#federal trade commission

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Paul Blest at More Perfect Union:

The Federal Trade Commission voted Tuesday to ban new noncompete agreements for all workers and make existing noncompetes null and void for everyone except senior executives. These agreements are used to restrict 30 million American workers from changing jobs or starting their own businesses due to claims that they could use “trade secrets” in their new roles.  Noncompete agreements can restrict job mobility based on geographic area (i.e., a doctor joining a new practice within 50 miles of their old one) or a time period after leaving the position (anywhere between several months to more than a year). They have been banned in multiple states in the past few years. 

But the FTC has issued a uniform ban that will cover hundreds of millions of workers following a 180-day period for for-profit companies to enter into compliance. More than 26,000 comments were submitted on the rule, more than 25,000 of which supported a noncompete ban, FTC staff said Tuesday.  The FTC estimated that the new rule will increase workers’ wages by up to $488 billion over 10 years, which FTC staff said would mean a $524 increase in annual wages for the average worker. The FTC also estimated that the rule would lead to more than 8,500 new businesses per year.   “Right now workers are stuck in place because of these noncompetes,” FTC chair Lina Khan told More Perfect Union in an interview about the rule. “So even if they get a better job opportunity with higher wages, with better benefits, they can't actually switch jobs, which is bad for those workers. It's also bad for other workers who won't have the opportunities that are not being created because of these noncompetes.”

Five states have passed bans on noncompetes, not including New York, where lawmakers passed a ban last year that was then vetoed by Gov. Kathy Hochul. After Oregon banned noncompete agreements in 2008, researchers found, average hourly wages for all workers were boosted by up to 3 percent; the same analysis found that low-wage workers subjected to noncompetes saw a substantial negative impact on their wages.  The final rule differs from the proposal in that “senior executives,” those in a “policy-making position” making more than $151,000 per year, will still be subjected to noncompete agreements signed before the effective date of the new rule.

Since announcing the proposal in early 2023, the FTC’s rule has come under fire from the business lobby. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce said before Tuesday’s meeting that it will file a lawsuit to block the proposal as soon as Wednesday. A top Chamber official said earlier this week that the rule “opens up a Pandora’s box where this commission or future commissions could be literally micromanaging every aspect of the economy,” Bloomberg reported.  But the FTC argues that noncompete agreements are “an unfair method of competition” that affect both high- and l0w-wage earners. In the medical profession, nearly half of all physicians are subject to noncompete agreements, according to the American Medical Association, which backs the effort to end the practice. (The FTC estimated that the new rule will result in “$74-$194 billion in reduced spending on physician services over the next decade.”)

The Federal Trade Commission voted to ban competition-stifling noncompete agreements except for senior executives.

#Noncompete Agreements #Business #FTC #Federal Trade Commission #Workers' Rights

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Why they're smearing Lina Khan

My god, they sure hate Lina Khan. This once-in-a-generation, groundbreaking, brilliant legal scholar and fighter for the public interest, the slayer of Reaganomics, has attracted more vitriol, mockery, and dismissal than any of her predecessors in living memory.

She sure must be doing something right, huh?

A quick refresher. In 2017, Khan — then a law student — published Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox in the Yale Law Journal. It was a brilliant, blistering analysis showing how the Reagan-era theory of antitrust (which celebrates monopolies as “efficient”) had failed on its own terms, using Amazon as Exhibit A of the ways in which post-Reagan antitrust had left Americans vulnerable to corporate abuse:

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox

The paper sent seismic shocks through both legal and economic circles, and goosed the neo-Brandeisian movement (sneeringly dismissed as “hipster antitrust”). This movement is a rebuke to Reaganomics, with its celebration of monopolies, trickle-down, offshoring, corporate dark money, revolving-door regulatory capture, and companies that are simultaneously too big to fail and too big to jail.

This movement has many proponents, of course — not just Khan — but Khan’s careful scholarship, combined with her encyclopedic knowledge of the long-dormant statutory powers that federal agencies had to make change, and a strategy for reviving those powers to protect Americans from corporate predators made her a powerful, inspirational figure.

When Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, he surprised everyone by appointing Khan to the FTC. It wasn’t just that she had such a radical vision — it was also that she lacked the usual corporate law experience that such an appointee would normally require (experience that would ensure that the FTC was helmed by people whose default view of the world is that it should be structured and regulated by powerful, wealthy people in corporate boardrooms).

Even more surprising was that Khan was made chair of the FTC, something that was only possible because a few Republican Senators broke with their party to support her candidacy:

https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1171/vote_117_1_00233.htm

These Republicans saw in Khan an ally in their fight against “woke” Big Tech. For these senators, the problem wasn’t that tech had got too big and powerful — it was that there were a few limited instances in which tech leaders failed to wield that power in the ways they preferred.

The Republican project is a matter of getting turkeys to vote for Christmas by doing a lot of culture war bullshit, cruelly abusing disfavored sexual and racial minorities. This wins support from low-information voters who’ll vote against their class interests and support more monopolies, more tax cuts for the rich, and more cuts to the services they rely on.

But while tech leaders are 100% committed to the project of permanent oligarchic takeover of every sphere of American life, they are less full-throated in their support for hateful, cruel discrimination against disfavored minorities (in this regard, tech leaders resemble the corporate wing of the Democrats, which is where we get the “Silicon Valley is a Democratic Party stronghold” narrative).

This failure to unquestioningly and unstintingly back culture war bullshit put tech leaders in the GOP’s crosshairs. Some GOP politicians actually believe in the culture war bullshit, and are grossly offended that tech is “woke.” Others are smart enough not to get high on their own supply, but worry that any tech obstruction in the bullshit culture wars will make it harder to get sufficient turkey votes for a big fat Christmas surprise.

