TechLaw

The Federal Trade Commission announced this afternoon that it will hold what it calls a "town hall meeting" to discuss consumer protection issues raised by new mobile commerce technologies. The event is set for May 6-7, 2008, at the FTC Conference Center.

This is good news for companies doing business over mobile devices. Washington is pretty in May. More importantly, an FTC town hall or workshop typically signals the end of FTC interest in a particular topic rather than the onset of regulatory scrutiny. You can look it up: spam, spyware, the role of social security numbers in identity theft, privacy, broadband competition, behavioral advertising, consumer protection, more spam, still more spam, online profiling, RFID privacy, consumer information privacy, more consumer information privacy. So many interesting policy issues, yet every single one of them, the FTC believes, will be best governed by market forces and industry self-regulation.

I wish FTC staffers would take another look at online disclosures and online contracting. Today's announcement suggests that it is going to do just that. The agency's 2000 publication, Dot Com Disclosures, a document intended for online advertisers but consulted widely by attorneys drafting online contracts and other online documents, contains a lot of advice that is very difficult to apply to small-screen commerce. An update for mobile businesses is needed. Key concepts like "proximity," "prominence," and "conspicuousness" don't translate easily to mobile devices. If you've ever used a Blackberry or iPhone, you'll immediately appreciate that advice such as "Avoid Web page formats that discourage scrolling" misses the mark by a long shot.

And while the FTC blesses (as do many courts) the practice of making important disclosures via hyperlink-accessible pages, there are enough differences between desktop computers and mobile devices (screen size, screen resolution, data transmission speeds, input technologies) that this common contracting strategy might have to be worked out all over again for mobile devices.