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The Stile Newsletter - Issue #909
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Subject:  09.26.2025 The Stile Newsletter Issue #909

The Stile Newsletter Issue # 909

ISSUE #909 – 09/26/2025

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China Section 301 Litigation Update – Grunfeld, Desiderio, Lebowitz, Silverman & Klestadt LLP

On September 25, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a decision in favor of the Government in the lead China Section 301 case (HMTX Industries LLC v. U.S.) and upheld the legality of the Section 301 Lists 3 and 4A duties that were imposed during the first Trump Administration. Those duties continue to be in effect today.

The three-judge panel that heard the case held that Section 301 empowered the United States Trade Representative (USTR) to make broad modifications to the initial action that it took in imposing the Section 301 List 1 and List 2 tariffs. Plaintiffs had argued that the statute did not provide such authority and that the List 3 and List 4A tariffs were beyond the scope of an allowable modification of the initial action. While the CAFC affirmed the decision of the U.S. Court of International Trade, it relied on a different part of Section 301 to uphold USTR’s promulgation of Lists 3 and 4A.

Plaintiffs can request a rehearing before the entire CAFC within 45 days of the judgment and may pursue a writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court within 90 days. In either event, we anticipate further proceedings in this case so a final decision is likely several months away.

Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact one of our attorneys.

USTR Seeks Public Comment on Unfair Foreign Trade Barriers for the 2026 National Trade Estimate Report – U.S. Trade Representative

WASHINGTON – This week, the Office of the United States Trade Representative invited public comment on foreign barriers to U.S. exports of goods and services and U.S. foreign direct investment for inclusion in the 2026 National Trade Estimate Report.

“President Trump’s America First Trade Policy is liberating American workers and businesses from unfair trade practices that have undermined our global competitiveness and led to the largest trade deficit in goods of any country in human history,” said Ambassador Greer. “The Trump administration is working to identify and remedy trade barriers to ensure American workers, farmers, manufacturers, and service-providers can compete on a level playing field.”

The deadline for submission of comments is October 30, 2025.

To view the Federal Register Notice, click here.

USITC Releases The Year in Trade 2024 – U.S. International Trade Commission

The U.S. International Trade Commission (Commission or USITC) today released The Year in Trade 2024, its annual overview of developments regarding the administration of U.S. trade laws and trade agreements.

The Year in Trade is one of the government’s most comprehensive reports available regarding activities related to U.S. trade policies, agreements, and laws. This report is the 76th in a series of annual reports submitted to the U.S. Congress under section 163(c) of the Trade Act of 1974 (19 U.S.C. 2213(c)) and its predecessor legislation.

The publication provides an overview of actions under U.S. international trade laws, activities of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and select multilateral institutions, and developments regarding U.S. free trade agreements (FTAs) and U.S. bilateral trade relations with major trading partners in 2024. In addition, topics covered in The Year in Trade 2024 include:

The global trade environment in 2024

  • U.S. safeguard, antidumping, countervailing duty, intellectual property rights infringement, national security, and section 301 investigations and actions during 2024
  • U.S. trade preference programs, including the U.S. Generalized System of Preferences; African Growth and Opportunity Act; the Caribbean Basin Economic Recovery Act, including initiatives for Haiti; and the Nepal Trade Preferences Act
  • WTO dispute settlement and other significant activities in the WTO
  • Activities under the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum and trade initiatives under negotiation, including the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity, the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity, the U.S.-Taiwan Initiative on 21st-century Trade, and the U.S.-Kenya Strategic Trade and Investment Partnership
  • Implementation and enforcement of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement and other U.S. FTAs in force
  • Trade patterns and developments in trading relationships with selected major U.S. partners—the European Union, Canada, Mexico, China, and the United Kingdom

The report and accompanying dashboard on the report landing page provide an overview of U.S. trade in merchandise and services during 2024. Statistical tables highlight U.S. bilateral trade with major trading partners and trade under U.S. trade preference programs and FTAs.

The Year in Trade 2024 (USITC Publication 5673, September 2025) is posted on the USITC website. 

