Archives For Maureen Ohlhausen

Biweekly FTC Roundup: A Guide for the Perplexed Edition

Daniel J. Gilman —  27 January 2023

In a prior post, I made the important if wholly unoriginal point that the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) recent policy statement regarding unfair methods of competition (UMC)—perhaps a form of “soft law”—has neither legal force nor precedential value. Gus Hurwitz offers a more thorough discussion of the issue here. 

But policy statements may still have value as guidance documents for industry and the bar. They can also inform the courts, providing a framework for the commission’s approach to the specific facts and circumstances that underlie a controversy. That is, as the 12th century sage Maimonides endeavored in his own “Guide for the Perplexed,” they can elucidate rationales for particular principles and decisions of law. 

I also pointed out (also unoriginally) that the statement’s guidance value might be undermined by its own vagueness. Or as former FTC Commissioner and Acting Chairman Maureen Ohlhausen put it:

While ostensibly intended to provide such guidance, the new Policy Statement contains few specifics about the particular conduct that the Commission might deem to be unfair, and suggests that the FTC has broad discretion to challenge nearly any conduct with which it disagrees.

There’s so much going on at (or being announced by) my old agency that it’s hard to keep up. One recent development reaches back into FTC history—all the way to late 2021—to find an initiative at the boundary of soft and hard law: that is, the issuance to more than 700 U.S. firms of notices of penalty offenses about “fake reviews and other misleading endorsements.” 

A notice of penalty offenses is supposed to provide a sort of firm-specific guidance: a recipient is informed that certain sorts of conduct have been deemed to violate the FTC Act. It’s not a decision or even an allegation that the firm has engaged in such prohibited conduct. In that way, it’s like soft law. 

On the other hand, it’s not entirely anemic. In AMG Capital, the Supreme Court held that the FTC cannot obtain equitable monetary remedies for violations of the FTC Act in the first instance—at least, not under Section 13b of the FTC Act. But there are circumstances under which the FTC can get statutory penalties (up to just over $50,000 per violation, and a given course of conduct might entail many violations) for, e.g., violating a regulation that implements Section 5.

That serves as useful background to observe that, among the FTC’s recent advanced notices of proposed rulemakings (ANPRs) is one about regulating fake reviews. (Commissioner Christine S. Wilson’s dissent in the matter is here.) 

Here it should be noted that Section 5(m) of the FTC Act also permits monetary penalties if “the Commission determines in a proceeding . . . that any act or practice is unfair or deceptive, and issues a final cease and desist order” and the firm has “actual knowledge that such act or practice is unfair or deceptive and is unlawful.”  

What does that mean? In brief, if there’s an agency decision (not a consent order, but not a federal court decision either) that a certain type of conduct by one firm is “unfair or deceptive” under Section 5, then another firm can be assessed statutory monetary penalties if the Commission determines that it has undertaken the same type of conduct and if, because the firm has received a notice of penalty offenses, it has “actual knowledge that such act or practice is unfair or deceptive.” 

So, now we’re back to monetary penalties for violations of Section 5 in the first instance if a very special form of mens rea can be established. A notice of penalty offenses provides guidance, but it also carries real legal risk. 

Back to pesky questions and details. Do the letters provide notice? What might 700-plus disparate contemporary firms all do that fits a given course of unlawful conduct (at least as determined by administrative process)? To grab just a few examples among companies that begin with the letter “A”: what problematic conduct might be common to, e.g., Abbott Labs, Abercrombie & Fitch, Adidas, Adobe, Albertson’s, Altria, Amazon, and Annie’s (the organic-food company)?

Well, the letter (or the sample posted) points to all sorts of potentially helpful guidance about not running afoul of the law. But more specifically, the FTC points to eight administrative decisions that model the conduct (by other firms) already found to be unfair or deceptive. That, surely, is where the rubber hits the road and the details are specified. Or is it? 

The eight administrative decisions are an odd lot. Most of the matters have to do with manufacturers or packagers (or service providers) making materially false or misleading statements in advertising their products or services. 

The most recent case is In the Matter of Cliffdale Associates, a complaint filed in 1981 and decided by the commission in 1984. For those unfamiliar with Cliffdale (nearly everyone?), the defendant sold something “variously known as the Ball-Matic, the Ball-Matic Gas Saver Valve and the Gas Saver Valve.” The oldest decision, Wilbert W. Haase, was filed in 1939 and decided in 1941 (one of two decided during World War II).