Biden’s ceding of antitrust policy to the left wing of the party, combined with disaffected GOP senators viewing Khan as their enemy’s enemy, led to Khan’s historic appointment as FTC Chair. In that position, she was joined by a slate of Biden trustbusters, including Jonathan Kanter at the DoJ Antitrust Division, Tim Wu at the White House, and other important, skilled and principled fighters like Alvaro Bedoya (FTC), Rebecca Slaughter (FTC), Rohit Chopra (CFPB), and many others.

Crucially, these new appointees weren’t just principled, they were good at their jobs. In 2021, Tim Wu wrote an executive order for Biden that laid out 72 concrete ways in which the administration could act — with no further Congressional authorization — to blunt corporate power and insulate the American people from oligarchs’ abusive and extractive practices:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

Since then, the antitrust arm of the Biden administration have been fuckin’ ninjas, Getting Shit Done in ways large and small, working — for the first time since Reagan — to protect Americans from predatory businesses:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

This is in marked contrast to the corporate Dems’ champions in the administration. People like Pete Buttigieg are heralded as competent technocrats, “realists” who are too principled to peddle hopium to the base, writing checks they can’t cash. All this is cover for a King Log performance, in which Buttigieg’s far-reaching regulatory authority sits unused on a shelf while a million Americans are stranded over Christmas and whole towns are endangered by greedy, reckless rail barons straight out of the Gilded Age:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

The contrast between the Biden trustbusters and their counterparts from the corporate wing is stark. While the corporate wing insists that every pitch is outside of the zone, Khan and her allies are swinging for the stands. They’re trying to make life better for you and me, by declaring commercial surveillance to be an unfair business practice and thus illegal:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/12/regulatory-uncapture/#conscious-uncoupling

And by declaring noncompete “agreements” that shackle good workers to shitty jobs to be illegal:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#neofeudal

And naturally, this has really pissed off all the right people: America’s billionaires and their cheerleaders in the press, government, and the hive of scum and villainy that is the Big Law/thinktank industrial-complex.

Take the WSJ: since Khan took office, they have published 67 vicious editorials attacking her and her policies. Khan is living rent-free in Rupert Murdoch’s head. Not only that, he’s given her the presidential suite! You love to see it.

These attacks are worth reading, if only to see how flimsy and frivolous they are. One major subgenre is that Khan shouldn’t be bringing any action against Amazon, because her groundbreaking scholarship about the company means she has a conflict of interest. Holy moly is this a stupid thing to say. The idea that the chair of an expert agency should recuse herself because she is an expert is what the physicists call not even wrong.

But these attacks are even more laughable due to who they’re coming from: people who have the most outrageous conflicts of interest imaginable, and who were conspicuously silent for years as the FTC’s revolving door admitted the a bestiary of swamp-creatures so conflicted it’s a wonder they managed to dress themselves in the morning.

Writing in The American Prospect, David Dayen runs the numbers:

Since the late 1990s, 31 out of 41 top FTC officials worked directly for a company that has business before the agency, with 26 of them related to the technology industry.

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-06-23-attacks-lina-khans-ethics-reveal-projection/

Take Christine Wilson, a GOP-appointed FTC Commissioner who quit the agency in a huff because Khan wanted to do things for the American people, and not their self-appointed oligarchic princelings. Wilson wrote an angry break-up letter to Khan that the WSJ published, presaging their concierge service for Samuel Alito:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-im-resigning-from-the-ftc-commissioner-ftc-lina-khan-regulation-rule-violation-antitrust-339f115d

For Wilson to question Khan’s ethics took galactic-scale chutzpah. Wilson, after all, is a commissioner who took cash money from Bristol-Myers Squibb, then voted to approve their merger with Celgene:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4365601-Wilson-Christine-Smith-final278.html

Or take Wilson’s GOP FTC predecessor Josh Wright, whose incestuous relationship with the companies he oversaw at the Commission are so intimate he’s practically got a Habsburg jaw. Wright went from Google to the US government and back again four times. He also lobbied the FTC on behalf of Qualcomm (a major donor to Wright’s employer, George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School) after working “personally and substantially” while serving at the FTC.

George Mason’s Scalia center practically owns the revolving door, counting fourteen FTC officials among its affliates:

https://campaignforaccountability.org/ttp-investigation-big-techs-backdoor-to-the-ftc/

Since the 1990s, 31 out of 41 top FTC officials — both GOP appointed and appointees backed by corporate Dems — “worked directly for a company that has business before the agency”:

https://www.citizen.org/article/ftc-big-tech-revolving-door-problem-report/

The majority of FTC and DoJ antitrust lawyers who served between 2014–21 left government service and went straight to work for a Big Law firm, serving the companies they’d regulated just a few months before:

https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/The-Revolving-Door-In-Federal-Antitrust-Enforcement.pdf

Take Deborah Feinstein, formerly the head of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, now a partner at Arnold & Porter, where she’s represented General Electric, NBCUniversal, Unilever, and Pepsi and a whole medicine chest’s worth of pharma giants before her former subordinates at the FTC. Michael Moiseyev who was assistant manager of FTC Competition is now in charge of mergers at Weil Gotshal & Manges, working for Microsoft, Meta, and Eli Lilly.

There’s a whole bunch more, but Dayen reserves special notice for Andrew Smith, Trump’s FTC Consumer Protection boss. Before he was put on the public payroll, Smith represented 120 clients that had business before the Commission, including “nearly every major bank in America, drug industry lobbyist PhRMA, Uber, Equifax, Amazon, Facebook, Verizon, and a variety of payday lenders”:

https://www.citizen.org/sites/default/files/andrew_smith_foia_appeal_response_11_30.pdf

Before Khan, in other words, the FTC was a “conflict-of-interest assembly line, moving through corporate lawyers and industry hangers-on without resistance for decades.”

