Blog

In the Bureau of Economics, we value an open exchange of ideas between our staff and experts outside the agency. Such an exchange enables us to learn new ideas and perspectives, hone our professional skills, and receive feedback on our work. When we engage in such dialogue, transparency about actual, potential, or perceived conflicts is important. This is especially important given our role at the FTC in providing expert economic advice on policy...

The turkey is gone, and the relatives have departed. We’ve now officially entered holiday shopping season, also known as make-or-break busy season for small business owners relying on Q4 profits to carry them through the year. If you’re in that category, remember it’s not just busy season for your business; it’s also busy season for scammers who know that when you’re pulling long hours and rushing to fulfill orders, it’s the perfect time to try...

Earlier this year, the Office of Technology (OT) published a list of research questions and made reference to the long history in mathematics of doling out questions that, as mathematician Paul Erdős put it, “can isolate an essential difficulty in a particular area, serving as a benchmark against which progress ... can be measured.” [1] In the spirit of posing complex questions, the Traveling Salesman Problem is a classic problem in the theory of...

The FTC recently announced a new enforcement action in which it alleged that the data broker Mobilewalla collected and retained sensitive location information from consumers—often without their consent—and shared those details with third parties to target advertisements. This data can reveal visits to healthcare facilities, churches, labor unions, military installations, and other sensitive locations. While it is hardly the first time the FTC has...

Don’t judge a book by its cover – how a technology is named doesn’t tell you how it is used. This is the case with Data Clean Rooms (“DCRs”), which are not rooms, do not clean data, and have complicated implications for user privacy, despite their squeaky-clean name. Data Clean Rooms are cloud data processing services that let companies exchange and analyze data, restrained by rules that limit data use. They are typically used when two companies...

As antitrust practitioners know, parties to certain mergers and acquisitions are required to submit premerger notification forms that disclose information about their proposed deal and business operations to the FTC and DOJ’s Antitrust Division. By now, everyone has heard the news that the Commission voted unanimously to issue rules that update the information parties must provide to the agencies on their HSR Forms. That rulemaking was published...

The FTC has long regulated negative options through the Negative Option Rule and strategic enforcement actions. Today, the FTC builds on that work by announcing a set of common-sense revisions to the Negative Option Rule, now known as the Rule Concerning Recurring Subscriptions and Other Negative Option Programs. The revisions are designed to protect people from misleading enrollment tactics, billing practices, and cancellation policies, and...

Get ready. It’s almost Store Your Records Day for telemarketers everywhere. You’re probably asking, what do telemarketers have to do with folks lining up outside of their local record stores to buy limited edition vinyl releases? Doesn’t Record Store Day happen in April and November? And, importantly, will there ever be a release that compares to the vinyl edition of Taylor Swift’s Long Pond Studio Sessions or Olivia Rodrigo’s Secret Tracks? Well...

Ahoy there, restaurant owners and other friends! Gather around to hear about the restaurant that tricked people into thinking its shrimp and fish were wild caught right nearby, when, actually, they were farmed, frozen, and shipped in from afar. Imagine a waterfront restaurant with beachy décor. Fishing nets hang from the ceiling and pictures of shrimp and fishing boats cover the wall. You sit down at a table draped in red, white, and blue, and...

To safeguard the widgets in the warehouse, companies secure their facilities and put inventory controls in place. To protect assets that may be even more valuable – intellectual property like patents and trademarks – savvy businesses follow the registration and renewal processes established by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). But guess who else knows how highly your company values your trademarks? Scammers. That’s why they try to trick trademark applicants and owners into paying phony fees by falsely claiming an affiliation with the USPTO or by using other questionable tactics. The USPTO and the FTC have advice on how you and your staff can spot, stop, and report possible trademark-related deception.