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Tag: Andrew Ferguson

  • FTC Sues Ticketmaster Over ‘Deceptive’ Ticket Pricing Tactics

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    The FTC and seven states have sued Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation for allegedly “deceptive” ticket resale tactics, according to a press release Thursday. The federal regulatory agency says that Ticketmaster is “tacitly coordinating with brokers,” allowing them to buy millions of dollars worth of tickets, just to resell them at a higher cost to the person who actually wants to attend a given concert.

    The FTC says Ticketmaster is also aware of ticket brokers regularly bypassing security measures by creating accounts using proxy IP addresses and, beyond that, offers tech support to brokers through software called TradeDesk which helps brokers track and aggregate purchases from multiple accounts. The interface allows resellers to manage resales much easier.

    Just five brokers had over 6,000 Ticketmaster accounts holding over 240,000 tickets to more than 2,500 events, according to the FTC. And the agency quotes an internal email from Ticketmaster that shows an executive admitted they “turn a blind eye as a matter of policy” to brokers buying more tickets than they should be allowed.

    The FTC notes that consumers spent $82.6 billion buying tickets from Ticketmaster from 2019 to 2024 and the company controls about 80% of the primary ticketing for major concert venues.

    Ticketmaster has also allegedly deceived consumers about the true cost of a ticket, advertising the prices without mandatory fees listed. Those fees can be as high as 44% of the cost of the ticket, according to the FTC, and don’t show up until the very end of the transaction. Those fees totaled $16.4 billion from 2019 to 2025, according to the agency.

    A more aggressive posture against Ticketmaster has been in the works since Joe Biden’s presidency, but current leadership at the FTC wants everyone to give Trump credit for this most recent move, which is admittedly an escalation.

    “President Donald Trump made it clear in his March Executive Order that the federal government must protect Americans from being ripped off when they buy tickets to live events,” FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said in a press release.

    “American live entertainment is the best in the world and should be accessible to all of us,” Ferguson continued. “It should not cost an arm and a leg to take the family to a baseball game or attend your favorite musician’s show. The Trump-Vance FTC is working hard to ensure that fans have a shot at buying fair-priced tickets, and today’s lawsuit is a monumental step in that direction.”

    Ticketmaster didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday afternoon. Gizmodo will update this article if we hear back.

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    Matt Novak

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  • FTC chair warns Google about Gmail’s ‘partisan’ spam filters | TechCrunch

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    Andrew Ferguson, the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Trade Commission, recently expressed concern that “Alphabet’s administration of Gmail is designed to have partisan effects.”

    In a letter addressed to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Ferguson pointed to a recent story in the New York Post describing complaints by Targeted Victory (a consulting and PR firm that’s worked with the Republican National Committee and Elon Musk’s X) claiming that Gmail flags emails linking to the Republican fundraising platform WinRed as spam, without doing the same to emails linking to the Democratic platform ActBlue.

    “My understanding from recent reporting is that Gmail’s spam filters routinely block messages from reaching consumers when those messages come from Republican senders but fail to block similar messages sent by Democrats,” Ferguson wrote.

    He warned Alphabet that if Gmail’s filters “keep Americans from receiving speech they expect, or donating as they see fit, the filters may harm American consumers and may violate the FTC Act’s prohibition of unfair or deceptive trade practices,” adding this could lead to “an FTC investigation and potential enforcement action.”

    In response, a Google spokesperson told Axios that Gmail’s spam filters “look at a variety of objective signals – like whether people mark a particular email as spam, or if a particular ad agency is sending a high volume of emails that are often marked by people as spam,” and they said the company applies this approach “equally to all senders, regardless of political ideology.”

    The spokesperson also said, “We will review this letter and look forward to engaging constructively.”

    Conservatives frequently complain that they are being censored or otherwise treated unfairly by digital platforms, including Gmail. In 2023, the Federal Election Commission dismissed a complaint from Republicans over Gmail’s spam filters, and a federal court also dismissed an RNC lawsuit with similar complaints. (The RNC seems to be reviving that lawsuit.)

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    Earlier this month, a federal judge blocked the FTC’s investigation into the left-leaning group Media Matters over its research into antisemitic content on X, describing the investigation as “a retaliatory act.”

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    Anthony Ha

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