The Importance of History to the Design of Competition Policy Strategy: The Federal Trade Commission and Intellectual Property Law

The Article's framework for considering the value of history in shaping strategy is the effort of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to apply its competition policy powers to issues involving intellectual property (IP). The Article chooses the example of intellectual property because of its importance to the modern work of the FTC and the increasingly significant place that intellectual property and, more generally, technology-driven innovation hold in the field of competition policy. To provide context for the discussion, Part II of the Article presents a profile of the FTC's modern competition policy initiatives concerning intellectual property. Part III then reviews how, since the major reforms of the FTC in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Commission has sought to improve the agency's performance by studying the past.

Part IV uses the most recent FTC initiatives, discussed in Part II, along with the Commission's past experience with historically oriented research, discussed in Part III, to suggest prescriptions about how the FTC and other competition authorities can use history to develop effective competition policy strategies.