Friday, January 29, 2021

FTC Disclosure

 The Biden Administration promises to bring back all of the onerous regulations passed during the Obama Administration. In 2009, the Obama Administration passed a regulation web sites include a big yellow box warning users if a blogger might receive financial gain from a link. The Obama Administration went after small web sites that failed to include FTC disclosures.

The Trump administration secretly removed that regulation and stopped going after small web sites. We can expect the FTC to revive the practice during the Obama administration.

FTC Disclosure: The FTC Rules of 2009 required that a blogger precede any link or post for which they might receive material benefit with a warning in a big yellow box. The font of the warning should be larger than the font of the offending link.

I've started blogging on HIVE. The HIVE platform gives bloggers rewards for upvotes. I might receive monetary consideration for the link in the following paragraph.

I wrote a post on HIVE about how much I despise the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC has a long history of writing rules that punish small publishers while allowing large firms link Google and Facebook to run roughshod over the community.

The Trump administration stopped enforcing this FTC regulation. Biden promises to revive the regulatory regime of the Obama Administration. I expect to see the FTC selectively enforcing this rule against the sites that the Biden administration wants to cancel.

No comments: