June 2018

The Senate passed legislation to reinstate a ban on sales of US components to ZTE Corp. in a rare rebuke of President Donald Trump, who had taken steps to revive the Chinese telecommunications company. The measure was wrapped in a larger, must-pass defense bill that cleared the Senate on an 85-10 vote. President Trump is expected to turn his attention to persuading congressional negotiators to strip the ZTE sales ban out of the final version of the defense authorization bill.

Although consent orders sound good in theory, recent revelations about Facebook’s behavior have left consumers doubting that they work in practice. While consent orders remain an important tool in the Federal Trade Commission’s enforcement toolkit, the Commission lacks the resources to properly administer them. Further, even if consent orders were fully and consistently enforced, the FTC’s ex post facto enforcement can only address consumer privacy violations after they have occurred.