Donald Trump should nominate digital freedom fighter Andrew Ferguson to chair FTC
Gail Slater, a skeptic of Big Tech, getting the nod for top job within the Justice’s Department’s antitrust effort was great news for America; President-elect Donald Trump should follow it up by naming Andrew Ferguson to chair the Federal Trade Commission.
A veteran lawyer who clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, Ferguson served as counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee then as point in Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s record string of judicial confirmations in the Trump years.
After a stint as solicitor general (basically, chief state trial lawyer, including before the Supreme Court) for Virginia, he secured easy Senate confirmation to a GOP seat on FTC this spring.
And he gets as few others do the insidious ways Big Tech and its handmaidens abuse their enormous economic power to stifle free speech and free thought and the way antitrust law can be marshaled to defeat them.
On Dec. 2, he wrote that the FTC should “should use all the tools we have” to fight back against both collusion between social-media companies like Facebook and Twitter to suppress alleged “misinformation” and blacklist-based ad boycotts organized to punish alleged purveyors of the same.
Why?
Because “misinformation” means opinions the left dislikes and facts that hurt the progressive narrative, be it on gender issues, COVID or Hunter Biden’s 100% real laptop.
Policing the totally fake “misinfo” problem is merely a way of intimidating publishers and writers and thinkers who lean right.
Ferguson slammed home how “Big Tech firms were happy to work with others to determine their censorship policies” in possible contravention of antitrust law and how ad boycotts pose “another danger to free speech on Big Tech platforms that may fall within our antitrust bailiwick.”
The Supreme Court more or less said the first kind of collusion is constitutional, which means that it’s likely still going on.
As for ad boycotts, they’re alive and well too.
Yes, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media censorship machine shut down after Elon Musk brought an antitrust suit over its targeting of Twitter.
But the blacklist industry is thriving.
Look at NewsGuard, which creates naughty (bad, bad right-wingers) and nice (left-leaning good guys) lists to scare big firms into starving offenders of revenue.
Putting Ferguson in as FTC chair would make sure that every legal avenue to shut down this obscenity is explored.
As the man himself said: “The Commission must use the full extent of its authority to protect the free speech of all Americans. That authority includes the power to investigate collusion that may suppress competition and, in doing so, suppress free speech online. We ought to conduct such an investigation. And if our investigation reveals anti-competitive cartels that facilitate or promote censorship, we ought to bust them up.”
That would be a victory for all Americans who don’t like being told what they can say, read, see, hear and think.