Khan is the first FTC head with no conflicts. This leaves her opponents in the sweaty, desperate position of inventing conflicts out of thin air.

For these corporate lickspittles, Khan’s “conflict” is that she has a point of view. Specifically, she thinks that the FTC should do its job.

This makes grifters like Jim Jordan furious. Yesterday, Jordan grilled Khan in a hearing where he accused her of violating an ethics official’s advice that she should recuse herself from Big Tech cases. This is a talking point that was created and promoted by Bloomberg:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-16/ftc-rejected-ethics-advice-for-khan-recusal-on-meta-case

That ethics official, Lorielle Pankey, did not, in fact, make this recommendation. It’s simply untrue (she did say that Khan presiding over cases that she has made public statements about could be used as ammo against her, but did not say that it violated any ethical standard).

But there’s more to this story. Pankey herself has a gigantic conflict of interest in this case, including a stock portfolio with $15,001 and $50,000 in Meta stock (Meta is another company that has whined in print and in its briefs that it is a poor defenseless lamb being picked on by big, mean ole Lina Khan):

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ethics-official-owned-meta-stock-while-recommending-ftc-chair-recuse-herself-from-meta-case-8582a83b

Jordan called his hearing on the back of this fake scandal, and then proceeded to show his whole damned ass, even as his GOP colleagues got into a substantive and even informative dialog with Khan:

https://prospect.org/power/2023-07-14-jim-jordan-misfires-attacks-lina-khan/

Mostly what came out of that hearing was news about how Khan is doing her job, working on behalf of the American people. For example, she confirmed that she’s investigating OpenAI for nonconsensually harvesting a mountain of Americans’ personal information:

https://www.ft.com/content/8ce04d67-069b-4c9d-91bf-11649f5adc74

Other Republicans, including confirmed swamp creatures like Matt Gaetz, ended up agreeing with Khan that Amazon Ring is a privacy dumpster-fire. Nobodies like Rep TomM assie gave Khan an opening to discuss how her agency is protecting mom-and-pop grocers from giant, price-gouging, greedflation-drunk national chains. Jeff Van Drew gave her a chance to talk about the FTC’s war on robocalls. Lance Gooden let her talk about her fight against horse doping.

But Khan’s opponents did manage to repeat a lot of the smears against her, and not just the bogus conflict-of-interest story. They also accused her of being 0–4 in her actions to block mergers, ignoring the huge number of mergers that have been called off or not initiated because M&A professionals now understand they can no longer expect these mergers to be waved through. Indeed, just last night I spoke with a friend who owns a medium-sized tech company that Meta tried to buy out, only to withdraw from the deal because their lawyers told them it would get challenged at the FTC, with an uncertain outcome.

These talking points got picked up by people commenting on Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley’s ruling against the FTC in the Microsoft-Activision merger. The FTC was seeking an injunction against the merger, and Corley turned them down flat. The ruling was objectively very bad. Start with the fact that Corley’s son is a Microsoft employee who stands reap massive gains in his stock options if the merger goes through.

But beyond this (real, non-imaginary, not manufactured conflict of interest), Corley’s judgment and her remarks in court were inexcusably bad, as Matt Stoller writes:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-for-microsoft-mergers

In her ruling, Corley explained that she didn’t think Microsoft would abuse the market dominance they’d gain by merging their giant videogame platform and studio with one of its largest competitors. Why not? Because Microsoft’s execs pinky-swore that they wouldn’t abuse that power.

Corely’s deference to Microsoft’s corporate priorities goes deeper than trusting its execs, though. In denying the FTC’s motion, she stated that it would be unfair to put the merger on hold in order to have a full investigation into its competition implications because Microsoft and Activision had set a deadline of July 18 to conclude things, and Microsoft would have to pay a penalty if that deadline passed.

This is surreal: a judge ruled that a corporation’s radical, massive merger shouldn’t be subject to full investigation because that corporation itself set an arbitrary deadline to conclude the deal before such an investigation could be concluded. That’s pretty convenient for future mega-mergers — just set a short deadline and Judge Corely will tell regulators that the merger can’t be investigated because the deadline is looming.

And this is all about the future. As Stoller writes, Microsoft isn’t exactly subtle about why it wants this merger. Its own execs said that the reason they were spending “dump trucks” of money buying games studios was to “spend Sony out of business.”

Now, maybe you hate Sony. Maybe you hate Activision. There’s plenty of good reason to hate both — they’re run by creeps who do shitty things to gamers and to their employees. But if you think that Microsoft will be better once it eliminates its competition, then you have the attention span of a goldfish on Adderall.

Microsoft made exactly the same promises it made on Activision when it bought out another games studio, Zenimax — and it broke every one of those promises.

Microsoft has a long, long, long history of being a brutal, abusive monopolist. It is a convicted monopolist. And its bad conduct didn’t end with the browser wars. You remember how the lockdown turned all our homes into rent-free branch offices for our employers? Microsoft seized on that moment to offer our bosses keystroke-and-click level surveillance of our use of our own computers in our own homes, via its Office365 bossware product:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revenge

If you think a company that gave your boss a tool to spy on their employees and rank them by “productivity” as a prelude to firing them or cutting their pay is going to treat gamers or game makers well once they have “spent the competition out of business,” you’re a credulous sucker and you are gonna be so disappointed.

The enshittification play is obvious: use investor cash to make things temporarily nice for customers and suppliers, lock both of them in — in this case, it’s with a subscription-based service similar to Netflix’s — and then claw all that value back until all that’s left is a big pile of shit.

The Microsoft case is about the future. Judge Corely doesn’t take the future seriously: as she said during the trial, “All of this is for a shooter videogame.” The reason Corely greenlit this merger isn’t because it won’t be harmful — it’s because she doesn’t think those harms matter.

