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The CPI Antitrust Chronicle published Geoffrey Manne’s and my recent paperThe Problems and Perils of Bootstrapping Privacy and Data into an Antitrust Framework as part of a symposium on Big Data in the May 2015 issue. All of the papers are worth reading and pondering, but of course ours is the best ;).

In it, we analyze two of the most prominent theories of antitrust harm arising from data collection: privacy as a factor of non-price competition, and price discrimination facilitated by data collection. We also analyze whether data is serving as a barrier to entry and effectively preventing competition. We argue that, in the current marketplace, there are no plausible harms to competition arising from either non-price effects or price discrimination due to data collection online and that there is no data barrier to entry preventing effective competition.

The issues of how to regulate privacy issues and what role competition authorities should in that, are only likely to increase in importance as the Internet marketplace continues to grow and evolve. The European Commission and the FTC have been called on by scholars and advocates to take greater consideration of privacy concerns during merger review and encouraged to even bring monopolization claims based upon data dominance. These calls should be rejected unless these theories can satisfy the rigorous economic review of antitrust law. In our humble opinion, they cannot do so at this time.

The Horizontal Merger Guidelines have long recognized that anticompetitive effects may “be manifested in non-price terms and conditions that adversely affect customers.” But this notion, while largely unobjectionable in the abstract, still presents significant problems in actual application.

First, product quality effects can be extremely difficult to distinguish from price effects. Quality-adjusted price is usually the touchstone by which antitrust regulators assess prices for competitive effects analysis. Disentangling (allegedly) anticompetitive quality effects from simultaneous (neutral or pro-competitive) price effects is an imprecise exercise, at best. For this reason, proving a product-quality case alone is very difficult and requires connecting the degradation of a particular element of product quality to a net gain in advantage for the monopolist.

Second, invariably product quality can be measured on more than one dimension. For instance, product quality could include both function and aesthetics: A watch’s quality lies in both its ability to tell time as well as how nice it looks on your wrist. A non-price effects analysis involving product quality across multiple dimensions becomes exceedingly difficult if there is a tradeoff in consumer welfare between the dimensions. Thus, for example, a smaller watch battery may improve its aesthetics, but also reduce its reliability. Any such analysis would necessarily involve a complex and imprecise comparison of the relative magnitudes of harm/benefit to consumers who prefer one type of quality to another.

If non-price effects cannot be relied upon to establish competitive injury (as explained above), then what can be the basis for incorporating privacy concerns into antitrust? One argument is that major data collectors (e.g., Google and Facebook) facilitate price discrimination.

The argument can be summed up as follows: Price discrimination could be a harm to consumers that antitrust law takes into consideration. Because companies like Google and Facebook are able to collect a great deal of data about their users for analysis, businesses could segment groups based on certain characteristics and offer them different deals. The resulting price discrimination could lead to many consumers paying more than they would in the absence of the data collection. Therefore, the data collection by these major online companies facilitates price discrimination that harms consumer welfare.

This argument misses a large part of the story, however. The flip side is that price discrimination could have benefits to those who receive lower prices from the scheme than they would have in the absence of the data collection, a possibility explored by the recent White House Report on Big Data and Differential Pricing.

While privacy advocates have focused on the possible negative effects of price discrimination to one subset of consumers, they generally ignore the positive effects of businesses being able to expand output by serving previously underserved consumers. It is inconsistent with basic economic logic to suggest that a business relying on metrics would want to serve only those who can pay more by charging them a lower price, while charging those who cannot afford it a larger one. If anything, price discrimination would likely promote more egalitarian outcomes by allowing companies to offer lower prices to poorer segments of the population—segments that can be identified by data collection and analysis.

If this group favored by “personalized pricing” is as big as—or bigger than—the group that pays higher prices, then it is difficult to state that the practice leads to a reduction in consumer welfare, even if this can be divorced from total welfare. Again, the question becomes one of magnitudes that has yet to be considered in detail by privacy advocates.

Either of these theories of harm is predicated on the inability or difficulty of competitors to develop alternative products in the marketplace—the so-called “data barrier to entry.” The argument is that upstarts do not have sufficient data to compete with established players like Google and Facebook, which in turn employ their data to both attract online advertisers as well as foreclose their competitors from this crucial source of revenue. There are at least four reasons to be dubious of such arguments:

  1. Data is useful to all industries, not just online companies;
  2. It’s not the amount of data, but how you use it;
  3. Competition online is one click or swipe away; and
  4. Access to data is not exclusive

Privacy advocates have thus far failed to make their case. Even in their most plausible forms, the arguments for incorporating privacy and data concerns into antitrust analysis do not survive legal and economic scrutiny. In the absence of strong arguments suggesting likely anticompetitive effects, and in the face of enormous analytical problems (and thus a high risk of error cost), privacy should remain a matter of consumer protection, not of antitrust.