The homepage of the report has interactive figures and tables of underlying data that show U.S. merchandise and services trade by country and by sector; U.S. imports under different trade preferences programs; information on USITC antidumping, countervailing duty, safeguard, and section 337 investigations; and information on WTO dispute settlement cases involving the United States.

For previous The Year in Trade reports, refer to the Commission’s Investigations Database System (IDS).

FTC Secures Historic $2.5 Billion Settlement Against Amazon – FTC

The Federal Trade Commission has secured a historic order with Amazon.com, Inc., as well as Senior Vice President Neil Lindsay and Vice President Jamil Ghani, settling allegations that Amazon enrolled millions of consumers in Prime subscriptions without their consent, and knowingly made it difficult for consumers to cancel. Amazon will be required to pay a $1 billion civil penalty, provide $1.5 billion in refunds back to consumers harmed by their deceptive Prime enrollment practices, and cease unlawful enrollment and cancellation practices for Prime.

“Today, the Trump-Vance FTC made history and secured a record-breaking, monumental win for the millions of Americans who are tired of deceptive subscriptions that feel impossible to cancel,” said FTC Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson. “The evidence showed that Amazon used sophisticated subscription traps designed to manipulate consumers into enrolling in Prime, and then made it exceedingly hard for consumers to end their subscription. Today, we are putting billions of dollars back into Americans’ pockets, and making sure Amazon never does this again. The Trump-Vance FTC is committed to fighting back when companies try to cheat ordinary Americans out of their hard-earned pay.”

The FTC has charged Amazon and several Amazon executives with knowingly misleading millions of consumers into enrolling in Prime, violating the FTC Act and the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act (ROSCA). The FTC alleged Amazon created confusing and deceptive user interfaces to lead consumers to enroll in Prime without their knowledge. Compounding these deceptive enrollment practices, Amazon also created a complex and difficult process for consumers seeking to cancel their Prime subscription, with the goal of preventing consumers from cancelling Prime. Amazon documents discovered in the lead up to trial showed that Amazon executives and employees knowingly discussed these unlawful enrollment and cancellation issues, with comments like “subscription driving is a bit of a shady world” and leading consumers to unwanted subscriptions is “an unspoken cancer.” 

The historic monetary judgment contained in the settlement is only the third ROSCA case in which the FTC has obtained a civil penalty. It includes:

  • a $1 billion civil penalty, which is the largest ever in a case involving an FTC rule violation;
  • $1.5 billion in consumer redress, providing full relief for the estimated 35 million consumers impacted by unwanted Prime enrollment or deferred cancellation. This is the second-highest restitution award ever obtained by FTC action.

Additionally, the settlement requires Amazon to stop their unlawful practices and make meaningful changes to the Prime enrollment and cancellation flows by:

  • including a clear and conspicuous button for customers to decline Prime. Amazon can no longer have a button that says, “No, I don’t want Free Shipping.”
  • Including clear and conspicuous disclosures about all material terms of Prime during the Prime enrollment process, such as the cost, the date and frequency of charges to consumers, whether the subscription auto-renews, and cancellation procedures.
  • creating an easy way for consumers to cancel Prime, using the same method that consumers used to sign up. The process cannot be difficult, costly, or time-consuming and must be available using the same method that consumers used to sign up; and
  • paying for an independent, third-party supervisor to monitor Amazon’s compliance with the consumer redress distribution process.

The Commission vote approving the stipulated final order was 3-0. The FTC filed the proposed order in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington.

NOTE: Stipulated final orders have the force of law when approved and signed by the District Court judge.

FTC Sues Live Nation and Ticketmaster for Engaging in Illegal Ticket Resale Tactics and Deceiving Artists and Consumers about Price and Ticket Limits – Federal Trade Commission

Agency alleges Ticketmaster used deceptive pricing tactics and earned hundreds of millions selling tickets acquired illegally by brokers, costing consumers billions of dollars in inflated prices and additional fees

The Federal Trade Commission and seven states sued Live Nation and Ticketmaster for tacitly coordinating with brokers and allowing them to harvest millions of dollars worth of tickets in the primary market. Live Nation and Ticketmaster then sell the illegally harvested tickets at a substantial markup in the secondary market, causing consumers to pay significantly more than the face value of the ticket. 