But it does, and not just because games are an art form that generate billions of dollars, employ a vast workforce, and bring pleasure to millions. It also matters because this is yet another one of the Reaganomic precedents that tacitly endorses monopolies as efficient forces for good. As Stoller writes, Corley’s ruling means that “deal bankers are sharpening pencils and saying ‘Great, the government lost! We can get mergers through everywhere else.’ Basically, if you like your high medical prices, you should be cheering on Microsoft’s win today.”

Ronald Reagan’s antitrust has colonized our brains so thoroughly that commentators were surprised when, immediately after the ruling, the FTC filed an appeal. Don’t they know they’ve lost? the commentators said:

https://gizmodo.com/ftc-files-appeal-of-microsoft-activision-deal-ruling-1850640159

They echoed the smug words of insufferable Activision boss Mike Ybarra: “Your tax dollars at work.”

https://twitter.com/Qwik/status/1679277251337277440

But of course Khan is appealing. The only reason that’s surprising is that Khan is working for us, the American people, not the giant corporations the FTC is supposed to be defending us from. Sure, I get that this is a major change! But she needs our backing, not our cheap cynicism.

The business lobby and their pathetic Renfields have hoarded all the nice things and they don’t want us to have any. Khan and her trustbuster colleagues want the opposite. There is no measure so small that the corporate world won’t have a conniption over it. Take click to cancel, the FTC’s perfectly reasonable proposal that if you sign up for a recurring payment subscription with a single click, you should be able to cancel it with a single click.

The tooth-gnashing and garment-rending and scenery-chewing over this is wild. America’s biggest companies have wheeled out their biggest guns, claiming that if they make it too easy to unsubscribe, they will lose money. In other words, they are currently making money not because people want their products, but because it’s too hard to stop paying for them!

https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/12/ftc_cancel_subscriptions/

We shouldn’t have to tolerate this sleaze. And if we back Khan and her team, they’ll protect us from these scams. Don’t let them convince you to give up hope. This is the start of the fight, not the end. We’re trying to reverse 40 years’ worth of Reagonmics here. It won’t happen overnight. There will be setbacks. But keep your eyes on the prize — this is the most exciting moment for countering corporate power and giving it back to the people in my lifetime. We owe it to ourselves, our kids and our planet to fight one.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

[Image ID: A line drawing of pilgrims ducking a witch tied to a ducking stool. The pilgrims' clothes have been emblazoned with the logos for the WSJ, Microsoft, Activision and Blizzard. The witch's face has been replaced with that of FTC chair Lina M Khan.]

#pluralistic #amazon's antitrust paradox #lina khan #business lobby #lina m khan #ftc #federal trade commission #david dayen #microsoft #activision #blizzard #wsj #wall street journal #reaganomics #trustbusting #antitrust #mergers #merger to monopoly #gaming #xbox #matt stoller #the american prospect #jim jordan #click to cancel #robert bork #Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley #microsoft activision #fuckin' ninjas

[whilomm]

to help spread the word a lil, ask a mortician just put out a new video, this one specifically about proposed FTC regulation changes for U.S. funeral homes, and theres a comment period that closes October 10th, 2023 to ya kno. comment on em. tell em to help make funerals a lil cheaper.

I would really reccomend watching the video as she explains it a lot better, but the TLDR is that the FTC is thinking of adding some rules to the regs on how funeral homes disclose a couple of things, like prices (making them list prices online, so you dont need to drive to 7 diff funeral homes to price shop the day your son died, and cause hidden prices=more expensive), and make it clearer WHEN embalming is required (that is, that its NOT required by law, but might be required by the funeral home themselves)

like i said, watch the vid for a better explaination, but both of those things contribute to funerals being Mega Fucking Expensive, so. if you feel like it, go to the FTC and tell em to implement the changes!

comment period ends october 10th, 2023!

#ask a mortician #caitlyn doughty #funerals #ftc #federal trade commission #uspol #funeral industry #buzzy #Youtube

[destielmemenews]

source 1

source 2

source 3

#destiel meme #destiel meme news #united states #us news #news #amazon #fta #federal trade commission #ftc #eat it jeffrey #jeff bezos

[iww-gnv]

Microsoft reneged on promises it made in court during its Federal Trade Commission (FTC) antitrust trial in 2023 by laying off 1,900 employees in late January, according to the FTC. FTC lawyer Imad Abyad filed a letter with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Wednesday, effectively telling on Microsoft. “This newly-revealed information contradicts Microsoft’s representations in this proceeding,” the FTC lawyer wrote. Microsoft announced on Jan. 15 that it was laying off 1,900 workers from its gaming division — around 8% of that part of the company. A large portion of those layoffs were at the newly acquired Activision Blizzard. The percentage of Activision Blizzard layoffs has not been made public, but at least 899 of that 1,900 worked out of Activision Blizzard’s California offices, according to public records.

#news #labor news #gaming news #tech news #the ftc #ftc #federal trade commission #microsoft #activision blizzard #blizzard #2024 layoffs #tech industry layoffs #gaming industry layoffs #layoffs

[reasonsforhope]

Non-paywalled version here.

“The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday [May 3rd] announced a plan to bar Facebook parent company Meta from monetizing the data of children and teens under the age of 18, citing allegations that the company misled parents about their ability to control their children’s communications in its Messenger Kids app.

The agency is seeking to update a landmark 2020 privacy settlement with Meta, which it says the company has already violated. The $5 billion order required the company to keep close watch over how third-party companies accessed users’ data and submit to regular privacy audits.

The FTC alleges that the company continued to give app developers’ access to users’ private information, after it promised to cut off access in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which revealed the political consultancy improperly gained access to the data of millions of Facebook users.

FTC Chair Lina Khan (D), a prominent tech industry critic, has promised to use the agency’s tools to more strictly monitor whether big companies are adhering to privacy agreements with the agency. Many Democrats criticized the FTC’s historic $5 billion settlement following Cambridge Analytica for not being tough enough. Now with a 3-0 majority at the agency, the party is newly emboldened to pursue tougher penalties.

The announcement comes as policymakers from both parties grow increasingly concerned about the impact of social media on children and teens. On Tuesday, a bipartisan group of senators revived multiple bills aimed at protecting kids and teens online...

Under the FTC’s new proposal, Meta would only be allowed to collect and use data about users under the age of 18 to provide services or for security purposes. It would not be able to use that data for commercial gain. The company would also be barred from launching new products or services until after they get a written assessment that they’re fully complying with the company’s privacy program. The rules would apply to any company that Meta acquires, including in virtual reality.

The announcement is just the first step in an administrative process to modify the 2020 order. Meta will have 30 days to respond to the agency’s plan.”

-via Washington Post, 5/3/23

#facebook #meta #instagram #zuckerberg #vr #big tech #digital privacy #privacy scandal #us politics #united states #ftc #federal trade commission #good news #hope

[destiel-news-channel]

The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) and 17 states are sueing Amazon for illegal monopoly

Source 1

Source 2

And the tweet that states it from the official FTC

There are waaaay more sources out there

thank you very much for the information :) here in Destiel meme format:

[Image ID: There are three images. The first one is similar to a title card and shows a screenshot froom the show supernatural. Dean and Castiel stand facing each other. The screenshot is faded and superimposed with a blue background from a news show. In the front is a logo which says 'Destiel News Channel'. The second is a screenshot of Castiel from the same confession scene. At the bottom is a headline which reads 'FTC sues Amazon' and a subline which says 'and this is why you don't cheat at Monopoly, guys!'. The third image is a screenshot of Dean from the same scene edited so that a text looking like subtitles spells out 'I love you'. /End ID]

#amazon #ftc #federal trade commission #monopoly #jeff bezos #destiel #destiel news channel #destiel meme #spn #supernatural #usa #united states

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The Biden administration announced a rule Tuesday to cap all credit card late fees, the latest effort in the White House push to end what it has called junk fees and a move that regulators say will save Americans up to $10 billion a year.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s new regulations will set a ceiling of $8 for most credit card late fees or require banks to show why they should charge more than $8 for such a fee.

The rule would bring the average credit card late fee down from $32. The bureau estimates banks brought in roughly $14 billion in credit card late fees a year.

“In credit cards, like so many corners of the economy today, consumers are beset by junk fees and forced to navigate a market dominated by relatively few, powerful players who control the market,” said Rohit Chopra, director of the bureau, in a statement.

President Joe Biden planned to highlight the proposal along with other efforts to reduce costs to Americans at a meeting of his competition council on Tuesday. The Democratic president is forming a new strike force to crack down on illegal and unfair pricing on things like groceries, prescription drugs, health care, housing and financial services.

The strike force will be led by the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission, according to a White House statement.

The Biden administration has portrayed the White House Competition Council as a way to save people money and promote greater competition within the U.S. economy.

The White House Council of Economic Advisers produced an analysis indicating that the Biden administration’s efforts overall will eliminate $20 billion in annual junk fees. The analysis found that consumers pay about $90 billion a year in junk fees, including for concerts, apartment rentals and auto dealers.

The effort appears to have done little to help Biden politically ahead of this year’s presidential election. Just 34 percent of U.S. adults approve of Biden’s economic leadership, according to a new survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Sen. Tim Scott, R-South Carolina, criticized the CFPB cap on credit card late fees, saying that consumers would ultimately face greater costs through higher interest rates and less access to credit.

“It will decrease the availability of credit card products for those who need it most, raise rates for many borrowers who carry a balance but pay on time, and increase the likelihood of late payments across the board,” Scott said.

Americans held more than $1.05 trillion on their credit cards in the third quarter of 2023, a record, and a figure certain to grow once the fourth-quarter data is released by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. next month. Those balances are now carrying interest on them, which is the highest it has been since the Federal Reserve started tracking the data back in the mid-1990s.

Further, more Americans are falling behind on their credit card debts as well. Delinquency rates at the major credit card issuers such as American Express, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Capital One and Discover have been trending upward for several quarters. Some analysts have become concerned Americans, particularly poorer households hurt by inflation, might be taking on too much debt.

“Overall, the consumer is credit healthy. However, the reality is that there are starting to be some significant signs of stress,” said Silvio Tavares, president and CEO of VantageScore, one of the country’s two major credit scoring systems, in an interview last month.

The growth of the credit card industry is partly why Capital One announced it would buy Discover Financial last month for $35 billion. The two companies, which are two of the largest credit card issuers, are also two companies whose customers regularly carry a balance on their accounts.

This is not the first time policymakers have weighed in on credit card fees. Congress in 2010 passed the CARD Act, which banned credit card companies from charging excessive penalty fees and established clearer disclosures and consumer protections.

The Federal Reserve issued a rule in 2010 that capped the first credit card late fee at $25, and $35 for subsequent late payments, and tied that fee to inflation. The CFPB, which took over the regulation of the credit card industry from the Fed after it was established, is proposing going further than the Fed.

The bureau’s proposal is similar in structure to what the bureau announced in January when it proposed capping overdraft fees to as little as $3. In that proposed regulation, banks would be required to either accept the bureau’s benchmark or show regulators why they should charge more, a method that few bank industry executives expect to use.

Biden has made the elimination of junk fees one of the cornerstones of his administration’s economic agenda heading into the 2024 election. Fees that banks charge customers have been at the center of that campaign, and the White House directed government regulators last year to do whatever is in their power to further curtail the practice.

In another move being highlighted by the White House, the Agriculture Department said it has finalized a rule to stop what it deems to be deceptive contracts by meat processors and to ban retaliation against small farmers and ranchers that work together in associations.

