YouSaid · the spoken record

Andrew Ferguson

lines on the record: 42
first: 2025-03-17
most recent: 2025-03-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Section 230 between consumers and say it doesn't matter what RTOS said, we kicked you off. That's a content decision. Therefore, you don't get to bring the lawsuit. And my view is consumers can protect themselves better from censorship if they're able to at least hold platforms to their terms of service. And one of the questions that we've asked consumers to provide us info on in our own tech platform investigation on this issue is give us examples if you have them of times that you think that you are de-platformed or shadow banned or whatever in violation of the terms you agree to when you got on the platform. And so on Section 230, I do think it has been interpreted wildly beyond what anyone thought was going to say and that at the very least Trump administration proposed these changes.”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For Section 5, our preeminent statute against online platform companies, and we have lost cases because of Section 230, where private businesses, large private businesses, are interposing Section 230 between the government and trying to protect Americans through government enforcement actions. In my view, that just categorically cries out for reform. But I don't think that that runs into conflict with censorship in the following sense. One of the Section 230 cases that have troubled me the most are people who were alleged that they were thrown off of a platform in violation of the platform's terms of service. It's just a contract claim, like, hey, I entered into this relationship with you, the platform, and I did so on the basis of what you had in your TOSs, which governed, you know, the kind of things I'm allowed to say, the kind of conduct in which I'm permitted to engage, et cetera. And you kicked me off in violation of your own TOS. And the platforms have been able to interpose.”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me talk about 230 really quickly. So as a state enforcer, which is what I was before I was at the AFTC trying to protect Virginians, the amount of time I spent trying to come up with complaints that had to plead around Section 230 was like shocking. Section 230 on its face seems to care mostly about protecting tech platforms in the early 1990s from the liability for torts committed by people who are speaking on their platforms. And it has over the course of years been interpreted basically to immunize tech platforms from anything relating to content moderation. In my view, that isn't with Section 230 says, but that is what the courts have done. My view about Section 230 is that it's very difficult to justify immunizing the biggest companies in the history of the world from state and federal enforcement actions. And the FTC has tried to”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't want a tiny number of suppliers because the government can coerce them real easily. And if the government can coerce them, they can coerce you.”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you are a libertarian and you care a lot about personal liberty, you ought to really care about monopoly because it is way easier for the government to control all of our lives if they only have to coerce a small handful of suppliers. If you have a wide range of options for consumers, it's harder for the government to pick up the phone over and over and over and be calling executive after executive and say, we need you to do this to that person and this to that person. But if it's just a handful, that gets really easy real quick. And I think we saw that in the Murthy litigation. It's just a couple platforms. You need a handful of government officials who call and berate platform people to kick consumers off. That's harder if there are more suppliers, if there are more choices for consumers. And so even if you are sort of libertarian and you have this ideological sort of predispositional view that markets correct themselves and government intervention is always worse than monopoly, my response is you”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where they were quite obviously degrading their product quality in a way that would surprise me in the presence of real competition. And I also want to address the, you know, in some instances there were emails where it was like, oh, take this person off. Look, I mean, I was involved in the Murthy litigation that Missouri against Biden litigation about alleged either coordination or collusion between the government and big tech platforms during 2020. It was more than just a couple emails. This was rampant. It was systematic and it was terrifying. The relationship between the big tech platforms and the government about who was going to get to speak about what. And, you know, I think this leads me to another important point. And it's one I try to make to my libertarian friends who think some of what I'm saying sounds extreme, which is”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a good question. And I'm not going to. We antitrust enforcers are sort of taking seriously the antitrust problems of the big tech companies for the first time. I mean, 2020 is sort of the watershed moment when President Trump brings the Medasuit and the Google search suit. I litigated the Google ad tech case alongside the Biden Department of Justice when I was the Solicitor General of Virginia. I'm not going to pretend like applying the antitrust laws to new contexts doesn't come with some difficulties, including potentially the difficulty you're describing. What I'm saying is that for a long time, especially in the 2010s, there was a strong preference before President Trump became preference for saying this is difficult, it's new, it's novel, let's not bring the antitrust laws into these contexts. And my view is that that sort of ideologically driven hands-off laissez-faire approach created a system where we have super large, super powerful platforms that, in my view, there are instances.”