President Donald Trump’s Federal Trade Commission candidate, Mark Meador, is moving quickly through the Senate confirmation approach. That doesn’t mean the consumer safety organization, with a soon-to-be Democratic majority, may differ considerably its policy plan from previous President Joe Biden’s four-year White House career.
The FTC, often referred to as the nation’s” leading consumer safety cop”, consists of a Bureau of Consumer Protection and a Bureau of Competition, focused on antitrust rules. The job of both of these departments is overseen by five commission, each nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Each has seven-year, rushed, words, and with the president elevated by the leader.
With the new departure of previous Biden-appointed Chairwoman Lina Khan, the FTC has been operating with a political deadlock. Meador’s verification would render it full and provide the Trump presidency its celebration majority at the agency.
Generally, the agency has been mostly nonpartisan, but Biden’s FTC was far more hostile and intense in both its policies and process. This jolt to the social left dovetailed with an extremely populist Republican Party on problems such as reining in the power of so-called” Great Tech”. The FTC now has many instances or studies pending against leading U. S. tech firms, including Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon.
It’s fair to expect ongoing support for cracking down on technology firms and other big companies from hold-over Democrat Commissioners Elizabeth Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya. But, the other commissioners ‘ policy positions are more difficult to predict.
Assuming Meador is confirmed, as is expected, all the Democratic commissioners have been outspoken about their worries about the habits of big tech firms.
Meador, while a staffer for Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), told an competitive conference in 2023 that the competitive world was in a “paradigm shift among Republicans and conservatives concerning the right role and use of government power” and that” focus financial power is just as harmful as focused political power”. He added that “at the core of this method is a refusal of libertarianism”, signaling antagonism to a laissez-faire method concerning rules after embraced by most of the Republican Party, but now in question with the rise of a more authoritarian, populist approach on the political right.
On social media platform X, Republican Commissioner Melissa Holyoak wrote, in praise of the FTC’s call for public comments on content moderation issues, that” Big tech censorship is one of the most consequential issues facing our nation”.
Trump-appointed FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson announced the agency’s call for public input by posting that” Big Tech censorship is not just un-American, it is potentially illegal”. He also asked for “public submissions from anyone who has been a victim of tech censorship ( banning, demonization, shadow banning, etc. )”.
The legal validity of the FTC’s labeling major platform content moderation decisions as “censorship” is legally specious. Just last year, the Supreme Court upheld the free speech rights of platforms not to carry any speech they do not wish to carry, writing that the First Amendment “does not go on leave when social media are involved”, highlighting that third-party posters cannot be “censored” on the private property of platforms. But the new FTC’s framing of the issue signals a continued hard line on America’s tech companies.
In another show of policy continuity, Ferguson recently announced that the agency would be keeping the merger guidelines as updated during the Biden administration. Merger guidelines are nonbinding but seek to impart to the business community what might raise red flags at the agency and, ideally, reflect the current state of antitrust law.
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Conservative critics decried the Biden-era version as not reflecting current antitrust practice in the courts and ignoring 40 years of economic learning in the antitrust field. Former FTC general counsel Alden Abbott wrote at the time of its final release that” the guidelines ignore the immense changes in U. S. antitrust case law over the last four decades, reflecting an economics-based appreciation for the role of business arrangements in advancing efficiency and consumer welfare” while generally comparing the updated version to a lipsticked pig and calling for its withdrawal in a post on a law and economics blog.
Advocates of traditional conservative “light-touch” antitrust regulation had hoped for a return to the previous guidelines, signaling an FTC more open to deferring to market forces and less inclined to government intervention. The guidelines do not bind the commissioners to any particular decisions, but they do leave the door open to continued heightened regulatory scrutiny of mergers and acquisitions.
