The Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) Cox Communications settlement resulted in penalties that were over the top and did not illustrate how the fine would result in “positive net benefits,” Thomas M. Lenard opines in an op-ed for The Hill.“From a public policy perspective, the goal of privacy enforcement should be to maximize net benefits, defined as benefits minus costs,” Lenard wrote. “The threshold question is whether the Cox settlement produces any benefits at all. The evidence presented by the FCC suggests that the harms were extremely small,” adding that “in the future, the FCC should provide evidence that its enforcement actions yield positive net benefits.”
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