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FCC Commissioner Rosenworcel penned an article this week on the doublespeak coming out of the current administration with respect to trade and telecom policy. On one hand, she argues, the administration has proclaimed 5G to be an essential part of our future commercial and defense interests. But, she tells us, the administration has, on the other hand, imposed tariffs on Chinese products that are important for the development of 5G infrastructure, thereby raising the costs of roll-out. This is a sound critique: regardless where one stands on the reasonableness of tariffs, they unquestionably raise the prices of goods on which they are placed, and raising the price of inputs to the 5G ecosystem can only slow down the pace at which 5G technology is deployed.

Unfortunately, Commissioner Rosenworcel’s fervor for advocating the need to reduce the costs of 5G deployment seems animated by the courageous act of a Democratic commissioner decrying the policies of a Republican President and is limited to a context where her voice lacks any power to actually affect policy. Even as she decries trade barriers that would incrementally increase the costs of imported communications hardware, she staunchly opposes FCC proposals that would dramatically reduce the cost of deploying next generation networks.

Given the opportunity to reduce the costs of 5G deployment by a factor far more significant than that by which tariffs will increase them, her preferred role as Democratic commissioner is that of resistance fighter. She acknowledges that “we will need 800,000 of these small cells to stay competitive in 5G” — a number significantly above the “the roughly 280,000 traditional cell towers needed to blanket the nation with 4G”.  Yet, when she has had the opportunity to join the Commission on speeding deployment, she has instead dissented. Party over policy.

In this year’s “Historical Preservation” Order, for example, the Commission voted to expedite deployment on non-Tribal lands, and to exempt small cell deployments from certain onerous review processes under both the National Historic Preservation Act and the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. Commissioner Rosenworcel dissented from the Order, claiming that that the FCC has “long-standing duties to consult with Tribes before implementing any regulation or policy that will significantly or uniquely affect Tribal governments, their land, or their resources.” Never mind that the FCC engaged in extensive consultation with Tribal governments prior to enacting this Order.

Indeed, in adopting the Order, the Commission found that the Order did nothing to disturb deployment on Tribal lands at all, and affected only the ability of Tribal authorities to reach beyond their borders to require fees and lengthy reviews for small cells on lands in which Tribes could claim merely an “interest.”

According to the Order, the average number of Tribal authorities seeking to review wireless deployments in a given geographic area nearly doubled between 2008 and 2017. During the same period, commenters consistently noted that the fees charged by Tribal authorities for review of deployments increased dramatically.

One environmental consultant noted that fees for projects that he was involved with increased from an average of $2,000.00 in 2011 to $11,450.00 in 2017. Verizon’s fees are $2,500.00 per small cell site just for Tribal review. Of the 8,100 requests that Verizon submitted for tribal review between 2012 and 2015, just 29 ( 0.3%) resulted in a finding that there would be an adverse effect on tribal historic properties. That means that Verizon paid over $20 million to Tribal authorities over that period for historic reviews that resulted in statistically nil action. Along the same lines, Sprint’s fees are so high that it estimates that “it could construct 13,408 new sites for what 10,000 sites currently cost.”

In other words, Tribal review practices — of deployments not on Tribal land — impose a substantial tariff upon 5G deployment, increasing its cost and slowing its pace.

There is a similar story in the Commission’s adoption of, and Commissioner Rosenworcel’s partial dissent from, the recent Wireless Infrastructure Order.  Although Commissioner Rosenworcel offered many helpful suggestions (for instance, endorsing the OTARD proposal that Brent Skorup has championed) and nodded to the power of the market to solve many problems, she also dissented on central parts of the Order. Her dissent shows an unfortunate concern for provincial, political interests and places those interests above the Commission’s mission of ensuring timely deployment of advanced wireless communication capabilities to all Americans.

