Josh Wright’s Unfinished Legacy: Reforming FTC Consumer Protection Enforcement
Josh Wright will doubtless be remembered for transforming how FTC polices competition. Between finally defining Unfair Methods of Competition (UMC), and his twelve dissents and multiple speeches about competition matters, he re-grounded competition policy in the error-cost framework: weighing not only costs against benefits, but also the likelihood of getting it wrong against the likelihood of getting it right.
Yet Wright may be remembered as much for what he started as what he finished: reforming the Commission’s Unfair and Deceptive Acts and Practices (UDAP) work. His consumer protection work is relatively slender: four dissents on high tech matters plus four relatively brief concurrences and one dissent on more traditional advertising substantiation cases. But together, these offer all the building blocks of an economic, error-cost-based approach to consumer protection. All that remains is for another FTC Commissioner to pick up where Wright left off.