The decisions make for interesting reading. For example, in R.J. Reynolds, we learn that:

…while as a general proposition the smoking of cigarettes in moderation by individuals not allergic nor hypersensitive to cigarette smoking, who are accustomed to smoking and are in normal good health, with no existing pathology of any of the bodily systems, is not appreciably harmful-what is normal for one person may be excessive for another.

I’ll confess: In my misspent youth, I did some research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), but I did not know that.

Interesting reading but, dare I suggest, not super helpful from the standpoint of notice or guidance. R.J. Reynolds manufactured, advertised, and sold cigarettes and other tobacco products; and they advertised that “the effect that the smoking of its cigarettes was either beneficial to or not injurious to a particular bodily system.” So, “not appreciably harmful,” but that doesn’t mean therapeutic.

A few things stand out. First, all of the complaints were brought prior to the birth of the internet. Second, five of the eight complaints were brought before the 1975 Magnuson-Moss Act amendments to the FTC Act that, among other things, revised the standards for finding conduct “unfair or deceptive” under Section 5.  Third, having read the cases, I have no idea how the old cases are supposed to provide notice to the myriad recipients of these letters. 

Section 5 provides that “unfair methods of competition” and “unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce” are unlawful. Section 5(n)—courtesy of the 1975 amendments—qualifies the prohibition: 

The Commission shall have no authority under this section … 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. … 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.

As Geoff Manne and I have noted, the amendment was adopted by a Congress that thought the FTC had been overreaching in its application of Section 5. Others have made (and expanded upon) the same observation: former FTC Chairman William Kovacic’s 2010 Senate testimony is one excellent example among many. Continued congressional frustration actually briefly led to a shutdown of the FTC. 

Here’s my take on the notice provided by the Notices of Penalty Authority: they might as well tell firms that the FTC has found that violating Section 5’s prohibition of unfair or deceptive acts or practices violates Section 5’s prohibition of unfair or deceptive acts or practices and (b) we’re not saying you violated Section 5, and we’re not saying you didn’t, but if you do violate Section 5, you’re subject to statutory monetary penalties, statutory and judicial impediments to monetary penalties notwithstanding.     

What sort of notice is that? Might the federal courts see this as an attempt at an end-run around statutory limits on the FTC’s authority? Might Congress? If you’re perplexed by the FTC’s mass notice action, which authority will provide you a guide?     

In Antitrust & Competition, Antitrust at the Agencies Roundup, Federal Trade Commission, Section 5, Truth on the Market , , , , , , , , , ,
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FTC Commissioner Joshua Wright gets his competiton enforcement guidelines

Geoffrey Manne —  13 August 2015

Today, for the first time in its 100-year history, the FTC issued enforcement guidelines for cases brought by the agency under the Unfair Methods of Competition (“UMC”) provisions of Section 5 of the FTC Act.

The Statement of Enforcement Principles represents a significant victory for Commissioner Joshua Wright, who has been a tireless advocate for defining and limiting the scope of the Commission’s UMC authority since before his appointment to the FTC in 2013.

As we’ve noted many times before here at TOTM (including in our UMC Guidelines Blog Symposium), FTC enforcement principles for UMC actions have been in desperate need of clarification. Without any UMC standards, the FTC has been free to leverage its costly adjudication process into settlements (or short-term victories) and businesses have been left in the dark as to what what sorts of conduct might trigger enforcement. Through a series of unadjudicated settlements, UMC unfairness doctrine (such as it is) has remained largely within the province of FTC discretion and without judicial oversight. As a result, and either by design or by accident, UMC never developed a body of law encompassing well-defined goals or principles like antitrust’s consumer welfare standard.

Commissioner Wright has long been at the forefront of the battle to rein in the FTC’s discretion in this area and to promote the rule of law. Soon after joining the Commission, he called for Section 5 guidelines that would constrain UMC enforcement to further consumer welfare, tied to the economically informed analysis of competitive effects developed in antitrust law.

Today’s UMC Statement embodies the essential elements of Commissioner Wright’s proposal. Under the new guidelines:

  1. The Commission will make UMC enforcement decisions based on traditional antitrust principles, including the consumer welfare standard;
  2. Only conduct that would violate the antitrust rule of reason will give rise to enforcement, and the Commission will not bring UMC cases without evidence demonstrating that harm to competition outweighs any efficiency or business justifications for the conduct at issue; and
  3. The Commission commits to the principle that it is more appropriate to bring cases under the antitrust laws than under Section 5 when the conduct at issue could give rise to a cause of action under the antitrust laws. Notably, this doesn’t mean that the agency gets to use UMC when it thinks it might lose under the Sherman or Clayton Acts; rather, it means UMC is meant only to be a gap-filler, to be used when the antitrust statutes don’t apply at all.

