About Us
Consumer choice is pivotal for economic freedom and lifestyle decisions. Regulators on local, national, and supranational levels keep regulating more and more areas of consumers’ lives. This leads to less consumer choice and usually higher costs.
Whether protectionism in the airline industry prevents more efficient airlines to sell cheaper tickets to passengers, excessive taxation of consumption serve as letters of indulgence, or branding bans destroy the brand value of companies. Consumers don’t benefit but suffer from such regulation.
In some cases, paternalistic regulations cause even harm. Examples can be seen in more driving under influence cases in cities after banning ride-sharing services such as Uber or smokers being unable to switch to less harmful ways of consuming nicotine such as vaporizers. Branding bans lead to a higher accidental consumption of counterfeit products that can be of lethal consequence for the consumer.
The CCC empowers consumers to raise their voice in media, the Internet, and on the streets and facilitates activism towards a more empowered consumer. Learning from the successes of its parent organization, Students For Liberty, the CCC will bring the struggle for consumer freedom to the next level.
The CCC represents consumers in over 100 countries across the globe. We monitor closely regulatory trends in Washington, Brussels, Geneva and other hotspots of regulation and inform and activate consumers to fight for #ConsumerChoice.
Code of Ethics
The Consumer Choice Center is an independent entity that aims to promote more choice and freedom for consumers.
The Consumer Choice Center is politically independent.
The Consumer Choice Center accepts no public funds and is supported by private individuals and partners.
When the Consumer Choice Center (CCC) takes a position, it does so in the full interest of increasing consumer choice and fostering the freedom of exchange in the marketplace.
We have a clear stance that consumer choice is pivotal. This coherent fight for choice is why we receive support from many partners, members, and individuals.
As a consumer group, the CCC maintains strict independent editorial policy. Its campaigns, events, op-eds, and videos are not sent to supporters before they are released. Members and partners see our content and outputs at the same time as the general public.
Maintaining these standards helps keep Consumer Choice Center free of outside influence and ultimately accountable to its members and supporters around the globe.
Frequently Asked Questions
The Consumer Choice Center was launched in February 2017 as a project of Students For Liberty. We held launch events in both Brussels, Belgium, and Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Currently, we have staff members in the United States, Canada, Brazil, and the European Union.
As an independent nonprofit organization, the Consumer Choice Center is dependent on funding from private donors. We do not accept money from governmental institutions. As described in our Code of Ethics, we strictly maintain editorial independence and do not give our funders influence on editorial decisions.
Our support comes from corporations, individuals, and foundations. We have a tiered membership model available to members who support us on a yearly basis, equaling silver, gold, and platinum status. These members donate anywhere between $10 to $50 a year to support our work and mission.
In the past, we have received funding from multiple industries such as energy, fast moving consumer goods, airlines, manufacturing, digital, healthcare, the chemical industry, banking, cryptocurrencies, and fin-tech. Among our many funders we are proud to count the Atlas Network (foundation), the Wayland Group (Cannabis), Canaccord (Banking), Japan Tobacco International (which co-sponsored our launch event in Brussels), the Supreme Cannabis Company, the Geneva Network, the electric Hand-dryer Association (corporation), Facebook (corporation), and the Atlas Project (corporation).
In 2017 we received seed funding from our parent organization SFL to start our operations in Europe and Canada.
You can find the latest list of our staff members on our staff page.
Become a member of the Consumer Choice Center, subscribe to our newsletter, and follow our social media pages.
We define Consumer Choice as a state in which consumers have wide choice among different products, innovations, and price classes. Prohibitive laws, protectionist measures, and indirect taxes are the main ways on how Consumer Choice gets limited.
The CCC works currently with thousands of consumers in the United States, the European Union and its Member States, Canada, Brazil, Nigeria, Latin America, Ukraine, Israel, Georgia, and Singapore.
We closely monitor trends in consumer regulation and comment on these in traditional media, social media and engage with policy makers and regulators in order to warn how respective regulation can harm the choice of consumers. While we try to shed light on as many issues as possible we usually pick some hot issues, secure funding and run larger awareness campaigns on these.
The CCC has run campaigns on legalized cannabis across Canada and the United States, evidence-based policy making in Europe’s agriculture and food supply, protecting Diesel-owners of reactionary policies, the soda tax in Montréal, sugar taxes across Canada, a consumer-oriented energy policy in the European Union, Brand Freedom in the Republic of Georgia, tariffs in the United States, transparency in the European Union, allowing innovations in agriculture that would bring down food prices for consumers, and more.
We are actively contributing to the debate through traditional media (opinion pieces, radio, TV, and press releases), infographics and videos through our own social media channels, grassroots activism, organizing roundtable events, conducting consumer polls, and by testifying in committees of legislatures or workshops hosted by regulators, stakeholders, and partner organizations.
Still have questions?
The Consumer Choice Center welcomes questions from prospective members, partner organizations, news outlets, and more.