16 Of course, if the Commission had assessed market power, it would have needed to define the relevant market, to understand the extent to which providers of different speeds and different services compete with each other. When defining markets for purposes of assessing competition, the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission use the “small but significant and non-transitory increase in price” (“SSNIP”) test. The test tries to determine whether a market actor can benefit from a hypothetical increase in price, indicating market power. U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, Horizontal Merger Guidelines 9 (2010) (“Horizontal Merger Guidelines”). But the Commission did not conduct such a test, and we cannot say how it would come out. Because broadband competition is geographically specific, simple market share data at a national level are of limited value. But firms that provide service to large numbers of consumers, albeit not everywhere, seem likely to rank as potential competitors quite broadly. With these limits in mind, we can look at U.S. subscriber numbers for each of the firms in the market, Leichtman Research, About 645,000 Add Broadband in the Third Quarter of 2015, http://www.leichtmanresearch.com/press/111715release.html, and construct a Herfindahl–Hirschman Index, which in fact is 1,445 points. This level is in the Department of Justice’s Range for “Unconcentrated Markets”—that is, markets where no firm has market power. Horizontal Merger Guidelines at 18-19. I report below the data used to construct the index. In fact, this number is biased upward (and thus biased toward finding market power), since the data for several smaller companies are grouped as if for only one, making it seem as if there is more concentration than there in fact is. Similarly, the Commission scoffs at what it regards as low turnover in customers’ use of mobile service providers,

Select target paragraph3

Connect to a paragraph
Connect to an entity
Disable highlights
Add to table of contents