Former Kovacic Adviser Points to FTC/Nomi Settlement as Evidence of ‘Regulatory Overreach’

wrote James Cooper, director-research and policy at the George Mason School of Law's Law and Economics Center, in an opinion piece on The Hill’s website Monday. Cooper, who was an adviser to then-FTC Commissioner William Kovacic and acting director of the Office of Policy Planning, wrote that by enforcing the FTC Act “against trivial misstatements in privacy policies that nobody reads, the Commission has been able to put an increasingly large number of firms in the digital economy under 20-year orders.” These orders “often mandate intrusive monitoring and reporting” and allow the FTC to “obtain substantial monetary penalties for order violations -- just ask Google, which was hit with a $22.5 million fine for a misstatement on its FAQ page about how to disable cookies in Safari (which by all indications impacted nobody),” Cooper wrote. “Not only do these actions threaten to chill innovation in the digital economy, they will -- to quote Commissioner Joshua Wright’s dissent -- deter firms from ‘engaging in voluntary practices that promote consumer choice and transparency -- the very principles that lie at the heart of the Commission’s consumer protection mission,’” Cooper said. Wright tweeted a link to the post.