Free State, ICLE, TechFreedom Encourage FTC To Regulate Sharing Economy Lightly
TechFreedom and the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) filed joint comments Tuesday on the FTC’s upcoming workshop on the Sharing Economy, in which the groups urged the FTC to establish a permanent advocacy program to serve as a…
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counterweight to “entrenched incumbents who typically seek local and state government policies that prevent their markets from being disrupted by ‘sharing economy’ services.” The FTC spends a tiny fraction of its budget on competition advocacy, TechFreedom President Berin Szoka said. "For years, Uber, Lyft, and other sharing-economy companies have been grappling with regulators doing the bidding of established industries,” Szoka said, while the FTC has “been asleep at the wheel -- too busy harassing tech companies over their use of customer data." The FTC needs to make advocacy an institutional priority and become more proactive, Szoka said. “The FTC should resist the tendency to regulate Uber, AirBnB and other sharing economy companies the same way it's regulated privacy and data security -- by bringing major players under consent decrees that force the companies to start vetting product innovations with the FTC,” ICLE Associate Director Ben Sperry said. “Forcing innovators to 'play it safe' will sap the disruptive spirit that has made these companies so successful,” he said. Free State Foundation President Randolph May, Senior Fellow Seth Cooper and Research Associate Michael Horney submitted comments to the FTC Tuesday, in which they encouraged the agency to focus on enhancing overall consumer welfare and consumer satisfaction. The success of the sharing economy is due to creative risk-taking, the comments said. “Sharing economy services and related applications must remain free to form and operate without the strictures of any new sector-specific regulations or older regulations designed for incumbent providers of legacy services,” they said. “The proper way to respond to ‘level the playing field’ between sharing economy entrants and incumbent service providers is to remove unnecessary regulations wherever they apply, not expand them in a competitive market environment.” Health, safety and consumer protection laws and regulations can be enforced so long as they are not formulated and implemented in a discriminatory fashion, they said. “Opponents of new sharing economy business models and disruptive new Internet applications should not be allowed to succeed in misusing laws and regulations in order to stifle the services merely because they perceive adverse impact on preexisting businesses.”