Yes, the Statement is a compromise. For instance, there is no safe harbor from UMC enforcement if any cognizable efficiencies are demonstrated, as Commissioner Wright initially proposed.

But by enshrining antitrust law’s consumer welfare standard in future UMC caselaw, by obligating the Commission to assess conduct within the framework of the well-established antitrust rule of reason, and by prioritizing antitrust over UMC when both might apply, the Statement brings UMC law into the world of modern antitrust analysis. This is a huge achievement.

It’s also a huge achievement that a Statement like this one would be introduced by Chairwoman Ramirez. As recently as last year, Ramirez had resisted efforts to impose constraints on the FTC’s UMC enforcement discretion. In a 2014 speech Ramirez said:

I have expressed concern about recent proposals to formulate guidance to try to codify our unfair methods principles for the first time in the Commission’s 100 year history. While I don’t object to guidance in theory, I am less interested in prescribing our future enforcement actions than in describing our broad enforcement principles revealed in our recent precedent.

The “recent precedent” that Ramirez referred to is precisely the set of cases applying UMC to reach antitrust-relevant conduct that led to Commissioner Wright’s efforts. The common law of consent decrees that make up the precedent Ramirez refers to, of course, are not legally binding and provide little more than regurgitated causes of action.

But today, under Congressional pressure and pressure from within the agency led by Commissioner Wright, Chairwoman Ramirez and the other two Democratic commissioners voted for the Statement.

Competitive Effects Analysis Under the Statement

As Commissioner Ohlhausen argues in her dissenting statement, the UMC Statement doesn’t remove all enforcement discretion from the Commission — after all, enforcement principles, like standards in law generally, have fuzzy boundaries.

But what Commissioner Ohlhausen seems to miss is that, by invoking antitrust principles, the rule of reason and competitive effects analysis, the Statement incorporates by reference 125 years of antitrust law and economics. The Statement itself need not go into excessive detail when, with only a few words, it brings modern antitrust jurisprudence embodied in cases like Trinko, Leegin, and Brooke Group into UMC law.

Under the new rule of reason approach for UMC, the FTC will condemn conduct only when it causes or is likely to cause “harm to competition or the competitive process, taking into account any associated cognizable efficiencies and business justifications.” In other words, the evidence must demonstrate net harm to consumers before the FTC can take action. That’s a significant constraint.

As noted above, Commissioner Wright originally proposed a safe harbor from FTC UMC enforcement whenever cognizable efficiencies are present. The Statement’s balancing test is thus a compromise. But it’s not really a big move from Commissioner Wright’s initial position.

Commissioner Wright’s original proposal tied the safe harbor to “cognizable” efficiencies, which is an exacting standard. As Commissioner Wright noted in his Blog Symposium post on the subject:

[T]he efficiencies screen I offer intentionally leverages the Commission’s considerable expertise in identifying the presence of cognizable efficiencies in the merger context and explicitly ties the analysis to the well-developed framework offered in the Horizontal Merger Guidelines. As any antitrust practitioner can attest, the Commission does not credit “cognizable efficiencies” lightly and requires a rigorous showing that the claimed efficiencies are merger-specific, verifiable, and not derived from an anticompetitive reduction in output or service. Fears that the efficiencies screen in the Section 5 context would immunize patently anticompetitive conduct because a firm nakedly asserts cost savings arising from the conduct without evidence supporting its claim are unwarranted. Under this strict standard, the FTC would almost certainly have no trouble demonstrating no cognizable efficiencies exist in Dan’s “blowing up of the competitor’s factory” example because the very act of sabotage amounts to an anticompetitive reduction in output.

The difference between the safe harbor approach and the balancing approach embodied in the Statement is largely a function of administrative economy. Before, the proposal would have caused the FTC to err on the side of false negatives, possibly forbearing from bringing some number of welfare-enhancing cases in exchange for a more certain reduction in false positives. Now, there is greater chance of false positives.

But the real effect is that more cases will be litigated because, in the end, both versions would require some degree of antitrust-like competitive effects analysis. Under the Statement, if procompetitive efficiencies outweigh anticompetitive harms, the defendant still wins (and the FTC is to avoid enforcement). Under the original proposal fewer actions might be brought, but those that are brought would surely settle. So one likely outcome of choosing a balancing test over the safe harbor is that more close cases will go to court to be sorted out. Whether this is a net improvement over the safe harbor depends on whether the social costs of increased litigation and error are offset by a reduction in false negatives — as well as the more robust development of the public good of legal case law.  

