Filing a Comment, Then Indexing Who Else Did:
A Note on Docket ATR-2026-0001
On February 23, 2026, the DOJ Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission (”FTC”) published a joint press release announcing a public inquiry on competitor collaborations. The 2000 Antitrust Guidelines for Collaborations Among Competitors had been withdrawn in December 2024 on a 3-2 vote, with Commissioners Ferguson and Holyoak dissenting on the ground that withdrawal without replacement guidance produces enforcement uncertainty rather than resolving it. The inquiry was the agencies’ vehicle for filling that gap.
The comment period closed May 21, 2026. I filed. Then I got curious about who else did.
Part One: What I Filed, and Why
The press release asked three questions. What topics would benefit from additional guidance, including joint licensing arrangements? What new technologies and business models warrant clarity? What significant legal, economic, or technological developments should inform any revision?
All three questions converge on the same domain: voluntary standards development and the standards-essential patent (”SEP”) licensing framework that makes it commercially viable. That convergence is not accidental. The standards ecosystem sits at the intersection of competitor collaboration, intellectual property licensing, and technology deployment at scale. It is precisely where updated antitrust guidance will have the most consequential effects.
My comment made six arguments.
The first is foundational. Voluntary, private-sector standards development through bodies such as the Third Generation Partnership Project (”3GPP”), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (”IEEE”), and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (”ETSI”) is among the most pro-competitive forms of competitor collaboration in the modern economy. The 3GPP process has, over more than 25 years, brought hundreds of competing firms together to reach technical consensus on 3G, 4G, 5G, and now 6G. Boston Consulting Group data show that 5G-enabled applications have already generated over $1 trillion in global economic impact, with cumulative value projected at $18.2 trillion by 2035. These outcomes did not happen despite competitor collaboration. They happened because of it. Any guidance that treats standards participation as presumptively suspect will erode the framework that produced them.
The FRAND declaration is an irrevocable unilateral undertaking under French law, the governing law of the ETSI intellectual property rights policy. A patent holder who declares under ETSI's policy is "prepared to grant" a license on FRAND terms. That language is operative, not prefatory. It records a continuously maintained state of readiness. It does not compel a grant, and it does not authorize an implementer to deploy a patented technology without a negotiated license. The bilateral framework of mutual obligations runs in both directions: the declarant commits to license on reasonable terms, and the implementer commits to negotiate in good faith and take a license before deploying. Guidance that treats the FRAND commitment as primarily an access guarantee, and ignores the reciprocal obligation on implementers, misreads the framework and will produce exactly the holdout dynamic the empirical record has documented.
The third argument is the one that regulatory commentary has most consistently underdeveloped: implementer holdout. For two decades, the dominant concern in policy discussions has been patent hold-up by SEP holders. The empirical record has not confirmed it. Bowman Heiden and Justus Baron, writing in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology in 2024, found the opposite: a royalty gap of $7 to $28 billion annually as of 2021, representing systematic undercompensation of SEP holders attributable in significant part to implementer holdout. Anne Layne-Farrar’s 2014 survey of 15 years of economic literature for the OECD reached the same conclusion from a different angle: empirical studies had not shown hold-up to be a common problem. Kirti Gupta and Urska Petrovčič documented systemic holdout behavior through comprehensive court case analysis published in the Berkeley Technology Law Journal. Guidance premised on a theory the data have not confirmed will produce over-deterrence without any offsetting benefit.
The fourth argument draws on the IEEE’s experience after the DOJ’s 2015 Business Review Letter as a natural experiment. Following the BRL’s endorsement of the revised IEEE intellectual property rights policy, new positive letters of assurance for 802.11 Wi-Fi standards dropped 90 percent. Negative letters reached an all-time high in 2016. In September 2022, IEEE rescinded the core provisions, including those restricting injunctive relief. The sequence is about as close to a controlled test of the interventionist hypothesis as the standards policy record provides. The result was unambiguous. Updated guidance should account for it.
