Lina Khan’s FTC has passed a sorely needed ban on junk fees. But it won’t come into effect until she—and President Biden—is long gone.
On Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission announced a rule that will require companies to show full prices for things like a hotel room, concert ticket, or sporting event at the beginning of a purchase rather than hiding it until the very last step of the checkout process.
“People deserve to know up front what they’re being asked to pay—without worrying that they’ll later be saddled with mysterious fees that they haven’t budgeted for and can’t avoid,” the Biden-appointed FTC chair said in a statement. “The FTC’s rule will put an end to junk fees around live event tickets, hotels, and vacation rentals, saving Americans billions of dollars and millions of hours in wasted time.”
Junk fees came into the light particularly after Taylor Swift’s Eras tour in 2022, when thousands of fans were enraged by hidden or unknown service fees from Live Nation and Ticketmaster.
“Wherever big corporations try to sneak fees onto bills, my administration has been fighting on behalf of American families to ban them,” Biden said in a statement Tuesday.
There’s just one problem: The regulation will only take effect in April, well into Donald Trump’s term, allowing him to claim credit in the minds of most consumers.
The only FTC member to reject the regulations was Republican Andrew Ferguson, who is expected to take over the FTC for Trump. The impact of his leadership on this current set of regulations remains to be seen.
Ferguson said in a statement that he didn’t actually disagree with the rules on principle, he just didn’t want it to happen while Khan and Biden were in charge.
“I dissent only on the ground that the time for rule-making by the Biden-Harris FTC is over,” he said.