Commissioner Rosenworcel’s concern about the Wireless Infrastructure Order is that it would prevent state and local governments from imposing fees sufficient to recover costs incurred by the government to support wireless deployments by private enterprise, or from imposing aesthetic requirements on those deployments. Stated this way, her objections seem almost reasonable: surely local government should be able to recover the costs they incur in facilitating private enterprise; and surely local government has an interest in ensuring that private actors respect the aesthetic interests of the communities in which they build infrastructure.

The problem for Commissioner Rosenworcel is that the Order explicitly takes these concerns into account:

[W]e provide guidance on whether and in what circumstances aesthetic requirements violate the Act. This will help localities develop and implement lawful rules, enable providers to comply with these requirements, and facilitate the resolution of disputes. We conclude that aesthetics requirements are not preempted if they are (1) reasonable, (2) no more burdensome than those applied to other types of infrastructure deployments, and (3) objective and published in advance

It neither prohibits localities from recovering costs nor imposing aesthetic requirements. Rather, it requires merely that those costs and requirements be reasonable. The purpose of the Order isn’t to restrict localities from engaging in reasonable conduct; it is to prohibit them from engaging in unreasonable, costly conduct, while providing guidance as to what cost recovery and aesthetic considerations are reasonable (and therefore permissible).

The reality is that localities have a long history of using cost recovery — and especially “soft” or subjective requirements such as aesthetics — to extract significant rents from communications providers. In the 1980s this slowed the deployment and increased the costs of cable television. In the 2000s this slowed the deployment and increase the cost of of fiber-based Internet service. Today this is slowing the deployment and increasing the costs of advanced wireless services. And like any tax — or tariff — the cost is ultimately borne by consumers.

Although we are broadly sympathetic to arguments about local control (and other 10th Amendment-related concerns), the FCC’s goal in the Wireless Infrastructure Order was not to trample upon the autonomy of small municipalities; it was to implement a reasonably predictable permitting process that would facilitate 5G deployment. Those affected would not be the small, local towns attempting to maintain a desirable aesthetic for their downtowns, but large and politically powerful cities like New York City, where the fees per small cell site can be more than $5,000.00 per installation. Such extortionate fees are effectively a tax on smartphone users and others who will utilize 5G for communications. According to the Order, it is estimated that capping these fees would stimulate over $2.4 billion in additional infrastructure buildout, with widespread benefits to consumers and the economy.

Meanwhile, Commissioner Rosenworcel cries “overreach!” “I do not believe the law permits Washington to run roughshod over state and local authority like this,” she said. Her federalist bent is welcome — or it would be, if it weren’t in such stark contrast to her anti-federalist preference for preempting states from establishing rules governing their own internal political institutions when it suits her preferred political objective. We are referring, of course, to Rosenworcel’s support for the previous administration’s FCC’s decision to preempt state laws prohibiting the extension of municipal governments’ broadband systems. The order doing so was plainly illegal from the moment it was passed, as every court that has looked at it has held. That she was ok with. But imposing reasonable federal limits on states’ and localities’ ability to extract political rents by abusing their franchising process is apparently beyond the pale.

Commissioner Rosenworcel is right that the FCC should try to promote market solutions like Brent’s OTARD proposal. And she is also correct in opposing dangerous and destructive tariffs that will increase the cost of telecommunications equipment. Unfortunately, she gets it dead wrong when she supports a stifling regulatory status quo that will surely make it unduly difficult and expensive to deploy next generation networks — not least for those most in need of them. As Chairman Pai noted in his Statement on the Order: “When you raise the cost of deploying wireless infrastructure, it is those who live in areas where the investment case is the most marginal — rural areas or lower-income urban areas — who are most at risk of losing out.”

Reconciling those two positions entails nothing more than pointing to the time-honored Washington tradition of Politics Over Policy. The point is not (entirely) to call out Commissioner Rosenworcel; she’s far from the only person in Washington to make this kind of crass political calculation. In fact, she’s far from the only FCC Commissioner ever to have done so.