The fifth argument addresses joint licensing and patent pools specifically, because the agencies called them out by name as a topic warranting guidance. Well-designed patent pools and platforms that aggregate SEP holders and offer portfolio licenses reduce transaction costs, increase access for smaller implementers, and facilitate licensing where portfolios are fragmented. They have historically been recognized as pro-competitive. Updated guidance should reaffirm that recognition and address concerns through transparent governance requirements rather than presumptive suspicion.
The sixth argument connects the guidance question to national technology strategy. President Trump stated in December 2025 that 6G will be foundational to U.S. national security and pivotal to the development of artificial intelligence. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz has warned that failure to lead in 6G would allow Huawei to create the backbone, handicapping U.S. efforts in AI, quantum, and semiconductors. BCG documents that China, South Korea, and India have each articulated explicit national targets for 6G standard-related patent shares. Guidance that raises the cost of enforcing SEP rights will disproportionately disadvantage the smaller innovators and startups whose R&D intensity makes standards leadership possible in the first place. Standards leadership and IP enforcement are not in tension. They are complementary elements of the same policy framework.
The comment closed with a structural point. The December 2024 withdrawal left businesses engaged in standards development and SEP licensing without any surviving framework document. The 2000 guidelines are gone. The 1995 IP licensing guidelines on which they relied are also withdrawn. The inquiry is the opportunity to fill that gap with guidance grounded in what the empirical record actually shows, rather than two decades of theoretical concerns the data have not confirmed.
Part Two: Who Else Filed, and How I Found Out
After the deadline passed, I wanted to see the full comment record. The answer is technically public. Getting to it is another matter.
Regulations.gov lists comments individually. There is no bulk export, no docket-level CSV, and no obvious path to a structured index of who filed and where their submissions live. For a practitioner who wants to survey the record before the agencies act on it, the portal is nominally open and practically clunky.
A short Python script changes that.
The Regulations.gov REST API v4 is free to access with an api.data.gov key, passed via an X-Api-Key header and kept in a .env file. The architecture has one non-obvious wrinkle that cost some time to work out. The /comments endpoint has no docket filter. You cannot query directly by docket ID. Instead, you fetch the docket’s documents first, read each document’s internal objectId, then query comments filtered by that ID, paginating through the results. For each comment in the list view, a second detail call is required to retrieve the submitter’s name and any attachment PDF links, because those fields do not appear in the list response.
The output is a CSV: one row per comment, with submitter name, comment ID, a direct Regulations.gov link to the comment, and a direct link to any PDF attachment. For docket ATR-2026-0001, that produced 100 comments and 107 rows. A handful of filers submitted multiple PDFs.
From there, a second script generates a landscape PDF of the same table, with clickable links, a repeating header row, and a translucent diagonal watermark. That PDF is what I attached to the LinkedIn post that preceded this article.
The build took a single Claude Code session, including debugging a transient API error on the detail call loop and getting the watermark opacity to render correctly. The architectural decisions, including the scope choice to index the record without downloading or summarizing any filing, were deliberate human calls made before the session started. The code executed them.
The scope choice deserves a word. The script is informational. It lists who commented and links their submissions. It does not download filings, summarize arguments, or take any position on the rulemaking. A neutral index of the public record is useful to everyone regardless of where they stand on the substance. Building editorial selection into the tool would have narrowed its utility and raised questions about what was left out. A clean index leaves those judgments to the reader.
The script is reusable. Swap the docket ID and it works for any Regulations.gov proceeding. The code is at github.com/theharlans/standards-at-risk.
A closing observation
One hundred comments on a DOJ antitrust inquiry is a real record. The agencies asked three specific questions and got substantive responses from practitioners, academics, trade associations, and firms across the technology sector. Whether the resulting guidance reflects the weight of that record, or selects from it, is the question worth watching.
My comment argued that the empirical case for treating SEP licensing as a presumptive antitrust risk has never been made, that implementer holdout is the underweighted market failure in this domain, and that guidance calibrated to theoretical harms will produce real deterrence of the R&D investment and standards collaboration the agencies say they want to encourage.
The comment is in the record. The index of who else filed is now public. The next move belongs to the agencies.
Jim Harlan is a standards and SEP licensing practitioner and the author of Standards at Risk.