Fourth, access to data is not exclusive

In fact, Barnett has said as much before:

In my series of three posts (here, here and here) drawn from my empirical study on search bias I have examined whether search bias exists, and, if so, how frequently it occurs.  This, the final post in the series, assesses the results of the study (as well as the Edelman & Lockwood (E&L) study to which it responds) to determine whether the own-content bias I’ve identified is in fact consistent with anticompetitive foreclosure or is otherwise sufficient to warrant antitrust intervention.

As I’ve repeatedly emphasized, while I refer to differences among search engines’ rankings of their own or affiliated content as “bias,” without more these differences do not imply anticompetitive conduct.  It is wholly unsurprising and indeed consistent with vigorous competition among engines that differentiation emerges with respect to algorithms.  However, it is especially important to note that the theories of anticompetitive foreclosure raised by Google’s rivals involve very specific claims about these differences.  Properly articulated vertical foreclosure theories proffer both that bias is (1) sufficient in magnitude to exclude Google’s rivals from achieving efficient scale, and (2) actually directed at Google’s rivals.  Unfortunately for search engine critics, their theories fail on both counts.  The observed own-content bias appears neither to be extensive enough to prevent rivals from gaining access to distribution nor does it appear to target Google’s rivals; rather, it seems to be a natural result of intense competition between search engines and of significant benefit to consumers.

Vertical foreclosure arguments are premised upon the notion that rivals are excluded with sufficient frequency and intensity as to render their efforts to compete for distribution uneconomical.  Yet the empirical results simply do not indicate that market conditions are in fact conducive to the types of harmful exclusion contemplated by application of the antitrust laws.  Rather, the evidence indicates that (1) the absolute level of search engine “bias” is extremely low, and (2) “bias” is not a function of market power, but an effective strategy that has arisen as a result of serious competition and innovation between and by search engines.  The first finding undermines competitive foreclosure arguments on their own terms, that is, even if there were no pro-consumer justifications for the integration of Google content with Google search results.  The second finding, even more importantly, reveals that the evolution of consumer preferences for more sophisticated and useful search results has driven rival search engines to satisfy that demand.  Both Bing and Google have shifted toward these results, rendering the complained-of conduct equivalent to satisfying the standard of care in the industry–not restraining competition.

A significant lack of search bias emerges in the representative sample of queries.  This result is entirely unsurprising, given that bias is relatively infrequent even in E&L’s sample of queries specifically designed to identify maximum bias.  In the representative sample, the total percentage of queries for which Google references its own content when rivals do not is even lower—only about 8%—meaning that Google favors its own content far less often than critics have suggested.  This fact is crucial and highly problematic for search engine critics, as their burden in articulating a cognizable antitrust harm includes not only demonstrating that bias exists, but further that it is actually competitively harmful.  As I’ve discussed, bias alone is simply not sufficient to demonstrate any prima facie anticompetitive harm as it is far more often procompetitive or competitively neutral than actively harmful.  Moreover, given that bias occurs in less than 10% of queries run on Google, anticompetitive exclusion arguments appear unsustainable.

Indeed, theories of vertical foreclosure find virtually zero empirical support in the data.  Moreover, it appears that, rather than being a function of monopolistic abuse of power, search bias has emerged as an efficient competitive strategy, allowing search engines to differentiate their products in ways that benefit consumers.  I find that when search engines do reference their own content on their search results pages, it is generally unlikely that another engine will reference this same content.  However, the fact that both this percentage and the absolute level of own content inclusion is similar across engines indicates that this practice is not a function of market power (or its abuse), but is rather an industry standard.  In fact, despite conducting a much smaller percentage of total consumer searches, Bing is consistently more biased than Google, illustrating that the benefits search engines enjoy from integrating their own content into results is not necessarily a function of search engine size or volume of queries.  These results are consistent with a business practice that is efficient and at significant tension with arguments that such integration is designed to facilitate competitive foreclosure. Continue Reading…

My last two posts on search bias (here and here) have analyzed and critiqued Edelman & Lockwood’s small study on search bias.  This post extends this same methodology and analysis to a random sample of 1,000 Google queries (released by AOL in 2006), to develop a more comprehensive understanding of own-content bias.  As I’ve stressed, these analyses provide useful—but importantly limited—glimpses into the nature of the search engine environment.  While these studies are descriptively helpful, actual harm to consumer welfare must always be demonstrated before cognizable antitrust injuries arise.  And naked identifications of own-content bias simply do not inherently translate to negative effects on consumers (see, e.g., here and here for more comprehensive discussion).

Now that’s settled, let’s jump into the results of the 1,000 random search query study.

How Do Search Engines Rank Their Own Content?

Consistent with our earlier analysis, a starting off point for thinking about measuring differentiation among search engines with respect to placing their own content is to compare how a search engine ranks its own content relative to how other engines place that same content (e.g. to compare how Google ranks “Google Maps” relative to how Bing or Blekko rank it).   Restricting attention exclusively to the first or “top” position, I find that Google simply does not refer to its own content in over 90% of queries.  Similarly, Bing does not reference Microsoft content in 85.4% of queries.  Google refers to its own content in the first position when other search engines do not in only 6.7% of queries; while Bing does so over twice as often, referencing Microsoft content that no other engine references in the first position in 14.3% of queries.  The following two charts illustrate the percentage of Google or Bing first position results, respectively, dedicated to own content across search engines.

