from the watch-what-I-do,-not-what-I-say dept
A few days ago I talked about how the Trump administration is desperate to present the illusion it still cares about consumer protection and “antitrust reform.” Via executive order, regulatory capture, DOGE cuts, and a rightward-lurching court system, Trump 2.0 really is taking an absolute hatchet to consumer protection, labor rights, corporate oversight, environmental law, and public safety.
It’s really not subtle. It’s also not very populist, or popular, so the Trumplings need to occasionally put on a good face to maintain the ruse they care about “antitrust reform” and consumer protection in what’s looking to be a new golden age of corruption.
Enter the FTC, where Trump just illegally fired the agency’s two Democrat commissioners. The FTC has been maintaining some of Lina Khan’s inquiries into California “big tech” companies. Not because they actually care about corporate power, but because they care about leverage. That leverage, so far, has quite successfully turned most Silicon Valley giants into obedient, authoritarian-coddling invertebrates.
The FTC this week also announced it had sued San Francisco based, Tesla-competitor Uber for deceptive billing practices, stating that the company charged consumers for its Uber One subscription service without their consent, failed to deliver promised savings, and made it difficult for users to cancel the service despite its “cancel anytime” promises. Said FTC boss Andrew Ferguson:
“The Trump-Vance FTC is fighting back on behalf of the American people.”
Indeed. That’s a bummer for Uber and Uber Technologies CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, who collectively donated $2 million for the Trump inauguration fund.
Trump has made it clear their regulatory targets will usually be highly selective, and usually chosen for cronyism purposes (like, say a company directly competing with the billionaire running your DOGE department). There’s no limit of dangerous misrepresentation and potential fraud you could target Elon Musk’s companies for, but that’s clearly not happening under Trump 2.0.
Meanwhile most Trump agencies, like the FCC, are openly making it clear they plan to utterly eviscerate consumer protection. All while Supreme Court rulings like Loper Bright make it so regulators can’t do much of anything without it being overturned down the road. These are actions that are going to make corporate malfeasance worse, not better.
At the same time, agencies like the FCC are hypocritically claiming to have authority they don’t have to do bizarre and legally incoherent things, like the harassment of companies for not being racist and sexist enough, accurately reporting on the Trump administration, or not going far enough to coddle right wing ideology or protect and nurture right wing online propaganda.
FTC boss Andrew Ferguson’s first act before joining the FTC was to announce he’d leverage the agency’s dwindling authority to do things like “fight back against the trans agenda,” and take aim at the tech industry’s “censorship” (read: refusing to coddle right wing ideology and propaganda).
A lot of gullible press outlets are going to see the cases against Meta, Uber, and Google and proclaim that Trump 2.0 is “perpetuating the antitrust legacy of Lina Khan.” But they’ll downplay the much larger reality that is the complete evisceration of most regulatory agencies and corporate oversight in a way that’s going to make all corporate misbehavior much, much worse.
There’s still a lot of normalization bias among people who don’t want to believe the reality of what’s happening. And a lot of major media outlets that are too afraid of losing money and access to accurately call a duck a duck.
When Trump 2.0 does take consumer-protection action, it’s going to be incredibly important to wait and see what the actual remedies for harm look like (if there are any). And whether any of these efforts survive the Trumplican court system being custom-repurposed to derail reform and corporate accountability of every kind, performative or otherwise.
For example the Trump-stocked Fifth and Sixth circuits have taken an absolute hatchet to efforts like net neutrality or location-data privacy enforcement. Any consumer protection efforts you do see are being taken knowning that they’re likely not going to survive the Trump-stocked court’s assault on regulatory oversight.
Which is to say I think most Trump 2.0 consumer protection efforts are still a sort of performance art, generally designed to trick the press and public into believing that the administration is populist, when on every level beneath that façade, it’s being built to coddle corporate power and a relatively tiny subset of white rich men.
Filed Under: andrew ferguson, antitrust reform, consumer protection, deceptive billing, fraud, ftc, subscription, uber one
Companies: uber