The FTC further alleged in a complaint that California-based Ticketmaster LLC and its parent company Live Nation Entertainment, Inc., (collectively “Ticketmaster”) deceived artists and consumers by engaging in bait-and-switch pricing through advertising lower prices for tickets than what consumers must pay to purchase tickets; deceptively claimed to impose strict limits on the number of tickets that consumers could purchase for an event, even though ticket brokers routinely and substantially exceeded those limits; and sold millions of tickets, often at much higher cost to consumers, on its resale platform that those brokers obtained in excess of artists’ ticket limits.

“President Donald Trump made it clear in his March Executive Order that the federal government must protect Americans from being ripped off when they buy tickets to live events,” said FTC Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson. “American live entertainment is the best in the world and should be accessible to all of us. It should not cost an arm and a leg to take the family to a baseball game or attend your favorite musician’s show. The Trump-Vance FTC is working hard to ensure that fans have a shot at buying fair-priced tickets, and today’s lawsuit is a monumental step in that direction.”

Ticketmaster is the leading provider of tickets for concerts—controlling about 80% or more of major concert venues’ primary ticketing—and it also has a growing share of ticket resales in the secondary market. From 2019 to 2024 alone, consumers spent more than $82.6 billion purchasing tickets from Ticketmaster.

The FTC alleges that in public, Ticketmaster maintains that its business model is at odds with brokers that routinely exceed ticket limits. But in private, Ticketmaster acknowledged that its business model and bottom line benefit from brokers preventing ordinary Americans from purchasing tickets to the shows they want to see at the prices artists set.

The FTC’s complaint against Ticketmaster alleges that:

  • Despite implementing security measures, Ticketmaster is aware that brokers routinely bypass such measures by creating thousands of Ticketmaster accounts and using proxy IP addresses in order to purchase event tickets.
  • Ticketmaster nevertheless allows brokers to post these illegally obtained tickets for resale on its platform, then profits from the additional fees and markups it unilaterally adds to the resale tickets.
  • In fact, a senior Ticketmaster executive admitted in an internal email that copied Live Nation leadership, that the companies “turn a blind eye as a matter of policy” to brokers’ violations of posted ticket limits. For example, an internal review showed that just five brokers controlled 6,345 Ticketmaster accounts and possessed 246,407 concert tickets to 2,594 events.
  • Ticketmaster and Live Nation even offer technological support to brokers through a software platform called TradeDesk, which enables brokers to track and aggregate tickets purchased from multiple Ticketmaster accounts into a single interface for simpler resale management. Through TradeDesk, Ticketmaster can identify which high-volume brokers are exceeding ticket limits through the use of hundreds, or even thousands, of Ticketmaster accounts.
  • The companies also have consistently declined to deploy additional technology that would more effectively prevent brokers from evading ticket limits because such tactics would decrease their revenue, according to internal company documents. For example, the company in 2021 opted against using third-party identity verification because it was “too effective.”
  • In addition, Ticketmaster deceived the American people by advertising list prices for tickets that were substantially lower than the actual cost consumers paid after fees and markups were added. The FTC alleged that Ticketmaster hid the mandatory fees, which are as high as 44% of the cost of the ticket, that it didn’t add the fees to the price of tickets until the very end of the transaction, and still failed to clearly detail the extra fees before consumers paid for the tickets. The fees totaled $16.4 billion from 2019-2024.
  • Despite publicly claiming that they support consumers knowing the “full cost of their tickets from the start,” company executives acknowledged internally that Ticketmaster engaged in deceptive pricing and deliberately continued that approach after internal research showed consumers were less likely to purchase tickets when they are informed of the true cost upfront.

The FTC alleges that these practices violate the FTC Act’s prohibition on deceptive acts or practices in the marketplace and the Better Online Ticket Sales Act. The FTC is seeking civil penalties against Ticketmaster and any additional monetary relief that that the court finds appropriate.

The Commission vote authorizing the staff to file the complaint was 2-0-1, with Commissioner Melissa Holyoak recused due to her previous work as Utah’s Solicitor General. The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

Federal Register Notices:

Silicon Metal From Australia: Preliminary Affirmative Countervailing Duty Determination, and Alignment of Final Determination With Final Antidumping Duty Determination

 
 

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