's obvious that a patent holder like Nokia would firstly go after premium car makers in order to establish high royalty amounts, those three German corporations aren't the only ones operating in that segment. Nokia could have sued some non-European brands first, but preferred to go to Germany because an injunction in that country would give them maximum leverage over a company with major manufacturing operations and logistics centers in that country.

   As I mentioned in previous posts, Germany won't make more than a negligible modification to its patent injunction regime. Nokia is lobbying very actively for the status quo. In fact, I personally participated in a WebEx conference in which Nokia's chief in-house litigator, Dr. Clemens Heusch, lobbied the German parliament to ensure patents would remain superstrong in Germany.

   By milking and suing European companies that are falling behind in terms of digital technologies and need resources to confront some fundamental challenges, Nokia makes it harder for EU Commission EVP Magrethe Vestager to achieve her vision of "A Europe Fit for the Digital Age."

2. As automotive supplier Continental publicly stated in March, Nokia's refusal to provide the prereqisite degree of legal and financial certainty to everyone in the supply chain has already prevented innovation from happening--digital innovation that in some cases has direct environmental impact.

   By impeding digital and environmentally-friendly innovation on the part of automotive suppliers like Continental, Nokia's patent licensing tactics run counter to both Commission President Ursula von der Leyen's "EU Green Deal" and Commission EVP Magrethe Vestager's "A Europe Fit for the Digital Age" policies.

3. As I reported yesterday, the Avanci patent pool/platform, whose primary purpose it is to advance Nokia's (and Ericsson's, Qualcomm's etc.) agenda of refusing to license component makers, has singled out Tesla as its next target for its patent attacks. It doesn't even matter whether those parties explicitly coordinated their lawsuits or simply act uniformly because of a shared strategic interest. Either way, they've decided to gang up on Tesla like a clan of hyenas.

   While Nokia itself isn't suing Tesla yet, Nokia patents are being asserted against Tesla by Sisvel as well as Conversant, with the latter being a Nokia front no matter how much Nokia disowns its privateer. And even Nokia itself apears to have bullied Tesla before based on what I hear (and what I conclude from what was discussed in the closed-door part of a Nokia v. Daimler trial in Munich).

   Many patent holders (this also applies to owners of non-standard-essential patents) consider Tesla a perfect target: they believe it may be somewhat soft because it's a small organization regardless of its market capitalization being about as high as the aggregate of the caps of VW, BMW, and Daimler; and they know that Tesla is a company everyone's watching closely in the industry.

   By choosing Tesla its next strategic target after those German car makers, Nokia--directly and indirectly--attacks the most innovative company in the automotive sector (which even invests big-time in Europe) instead of letting Tesla focus on what it's best at: eliminating automotive emissions and keeping up the pressure on the car industry at large to abandon combustion engines.

   Targeting Tesla after Daimler creates another conflict between Nokia's opportunistic patent monetization tactics and Commission President von der Leyen's EU Green Deal policy agenda.

Nokia is being very inconsiderate, so the Commission should take off its velvet gloves, focus on the actual issues, and just disregard the countries in which the different parties are based. Europe doesn't even own 15% of all 5G patents, so from a strategic point of view, patent abuse by non-EU companies poses a several times greater threat than whatever Nokia and Ericsson are doing.

That said, it would of course be desirable for Europe to slow down Nokia's and Ericsson's demise, or to enable them to grow again. But there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. Condoning SEP abuse is a bad deal for Europe on the bottom line.

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