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But what they don't have the right to do is engage in conduct that maintains a monopoly where they can charge you higher prices than they could otherwise charge you in a competitive marketplace. Yeah, of course, we're going to have luxury goods, but we don't want a market and we shouldn't have a market. And it isn't a free market for anyone who cares about free markets like I do. A market isn't free if monopolists get to charge you higher prices, degrade your product quality, deprive you of innovation because of their market power.”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I don't think that anyone has a right to be on any particular platform, but you do have a right to participate in a market that isn't infected by monopoly, and you do have a right not to have the quality of the product that you want, including speech on platforms be degraded by someone who will suffer no competitive consequences from doing that. For the same reason, Hermes does not have to lower its prices to sell you a birken bag.”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With market power will sometimes leverage that market power to injure consumers and sometimes do it in politically motivated ways and we should really care about the market power that makes that sort of mistreatment possible. But that's the thing I care about is the market power that makes the treatment possible. I don't want to police people's speech, but I do want to police market power.”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not going to be on the platform. You want to question whether it's fair to change voting laws in the middle of an election. You're not going to be on the platform. You want to question whether there's something in Hunter Biden's laptop that we should know about. You're not going to be on the platform and we're not going to let you publish it. But it wasn't just censorship. Like any consumer in 2020, you couldn't watch TV. You couldn't go online. You couldn't shop in a store without having nakedly political messages, almost exclusively the platform of one party being thrown in your face. And as a consumer, I said how can it be that there are all these businesses who are willing to alienate huge swaths of their consumer base with these messages that they throw on our face and suffer no economic or competitive consequences at all. And I started to understand sort of the critique of the very narrow understanding the consumer welfare standard and the libertarianism that had sort of clommed onto it, which is large businesses.”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a sort of conservative that had relatively strong deference for markets and for market actors and people making decisions in those markets. I was shocked by this. And my response was, why are you calling me about this? You're supposed to make widgets at low prices for Americans. Why are you calling me about police reform? What the hell does this have to do with you? Leave the political debates to Americans and to voters. Stop calling me about this. If anything, don't you want more police to protect your businesses? And they're like, no, this is really important to us. We want this done. And I remember sitting in my office and going, it's weird that these big businesses with all this economic power are leveraging that economic power to accomplish social and political objectives. And then in 2020, we have this censorship crisis. People want to question the efficacy of masks. You're not going to be on a platform. You want to question the safety of vaccines.”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. Can I resist your premise slightly? I don't want to go after censorship. The government is not supposed to go after censorship censorship because we're not the speech police. I do care about market power. And if market power enables a business to mistreat its consumers or to degrade the quality of its product by, for example, throwing people off of their platform and suffering no competitive consequences whatsoever that antitrust cares about. Not the censorship itself, the market power that makes it possible to mistreat consumers without suffering competitive consequences. I just give you some background on this. 2020, I am Mitch McConnell's lawyer. I'm sitting in my Senate office. The George Floyd protests are sort of at their peak. And I start getting calls from the GCs of giant Fortune 100 businesses and business groups. And I pick up the phone and they say, hey, cops are really racist. We, the business community, want you to pass a bunch of police reform bills. And I...”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That led to the creation of a monopoly B reason not to confront the monopoly today because that's basically just the sunk cost file. It's like, oh, well, we already did this once. They have the monopoly now. It is what it is. My view is no. If we have monopolies and they're being maintained illegally, no matter how they were formed, no matter who is asleep at the wheel when their formation came about, my job as an interest enforcers to do something about that if I think I can win in court. And if I don't think I can win in court, I need to leave it alone”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would have said, hey, this is potentially a problem. I mean, for example, the FTC's theory in Meta was that the acquisition of Instagram was an antitrust violation, but the FTC did not block the merger. My own view is I don't think that we should say if a monopoly arose in any market, in any market, internet platforms or any of the other goods and services we use every day, we shouldn't let enforcement