#lina_khan

Opinion | Lina Khan : We Must Regulate A.I. Here’s How. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/03/opinion/ai-lina-khan-ftc-technology.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/05/03/opinion/03khan/03khan-facebookJumbo.png

Encore une excellent prise de position de Lina Khan... une des personnes les plus pointues sur la régulation des technologies.
Jeune, dynamique, ouverte, courageuse, d’une intelligence et subtilité sans faille... je suis membre du fan-club.

By Lina M. Khan

Ms. Khan is the chair of the Federal Trade Commission.

It’s both exciting and unsettling to have a realistic conversation with a computer. Thanks to the rapid advance of generative artificial intelligence, many of us have now experienced this potentially revolutionary technology with vast implications for how people live, work and communicate around the world. The full extent of generative A.I.’s potential is still up for debate, but there’s little doubt it will be highly disruptive.

The last time we found ourselves facing such widespread social change wrought by technology was the onset of the Web 2.0 era in the mid-2000s. New, innovative companies like Facebook and Google revolutionized communications and delivered popular services to a fast-growing user base.

Those innovative services, however, came at a steep cost. What we initially conceived of as free services were monetized through extensive surveillance of the people and businesses that used them. The result has been an online economy where access to increasingly essential services is conditioned on the widespread hoarding and sale of our personal data.

These business models drove companies to develop endlessly invasive ways to track us, and the Federal Trade Commission would later find reason to believe that several of these companies had broken the law. Coupled with aggressive strategies to acquire or lock out companies that threatened their position, these tactics solidified the dominance of a handful of companies. What began as a revolutionary set of technologies ended up concentrating enormous private power over key services and locking in business models that come at extraordinary cost to our privacy and security.

The trajectory of the Web 2.0 era was not inevitable — it was instead shaped by a broad range of policy choices. And we now face another moment of choice. As the use of A.I. becomes more widespread, public officials have a responsibility to ensure this hard-learned history doesn’t repeat itself.

As companies race to deploy and monetize A.I., the Federal Trade Commission is taking a close look at how we can best achieve our dual mandate to promote fair competition and to protect Americans from unfair or deceptive practices. As these technologies evolve, we are committed to doing our part to uphold America’s longstanding tradition of maintaining the open, fair and competitive markets that have underpinned both breakthrough innovations and our nation’s economic success — without tolerating business models or practices involving the mass exploitation of their users. Although these tools are novel, they are not exempt from existing rules, and the F.T.C. will vigorously enforce the laws we are charged with administering, even in this new market.

While the technology is moving swiftly, we already can see several risks. The expanding adoption of A.I. risks further locking in the market dominance of large incumbent technology firms. A handful of powerful businesses control the necessary raw materials that start-ups and other companies rely on to develop and deploy A.I. tools. This includes cloud services and computing power, as well as vast stores of data.

Enforcers and regulators must be vigilant. Dominant firms could use their control over these key inputs to exclude or discriminate against downstream rivals, picking winners and losers in ways that further entrench their dominance. Meanwhile, the A.I. tools that firms use to set prices for everything from laundry detergent to bowling lane reservations can facilitate collusive behavior that unfairly inflates prices — as well as forms of precisely targeted price discrimination. Enforcers have the dual responsibility of watching out for the dangers posed by new A.I. technologies while promoting the fair competition needed to ensure the market for these technologies develops lawfully. The F.T.C. is well equipped with legal jurisdiction to handle the issues brought to the fore by the rapidly developing A.I. sector, including collusion, monopolization, mergers, price discrimination and unfair methods of competition.

And generative A.I. risks turbocharging fraud. It may not be ready to replace professional writers, but it can already do a vastly better job of crafting a seemingly authentic message than your average con artist — equipping scammers to generate content quickly and cheaply. Chatbots are already being used to generate spear-phishing emails designed to scam people, fake websites and fake consumer reviews —bots are even being instructed to use words or phrases targeted at specific groups and communities. Scammers, for example, can draft highly targeted spear-phishing emails based on individual users’ social media posts. Alongside tools that create deep fake videos and voice clones, these technologies can be used to facilitate fraud and extortion on a massive scale.
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When enforcing the law’s prohibition on deceptive practices, we will look not just at the fly-by-night scammers deploying these tools but also at the upstream firms that are enabling them.

