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Comment by nirav72 | Hacker News Reader

Wonder if this going to be permanent or will be reverted as soon as the new FTC head is in office.

Time will tell - the change I'm really hoping will stick is the outlawing of non-competes without consideration.

I would not be hopeful. From AP news:

> Four of the FTC’s five commissioners voted to approve the rule. Commissioner Andrew Ferguson, – who is President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to replace Khan, was the one dissenting vote.

https://apnews.com/article/ftc-junk-fees-rule-hotels-tickets...

One republican commissioner voted with the rule, and Ferguson dissented based on lame duck rule making, not the merits, while agreeing that the FTC rule making was valid for businesses like tickets and short term lodging.

That's a moronic dissent. It's either valid or not, lame duck or no.

Edit: The full decent reads like choosing fealty to Trump over good rule making. https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/ferguson-junk-f...

A lot of people probably weigh this too much. Forcing companies to have some skin in the game is good. But, in practice, if a company really wants to enforce a non-compete--even with consideration--it's probably not great unless you're in a position and want to take a sabbatical with substantially reduced compensation.

This is absolutely true and when I read my first non-compete my dad calmly explained how unenforceable they are due to hardship exceptions and lack of specificity. However, I had a very business minded father to ask and most people don't. Non-competes have been abused to scare uninformed employees into staying in positions they want to leave or as revenge for someone leaving.

The fact that they're so often unenforceable is probably a decent argument that they're an irrelevant complication of labor interactions that we don't need anyways. They only ever made sense with executives and those folks usually have large sums of money attached to their compliance.

The few months when I actually had a non-compete in place it was quite specific and didn't apply to me.

But, yeah, as a generic thing below the level of a CEO becoming the CEO of a direct competitor (in which case lawyers have presumably put specific contracts in place if they're competent), they don't make a lot of sense beyond NDAs in play. No properly-managed company was ever going to pay me a bunch of money to not work at a random company in the industry who was probably a partner anyway.

Come January 21st, expect junk fees to explode. But don’t worry, as long as you make at least $10,000,000 per year, you’ll get a huge tax cut.

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