Live Nation's answer to the FTC: 260 million bot blocks a day, and a liability theory that punishes us for it

Updated:

Live Nation and Ticketmaster formally answered the FTC's BOTS Act complaint on October 13, 2026, weeks after presiding Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong denied their motion to dismiss. The answer, hosted by Digital Music News, is a document with two very different jobs: it is a legal defense, and it is a public-relations offensive. The two jobs pull against each other, and the tension between them is the story.

The case, briefly

The FTC and seven states — Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Nebraska, Tennessee, Utah, and Virginia — sued in 2025, alleging that the defendants "routinely allow ticket brokers to exceed ticket limits" and fail to enforce purchase rules. The government also claims Ticketmaster "displayed deceptively low ticket prices to consumers and charged much more" via fees that only appeared at checkout — the drip-pricing allegation. Per Billboard's report on the September 28 ruling, the FTC alleges brokers used "hundreds and even thousands" of fake accounts, and claims Live Nation and Ticketmaster "have reduced, discontinued, or declined to implement the use of tools that could effectively enforce ticket limits against brokers."

The BOTS Act itself bars "any person" from circumventing "a security measure, access control system, or other technological control…used by the ticket issuer to enforce posted event ticket purchasing limits," and extends liability to anyone who "participated directly in or had the ability to control the conduct" or "knew or should have known that the event ticket was acquired in violation of" the Act. The question the case turns on is whether "any person" includes the ticket issuer itself — the platform whose limits were circumvented.

The judge has already answered that in the plaintiffs' favor at the motion-to-dismiss stage: "The BOTS Act does not preclude platforms from facing liability, and the court will not read it as doing so," she wrote, per Billboard.

The defense's two faces

The first face is the one Live Nation shows the public. "Nearly every major technological advancement in the fight against bots and automated ticket harvesting has come from" Live Nation and Ticketmaster, the companies argue. Ticketmaster "detected and blocked nearly 260 million attempts daily by bots to access its services" last year. Congress passed the BOTS Act "to combat scalpers who use bots and other technological exploits to circumvent ticket issuers' safeguards and harvest tickets ahead of fans, not to penalize ticket companies." The suit, in this telling, punishes Ticketmaster "for not perfectly blocking all ticket purchase abuse on Ticketmaster's platform" — a company sued for the imperfection of its own defense.

The second face appears in the discovery record. Billboard's reporting on the ruling cites an internal Ticketmaster email describing a decision to "turn a blind eye as a matter of policy" — and Judge Frimpong let the case proceed in part on the allegation that the companies declined to implement tools they knew would work. A company that blocks 260 million bot attempts daily and a company that turns a blind eye as a matter of policy are not obviously the same company; the FTC's whole case is that they are. Live Nation's answer, notably, does not deny blocking the 260 million — it denies that blocking more, or enforcing limits more rigorously, was ever a legal obligation. Those positions are compatible. That compatibility is precisely the government's complaint.

The sharpest paragraph in the filing is the one Live Nation's lawyers clearly wrote for the judge rather than for the press:

"Under the Commission's reading, by contrast, any new abuse-prevention measure or ticket limit Ticketmaster deploys becomes a new source of potential liability whenever a determined scalper finds a way around it… Platforms will face pressure to abandon prevention measures or purchase limits altogether, making it exponentially easier for scalpers to harvest tickets, forcing fans, artists, and venues to bear the cost."

This is a genuinely interesting argument, and it deserves to be engaged honestly. If the BOTS Act makes every security measure a new liability surface, then platforms' safest legal strategy is to deploy no measures and set no limits. As the answer itself notes, abstention would leave "nothing for scalpers to circumvent" — minimal liability at the customer's expense. Read this way, the FTC's theory perversely rewards the platforms that did the least.

The counter-argument, though, is why the case survived dismissal. The FTC's position is that liability attaches not to imperfect measures but to deliberate non-use of effective ones — the reduced, discontinued, or declined tools, the blind-eye policy. Under that reading, a platform that deploys measures and sometimes fails is safe; a platform that has them available and chooses not to use them is not. The 260-million-blocks figure, the government would say, is evidence of capability, not of diligence.

The political complications

This is not a quiet case. Several members of Congress filed an amicus brief opposing Live Nation's dismissal motion — the lawmakers who wrote the statute telling the court what it means, against the company it targets. Then the discovery process collided with the Senate itself: last week, Senators Marsha Blackburn and Ben Ray Luján, whose files the government subpoenaed, described the dispute as arising "out of the improper use of document subpoenas to root through constitutionally protected files of two United States Senators," arguing that the Speech or Debate Clause bars compelled disclosure, the materials have no bearing on relevant facts, and sovereign immunity precludes enforcement. A consumer-protection case has now generated a separation-of-powers sideshow in discovery.

The timeline is long: plaintiffs estimate an April 2028 trial, the defendants October 2028. However it resolves, the BOTS Act suit alone now stretches years past the conduct it challenges.

What to watch

The answer reiterates Ticketmaster's move to all-in pricing — a concession to the drip-pricing half of the case, and a hint that the pricing claims may be the more vulnerable front for the defense. The BOTS Act claims, meanwhile, will come down to a paper trail: which tools existed, who decided not to deploy them, and what the internal emails said. Billboard's reporting already cites one such email, and the FTC clearly has more. Live Nation's public narrative — the 260-million-blocks company, unfairly punished for fighting — and its litigation posture — a company that says enforcing limits was never its job — will keep colliding as those documents surface. The trial is two years out, but the discovery fight is now, and the senators' subpoena standoff is a preview of how little of it will be quiet.

Sources