declinations in the past”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's just take Google search, for example. A lot of the Google search case is a very traditional section two case. It's tying its ordinary monopolization conduct. It doesn't propose breaking sort of our standards. It was a very normal thing. And this case, the idea for this case is sort of sat around for a long time. But there were political decisions made by antitrust enforcers in previous administrations not to do it. But those are political decisions. Those are political economy decisions driven either by some combination of ideology or a prudential preference against government intervention, even if you think you can win the case because you don't want to be the guy that kills the goose laying the golden egg. I think we need to be realistic about it. There were moments during the creation of the internet and during the sort of rise of these platforms where they made decisions that even under ordinary antitrust theories”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So network effects are sort of a natural part of the internet environment. And the antitrust laws do not actually forbid monopoly itself. They don't. The courts have gone out of their way over and over for decades to say the acquisition of a monopoly naturally and lawfully does not violate the antitrust laws. If someone is just really good at something and way better than everyone else, they sort of will naturally develop a monopoly in that because people will prefer that product or service. What you can't do is maintain your monopoly from things unrelated to your skill or the quality of your product or sort of dumb luck. And in terms of like, you know, failures of previous antitrust regimes, let me just touch on that a minute.”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and the additional layer of complication for a lot of the internet platforms that we all use is that we use them without exchanging money for them. It's like, you know, Facebook X not premium, Google search, we don't hand over money in exchange for using those services. That doesn't mean that there aren't ways to measure a loss of competition. So I'll just use an example of the position that the Commission has articulated in Meta, which is purely public. But one of the ways you can measure a loss of competition is if product quality is degraded without a meaningful competitive impact to the company that's degrading product quality. So for example, the FTC has alleged, and we've got a trial coming up on this, but the FTC has alleged in Meta, for example, that Facebook was able to massively increase the ad load on Facebook without losing any consumers, which meant that they were able to degrade the quality of their product, and consumers didn't have anywhere else to go. And so they just sort of stayed. And the antitrust laws and a sort of fully formed”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Vigorously enforce your, and utility monopolies are a little different because of the sort of space constraints on wires and cables and things like that. But if you take the antitrust laws very seriously and you really vigorously enforce them and you don't pull your punches because of ideological suppositions about markets, you can avoid the need for ex-anti-regulation because vigorous market competition ensures monopolies do not rise. Antitrust enforcement ensures vigorous market competition. And if you have market competition, you don't need heavy regulation because you don't have giant monopoly problems”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Administration was that it had a really hardcore focus on ex ante regulation. The FTC under my predecessor passed a record shattering number of ex-ante rules for an agency that doesn't pass very many ex-ante rules, including competition rules, which it had not done in a long time, arguably had, in my view, had never lawfully done. And the only one that we passed has been vacated by the courts. But it was not just a sort of neo-Brandeisian revolution, it was an emphasis on ex-anti-regulation. And my view is as a cop on the beat, if we really vigorously enforce the antitrust laws, we avoid the need for regulation because regulation is what you have to do when monopolies have totally consumed a market. I mean, all of us live in some form of a utility monopoly. Grew up in Virginia. We have a giant electric utility monopoly. It is heavily, heavily, heavily regulated directly by the state legislature. But if you, if”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can call it Maggie Antitrust if you want. I think there are two things I would say. The first is it's conservative antitrust in the sense that we aren't beholden to sort of libertarian ideology about markets. We take markets actually as they actually are. We take consumers as they actually are, how they actually participate in markets. We take laborers as they actually are. And we take very seriously that consumers and laborers suffer in markets short of things that just affect short-term price and output and that the loss of innovation, even if you can't measure it the way or the loss of choice or product quality, even if you can't measure it the way that an economist would measure price and output still matter to consumers and still matter to antitrust. And I think the second is I really do see my view as just like a cop on the beat. I think the other thing that was unusual about the previous...”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“United States is asking to split Chrome off the rest of Google. President Trump brought that case. And the answer to that is that's true, but Bork didn't actually say just limited to price and output. He understood consumer welfare standard to encompass consumers in all of their aspects of participating in markets, including how things will happen further in the future with innovation and product quality. And I think if you measure the previous antitrust regime by whether it achieved its neo-brandisian revolution, the answer is it definitely did not. Every court in the country still applies the consumer welfare standard.”