#ftc

"The target of the latest consumer protection rule unveiled by the Biden-Harris administration's Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday is, as one journalist said, "one of those things that sounds minor but is at the heart of many of the frustrations of American life": The hoops people in the U.S. are required to jump through to cancel subscriptions or services they no longer want or need.

The FTC announced that its "click-to-cancel" rule, part of the agency's review of the 1973 Negative Option Rule, was finalized and will go into effect 180 days after it is published in the Federal Register.

NEW YORKERS! Catch me TONIGHT at The Strand with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyebuchi and Alia Dastagir for a PEN World Voices panel called “Techidemic.”

If you want to piss me off, it's easy: just breezily assert that our tech regulation problems are the result of the fast pace of technological change racing ahead of the plodding speed of governmental action:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/22/uber-for-nurses/#go-meta

While there have been some instances in which this was true, it is far more often the case that there are blindingly obvious answers to tech problems, which our lawmakers and regulators ignore, amidst a rising chorus of warnings about the dire consequences of failing to act.

Take the new Maryland bill that (supposedly) outlaws surveillance pricing: this bill is, frankly, a terribly drafted piece of shit. Worse: it's a terribly drafted piece of shit bill that fails to resolve a serious and urgent problem. Even worse: the lawmakers who drafted this piece of shit bill and Maryland Governor Wes Moore were all loudly and repeatedly warned about the problems of this bill, and they did nothing and now the people of Maryland are fucked.

So what is surveillance pricing, why is it so dangerous, and what's wrong with Maryland's Protection Against Predatory Pricing Act?

Surveillance pricing is when a company spies on you ("surveillance") and uses the resulting dossier to raise its prices to the maximum it calculates you will be willing to pay ("pricing"). With surveillance pricing, a retailer reaches into your bank account and devalues your dollars. If you pay $2 for an apple at the grocery store and the same store only charges me $1 for that apple, then that grocer is telling you that your dollars are worth half as much as mine:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/

There's a kind of economics brainworm that makes some economists looooove surveillance pricing. They will insist that this is an "efficient" way to price goods, and claim that surveillance pricing isn't just a way to raise prices on people who are willing to pay more, it's a way to lower prices for people who are willing to pay less.

What you're supposed to infer from this is that people who can afford more will end up paying more, while people who can afford less will pay less. It's pitched as the Robin Hood of pricing policies, gouging the rich to finance discounts for the poor. But in practice, that's not at all how surveillance pricing works. Instead, surveillance pricing is most often used to levy a "desperation premium" on people who have fewer choices and less leverage.

Federal regulators on Tuesday [April 23, 2024] enacted a nationwide ban on new noncompete agreements, which keep millions of Americans — from minimum-wage earners to CEOs — from switching jobs within their industries.

The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday afternoon voted 3-to-2 to approve the new rule, which will ban noncompetes for all workers when the regulations take effect in 120 days [So, the ban starts in early September, 2024!]. For senior executives, existing noncompetes can remain in force. For all other employees, existing noncompetes are not enforceable.

[That's right: if you're currently under a noncompete agreement, it's completely invalid as of September 2024! You're free!!]

The antitrust and consumer protection agency heard from thousands of people who said they had been harmed by noncompetes, illustrating how the agreements are "robbing people of their economic liberty," FTC Chair Lina Khan said. 

The FTC commissioners voted along party lines, with its two Republicans arguing the agency lacked the jurisdiction to enact the rule and that such moves should be made in Congress...

Why it matters

The new rule could impact tens of millions of workers, said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist and president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. 

"For nonunion workers, the only leverage they have is their ability to quit their job," Shierholz told CBS MoneyWatch. "Noncompetes don't just stop you from taking a job — they stop you from starting your own business."

Since proposing the new rule, the FTC has received more than 26,000 public comments on the regulations. The final rule adopted "would generally prevent most employers from using noncompete clauses," the FTC said in a statement.

The agency's action comes more than two years after President Biden directed the agency to "curtail the unfair use" of noncompetes, under which employees effectively sign away future work opportunities in their industry as a condition of keeping their current job. The president's executive order urged the FTC to target such labor restrictions and others that improperly constrain employees from seeking work.

"The freedom to change jobs is core to economic liberty and to a competitive, thriving economy," Khan said in a statement making the case for axing noncompetes. "Noncompetes block workers from freely switching jobs, depriving them of higher wages and better working conditions, and depriving businesses of a talent pool that they need to build and expand."

Real-life consequences

In laying out its rationale for banishing noncompetes from the labor landscape, the FTC offered real-life examples of how the agreements can hurt workers.

In one case, a single father earned about $11 an hour as a security guard for a Florida firm, but resigned a few weeks after taking the job when his child care fell through. Months later, he took a job as a security guard at a bank, making nearly $15 an hour. But the bank terminated his employment after receiving a letter from the man's prior employer stating he had signed a two-year noncompete.

In another example, a factory manager at a textile company saw his paycheck dry up after the 2008 financial crisis. A rival textile company offered him a better job and a big raise, but his noncompete blocked him from taking it, according to the FTC. A subsequent legal battle took three years, wiping out his savings. 

-via CBS Moneywatch, April 24, 2024

--

Note:

A lot of people think that noncompete agreements are only a white-collar issue, but they absolutely affect blue-collar workers too, as you can see from the security guard anecdote.

In fact, one in six food and service workers are bound by noncompete agreements. That's right - one in six food workers can't leave Burger King to work for Wendy's [hypothetical example], in the name of "trade secrets." (x, x, x)

Noncompete agreements also restrict workers in industries from tech and video games to neighborhood yoga studios. "The White House estimates that tens of millions of workers are subject to noncompete agreements, even in states like California where they're banned." (x, x, x)

The FTC estimates that the ban will lead to "the creation of 8,500 new businesses annually, an average annual pay increase of $524 for workers, lower health care costs, and as many as 29,000 more patents each year for the next decade." (x)

Clearer explanation of noncompete agreements below the cut.

UnitedHealth Group is charging patients a markup for key life-saving drugs that could easily exceed their cost by a factor of ten or more, according to findings from the Federal Trade Commission.

The report, which levels the same allegations at CVS and Cigna, is the latest indictment of America’s broken healthcare system and comes on the heels of last month’s shocking murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

The U.S. is notorious for incurring the highest costs per capita of any wealthy nation, yet failing to achieve an even remotely equivalent improvement in patient outcomes versus Europe’s social market-based economies.

Critics argue that is due largely to the highly opaque manner in which needless markups are hidden to conceal inefficiencies that serve various vested interests. These include, but are not limited to, the big three drug middlemen known as pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs).

According to the FTC report, UnitedHealth’s OptumRx, along with Cigna’s Express Scripts and CVS Caremark Rx, were able to collectively pocket $7.3 billion in added revenue above cost during the five year period of the study through 2022.

“The Big 3 PBMs marked up numerous specialty generic drugs dispensed at their affiliated pharmacies by thousands of percent, and many others by hundreds of percent,” it concluded.

A thousand percent increase in the price of a drug that costs $10 wholesale would result in a retail price of $110.

This markup rate applied to 22% of the specialty therapies examined, including Imatinib, a generic used to treat leukemia, or non-oncological Tadalafil for pulmonary hypertension. Others such as Lamivudine needed by HIV-positive patients were nearly quadruple the price of their acquisition cost.

Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has been conducting Congressional hearings in an attempt to shed light on the problems posed by these drug middlemen as well as drugmakers themselves.