Lastly, these A.I. tools are being trained on huge troves of data in ways that are largely unchecked. Because they may be fed information riddled with errors and bias, these technologies risk automating discrimination — unfairly locking out people from jobs, housing or key services. These tools can also be trained on private emails, chats and sensitive data, ultimately exposing personal details and violating user privacy. Existing laws prohibiting discrimination will apply, as will existing authorities proscribing exploitative collection or use of personal data.

The history of the growth of technology companies two decades ago serves as a cautionary tale for how we should think about the expansion of generative A.I. But history also has lessons for how to handle technological disruption for the benefit of all. Facing antitrust scrutiny in the late 1960s, the computing titan IBM unbundled software from its hardware systems, catalyzing the rise of the American software industry and creating trillions of dollars of growth. Government action required AT&T to open up its patent vault and similarly unleashed decades of innovation and spurred the expansion of countless young firms.

America’s longstanding national commitment to fostering fair and open competition has been an essential part of what has made this nation an economic powerhouse and a laboratory of innovation. We once again find ourselves at a key decision point. Can we continue to be the home of world-leading technology without accepting race-to-the-bottom business models and monopolistic control that locks out higher quality products or the next big idea? Yes — if we make the right policy choices.

#Lina_Khan #Régulation #Intelligence_artificielle

F.T.C. Chair Lina Khan Upends Antitrust Standards by Suing Meta - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/28/technology/ftc-lina-khan-meta.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/07/29/business/28ftc-legal1/28ftc-legal1-facebookJumbo.jpg

WASHINGTON — Early in her tenure as chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan declared that she would rein in the power of the largest technology companies in a dramatically new way.

“We’re trying to be forward looking, anticipating problems and taking fast action,’’ Ms. Khan said in an interview last month. She promised to focus on “next-generation technologies,” and not just on areas where tech behemoths were already well established.

This week, Ms. Khan took her first step toward stopping the tech monopolies of the future when she sued to block a small acquisition by Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, of the virtual-reality fitness start-up Within. The deal was significant for Meta’s development of the so-called metaverse, which is a nascent technology and far from mainstream.

In doing so, Ms. Khan upended decades of antitrust standards, potentially setting off a wholesale shift in the way Washington enforces competition across corporate America. At the heart of the F.T.C.’s lawsuit is the idea that regulators can apply antitrust law without waiting for a market to mature to the point where it is clear which companies hold the most power. The F.T.C. said such early action was justified because Meta’s deal would probably eliminate competition in the young virtual-reality market.

The F.T.C.’s lawsuit against Meta in the budding virtual-reality market is a “deliberately experimental case that seeks to extend the boundaries of merger enforcement,” said William Kovacic, a former chair of the agency. “Such cases are certainly harder to win.”

The F.T.C.’s action immediately caused a ruckus within antitrust circles and across the tech industry. Silicon Valley tech executives said that moving to block a deal in an embryonic area of technology might stifle innovation and spook technologists from taking bold leaps in new areas.

For Ms. Khan, winning the lawsuit may be less of a priority than showing it’s possible to file against a tech deal while it is still early. She has said regulators were too cautious in the past about intervening in mergers for fear of harming innovation, allowing a wave of deals between tech giants and start-ups that eventually cemented their dominance.

“What we can see is that inaction after inaction after inaction can have severe costs,” she said in an interview with The New York Times and CNBC in January. “And that’s what we’re really trying to reverse.”

The F.T.C. accused Meta of building a virtual reality “empire,” beginning in 2014 with its purchase of Oculus, the maker of the Quest virtual-reality headset. Since then, Meta has acquired around 10 virtual-reality app makers, such as the maker of a Viking combat game, Asgard’s Wrath, and several first-person shooter and sports games.