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty vociferously on the campaign trail, and I'm writing in, I'm going, what's happening? A, we're talking about antitrust in a presidential campaign. This is very strange. And, a Republican calling for more vigorous antitrust enforcement. And so when President Trump takes office, he's not calling for a revolution in the consumer welfare standard, like some of his successors did. He wasn't saying, you know, get rid of the consumer welfare standard, but he hires antitrust enforcers who take seriously the idea that consumer welfare isn't just about price and output and what a bunch of economists say. It's about consumers participation in marketplaces and protecting them from short-term and long-term injuries and laborers as marketplace participants. And so, you know, a lot of folks have talked not incorrectly about the Biden administration bringing lots of lawsuits against big tech. A lot of people have talked about the Google search suit, which is in the remedy phase right now where the”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How to ask it politely, but yeah, go ahead. So then we get to President Trump's first administration. And I'll just give a little background on myself. I was a private practicing lawyer. I clerked out law school and was a private practicing lawyer here at DC Firms doing antitrust work. And my parents back in rural Virginia used to joke that I was a pro-trust lawyer because I represented the businesses who were resisting antitrust suits. And then I went and clerked on the Supreme Court for Justice Thomas during the 2016 election and I would bike into work from Old Town and listen to the news or podcast on the way in and was doing this as sort of like lawyer who had thought a lot about antitrust as a practitioner, but very little about antitrust as a policy. You know, when you're practicing lawyer, you think about doctrines, how can I help my client with these doctrines? You don't go one step up and sort of think about the policy. And as I'm driving into work, I'm listening to President Trump calling for more vigorous antitrust enforcement.”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And expensive. And so that is, you know, in my view, the consumer welfare standard encompasses injuries to participant, economic injuries to participants in marketplaces. It includes consumers, obviously. It also includes laborers. The Supreme Court has understood the antitrust laws to protect laborers as sellers of labor. To the same extent it protects purchasers of goods. You know, the sort of fixation on short and intermediate term price and output effects isn't actually what consumer welfare was ever understood to mean. It was supposed to encompass a broader range of injuries to marketplace participants, but it got shrunk largely because of ideological views about markets.”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you. That's right. Quantitative, which also ends up making antitrust cases very expensive because everyone has to hire an army of economists to talk about the case. It makes it very difficult for judges to decide these cases because the way these often go is each side has their own army of economists identically trained, identical schools, fancy credentials on both sides making exactly opposite arguments about the same number, often predictive arguments, and a judge untrained in any of this. I mean, I don't know how much how many lawyers are in the room, but the average federal district judge in the United States was like a local prosecutor or a local defense attorney or a member of the local bar has probably never dealt with antitrust in his or her life before that case. And now you've got MIT and Stanford trained economists having a really vicious dispute about identical facts. And the judge is supposed to decide. The judge kind of goes, I don't know, it seems like a wash, but it makes these cases long.”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or short term output, a loss of innovation is a huge injury to consumers, a loss of product quality, huge injury to consumers. But a lot of courts have started to shift away and focus on the extremely qualitative question about price and output, which also led to a deference to econometrics and to economists and antitrust cases.”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is one of the suppositions. Professor at NYU, Daniel Francis Bright Young Antitrust Scholars, written a lot about this. I highly recommend him, that government intervention is almost always worse than anything happening in markets, even monopolies. And so we should always preference against government intervention, even if it's to correct market failures and monopolies. And a strong deference to C-suite decision-making on the view that they understand what should work best in a marketplace and government ought to be hands-off and deferential to C-suite decision making. These two things ride alongside each other. And so by the 1990s, consumer welfare has basically been reduced to two questions. Is the transaction or conduct at issue likely to increase price in the shorter intermediate term or reduce outcome in the shorter intermediate term? But that isn't really what consumer welfare is about. Consumers can suffer all sorts of injuries that aren't just about short-term prices.”