Op-Ed: Evan Swarztrauber: The Senate should quickly confirm Mark Meador for the FTC

For the U.S. to fully enter a golden age, the economy needs smart, humble regulators who understand the limited yet critical role of government in protecting consumers and competition.

In recent years, Republicans have rightly broadened their perspective on threats to liberty and to human flourishing. While expansive and intrusive government should always be seen as the primary risk, unchecked corporate consolidation and lax enforcement of consumer protection laws pose significant, though unequal, threats.

For President Donald Trump and for the Republican Congress to succeed in their goals of supercharging the economy and unleashing technological innovation, America needs a strong Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The country’s premier consumer protection authority needs leaders who understand how to take narrow, targeted actions that unlock economic potential rather than stifle growth.

Thankfully, President Trump made two excellent choices in appointing Andrew Ferguson as chairman of the FTC and in nominating Mark Meador for commissioner; Meador’s confirmation would deliver a Republican majority at the agency. The Senate would do the American people a great service in expediting Meador’s confirmation.

Meador’s impressive resume makes him the perfect candidate for the moment. As an antitrust attorney, his background includes stints in the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, and in the U.S. Senate. He also has experience representing plaintiffs victimized by anticompetitive behavior that undermines free markets and harms consumers.

As a staffer on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Meador spearheaded legislation to break Google’s monopoly over the advertising technology market, which raised ad prices for small businesses, drained independent publishers and content creators of deserved revenue, and facilitated advertising boycotts of disfavored publishers. Meador understands well the challenges posed by Big Tech, where consumer harms are often shrouded in opaque terms of service and “freemium” business models that hide monopoly rents behind sleek user interfaces.

However, the answer to these challenges shouldn’t be excessive regulation and market intrusion by the government. The FTC under prior chair Lina Khan spent too much of its resources and political capital pursuing novel antitrust theories and legally dubious rulemakings. While there is broad bipartisan support for reining in undue corporate power and harmful business practices, Meador understands what should be more obvious to regulators: existing laws are often fit for purpose in the digital age. Regulators just need to enforce them by bringing cases.

Antitrust is an important tool for promoting competition and innovation, but it is no panacea. The FTC plays a critical enforcement role in protecting consumers from unfair methods of competition, deceptive advertising, fraud, and other harms. Big Tech companies have put American consumers and small businesses through it all.

TikTok has continually misrepresented its relationship with the Chinese Communist Party, sending American users’ data to a foreign adversary with malign intent. YouTube has repeatedly violated children’s privacy. Apple and Google have used their app stores to squash competition and to collect monopoly rents from developers, which serve as a tax on the mobile app ecosystem. Amazon has used its bottleneck over e-commerce to raise prices on sellers and to use their data to rip off their products.

These practices don’t enhance consumer welfare or economic growth — they do the opposite. As President Trump put it, “Big Tech has run wild for years, stifling competition in our most innovative sector and, as we all know, using its marketing power to crack down on the rights of so many Americans, as well as those of Little Tech!” Few know that better than Chairman Ferguson and Commissioner nominee Meador.

For the U.S. to fully enter a golden age, the economy needs smart, humble regulators who understand the limited yet critical role of government in protecting consumers and competition. President Trump made the right choice in Mark Meador, and the Senate should confirm him quickly so that the American people can begin benefitting from his talent and expertise as soon as possible.

Evan Swarztrauber is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and a former policy advisor at the Federal Communications Commission.