The most striking aspect of these results is the small fraction of queries for which placement of own-content is relevant.  The results are similar when I expand consideration to the entire first page of results; interestingly, however, while the levels of own-content bias are similar considering the entire first page of results, Bing is far more likely than Google to reference its own content in its very first results position.

Examining Search Engine “Bias” on Google

Two distinct differences between the results of this larger study and my replication of Edelman & Lockwood emerge: (1) Google and Bing refer to their own content in a significantly smaller percentage of cases here than in the non-random sample; and (2) in general, when Google or Bing does rank its own content highly, rival engines are unlikely to similarly rank that same content.

The following table reports the percentages of queries for which Google’s ranking of its own content and its rivals’ rankings of that same content differ significantly. When Google refers to its own content within its Top 5 results, at least one other engine similarly ranks this content for only about 5% of queries.

The following table presents the likelihood that Google content will appear in a Google search, relative to searches conducted on rival engines (reported in odds ratios).

The first and third columns report results indicating that Google affiliated content is more likely to appear in a search executed on Google rather than rival engines.  Google is approximately 16 times more likely to refer to its own content on its first page as is any other engine.  Bing and Blekko are both significantly less likely to refer to Google content in their first result or on their first page than Google is to refer to Google content within these same parameters.  In each iteration, Bing is more likely to refer to Google content than is Blekko, and in the case of the first result, Bing is much more likely to do so.  Again, to be clear, the fact that Bing is more likely to rank its own content is not suggestive that the practice is problematic.  Quite the contrary, the demonstration that firms both with and without market power in search (to the extent that is a relevant antitrust market) engage in similar conduct the correct inference is that there must be efficiency explanations for the practice.  The standard response, of course, is that the competitive implications of a practice are different when a firm with market power does it.  That’s not exactly right.  It is true that firms with market power can engage in conduct that gives rise to potential antitrust problems when the same conduct from a firm without market power would not; however, when firms without market power engage in the same business practice it demands that antitrust analysts seriously consider the efficiency implications of the practice.  In other words, there is nothing in the mantra that things are “different” when larger firms do them that undercut potential efficiency explanations.

Examining Search Engine “Bias” on Bing

For queries within the larger sample, Bing refers to Microsoft content within its Top 1 and 3 results when no other engine similarly references this content for a slightly smaller percentage of queries than in my Edelman & Lockwood replication.  Yet Bing continues to exhibit a strong tendency to rank Microsoft content more prominently than rival engines.  For example, when Bing refers to Microsoft content within its Top 5 results, other engines agree with this ranking for less than 2% of queries; and Bing refers to Microsoft content that no other engine does within its Top 3 results for 99.2% of queries:

Regression analysis further illustrates Bing’s propensity to reference Microsoft content that rivals do not.  The following table reports the likelihood that Microsoft content is referred to in a Bing search as compared to searches on rival engines (again reported in odds ratios).

Bing refers to Microsoft content in its first results position about 56 times more often than rival engines refer to Microsoft content in this same position.  Across the entire first page, Microsoft content appears on a Bing search about 25 times more often than it does on any other engine.  Both Google and Blekko are accordingly significantly less likely to reference Microsoft content.  Notice further that, contrary to the findings in the smaller study, Google is slightly less likely to return Microsoft content than is Blekko, both in its first results position and across its entire first page.

A Closer Look at Google v. Bing

 Consistent with the smaller sample, I find again that Bing is more biased than Google using these metrics.  In other words, Bing ranks its own content significantly more highly than its rivals do more frequently then Google does, although the discrepancy between the two engines is smaller here than in the study of Edelman & Lockwood’s queries.  As noted above, Bing is over twice as likely to refer to own content in first results position than is Google.

Figures 7 and 8 present the same data reported above, but with Blekko removed, to allow for a direct visual comparison of own-content bias between Google and Bing.

Consistent with my earlier results, Bing appears to consistently rank Microsoft content higher than Google ranks the same (Microsoft) content more frequently than Google ranks Google content more prominently than Bing ranks the same (Google) content.

This result is particularly interesting given the strength of the accusations condemning Google for behaving in precisely this way.  That Bing references Microsoft content just as often as—and frequently even more often than!—Google references its own content strongly suggests that this behavior is a function of procompetitive product differentiation, and not abuse of market power.  But I’ll save an in-depth analysis of this issue for my next post, where I’ll also discuss whether any of the results reported in this series of posts support anticompetitive foreclosure theories or otherwise suggest antitrust intervention is warranted.

How Do Search Engines Rank Their Own Content?

Examining Search Engine “Bias” on Google

Examining Search Engine “Bias” on Bing

A Closer Look at Google v. Bing

Former TOTM blog symposium participant Joshua Gans (visiting Microsoft Research) has a post at TAP on l’affair hiybbprqag, about which I blogged previously here.