One need look no further than the previous FCC Chairman, Tom Wheeler, to see the hypocritical politics of telecommunications policy in action. (And one need look no further than Tom Hazlett’s masterful book, The Political Spectrum: The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology, from Herbert Hoover to the Smartphone to find a catalogue of its long, sordid history).

Indeed, Larry Downes has characterized Wheeler’s reign at the FCC (following a lengthy recounting of all its misadventures) as having left the agency “more partisan than ever”:

The lesson of the spectrum auctions—one right, one wrong, one hanging in the balance—is the lesson writ large for Tom Wheeler’s tenure at the helm of the FCC. While repeating, with decreasing credibility, that his lodestone as Chairman was simply to encourage “competition, competition, completion” and let market forces do the agency’s work for it, the reality, as these examples demonstrate, has been something quite different.

The Wheeler FCC has instead been driven by a dangerous combination of traditional rent-seeking behavior by favored industry clients, potent pressure from radical advocacy groups and their friends in the White House, and a sincere if misguided desire by Wheeler to father the next generation of network technologies, which quickly mutated from sound policy to empty populism even as technology continued on its own unpredictable path.

* * *

And the Chairman’s increasingly autocratic management style has left the agency more political and more partisan than ever, quick to abandon policies based on sound legal, economic and engineering principles in favor of bait-and-switch proceedings almost certain to do more harm than good, if only unintentionally.

The great irony is that, while Commissioner Rosenworcel’s complaints are backed by a legitimate concern that the Commission has waited far too long to take action on spectrum issues, the criticism should properly fall not upon the current Chair, but — you guessed it — his predecessor, Chairman Wheeler (and his predecessor, Julius Genachowski). Of course, in true partisan fashion, Rosenworcel was fawning in her praise for her political ally’s spectrum agenda, lauding it on more than one occasion as going “to infinity and beyond!”

Meanwhile, Rosenworcel has taken virtually every opportunity to chide and castigate Chairman Pai’s efforts to get more spectrum into the marketplace, most often criticizing them as too little, too slow, and too late. Yet from any objective perspective, the current FCC has been addressing spectrum issues at a breakneck pace, as fast, or faster than any prior Commission. As with spectrum, there is an upper limit to the speed at which federal bureaucracy can work, and Chairman Pai has kept the Commission pushed right up against that limit.

It’s a shame Commissioner Rosenworcel prefers to blame Chairman Pai for the problems she had a hand in creating, and President Trump for problems she has no ability to correct. It’s even more a shame that, having an opportunity to address the problems she so often decries — by working to get more spectrum deployed and put into service more quickly and at lower cost to industry and consumers alike — she prefers to dutifully wear the hat of resistance, instead.

But that’s just politics, we suppose. And like any tariff, it makes us all poorer.

The Eleventh Circuit’s LabMD opinion came out last week and has been something of a rorschach test for those of us who study consumer protection law.

Neil Chilson found the result to be a disturbing sign of slippage in Congress’s command that the FTC refrain from basing enforcement on “public policy.” Berin Szóka, on the other hand, saw the ruling as a long-awaited rebuke against the FTC’s expansive notion of its “unfairness” authority. Whereas Daniel Solove and Woodrow Hartzog described the decision as “quite narrow and… far from crippling,” in part, because “[t]he opinion says very little about the FTC’s general power to enforce Section 5 unfairness.” Even among the ICLE crew, our understandings of the opinion reflect our priors, from it being best understood as expressing due process concerns about injury-based enforcement of Section 5, on the one hand, to being about the meaning of Section 5(n)’s causation requirement, on the other.

You can expect to hear lots more about these and other LabMD-related issues from us soon, but for now we want to write about the only thing more exciting than dueling histories of the FTC’s 1980 Unfairness Statement: administrative law.

While most of those watching the LabMD case come from some nexus of FTC watchers, data security specialists, and privacy lawyers, the reality is that the case itself is mostly about administrative law (the law that governs how federal agencies are given and use their power). And the court’s opinion is best understood from a primarily administrative law perspective.