By buying Within and its Supernatural virtual-reality fitness app, the F.T.C. said, Meta wouldn’t create its own app to compete and would scare potential rivals from trying to create alternative apps. That would hobble competition and consumers, the agency said.

“This acquisition poses a reasonable probability of eliminating both present and future competition,” according to the lawsuit. “And Meta would be one step closer to its ultimate goal of owning the entire ‘Metaverse.’”

The F.T.C. is reviewing other tech deals, including Microsoft’s $70 billion acquisition of the gaming company Activision and Amazon’s $3.9 billion merger with One Medical, a national chain of primary care clinics. In addition, the agency has been investigating Amazon on claims of monopoly abuses in its marketplace of third-party sellers.

Ms. Khan appears to be prepared for long legal battles with the tech giants even if the cases do not end up going the F.T.C.’s way.

In her earlier interview with The Times and CNBC, she said, “Even if it’s not a slam-dunk case, even if there is a risk you might lose, there can be enormous benefits from taking that risk.”

#Lina_Khan #Federal_Trade_Commission #Etats-Unis #Concurrence #Economie_numérique

Letter to Lina Khan by Steven Levy
▻https://link.wired.com/view/5cec29ba24c17c4c6465ed0bfqmpt.wsu/3833f86a

The Plain View

Two key figures in Biden’s murderers row of tech regulators—FTC chair Lina Khan and the DOJ’s assistant attorney general for antitrust, Jonathan Kanter—emerged from their hideouts this week to announce that they are preparing new guidelines on how mergers should be evaluated, kicking off the process with a 60-day call for comments.

In an apparent accident of timing (of course, skeptics would say there are no coincidences), Microsoft announced that same day that it was making the biggest merger in its history, capturing one of the bosses of the game world, Activision, for $69 billion. Clearly, Big Tech has already decided what guidelines bind them on acquisitions: whatever they can get away with.

Obviously, the two sides have differences in opinion. To clear up matters, I thought I’d take up Kahn and Kantor’s offer and make my own public comment, sent right to the inbox of you lucky Plaintext subscribers!

Dear Antitrust Czars,

I’m not a lawyer or an investor, but as a longtime observer of bad behavior and predatory mergers in the tech field, I have Thoughts. I’m not sure how much impact my view will have, though, because it seems to me you’ve already made up your minds on how you want to change merger guidelines, as well as what’s considered anticompetitive behavior. But that’s OK! It doesn’t mean, Chair Khan, that you should recuse yourself from your antitrust lawsuits against Amazon and Meta, just because you have Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg on your dartboard. They are there for policy reasons, not because you can’t stand Bezos’ laugh or Zuckerberg’s sunscreen. The president appointed you because he wants to get tougher with the likes of those corporate barons, and the judge in the Meta case has already rejected the argument that you’re conflicted.

So I’m betting that all the comments the two of you get, including mine, won’t divert you from the course you basically set out this week. When you talk about modernizing the guidelines, the headline of your press release makes clear your agenda: to “strengthen enforcement against illegal mergers.” You already have your road map—expanding the definition of anticompetitive to include cases where products are free to consumers, considering the future impact on mergers in nascent markets, and assessing the eventual effects of a dominating company’s entry into a new business. In practice, you don’t necessarily need new guidelines—you’ve already been more aggressively challenging mergers in industries from publishing to computer chips. And those guidelines can be ephemeral. After all, Chair Khan, you’d hardly taken your seat at the agency when you tossed out a merger guideline established just last year by your predecessor. Maybe a future administration will trash your new guidelines just as blithely. But I get it—revising the guidelines to give you more power provides ammunition when companies challenge you in court, which they undoubtedly will.

