For the first time ever, the Federal Trade Commission on Friday began asking for comment on a regulatory matter by way of the Internet. The history-making solicitation of Net comment comes in the case of a proposed US$4 billion merger between office-supply giants Staples and Office Depot, which the commission is trying to block.
Although the FTC insisted the move was simply a way of making it easier for the public to express concerns, the online activist who spurred the move sees it as a big step in the incremental cobweb-clearing that the Internet has begun to wreak on government bureaucracy. "This is a big step toward taking the debate out of the Beltway and into the hinterlands," says Jamie Love, the director of the Center for the Study of Responsive Law's Consumer Project on Technology. "Until now, the only people who had a clue how to influence the FTC's merger review process were high-priced K Street lawyers. This opens the process up to the consumers and small businesses affected most before it's too late to make a difference. It gives people more access to democracy."
Love penned a 5 March letter blasting the agency for instructing FTC staffers "to release no information to the public, including routine information such as the market share data from industry trade publications, SEC reports or other sources which are common knowledge to large industry players." The letter, cosigned by Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Stanton McCandlish of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Steve Waldman of the MIT Media Lab and almost 100 other college professors, small business owners, citizen groups, and consumers, also charged that "the FTC is influenced too much by a handful of large firms who can afford high-priced counsel and experts."
"This could have a profound effect on the way the FTC conducts its business," Love says.
Not so, says FTC spokeswoman Victoria Streitfield. "We get commentary all the time. We get email, phone calls, and letters all the time. This is just more of the same." As to whether the Web-page address has so far garnered much response, Streitfield would not comment.
