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Policy Impacts

Protecting Consumers From Hidden Fees

Spurred by a 2021 petition from Policy Integrity, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) voted in 2022 to issue an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on Junk Fees. Our petition called for a new rule banning the use of “drip pricing”— sellers’ use of deceptively low sticker prices only to reveal additional, mandatory fees at purchase. Legal fellow Laura Figueroa provided video comments at an FTC meeting to discuss the problem and encourage the Commission to ban the practice. In an earlier New York Times op-ed, Max Sarinsky discusses how the FTC could do this.