You’re right in saying you need new weapons, especially since the forces stacked against you are so formidable. That’s your biggest problem: the unholy bigness of Big Tech. I know that an oft-used canard in antitrust law is that humongous size doesn’t necessarily equal anticompetitiveness. But Big Tech’s bulk has thrown everything out of whack. The combined market cap of Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta is around $7 trillion. That would fund the Defense Department for a decade.

That size means that every one of those giants’ substantial mergers is arguably anticompetitive on its face, because their acquisitions immediately become more powerful by virtue of being tied to those dominating platforms. When, for instance, a tech giant like Amazon or Apple decides to become a movie studio, it isn’t like a bunch of film students setting up a back lot somewhere. The new content, financed by the mother ship’s Brobdingnagian profits, has an immediate pipeline to existing consumers already locked into those ecosystems—ecosystems that might favor in-house productions over traditional fare.

Now let’s talk about how that bigness plays into the Activision bid. In terms of dollars, it’s the most expensive acquisition in Microsoft’s history. Even so, Microsoft doesn’t have to stretch to make the purchase. For perspective, let’s look back to the unsuccessful $45 billion bid for Yahoo that Microsoft made in 2008. If it had gone through, it would have remained the biggest acquisition in the company’s history to date. Capturing Yahoo would have required Microsoft to squander a fifth of its value. (Buying the troubled Yahoo would also have been a huge mistake, but that’s another story.) But the Activision price tag eats up less than 3 percent of Microsoft’s current $2.25 trillion market cap. That’s pocket change for Satya Nadella.

That sum brings an anticompetitive bounty to Microsoft. It is one of two producers of high-end game consoles, and potentially it could limit Activision titles to Xbox. No wonder Sony took a $20 billion hit after the announcement. Activision also has tens of millions of users who now will find it easier to use Microsoft’s other offerings. Most importantly, camo gear might prove the fashion choice in the next generation of computing, as armies of Call of Duty warriors could use the popular Activision game as a gateway to Microsoft’s metaverse.

The only way you are going to temper Big Tech—forget about taming it—is to challenge those companies early and often. Guts, not guidelines, might prove more decisive. I suspect you know this. You are right to push hard for Congress to increase your resources, in both financial power and new hires, because you need more regulators, more investigators, more lawyers, more analysts, and more pizzas delivered for late-night brainstorming. These titans will not slow down unless they know there’s a price to be paid. If a tech giant knows that an investigation, and then a lawsuit, could stand in the way of an acquisition, that bid might not be offered in the first place.

Chair Khan, you acknowledged in a television interview this week that because of your limited tenure, you have a “fierce sense of urgency.” But with the Activision merger announcement, Microsoft laughed in your face. Don’t let them have the last laugh.

#Lina_Khan #Antitrust #Microsoft #Activision #Jeu_vidéo #Monopoles

Lina Khan’s Battle to Rein in Big Tech | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/06/lina-khans-battle-to-rein-in-big-tech

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/619eda5206dce1701f60ce17/16:9/w_1280,c_limit/211206_r39498.jpg

Open Markets studied industries ranging from banking to agriculture. In case after case, Lynn found, the number of companies in each market had been reduced to a few big entities that had bought up their competitors, giving them a disproportionate amount of power. Consumers had the impression of vast choices among brands, but this was often misleading: many of the biggest furniture stores were owned by one company; a large percentage of the dozens of laundry detergents in most supermarkets were made by two corporations. After consolidation, it became easier for furniture sellers and detergent manufacturers to raise prices, compromise the quality of their products, or treat employees poorly, because consumers and workers had few other places to go. It also became much more difficult for entrepreneurs to break into the marketplace, because competing with these giants was almost impossible. As huge companies became even bigger, much of the American middle class struggled with stagnant wages. In Lynn’s view, the issues were connected.

