Daniel Solove and Woodrow Hartzog write:
This past Tuesday the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a complaint against AT&T for allegedly throttling the Internet of its customers even though they paid for unlimited data plans. This complaint was surprising for many, who thought the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was the agency that handled such telecommunications issues. Is the FTC supposed to be involved here?
This is a question that has recently been posed in the privacy and data security arenas, where the FTC has been involved since the late 1990s. Today, the FTC is the most active federal agency enforcing privacy and data security, and it has the broadest reach. Its fingers seem to be everywhere, in all industries, even those regulated by other agencies, such as in the AT&T case. Is the FTC going too far? Is it even the FTC’s role to police privacy and data security?
Read more on LinkedIn, where Dan and Woody also discuss the significance of the Wyndham and LabMD challenges to FTC authority.
Related: The Scope and Potential of FTC Data Protection. Hartzog & Solove’s paper, available for download on SSRN.