On November 14, the FTC Commissioners, in an opinion authored by Chairman Simons, issued an opinion in an antitrust case involving the online advertising industry that has important implications for online advertisers. Last November, we discussed the initial decision by FTC ALJ Chappell that 1-800 Contacts had violated Section 5 of the FTC Act by coming to agreements with its competitors limiting their abilities—as well as 1-800 Contacts’ ability—to bid on each other’s trademarks and URLs in auctions for placement in search results. In his decision, termed an “Initial Decision” in FTC parlance, Judge Chappell found that those agreements directly harmed competition and consumers in the market for contact lenses sold over the internet, and he rejected the efficiency justifications proposed by 1-800 Contacts.
The full Commission went even further, affirming the ALJ’s decision, albeit on different grounds, and also holding that the agreements also violated the antitrust laws by harming competition in the bidding market for search engine keywords, reducing the prices that search engines like Google received for presenting ads in search results, and reducing the quality of the results delivered to consumers. As a result of the Commission’s decision, 1-800 Contacts is barred from either enforcing the agreements it already has with other online contact lens marketers, or from entering into similar agreements in the future.
Continue Reading The FTC, Contact Lenses, and the Future of Retail?