Letting Companies Settle While Denying Guilt Reconsidered by FTC

The Federal Trade Commission said it would re-examine its own practice of allowing companies to settle charges of wrongdoing while denying that they had done anything wrong.

The turnabout came in response to a blistering dissent from the Facebook settlement by one commissioner, J. Thomas Rosch, who said that allowing the company to deny charges it was agreeing to settle undermined the commission’s authority. Commissioner Rosch agreed with the general outlines of the Facebook settlement, but wrote in his dissent that the Federal Trade Commission Rules of Practice “do not provide for such a denial” of the charges. He also advocated further tightening of the commission’s rules, which in addition to outright denial allow a settling company to say that its agreement “is for settlement purposes only and does not constitute an admission by any party that the law has been violated.” That is tantamount to a denial, Commissioner Rosch said, and should be disallowed. Commissioner Rosch also dissented from the FTC’s settlement with Google and in at least one earlier case. The Google settlement allowed the company to deny charges that it misrepresented whether it would place tracking cookies on Apple’s Safari browser.