Gans notes, as I did, that Microsoft is not engaged in wholesale copying of Google’s search results, even though doing so would be technologically feasible.  But Gans goes on to draw a normative conclusion:

Let’s start with “imitation,” “copying” and its stronger variants of “plagiarism” and “cheating.” Had Bing wanted to do this and directly map Google’s search results onto its own, it could have done it. It could have set up programs to enter terms in Google and skimmed off the results and then used them directly. And I think we can all agree that that is wrong. Why? Two reasons. First, if Google has invested to produce those results, if others can just hang off them and copy it, Google’s may not earn the return on its efforts it should do. Second, if Bing were doing this and representing itself as a different kind of search, then that misrepresentation would be misleading. Thus, imitation reduces Google’s reward for innovation while adding no value in terms of diversity.

His first reason why this would be wrong is . . . silly.  I mean, I don’t want to get into a moral debate, but since when is it wrong to engage in activity that “may” hamper another firm’s ability to earn the return on its effort that it “should” (whatever “should” means here)?  I always thought that was called “competition” and we encouraged it.  As I noted the other day, competition via imitation is an important part of Schumpeterian capitalism.  To claim that reducing another company’s profits via imitation is wrong, but doing so via innovation is good and noble, is to hang one’s hat on a distinction that does not really exist.

The second argument, that doing so would amount to misrepresentation, is possible, but I’m sure if Microsoft were actually just copying Google’s results their representations would look different than they do now and the problem would probably not exist, so this claim is speculative, at best.

Now, regardless, I doubt it would be profitable for Microsoft to copy Google wholesale, and this is basically just a red herring (as Gans understands–he goes on to discuss the more “innocuous” imitation at issue).  While I think Gans’ claims that it would be “wrong” are just hand waiving, I am confident it would be “wrong” from the point of view of Microsoft’s bottom line–or else they would already be doing it.  In this context, that would seem to be the only standard that matters, unless there were a legal basis for the claim.

On this score, Gans points us to Shane Greenstein (Kellogg).  Greenstein writes:

Let’s start with a weak standard, the law. Legally speaking, imitation is allowed so long as a firm does not violate laws governing patents, copyright, or trade secrets. Patents obviously do not apply to this situation, and neither does copyright  because Google does not get a copyright on a search result. It also does not appear as if Googles trade secrets were violated. So, generally speaking, it does not appear as if any law has been broken.

This is all well and good, but Greenstein goes on to engage in his own casual moralizing, and his comments are worth reproducing (imitating?) at some length:

The norms of rivalry

There is nothing wrong with one retailer walking through a rival’s shop and getting ideas for what to do. There is really nothing wrong with a designer of a piece of electronic equipment buying a rival’s product and studying it in order to get new ideas for a  better design.

In the offline world, such intimate familiarity with a rival’s users and their transactions would be uncomfortable. It would seem like an intrusion on the transaction between user and supplier. Why is it permissible in the online world? Why is there any confusion about this being an intrusion in the online world? Why isn’t Microsoft’s behavior seen — cut and dry — as an intrusion?

That is what bothers me about Bing’s behavior. There is nothing wrong with them observing users, but they are doing more than just that. They are observing their rival’s transaction with users. And learning from it. In other contexts that would not be allowed without explicit permission of both parties — both user and supplier.

Moreover, one party does not like it in this case, as they claim the transaction with users as something they have a right to govern and keep to themselves. There is some merit in that claim.

In most contexts it seems like the supplier’s wishes should be respected. Why not online? (emphasis mine)

Where on Earth do these moral standards come from?  In what way is it not “allowed” (whatever that means here) for a firm to observe and learn from a rival’s transactions with users?  I can see why the rival would prefer it to be otherwise, of course, but so what?  They would also prefer to eradicate their meddlesome rival entirely, if possible (hence Microsoft’s considerable engagement with antitrust authorities concerning Google’s business), but we hardly elevate such desires to the realm of the moral.

What I find most troublesome is the controlling, regulatory mindset implicit in these analyses.  Here’s Gans again:

Outright imitation of this type should be prohibited but what do we call some more innocuous types? Just look at how the look and feel of the iPhone has been adopted by some mobile software developers just as the consumer success of graphic based interfaces did in an earlier time. This certainly reduces Apple’s reward for its innovations but the hit on diversity is murkier because while some features are common, competitors have tried to differentiate themselves. So this is not imitation but it is something more common, leveraging without compensation and how you feel about it depends on just how much reward you think pioneers should receive.

It is usually politicians and not economists (other than politico-economists like Krugman) who think they have a handle on–and an obligation to do something about–things like “how much reward . . .pioneers should receive.”  I would have thought the obvious answer to the question would be either “the optimal amount, but good luck knowing what that is or expecting to find it in the real world,” or else, for the Second Best, “whatever the market gives them.”  The implication that there is some moral standard appreciable by human mortals, or even human economists, is a recipe for disaster.

One of my favorite stories in the ongoing saga over the regulation (and thus the future) of Internet search emerged earlier this week with claims by Google that Microsoft has been copying its answers–using Google search results to bolster the relevance of its own results for certain search terms.  The full story from Internet search journalist extraordinaire, Danny Sullivan, is here, with a follow up discussing Microsoft’s response here.  The New York Times is also on the case with some interesting comments from a former Googler that feed nicely into the Schumpeterian competition angle (discussed below).  And Microsoft consultant (“though on matters unrelated to issues discussed here”)  and Harvard Business prof Ben Edelman coincidentally echoes precisely Microsoft’s response in a blog post here.

What I find so great about this story is how it seems to resolve one of the most significant strands of the ongoing debate–although it does so, from Microsoft’s point of view, unintentionally, to be sure.

Here’s what I mean.  Back when Microsoft first started being publicly identified as a significant instigator of regulatory and antitrust attention paid to Google, the company, via its chief competition counsel, Dave Heiner, defended its stance in large part on the following ground:

All of this is quite important because search is so central to how people navigate the Internet, and because advertising is the main monetization mechanism for a wide range of Web sites and Web services. Both search and online advertising are increasingly controlled by a single firm, Google. That can be a problem because Google’s business is helped along by significant network effects (just like the PC operating system business). Search engine algorithms “learn” by observing how users interact with search results. Google’s algorithms learn less common search terms better than others because many more people are conducting searches on these terms on Google.

These and other network effects make it hard for competing search engines to catch up. Microsoft’s well-received Bing search engine is addressing this challenge by offering innovations in areas that are less dependent on volume. But Bing needs to gain volume too, in order to increase the relevance of search results for less common search terms. That is why Microsoft and Yahoo! are combining their search volumes. And that is why we are concerned about Google business practices that tend to lock in publishers and advertisers and make it harder for Microsoft to gain search volume. (emphasis added).

Claims of “network effects” “increasing returns to scale” and the absence of “minimum viable scale” for competitors run rampant (and unsupported) in the various cases against Google.  The TradeComet complaint, for example, claims that

[t]he primary barrier to entry facing vertical search websites is the inability to draw enough search traffic to reach the critical mass necessary to become independently sustainable.

But now we discover (what we should have known all along) that “learning by doing” is not the only way to obtain the data necessary to generate relevant search results: “Learning by copying” works, as well.  And there’s nothing wrong with it–in fact, the very process of Schumpeterian creative destruction assumes imitation.

As Armen Alchian notes in describing his evolutionary process of competition,

Neither perfect knowledge of the past nor complete awareness of the current state of the arts gives sufficient foresight to indicate profitable action . . . [and] the pervasive effects of uncertainty prevent the ascertainment of actions which are supposed to be optimal in achieving profits.  Now the consequence of this is that modes of behavior replace optimum equilibrium conditions as guiding rules of action. First, wherever successful enterprises are observed, the elements common to these observable successes will be associated with success and copied by others in their pursuit of profits or success. “Nothing succeeds like success.”

So on the one hand, I find the hand wringing about Microsoft’s “copying” Google’s results to be completely misplaced–just as the pejorative connotations of “embrace and extend” deployed against Microsoft itself when it was the target of this sort of scrutiny were bogus.  But, at the same time, I see this dynamic essentially decimating Microsoft’s (and others’) claims that Google has an unassailable position because no competitor can ever hope to match its size, and thus its access to information essential to the quality of search results, particularly when it comes to so-called “long-tail” search terms.

Long-tail search terms are queries that are extremely rare and, thus, for which there is little user history (information about which results searchers found relevant and clicked on) to guide future search results.  As Ben Edelman writes in his blog post (linked above) on this issue (trotting out, even while implicitly undercutting, the “minimum viable scale” canard):

Of course the reality is that Google’s high market share means Google gets far more searches than any other search engine. And Google’s popularity gives it a real advantage: For an obscure search term that gets 100 searches per month at Google, Bing might get just five or 10. Also, for more popular terms, Google can slice its data into smaller groups — which results are most useful to people from Boston versus New York, which results are best during the day versus at night, and so forth. So Google is far better equipped to figure out what results users favor and to tailor its listings accordingly. Meanwhile, Microsoft needs additional data, such as Toolbar and Related Sites data, to attempt to improve its results in a similar way.

But of course the “additional data” that Microsoft has access to here is, to a large extent, the same data that Google has.  Although Danny Sullivan’s follow up story (also linked above) suggests that Bing doesn’t do all it could to make use of Google’s data (for example, Bing does not, it seems, copy Google search results wholesale, nor does it use user behavior as extensively as it could (by, for example, seeing searches in Google and then logging the next page visited, which would give Bing a pretty good idea which sites in Google’s results users found most relevant)), it doesn’t change the fundamental fact that Microsoft and other search engines can overcome a significant amount of the so-called barrier to entry afforded by Google’s impressive scale by simply imitating much of what Google does (and, one hopes, also innovating enough to offer something better).