Reduced FTC Discretion Under the Statement

The other important benefit of the Statement is that it commits the FTC to a regime that reduces its discretion.

Chairwoman Ramirez and former Chairman Leibowitz — among others — have embraced a broader role for Section 5, particularly in order to avoid the judicial limits on antitrust actions arising out of recent Supreme Court cases like Trinko, Leegin, Brooke Group, Linkline, Weyerhaeuser and Credit Suisse.

For instance, as former Chairman Leibowitz said in 2008:

[T]he Commission should not be tied to the more technical definitions of consumer harm that limit applications of the Sherman Act when we are looking at pure Section 5 violations.

And this was no idle threat. Recent FTC cases, including Intel, N-Data, Google (Motorola), and Bosch, could all have been brought under the Sherman Act, but were brought — and settled — as Section 5 cases instead. Under the new Statement, all four would likely be Sherman Act cases.

There’s little doubt that, left unfettered, Section 5 UMC actions would only have grown in scope. Former Chairman Leibowitz, in his concurring opinion in Rambus, described UMC as

a flexible and powerful Congressional mandate to protect competition from unreasonable restraints, whether long-since recognized or newly discovered, that violate the antitrust laws, constitute incipient violations of those laws, or contravene those laws’ fundamental policies.

Both Leibowitz and former Commissioner Tom Rosch (again, among others) often repeated their views that Section 5 permitted much the same actions as were available under Section 2 — but without the annoyance of those pesky, economically sensible, judicial limitations. (Although, in fairness, Leibowitz also once commented that it would not “be wise to use the broader [Section 5] authority whenever we think we can’t win an antitrust case, as a sort of ‘fallback.’”)

In fact, there is a long and unfortunate trend of FTC commissioners and other officials asserting some sort of “public enforcement exception” to the judicial limits on Sherman Act cases. As then Deputy Director for Antitrust in the Bureau of Economics, Howard Shelanski, told Congress in 2010:

The Commission believes that its authority to prevent “unfair methods of competition” through Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act enables the agency to pursue conduct that it cannot reach under the Sherman Act, and thus avoid the potential strictures of Trinko.

In this instance, and from the context (followed as it is by a request for Congress to actually exempt the agency from Trinko and Credit Suisse!), it seems that “reach” means “win.”

Still others have gone even further. Tom Rosch, for example, has suggested that the FTC should challenge Patent Assertion Entities under Section 5 merely because “we have a gut feeling” that the conduct violates the Act and it may not be actionable under Section 2.

Even more egregious, Steve Salop and Jon Baker advocate using Section 5 to implement their preferred social policies — in this case to reduce income inequality. Such expansionist views, as Joe Sims recently reminded TOTM readers, hearken back to the troubled FTC of the 1970s:  

Remember [former FTC Chairman] Mike Pertschuck saying that Section 5 could possibly be used to enforce compliance with desirable energy policies or environmental requirements, or to attack actions that, in the opinion of the FTC majority, impeded desirable employment programs or were inconsistent with the nation’s “democratic, political and social ideals.” The two speeches he delivered on this subject in 1977 were the beginning of the end for increased Section 5 enforcement in that era, since virtually everyone who heard or read them said:  “Whoa! Is this really what we want the FTC to be doing?”

Apparently, for some, it is — even today. But don’t forget: This was the era in which Congress actually briefly shuttered the FTC for refusing to recognize limits on its discretion, as Howard Beales reminds us:

The breadth, overreaching, and lack of focus in the FTC’s ambitious rulemaking agenda outraged many in business, Congress, and the media. Even the Washington Post editorialized that the FTC had become the “National Nanny.” Most significantly, these concerns reverberated in Congress. At one point, Congress refused to provide the necessary funding, and simply shut down the FTC for several days…. So great were the concerns that Congress did not reauthorize the FTC for fourteen years. Thus chastened, the Commission abandoned most of its rulemaking initiatives, and began to re-examine unfairness to develop a focused, injury-based test to evaluate practices that were allegedly unfair.

