DNA Edit: Oversight powers - Even Google can be hauled up in the US

It says something about the powers of the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the accountability of the American system, that no organisation, however successful, is considered above law. Not even the almighty social media behemoths.

Last month Facebook was fined $5 billion by the FTC after a year-long investigation into the company’s privacy violations following the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. Now comes under bombshell, equally sweeping in its scope.

The FTC on Wednesday directed Google to pay a record $170 million over YouTube’s child privacy violations. The settlement requires Google and YouTube to pay $136 million to the FTC and $34 million to New York for allegedly violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) Rule. The $170 million penalty is by far the largest amount the FTC has ever obtained in a COPPA case since Congress enacted the law more than two decades ago.

In a complaint filed against the companies, the FTC and New York Attorney General allege that YouTube violated the COPPA Rule by collecting personal information - in the form of persistent identifiers that are used to track users across the Internet - from viewers of child-directed channels, without first notifying parents and getting their consent.

YouTube earned millions of dollars by using the identifiers, commonly known as cookies, to deliver targeted ads to viewers of these channels, according to the complaint. Despite many warts, consumer rights in the US remains a formidable public moment.

The FTC was developed to protect consumers against fraudulent business practices and its powers are all-encompassing. Its brief is to investigate business practices that are unethical, illegal, or deceptive; to probe any violations of antitrust statutes to ensure anti-competitive mergers do not happen and to hold trials to handle disputes of accusatory actions.