From that perspective, the case should lead to some significant introspection at the Commission. While the FTC may find ways to comply with the letter of the opinion without substantially altering its approach to data security cases, it will likely face difficulty defending that approach before the courts. True compliance with this decision will require the FTC to define what makes certain data security practices unfair in a more-coherent and far-more-readily ascertainable fashion.

The devil is in the (well-specified) details

The actual holding in the case comes in Part III of the 11th Circuit’s opinion, where the court finds for LabMD on the ground that, owing to a fatal lack of specificity in the FTC’s proposed order, “the Commission’s cease and desist order is itself unenforceable.”  This is the punchline of the opinion, to which we will return. But it is worth spending some time on the path that the court takes to get there.

It should be stressed at the outset that Part II of the opinion — in which the Court walks through the conceptual and statutory framework that supports an “unfairness” claim — is surprisingly unimportant to the court’s ultimate holding. This was the meat of the case for FTC watchers and privacy and data security lawyers, and it is a fascinating exposition. Doubtless it will be the focus of most analysis of the opinion.

But, for purposes of the court’s disposition of the case, it’s of (perhaps-frustratingly) scant importance. In short, the court assumes, arguendo, that the FTC has sufficient basis to make out an unfairness claim against LabMD before moving on to Part III of the opinion analyzing the FTC’s order given that assumption.

It’s not clear why the court took this approach — and it is dangerous to assume any particular explanation (although it is and will continue to be the subject of much debate). There are several reasonable explanations for the approach, ranging from the court thinking it obvious that the FTC’s unfairness analysis was correct, to it side-stepping the thorny question of how to define injury under Section 5, to the court avoiding writing a decision that could call into question the fundamental constitutionality of a significant portion of the FTC’s legal portfolio. Regardless — and regardless of its relative lack of importance to the ultimate holding — the analysis offered in Part II bears, and will receive, significant attention.

The FTC has two basic forms of consumer protection authority: It can take action against 1) unfair acts or practices and 2) deceptive acts or practices. The FTC’s case against LabMD was framed in terms of unfairness. Unsurprisingly, “unfairness” is a broad, ambiguous concept — one that can easily grow into an amorphous blob of ill-defined enforcement authority.

As discussed by the court (as well as by us, ad nauseum), in the 1970s the FTC made very aggressive use of its unfairness authority to regulate the advertising industry, effectively usurping Congress’ authority to legislate in that area. This over-aggressive enforcement didn’t sit well with Congress, of course, and led it to shut down the FTC for a period of time until the agency adopted a more constrained understanding of the meaning of its unfairness authority. This understanding was communicated to Congress in the FTC’s 1980 Unfairness Statement. That statement was subsequently codified by Congress, in slightly modified form, as Section 5(n) of the FTC Act.

Section 5(n) states that

The Commission shall have no authority under this section or section 57a of this title to declare unlawful an act or practice on the grounds that such act or practice is unfair unless the act or practice causes or is likely to cause substantial injury to consumers which is not reasonably avoidable by consumers themselves and not outweighed by countervailing benefits to consumers or to competition. In determining whether an act or practice is unfair, the Commission may consider established public policies as evidence to be considered with all other evidence. Such public policy considerations may not serve as a primary basis for such determination.

The meaning of Section 5(n) has been the subject of intense debate for years (for example, here, here and here). In particular, it is unclear whether Section 5(n) defines a test for what constitutes unfair conduct (that which “causes or is likely to cause substantial injury to consumers which is not reasonably avoidable by consumers themselves and not outweighed by countervailing benefits to consumers or to competition”) or whether instead imposes a necessary, but not necessarily sufficient, condition on the extent of the FTC’s authority to bring cases. The meaning of “cause” under 5(n) is also unclear because, unlike causation in traditional legal contexts, Section 5(n) also targets conduct that is “likely to cause” harm.