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He articulates this view in the 70s, and by 1975, in this famous case called Writer, the Supreme Court is citing Judge Bork and saying the antitrust laws are a prescription for consumer welfare. Okay, when Judge Bork writes about consumer welfare, he says, look, low prices, that's important for consumer welfare. High output, that's important. Other things are important too, like the promotion of future competition, the protection of innovation, product quality, all sorts of things sort of fit within consumer welfare. But what we care about are economic injuries inflicted on participants in marketplaces, not about stuff that isn't related to sort of economic welfare of market participants. At the same time, this is happening, something else is happening in our system. We have this sort of like economic libertarianism on the right that sort of attaches itself to the consumer welfare standard, and it has certain supposition, like ideological suppositions about markets. Markets always correct themselves.”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clayton Act and sections one and two of the Sherman Act are basically unchanged since they were originally adopted. For decades, courts kind of cast about for a theory about how to apply the antitrust laws. So we know that the antitrust laws are about competition and protecting competition, but it doesn't tell you a whole lot. Does that mean like making sure that there are a particular number of competitors in the marketplace? Does it mean competitors have to do particular things and we don't care how many there are? Does it mean that we care about the economic effects of monopoly? Does it mean we care about the political effects of monopoly? And this can matter.”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so you said. So Congress passes its first competition law in 1890, the Sherman Act. I don't know how many of you read the Sherman Act, but the operative provisions of the Sherman Act, Sections 1 and Sections 2, it's like 50 words. Like the most important provisions of American antitrust law are 50 words adopted in 1890 that Congress has not changed effectively since then. Then in 1914, they passed the FTC Act, which both creates my agency and also creates a new antitrust provision that prohibits unfair methods of competition. And then a couple months later, it passes the Clayton Act. And the Clayton Act is really important because that's the law that prohibits mergers that tend to create a monopoly or injure competition. So by 1914 with an important amendment called the Robinson-Patman Act of the 1930s, our antagonist laws are basically set, like the operative provisions for merger purposes of Section 7 and the”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Writing them. And B, everyone will remain very uncertain about how the agencies feel about it. And finally, a lot has been written about the sort of effects of the guidelines. They're guidelines at the end of the day. They aren't law. They're supposed to be explanations to the public about how the agencies generally understand the merger program going forward. But the most important feature of antitrust enforcement in the United States isn't the guidelines. It's the commitment of particular antitrust enforcers to following the law as is written, providing certainty and clarity about how they understand the law. And then when you go to court bringing the cases that you think that you can win, and when you can't win the cases, get the hell out of the way and let the mergers close.”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Years having to write this one, they were only effective for barely a year of the last administration. If we get into this process where every four years we're yanking and rewriting, it's all the agencies are going to do. Number one, number two, the guidelines will become basically meaningless if they just are like one party statement of its view of antitrust policy. Courts won't follow them anymore if they think that they're just openly partisan. Regulated entities won't rely on them to plan. Businesses can't just plan in two-year cycles. They have to plan longer than that. And if you're of the view that every election runs the risk of the guidelines being yanked, the guidelines just become meaningless. And third, you know, there definitely were parts of the guidelines that were, you know, departures from the 2010 guidelines, but they generally are relatively well aligned. They're built on case law. They preserve a lot of the principles from previous guidelines. And I think just throwing them all out all at once means, A, the agencies are going to devote tremendous resources to”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we've had various iterations of the merger guidelines dating back to the 60s, and then when the FTC and DOJ started doing it together in the 1980s, we tend to have guidelines for pretty long periods of time. Sometimes there are sort of iterative changes made to those guidelines over the course of time, but a complete rewrite of the guidelines relatively rare. And it happens, you know, we had the guidelines rewritten in 2010, but the general principle has been presidents of one party maintain the guidelines from the previous. They may add here and there, they provide commentaries on those guidelines to sort of explain to business how that current administration understands the guidelines, but a complete read vamp is rare. The agencies spend all their time writing the guidelines. I mean, the previous administration jettisoned the 2010 guidelines and spent like two”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Particular value add is you combine the two missions consumer protection and antitrust in a single house, and they both sort of like help reinforce the other.”