Perhaps Google is “better equipped to figure out what users favor.”  But it seems to me that only a trivial amount of this advantage is plausibly attributable to Google’s scale instead of its engineering and innovation.  The fact that Microsoft can (because of its own impressive scale in various markets) and does take advantage of accessible data to benefit indirectly from Google’s own prowess in search is a testament to the irrelevance of these unfortunately-pervasive scale and network effect arguments.


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Promoting Social Dialogue in the Mining Sector in the State of Pará, Brazil

Noelia Cornejo, Claire Kells, Tania Ortiz de Zuñiga, Stacey Roen, Brandon Thompson

In 2006 Instituto Observatório Social (IOS) and Centro de Estudos das Negociações Internacionais (CAENI) embarked on a research and field project to study the labor situation as well as the environmental impact of five aluminum companies in the north of Brazil. While preliminary findings indicated that companies adhered to labor laws and regulations and invested in technological improvements in order to tackle environmental issues, there remained significant resource inequalities across stakeholders in the aluminum value chain. Nevertheless, both local government and civil society often remained acquiescent to the status quo established by companies. IOS and CAENI identified a need for further research on the impact of mining and corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices on local development and sustainability issues, as well as Brazil’s role in the global aluminum value chain. They invited a team of students from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) to research the feasibility of a multi-stakeholder engagement or social dialogue, by studying and analyzing the aluminum value chain and performing a stakeholder mapping in the affected areas.

The team traveled to Brazil in January, conducting interviews in São Paulo, Belém and Barcarena, with companies, unions, governmental authorities, communities and civil society organizations. Preliminary findings indicated a complex and intricate web of relations, further complicated by political, historical and cultural factors. A second field trip took place in March 2009, to refine the research and fill the existing gaps in the data, going into more depth regarding the involvement of government entities and local or regional NGOs.

The complexity of actors and issues, as well as the observed previous efforts to establish a stakeholder dialogue – which systematically failed to tackle socio-economic issues – demanded that the team move beyond traditional approaches. The team conducted a stakeholder mapping, followed by an analysis based upon relations between stakeholders, looking at challenges and opportunities derived from those relationships.

The team found that companies continued to use paternalistic corporate responsibility models from the 1970s that reinforce a cycle of dependency. This dependency on the companies for the provisions of social services has rendered the local community unorganized, voiceless and weak. The only organizations in the community with a voice are the labor unions, which have settled on solely performing social and financial activities that attack symptoms, not causes of social ills. In favor of the promotion of economic growth through private investments, government at local and state levels have for the most part failed to enforce regulations, conceding implementation of public services to the companies. Licensing and monitoring responsibility is not explicitly distinguished among different levels of government, leading to confusion and lack of accountability. Civil society organizations with a broader scope and resources are integral to providing representation to voiceless communities, liaising with companies and advancing the team’s recommendations for social dialogue.

From this analysis of the power structure, the team understood that no formal dialogue could be undertaken with the current inequalities between actors.

Thus, the team proposed a series of activities aiming at increasing leverage among stakeholders. Three goals have been identified and developed through a series of interventions:

  1. Building civil society capacity, to ensure their concerns are considered and reflected in regulations and decisions both at company and government level;
  2. Enhancing elected authorities’ accountability, to ensure that they effectively protect the rights of communities;
  3. Ensuring that companies include socio-economic impacts in their decision-making process by moving past a philanthropic CSR model to engaging in integral and sustainable relations within their direct and indirect spheres of influence.

IOS/CAENI can act as a monitor of a social dialogue across the aluminum value chain in Brazil, and as such, help stakeholders to identify opportunities to maximize positive externalities across the aluminum value chain, while ensuring sustainable development. IOS/CAENI will be essential in bridging the informational gap existing between local and global networks, taking full advantage of the international projection of the aluminum value chain. Finally, the team hopes the different stakeholders will use this report as a strategy for building stakeholder engagement into their own analysis.

Full Text: PDF


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image sample Home fashion describes a group of various yet related projects that involve turning an interior space into an effective setting for the range of human activities that are to take place there. An interior designer is someone who conducts such projects. Interior design is a multifaceted profession that includes conceptual development, liaising with the stakeholders of a project and the management and execution of the design. home fashion as carried out in the US is an almost entirely different practice to that carried out in the UK. What follows relates mainly to the US.

home fashion specialties in the US

Residential design is the design of the interior of private residences. As this type design is very specific for individual situations, the needs and wants of the individual are paramount in this area of Interior Design. The interior designer may work on the project from the initial planning stage or may work on the remodelling of an existing structure.

Interior design(home fashion) profession history in the USA

In ancient India, architects used to work as interior designers. This can be seen from the references of Vishwakarma the architect - one of the Gods in Indian mythology. Additionally, the sculptures depecting ancient texts, events are seen in palaces built in 17th century India.  Read more


How to Dance on Beat

Loretta: Hi, everybody. My name is Loretta and this is my sister, Ava. We’re the Double-Time Twins, and today we’re going to teach you how to dance on beat. So the first thing you should remember when you do this is basically just listen to the music and get into the groove of the music. The easiest thing you could do is clap. So when you hear your instructor or someone talk . . .

