Four Hundred Thirty Nine – That’s how many comments the FTC received in response to their most recent Staff Report on Online Behavioral Advertising.  439!  Evidon, following up on our two days of meetings at the FTC last month, submitted our comments here. There’s so much noise in the space, with bills, reports, press, beta products and companies making what at times seem like irrational moves to us, that we’re working hard to cut through the noise for our clients and friends.  My partner, Co-Founder Colin O’Malley, just posted what I think is the best way for companies to understand the situation, their options, and the consequences, here at the IAB Blog. One of the biggest points of confusion we hear is “Isn’t the FTC saying that Self-Regulation has failed, and the focus is entirely on Do Not Track?”  The answer to that is a resounding no.  FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz clarified their stance this week in an excellent interview in MultiChannel News.  While the term Do Not Track catches a lot of headlines, the concept is really just that the FTC wants to keep the pressure on the industry to continue providing better tools for consumers, not for a draconian web version of the Do Not Call List: “Those would be that right after we released our report, both Microsoft and Mozilla came out with [browser-based] do-not-track proposals.  And the development of an icon that consumers can click on to opt out of targeted advertising is pretty promising. There are flowers of privacy blooming out there that don't involve government regulation. Indeed, they involved the private sector moving with alacrity on its own.  Moving that process forward would probably be a pretty effective way to avoid more prescriptive government regulation.  So, I guess I would say that the business community really has it in its hands to avoid regulation, it just has to step up to the plate… I am confident they can do this, whether they will do this is a question we are hoping to find out the answer to in the next six months or so. But, make no mistake – we’ve got a very short period of time to show that the self-regulatory program can work.  So, how should a company think about approaching compliance?  Here’s a quick way to have the discussion internally if you are considering not embracing self-regulation because you are confused about how the program intersects with the noise around Do Not Track:

• If self-regulation fails, we are pretty much guaranteed to get draconian legislation + draconian Do Not Track
• If self-regulation succeeds, we likely get neither
• If this ends in a compromise, all indications are that corporate leaders in the self-regulatory movement will be rewarded
• If you want to influence the outcome, you must act now
• The self-regulatory movement is about empowering the consumer; do right by the consumer and your brand will benefit (with or without a self-regulatory program)

It's time to get on board with self-regulation and DNT is just the latest in a list of good reasons.