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And those two can cross pollinate, and they protect consumers more fully than just a singular antitrust enforcement necessarily would. And the two missions sort of learn from each other. The antitrust people, when they're doing investigations, they can find problems that violate the consumer protection laws. And then the FTC can continue those investigations with the other side of the house. So I think there's some benefit to that. But there's also, I think, some benefits in certain circumstances to having multi-member agencies with people from both parties. I mean, look, if you have an agency that is exceeding the law, abusing the companies that it purports to regulate, it's helpful for markets, for courts, for litigants, for government transparency to have people in the other party pointing this out and saying it in a dissense like, you know, I wrote 400 plus pages of dissents during my time as a minority commissioner. I think that that adds value. But I think that the FTC's”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Recording, so let's have it. Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold No, it's a live recording. It's a live recording. President Trump spent four years as the victim of endless lawfare. He's president of the United States. All right, it's DC audience. I get it. He has spent the last several months picking people in his cabinet or in agencies like mine who are focused on enforcing the laws as they are written and carrying out this agenda. Let me ask you, You mentioned streamlining. The FTC So I think we can get to independence in a minute, but I think the FTC sort of adds value to the enforcement regime because it combines the consumer protection and the antitrust enforcement program in a single agency. Okay.”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think President Trump is pro-American markets. He's pro-business, but that is Easily reconcilable with favoring vigorous antitrust enforcement. And President Trump, you know, he's been president. Four years before this, you sort of have seen what President Trump's antitrust agenda looks like, and he favors vigorous enforcement. He favors following the law, and he favors clarity and certainty for people who have to participate in these markets.”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think President Trump is pro-innovation, pro-growth, and in that sense he is pro-business. But I'm going to push back a little bit on the way you frame the question. I don't think that there's any inconsistency with being pro-business and favoring vigorous antitrust enforcement. Those two have to go hand in hand. Look, I like most Republicans, and I think like most Americans in pro free markets, antitrust is how we keep our markets free. Markets that are infected with monopoly, that are infected with collusion, that are infected with foreclosure. These are not free. They move value from consumers, from innovative businesses to giant monopolies who then are focused mostly on protecting those monopolies rather than innovating rather than growing rather than coming up with the next great idea that changes Americans' lives.”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would not presume that. Look, the Americans voted for major reform. President Trump ran on major reform. And he's giving it to him. And government should not be bigger than is necessary to deliver the services that Americans need to protect Americans from the problems that Americans have. The FTC, we are engaged in this streamlining process. The goal is to maximize Americans' returns on their taxpayer dollars. When they send their money off to Washington, they expect their government to do a lot with that money and that the government shouldn't be any bigger than is necessary to do those tasks. And so at the FTC, we've got the resources we need to protect Americans from fraud and monopoly. And look, no government official in history has ever said, no, I want fewer resources, which is why the president's efficiency agenda is so important because government will always keep sucking up resources. The goal here is to maximize the return on investment for American taxpayers, and that's where we're doing the FTC.”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you for having me. Lot to unwrap there. Yeah, first on constraints, no. Okay, I've got the people I need to protect Americans from monopolies, to protect them from fraud. And I don't think anyone in Washington has taken sort of the threat that big tech poses to American consumers more seriously than I have when President Trump announced my appointment. This is one of the things he said he really cared about was taking the threats that big tech posed to American consumers very seriously. I will throw every resource the agency has at prosecuting cases against big tech that we've got going so unequivocally no there are no resource constraints on protecting Americans from monopolies and fraud can you explain what happened today I think a lawyer had a bad day in court he was wrong he filed a letter almost immediately after saying I was wrong we don't have resource constraints and we are ready to prosecute this case on whatever timeline the court wants for us so we're ready to go okay”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you so much for coming. I'm really annoyed actually because one of your lawyers gave me like the perfect first question for the podcast today. I was like, oh, this is amazing. And then you sort of walked it back. I don't exactly know what happened. So that dulled it a little bit. But anyway, apparently in court today, one of your lawyers said we need a pause for this case against Amazon because we don't have the resources and we can't pay for transcripts. We're like, oh, this is an amazing first question for Andrew. And then you walked back. Is there a constraint though between this impulse, and we'll get into it in terms of headcount and your desire for what looks like going to be a sort of vigorous new antitrust enforcement approach?”
2025-03-17 · Odd Lots · FTC Chief Andrew Ferguson on the Trump Vision for Antitrust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source