OK, I guess I actually know why: Political pressure. To get to where they have with this report the FTC wonks had many meetings and "roundtables" with "stakeholders," academics, and any one else who was interested. From that input they created the report, which is to say if you want to know what defined the report, just follow the money.

The problem with the report is that a de facto opt-out system is, in reality, ethically dubious because it presupposes that all of the consumers are completely informed and they actually know about the choices they have and what those choices really mean. This is, obviously, not the case.

The theory is all well and good but there's a huge, glaring and fundamental flaw in the whole report: Opt-out is not the same as opt-in.

In the philosophy of "," a concept pioneered by Seth Godin, the consumer is never, and I repeat, never, engaged by a vendor without the vendor first asking whether the consumer wants to engage – that is, whether they want to "opt-in." In permission marketing, there's no default engagement, it's all about symmetry in the relationship.

In a permission marketing environment the consumer expresses interest, their willingness to engage, by going to the vendor's site where the vendor then makes a deal with the consumer along the lines of "you give me your e-mail address and or some other interesting data and, in return, I'll give you X," where X is something the consumer perceives as being valuable. Without an "exchange of equivalent value" the relationship becomes skewed and "untrustworthy" by the consumer.