Ava: Wait. When you hear your instructor, or if you’re ever taking class and they count to eight, that’s what they’re counting. They’re counting the beat. So they go, "One, two, three, four . . ."

Loretta: They’re doing that to help you so you can dance on beat.

Ava: On beat.

Loretta: So I can do that, and Ava, you could do a dance move so they could see what it’s like to dance on beat.

Ava: Okay.


Prosecutors Are Rewarded for Convictions, Not Justice

Law is supposed to be impartial, with a presumption of innocence. Unfortunately, as we learned from the case of the three former Duke lacrosse players who were exonerated after being indicted last year on charges of rape and sexual assault, the criminal justice system is all too often used to advance political agendas at the expense of justice.

“This entire experience has opened my eyes to the tragic world of injustice I never knew existed,” said wrongfully accused student Reade Seligmann after the 395-day ordeal. “If it is possible for law enforcement officials to systematically railroad us with no evidence whatsoever, it is frightening to think what they could do to those who do not have the resources to defend themselves.” What a sad, but true, statement.

Although many want to characterize District Attorney Michael Nifong, who pursued the charges, as a rogue prosecutor, we should examine why he acted as he did and why such a wrongful prosecution could go on as long as it did.

The answer stems from the incentives created by our highly politicized legal system, which rewards law enforcement officials for high conviction rates, rather than meting out justice. Indeed, in high-profile cases, law enforcement officials frequently use a conviction to advance their career.

But why is law enforcement so political, and has it always been this way?

The answer to the second question is no.

Several hundred years ago in England, law enforcement was a private system that included dispute resolution and bore a close resemblance to modern arbitration and mediation.

The system was very different from today’s adversarial system of criminal prosecution. When an injustice occurred, people would bring their dispute to private informal courts where the victim was compensated by the perpetrator. Private law enforcement worked quite well until the Normans invaded England and the government decided to use the system to collect revenue, passing laws prohibiting private restitution and requiring all compensation be made to the king.

Eventually, when parties could no longer resolve disputes on their own, the system of private law enforcement disappeared. Only later did theorists develop arguments justifying why a government monopoly over law enforcement is allegedly necessary.

Today, most people believe the state needs to provide law enforcement and that nongovernment alternatives would be unfair or ineffective. But the historical record in England, as well as in ancient Ireland and ancient Iceland, shows that nongovernment law enforcement agencies existed for hundreds of years.

Modern America need not turn back the clock to adopt the system of England’s long-ago past, but we might consider how today’s government monopoly could be replaced or supplemented by private institutions and mechanisms.

It’s already happening, of course. From private police forces and security guards to private arbitration institutions, Americans are increasingly looking for alternatives to the government law-enforcement monopoly. In Cincinnati, for example, the Queen City Private Police and Queen City Private Patrol provide security for businesses, schools and special events, and police escorts for funerals. In Philadelphia, Wackenhut Corp. guards the Liberty Bell, one of America’s most important national treasures.

Imagine if Duke University controlled law enforcement in the area around the university, rather than the city, county and local court system. It’s hard to imagine any private organization behaving as unjustly as the government did in this case. The university would have been guided in its behavior not only by the pursuit of justice and truth, certainly the top considerations, but also by the impact of the allegations on all of its constituencies—students, alumni, faculty the athletic community, donors and its neighbors in Durham.

Rather than the circus atmosphere that prevailed under prosecutor Nifong, who was running for re-election, we probably would have seen a sober effort to arrive at the truth and mete out justice as warranted.

Government monopolies are not responsive to consumer needs in other areas, so we should not expect them to be responsive in the area of police and courts.

Luckily, nongovernment alternatives do exist. The more we move away from a government monopoly, the less we are likely to see repeat tragedies such as the wrongful prosecution of the Duke lacrosse players.

Edward P. Stringham is Research Fellow at the Independent Institute; Associate Professor of Business Economics in the Area of Energy, Economics and Law in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University; and editor of the Independent Institute book Anarchy and the Law: The Political Economy of Choice.


Loire Wine Tours, Bed And Breakfast

La Grande Maison Loire - Saumur France

The History

Find tranquility at La Grande Maison but you will also discover it is fascinating to visit.  Originally a fortified farm and wine estate in the 17th century.

pigeontower pigeonniere

“How do you say "awesome" in French?”

tunnels winecave

La Grande Maison d'Arthenay, rue de la Cerisaie, Arthenay, Les Verchers Sur Layon, SAUMUR 49700 FRANCE.  Email : resv@lagrandemaison.net

Aubert Du Petit-Thouars (Aristide's brother) was also born at Chateau Boumois and was obviously more of a pacifist than Aristide specialising in botany and a herbist of 2,000 exotic plants. He became Director of La Pepiniere du Route a Paris and was a member of the Academy of Sciences. It is said that he also sailed with his brother to Botany Bay in his exploration of plant life.