A truly significant effect of the Policy Statement will be to neutralize the effort to use UMC to make an end-run around antitrust jurisprudence in order to pursue non-economic goals. It will now be a necessary condition of a UMC enforcement action to prove a contravention of fundamental antitrust policies (i.e., consumer welfare), rather than whatever three commissioners happen to agree is a desirable goal. And the Statement puts the brakes on efforts to pursue antitrust cases under Section 5 by expressing a clear policy preference at the FTC to bring such cases under the antitrust laws.

Commissioner Ohlhausen’s objects that

the fact that this policy statement requires some harm to competition does little to constrain the Commission, as every Section 5 theory pursued in the last 45 years, no matter how controversial or convoluted, can be and has been couched in terms of protecting competition and/or consumers.

That may be true, but the same could be said of every Section 2 case, as well. Commissioner Ohlhausen seems to be dismissing the fact that the Statement effectively incorporates by reference the last 45 years of antitrust law, too. Nothing will incentivize enforcement targets to challenge the FTC in court — or incentivize the FTC itself to forbear from enforcement — like the ability to argue Trinko, Leegin and their ilk. Antitrust law isn’t perfect, of course, but making UMC law coextensive with modern antitrust law is about as much as we could ever reasonably hope for. And the Statement basically just gave UMC defendants blanket license to add a string of “See Areeda & Hovenkamp” cites to every case the FTC brings. We should count that as a huge win.

Commissioner Ohlhausen also laments the brevity and purported vagueness of the Statement, claiming that

No interpretation of the policy statement by a single Commissioner, no matter how thoughtful, will bind this or any future Commission to greater limits on Section 5 UMC enforcement than what is in this exceedingly brief, highly general statement.

But, in the end, it isn’t necessarily the Commissioners’ self-restraint upon which the Statement relies; it’s the courts’ (and defendants’) ability to take the obvious implications of the Statement seriously and read current antitrust precedent into future UMC cases. If every future UMC case is adjudicated like a Sherman or Clayton Act case, the Statement will have been a resounding success.

Arguably no FTC commissioner has been as successful in influencing FTC policy as a minority commissioner — over sustained opposition, and in a way that constrains the agency so significantly — as has Commissioner Wright today.

In Antitrust & Competition, Exclusive Dealing, Federal Trade Commission, Google, Intellectual Property, Law & Economics, Merger Guidelines, Monopolization, Patent, Platforms, Resale Price Maintenance, Section 5, Unfair Methods of Competition Symposium , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Welcome to the TOTM Blog Symposium: Regulating the Regulators–Guidance for the FTC’s Section 5 Unfair Methods of Competition Authority

Geoffrey Manne —  1 August 2013

Regulating the Regulators: Guidance for the FTC’s Section 5 Unfair Methods of Competition Authority

August 1, 2013

Truthonthemarket.com

Welcome!

We’re delighted to kick off our one-day blog symposium on the FTC’s unfair methods of competition (UMC) authority under Section 5 of the FTC Act.

Last month, FTC Commissioner Josh Wright began a much-needed conversation on the FTC’s UMC authority by issuing a proposed policy statement attempting to provide some meaningful guidance and limits to the FTC’s authority. Meanwhile, last week Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen offered her own take on the issue, echoing many of Josh’s points and further extending the conversation. Considerable commentary—and even congressional attention—has been directed to the absence of UMC authority limits, the proper scope of that authority, and its significance for the businesses regulated by the Commission.

Section 5 of the FTC Act permits the agency to take enforcement actions against companies that use “unfair or deceptive acts or practices” or that employ “unfair methods of competition.” The Act doesn’t specify what these terms mean, instead leaving that determination to the FTC itself.  In the 1980s, under intense pressure from Congress, the Commission established limiting principles for its unfairness and deception authorities. But today, coming up on 100 years since the creation of the FTC, the agency still hasn’t defined the scope of its UMC authority, instead pursuing enforcement actions without any significant judicial, congressional or even self-imposed limits. And in recent years the Commission has seemingly expanded its interpretation of its UMC authority, bringing a string of standalone Section 5 cases (including against Intel, Rambus, N-Data, Google and others), alleging traditional antitrust injury but avoiding the difficulties of pursuing such actions under the Sherman Act (or, in a few cases, bringing separate claims under both Section 5 and Section 2).

We hope this symposium will provide important insights and stand as a useful resource for the ongoing discussion.

