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Pause Play? CFPB Gaming-Related Rules on Hold
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February 12, 2025
Pause Play? CFPB Gaming-Related Rules on Hold
By: Michelle Cohen
Newly installed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (“CFPB”) Director Russell Vought directed agency staff to stop work on agency matters and stay home. The future of many of the CFPB-led initiatives looks bleak, including a recent interpretive rule proposal that would treat video game publishers like payment processors. Background Congress created the CFPB, an independent federal agency, in 2011 in response to the financial crisis of 2007-08. The agency oversees federal financial consumer protection laws and has jurisdiction over a wide range of entities, including mortgage lenders and brokers, student loan issuers, and other financial institutions. In 2024, the CFPB began to focus on an unlikely target – video game companies. The agency started monitoring developments in the video game industry…
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Death of the CFPB and Impact on Consumer Arbitration
February 11, 2025
Death of the CFPB and Impact on Consumer Arbitration
By: George Calhoun
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (“CFPB”) has spent years trying to limit provisions that may be placed into consumer contracts, particularly with regard to class-action waivers, arbitration, and damages limitations. In 2015, the CFPB conducted a study of consumer arbitration clauses. Notably, the CFPB’s study found that few class action cases proceed to trial, but in those that do, trial lawyers make $1 million per…
Cancelling Subscriptions Could be Easier, or Maybe Signing Up Will Get Harder
January 15, 2025
Cancelling Subscriptions Could be Easier, or Maybe Signing Up Will Get Harder
By: Jordan Briggs
Drawn in by the appeal of steady revenue, nearly three-quarters of direct-to-consumer companies now include a subscription model.[1] Everything has a subscription these days: video games, groceries, dating apps—you can even subscribe to a service to cancel your other subscriptions.[2] These subscriptions were not deterred from joining their most prominent predecessor (the gym membership) as an age-old punchline about how hard they are to cancel….
Facebook and the FTC: A Wake-Up Call for Companies Collecting Personal Data
March 21, 2018
Facebook and the FTC: A Wake-Up Call for Companies Collecting Personal Data
By: Michelle Cohen
The FTC is reported to be joining state and international regulators in examining Cambridge Analytica’s actions with data accessed from Facebook, including how the data analytics company obtained the information, what it did with the information, and whether Facebook complied with existing obligations, including a 2012 FTC consent decree. The situation underscores the importance of and need for clearly defined regulations governing corporate practices like…
Full Metal Cryptojacket
February 28, 2018
Full Metal Cryptojacket
By: James Trusty
In retrospect, it all seems so predictable. International capitalism creates virtual currencies. Banks are avoided. Millennials hail a new world order of anonymous or nearly untraceable market transactions. Numerous parties and exchanges hold on to large quantities of virtual currencies. But then the bad guys show up. And I’m not talking about the regulators. Last month, in what looks like the biggest cryptocurrency breach in history, hackers stole over $534 million…
Coming Soon: Digital Asset Regulation
February 20, 2018
Coming Soon: Digital Asset Regulation
By: George Calhoun
In January, Bitcoin dropped to approximately 50% of its 2017 peak price. Other digital currencies saw similar declines. Most market observers blamed these massive price fluctuations on related events: (i) widespread reports of fraud and price manipulation, and (ii) increasing prospects for the regulation of digital assets and currencies. Indeed, 2018 has brought us federal charges against fraudulent coin offerings and public statements by the…
The Extraordinary Reach of FTC Ex Parte
February 6, 2018
The Extraordinary Reach of FTC Ex Parte
By: Ifrah Law
The Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) is granted extraordinary authority to participate in ex parte discussions with judges, conduct investigations and enact enforcement actions like asset freezes and TROs without notice to the parties it is targeting. Often the first time a company learns it is under investigation is when it is served a subpoena and its business operations are shut down. Usually the process of…
Social Media’s Hesitation to Promote Cryptocurrencies Explained
February 5, 2018
Social Media’s Hesitation to Promote Cryptocurrencies Explained
By: Ifrah Law
In a paradox of sorts, cryptocurrency’s continued survival may hinge on its submission to greater regulatory oversight. Such a notion is paradoxical in the sense that cryptocurrency’s origins can be traced to a “stick it to the man” mentality in which currency is decentralized and not tied to any one governmental body. Thus, submitting to regulatory oversight seems anathema to cryptocurrency’s credo. That is, until…