#us politics #news #pbs #president joe biden #2024 #Consumer Financial Protection Bureau #credit cards #late fees #junk fees #Rohit Chopra #Federal Trade Commission #department of justice #White House Competition Council #White House Council of Economic Advisers #Sen. Tim Scott #Federal Deposit Insurance Corp #federal reserve #youtube #videos #economy #economics

[supremeuppityone]

#federal trade commission #ftc #noncompete agreements #this is a huge win for workers

[winged-fool]

Amazon is finally getting hit with an antitrust lawsuit and I couldn't be happier 🥹

#anti amazon #Anti big tech #us politics #federal trade commission #lfggggg

[wowimactuallyfeelingokay]

Have this very specific meme I made for a discord I'm in

#uh #federal trade commission

[seth-the-giggle-fish]

By

Hannah Garden-Monheit and Ken Merber

March 1, 2024

Landlords and property managers can’t collude on rental pricing. Using new technology to do it doesn’t change that antitrust fundamental. Regardless of the industry you’re in, if your business uses an algorithm to determine prices, a brief filed by the FTC and the Department of Justice offers a helpful guideline for antitrust compliance: your algorithm can’t do anything that would be illegal if done by a real person.

Today, the FTC and Department of Justice took action to fight algorithmic collusion in the residential housing market. The agencies filed a joint legal brief explaining that price fixing through an algorithm is still price fixing. The brief highlights key aspects of competition law important for businesses in every industry: (1) you can’t use an algorithm to evade the law banning price-fixing agreements, and (2) an agreement to use shared pricing recommendations, lists, calculations, or algorithms can still be unlawful even where co-conspirators retain some pricing discretion or cheat on the agreement.

The agencies’ work in this space is especially important given rising residential housing rental prices. Rent is up nearly 20% since 2020, with the largest increases concentrated on lower- and middle-tier apartments rented by lower-income consumers. About half of renters now pay more than 30% of their income in rent and utilities, and rising shelter costs were responsible for over two-thirds of January inflation.

Meanwhile, landlords increasingly use algorithms to determine their prices, with landlords reportedly using software like “RENTMaximizer” and similar products to determine rents for tens of millions of apartments across the country. Efforts to fight collusion are even more critical given private equity-backed consolidation among landlords and property management companies. The considerable leverage these firms already have over their renters is only exacerbated by potential algorithmic price collusion. Algorithms that recommend prices to numerous competing landlords threaten to remove renters’ ability to vote with their feet and comparison-shop for the best apartment deal around.

What’s the message for other businesses?

Agreeing to use an algorithm is an agreement. In algorithmic collusion, a pricing algorithm combines competitor data and spits out the suggested “maximized” rent for a unit given local conditions. Such software can allow landlords to collude on pricing by using an algorithm—something the law doesn’t allow IRL. When you replace once-independent pricing decisions with a shared algorithm, expect trouble. Competitors using a shared human agent to fix prices? Illegal. Doing the same thing but with an agreed upon, shared algorithm? Still illegal. It’s also irrelevant that the algorithm maker isn’t a direct competitor if you and your competitors each agree to use their product knowing the others are doing the same in concert.

Price deviations don’t immunize conspirators. Some things in life might require perfection, but price-fixing arrangements aren’t one of them. Just because a software recommends rather than determines a price doesn’t mean it’s legal. Setting initial starting prices or recommending initial starting prices can be illegal, even if conspirators deviate from recommended prices. And even if some of the conspirators cheat by starting with lower prices than those the algorithm recommended, that doesn’t necessarily change things. Being bad at breaking the law isn’t a defense.

The housing industry isn’t alone in using potentially illegal collusive algorithms. The Department of Justice has previously secured a guilty plea related to the use of pricing algorithms to fix prices in online resales, and has an ongoing case against sharing of price-related and other sensitive information among meat processing competitors. Other private cases have been recently brought against hotels and casinos.

Technology is a promise. Used correctly, it can make our lives healthier, safer, and more efficient. But its efficiency can also be used by bad actors to crush competition or bilk consumers in novel ways. No matter the tool law violators use, the FTC and the Department of Justice stand vigilant on the side of consumers and competition.

Hannah Garden-Monheit is Director of the FTC’s Office of Policy Planning and Ken Merber is Deputy Assistant Director of the FTC’s Anticompetitive Practices II Division. 

#fucking finally #can't wait for landlords to be forced to stop this shit #federal trade commission #price fixing

[exclamaquest]

This is a very basic overview of the 1980 KidVid scandal, an important part of advertising regulation history and a good illustration of just how much power ad lobbyists hold. I recommend this or this (both PDFs, the second is from the FTC) to get a more in depth look at what went wrong.

In the late 70s and into 1980, there was a push from the Federal Trade Commission to amp up the regulations around what foods could be advertised on children's television, with a special emphasis on sugary foods. They were also concerned about ads that portrayed vitamins as candy-like that could encourage children to eat far more than they should.

The FTC requested a total ban on ads "for any product which is directed to, or seen by, audiences composed of a significant proportion of children who are too young to understand the selling purpose of or otherwise comprehend or evaluate the advertising [in this case, eight, though the limit was later lowered to six]" targeting "sugared food products directed to, or seen by, audiences composed of a significant proportion of older children".

This may seem harsh, but as you read, keep in mind it's still a far cry from the older, firmer regulations prohibiting any advertisement at all. Additionally, while eight may seem old, there were studies done that clearly showed that children could not reliably differentiate normal programming from ad segments.

Another piece of the most damning evidence used in the case came straight from the horse's mouth: Among other things, an advertising executive was caught on tape saying, "When you sell a woman on a product and she goes into the store and finds your brand isn’t in stock she’ll probably forget about it. But when you sell a kid on your product, if he can’t get it he will throw himself on the floor, stamp his feet, and cry. You can’t get a reaction like that out of an adult."