Khan began researching book publishing. “There was a sense that this industry was in crisis,” she recalled. Publishers had come under pressure, first from chain stores like Barnes & Noble, and then from Amazon, which sold electronic books by pricing them at a loss, in order to encourage consumers to buy its Kindle e-book readers. Amazon eventually controlled more than seventy per cent of the e-book market, a dominance that gave it the ability to force publishers to accept its terms, undermining the business model they had long used to subsidize the creation of a wide variety of books. When publishers tried to band together to fight Amazon, the Justice Department sued them, fearing that their action would increase the retail price of e-books. The publishers saw Amazon’s power as potentially leading to a decline in the free exchange of ideas and as a crisis for democracy. Increasingly, so did Khan. Her work helped provide the basis for a piece that Lynn published in Harper’s, in February, 2012, called “Killing the Competition.” Today, he wrote, “a single private company has captured the ability to dictate terms to the people who publish our books, and hence to the people who write and read our books.”

Khan told me that she started to see the world differently. “It’s incredible, once you start studying industry structure and see how much consolidation there has been across industries—in airlines, contact-lens solution, funeral caskets,” she said. “Every nook and cranny of our economy has consolidated. I was discovering this new world.” At one point, she investigated the candy market, identifying nearly forty brands in her local store that were made by Hershey, Mars, or Nestlé. In another project, about the raising of poultry, she found that most farmers had to purchase chicks and feed from the giant poultry processor that bought their full-grown chickens, which, because it had no local competitors, could dictate the price it paid for them.

On June 15, 2021, Khan was sworn in as the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, the agency responsible for consumer protection and for enforcing the branch of law that regulates monopolies. At the age of thirty-two, she is the youngest person ever to head the F.T.C.

Amazon taught a generation of consumers that they could order anything online, from packs of mints to swimming pools, and expect it to be delivered almost overnight. According to some estimates, the company controls close to fifty per cent of all e-commerce retail sales in the U.S. and occupies roughly two hundred and twenty-eight million square feet of warehouse space. It makes movies and publishes books; delivers groceries; provides home-security systems and the cloud-computing services that many other companies rely on. Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, wants to colonize the moon. During the Presidency of Barack Obama, Amazon’s relentless expansion was largely encouraged by the government. The country was emerging from a devastating recession, and Obama saw entrepreneurs like Bezos as sources of innovation and jobs. In 2013, in a speech given at an Amazon warehouse in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Obama described the company’s role in bolstering the financial security of the middle class and creating stable, well-paying work. He spoke with near-awe of how, during the previous Christmas rush, Amazon had sold more than three hundred items per second. Obama was also close with Eric Schmidt, the former executive chairman of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. An analysis by the Intercept found that employees and lobbyists from Alphabet visited the White House more than those from any other company, and White House staff turned to Google technologists to troubleshoot the Affordable Care Act Web site and other projects. Between 2010 and 2016, Amazon, Google, and other tech giants bought up hundreds of competitors, and the government, for the most part, did not object. The analysis also found that nearly two hundred and fifty people moved between government positions and companies controlled by Schmidt, law and lobbying firms that did work for Alphabet, or Alphabet itself. When Obama left office, many of his top aides took jobs at tech companies: Jay Carney, Obama’s former press secretary, joined Amazon; David Plouffe, his campaign manager, and Tony West, a high-ranking official at the Department of Justice, joined Uber; and Lisa Jackson, the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, went to Apple.

As a result, antitrust policy, especially as it pertains to big technology firms, has emerged as one of the starkest differences between the Biden Presidency and the Obama one.

Biden Administration has indicated that it wants to reshape the role that major technology companies play in the economy and in our lives. On March 5th, Biden named Tim Wu, a Columbia Law School professor and an anti-monopoly advocate who has argued that Facebook should be broken up, to the newly created position of head of competition policy at the National Economic Council, which advises the President on economic-policy matters. On March 22nd, Biden nominated Khan to her current role. And, in July, he selected Jonathan Kanter to head the antitrust division of the Department of Justice. Kanter left the law firm Paul, Weiss in 2020 because his work representing companies making antitrust claims against Big Tech firms posed a conflict for the firm’s work for Apple, among others. Wu, Khan, Kanter, and a handful of other anti-monopoly advocates have been referred to as members of a “New Brandeis movement,” after the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, whose decisions limited the power of big business.

