It appears that one of the conservative members of the Federal Trade Commission is about to resign in the fall. Typically, the president would defer to the GOP to nominate his successor. This is actually a great opportunity to get an actual conservative on the board. However, in the past the GOP has nominated squishy RINO types who cave to #BigTech's every whim.

So what do you think? Will the GOP promote a principled conservative candidate? If they did, would Biden hold to tradition and nominate that individual? Check out this snippet from The Federalist. The link for the full story is at the bottom:

Republicans could reshape the FTC by appointing people who are actually interested in enforcing the law rather than just granting Big Tech’s every request.

It was reported this week that Noah Phillips, a Republican commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission, will step down in the fall. While Biden will presumably nominate his successor, tradition suggests he’ll defer to Senate Republicans — read: Mitch McConnell — for the pick. This gives the GOP an opportunity to turn the page on more than a decade of Big Tech appeasement by Republican FTC commissioners like Phillips and his predecessors.

The FTC’s historical record on Big Tech is abysmal, having rubber-stamped the anti-competitive acquisitions and predatory conduct that enabled tech platforms to become the monopolistic behemoths they are today. And conservatives increasingly believe, rightly, that their gripes with Big Tech, from censoring speech to bootlicking the Chinese Communist Party, are downstream of the companies’ market power — the absence of real competition enables bad behavior.

That’s why conservative organizations like my employer, American Principles Project, have worked with anti-monopolists from all across the political spectrum to back antitrust legislation that will empower the FTC and other bodies to check the power of these companies.

Last year, Republicans signaled their desire for change at the FTC when 21 senators crossed the aisle to vote to confirm Lina Khan as commissioner; she was then appointed to chair the agency by Biden. This rare display of bipartisanship was for one reason: Khan pledged to rein in Big Tech.

The FTC’s enforcement record when it comes to Big Tech has been awful for more than a decade. Between 2010 and 2019, Big Tech companies completed more than 600 transactions involving smaller companies, including anti-competitive takeovers of Instagram and WhatsApp. Particularly under the Obama administration, these takeovers were rubber-stamped by the FTC as a matter of course. In 2013, the FTC even closed an investigation into Google’s monopolistic power — a problem which was apparent then but has only become worse in the intervening years.

The Trump administration made some strides in antitrust enforcement, but the FTC’s record still leaves much to be desired. Consistent with Obama’s FTC’s failed policy framework, Trump’s FTC failed to block a single tech merger. Just a few weeks ago, Republican commissioners continued to vote against the first major Big Tech challenge. And now, reports are that the FTC is about to greenlight yet another tech merger, with Microsoft, the world’s second-largest company, seeking to acquire Activision, one of the largest video game companies.

On the last point, this is exactly the kind of merger where you’d expect to see bipartisan opposition. From the left’s perspective, this should be right up their alley as the supposed opponents of concentrated corporate power. As an added bonus, both companies have all sorts of woke fatwas out on them — the funniest being after Activision failed to grant enough a suitable amount of work-from-home days in response to employee demand after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. But apart from a sternly worded letter from four leftist senators, the outcry about the deal has been fairly muted.

Read the full article at the link below.
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LINK:
https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/15/no-more-excuses-republicans-must-appoint-an-ftc-commissioner-who-will-rein-in-big-tech/