But this was during the leadup to Reagan's term and so, of course, it ended in misery. Advertisers, emboldened by Reagan's support of deregulating their industry and aggravated the the FTC's recent aggressive rulemaking, wrote scathing op-eds in national newspapers. They branded the FTC a "nanny" and put forth the argument that because parents were the ones making the final purchasing decision, there was no deception of consumers going on, and therefore it was an overreach of the FTC's rulemaking power. They even postured parents supporting the new regulations as a sign of weakness and inability to control their children.

Of course, these arguments fall apart under the slightest bit of pressure, but that didn't matter to advertisers or to newspapers. To them, every new rule on advertising was another chunk of money taken out of their lucrative ad placements. Even the Washington Post wrote against it.

There's a lot more to why this failed, including it happening at the same time as other FTC rulings that angered politically powerful businesses like funerary services, large used-car dealerships, and the tobacco industry, but that would take up a whole history book. Instead, it's important to know that the FTC had many, many enemies in very powerful positions, and this lead to the Federal Trade Commission Improvement Act of 1980.

The 1980 act cut the FTC off at the knees. It now required stringent congressional oversight, public announcements of proposed rules, and explicitly prohibited the FTC from any rulemaking involving children's advertising.

The FTC was burned so badly that on May 1, 1980, after the landmark Civiletti Opinion, they shut their doors. Luckily, funding was reappropriated relatively quickly thanks to President Carter's novel interpretation of the 1884 Antideficiency Act (the same one used by Attorney General Civiletti to shut it down in the first place) and the shutdown only lasted a day, but the wounds were there.

Even today, the FTC is loathe to touch children's television, instead focusing on advertising in apps and websites. The KidVid scandal is part of what enabled Reagan to enact such strict deregulation, and is a major contributing factor to the state of advertising as it is currently.

It's as fascinating as it is horrific, and it's something that's essential to know. Both the degree to which lobbyists were able to influence public opinion and public policy and the extent of the aftershocks of the KidVid scandal are very important to understanding today's advertising regulations and the FTC's position in them.

I tried to simplify this as much as I could, but there was a lot to cover, and this is only a fraction of everything that happened during the scandal. The two PDFs I linked in the first paragraph (this and this) are great resources for understanding more about what happened, and if you're interested, I'd highly recommend you read them.

If there's any questions, I'll do my best to answer them, but please bear in mind I'm neither a historian nor a lawyer, just a guy with a special interest.

#theo.txt #theo.pdf #man this got long. what autism does to a mfer #advertising #children's advertising #ronald reagan #advertising deregulation #lawboy tag #federal trade commission #ftc #kidvid scandal

[mypatchworkreflection]

"What is Facebook’s response to the ugly stories on how it tracks and manipulates children? To apologize? To obey the Federal Trade Commission’s order to stop? Nope.

Zuckerberg just asked a court to declare the FTC unconstitutional."

- Matthew Stoller

Actually, I think that the court should find that I have too much money for rules to apply to me, and I can do what I want.

#Facebook #federal trade commission #fuck mark zuckerberg #eat the rich

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Donald Trump's White House blocked dozens of federal agencies from creating new government websites aimed at aiding homeless people, fighting human trafficking, and helping people vote, according to records obtained by Insider through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The requests for new websites came from agencies small and large at a time when Trump had grown openly hostile toward his own administration, often deriding the federal government's executive branch as an out-of-control "deep state" conspiring to undermine him.

The Department of Defense, Department of Labor, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Central Intelligence Agency, and Environmental Protection Agency are among the more than two-dozen agencies that Trump's Office of Management and Budget rebuffed.

Proposed websites that Trump's Office of Management and Budget rejected include HumanTrafficking.gov (Department of State); ReportFraud.gov (Federal Trade Commission); Telehealth.gov (Department of Health and Human Services), FindShelters.gov (Department of Housing and Urban Development), and FiscalData.gov (Department of the Treasury), according to federal records.

Such custom ".gov" website domains enhance government agencies' ability to effectively provide and market services to an American public that's all but universally connected to the internet.

Without them, agencies can still create new sections on their primary websites, but with long and unmemorable subdomain names replete with slashes and hyphens — not exactly prime fodder for a billboard or public service announcement.

The documents obtained by Insider listed no reasons for why the Office of Management and Budget rejected or accepted an agency's ".gov" website domain request.

Neither did the Office of Management and Budget, whose spokesperson, Isabel Aldunate, declined to answer Insider's questions.

Representatives for Trump, who this week officially launched his 2024 presidential campaign, did not reply to several messages.

MAJOR DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TRUMP AND BIDEN

The Trump White House's practice of regularly blocking and slow-walking federal agencies' website requests stands in stark contrast to that of President Joe Biden's White House, which has approved almost every request it's received, federal records indicate.

Of the 105 ".gov" websites requests Trump's Office of Management and Budget considered between July 2018 and the day Trump left office on January 20, 2021, it accepted 60, denied 44, and left one pending — a 41.9% rejection rate, according to the records obtained by Insider.

Of the 95 ".gov" website requests Biden's Office of Management and Budget considered between January 21, 2021, and September 9, 2022, it accepted 85, denied four, and recorded six requests voluntarily withdrawn — a 4.2% rejection rate.

Insider asked more than a dozen federal agencies that had their custom .gov website domain requests rejected by the Trump White House to explain what happened.

Some declined to comment, including officials at the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Labor. Others did not respond to inquiries, including the Department of Agriculture and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

For those who did comment, they offered limited insight into why they sought new .gov websites or why the Trump White House denied their requests.

Housing and Urban Development, for one, told Insider in a statement that it asked to establish FindShelters.gov in late 2019 "for the creation of a new tool that would provide information about housing, shelter, healthcare and clothing resources in communities across the country."