Benjamin Woodring, who worked with Khan on the Yale Journal on Regulation, said that she seemed more sophisticated than the typical law student. “She understood the political dimension of regulation and the lawmaking process,” Woodring told me. “It’s so easy for law students, especially relatively green ones coming straight from college, to just treat the study of law as this disembodied language in a vacuum. But, in reality, especially with things like antitrust and civil rights, it is very much a political struggle, a complicated journey that involves all three branches. She was comfortable with the nuts and bolts of how that process worked.”

Khan started writing a paper arguing that the consumer-welfare standard was outdated, using Amazon as a case study. Amazon had avoided antitrust scrutiny so far, Khan wrote, because of the fixation on consumer prices. There was no question that consumers loved the convenience of being able to order almost anything on Amazon, and of the free and expedited shipping included in an Amazon Prime membership. Khan believed that the low costs to consumers were a short-term benefit that failed to account for the harm the company’s size and practices posed to the economy. She highlighted the company’s willingness to operate with billions of dollars in losses for years at a time, often by pricing products below what it cost to make and deliver them. This strategy has helped Amazon crush its competitors in so many markets that the company now provides critical infrastructure to other businesses, which rely on it to get their own products to market. It also has access to sensitive data about most of its competitors, who must use Amazon’s platform in order to survive. Khan proposed two ways to address the problem: One would be to return to the old idea of antitrust law, which focussed on preserving healthy competition rather than on the prices consumers paid. The second would be to treat Amazon and similar companies like public utilities, and to regulate them aggressively, including by requiring that their competitors be given access to their platforms on more favorable terms.

Independent businesses tended to be reliant on Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple, in order to communicate with their customers and sell their products. Cicilline’s team described the big four as “gatekeepers” that dictated how other firms could operate. They discovered that leaders of companies were afraid of speaking out against any of the dominant tech firms, especially Amazon, and worried that their coöperation with the investigation would become public. The companies understood that Amazon could block them from doing business on its site, a tactic that Amazon had used in 2014, during the e-book-pricing dispute, when it removed books published by Hachette from its Web site.

Cicilline opened the proceedings from the congressional hearing room. Before the pandemic, he noted, the companies in question were already “titans in our economy.” Since then, they had grown even more powerful, while locally owned businesses faced an economic crisis. “Open markets are predicated on the idea that, if a company harms people, consumers, workers, and business partners will choose another option. That choice is no longer possible,” he said. “Concentrated economic power leads to concentrated political power. This investigation goes to the heart of whether we as a people govern ourselves, or let ourselves be governed by private monopolies.” Khan sat beside him, in a pastel blazer and a mask.

Most of the names mentioned in the press, however, were longtime corporate lawyers who had cycled in and out of government. Karen Dunn, a partner at Paul, Weiss who had served as White House counsel under Obama, and as a senior adviser and communications director to Senator Hillary Clinton, was rumored to be under consideration for a position in the Justice Department. Dunn had represented Uber and Apple, and advised Bezos during his antitrust subcommittee hearing. Renata Hesse, a Sullivan & Cromwell partner and former Obama Justice Department official who had worked for Google and advised Amazon on its 2017 purchase of Whole Foods Market, was said to be a leading candidate for the Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust position. Susan M. Davies, a corporate lawyer who had worked for Facebook, was rumored to be Attorney General Merrick Garland’s first choice for the antitrust job. Left-leaning news outlets published harshly critical articles about the pro-corporate direction Biden’s Administration seemed to be taking. On January 28th, a piece ran in the American Prospect with the headline “Merrick Garland Wants Former Facebook Lawyer to Top Antitrust Division.”

Then, in March, Biden announced that he was nominating Khan to a seat on the F.T.C. Khan said that she was surprised when, a few months later, she was named chair. On July 9th, Biden issued an executive order instructing more than a dozen regulatory agencies to take aggressive steps to promote competition in the economy.

