Slaughter Says Industry Would Benefit From FTC Rulemaking Authority, Clarity
Industry would benefit if the FTC had more rulemaking authority to provide clarity and could do more policymaking like the FCC, FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter told FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel on a podcast released Thursday. With fewer limits on…
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rulemaking, the FTC could provide clearer rules for industry, so businesses wouldn’t have to guess and fall “afoul of enforcement action,” Slaughter said. She sought more resources, noting the FTC had about 50 percent more employees at the start of the Reagan administration. “And that's not an accident, right?” Slaughter said. “We were systematically downsized in order to limit our effectiveness and limit our enforcement.” She said the agency could be doing more with its existing resources. She noted her dissent on the FTC’s $5 billion privacy settlement with Facebook, which she said wasn’t a strong enough deterrent to bad behavior. The agency hears a lot of concerns about manipulative ads, Slaughter said, which are enabled by personal data and personalized advertising. It can be useful for giving consumers what they want, but there's risk of propaganda messages reaching certain audiences, said Slaughter, a Democrat like Rosenworcel. “We've seen a lot of literature, recently, about white supremacist recruitment, targeting teenage boys.” The FTC member noted consumers have very little information about who collects data and how it’s collected, shared and used.