We’ve lined up an outstanding and diverse group of scholars and practitioners to participate in the symposium.  They include:

  • David Balto, Law Offices of David Balto [1] [2]
  • Terry Calvani, Freshfields [1]
  • James Cooper, GMU Law & Economics Center [1] [2]
  • Dan Crane, Michigan Law [1]
  • Paul Denis, Dechert [1]
  • Angela Diveley, Freshfields [1]
  • Gus Hurwitz, Nebraska Law [1] [2]
  • Thom Lambert, Missouri Law [1]
  • Marina Lao, Seton Hall Law [1]
  • Tad Lipsky, Latham & Watkins [1]
  • Geoffrey Manne, Lewis & Clark Law/ICLE [1]
  • Joe Sims, Jones Day [1]
  • Josh Wright, FTC [1]
  • Tim Wu, Columbia Law [1]

The first of the participants’ initial posts will appear momentarily, with additional posts appearing throughout the day. We hope to generate a lively discussion, and expect some of the participants to offer follow up posts as well as comments on their fellow participants’ posts—please be sure to check back throughout the day and be sure to check the comments. We hope our readers will join us in the comments, as well.

Once again, welcome!

In Antitrust & Competition, Federal Trade Commission, Google, Platforms, Section 5, Unfair Methods of Competition Symposium , , , , , ,
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FTC sacrifices the rule of law for more flexibility; Commissioner Ohlhausen wisely dissents

Geoffrey Manne —  1 August 2012

On July 31 the FTC voted to withdraw its 2003 Policy Statement on Monetary Remedies in Competition Cases.  Commissioner Ohlhausen issued her first dissent since joining the Commission, and points out the folly and the danger in the Commission’s withdrawal of its Policy Statement.

The Commission supports its action by citing “legal thinking” in favor of heightened monetary penalties and the Policy Statement’s role in dissuading the Commission from following this thinking:

It has been our experience that the Policy Statement has chilled the pursuit of monetary remedies in the years since the statement’s issuance. At a time when Supreme Court jurisprudence has increased burdens on plaintiffs, and legal thinking has begun to encourage greater seeking of disgorgement, the FTC has sought monetary equitable remedies in only two competition cases since we issued the Policy Statement in 2003.

In this case, “legal thinking” apparently amounts to a single 2009 article by Einer Elhague.  But it turns out Einer doesn’t represent the entire current of legal thinking on this issue.  As it happens, Josh Wright and Judge Ginsburg looked at the evidence in 2010 and found no evidence of increased deterrence (of price fixing) from larger fines:

If the best way to deter price-fixing is to increase fines, then we should expect the number of cartel cases to decrease as fines increase. At this point, however, we do not have any evidence that a still-higher corporate fine would deter price-fixing more effectively. It may simply be that corporate fines are misdirected, so that increasing the severity of sanctions along this margin is at best irrelevant and might counter-productively impose costs upon consumers in the form of higher prices as firms pass on increased monitoring and compliance expenditures.

Commissioner Ohlhausen points out in her dissent that there is no support for the claim that the Policy Statement has led to sub-optimal deterrence and quite sensibly finds no reason for the Commission to withdraw the Policy Statement.  But even more importantly Commissioner Ohlhausen worries about what the Commission’s decision here might portend:

The guidance in the Policy Statement will be replaced by this view: “[T]he Commission withdraws the Policy Statement and will rely instead upon existing law, which provides sufficient guidance on the use of monetary equitable remedies.”  This position could be used to justify a decision to refrain from issuing any guidance whatsoever about how this agency will interpret and exercise its statutory authority on any issue. It also runs counter to the goal of transparency, which is an important factor in ensuring ongoing support for the agency’s mission and activities. In essence, we are moving from clear guidance on disgorgement to virtually no guidance on this important policy issue.

An excellent point.  If the standard for the FTC issuing policy statements is the sufficiency of the guidance provided by existing law, then arguably the FTC need not offer any guidance whatever.

But as we careen toward a more and more active role on the part of the FTC in regulating the collection, use and dissemination of data (i.e., “privacy”), this sets an ominous precedent.  Already the Commission has managed to side-step the courts in establishing its policies on this issue by, well, never going to court.  As Berin Szoka noted in recent Congressional testimony:

The problem with the unfairness doctrine is that the FTC has never had to defend its application to privacy in court, nor been forced to prove harm is substantial and outweighs benefits.

This has lead Berin and others to suggest — and the chorus will only grow louder — that the FTC clarify the basis for its enforcement decisions and offer clear guidance on its interpretation of the unfairness and deception standards it applies under the rubric of protecting privacy.  Unfortunately, the Commission’s reasoning in this action suggests it might well not see fit to offer any such guidance.

In Antitrust & Competition, Data Privacy & Security, Federal Trade Commission , , , , , , ,
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