Consumer Law & Policy Blog

White House looks to update GMO standards

The Hill reports:

In a push to produce a more transparent regulatory process, federal agencies will review their standards for genetically engineered food, plants and animals, the White House announced on Thursday.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) will update their “Coordinated Framework,” the regulatory policy that governs bio-engineered products in the U.S., officials said.

The regulations were last updated in 1992, and, “while the current regulatory system for biotechnology products effectively protects health and the environment, advances in science and technology since 1992 have been altering the product landscape,” four White House health and science advisers wrote in a blog post on Thursday.

The full story is here.

First CFPB action against credit card add-on vendors

By guest blogger Jessica Ranucci

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau filed complaints last week against two companies that charge consumers for credit card add-ons -- such as “credit monitoring” and “identify theft protection” -- that the consumers never receive.

The two companies, Affinion and Intersections, partnered with banks to sell add-on services. Fees were charged automatically to the customers’ accounts, even when the customers did not receive the promised benefits. The CFPB alleges that the imposition of these fees was an unfair practice in violation of the Dodd-Frank Act.

These complaints represent the first time that the CFPB has taken action directly against companies that provide the add-on services; in the past, the agency has taken on the banks that partner with them.

The CFPB complaints were accompanied by proposed consent orders. Under the terms of these orders, Affinon would refund $6.8 million to 73,000 consumers who were charged for services never received, end unfair billing and retention practices, and pay a $1.9 million civil penalty. Intersections would pay a full refund, end unfair billing practices, and pay a $1.2 million civil penalty.

Read the complaint against Affinion, proposed consent decree, the complaint against Intersections, and that proposed consent decree.

 

Paul Bland Op-Ed on Womack-Graves Arbitration Amendment

Here.  Excerpt:

 

* * * Congressmen Steve Womack (AR-3) and Tom Graves (GA-14) wrote an amendment to an appropriations bill that ignores all the evidence in the [2015 CFPB Arbitration] report. Unsurprisingly, they both have received consistent financial support for years from banking lobbyists. Adopted by voice vote within a matter of minutes, the amendment revoked CFPB’s authority to create regulations for arbitration clauses until an entirely new study is conducted.

CFPB would be barred from restoring American consumers’ essential right to bring their disputes to court until they essentially repeat the study they just did. * * *

New York State and CFPB target student debt relief scams

By guest blogger Jessica Ranucci

New York state officials announced today that a student loan debt relief provider is shutting down operations after an investigation by the state’s Student Protection Unit. The company, Inveractiv Edcuation, advertised that it could lower students’ monthly loan payments and charged borrowers upfront fees of up to $3,400 for its services.  The company assisted borrowers by completing applications for federal Direct Consolidation Loans — which are available to all borrowers free of charge.

This announcement comes on the heels of efforts by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to shut down scams directed at student borrowers. In the past, the CFPB has partnered with state authorities to take enforcement action against other companies that illegally trick student borrowers into paying high upfront fees for free federal loan benefits.

Recently, the CFPB turned to Google, Bing, and Yahoo for help stopping these scams. The agency monitored advertising data from the search engines and found that struggling borrowers search for debt assistance through keywords such as “student loan default” and “student loan forgiveness.” In letters to the companies sent last week, the CFPB requested that the search engines help to ensure that these keywords return results that exclude illegal scams and link to legitimate sources, such as government websites.

The New York consent decree is here, and the CFPB letter is here.

FDA looks to regulate liquid nicotine, e-cigarettes

The Food and Drug Administration has issued an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking "seeking comments, data, research, and/or other information related to nicotine exposure warnings and child-resistant packaging for liquid nicotine, nicotine-containing e-liquid(s), and potentially for other tobacco products including, but not limited to novel tobacco products such as dissolvables, lotions, gels, and drinks."

The FDA's news release explains that the agency "has evaluated data and science related to the risks, especially to infants and children, from accidental exposure to nicotine, including exposure to liquid nicotine and nicotine-containing e-liquid (s). The continuing rise in popularity of electronic nicotine devices (ENDS), such as e-cigarettes, which often use liquid nicotine and nicotine-containing e-liquids, has coincided with an increase in calls to poison control centers and visits to emergency rooms related to liquid nicotine poisoning and other nicotine exposure risks. FDA’s assessment of these recent trends has led the agency to seek additional information on whether, based on the acute toxicity of nicotine (up to and including nicotine poisoning), it would be appropriate for the protection of the public health to:

• warn the public about the dangers of nicotine exposure (especially due to inadvertent nicotine exposure in infants and children); and/or
• require some tobacco products be sold in child-resistant packaging."

The comment period is open for 60 days, beginning today.

 

Appellate court holds Apple liable for e-book price fixing

The LA Times reports:

A federal appeals court Tuesday let stand a 2013 lower court ruling that concluded Apple conspired with several top book publishers to raise e-book prices. The Justice Department had accused Apple of unfairly taking control of a nascent market that had been dominated by Amazon.com.

….

[The court] wrote that Apple pressured publishers to band together to prevent price drops for books, both electronic and print. Apple had leveraged publisher frustration with Amazon’s $9.99 per book pricing on its Kindle reader as a bargaining chip, she said.

The publishers then “combined forces to grab control over price,” she wrote, referring to five of the “Big Six” publishers -- Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Hachette.

….

Apple now may be ordered to pay $400 million to consumers, complying with a 2014 settlement of a class-action lawsuit brought by 33 states and territories.

The full story is here.

The opinion of U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is here.