After two months in limbo, the Trump White House denied the agency's request. It now provides such information on its main agency website, with resources concentrated at a URL of https://www.hud.gov/homelessness_resources.

HUD's understanding of why its request was denied: "There has been a federal-wide ongoing effort to limit and reduce the number of federal public-facing websites. The effort was started to reduce cost and redundancy."

On December 23, 2019, the CIA asked Trump's White House to approve the website domain DataTransport.gov. A week later, the Office of Management and Budget rejected the request.

"The domain was registered to support the IC's data services program," a source familiar with the matter said of the CIA's request, with "IC" standing for "intelligence community." The source offered no additional details.

In March 2019, the generally apolitical Peace Corps asked Trump's Office of Management and Budget to green-light PeaceCorpsCN.gov — a website referencing its operation in China. Office of Management and Budget officials rejected the request on an unspecified date.

"Per compliance with Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 18-01, the domain was requested at the time to enhance email and web security," Peace Corps spokesman Troy Blackwell wrote in an email.

By early 2020, the Peace Corps had begun the process of leaving China — one of Trump's favorite targets and topics. The Peace Corps has not re-upped its PeaceCorpsCN.gov website request since.

"After Peace Corps closed the China post, we no longer needed the domain," Blackwell said.

BLOCK AND DELAY

In at least one case, Trump's White House denied a website request — the United States Agency for International Development-sponsored ProsperAfrica.gov — that Biden's White House later approved.

The ProsperAfrica.gov website now details efforts by the United States Agency for International Development to mobilize "services and resources from across the US government to empower businesses and investors with market insights, deal support, and financing opportunities" on the African continent.

And of the custom website domains Trump's Office of Management and Budget did OK, approval often took weeks or months instead of the days or hours typical for Biden's Office of Management and Budget.

One particularly testy delay came during the summer of 2020, when the Election Assistance Commission sought approval to create HelpAmericaVote.gov and use it to recruit and coordinate an army of new poll workers amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which by then had sidelined tens of thousands of older election volunteers unable or unwilling to staff in-person voting sites.

An unexpectedly long delay ensued. Finally, the Office of Management and Budget sunk the Election Assistance Commission's HelpAmericaVote.gov website, arguing in an email obtained by Insider that the election agency's request "did not justify the creation of a stand-alone site." The decision arrived as Trump's assertions that US elections were "rigged" and fraudulent had grown louder and evermore detached from reality.

Then-Election Assistance Commission Executive Director Mona Harrington frantically appealed for reconsideration.

"This is really negatively impacting our progress at this point," she wrote Justin Grimes, then an official in the Office of Management and Budget's Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer. "Please advise, we desperately need the domain."

Several days later, the Office of Management and Budget reversed its decision, and HelpAmericaVote.gov would go live in mid-August 2020, just in time for National Poll Worker Recruitment Day on September 1. About 100,000 people visited the site that day, the Election Assistance Commission said.

In a statement to Insider at the time, Trump's Office of Management and Budget said it rejected the Election Assistance Commission's request for HelpAmericaVote.gov "because the information provided did not justify the creation of a stand-alone site based on existing requirements. OMB worked with EAC given the importance of the topic to improve the justification which led to approval."

Trump's Office of Management and Budget did approve a few custom web domains quickly.

Among those granted the swiftest approval: TrumpLibrary.gov, TrumpWhiteHouse.gov, and FlyHealthy.gov.

Curiously, the General Services Administration on October 8, 2020, proposed creating BuildBackBetter.gov, which Trump's Office of Management and Budget approved the same day, according to federal records.

At that juncture, Biden has already made "build back better" a cornerstone plank of his 2020 presidential campaign platform. Trump's administration did not appear to use the BuildBackBetter.gov domain for any material purpose. But in mid-November 2020, then President-elect Biden began using it as part of his official presidential transition web presence, according to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

AN OPAQUE APPROVAL PROCESS

Trump in 2018 tapped the White House's Office of Management and Budget to serve as the national gatekeeper for new federal government websites — a role previously filled by the General Services Administration.

In a statement to Insider last year, the General Services Administration said the Office of Management and Budget decided in February 2018 to "perform the adjudication of all new federal executive branch .gov domain requests to limit the proliferation of executive branch stand-alone .gov websites/domains and infrastructure."

The office immediately took a hard line on agencies' website requests, denying as many as it accepted during the second half of 2018, according to federal records.

But the decisions were made out of public view.

In January 2021, Insider filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking the Office of Management and Budget for records related to .gov website domains that federal government agencies had petitioned to create. Insider also asked for records indicating whether the Office of Management and Budget approved or denied the agencies' requests to create .gov websites.

In March 2021, Office Management and Budget officials denied Insider's FOIA request, stating that "no responsive records were located."

Insider formally appealed that decision. In late October, about 19 months later, Office of Management and Budget officials acknowledged that records Insider requested did indeed exist.

Officials then agreed to release a summary of .gov website requests the Office of Management and Budget had approved and rejected, although it did not immediately provide other requested records, such as documents explaining why officials approved or denied a particular website.

The data include eight recently requested websites that are listed as "pending." Seven come from the Department of Education and appear to pertain to student debt relief, a top Biden administration priority, and feature URLs such as StudentDebtRelief.gov and GetStudentLoanRelief.gov.

The websites were not yet functional as of mid-November.

#us politics #news #donald trump #trump administration #president joe biden #biden administration #2022 #2018 #Freedom of Information Act #Department of Defense #Department of Labor #Centers for Disease Control and Prevention #Environmental Protection Agency #cia #Office of Management and Budget #government website domains #Isabel Aldunate #Federal Trade Commission #department of labor #Department of Agriculture #Housing and Urban Development #Peace Corps #United States Agency for International Development #Election Assistance Commission #General Services Administration #department of education #business insider #foia