>"While we certainly do not endorse the use of unfair and deceptive practices in negative option marketing, the procedural deficiencies of the Commission's rulemaking process are fatal here,"
As with a lot of judge rulings, and what they're always supposed to do, they ruled on what the actual law is and not just on what sounds good.
>The FTC is required to conduct a preliminary regulatory analysis when a rule has an estimated annual economic effect of $100 million or more. The FTC estimated in a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that the rule would not have a $100 million effect.
Basically the judges, and a lower court, all agreed that there's no way this rule won't have at last a $100 million in impact, and when something has that much impact there are rules they were meant to follow and didn't. And they rightly commented that if this was allowed to stand, the FTC and every government agency would just always estimate low in these cases.