Khan told me that her vision for the F.T.C. takes these challenges into account. “Antitrust needs to be on the table, but we need to have a whole host of other tools on the table as well,” she said. On September 22nd, she issued a memo outlining her priorities. One of them, she told me, was to address the merger boom that’s under way; during the first eight months of 2021, $1.8 trillion in mergers and takeovers was announced. Some of the largest corporations were set to become even bigger: Amazon announced a proposed acquisition of M-G-M studios; UnitedHealth Group proposed to buy Change HealthCare; A.T. & T. wants to merge WarnerMedia, which it owns, with Discovery. “There’s a very real risk that the economy emerging post-COVID could be even more concentrated and consolidated than the one leading up to it,” Khan said.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page, which has published at least six critical pieces about Khan since she started, described her as “Icarus,” and said that her “power grab at the F.T.C. will end with her wings melting in the courts.”

#Lina_Khan #Antitrust #FTC

FTC to Ramp up Enforcement against Illegal Dark Patterns that Trick or Trap Consumers into Subscriptions | Federal Trade Commission
▻https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2021/10/ftc-ramp-enforcement-against-illegal-dark-patterns-trick-or-trap

https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/images/press-releases/social-share/ftc_social_share_default_en_2.jpg

Il faut une loi semblable en France !!!
Quand je disais que Lina Khan (qui dirige actuellement la FTC) était une personne à suivre...

The Federal Trade Commission issued a new enforcement policy statement warning companies against deploying illegal dark patterns that trick or trap consumers into subscription services. The agency is ramping up its enforcement in response to a rising number of complaints about the financial harms caused by deceptive sign up tactics, including unauthorized charges or ongoing billing that is impossible cancel.

The FTC’s policy statement puts companies on notice that they will face legal action if their sign-up process fails to provide clear, up-front information, obtain consumers’ informed consent, and make cancellation easy.

“Today’s enforcement policy statement makes clear that tricking consumers into signing up for subscription programs or trapping them when they try to cancel is against the law,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “Firms that deploy dark patterns and other dirty tricks should take notice.”

This policy statement builds on the many enforcement actions taken by the FTC and other law enforcement agencies against illegal subscription tricks and traps sometimes used by unscrupulous sellers in automatic renewal subscriptions, continuity plans, free-to-pay or free-to-pay conversions, and pre-notification plans.

The FTC has brought cases challenging a variety of illegal subscription practices. It has sued companies that hid important payment information, or even the fact that consumers would be charged at all, behind hyperlinks, hover-overs or in inconspicuous places or buried on pages beyond the initial offer page. It has sued companies that made consumers wait on hold or listen to lengthy ads before they could cancel. It has sued companies that converted free trials to paid subscriptions before the free trial ended. And, recently, the FTC sued a company that failed to disclose that widely advertised, material benefits of the subscription were no longer available.

Under the enforcement policy statement issued today, businesses must follow three key requirements or be subject to law enforcement action, including potential civil penalties:

Disclose clearly and conspicuously all material terms of the product or service, including how much it costs, deadlines by which the consumer must act to stop further charges, the amount and frequency of such charges, how to cancel, and information about the product or service itself that is needed to stop consumers from being deceived about the characteristics of the product or service. The statement provides detail on what clear and conspicuous means, particularly noting that the information must be provided upfront when the consumer first sees the offer and generally as prominent as the deal offer itself.
Obtain the consumer’s express informed consent before charging them for a product or services. This includes obtaining the consumer’s acceptance of the negative option feature separately from other portions of the entire transaction, not including information that interferes with, detracts from, contradicts, or otherwise undermines the consumer’s ability to provide their express informed consent.
Provide easy and simple cancellation to the consumer. Marketers should provide cancellation mechanisms that are at least as easy to use as the method the consumer used to buy the product or service in the first place.

#Souscriptions #Lina_Khan #Régulation #Commerce_électronique