FTC Will Go to Trial Against Meta: FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson

Well, thank you for having me. And good morning. That's a good question. I think it's making sure that the FTC is devoting sufficient resources to protect Americans when they're online and that President Trump has taken sort of the big tech issue very seriously, dating back to his first administration, the Google search case and the Meta monopolization case for both brought by President Trump's administration in 2020. And we don't intend to sort of take our foot off the gas. Every American interacts with big tech. Every American is online. And I think it's really important that at the FTC, we're taking very seriously protecting Americans both from competition problems that big tech platforms might present, but also consumer protection problems. So we're going to devote a lot of resources to protecting Americans online, just like President Trump did in his first administration.

Yeah. So that's a that's a good point. The consistent complaint I heard and is heard from the business community about the Biden FTC was a lot of uncertainty, a lot of lack of clarity, a sudden presentation of novel theories. Look, we're gearing up for trial, the trial scheduled in about a month. We've got some of the FTC's best lawyers on it, and we're we're getting ready to go. This trial has been five years in the making. Again, this started by President Trump in 2020. And we have got the resources ready to go and we're ready for trial.

I think if you are a big tech company, you should be getting your lawyers to give you great advice on complying with our competition and consumer protection laws. Look, I don't have a particular axe to grind with any industry, but I do think it's very important that the FTC devote its resources to the markets that Americans most frequently engage with. It's not just big tech, although that's definitely one of them. It's also health care. And it's protecting American laborers. But no matter who you are, I think it's important to proceed like the FTC is a vigilant cop on the beat. We're surveying the markets. We're looking for competition problems. We're looking for violation of the consumer protection laws. And if we think they're there, we're going to go to court. But most importantly, if we don't think that there are problems, it's really important for the FTC to get out of the way. Again, one of the most consistent complaints that I've heard about the previous administration was a lack of certainty and a tendency to want to do a lot of regulating. The FTC, we're not regulators, we're cops on the beat. We police for competition problems and consumer protection problems. But we're not trying to regulate the economy. We want to create economic conditions that allow companies to innovate, to grow, and to help lift the whole country out of this debt crisis and bring about the golden age that President Trump has promised the American people.

Well, I do think that Europe has a real regulatory problem. It has an innovation problem, and we definitely don't want to create conditions here in the United States that suppress innovation. But I think it's important to bear in mind, monopoly suppresses innovation. Monopoly makes it very difficult for little companies with the next great idea to sort of rise. And I think it's very important if we want to sort of preserve the American innovating spirit, that we create conditions in our economy that allow little tech who have the next great ideas, the next life changing ideas for all Americans to thrive. President Trump has been pretty emphatic on the importance of making sure that our economic system allows little tech to bring its ideas to market. And that's what antitrust really does, is it prevents monopoly, and monopoly stifles innovation. So if the antitrust cops are vigilant and are making sure that they're protecting us from competition problems, it allows the innovation that has made America and our economy sort of the driving engine of the whole world.