The pigeon tower "fuye" at La Grande Maison d’Arthenay is not on the scale of that at Chateau Boumois or Chateau de Brezé but is a rare example of a “fuye” sous sol. Extending underground by some 10 metres and 7 metres above ground. The tunnel from the “fuye” leads to a spectacular 14th century wine cave where you can still see the remains of the old wine press and barrels. Many of the other tunnels have the names and dates of soldiers carved out in the tuffeau walls where they hid during the 1st World War. The site is remarkable with it's sous terrain caves and tunnels and speak of the historical significance of the property in the 17th Century when permission needed to be granted from the king to build a "fuye" and was therefore considered a status symbol in it's day.


We are seeking a five (5) year non-recurring revenue override referendum in the amount of $300,000 per year.
Public informational meeting March 20 at 7:00pm in high school gym.
Wisconsin Schools have been under “Revenue Limits” for over 20 years. Revenue limits are driven by membership count, general aid, computer aid, general tax levy, non-referendum debt, and capital projects. Each school is given a one page “Revenue Limit Worksheet” to fill out each year with strict preloaded information. Schools simply fill in their membership numbers, aids, and levy funds to arrive at their limits. The calculation results are what the district has to work with and the Board must regulate expenditures to fit within this limit. Until budget year 2011-12 there was an allowable increase each year to cover increased costs of operation. This increase was very close to the CPI (consumer price index) for inflation. During the 2011-12 year the allowable increase per student was changed to a negative ($520.08) per student. Because Luck has always been considered a “low spending” district by the DPI our reduction was reduced to ($456.03) per student. This amounted to our overall revenue decrease of ($236,223.54) during budget year 2011-12. During the same budget year the state reduced our state aid by $210,451.00.

Examples of Revenue Override Referendums in Local Schools

 District     Amount Type Year

$1,000,000Recurring 2006-Current
Barron $790,000Non-Recurring 2012-2017

$200,000/$300,000 School Year 2012 and 2014
Prairie Farm $150,000 Non-Recurring 2006-2011
Siren$125,000/$250,000 Non-Recurring 99-04/04-09
Turtle Lake$125,000 to $600,000 School Year 2012/2016

$900,000 Recurring 2006-Current

A total of 33 school districts are seeking approval for a revenue override during this year's February and April elections for a total of $33,755,000.  According to the DPI referenda report there have been 30 successful revenue overrides in CESA 11 (made up of local schools) from 1990-2013.


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Vicksburg in The Civil War

May 22, 1863 - Jul 4, 1863

All through traffic on the Mississippi River was controlled by the Confederate fortress at Vicksburg, Mississippi.  Situated atop seemingly insurmountable cliffs, the fort and its big guns determined whose men and supplies flowed down the critical water highway.

So well defended by nature and big guns was the fort that Union General Ulysses S. Grant spent more time trying to figure out how to circumvent the fort than attack it. Several schemes involving canals, dredges, and levees were explored; if a new ditch could be dug, Vicksburg could be avoided and Northern military transports could work their way down Ol’ Muddy. But none of these schemes panned out.  Grant had no choice but to take Vicksburg if he were to take the Mississippi. And perhaps where modern technology had failed, ancient military tactics could succeed.

Grant began by marching his army down the western bank of the Mississippi well past Vicksburg located on the eastern bank.  To cross the river he had no other choice but to order his transport boats to parallel his movement—that is, float past the fort and its deadly accurate guns.  Those ships that made it, ferried Grant and his men to the Vicksburg side of the river about 25 miles south of the fort.

Next, Grant marched 50 miles east to Jackson, the state capital, to establish control over the supplies that might be used to restock Vicksburg.  For a time, the Confederate commander at Vicksburg, John C. Pemberton, was confused by Grant’s movements and distracted by some diversionary raids order by Grant and led by Col. Benjamin Grierson.  But soon enough, Pemberton figured out what was up –Grant was planning to lay siege to his fortress.  Caught in something of a Catch-22—afraid to leave Vicksburg undefended but anxious to support the small army engaged in delaying Grant’s progress, Pemberton sent out a small force to help intercept the Union general.  But his desperate gambit failed.  Pemberton was forced to retreat to the heavily barricaded city with Grant hot on his heels.

Grant, a hard charger by nature, initially tried take the fort by storm, first on 19 May and then again three days later.  But after taking heavy casualties, he settled in for a long siege. His 75,000 men easily contained the 30,000 Pemberton had entrenched within the city-fort. Grant’s troops also proved sufficient to fend off General Joe Johnston’s desperate attempt to break Grant’s stranglehold by attacking from the east.

Without reinforcements and without supplies, Pemberton's army and the civilian population of the city faced terrible hardships. To escape the barrage let loose by Union gunboats hovering outside, locals hid in caves.  To fend off starvation, they ate anything they could find—by late June all the army’s mules had been stewed.  Yet Grant’s grip was relentless, his siege could not be broken.  On 4 July 1863—four score and seven years after the Declaration of Independence was read—and one day after Pickett’s charge sent the Confederacy to a devastating defeat at Gettysburg—Pemberton surrendered Vicksburg to Grant. The North now controlled the Mississippi.

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