Section 5(n) concludes with an important, but also somewhat inscrutable, discussion of the role of “public policy” in the Commission’s unfairness enforcement, indicating that that Commission is free to consider “established public policies” as evidence of unfair conduct, but may not use such considerations “as a primary basis” for its unfairness enforcement.

Just say no to public policy

Section 5 empowers and directs the FTC to police unfair business practices, and there is little reason to think that bad data security practices cannot sometimes fall under its purview. But the FTC’s efforts with respect to data security (and, for that matter, privacy) over the past nearly two decades have focused extensively on developing what it considers to be a comprehensive jurisprudence to address data security concerns. This creates a distinct impression that the FTC has been using its unfairness authority to develop a new area of public policy — to legislate data security standards, in other words — as opposed to policing data security practices that are unfair under established principles of unfairness.

This is a subtle distinction — and there is frankly little guidance for understanding when the agency is acting on the basis of public policy versus when it is proscribing conduct that falls within the meaning of unfairness.

But it is an important distinction. If it is the case — or, more precisely, if the courts think that it is the case — that the FTC is acting on the basis of public policy, then the FTC’s data security efforts are clearly problematic under Section 5(n)’s prohibition on the use of public policy as the primary basis for unfairness actions.

And this is where the Commission gets itself into trouble. The Commission’s efforts to develop its data security enforcement program looks an awful lot like something being driven by public policy, and not so much as merely enforcing existing policy as captured by, in the LabMD court’s words (echoing the FTC’s pre-Section 5(n) unfairness factors), “well-established legal standard[s], whether grounded in statute, the common law, or the Constitution.”

The distinction between effecting public policy and enforcing legal norms is… not very clear. Nonetheless, exploring and respecting that distinction is an important task for courts and agencies.

Unfortunately, this case does not well describe how to make that distinction. The opinion is more than a bit muddled and difficult to clearly interpret. Nonetheless, reading the court’s dicta in Part II is instructive. It’s clearly the case that some bad security practices, in some contexts, can be unfair practices. So the proper task for the FTC is to discover how to police “unfairness” within data security cases rather than setting out to become a first-order data security enforcement agency.

How does public policy become well-established law?

Part II of the Eleventh Circuit’s opinion — even if dicta — is important for future interpretations of Section 5 cases. The court goes to great lengths to demonstrate, based on the FTC’s enforcement history and related Congressional rebukes, that the Commission may not rely upon vague “public policy” standards for bringing “unfairness” actions.

But this raises a critical question about the nature of the FTC’s unfairness authority. The Commission was created largely to police conduct that could not readily be proscribed by statute or simple rules. In some cases this means conduct that is hard to label or describe in text with any degree of precision — “I know it when I see it” kinds of acts and practices. In other cases, it may refer to novel or otherwise unpredictable conduct that could not be foreseen by legislators or regulators. In either case, the very purpose of the FTC is to be able to protect consumers from conduct that is not necessarily proscribed elsewhere.

This means that the Commission must have some ability to take action against “unfair” conduct that has not previously been enshrined as “unfair” in “well-established legal standard[s], whether grounded in statute, the common law, or the Constitution.” But that ability is not unbounded, of course.

The court explained that the Commission could expound upon what acts fall within the meaning of “unfair” in one of two ways: It could use its rulemaking authority to issue Congressionally reviewable rules, or it could proceed on a case-by-case basis.

In either case, the court’s discussion of how the Commission is to determine what is “unfair” within the constraints of Section 5(n) is frustratingly vague. The earlier parts of the opinion tell us that unfairness is to be adjudged based upon “well-established legal standards,” but here the court tells us that the scope of unfairness can be altered — that is, those well-established legal standards can be changed — through adjudication. It is difficult to square what the court means by this. Regardless, it is the guidance that we have been given by the court.

This is Admin Law 101

And yet perhaps there is some resolution to this conundrum in administrative law. For administrative law scholars, the 11th Circuit’s discussion of the permissibility of agencies developing binding legal norms using either rulemaking or adjudication procedures, is straight out of Chenery II.

