Federal Trade Commission

Subscribe to Federal Trade Commission

We open today’s episode by teasing the Supreme Court’s decision to review whether section 230 protects big platforms from liability for materially assisting terror groups whose speech they distribute (or even recommend). I predict that this is the beginning of the end of the house of cards that aggressive lawyering and good press have…

  • Gus Hurwitz brings us up to speed on tech bills in Congress. They are all dead, but some of them don’t know it yet. The big privacy bill, American Data Privacy and Protection Act, was killed by the left, but I argue that it’s the right that should be celebrating, since the bill

…

The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) other foot, I argue, is lodged firmly in its mouth. Tatyana Bolton defends the agency, which released what can only be described as a regulatory blog post in response to the log4j vulnerability, invoking the $700 million in fines imposed on Equifax to threatening “to use its full legal…

Brian Egan hosts this episode of the podcast, as Stewart Baker is hiking the wilds of New Hampshire with family. Nick Weaver joins the podcast to discuss the week in ransomware, as DOJ gets serious, and the gangs do too. Justice has a new ransomware task force,  and the gangs have asked  for $50…

This is a bonus episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast – a freestanding interview of Noah Phillips, a Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. The topic of the interview is whether privacy and antitrust analysis should be merged, especially in the context of Silicon Valley and its social media platforms. Commissioner Phillips, who has devoted considerable attention to the privacy side of the FTC’s jurisdiction, recently delivered a speech on the topic and telegraphed his doubts in the title: “Should We Block This Merger? Some Thoughts on Converging Antitrust and Privacy.” Subject to the usual Cyberlaw Podcast injunction that he speaks only for himself and not his institution or relatives, Commissioner Phillips lays out the very real connections between personal data and industry dominance as well as the complexities that come from trying to use antitrust to solve privacy problems. Among the complexities: the key to more competition among social media giants could well be more sharing between companies of the personal data that fuels their network effects, and corporate sharing of personal data is what privacy advocates have spent a decade crusading against. It’s a wide-ranging interview, touching on, among other things, whether antitrust can be used to solve Silicon Valley’s censorship problem (he’s skeptical) and what he thinks of suggestions in Europe that perhaps the Schrems problem can be solved by declaring that post-CCPA California meets EU data privacy standards. Commissioner Phillips is bemused; I conclude that this is just Europe seeking revenge for President Trump’s Brexit support by promoting “Calexit.”…

Continue Reading Episode 303: Another merger the FTC should block

This episode of the Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast features an interview with Chris Painter, the State Department’s Coordinator for Cyber Issues.  Chris had a long and distinguished career at the Justice Department and the White House before joining State.  Our interview ranges widely.  Are there really norms in cyberconflict, and should the US really encourage the…

The Federal Trade Commission is really on a roll these days. In the last few weeks alone it has: reached settlements with two companies, Compete, Inc. and Epic Marketplace, Inc., over the FTC’s charges that the two companies deceived consumers by misrepresenting their online data collection practices; released a blistering report criticizing the developers…