Displaying bipartisanship seldom seen on Capitol Hill, the Antitrust Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing yesterday on Reviving Competition in which Democrats and Republicans appeared to agree on crucial issues.[1] Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline and Ranking Member Ken Buck echoed one another on the need for reforms, while many members of the full Judiciary Committee, including Chairman Nadler and Ranking Member Jordan, weighed in with their own support for writing new…

The Children’s Advertising Review Unit (or “CARU”) has guidelines that apply to ads directed to children who are under 12 years old. A lot has changed since the guidelines were last updated in 2006, and CARU recently announced that it’s working on an update. At ACI’s Advertising Claims Substantiation Forum this month, I asked Angela Tiffin about the update, and she previewed some of the upcoming changes. Here are three: The current guidelines are very…

On February 12, 2021, the General Assembly of the State of Maryland enacted legislation imposing the Digital Advertising Gross Revenues Tax, overriding a prior veto of the legislation by Maryland Governor Larry Hogan. The Act imposes a tax, at rates of up to 10%, on gross revenues “derived from digital advertising services in the state.”  The tax could be extremely burdensome, and within days of the Act’s enactment, a number of advertising industry groups commenced…

Often when people think about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) they say to themselves, “well, I’m not a bank so that doesn’t really apply to me.” But consumer financial protection laws are actually much broader and cover all aspects of consumer financial products, any way that consumers bank, pay, or finance transactions and the financial technology sector more broadly. On this episode of the Ad Law Access Podcast, partner Alysa Hutnik and special…

Welcome to our monthly digest of litigation and regulatory highlights impacting the food and beverage industry.  As it has been for many months, the story was mostly about what’s going on in the food court.  Let’s take a look…. Litigation Vanilla, vanilla, and more vanilla….The plaintiff’s bar remains skeptical of any product labeled as vanilla.  Among the many vanilla-related lawsuits filed, McDonald’s, Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s defended suits alleging that their vanilla ice…