Donald Trump has appointed Andrew Ferguson to serve as the next chair of the Federal Trade Commission, which has a major say over mergers and acquisitions.
The president-elect signaled that Ferguson would take on big tech, as his pick has previously suggested that major platforms may be “cartels” that have suppressed conservative voices and should even be broken up.
“Andrew has a proven record of standing up to Big Tech censorship, and protecting Freedom of Speech in our Great Country,” Trump wrote on Truth Social this afternoon.
Ferguson has been a commissioner on the FTC since April, so he does not have to be confirmed in the Senate.
He previously served as solicitor general in Virginia, and was a litigator for antitrust at several D.C. law firms.
“Andrew will be the most America First, and pro-innovation FTC Chair in our Country’s History,” Trump wrote.
Trump also nominated Mark Meador, a partner at a partner at Kressin Meador Powers LLC, to serve as a commissioner at the FTC. Meador was deputy chief counsel for antitrust and competition policy for Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary antitrust subcommittee. Meador will require Senate confirmation.
Ferguson will succeed Lina Khan, President Joe Biden’s pick for FTC chair. During her tenure, she has aggressively challenged some major mergers and industry concentration. Earlier today, a federal judge sided with the FTC in blocking the merger of grocery giants Kroger and Safeway.
Earlier this month Trump nominated Gail Slater to serve as chief of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, a signal that his administration would continue the Biden administration efforts to rein in big tech. In November, he tapped FCC commissioner Brendan Carr to chair that agency.
Carr also has targeted big tech with similar claims that they have censored voices on the right in content moderation. Like Carr, Ferguson has singled out one company in particular, NewsGuard, which rates the trustworthiness of news outlets. In a statement last week, Ferguson argued that a NewsGuard’s poor rating can “choke off advertising dollars that are the life-blood for many websites.”
“NewsGuard is, of course, free to rate websites by whatever metric it wants. But the antitrust laws do not permit third parties to facilitate group boycotts among competitors,” Ferguson said.
Last month, NewsGuard pushed back on Carr’s attacks that it favored censorship, given the low score it had given to right-wing site Newsmax.
NewsGuard said that “our journalism is itself speech protected by the First Amendment, and we’re concerned to see a government official using the powers of his office, however unwittingly, to rely on false claims, to benefit the very publishers who make the false claims, such as Newsmax.”
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