Comment by delfinom
5 days ago
Well, after you factor in some of these companies are probably large corps with layers of middle management. It will probably require at least 3 months of premeetings
5 days ago
Well, after you factor in some of these companies are probably large corps with layers of middle management. It will probably require at least 3 months of premeetings
Which explains the issue with the law neatly:
1. Not pegged at inflation, so the threshold is continually moving downward. 2. All it takes is a couple of bad actor companies to blow out the threshold. If you take the companies at their word, then you will never get under this threshold. Why trust them?
Yes, Congress should probably revisit the threshold. But all thresholds are arbitrary, and for this purpose a hundred million is arguably as good as any. It’s not the end of the world if they only do that every few decades. In fact I would argue that instead of being inflation adjusted, the threshold should be adjusted so that the FTC always has to do a review on some percentage of their new rules. But simplicity has a lot going for it too.
> All it takes is a couple of bad actor companies…
Keep in mind that this threshold is not about bad actors at all. It’s about the impact to the legitimate companies that are not defrauding people at all. The FTC estimated that there were over a hundred thousand companies that would be effected by these new rules, and possibly that there were 5× that. As the judge noted, the implementation cost of these new rules would have to be less than $1000 _per company_ in order for it to be below the threshold. That’s two days of an average engineer’s salary, or even less if they’re getting paid well instead of just average. And since the rules involve more than just adding a button to your webpage the work involved would need to be done by more than just an engineer.
And hitting that threshold is no bad thing, since it just means that the FTC has to allow an extra public comment period with the specific purpose of coming up with alternative rules. If any of those alternative rules would be effective but cheaper to implement then the FTC is supposed to drop their own rules and adopt the alternative rules instead. That keeps the cost down for the legitimate companies while still allowing the FTC to go after the illegitimate ones that aren’t going to bother following the rules anyway.