President Donald Trump’s firing of two Democratic commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has liberal commentators, including the terminated employees themselves, warning that the agency could become lenient with Big Tech.
Reuters first reported on Tuesday that Trump had removed Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Slaughter from the FTC, which traditionally has three majority-party commissioners and two minority members.
The firings will almost certainly result in legal challenges that could rise to the Supreme Court, experts say. Under a nearly century-old judicial precedent, the president can only remove officers from “quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial” agencies for cause, but it’s unclear if the FTC still meets that definition.
In the meantime, Democrats, including Bedoya himself, are adamant that the move will embolden Big Tech giants like X and Meta.
“I am suing Amazon in not one but two lawsuits. FTC staff is trying to strengthen privacy rules for Meta users. I’m a judge in that matter. I enforce a 20-year privacy consent decree against X,” wrote Bedoya on X, including a photo of tech moguls like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos at Trump’s inauguration. “Who wins from the President’s attempt to illegally fire me?”
Slaughter made a similar nod toward the tech executives in a statement shortly after the firing.
“The administration clearly fears the accountability that opposition voices would provide if the President orders [FTC chair Andrew Ferguson] to treat the most powerful corporations and executives—like those that flanked the President at his inauguration—with kid gloves,” Slaughter wrote.
News of the firing rose to the top spot on Reddit’s popular r/technology channel last night.
“And there goes any hope at holding Big Tech (or anyone else for that matter) even remotely accountable,” one Reddit poster lamented.
At least one prominent conservative pushed back on the notion that the FTC will suddenly get cozy with the tech industry.
“If there is a single thing the Republican FTC Commissioners have been clear about — it is that Big Tech is a target,” wrote former Republican commissioner Josh Wright on X.
Republican agency heads at the FTC and FCC have made it a point to criticize tech giants since Trump’s election, but they’ve mostly focused on culture war issues like online content moderation rather than, say, data sharing or competition enforcement.
In the meantime, Zuckerberg followed Elon Musk’s lead in January and eliminated Meta’s independent content moderation team, which conservatives long reviled, and replaced it with X-style community notes.
Content moderation aside, some investors see antitrust and competition enforcement against tech companies softening in the years ahead now that Republicans are in charge.
“In our view with [former chair] Lina Khan gone at the FTC…the M&A engines are back underway in Big Tech after a dark period,” wrote the popular investment analyst Dan Ives on X.
That theory will be put to the test soon enough. Next month, Zuckerberg will testify in the FTC’s pending case to reverse Meta’s acquisition of Instagram.
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