EXCLUSIVE: With Google’s Gmail change, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson delivers on his promise to take on big tech 

Republicans are crediting Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson with helping push Google to change its treatment of political emails after years of GOP complaints that Gmail disproportionately sent Republican campaign messages to spam.Google this month launched a new Verified Sender Program for political committees through Campaign Verify, giving verified campaigns and political organizations a new avenue to improve email deliverability.

Chairman Ferugson told the Washington Reporter in an exclusive statement: “Companies must adhere to the terms and conditions they impose on their users. Google’s right to free speech is not a license to discriminate based on the content of their users’ speech. I am glad to see the end of Alphabet’s alleged partisan treatment of comparable messages or messengers in Gmail.”

Joel Thayer, a senior advisor at the America First Policy Institute and longtime antitrust expert gave Chairman Ferguson credit for the change. In an exclusive statement to the Reporter, Joel said: “Gmail is a chokepoint for how tens of millions of Americans receive political speech, and Google alone decides what gets through. When a platform with that kind of market power controls the pipes, especially ones used for our political communication, ‘trusting our algorithm’ is not in the cards. Chairman Ferguson understands this very well. His actions have directly contributed to ensuring a tech oligarch cannot use its monopoly to sway our elections. The public is entitled to real transparency into how these filtering decisions get made and whether they land disproportionately on one side of the aisle. We are one step closer to that now. ” 

Two Republican sources also told the Reporter that Ferguson’s intervention made the difference.

“Republicans pushed on this for years to no avail,” a former Republican Senate staffer told the Reporter. “We were never asking for special treatment, just to be treated the same as the Democrats by Google. As annoying as campaign emails are, there should be one standard for everyone. The Gmail experience is a reminder of the risk of one company having large control over something as important as email or AI.”

A GOP campaign operative said the financial consequences for Republican campaigns had been substantial.

“We probably lost hundreds of millions in small dollar contributions from emails getting wrongly sent to spam accounts over the past few cycles,” the operative said. “Better late than never, and I don’t think this would have happened but for the FTC getting involved.”

Ferguson sent Google a letter in August 2025, addressed to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai warning that alleged partisan administration of Gmail could violate federal consumer protection law.

“Alphabet’s alleged partisan treatment of comparable messages or messengers in Gmail to achieve political objectives may violate” the FTC Act, Ferguson wrote.

Ferguson argued that Americans have an interest in receiving communications from candidates and political parties they choose to hear from, including fundraising solicitations.

“If Gmail’s filters keep Americans from receiving speech they expect, or donating as they see fit, the filters may harm American consumers,” Ferguson wrote.

He ended with an explicit enforcement warning: “Any act or practice inconsistent with these obligations could lead to an FTC investigation and potential enforcement action.”

The controversy dates back years. A 2022 North Carolina State University study examining campaign emails from the 2020 election found Gmail marked a greater share of right-leaning campaign emails as spam. Republicans continued pressing Google over the issue. Ferguson’s letter came months after his FTC launched a broader inquiry into whether technology platforms had denied or degraded services based on users’ speech or affiliations.

“Tech firms should not be bullying their users,” Ferguson said at the time.

Google has now changed its approach.

Under its new program, political committees can verify their sending domains through Campaign Verify. Participating senders must still meet Gmail’s security and compliance requirements, but the program is designed to improve deliverability for verified political senders.

The Google development is one piece of a much broader campaign by Ferguson’s FTC to confront some of the world’s largest technology companies.

In September 2025, the FTC secured a record-setting $2.5 billion settlement against Amazon over allegations that the company enrolled consumers in Prime without their consent and made subscriptions difficult to cancel.

The settlement included a $1 billion civil penalty, the largest ever for an FTC rule violation, and $1.5 billion in consumer refunds. The agency said roughly 35 million consumers were affected.

“Today, the Trump-Vance FTC made history,” Ferguson said in announcing the agreement.

The FTC has continued taking on Amazon. In August, Ferguson’s agency and 22 states sued the company over allegations that it secretly inflated prices in its advertising auctions, extracting what the government’s complaint alleges were tens of billions of dollars from advertisers.

Ferguson’s FTC has also targeted the infrastructure of the digital advertising industry.

Earlier this year, the agency and several states took action against major advertising agencies over alleged collusion involving common “brand safety” standards that the FTC said could be used to demonetize disfavored political viewpoints.

The companies agreed to orders barring the alleged coordinated conduct, which were subsequently approved by a federal court.