The FTC Is Better When It’s Less Ambitious
The agency should focus more on small changes that improve the consumer experience than on broad systemic reform.
The FTC can go big or small.
Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images North AmericaAs the author of a subscription-based newsletter, I have more than a passing interest in recent changes to Title 16 of the Code of Federal Regulations, specifically Part 425. That’s where you’ll find the Federal Trade Commission’s final “click to cancel” rule, announced last week, mandating that it be as easy to cancel a recurring subscription or membership as it is to sign up.
I will not stoop to the level of quoting the Federal Register, either here or in my newsletter. (Feel free to subscribe — and if you don’t like it, unsubscribe!) But the change illustrates one of the ways Lina Khan, the chair of the FTC, is trying to fight Big Business: by using regulatory power to alter its behavior. That is a better approach, politically and substantively, than using antitrust law to challenge its very existence.