Chenery II is a bedrock case of American administrative law, standing broadly for the proposition (as echoed by the 11th Circuit) that agencies can generally develop legal rules through either rulemaking or adjudication, that there may be good reasons to use either in any given case, and that (assuming Congress has empowered the agency to use both) it is primarily up to the agency to determine which approach is preferable in any given case.

But, while Chenery II certainly allows agencies to proceed on a case-by-case basis, that permission is not a broad license to eschew the development of determinate legal standards. And the reason is fairly obvious: if an agency develops rules that are difficult to know ex ante, they can hardly provide guidance for private parties as they order their affairs.

Chenery II places an important caveat on the use of case-by-case adjudication. Much like the judges in the LabMD opinion, the Chenery II court was concerned with specificity and clarity, and tells us that agencies may not rely on vague bases for their rules or enforcement actions and expect courts to “chisel” out the details. Rather:

If the administrative action is to be tested by the basis upon which it purports to rest, that basis must be set forth with such clarity as to be understandable. It will not do for a court to be compelled to guess at the theory underlying the agency’s action; nor can a court be expected to chisel that which must be precise from what the agency has left vague and indecisive. In other words, ‘We must know what a decision means before the duty becomes ours to say whether it is right or wrong.’ (emphasis added)

The parallels between the 11th Circuit’s opinion in LabMD and the Supreme Court’s opinion in Chenery II 70 years earlier are uncanny. It is also not very surprising that the 11th Circuit opinion would reflect the principles discussed in Chenery II, nor that it would do so without reference to Chenery II: these are, after all, bedrock principles of administrative law.  

The principles set out in Chenery II, of course, do not answer the data-security law question whether the FTC properly exercised its authority in this (or any) case under Section 5. But they do provide an intelligible basis for the court sidestepping this question, and asking whether the FTC sufficiently defined what it was doing in the first place.  

Conclusion

The FTC’s data security mission has been, in essence, a voyage of public policy exploration. Its method of case-by-case adjudication, based on ill-defined consent decrees, non-binding guidance documents, and broadly-worded complaints creates the vagueness that the Court in Chenery II rejected, and that the 11th Circuit held results in unenforceable remedies.

Even in its best light, the Commission’s public materials are woefully deficient as sources of useful (and legally-binding) guidance. In its complaints the FTC does typically mention some of the facts that led it to investigate, and presents some rudimentary details of how those facts relate to its Section 5 authority. Yet the FTC issues complaints based merely on its “reason to believe” that an unfair act has taken place. This is a far different standard than that faced in district court, and undoubtedly leads the Commission to construe facts liberally in its own favor.

Moreover, targets of complaints settle for myriad reasons, and no outside authority need review the sufficiency of a complaint as part of a settlement. And the consent orders themselves are largely devoid of legal and even factual specificity. As a result, the FTC’s authority to initiate an enforcement action  is effectively based on an ill-defined series of hunches — hardly a sufficient basis for defining a clear legal standard.

So, while the court’s opinion in this case was narrowly focused on the FTC’s proposed order, the underlying legal analysis that supports its holding should be troubling to the Commission.

The specificity the 11th Circuit demands in the remedial order must exist no less in the theories of harm the Commission alleges against targets. And those theories cannot be based on mere public policy preferences. Courts that follow the Eleventh Circuit’s approach — which indeed Section 5(n) reasonably seems to require — will look more deeply into the Commission’s allegations of “unreasonable” data security in order to determine if it is actually attempting to pursue harms by proving something like negligence, or is instead simply ascribing “unfairness” to certain conduct that the Commission deems harmful.

The FTC may find ways to comply with the letter of this particular opinion without substantially altering its overall approach — but that seems unlikely. True compliance with this decision will require the FTC to respect real limits on its authority and to develop ascertainable data security requirements out of much more than mere consent decrees and kitchen-sink complaints.