Not a lawyer, but I read the full opinion (I highly recommend making a free PACER account). It's a summary judgement essentially saying that even though the FT

Not a lawyer, but I read the full opinion (I highly recommend making a free PACER account). It's a summary judgement essentially saying that even though the FTC has a long-established history in both the law itself and legal precedent for making rules to protect people from "unfair methods of competition" apparently that was all an illusion and the FTC has no power to do that at all. This was based on (IMO) flimsy reasoning that a 1975 law[1] that granted the FTC some new, explicit rulemaking powers over warranties (including a provision that says something like "nothing in this law is meant to restrict powers already granted by the FTC Act") actually caused the FTC to lose all other implicit rule-making power, even though obviously that wasn't Congress's intention and isn't supported by the text. The judge went further to claim the rule was "arbitrary and capricious", even though the rule was published alongside 570 pages of analysis[2] (that I also read), and the relevant Supreme Court decision[3] explicitly requires judges to defer to the expertise of federal agencies in these matters. Once again, we can't have nice things, even if the law literally says we can. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty... [2]: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/05/07/2024-09171/non-compete-clause-rule https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/05/07/2024-09... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_v._Prometheus_Radio_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_v._Prometheus_Radio_Projec...