Though driven by good intentions, these efforts only highlight how the Information Age is rendering the FTC increasingly obsolete. The private sector is devising innovative new mechanisms to protect consumers online, proving that the solution to the Internet's governance problems is usually not more government, but less.
Fraud poses a substantial threat to online commerce and consumers.
Freed from geographic constraints, web-based con artists can easily pose as legitimate businesses. To date, the most prevalent scams have been phony businesses and schemes that lure web surfers with the false promise of easy money. But the agency efforts are meeting only limited success. Despite such grand rhetoric, the agency's bark is bigger than its bite. Most sites will receive only a strongly-worded, email reprimand.