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Day: July 12, 2019

Winter is Coming for Consumers

Imagine you open your Netflix or Amazon Video App one day to only stare at a black screen. Imagine you want to rewatch the amazing series Friends or live once more through the long night of Game of Thrones but your government shut down most entertainment options in your country.

This is a situation hundreds of millions of Brazilians are currently facing. A well-intended law from 2011 that tried to prevent market concentration in the TV market might now lead to the rather opposite consequences of what it intended. Due to the ban of TV channels being allowed to own and produce content, business models such as streaming services but also the vertical integration of content and channels. 

Brazilian consumers will be the ones who lose in this situation. If this law, which was made in a pre-streaming and pre-vertical integration world, does not get repealed many great shows, movies, and even sports events like the Champions League might disappear from Brazilian TV and tablet screens.

That’s why we launched the campaign #ChegaDeBarreiras or#NoMoreBarriers which has already reached over 800,000 Brazilians through social media. This week we took the campaign to the next level when I and our Brazilian Affairs Manager Andre Freo met with over 20 Congressmen, Senators, and regulators in Brasilia to discuss our campaign. The overwhelming majority of these policy makers support our campaign. Read more at chegadebarreiras.org

This month Bill Wirtz, Luca Bertoletti, and I spent a week in Strasbourg to meet the new European Parliament with a whooping 60-something of newly elected Members of the European Parliament. We discussed our EU-focused projects BrandsMatter!, #HandsOffMyCheapFlights, and Consumer Privacy in the Age of 5G with two dozen of MEPs from most parts of the Union. The next two weeks we will also be busy in Brussels with meetings with MEPs and the EU Commission. The good news is that we will be supported our new Brussels-based consumer rockstar Maria Chaplia, who is our new European Affairs Associate.

Over in Berlin, I had the opportunity to share our views on consumer privacy and trans-Atlantic collaboration with US Ambassador Richard Grenell.

You will also hear more about our ongoing #FreeTrade4US campaign. Fighting for freer trade and defeating new proposed tariffs is unfortunately a busy affair these days. We started promoting the EU-Mercosur FTA on both sides of the Atlantic and work on helping this important trade deal over the finishing line (or the 40+ finishing lines if one counts every legislature it has to be ratified by).

Over in Ontario, Canada our omnipresent David Clement has advocated for a long time for a liberalization of the beer sales monopoly in his home province. The provincial government decided to partially liberalize the sale of beer and move away from having merely one monopolist selling liquid hops. This got us a shoutout by the provincial government – who would have thought governments will ever quote us 😉

Competition is not only good for consumers but also within consumer advocacy groups: Following Ontario’s beer policy, North Carolina increased the amount of beer craft breweries are allowed to distribute without a middleman. Our Yael Ossowski has been advocating for a more consumer friendly alcohol policy in his home state for years and has been finally heard.

The CCC is growing and we fight for your choice as a consumer across the globe – Stay tuned for more exciting news about supersonic travel, borderless wires, our plans for Davos2020, GMO-fish, a digital consumer economy, and Argentinian steaks (see below) for everyone!

Thank you for following our work!

Fred Roeder

Onerous labeling laws harm consumers who want innovative meat alternatives

CONTACT:
Yaël Ossowski
Deputy Director
Consumer Choice Center
yael@consumerchoicecenter.org

Washington, D.C. – Earlier this month, Mississippi lawmakers passed onerous labeling laws that will prohibit meat-alternative products, such as veggie burgers and sausages, from using the word “meat” in their marketing and branding. This is part of a larger trend by politicians and industries to limit what consumers can know about the products they consume.

Yaël Ossowski, Deputy Director of the Consumer Choice Center (CCC), said “For years, consumers have demanded better tasting and more innovative meat alternatives, and entrepreneurs have delivered. The effort to stymie these innovations by forbidding the use of the word meat harms consumers who want more choice.

“By censoring what information and branding companies are able to use, consumers are left to guess what products they’re consuming, and what taste they’re due to expect.

“This is nothing more than an attempt to preemptively stop the innovative market of meat alternatives that environmentally conscious consumers want and demand. Brands matter, and labeling matters as well. Broader categories and more information are always better for consumers, and these laws to restrict this end up harming consumers,” said Ossowski. “That’s why the Consumer Choice Center launched the Brands Matter! initiative.

“Legislation like this is predicated on the idea that consumers are too dumb to understand the differences between meat and meat alternatives. Using legislation to bicker over nomenclature is ridiculous, and mirrors when the dairy industry lobbied against almond and soy beverages.

“Let’s let consumers choose,” concluded Ossowski.

*** Deputy Director Yaël Ossowski is available to speak with accredited media on consumer regulations and consumer choice issues.  Please send media inquiries HERE.***

—The CCC represents consumers in over 100 countries across the globe. We closely monitor regulatory trends in Ottawa, Washington, Brussels, Geneva and other hotspots of regulation and inform and activate consumers to fight for #ConsumerChoice. Learn more at consumerchoicecenter.org.

Legal weed is a lot more expensive than your dealer: Statistics Canada

“The data from Stats Can is troubling, because it shows that the legal market is getting less competitive over time,” said David Clement, the North American affairs manager at Consumer Choice Center. “Luckily there are some simple solutions that could be enacted to help the legal market compete when it comes to price. The federal government could quickly get rid of the minimum tax amount, and simply tax cannabis on its wholesale value. This would immediately allow for discount products to hit the shelves, which will put downward pressure on prices.”

In addition to changing the excise tax formula, Clement said the government could change production regulations that are holding back industry efficiency.

“Shifting production regulations to be in line with food-grade rules, as opposed to pharmaceutical-grade restrictions, would go a long way in terms of reducing costs, which are passed on to consumers through lower prices,” he said.

Read more here

The price isn’t right for legal pot says consumer group

“It’s time to re-evaluate the taxes on cannabis,” according to a Toronto-based North American consumer affairs group.

The Consumer Choice Center said the growing gap in price between legal cannabis and illegal pot shows that it’s time to re-evaluate cannabis taxes.

Earlier this week, Statistics Canada released data on the price differences between illegal and legal cannabis. It found that over the past three months, the price of a gram of cannabis bought illegally has fallen from $6.23 to $5.93 but over that same time, the average price of a gram of legally purchased cannabis rose from $10.21 to $10.65.

“The data from StatsCan is troubling, because it shows that the legal market is getting less competitive over time,” said David Clement, manager of the Consumer Choice Center.

He said there are some simple solutions that could be enacted to help the legal market compete when it comes to price. Clement said the federal government could get rid of the minimum tax amount, and simply tax cannabis on its wholesale value, which would immediately allow for discount products to hit the shelves and decrease prices. He added the government could also change production regulations to make the industry more dynamic. Clement said shifting production regulations to be in line with food-grade rules, as opposed to pharmaceutical-grade restrictions, would go a long way in terms of reducing costs, which are passed down to consumers through lower prices.

Read more here

Legal Cannabis in Canada is More Expensive than the Black Market

“The taxes and fees create prices that are high out of the gate, and then a lack of competition prevents those prices from being slowly pushed down,” David Clement, the North American affairs manager for the Consumer Choice Center, told CBC Radio-Canadaat the time. “It costs half a billion [over five years] to enforce the rules and regulations in the Cannabis Act, so in order to generate the revenues to cover that, they’ve implemented fees and licenses on licensed producers.”

Read more here

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